Pity the poor billionaires. The world is not as enamoured with them as it once was, and the moneyed are upset that they don't know where they stand any more. Are they winners, or wicked?
Even though we traditionally measure success by how much money you have amassed, and they have more than anyone, a shift has occurred. We are starting to see these funded folks more as a global liability than the blessing that they consider themselves to be.
Show me a billionaire and I will show you someone that got to the top of the heap by way of tax evasion, environmental destruction, corruption, low paid workers, and a host of other questionable and outright criminal behaviours.
One study found that if the 3000 largest corporations had to pay for all the damage they were responsible for, none of them would be profitable.
The companies in question were responsible for $2.15 trillion dollars in environmental damages in 2008 alone. One year. But wait, there is more.
We also have to include the $4.7 trillion per year in health care and social costs, lost ecosystem services and pollution.
In other words, if companies really did put people and the planet before anything else, there would be no profits. The "profits" can only be made through the exploitation of both the people and the planet.
Then there is corporate malfeasance, which outright steals untold trillions of dollars more from the global economy. All of this only to make a small group of people insanely wealthy.
Can the world afford billionaires? Are such individuals a net benefit for society? Or are they a danger to themselves and others?
Money hoarding can be a sign of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so if we do what some suggest, and eliminate the status of billionaire (not to be confused with eliminating people that are billionaires), we might be doing the billionaires themselves a favour.
There is no use hoarding all that cash if people don't respect what you do, or how you do it.
We can see that the little men behind the curtain that have been operating the gears and levers of the billionaire assembly line, really only want love, just like the rest of us. They just don't know how to get it.
What a frustrating, yet humbling, moment that must be for them.
All 2229 of them.
No, we don't envy you. We pity you.
You are wicked, and now you are a bunch of whiners, too. A former coffee company CEO, seeing where the whole thing is headed, is now asking us to call him and his fellow hoarders "people of means" rather than the now increasingly pejorative "billionaires".
So I say to them,
"People of means, please seek help before you destroy everything, including yourselves. Maybe, in the end, you will find the love you obviously want, but don't know how to get through normal, healthy means."
There is indeed nothing better than love, is there? Not even billions and billions of dollars.
