© REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Unfortunately, there are some people who didn't get the memo on greed. Take the Waltons, for example, the family behind the Walmart retail empire. According to the financial and money website, Bloomberg, they get richer by $4 million every hour - yes, you read that right, not every week or month, every hour - while at the same time paying their workers (or as they prefer to refer to them, 'associates') a paltry 11 bucks an hour.
There is no human being on this Earth who can justify getting (not making, mind, getting) $4 million an hour, and there is no justification for paying any worker a wage as low as $11 an hour. Only the most psychologically dysfunctional or morally empty could conceivably consider such a scenario and wealth gap compatible with progress.
And yes, yes, yes, we've heard it all before about human enterprise and dynamism and hard work and entrepreneurship. But these are merely words used to legitimize greed and avarice. Words thrown into the faces of the masses like so much dust to blind them as to the reality of the world and their true place in it. That place is as human drones, consigned to a life spent working their fingers to the bone for a pittance while being programmed to believe that they're actually free.
If they are free it's free to be poor, to be homeless, to go hungry, and to suffer.
The Walton family, whose fortune now sits at an outrageous $191 billion, aren't the only reprobates at the apex of this world grown sick with greed. Hark the Mars family, the confectionery giants, with a fortune of $127 billion. That's a lot of Mars Bars. Or how about the Kochs, notorious for bankrolling numerous politicians in Washington? They're currently sitting on a mountain of assets to the tune of $125 billion.
It takes neither a PhD in economics nor any grounding in Marxist theory to grasp the fact that a world that allows for such obscene amounts of wealth to be so concentrated in the coffers of so few, is also a world that allows for obscene levels of poverty to be endured by so many. One cannot exist without the other.
In America today, the number of victims of poverty is legion. Some 40 million to be precise. And victims they are, to be sure. Because let us have none of this silly talk about poverty being self-inflicted. This is just the propaganda endlessly churned out by the superrich and their flunkeys in positions of influence in the media and politics.
Now I'm not here suggesting that we put the superrich in jail (well not for too long anyway. Just long enough for them to get their heads straight and back in touch with their humanity with a spell of hard labor and re-education). What I'm suggesting is that we tax them in a manner befitting civilization, and redistribute their wealth in the interests of the common good.
Karl Marx (remember that guy?) happens to agree. "History," the great bearded one once proclaimed, "calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy."
Jesus also understood this to be the case. That's why he chased the money changers out of the Temple. And Jesus, like Marx, was a revolutionary. You disagree? In that case, consider his words:
"Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.Staying with Jesus, and getting funky for a minute, there's an argument to be made that early Christianity was the communism of its time and that communism is the early Christianity of ours. Because in its earliest incarnation, Christianity like communism was a revolutionary creed, emerging in response to the crippling oppression and poverty being suffered by the many in the name of a Roman Empire that was less a monument to human progress and more its impediment.
"Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.
"But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.
"Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.
"Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep."
Today, it's the American empire that is an impediment to progress; sick with greed for money, for power and for hegemony.
Not that all of the superrich are American. Of course not. As the Bloomberg article reveals, they are of many different nationalities and live all over the world. But who can argue that the cultural values that predominate in that world are American cultural values - and that those values are specifically the values of the superrich?
For those of you who may blanche at the mere mention of the word communism, by the way, my apologies but it does remain a specter that hasn't gone away. And the idea of communism, as opposed to the reality, will never die while misery and poverty and human need exists alongside decadence and avarice and human greed.
The philosopher Erich Fromm is someone who can always be relied on to drill down into the heart of the matter. "Greed," he writes, "is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."
The next time you find yourself in Walmart, spare a thought for the Waltons. Four million bucks an hour doesn't go as far as it used to.
Reader Comments
Creating a fair working environment for all is what it is about. Fair Go for All.
Fair working environment for all ? Go work for someone else who pays how you like to get paid and shares their wealth with you or open your own company. No one is forcing you to work for $12/hr. You are free to choose.
The system is corrupt e.g. look at the US government treatment of Huawei... Why are they trying to shut the company down? It's because it's eating up all the market share of US companies like apple etc. That's not capitalism, that's not fair, that's greed.
US trying to bully Europe into not accepting cheaper and better Russian energy... That's not capitalism, that's greed.
In addition to the dirty tricks governments and companies play to get and maintain an advantage, a good chunk of wealthy people didn't choose the be wealthy, they were born wealthy. This is an example that just shows it's not necessarily about choice or being forced the do anything. Sometimes people are just born into a situation, be it wealth or poverty and choice rarely has anything to do about it unless you think poor people choose to be poor and live in poverty including homelessness etc.
Lastly, some rich people are just criminals and got there through crime, a good topical case in point is Jeffrey Epstein. How did he get so rich? You think it's because he was a wonderful capitalist?
In short, my point is, your conclusion about choice and no one forcing anyone to do anything is wrong.
I've given you my reasons why I think so... Awaiting yours of why you think you are right kind sir.
I stand by the notion that the world is corrupt, greed gas run amok and leads people to corruption. Very few people have choice.
Communism sucks, capitalism sucks. What we are left with than ?
Life we enjoy and comforts we have is a product of inequality in the world.
Cheap resources we get, produce, goods all come from people who live in very unequal parts of the world.
We do not seem to sweat about it at all that some live on less $1 a day and barely have anything to feed their families.
Yet, when inequality affects us and ones close to us all the sudden we scream - unfair ! Selfish greed !
Boohoo. Poor $11/hr walmart workers where walmart owners do not want to pay more by sharing their wealth.
I don't see anyone rallying or being fired up because stuff we buy in walmart is made in inhuman sweatshops whose workers are treated and paid unfairly so we can enjoy our day to day luxury.
Seems to me we are fine and happy with the system we use daily and luxuries it provide, just not happy with the piece of pie that systems shares with us. Anything beyond and we run out "Jesus" pretty quickly.
Corpos and rich-riches are not doing anything different we are all doing.
For us to live good, others have to suffer. Ain't it the truth nowadays ? We seem to be ok with this though. As long it's not us.
Maybe in the end we are all hypocrites pretending to be something else?
I know from my part, I do what I do so I can survive, I buy the products I do as they are the most convenient and at the price I can afford. In the end, I depend on the system, which truth be told is built by people who are probably the 0.1% psycho pedos who Epstein was busy blackmailing. So I don't know... Maybe we aren't as squeaky clean and righteous as we think we are. Maybe all this talk about greed and corruption is just virtue signalling and hypocrisy. Who knows...
The system is totally and utterly corrupted.