I posted this at DU but I think it bears repeating.
Think about this. The Koch brothers split 11.5 billion last year. That's $5.75 billion each. That's 5,750 million. Let's say Tom Cruise makes $20 million a movie. If most people had that kind of money they'd buy a fat house, a fat second house, a fat boat and very nice couple of cars. So let's say they'd get $5 million in goodies and live large off the interest happily ever after. That's $20 million. Tom could do about 3 of those a year so he'll bank about $60 million. Peanuts, chump change, walking around money.
Tom Cruise is going to have to make 287.5 movies next year to pull down what one of the Koch brothers got last year. He's going to have to make a movie about every day and a third to keep up.
A Rod, highest paid athlete in the world. Ten year contract for $275 million. That's 27.5 million a year. I hope A Rod's legs hold out because he's going to have to play another 209 seasons to pull down what one of the Koch brothers did last year.
And yet, they need more. They think YOU are earning too much. You with your little house and your little kids and your little doctor bills and your hopes of someday retiring, YOU are earning too much money. And it's costing them. YOU are the greedy one. Get it? These are sick men. They have wealth beyond any imagining and yet they wake up every day thinking about how they can take more from you, how they can make the lives of others more miserable. They will never be satisfied. It is a character disorder and it will never be repaired. Their souls are empty places and YOU must pay in suffering to fulfill that emptiness. They will never stop.
And they have limitless money with which to buy armies of boot licks like Scott Walker and armies of snake oil salesmen like Bill'O and Shawn and Glenn. More soulless men who should be selling slicer dicers in a Kmart but now enjoy duping the public into self destruction for tens of millions per year. I hope America is finally waking up to realize that they are fighting against broken men who hate beyond imagining.
Maybe I should try and clarify my purpose.
What I'm trying to do here is make the point is that these guys are so far beyond what average folks think of as wealthy. Clearly one of the goals of the right wing media is to create a false empathy with the wealthy.
I think one of the key elements in the psyops war on the middle class is to make the wealthy appear to be just ordinary folks, just like you and me. So we would want them to be treated fairly, just like we'd like to be treated. And if we work hard some day we might be in their position. Nonsense. So the point is, this is wealth beyond imagining. What the ordinary person thinks of as serious wealth isn't even in the neighborhood of the kind of wealth these guys control. Athletes and celebrities are people the public thinks of as extremely wealthy. So showing how far beyond them folks like the Kochs are might help put things in perspective. The psyops (read Fox News/Clear Chanel) play off of our ingrained sense of fairness. Fairness? There's no fairness here. What's fair about starting life with enough money to buy your own country? I think if the kids can't pull themselves up by their own bootstraps with a couple hundred million to start out, the blood may have gone thin.
And if you can't make yourself happy with only, say $27 or so billion, I don't think $30 billion is going to do it for you either. My point being, we're making public policy to cater to the emotionally disturbed. That's what they are. Because in spite of their emotional problems they've got enough money to buy public policy. What did the Kochs spend on the last election cycle? I think it was $325 million. That's nothing to them.
What's the Gandhi quote 'The world has enough to fill our need but not our greed.' We're making public policy to fulfill the wishes of sick people, people who can never be fulfilled. We're going to make everyone's lives miserableness in the service of insane and insatiable greed. It's madness. We have to get that message out there.
