This sounds like a simple solution, too simple but it worked in France in the year 1789. It may sound immoral but is anymore immoral than removing parasites such as fleas and ticks from a suffering pet? Think about. The filthy rich for the most part a fully evil. We have all heard the saying, "power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Maybe that's bullshit. Perhaps the truth is, those who rise to wealth and power were corrupt the day they slithered out of their mother's fuck hole. I say this because their have been benevolent monarchs. Money is power but not all of those who have it are death deserving fucking assholes.
Tolerating the depravity and the insatiable greed of the rich is immoral. Take filthy rich pedophile Jeffery Epstein, his pedophile mob and the government trash who refused to bring him to justice for most of his life. How many less victims would there be had the father of one of his early victims simply put a bullet through Jeffery's black heart or evil brain?
Let's say hypothetically if the filthy rich were issued a warning that said, "Give up your ill-gotten wealth and confess to your crimes. You will be treated humanely but if you don't you will will have sealed your fate and your fate will then be death". Thinking they are insulated and prtected from the just repercussions of their criminal immorality they mostly likely will ignore the warning but what if assassins throughout the world were to eradicate several dozen of them? What choices would they have? Hire more security? Live with the constant fear that they may be shot, kidnapped or poisoned?
Some bleeding hearts my say that there is good in everyone. There isn't but even if there is, it is immoral and barbaric not to eliminate these dangerous and remorseless predators from moral civilized society. Is it not?
What is a moral populace to do if those in power are so compromised and corrupt that they will not protect them from the members of the predatory filthy rich? Trump is merely one of them and compared to most of the Trump is a third string player on a last place minor league team. Let that asshole and his depraved family twist in the wind.
If the criminally elite and not will to give up 99% of their ill-gotten wealth and spend their days living comfortably, in a modest home or a federal prison, make them pay the same price that other oppressors have paid throughout history.
The habits of the wealthiest mirror the supposed ‘pathologies’ of the poor. But while those in poverty are called lazy, the rich are dubbed bon vivants
If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe.
In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say things like:
“I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me.’ Because they are really immoral people – too much time on their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was picking up other men’s wives.”
The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth”.
In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement. Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by the private lives of the ultra-rich: “They [the clients] have to pick someone they want to know everything about them: about Mother’s lesbian affairs, Brother’s drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the room.” Many of these clients are not employed and live off family largesse, but no one calls them lazy.
As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow:
When a rich man doesn’t want to work
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger
He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk
When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.
Behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy “welfare queens”, “crackheads” and other drug addicts, and the “promiscuous poor” (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).
These disparate perceptions aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy; they are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients –even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.
Meanwhile, the “billionaire” in the White House starts his days at 11am – the rest of the morning is coyly termed “executive time” – and is known for his frequent holidays. “Nice work if you can get it,” quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because – unlike Trump – most billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: “I want to be invisible.” This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich, specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes “rich list”.
Many even present themselves as homeless – for tax purposes – despite owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:
“I am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says ‘show me a utility bill’, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in Thailand, and it’s in a language that the European authorities aren’t familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world, international marriages, governments can’t keep up with people.”
Meanwhile, the poor can end up being “resident nowhere” because no one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters – which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spaces is increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.
It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.
For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.
So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.
Brooke Harrington is a professor of economic sociology at the Copenhagen Business School and the author of Capital without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent (2016, Harvard University Press)
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If you support Trump you deserve cancer.