Post ID: @OP+15QDKOze said:
"Eddie Lampert: caused a famine by not paying vendors and wrote an article comparing COVID-19 to traffic
Bill Gates, Building a team to combat COVID-19 while funding billions for vaccine research. Usually he donates to poor country diseases, instead of diseases that also happen to affect rich countries.
Jeff Bezos: reorienting the whole company to become the world's largest deliverer of essential goods during the pandemic, restructuring the entir supply chain with masks, policies, and PPE while working with the World Health Organization to combat the coronavirus, setting up a relief fund for sick employees, $100M for food banks, coming after $10B in donations last year
Warren Buffet: Berkshire Hathaway and GEICO offer $2.5B in credits to policyholders. Flew in planeloads of N95 masks from China.
Mark Zuckerberg: $58M to fund vaccine research, studies, and public awareness
Mike Bloomberg: $75M for prevention and mitigation
Michael Dell: $100M for research and healthcare"
Even if some billionaires are philanthropists, they are all parasites on the economy and a danger to society. There is simply no individual who has legitimately done something worth that amount of money, since in all cases their profits rely on taking the fruits of someone else’s labor.
What it means to have acquired so much wealth in one lifetime, speaks volumes about a billionaires priorities and values; values based on greed and power. They value money as a thing to acquire, rather than as just something to get you what you need or even want (orders of magnitude beyond what would happen if you were just good at business but didn’t constantly feel the need to make more). They hoard their immense wealth not while people are just living ordinary lives around them, but while people are dying or miserable from easily treated medical conditions, suffering from hunger, or working multiple jobs just to stay functional. And they don’t just possess their ill-gotten gains; they spend a great deal of effort pushing for laws to help them keep grasping their hoards, to keep workers from getting their share of profits (are anti-union, for example), and to keep tax shelters and tax cuts going so they can keep it.
We have a commons that is the collective version of society and a total, shared set of resources that are essential to the functioning of society (that includes our infrastructure, government, public services, etc.). That is an essential component of a democracy and vital to its sustenance and growth. Working people provide the infrastructure, services, legal system and other factors that allow corporations to exist, compete, prosper and grow. Every person has an obligation to abide by it, respect it and contribute to it. When vested interests exploit it to their sole advantage, that becomes a threat to our democracy; you can't have billionaires without having lots and lots of poor people.
The individuals who have created the huge economic imbalance by grabbing up more than their fair share, and now offer to give away large sums of their money, really underscore just how awful billionaires are. They live in the smallest bubble possible to live in; they don’t care about the working man, and are only doing this for publicity, not out of any kind of desire to help people, but for pure personal gain.
Taxing net wealth, beyond just annual income, is the only way to restore balance; spreading out the wealth for the benefit of the rest of society.