unless Branson converted his own office property

Yours is a good reason not to read historical criticisms by historians, either...

if not the people who have experienced them? Should he stop working? Demand only the rich purchase his movies, CDs, etc, etc?.... Just kidding. I know you won't reply.

Poor people are not as dumb as Chris Rock thinks they are. They do know these things and they are not rioting in the streets. It says far more about the intelligence of regular folk than that of Rock and those who agree with him.

I didn't know a lot about 1st class travel before reading the article.

I think everyone knows the "haves" have it better than the rest of us, but the degree of excess might be unknown.

For example, this 100-story luxury condo building with only 104 condos - most of which will only be occupied part - time, seems rather shocking.
http://www.businessinsider.com/432-park-tallest-building-in-new-york-2014-10

Again, poor folks are not as dumb as Rock thinks they are.

But some posters here are commenting as if it is the Truth.

if middle and lower income people were blantantly exposed to the excesses made and spent on the dollars & backs of the middle class & the poor, i agree the revolution would happen tomorow.

Where in the world do you think we (since I am one of them) live? Off in the dark forest somewhere and the rich are partying in the castle? The rich are not isolated. People go into their communities everyday to travel and work. Anyone who has the internet, tv set or newspaper can easily see how the rich live. And there is no "rioting" or revolution. Are you the only one who has this mysterious knowledge of the rich while the rest of us wallow in ignorance? Why aren't you rioting?

No it is not the truth. Just a comedian throwing off a line...

but many of us who are poor or low income - myself included - have generationally been poor and not exposed to the opulence and ridiculously wealthy lifestyles. especially, those of us who live in rural communities where every kid in the local schools qualifies to receive a "no cost to them" breakfast, lunch, and after school snack. these kids go home to cold homes with no tv. today, through television and internet more people are seeing a whole lot more than ever. i, peronally, had no idea having never been in wealthy person's home. where do you get that this is what i am inferring?

whether one has been exposed to it has nothing to do with brains and it certainly does not mean they are stupid. i don't understand how you infer this from chris rock's rant.

further, as the disparity becomes greater & starker - there will be rioting in the streets.

I used to teach in a state college. Students were from blue-collar backgrounds. We would get on the subject of wealth and inequality. My question to them was "How much would someone have to make to be considered rich?" The answer was always in the neighborhood of $150,000 to $250,000 a year -- with an occasional reach to $500,000.

It was my sad duty to inform them that the truly rich could spend $150,000 on a weekend of golf. They had no concept of someone buying a third vacation home for $11 million -- and paying cash. (CEO of Starbucks). They couldn't imagine someone with a 250-acre vacation home estate with an 18-hole golf course, helipad, and a permanent staff of 120.

They couldn't even get their heads around those figures. They thought that at $250,000 a year you would be living in the lap of luxury.

If you were to ask someone making $300k a year if they were rich they would say "no". They would probably say making a million year was rich, and so on, up and down the ladder.

wealthy comedians like Maher and Rock (and, before them, to the late George Carlin).

But, mass media is big, big business. Corporate America is not about to dwell on how much money its biggest stockholders enjoy, let alone at whose expense they became so rich.

And who knows what he does with his money. There are some rich people who actually share their wealth and support higher taxes on the rich you know.

Didn't think so.

Do you?

How do you know that? As far as what he said, it is nonsense that "poor people" would riot if they knew how the rich live. They do know and they are not rioting. Poor people are not as dumb as Rock thinks they are.

I don't see poor people rioting in the street because of what rich people have. Do you? Where?

Have a nice day.

Sorry that you're so blind.

I had to do this the other day about Dave Grohl.

Chris Rock has numerous films and comedy concerts free online for anyone who wants to see them. Yes he gets paid for what he does, and he also makes sure that people who can't afford it get the opportunity to hear him.

So you might want to retract your statement.


And if you want the free stuff, well, you figure out how to get it since you seem to know more about Chris Rock than anyone...

great investments for the future, but he is not in the 1% class of uber-wealthy people that he is talking about. He came up the hard way and hasn't forgotten his past.

I still don't understand why anyone be grudges the earnings of another. Taking from them, might reduce the income gap; but, it won't put a dime more in your pocket.

I don't begrudge him for his success. I've met the man - he's very kind.

And he pays his personal assistant very well.

when it comes to someone else's income, folks act a lot like the typical union/government-hating tea partier that complains about union/government's wages, pension and workplace protections.

Some people have actually worked hard and made sacrifices to obtain that level of income. And they didn't have Donald Trump's daddy to help them out.

Chris Rock is probably at the higher end of that income scale but still not in that whelm of billionaire.

When you can't attack the message, attack the messenger. Do you know just how lame that makes you appear...

Telling us about life.

Gee, now who would use that kind of phrase, complete with a spelling error?

Hmmmm...

RL

_!_

RL

Mr. Rock does not have the OBSCENE level of wealth that differentiates the corporate megalomaniacs--think Koch, Walton, Rothschild, Helú--from the rest of us. Less than four hundred people on this planet own and control better than 50% of the planet's resources, including HUMAN resources. Mr. Rock's wealth is a tiny fraction of this ginormous pile of hedonism.

Now, I understand that it's easy to vilify garden-variety millionaires like Rock (and other individuals with similar wealth). However, people like Chris Rock are not spending tens of millions of dollars to insure that they control our media, our politics, AND our global economy. Those who ARE spending tens of millions of dollars to insure their hegemony are using a mere fraction of their wealth.

By the way, keeping the Hoi Polloi divided and divisive is one of the most effective tools of the obscenely wealthy, and it works particularly well with Republicans, who bemoan their tax money being spent on immigrants instead of asking why Wall Street got away with tanking our economy to the tune of billions of dollars.

This radical income inequity cannot continue. Too many people are hurting (self included). I no longer hold out hope that there can be a peaceful solution, and I grieve for our littlies. And, I'd rather we have each other's backs when it comes time to take back our democracy.

Shaquille O'Neil: Rich

Rick DeVos, the person who actually wrote his checks: Wealthy

Can I still criticize the KKK?

Same logic.

If you see no difference between him and the likes of the Koch brothers, then you are really clueless. There are a lot of rich people who understand income disparity. They do not spend hundreds of millions buying politicians for their own gain. Having money does not make you an enemy of lower classes.

You need to listen to what he's got to say. He's one of those comedians who slips the truth in there from time to time.

While people like Brand try to feign that they're doing anything to change it.

Basically he's saying the only logical thing, if people want to change it, they'd be rioting in the streets.

Somehow, George Carlin got away with it better, not sure how.

is that the numbers are so large, it's difficult to even comprehend that level. I mean, I can understand the living and buying power of one million, but a billion blows my mind. Seeing the word used in reference to government spending doesn't help, either, because what we see for the results is a tiny fraction of how a billion (or more) gets used.

My husband's niece couldn't join his family in Chile for Christmas because they were flying, with their yacht crew, to Panama to meet the Irish crew that had sailed their new yacht across the Atlantic. Then, they were going on the "training leg" with both crews from Panama to Valparaiso, Chile.

My mind boggled!

Then I got to know a little more about them and the incredible amount of their wealth. It's almost unimaginable. And all they seem to want is more, more, more.

is that there are also multi-millionaires at the other end of the spectrum. That is, they don't live large, you'd never know they were worth millions by either looking at them or even working with them.

I know one guy that's now a handyman, yet had owned a vehicle-modifying shop that probably started him on that road to wealth, and his investments kept him there. Yet, he looks like an older skilled labor kind of guy, his truck is beat up, and I assume his house likely is of modest means (I haven't seen it, just an educated guess.)

Those kind of wealthy people will never be noticed by the rioters. Of course, they aren't the majority of the wealthy, but they are there and seem to know oodles about frugal living

of the class struggle in America. This country is fucked. And as long as this situation continues, there are going to be more Fergusons.

im not sure even many of the rioters knew why they were doing it

I fear you're correct.

Stirring up class anger works - it's how America built the socialist foundations that made us #1 in everything by the middle of the 20th century. And when we disengaged in arrogant triumph, and activists splintered off to pursue less unifying issues, that's when those foundations eroded and we started backsliding.

I want every waitress, janitor, and Wal-Mart clerk to know how their corporate masters live, how society does everything for those people at their expense. Even if most people don't do anything with the knowledge, a few would come together and get active. And that's all it ever takes to start making change.

Even the carefully engineered distractions are starting to wear thin with the Teeming Millions. And it will not be pretty for the rich if they finally do wake up. I hope to live to see that day.

love the ballot initiatives passing in every election, that is the way to go

"Shaq is rich. The white guy who signs Shaq's check is wealthy." "If Bill Gates woke up with Oprah's money, he would jump out the window."

And while Oprah is a multi-billionaire, she got that way because of CBS. The wealthy owner of CBS had to sign her check

The rich do not even fly commercial for fear that they might have someone in the middle class or lower actually touch them.

I remember after Katrina when my mom and stepdad signed up to offer their separated cottage to house a refugee couple. They're retired, comfortable but certainly not wealthy, and live in California. FEMA paid the airfare for a couple to go there to live for six months. They were decent people, though certainly rough around the edges, with a bit of culture shock coming to a different region after the disaster. But mostly they had a hard time seeing just how mild and ordinary and unharried it was to live in a quiet suburb. They had no experience with life as anything but a day-to-day struggle, never having enough, surrounded by people who had been somewhat desperate their whole lives. "I just had no idea people lived like this" the woman said to me, when I was visiting and we were coming back from a nice lunch with my aunts. After a few months they had adjusted and found work, and had no interest in ever going back.

is NOT what should get people rioting in the streets.

It's the lack of justice for the poor and minorities.
It's the lack of jobs for the poor and minorities.
It's the lack of equal educational opportunities for the poor and minorities.
It's the lack of support to enable the poor and minorities to be able to go to school/college or receive job training.
It's the lack of a proper progressive tax structure to relieve the financial burden from the poor.
It's the lack of healthcare (esp. those states refusing to expand Medicaid) for the poor.
It's the lack of equal voting rights for minorities.


I could go on and on. He's barking up the wrong tree w/that line.

for the rest of us that not only do we need all the things you mention, but while we want for those things there is such disparity and unfairness that it should make us really mad, and if we got really mad we might get all the things in your list much sooner.

There's a difference between rich and wealthy.

I'm FAR from rich. I'm middle class (probably considered by many as upper) and I can frequent airport lounges like that due to my airline status. I fly weekly for work so have racked up some decent levels of status.

Should the 99% (of which I'm a part) riot against me then?

He's focusing on one small aspect that doesn't really have anything to do with the reason he's angry!


Look to the types of people who use private jets to fly to the Caribbean for the weekend or for a weekend ski trip in Europe and who do so as they inherited it and did not a damn thing to earn any of that privilege or run mega-corps making millions or even billions off the backs of minimum wage part-time workers.

That's a common fallacy which needs to be challenged wherever possible.

Those things they are talking about like product freebies/endorsements, gift bags at award shows, sponsors, getting paid to lose weight are related to celebrities, not the majority of the wealthy.

Truly wealthy people don't fly commercially either, they have private jets and helicopters to ferry them to and from their yachts.

I see the point the article is trying to make but they went about it all wrong.

When I was a kid, that welfare was also to keep poor people with something so they wouldn't turn to communism. Don't know if that was true. I've never seen or heard anything more.

There is no communism now so no one gives a damn.

including shredding 4th amendment protections & overthrows of foreign regimes.

Now that word has been replaced with terrorist. Though it would hard to spin that into why there is a welfare though I could see communism being logical, the need for it was obvious due to the poverty associated with the great depression.

n/t

…so I get to see the lavish lifestyle in full technicolor--every morning at breakfast.

Oh joy!

I do not begrudge people who are rich. I know plenty of millionaires and very successful people. However, the WSJ is really over the top. Even the ads are extravagant. Today's WSJ features a large ad for diamond earrings--only 30,000 a pair. Many ads like that--for ultra-expensive shoes, suits, jewelry, lavish trips, NYC apartments that go for $100 million, etc.

The opinion pages is a literary playground for the neocons and CEOs who believe that the EPS is destroying their lives by decreasing their profit margins by .5 percent.

My favorite is Friday's "Mansion" section. An eight-to-ten page homage to uber-extravagant homes and the people who live in them. One edition focused on homes that were so tailored to the homeowners tastes that selling these multi-million-dollar properties was practically futile. A family commissioned an artist to paint all family members--including dogs and cats--on a wall in their indoor swimming pool room (and they wonder why it won't sell?). People had indoor basketball courts, tennis courts and Olympic-sized swimming pools. One man built his 50 million dollar home to resemble a European castle. But now he wants to move. Hmmm.

It's all very interesting.

So much Obama bashing, and groaning when it comes to paying taxes or funding healthcare for lower-income folks.

It really is something.

What's the point of saying what rich people do? Is it suppose to make people angry? It's so sad that some people promote hate.

ask the politicians and the judges.

Enough said!

A new report came out a couple days ago. The wealth gap has spread even wider.

The 70 richest people own as much wealth as the bottom 40% of all people on the planet. 70 people. If you think those 70 people earned that much money by "working hard" then you must terribly young and naive..

I don't have a problem with people earning their money. But do you actually think that the guy sitting behind a desk on the phone all day works harder than the guy who is out fixing my roof in 30 degree weather? Yet the guy at the desk makes millions and the roofer gets 20 bucks an hour.

Maybe you can explain to me how that's "fair wages"..

But if you use your money to influence politics to increase your wealth, or make you money by screwing over others that is a problem. Those types contribute to the problem of inequality, which if it gets worse will hurt everyone. I do not hate rich people. I hate how some rich and wealthy people have earned and use their money.

republicans and the corporate media are good at that

they have a moral imperative to own the earth's material resources for the purpose of making profit from them. They bamboozle us with propaganda, convincing us that everyone can be rich, if they just 'work' hard enough. They've also convinced most of us, that the equivalent of 'freedom', is having more than one needs for a comfortable existence.

Capitalism is the bane of civilization. If we survive the ravages of this 'economic system', its 'theories' will surely be considered some of the most bizarre, diabolical beliefs to ever exist.

Why do people in small town and small city America vote Republican?

Because they have no idea how they are being ripped off. That's why.

It's the work of the people who just barely get buy that pays for the excessive wealth.

Disparity in wealth will always exist. But the European kings and queens of past eras did not live as well as the CEOs of major companies..

Among many other things, "divide and conquer" works very well.

And, whenever things look as though some issue or issues could lead to disruption, government throws out some bones to placate the masses and keep the rich safe.

insufficient. General strike? Nonviolent protest? Third parties? Given that the rich own the government and most of its decision makers, it's hard to imagine a serious revision of an unequal system coming from that direction. I keep thinking of the line in Michael Moore's Sicko where the American in France says something to the effect that in America, the people are afraid of the government, but in France, the government is afraid of the people.

I would hear this ad nauseam in my area. Truly an uphill climb. The one-day-I-will-be-rich-too-syndrome-even-though-I-have-snowball-chance-in-hell.

no matter how much money he has personally.

The problem, for me, is that poverty becomes institutionalized after decades of living in it. I could never live live those lifestyles the super rich live. I like my old wool Linus coat that has my dog's hair embedded into it too much. I like my old school vehicles and working with my hands. The things I really like to do don't cost money, so I just don't fit in. After a while I stop feeling so poor, like its normal to live this way.

Even though I agree with Chris Rock that the wealth disparity will lead to riots, I cannot be reached that way because I'm just too far gone.

Wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands as corporations gobble one another up and banks acquire assets having nothing to do with banking and finance.

people still think the ladder to the top is available to everyone
"Someday I'll be rich too."