Lord Bezos's upcoming wedding might come in at about $600 million. He's denying it, but considering that he dropped $2.5 million on the engagement ring and proposed on a yacht so large that there were plans to dismantle a bridge to get it out to sea. (They didn't, but it's still so honking large it needs a support ship to follow it around like a nautical butler.)
As much as I don't give a fuck about the Teamsters, I wish them well in their fight against the second-richest man on Earth.
The super-rich are almost daring us to take action against them. There seems to be three paths ahead: A police state, where the oligarchs stamp on our faces for fun and profit; taxation to cut down their fortunes to merely filthy rich; or a revolution to take them all down. This level of inequity cannot stand.
Bezos may be a canary in the coal mine with this wedding. And so is Luigi Mangione. Oh, the press is out there telling everyone that Luigi is evil and emphasizing "OMG, he kilt somebody", but those who live the sub-millionaire life, which is most of us, know the truth. Insurers, for example, deny that prosthetic limbs are necessary, figuring that people can be just as productive and active in wheelchairs, on peg legs and with hooks for hands.
Things will change, someday. The question is can it be managed to bring about a fairer society without a lot of turmoil.
The easy fix is to tax the billionaires down to a merely obscene level of wealth, to bring taxation back to 1950s levels and to tax capital gains over a certain amount as ordinary income (and pay into Social security). But since the billionaires have captured the incoming administration and one of them owns the GOP, I don't see it changing. Trump and his circle want to bring back 1890s America, where workers didn't have unions, worked for pittance wages and the plutocrats lived free and untaxed lives. But what they may get is 1790s France, where the plutocrats got separated from their heads.
Literally Scream For Ice Cream, Part 8
1 hour ago
12 comments:
Just as a question, (and I really would like to understand) why do you hate the Really Rich?
Why do you think that their wealth is somehow subject to excessive taxation? (Or should be)?
What right do folks like you have to take their money? They earned it fairly. What gives folks like you the right to demand some of their earnings?
I won't respond to your answers (Not looking for an argument here, just understanding), so feel free to explain.
Unless our current overlords are smarter than their predecessors, they'll think that they've got this- either we're now docile, or their security will protect them. They're always surprised when the Guillotines go up.
Its the impact of rising expectations. That doesn't mean a free
ride only that working hard gets you more and also a fair shake.
Its what took the USSR down. The Soviets could not improve life
without changing their allocation of resources from military to
improving living conditions and incentives. Sooner or later they
the people stop asking and start demanding. What follows can
be bloody. History is rich with cases like that.
We have the problem of lowered expectations while the rich
get richer and the cost to the poorer. Disincentives and
saying they are going to cut things most of us worked
hard for seems to be having the same potential effect.
I told you so, was the warning for what you did may be the
cause of this. The result may be well be the thing that their
collective not listening leads too the lesson that always
follows the failed test. Usually painfully.
Me, its going to be fun watching them twist.
Eck!
In short, we paid for everything they used to get rich. We paid for the roads, the highways, the airports. We paid to educate his workers.Amazon didn’t build any of that. Is it not only fair that, having made his pile on the backs of our public investments, that Bezos and the rest pay a fair tax rate?
I’ll settle if they pay the top wage-earning tax rate on what they pull in. Which they don’t. I’ll bet Bezos doesn’t even pay 5%.
And that is nowise fair.
Nobody earns tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. They did not personally do work or create value remotely proportionate to that kind of money. What they did was establish, or take advantage of, systems which enable them to skim off that wealth from the workers who actually did create it, by grossly underpaying them for their labor. Redistribution would merely mean returning these obscene piles of wealth to those who produced them.
The exceptions are the rare highly-successful artistic creatives like Taylor Swift or JK Rowling, whose work is so popular that they actually do generate huge incomes without exploiting the labor of others. And such people generally have much more sensitivity toward the less fortunate and those who do the grunt work. Swift paid tens of millions out of her own pocket in bonuses to workers on her tour. Rowling has donated so much to charity that she's no longer a billionaire. Anyway, one billion dollars in the hands of an individual is still not as corrosive to democracy as a hundred billion.
Thank you for the straight up, non shrill and on emotional answer.
Tumbrel is an old word. Any left would be antiques. Still, they could be pulled out of storage if required.
The Big con of the Right is that maybe lightning will strike you and you will, by dint of your specialness or dumb luck, become suddenly filthy, obscenely rich....and will naturally want to KEEP ALL OF IT!!!!! Of course, lightning is more likely to strike you than that happen, but it keeps the hoi polloi playing the lottery and believing that social benefits and safety nets are a BAD THING THAT LEADS TO COMMUNISM. So they'd rather vote for an Anti-Christ, than redistribute a penny or a better life for themselves.
The other and updated Big GOP Lie is that the Other coming in is going to take some of your pie which you are entitled to, and so they push away the ladder lest they have to be valued on their own merit. Being special means you get to rest on the oars.
If I understand correctly, Waluigi does NOT come from the working classes.
Indeed, I am told his family belongs to the 1%.
Also, while some American Horseshoe Leftists may be cheering Waluigi on now, the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army (and the Unabomber, if he be counted as Leftist) are remembered largely because the American Horseshoe Left generally does NOT go in for revolutionary violence.
These things would suggest that revolutionary outrage against Tha K'rupt EE-vul Oligarchy is NOT likely to be his real motive.
It will be interesting to see how his trial plays out, and if his true motive will emerge.
Ivory Bill: The Messiah is getting plenty of adulation from the right as well (the ordinary masses, not the "opinion leaders" or activist fringe, who are as full of scolding as their left-wing equivalents). The knowledge that the billionaire parasite class is exploiting and ripping off ordinary workers is pretty universal regardless of ideology.
Also, you can't judge what his political orientation is from that of his family. From what I've heard, his ideological views are kind of a grab bag that doesn't fit easily in "left" or "right" pigeonholes.
We don't need to go back to the French revolution to understand what happens when economic distribution is lopsided.
We just need to recall our own history of the labor wars that came out of the guilted age post 1900.
I find it sad that the period from 1900 to the beginning of FDR economically is only remembered for the Newport Mansions and then the Great Depression. People died for what resulted in the New Deal through to the environmental movement.
Indeed. People have forgotten that the National Labor Relations Board, and union organizing procedures, replaced running gun battles and burning down the homes of factory owners.
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