Billionaires are evil

[MickiQ]

Sharpen your pitchforks people

Frasers: New boss of Sports Direct group could net £100m

Michael Murray, prospective son-in-law of Mike Ashley, could bag the bonus after he takes over the Sports Direct group.

www.bbc.co.uk

What the fuck does an 'head of elevation' do apart from marry the boss's daughter that is?

 

[Pickman's model]

Sharpen your pitchforks people

Frasers: New boss of Sports Direct group could net £100m

Michael Murray, prospective son-in-law of Mike Ashley, could bag the bonus after he takes over the Sports Direct group.

www.bbc.co.uk

What the fuck does an 'head of elevation' do apart from marry the boss's daughter that is?

Stands in lifts and presses the floor button for people

 

[Carvaged]

This seems relevant to this thread: - the continuing accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of an ever smaller coterie of ultra-rich corporate fucks:

We need to talk about the real reason behind US inflation | Robert Reich

Corporate giants are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. How can this be? Because of their unchecked power

www.theguardian.com

 

[Carvaged]

Michael Steinhardt, Billionaire, Surrenders $70 Million in Stolen Relics​

The hedge fund pioneer is barred for life from buying more antiquities. He turned over 180 stolen objects that had decorated his homes and office.

Michael Steinhardt, Billionaire, Surrenders $70 Million in Stolen Relics

The hedge fund pioneer is barred for life from buying more antiquities. He turned over 180 stolen objects that had decorated his homes and office.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Nylock]

Barring him for life will have literally zero effect.

 

[8ball]

I felt this thread was a little unbalanced so Googled “billionaire being nice”.

Wasn’t the most bountiful Google search I’ve ever done.

 

[Carvaged]

Evil lives here:

Rupert Murdoch buys $200m Montana cattle ranch from Koch family

The ranch provides habitat for 4,000 elk, 800 antelope and 1,500 mule deer and a 28-mile-long creek stocked with trout

www.theguardian.com

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Evil lives here:

Rupert Murdoch buys $200m Montana cattle ranch from Koch family

The ranch provides habitat for 4,000 elk, 800 antelope and 1,500 mule deer and a 28-mile-long creek stocked with trout

www.theguardian.com

I've spent quite a lot of time in and around Yellowstone and Grand Teton. It's a shame how the rich have carved out much of this for themselves. These days a lot of the area is a giant gated community for the rich. My first time out there I took a road that looked interesting and found myself at one of these gates. Let's just say my reception wasn't particularly friendly, despite the fact that I'd already started to turn around and go back the way I came. In Yellowstone Park itself, the park has been placed under contract with a company that runs the restaurants, hotels, and t-shirt shops. (God help you if you're looking to buy cheap beer and chocolate. You can, however, buy the contractors brand, which is shit, and overpriced.) Meanwhile, the park employees live in squalid conditions in ricketty mobile homes. They hold a major economic summit at Grand Teton each year that draws the uber rich from all over the world. The next week is a major art auction where art sells for millions of dollars in seconds. I've been to the auction and it was something to see with waiters in white uniforms walking around offering glasses of wine, while auctioneers took bids by phone. If I go back now, I tend to avoid town and the gated areas.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Barring him for life will have literally zero effect.

Yeah he was already barred for life from doing crimes.

 

[teqniq]

Interesting:

100+ Ultra-Rich People Warn Fellow Elites: 'It's Taxes or Pitchforks'

"History paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like," reads an open letter signed by millionaires and billionaires calling for higher taxes on people like themselves.

www.commondreams.org

 

[NoXion]

Seems like some of them are getting scared. As well they should be.

 

[ska invita]

still sounds like a fringe minority view amongst the super wealthy
nothing to stop them putting their money where their mouth is in the meantime

 

[yield]

Interesting:

100+ Ultra-Rich People Warn Fellow Elites: 'It's Taxes or Pitchforks'

"History paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like," reads an open letter signed by millionaires and billionaires calling for higher taxes on people like themselves.

www.commondreams.org

The Pitchforks are coming! a warning from a 1% er.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats By Nick Hanauer Memo: From Nick Hanauer To: My Fellow Zillionaires June 28, 2014 "ICH" - "Politico" - - You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded...

www.urban75.net

 

[yield]

At What Point Does a Billionaire’s Greed Hurt the Rest of Us?
Mar 21, 2022. Institute for New Economic Thinking

So let’s for a moment consider just how much $1 Billion really is. Just a one with a lot of zeros you say? In January 2019, historian Rutger Bregman tried to explain to a bunch of billionaires at the World Economic Forum (held in Davos) why philanthropy is not the way to address inequality. Rather, it’s taxes. On his own website, he helps us understand just how much a billion dollars is in 2019 numbers:

If you made $50k a year, and you didn’t ever spend one penny of it — you just put that money into safekeeping and saved it up — do you know how long you would have to work to save up a BILLION dollars? TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS. That’s right… Roughly 4X the length of recorded human history.

 

[yield]

How the ‘Homeless Billionaire’ Became a Philosopher King
Michael Steinberger archive.ph
NYTimes 06/04/2022

A few moments later, after another sharp turn, we reached our destination, a plateau not far from the Getty Center. Here Berggruen plans to construct what he half-jokingly describes as a “secular monastery,” a campus where scholars affiliated with the think tank that he founded, the Berggruen Institute, will live, work, cogitate. The 450-acre property, known informally to Berggruen and his staff as Monteverdi (they haven’t decided on an official name), will be centered around a building designed by a group that includes the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, famed for the Bird’s Nest Olympic venue in Beijing. According to Berggruen, he purchased the land in 2014 for $15 million. But he has yet to break ground on the project, which has drawn resistance from nearby residents. If completed, this spot overlooking Los Angeles will become the de facto seat of what might be called an empire of the mind.

The son of the late Heinz Berggruen, one of postwar Europe’s most celebrated art dealers and collectors, the 60-year-old Berggruen grew up in France and made his fortune in America. For a time, he was known as the “homeless billionaire” because he didn’t have a fixed address and lived out of luxury hotels. In the late 2000s, dissatisfied with his career in finance, Berggruen began privately studying philosophy and political theory with a couple of U.C.L.A. professors. Soon after that, he established the Berggruen Institute. A prolific networker, Berggruen has recruited so many prominent names to the institute’s roster of supporters and advisers — Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Arianna Huffington and Fareed Zakaria are among those listed on the organization’s website — that it has been described as his own personal Davos.

Elite philanthropy mainly self-serving
The Academic Times. March 26, 2021

 

[Cado]

Thats like saying Gold Medal winners are evil.

 

[yield]

Thats like saying Gold Medal winners are evil.

I don't think they're comparable.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Seems like some of them are getting scared. As well they should be.

Their response to this won't be to loosen their grip on the government and the economy so people can survive. Instead, they'll tighten their grip and rachet down harder on the poor. They'll build compounds and surround themselves with walls and guards. Inside, they'll happily tell themselves that they've earned it. I'm pretty sure when the poor outside come over the walls, that yes, they'll have earned it.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Thats like saying Gold Medal winners are evil.

So the power to influence and shape society afforded by winning a gold medal (in say small bore rifle shooting) is the same as you get when you have in excess of one billion dollars or pounds? Also does what you have to do to win a gold (this time let's have table tennis) have the same impact on society as what you (or your parents) have to do to accumulate a billion whatevers? What I'm saying is your comparison is a bit flawed.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[Pickman's model]

Thats like saying Gold Medal winners are evil.

No it isn't

 

[Cado]

Why is a Billionaire a Billionaire?

He/she doesn't have a penny someone hasn't given them.

They've won the Gold Medal of the free market economy.

Billionaires aren't thieves otherwise they'd have never crawled from the gutter.

 

[Almor]

Why is a Billionaire a Billionaire?

He/she doesn't have a penny someone hasn't given them.

They've won the Gold Medal of the free market economy.

Billionaires aren't thieves otherwise they'd have never crawled from the gutter.

What proportion of billionaires 'crawled from the gutter'?

Pretty sure it's possible to thieve your way out 'from the gutter', although billionaire levels of wealth likely require more direct exploitation, or at least levelling up from thieving to fraud.

 

[Cado]

Typo (or grammer) - I'm alleging none of them have.

 

[ice-is-forming]

I think you're agreeing with each other

 

[Dogsauce]

It’s the old ‘magic money tree’, billionaire wealth is just created from thin air, not ripped off from the pocket of millions of hard working ordinary people. It’s theft one way or the other.

 

[Cado]

Whose giving the money to who? Was in Supermarket today, could have sworn that I handed the cash over freely in return for the food I had in my hands.

.

 

[NoXion]

Whose giving the money to who? Was in Supermarket today, could have sworn that I handed the cash over freely in return for the food I had in my hands.

.

How is the supermarket able to add value and thus generate profit? Do you think that a supermarket could operate without someone, somewhere, being paid a wage for doing the work?

 

[Cado]

YEs, but it would rely on an honesty box. Amazon have done supermarkets whereby the whole thing was automated, ie no checkouts. However still needed people to load up shelves and keep an eye on things.

A fail to see your point however, my point was - that I freely handed the money over, it wasn't thieved Therefore someone in "supermarket A" is better off and a bit closer to being a billionaire - I did that..

 

[Almor]

Whose giving the money to who? Was in Supermarket today, could have sworn that I handed the cash over freely in return for the food I had in my hands.

.

You handed the money over to a billionaire? Fancy supermarket you go to

Did you actually give your money to a person providing a service on behalf of a company that chose to give loads of money to a few people that you didn't see and much less money to the employees that you did see?

 

[Cado]

Yes, but thats the way the cookie crumbles.
Old joke about NASA, they couldn't do something. So they wheel in this old sod who says .....'there'....thereafter it worked. HE billed them $10k which they were a little stunned at. He itemised it $1 for the piece of chalk and $9999 for where to put the 'x'.