Rich Guys

I recently saw a list of the eight wealthiest men in the world. They limited the list to eight because those eight guys actually possess one-half (1/2)—50%--fifty percent—yup, half of the entire world’s wealth.  Let me say that again so it sinks in: EIGHT men control half of the entire world’s wealth.

Talk about your filthy, stinking, greedy, sonofabitching one percent!

No surprise that six of the eight are United States citizens, what with us having unfairly raped and pillaged a 4,000-year-old system of civilization in just the last 200 years by designing that most evil of evil economic and social systems: capitalism. (Hissssss.)

So this might surprise you a little bit as your hatred for the 1% festers like a boil: all six Americans are democrats. Yup. Six of the eight richest guys on the planet are US of A democrats.  Flaming ones, actually.

Bill Gates, of course, tops the list, followed by Amancio Ortega—a Spaniard—who owns a 7,000 store international retail fashion chain. Warren Buffet comes in third just ahead of Carlos Slim Helu—a Mexican who made his fortune in telecommunications and maybe drug trafficking, but mostly telecommunications. In the Mexican press they like to drop his last name and just call him Carlos Slim. Three years ago he was the richest man in the world but then the U.S. started legalizing marijuana and the telecommunications industry took a downturn. (What?)

Rounding out the list are all a bunch of happy, smiling, American democrats. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, who is a huge contributor to the democratic party but an outspoken opponent of laying more of a tax burden on the rich. Hmmm. More on that later.

Michael Bloomberg is sixth. He created a huge financial information provider after an investment bank fired him. His main clients all have Wall Street addresses. No one seems to mind that he retains an 89% stake in his privately held company while he discharges his duties as mayor of New York. Weird.

Then comes Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. I couldn’t find much information on Larry other than he is indeed a registered and heavily contributing democrat.  Maybe not so oddly, his first and still largest client is the CIA. Shhhhh.

And at number eight with a paltry $44.6 billion is my personal favorite rich guy, that flaming pussy and guardian of the truth and only information he likes, Mark Zuckerberg. Everyone probably knows Mark founded Facebook, to which most of us are addicted. Mark would be the richest guy in the world but he sold 50% of his holdings in Facebook and put it all in a foundation dedicated to philanthropic causes.  So far most of that money is still in his foundation. I wonder if the DNC is on his list of philanthropic causes?

I don’t know about the rest of you but my head is fairly reeling from the cognitive dissonance of this information. I thought all those evil, rich corporate barbarians dedicated to keeping poor people poor were filthy conservative bastards. I thought the 1% was made up of old fat white republicans sitting around their country clubs plotting ways to discriminate and suppress populations and not share their ill-gotten fortunes.

Could it be that the richest men in America, nay, the world, and the biggest political contributors in our society have a vested interest in a system that the left professes to hate and wants to bring crashing to the ground in flames? Could it be they’ve been lying to us all along about whose interest they have at heart and that they actually need the wheels of capitalism to continue to turn in their direction? Is it possible they’ve been perpetuating a collection of “victim” coalitions to keep their own interests at the top of the pyramid?

Say it isn’t so Dick Cheney? What’s up Donald? What about the evil Koch Brothers?

Here’s some consolation for the left: together the combined fortunes of the Koch brothers make the two of them the richest man in the world but even in American journalism you can’t claim two men are one guy. At $80 billion they would edge out Gates if you can consider a $5 billion margin an edge. They own a $20 million home in Aspen but don’t be impressed, $20 million just won’t but what it used to in Aspen. They also own a 10,000 sf home in New York and the wing with the pool alone is supposed to be worth $25 million. Now you can be impressed.

So if none of my boyhood heroes sit atop the list of 1%ers I am a little pissed. All this time I’ve been taking crap from the left about how the evil rich republicans are the problem and come to find out the biggest evil rich guys are actually lefties. Go figure.

It’s the fella’s who pull the strings on the left who are benefitting the most from our oppressive economic and social system. I’m sure they don’t want to. I can remember Warren Buffet being upset that his secretary paid more in taxes than he did. I never did here if he wrote a check for a few billion to the feds to make up for it.

He was probably too busy protecting Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in rail transportation systems whose value is severely threatened by the prospect of much safer and less hazardous oil and gas pipelines. Ah, probably not.

And what’s with this Bezos guy not being down with raising taxes on the rich? The left and their media tell us that merely requiring the rich to pay their fair share would solve our problems. I can’t find the stat I saw recently that showed if you confiscated ALL of the assets of the 1% and dumped it in the federal treasury it would only keep the government afloat for an alarmingly short time period.  Zuckerberg probably knocked that link down cuz it was fake news. Or maybe just something that didn’t contribute to his leftist agenda, to which he remains committed because the results of convincing a nation rich republicans suck hasn’t been bad for him.