Money

A friend of mine posted  something on facebook today, outlining all the evil stuff the Koch brothers do, highlighting the fact that they plan to spend a billion dollars on the next election, and almost entirely saying stuff I agree with.

Charles and David Koch are horrible people.  They aren’t happy just being rich,  they want the poor to suffer more.  They really have nothing to gain by slashing social security, it’s not as if they are paying a huge percentage of their income in taxes.  Even if they were, they should be arguing for a reduction in the military, because that’s where over half of the money goes.

They are anti-all-environmental-regulations which, as everybody knows, means pro-pollution.   The only reason any corporation opposes environmental oversight is because they are big pigs making a mess  everywhere and don’t want to get called on it.

They want to put a pipeline all the way across the United States, longer than the Mississippi river, which is almost bound to cause serious environmental damage sooner or later.

The one thing I objected to about the meme was that it said “Charles and David Koch are the richest men in the world.”  It’s just not true and, unlike Republicans, we don’t need to lie to make our point.  In fact, it would be better if we didn’t.

Well, I raised that tiny objection and somebody linked to a list of the world’s richest people.

Holy shit.

First, the Koch’s were much higher on the list than I thought, at 5th and 6th place, but that wasn’t the thing that knocked me out.

Secondly, they didn’t count people like Queen Elizabeth and the Pope, because that’s a whole different category, a different (and perhaps impossible) way of calculating, but that wasn’t what knocked me out.

What knocked me out was the number of people on the list and the  huge amounts of money involved.  How much money is in the world, any way?  That is the question.  There were over a thousand people on the list, and the top 200 or so all had more than $10 billion. That’s over  $2 trillion right there.  All together, I’m guessing there was over $10 trillion in the hands of these few (1,000 seems a lot, but not 1,000 out of 7 billion)individuals.

They could easily provide everybody on Earth with clean drinking water.  They could probably, with a bit of clever planning and pooling of resources, make sure everybody on Earth has a decent home.  They could do all that, and still be rich.

But they won’t.  With a very few exceptions (Richard Branson, Elon Musk, maybe Bill Gates but I distrust his motives) they are doing nothing good for the world at all, and a lot of them are actively working to make the world a more horrible place.  Because they are assholes.