wealth

"Beasley pointed toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the two richest people in the world, who could each individually help those in these situations with a small chunk of their overall change. Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has a net worth of $151 billion, according to Forbes, with his wealth increasing by more than 500% from January 2020 to March this year. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Bezos has a net worth of $177 billion. And their net worth is still growing. The week of October 11, Musk's net wealth increased by $12.7 billion due to Tesla stock gains, according to Forbes, and in just one day, on October 15, Bezos' generated $5.6 billion from Amazon stock. When news broke that Musk may have beat Bezos for the richest person title, he tweeted at Bezos a silver second place medal emoji. Meanwhile, Beasley told CNN that millions of others are in a "heartbreaking" situation as they're "knocking on famine's door.""

"The rich individuals are increasingly hoarding everything. If the billionaires want to go to space, they could at least leave their money on Earth to solve the critical Earthbound problems. We now have an estimated 2,775 billionaires with a combined net worth of around $13.1 trillion. I have it on good authority that you don’t need more than $1 billion to live comfortably. Even if every billionaire kept $1 billion, that would leave around $10 trillion for ending hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction. We should be taxing the vast and rapidly growing billionaire wealth to help finance a civilized world."

"The wealth that we have in this country is extraordinary. Last year, at the height of COVID, a billionaire was created every 17 hours. The average net worth increase by the billionaire community – that’s over 2,000 billionaires worldwide – was $5.2 billion per day... I need an additional $6 billion this year to reach the 41 million ... that are knocking on famine’s door... Let me tell you what will happen if I don’t reach those ... countries with that $6 billion. Yes, you’ll have starvation, mass starvation. You will have destabilization of nations. And you will have mass migration... The price tag to fix it will not be $6 billion... It will be trillions of dollars."

"The only s I know who are billionaires are failed physicists."

"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system. The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors."

"The governments are tapped out. This is why and this is when ... the billionaires need to step up now on a one-time basis, $6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don't reach them. It's not complicated... I'm not asking them to do this every day, every week, every year... We have a one-time crisis: a perfect storm of conflict, climate change and COVID. ...Just help me with them one time... The world's in trouble and you're telling me you can't give me .36% of your net worth increase to help the world in trouble, in times like this?... What if it was your daughter starving to death? What if it was your family starving to death? Wake up, smell the coffee, and help... My god, people are dying out there... We have a vaccine for this. It's called money, food."

"What we have seen is that while the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, we have seen a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, which is now reaching obscene levels. This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans … You know, this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires."

"As school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, America’s billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households."

"Billionaires and Wall Street should not be buying elections."

"Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist."

"The amount of people that are struggling out there because of these fucking billionaires, and they got us all arguing liberal and conservative. We gotta stop doing that, like I am so tired of hearing about people going to bed worried about what’s going to happen next week. There is so much fucking money in this country, and there is so much work being done. And if you work a whole fucking week at a job, you should be able to pay your fucking rent. You shouldn’t have to go out and get another fucking job and still be struggling. It’s bad for the country 'cause the kids don’t see their parents and they’re not getting the upbringing they need. These fucking billionaires! They need to be put down, you know? Like fucking rabid dogs They’re rabid with fucking greed, and just going out and just dividing everybody."

"Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently from useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the men of the same social classes. ...Her sphere is within the household, which she should "beautify," and of which she should be the "chief ornament." The male head of the household is not currently spoken of as its ornament. ...attention to conspicuous waste of substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of the woman."

"There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than to their class privileges and vested interests except perhaps to their illusions."

"It is wrong to think that the mixing of classes can affect the karma of people in a negative way. At the present time, quite often, the healthy, spiritually sound peasant family offers the best environment for a highly developed spirit. One's having been born in a palace or in a corner of a cobbler's shack should not be deemed the result of a mixing of classes, but, rather, to have been for the purpose of fulfilling a personal karma or else a certain mission. Thus, Boehme was a cobbler, but this was for the very reason that in those days this was the way in which he could best fulfil his great mission, in comparative peace. The dreadful karma of humanity is the result of the violation of cosmic laws, beginning with birth, but it is not the result of the mixing of social classes. Thus, marriage will be scientifically treated in the future. It is even said that people should conjoin according to their affinity with certain elements. 5 May 1934"

"# Social class space..."

"And when you have a society where 50 million people work for a living but have no health insurance, where millions have lost their savings and pensions to the Wall Street scandals, where no one feels secure that his job will be his job a year from now-well, those aren't race issues, (although African-Americans are the ones hit the hardest) those are bread-and-butter nightmares facing all Americans who are not privileged to be in the upper 10 percent. They are issues of class, and once the discussion turns to class, those in charge seek to shut it down as quickly as possible. Why? Because class is what will unite white and black and brown in this country and, God forbid, if that day ever comes ... well, let's just say the powers that be will be wringing there hands over much more than some smart-ass comic strip."

"The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life."

"Art is neither the monopoly of a nation, nor of a social class, or the major age. People of outstanding talents and fine feelings, people who are not lacking in imagnation and the sense of creation, as well as good will-power. They are privileged to be involved in ART."

"The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution — particularly the Socialist idea — is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class."

"# among ethnic or racial groups."

"The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society’s "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world — the power that creates the nation’s real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political system."

"The collectivity is divided into two classes of people: those who, by virtue of their ownership of the means of doing, command others to do, and those who, by virtue of the fact that they are deprived of access to the means of doing, do what the others tell them to do."

"Scientific observers often view living systems as existing in spaces which they conceptualize or abstract from the phenomena with which they deal. Examples of such spaces are:"

"# Political distance among political parties of the right and left."

"In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class."

"In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those now below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class- as well as self-justification. Nevertheless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority."

"# Pecking order in birds or other animals."

"In case you haven’t noticed, we … dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything. Piece of cake."

"Or les trois classes d'être créés par les mœurs sont : L'homme qui travaille ; L'homme qui pense ; L'homme qui ne fait rien."

"Mimi used to tell me that anyone who said they were middle class probably wasn’t."

"In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a handicap and, to the extent that he cares what the persons think of him or has internalised the dominant middle-class attitudes toward , he may be expected to feel some 'shame'."

"We must want equality, and we must grasp that equality does not coexist with class structure."

"Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful."

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just."

"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."

"Nothing can you steal, But thieves do lose it."

"Lacking much historical information and assuming (1) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendants of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices, ... then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in the society. ... These issues are very complex and are best left to a full treatment of the principle of rectification. In the absence of such a treatment applied to a particular society, one cannot use the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme of transfer payments, unless it is clear that no considerations of rectification of injustice could apply to justify it. Although to introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices might seem to be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state in order to rectify them."

"In the last 30 years, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth. The problem is this redistribution has gone in the wrong direction."

"The free market’s the best mechanism ever devised to put resources to their most efficient and productive use. … The government isn’t particularly good at that. But the market isn’t so good at making sure that the wealth that’s produced is being distributed fairly or wisely. Some of that wealth has to be plowed back into education, so that the next generation has a fair chance, and to maintain our infrastructure, and provide some sort of safety net for those who lose out in a market economy. And it just makes sense that those of us who’ve benefited most from the market should pay a bigger share."

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

"You don't need to be a statistician or an economist to be able to read the basic facts in the world today: the dominant classes and the corporations that they control extract surplus profits from the wealth produced by society, while billions of human beings who work to produce that wealth find themselves treated as if they are surplus humanity. This immense social divide, a widening gap across the class structure, can be observed in almost every single country in the world. This gap is not the result of any natural development, let alone of the magical phrase 'the Market'. This chasm across human society is produced and reproduced solely because of the civilizational system that privileges the private property of the few above the social needs of the many. That system is known as capitalism, a dynamic social process that - through inter-capitalist competition, through advancements in science and technology - has led to the vast increases in productivity but at the same time - because of private property - to immense social inequality. This double movement of capitalism, which generates enormous social wealth and enormous social inequality, both confounds humanity and provides immense potential for solutions to our great dilemmas - solutions that we call socialism."

"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver."

"Silver and gold have In one; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk."

"And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver."

"Hi-ho, Silver, away!"

"If a man bring to London an ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru in the same time that he can produce a bushel of Corn, then one is the natural price of the other."

"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver."

"The sayings of the Lord are pure; they are like silver refined in an earthen furnace, purified seven times."

"After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron."

"The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold."