We need to change our attitude towards the extremely wealthy

[jorno67]

Hoarding is a serious mental disorder that compels the afflicted to nonstop acquisition of possessions - in this case, wealth. Most Hoarders don't see a problem with their behavior so treatment is very difficult.

[provis99]

1. Hoarders don't typically steal from other people. The rich do.

[dkf]

4. So Bill Gates, Warren Buffet And Larry Ellison have stolen how much from you?

Do you think Bill Gates has done nothing positive for you and the world would have been better without him?

That is the Forbes top 3 by the way.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. Having to purchase crappy software for crappy computers

because of the monomoply that microsoft has - yeah, that's stealing.

In the beginning there was a fucking hell of a lot more than Word.

[rhett o rick]

9. You are responding to a corporatist. A Koch-Democrat. A bigger problem to our party

than the republicans.

[badtoworse]

35. Why is she a problem? She asks questions and posts things that are tough to answer with demagoguery

[lunasun]

13. plus he took our seeds and put them in a box far away from us

[PETRUS]

6. Quite a bit, actually.

Over the past 30 years people like them have been behind the defunding of the NLRB and the weakening of labor law, enactment of selective trade agreements and immigration policy, adjustments to monetary and currency policy, deregulation of the financial sector, and various other things. All of which have been enormously beneficial to hedge fund managers and corporate executives to the detriment of the majority of the population - i.e. an tremendous upward redistribution of wealth. Oh yeah, they iced the cake by making the tax code steadily less progressive. True story.

(occupy wall street)

[dkf]

16. Bill Gates is responsible for deregulation in financial services? For weakening the NLRB?

What do those things have to do with him? Do you have anything to back this up?

[PETRUS]

18. What I wrote was...

"people like them." For all I know, Bill Gates is a peach. He sure did benefit, though. I'm not naming names, I'm talking policy and the results.

If you're honestly interested and willing to spend some time reading, go here:

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/

and here:

http://www.deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/End-of-Loser-Liberalism.


Have fun.

[Confusious]

12. Well, Bill Gates stole DOS

Since that is what his fortune is based on, it's all blood money.

Very well know fact by computer geeks, long before the internet.

Oh, and then there was windows ME, windows vista, etc...

[dkf]

17. Maybe so...But not from you.

[Confusious]

19. Boy, that's a first

Do you do this with the people you know also?

He didn't steal from me, so he's OK.

He's not beating me, so he's OK.

And you must not have read my entire post. Steal from me, yea he did. The money I paid for crap dos, crap windows 95, crap windows me and crap vista. If it had been a car, they would have had to give me a new car. But they wouldn't have. That's stealing.

I use Linux now. If you actually had to pay for it, it would be worth twice as much, or more, then windows.

Shit on Linux that they say is "beta" works a hell of a lot better then the shit microsoft says is release and makes you pay for.

[Bryn]

2. I once knew a couple of wealthy guys who would

make a big fuss over ONE DOLLAR!!! One of they refused to pay 1.00 for frigging parking! Another one had a biggest fear of being poor so he became a hoarder, wouldn't spare a dollar.

[Booster]

7. I read that John Paul Getty would get up from a couch and

check the cushions to see if change had fallen out of his pocket. Sounds like a sickness to me. And I wish I had a reason for that sickness.

[Norrin Radd]

3. We need to declare their money valueless. Create a new currency.

Well, I'm pro post scarcity, but this is a start.

[dana_b]

8. lol - yeah, let's not give Lifetime or whatever channel it is

any ideas.

[jorno67]

10. oh crap...I din't think about the possible Reality TV series!

"Wealth Hoarders: Penny Punched"

[grasswire]

11. democratic underground, february 28, 2011

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x529417

"The mental condition of the 1% is the same as that of hoarders who have debilitating mental disorders that delude them into destructive behaviors. They are ruining our collective "house" with their hoarding of money and power. They are causing grevious suffering in the American family.

Sometimes a family has to intervene in the hoarder's actions -- for their own good and for the good of the family.

And so it's time for those of sound mind to intervene by making the hoarders relinquish some of their stash, and putting them on a path of health and community. For their own good.

Tax the rich their fair share.

End corporate welfare.

Enact laws that take money out of politics.

Enact laws that return jobs to Americans.

We're doing this for your own good, 1%."

[jorno67]

20. we should make a 30 second public service announcement

about this affliction...

[Drix]

14. The treatment is easy. Just take their money.

Because ironically it's not really about the money. It's about the game. As a single person you can only wear one suit at a time,live in one house at time, ride in one plane at a time, sail in one boat at time. You can only personally consume so much. Once you have a hundred million the rest is just zeros on accounting ledgers.Inanimate objects you can lay claim to but never actually use. They are like gambling addicts. If they can't play big casinos they'll pitch pennies in the alley. Let them cry and moan. They'll get over it. Sniffling tears on your yacht because of all the money you don't have while surrounded by buckets of champagne and caviar usually doesn't last too long.

[AdHocSolver]

15. There are two ways in which hoarding of money by the wealthy hurts the economy.

From an economic standpoint, tax breaks for the already wealthy and corporations are wasteful because they extract money from the economy. Wealthy people who don't pay their fair share of the tax load are like hoarders. They extract the life's blood of an economy, that is, its circulating medium of exchange that we call "money".

The driving force of any economy is DEMAND. Demand arises when people have money to spend. To be able to spend money in such a way as to stimulate the economy, the mass of the people need income, which for most people means a job.

Tax breaks for the wealthy also hurt the economy because governments then have less money to invest in education, infrastructure, and research and development. Expenditures for Social Security and Medicare are also investments in America because these expenditures "prime" the economic "pump" just as does spending on infrastructure.

The wealthy class derides these expenditures because they want to steal these funds to enrich themselves by transferring public sector funds to themselves through tax breaks and privatization.

[hack89]

22. If it is not under their mattresses, their money is circulating in the economy

what do you think banks and investment companies do with their customers money?

If demand depends purely on people with jobs why was there ever a recession? By your logic, if corporations had simply refused to lay off people, there would not have been a recession. Are you saying that all these business owners made a deliberate business decisions to lay off people and make less profit?

[jorno67]

24. Don't banks and investment companies buy Junk Bonds

and worthless derivatives?

[hack89]

25. Don't they also buy municipal bonds and other premium investments?

do you understand junk bonds - it does not mean they are worthless. You can make good money on junk bonds if done right. More to the point, they do not represent some harm to anyone - it simply means some companies have to pay more to investors in order to raise needed capital.

[jorno67]

26. Well when you put it that way....

Everything is ok! Everyone can have their homes back and Wall Street promises not to do it again! Have a nice day!

[hack89]

27. Thank you - I think I will. nt

[AdHocSolver]

29. Money used to trade financial paper has little effect on the real economy.

The term used to label the "economy" that you describe is called a "banana republic" in which a large amount of money circulates among a small group of wealthy people at the top, and the masses live in poverty.

What the banks and investment companies do these days with their customers deposits (which they get essentially for free since they pay so little interest) is to operate Ponzi schemes or build factories in China.

Moreover, companies DO make conscious decisions to lay off people to boost short term profits in order to drive their stock prices up (at which time the executives sell their stocks at a temporarily inflated price).

These techniques have been described in this forum and many other places.

The real economy is driven by demand, which indicates that the populace has money to spend, and most people get their income from having a job. Borrowing money to import goods, while it might make the financial numbers like GDP and the Dow-Jones average look good, is no indication of the health of the real economy.

The huge U.S. trade deficit and the high rate of unemployment are indicators of a very sick economy.

[TBF]

21. If your system is capitalism you're going to get greed -

change the system and you might see a change in behavior.

:shrug:

[socialist_n_TN]

23. Word sister............

When the system not only encourages greed, but has greed as an inherent PART of it, guess what? You're going to get greed. I'm not so sure why this is so hard to understand. :shrug:

[hack89]

28. How have countries like Sweden embraced capitalism

and avoid many of America's problems? Capitalism seems to work very well there.

[EOTE]

30. They have far greater social safety nets IE Socialism.

It's unfettered capitalism that's the problem. The countries that regulate capitalism with a healthy dose of socialism are faring much better in today's economy.

[hack89]

31. I don't think that socialism is the proper term

They recognize that only capitalism will generate the necessary wealth to support a just and equal society. So it appears to me that capitalism itself is not the problem at all.

I find Sweden interesting in that there is very little government ownership of companies and business - the economy is regulated but it is primarily in private hands. I am not sure I would call that socialism.

[EOTE]

32. You may not think it's the proper term, but that's what it is.

What would you call a government run health care system? Or the myriad other government run public utilities? I said before that Sweden implements capitalism, but it's certainly not unfettered capitalism, which is what we're approaching here.

[hack89]

33. Sweden is capitalism done right

Socialism implies public ownership of the means of production - that is not the case in Sweden. Private ownership rules - there are few government run companies. Vattenfall AB and E.ON Sverige , Sweden's two largest power companies are both parts of transnational conglomerates. That government provide health care more frequently means public money being spent at private hospitals and doctors offices.

Sweden is capitalism done right - a near perfect partnership of government, business and labor. But it is capitalism that generates the wealth to make it work.

[AdHocSolver]

34. The essential part of capitalism that generates wealth is competition.

With all the mergers and acquisitions of corporations in the U.S. that created companies "too big to fail", the U.S. in reality has an economy that more correctly should be called corporate socialism (as opposed to government socialism).

Companies that are as vertically and horizontally integrated, as are many corporations today, do not compete, rather they collude.

This is not classical capitalism. When industries were more decentralized and the government regulated them (more or less, but more than today), the system "worked" and we had prosperity.

What we have today are government sanctioned monopolies controlled by a power elite. The American public is in the same situation today that are Founding Fathers found themselves back in 1776 with the British crown and government sanctioned monopolies such as the East India Company.

Until these conglomerates are decentralized so that they are forced to compete, and the government reinstitutes regulation to promote competition AND protect the public interest, the U.S. will not experience classic capitalism that promoted innovation and created new wealth.