One thing to think about when ranting about going after the "rich"

[RB TexLa]

We in America are the rich.



Villagers boil rats in Suphan Buri province, 120 km (75 miles) north of Bangkok, November 1, 2007. Once struggling to make ends meet in pest-infested villages, Thai rice farmers are now making money out of the very scourge that has gnawed at their finances -- rats. Thailand is the world's biggest rice exporter and roasted bandicoot rat has become a popular delicacy at roadside stalls despite costing twice as much as pork or chicken. Picture taken November 1, 2007.
REUTERS/Sukree Sukplang (THAILAND)



Children living at a dump site play in a toy house they constructed out of debris in Malabon, Metro Manila May 3, 2007.
REUTERS/Darren Whiteside (PHILIPPINES)



Charcoal seller Carlos Vasquez rests in the Caribbean city of Cartagena August 20, 2007. More than 8,000 families in the area survive by burning wood to produce charcoal, a business that pays them less than $3 a day.



A woman walks through Olusosun rubbish dump in Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos April 18, 2007. A fire tore through a makeshift village built atop the dump site on Wednesday, razing hundreds of shacks and leaving many people who scavenge waste material without shelter.
REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly (NIGERIA)





A child's height is measured during medical checks and food distribution at a feeding center set up by Action Against Hunger relief organisation to treat severely malnourished children outside Mandera town, 900 km (552 Miles) northeast Nairobi, November 15, 2007.
REUTERS/Radu Sigheti (KENYA)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Ya know, those conditions you cite are PRECISELY the result of countries

NOT soaking their rich residents.

[Fovea]

3. and their rich colonial overlords

be they nationalists, ideologues, or corporatists.

[JDPriestly]

14. These terrible conditions are often the result of corruption in the governments

and greed by the extremely wealthy. Some nations have few natural resources, but most nations have some resources. The unfair allocation of resources makes a country poor. When a few are rich and most are poor, poverty spreads. Some rich, some poor but most people belonging to a strong middle class. That is the ideal. The middle class has purchasing power and is the engine for economic development and progress.

[B Calm]

22. Exactly! The rich in those countries exploit the poor!

[sjdnb]

2. Thanks to the unequitable distribution of wealth - UN study 2006

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University

http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/2006-2007/2006-2007-1/wider-wdhw-launch-5-12-2006/wider-wdhw-press-release-5-12-2006.htm

[Fovea]

4. I believe that you can reach a point where the concentration of wealth

destroys the very concept of wealth. Not long after that, heads are mounted on fence posts.

[Selatius]

13. Wealth is useless if its circulating in a stagnant pool of a very few people.

It's a pool only the top crust get to swim in. Everyone else becomes the "Great Unwashed" like the medieval days.

[tekisui]

5. Thank you for the perspective.

I try to remember this.

[readmoreoften]

6. Just because the world's wealthy live here doesn't mean we're part of that 2%

The study the other poster linked to put the North American wealth per capita at $144K. For the past three years both my partner our household income is less than 10% of that. We're under the poverty line, but certainly not hopelessly destitute. I'm pretty sure I can still safely rail against neoliberal multi-millionaires.

But it is important to remember that neoliberal policies are often brutalizing citizens of other nations far worse than citizens of our own.

[sjdnb]

7. Yeah, there are ultra, make me wanna puke wealthy, in NA

vs everyone else. That's the point ... over the last 30 years, the concentration of wealth has increased to the point where the vast majority of the population, while increasing their productivity annually, are spinning their wheels, in order to increase the wealth of fewer and fewer people, exponentially.

[Romulox]

8. Right...what's a little infant mortality here in the good ol' USA? Things could get worse!

What an absolutely ridiculous thread! :silly:

[RB TexLa]

16. Yeah, about 6 or 5 out of every 1000 live births compared to I think 45 or so per as the world

average. Yes, Americans are truly among the world's poor.

[Romulox]

20. If we can just get that infant mortality rate up, maybe YOU won't have to feel so GUILTY! nt

[RB TexLa]

23. I don't feel guilty, its just to the bottom 10 or 20 % the top 80% or so look the same at the top

2%

[Romulox]

33. So? This game can be played by ANYONE.

To the bottom 50%, the top 50% also look the same.

So what? :shrug: You seem to imply that inequality in the world excuses inequality here at home.

That's a disturbing sentiment, to say the least: So I murdered someone. You should see how many people were murdered in the Sudan last year! This sort of "everyone's doing it" argument isn't acceptable beyond 1st grade or so.

[eridani]

9. The One Percenters are multinational and multicultrural

Therefore it is imperative that the rest of us do that also.

[harmonicon]

10. and your point is what?

we shouldn't complain until we've got it that bad? I don't bitch about the rich because I want more money or freebies or some shit like that. I'm perfectly comfortable. I rail against the wealthy, because they're wealthy due to the suffering of the truly poor. A few weeks ago I was looking for a new coat, and I went to this shop that people told me was cheap - I couldn't bring myself to buy anything there, because it was too cheap (this is the UK, which, astonishingly, doesn't have the same labeling laws). I couldn't imagine that those clothes weren't made in sweatshop conditions. I cannot support the exploitation of workers.

[David Dunham]

11. Effective birth control is needed to combat poverty in the Third World

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. The best birth control in the Third World is education for women and girls

Fertility rates correlate almost perfectly with female illiteracy. Birth rates are highest in countries where most women are illiterate, and lowest in countries where males and females have equal educational opportunities, even if the countries aren't that wealthy (like Thailand).

Get 100% of the school age girls into school, institute literacy programs for adult women, and birth rates will drop, guaranteed.

[AdHocSolver]

12. The problem is not rich people per se. It is the rich people who are never satisfied with ...

the wealth they already have. They have an insatiable greed that drives them to ruthlessly exploit people, cheat people, degrade people, and even kill people for profit.

Those people must be reined in by the rest of us. The Republican and the Democratic political leadership who enable the Bush cabal and their corporate cronies to get away with the corruption and the carnage of this planet are as guilty as Bush and company.

The war in Iraq must be brought to a conclusion. The military/industrial complex must be reined in. Tax laws and trade laws must be rewritten to make it unprofitable to export jobs overseas. Companies that want to manufacture goods in the US with American workers, while following environmental and labor laws, should be given preferential treatment.

The government must immediately mandate fuel efficiency standards for all new vehicles, with stiff penalties for noncompliance. The technology exists today to increase fuel efficiency. The environment must take precedence over corporate profits.

The government must immediately develop plans and start implementing (and funding) universal health care in this country. Health care must become the right of every citizen. Single payer healthcare available to all citizens and not tied to employment would make it possible for small companies to compete in the market place. More companies means more jobs, and more opportunity for more people. Large corporations that have a few executives controlling tens of thousands of lives is bad for the country.

The tax and trade laws have to give smaller companies an edge and penalize the merger into larger companies. Tax laws should be rewritten to make stock options for corporate executives undesirable. This would eliminate a lot of the opportunity for shady deals ala Enron.

To achieve these goals, which interplay in ways that aid each other, we have to elect a progressive President, a progressive majority in Congress, and progressives at the state and local level. This means running progressives in all races, not just a few here and there. The reactionaries became ascendent because they run reactionary candidates throughout all government. This means fielding progressive candidates against Democratic incumbents who are enablers of the reactionary agenda.

We won't be immediately successful everywhere. However, we must keep at it until we succeed in getting a government that responds to the needs of the people rather than to the whims of their corporate masters.

[Occam Bandage]

15. The next thing to think about:

You have a computer.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

17. its funny i often think that when i see the we hate the rich threads

but i think there is a difference between a good standard of living, and an opulent display/consumption of wealth and resources/

[fed-up]

18. taking my then 16 YO to Belize (a developing country) was the best thing I have ever done

Most Americans are completely oblivious to how the majority of the rest of the world exists.

We bitch about high prices, while spending money on utterly useless crap (made by slaqve wage workers and creating tons of pollution during manufacturing) that ends up in a (toxic) landfill a few months down the road.

We basically stick our heads in the sand and ignore the needs of fellow human beings...

We are complicit in the destruction of this planet and the human life that lives here.

[Initech]

32. I have a great idea for a reality show...

We take the over-privileged young rich kids that party their asses off on "My Super Sweet 16" or that Tila Tequila show or whatever the fuck the latest reality craze is, and we dump them off in a third world country for two weeks after their big celebration so they can see how the rest of the world lives.

And if there are any producers out there who happen to be reading this, feel free to steal this idea. Just make sure I get credit for it!

[Cerridwen]

19. Yes, some of us are. Then there are those who will have no home to sleep

in tonight, those who will die because they could not get proper health care, those who suffer from malnutrition, those who may freeze to death because they could not afford their heating bill or who may die due to heat because they couldn't afford that bill, those who will for the duration of their life suffer some form of health issue because their mother couldn't afford needed health care while pregnant or during infancy, those who live in conditions here in the rich U.S. that look almost identical to the pictures you posted, and those who will die in health care facilities while their CEO buys a yacht. Just some examples of how the "rich" in this country take care of our people.

Yes, some of us here in the U.S. are "rich" by comparison. I'm happy for you that they're the only ones you're familiar with. The rest of us care about the ones who aren't; even if we can't see them out our front window.

edit to add: we may be "rich" by comparison, but we appear to be impoverished when it comes to compassion.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. Yes, last night my church fed a hot dinner to a couple hundred people who

walked over in 10°F weather wearing ragged layers of coats and sweaters, some of them with missing teeth and other signs of poor health care and poor nutrition. Tonight we will feed about 100 youth who are either on the streets or working poor.

It's hard to feel that we're in a rich country when I see things like that.

A country is only as rich as its poorest citizens, and to think that some people literally have more money than they can possibly spend in a lifetime while others are dependent on charity to get a hot meal or to find shelter from the cold is infuriating.

Contrary to the stereotype, not all street people have substance abuse or mental health problems, and even if they do, why aren't they in treatment instead of being forced to camp out in a Minnesota winter?

There are an awful lot of people in this country who have an awful lot of money, and who could fund treatment centers and group homes for those who cannot work and start businesses that provide jobs for those who can work, but no, they'd rather isolate themselves in enclaves where they never have to see a poor person.

[Cerridwen]

29. Priorities plus judgement plus indifference plus fear plus the need to punish...

I think those are the start of a recipe for what we've made here in the U.S.

The poor are not worthy.
They bring it on themselves.
They should pay the price for their mistakes.
Life's not fair.
They didn't earn it.
If only they worked harder.
The poor are lazy.
No one gets a free ride.

*sigh* I've seen and heard those comments and/or variations of them, off and on my entire life - from "conservatives" and "liberals" and all parts of the social and political spectrum in between and around. For a "Christian" nation, we sure seem to have missed learning some of Christ's lessons.

[flashl]

21. U.S. Roots in Pictures

American Pictures

[Angela Shelley]

24. Thanks for the link, flashl

[flashl]

25. Pictures of America's other class, 'the underclass'

[Perry Logan]

27. Good point, RG.

[spanone]

30. i know many people who are 'rich'. Most are liberals.

[Initech]

31. Yeah, but this is where we could be headed if this crap continues.

The rich will continue to get richer while screwing the middle class (read: their employees) through the nose.

Honestly when I watch TV and flip through the channels, the amount of shows that glorify rich lifestyles is sickening (MTV, I'm looking at you).