I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point.
By the same token, a billionaire’s lifestyle is also a piss in the bucket. A yacht full of flat screens may be individually expensive, but even a third rate country’s government could easily afford one. If you’re suggesting the billionaires actually seriously impact consumption of resources on a global basis, then please provide some figures on this, because I’m deeply sceptical.
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This is exactly right. It doesn’t affect everyone the same way, just as becoming a mega-star as a child or teenager doesn’t always lead to drinking, drugs, etc. But we live in a culture that glorifies money, so when you have a lot of it, everything changes: people treat you differently, your daily concerns change, your horizon shifts.
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During the last presidential campaign, Obama was pushing for Mitt Romney to release his tax statements. During that time, we visited a friend who is an accountant for a big Wall Street firm that does the taxes for the hyper rich. He told us that though Obama’s group probably didn’t know of any specific tax transgressions, that if any of us normal folk saw the tax returns of one of these super rich people we would just be shocked at the games they play to avoid paying taxes.
I guess the very rich must be feeling persecuted right now as instead of being toasted as masters of industry as they were before, now we are all questioning whether they are sociopaths out to plunder us for all we are worth then stick the money where no one can find it.
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I get your point, but I’d temper it by acknowledging that the white male privilege most of them enjoy sure ain’t “nothing.”
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Strictly speaking, there will always be a one percent in any society with an uneven distribution of incomes. What we object to is the scale of this inequality, and the outsize societal advantages that are starting to accrue to this wealthy class at the expense of those beneath.
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I blame Robin Leach… I really don’t remember that much over-the-top celebration of the rich and famous before then.
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a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent
Megalomaniacs plunder society and call it “success”. Their dirty secret is they know damn well if they paid for just a fraction of the externalities that they profitably thrust upon the rest of society (especially the poor), they’d be upper middle-class at best.
The dolts that celebrate the absolute narcissistic sickness of megalomania are part of the problem. It’s one thing to be successful and make a good living, it’s quite another to plunder society for vast wealth and be a net loss against society for your own gain.
Yeah, we’re coming for you, Tom Perkins. Not to kill you, but to kill your sickness, your megalomania that takes and takes and takes from society while serving a doctrine of depravity, inbred ineptitude, willful ignorance, sloth, purposefully obtuse corruption and despicable, undeserved power. You narcissistic, megalomaniacal, hoarder sacks of shit that put money before humanity are our enemy. Keep crying, weakling… it’s more fun that way.
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Exactly. Also, if a large corporation is too big to fail, it’s too big to exist. The monopolies and oligopolies keep trying to convince average Americans that our lives would destruct without them. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of jobs are created by small businesses.
Never mind the fact that a lack of business diversity thwarts healthy competition that benefits society at large. Never mind that they are destructive and are the very opposite of the virtues of “free enterprise” that they espouse but actively destroy.
They are injecting treasonous, anti-government, anti-regulation (for the rich) entities into our government and rotting it away from the inside out just to pad their already obscene profits… and they wonder why we might be just a little bit pissed?
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His ex-wife and friend apparently…
I didn’t realize there were over 6 million billionaires in Nazi Germany. Where did they fit all their sprawling mansions and property?
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I disagree. The history of the past 200 years has been inextricably entwined with the growth of capitalism and the attendant increases in productivity, which in turn have dramatically improved the well-being of a great many people - you and I included.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been massive problems along with that increased productivity. Ecological destruction, concentration of power-through-money corrupting political systems (not unique to capitalism, but present). I have massive problems and concerns with capitalism as currently practiced. However I am not convinced it is capitalism - or at least the engine of creativity and innovation that happens within parts of capitalism - that is the problem, per se. It is power and its abuse, and the distortions that power creates in markets as well as political discussion.
It also doesn’t mean we can’t increase productivity without capitalism as a major part of that process - I just haven’t yet seen any alternatives that provide the productivity without being in some way worse than capitalism.
We are not perfect brains, and we are very good at creating bigger problems while we try to solve (relatively) small problems. We exist within the context of our times, we don’t know what is going to happen next. Nobody imagined that a petty trade dispute about exported chickens would create a sheltered industry in light trucks that led North American automakers to spend billions selling SUVs, in turn harming the economy and inflicting significant damage to the planet.
Opposing capitalism in general is a lazy response rooted in an unwillingness to accept the complexity of the problem. I hate the bad parts but love the good parts, and I’d like to figure out a way to make things better without creating still more unintended consequences.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see some kind of "The Dispossessed" style of economy, I just don’t see a way there from here that doesn’t involve a lot of people dying and it probably not working anyway because power corrupts.
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Indeed. Growth in the first few years of this century was mostly in Real Estate. An absurd notion in that no land was grown, nor was it used up in any meaningful sense. But it still counts as growth in the economic world because the numbers got bigger.
Not that that is a bad thing. If growth were inextricably linked to resource consumption we’d already be dead. However, once we get past basic needs (for truly basic needs that is a fairly modest amount of most North Americans’ income) then growth becomes about well-being, or at least desires (in the sense that I desire a nice piece of cheese or a nice shirt, even though I don’t really need it to survive the day).
I think we have more than adequate food supplies, shelter capability, medical knowledge and educational skills to meet the basic needs of everyone on the planet without really breaking a sweat. What we have not yet managed to create is a system that ensures that is available to everyone, and the few attempts we have made on any scale have ended up sacrificing personal liberty - another basic need (IMO).
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Just saying that if people are going to throw rocks, pick the right target. Otherwise it just gives ammo to the well paid apologists for the plutocrats.
According to the Fox News account, we need wealthy ‘jobs creators’ like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. But when you look at what those so-called ‘jobs creators’ say about the economic situation they are doing just fine and have no complaints at all. Except for Warren Buffet who keeps saying that people like him should pay more in tax as a percentage of their earnings than their secretaries.
And having known quite a few people who have done well on the dot com boom, I think their approach is pretty typical of entrepreneurs. Taxes are a concern, but US federal taxes are a pretty minor concern.
Then we have people like Dick Cheney who got rich from being CEO of a government contractor and the Koch brothers whose family fortune was founded in Stalin’s gulags and the Walton family. And the people who don’t remotely fit the ‘wealth creator’ profile, who have lived their entire lives off the government teat or off inherited wealth claim that they should pay no taxes because they are so special.
Nor is the way Mitt Romney made his money anything to be proud of. Like Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff, Romney’s trick was to take other people’s money without intending to pay it back. Unlike Ponzi and Madoff he did it legally (or at least escaped prosecution) by buying up companies on credit, borrowing more money to pay his firm a huge dividend which was never clawed back after the companies went bankrupt.
A reform of bankruptcy law is overdue. If the money paid out to Madoff’s clients in dividends can be clawed back, why not Mitt Romney’s dishonest gains?
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“self-made men” aren’t the norm among the 1% though. Most of them were born on third base, or had a heck of a lot more privilege and advantages than the poor that they hate so much.
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You’ve probably never been to a poor neighborhood, if you had you might learn that mostly what’s available is crap, and that poor people’s time and resources are scarcer than yours.
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Yes they are, but that isn’t a conspiracy either. To answer the point specifically, should we, as a society, disallow the building of fast food restaurants in poor areas? We probably should be more proactive - subsidising fruit and veg and the like. I know of at least one scheme to do exactly that (I suspect such a scheme would be disproportionatly impactful).
Actually the problem is that billionaires don’t spend their money. They simply suck the money out of the economy by slashing wages and getting huge government subsidies for profitable companies, then they stash that money in offshore tax haven where it does nothing. If they paid that money in wages or simply spent it, this would be a huge boost to the economy.
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So there is a ‘science’ museum in New York with a dinosaur exhibit with all references to evolution excised
I’ll need proof. At my local natural History museum, we also have a Koch exhibit
The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins
Location: First Floor
Exhibit: March 17, 2010 - Permanent
Based on decades of cutting-edge research by Smithsonian scientists, the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins will tell the epic story of human evolution and how humans evolved over six million years in response to a changing world. Following the process of scientific discovery, visitors will explore the evidence for human evolution, come face-to-face with unforgettable representations of early humans, and arrive at a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
And you’re saying that this has a creationist subtext? That’s Chutzpah.
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*Not representative.
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