The 1% are evil. The 1% is the reason why the problems of this country exist. The 1% are greedy and only care about making money. The 1% have made their money on the suffering of the 99%. The 1% have more wealth than most of the free world. The 1% are buying every election. We have heard it so much over the past years that the wealthiest 1% of this world is responsible for most of the problems of the world. But is that reasonable?
What do we really know about the stories of the so called ‘evil’ 1%? Why shouldn’t the people that have money be allowed to have a say in how this country is run as much as the person making minimum wage. Is it easier for us to call them the 1% instead of knowing who they really are? The most important question is whether the very people demeaning the 1%, the so called ‘99%’, actually helped create the 1%?
First of all, in the world, the 1% group is about 70 million people, yes that is million. To qualify for the 1% club the average net worth starts at around $600,000, the US that is closer to $400,000. That means that every major league ballplayer is part of the evil club, even the ones that are just starting out.
When you look at the 1,810 billionaires in the world, they are worth 6.5 trillion dollars combined. However, when you look at who these billionaires are, are they really the type that are building their fortune suppressing others?
http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
So let’s take a look at a few of these billionaires to show that no matter what they are still human.
Let’s start out with the most evil of the 1%, one of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. This is a man whose intelligence allowed him at the early age of 13 to create computer programs. Even though he attended Harvard, he chose to work on getting a company started in the 1970’s on the verge of the computer revolution. He never graduated from Harvard.
Bill Gates is a married man with 3 children. He has created a foundation with assets of in the billions of dollars that helps programs related to education and fighting poverty among its many charities. He has helped create a ‘pledge’ among billionaires to give half their wealth to charity, a pledge that he created with Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg.
Mr. Gates wealth came from being smart enough to partner with IBM and not give up the rights to his software but to continue partnerships with other computer companies. Bill Gate’s wealth came from companies need to use computers are part of their business, computers that contained their program.
Mr. Gates wealth came from our internal need to have a computer with his operating system on it, a computer to play games, put pictures and do our checkbook on. A need that eventually led to wanting tablets, smartphones and everything else that came from Microsoft.
So is Bill Gate part of the ‘evil’ that we are suddenly protesting? His company probably doesn’t pay their fair share in taxes and I am sure he doesn’t as well. He has been accused of bad business practices in the past.
At the same time, he has changed our world for the better as part of the technological revolution, helping companies work better and more efficient. Computers employ millions of people, people that make good money and this is because of people like Bill Gates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
Our next ‘evil’ billionaire is from Spain and created the empire of Zara clothing, Amancio Ortega Gaona. He started out in a shirt shop, making clothes by hand. Eventually, he opened a store with his wife and the rest as they say is history.
Zara now has over 6,000 stores and over 92,000 employees. Mr. Gaona was never a person who flaunted his wealth, no picture had ever been circulated of him before 1999. He also has created a foundation that helps Spain’s needy.
Clothing empires are built on the need of consumers to have the latest clothing and willing to pay for those clothes. Satisfying our need to be dressed in a brand helps give people jobs in these stores. The company probably doesn’t pay its share of taxes and Mr. Gaona probably doesn’t either and the stores have been accused of running sweat shops in South America.
In the end, is it evil to give people what they want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amancio_Ortega_Gaona
Jeff Bezos is a person who loved science and actually graduated from Princeton with electrical engineering and computer science. He was so into mechanical things that he built an alarm when he was a kid to keep his siblings out of his room.
Mr. Bezos was already making money from being a Hedge Fund Manager but when the internet was starting to take off in 1994, he realized that there would be a need to sell things online. This business is over 20 years old which means it started when the internet was barely a blimp on the radar. He was also an original investor in Google. Even though he has not taken the ‘pledge’, Mr. Bezos does help donate time and money to charities and also is very involved in the aerospace industry.
Amazon has made its money on the fact that consumers want to be able to buy things in the comfort of their own home. Even though it has reduced business from other retail companies, it has created an environment that other companies had to change to in order to compete. It has branched out into other areas such as streaming video, another area that consumers have flocked to.
Is it evil to make our lives easier to live from the comfort of our home?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Mark Zuckerberg is probably called evil for different reasons, the most because he supposedly ‘stole’ the idea of Facebook from others. However, he paid for that and yet it didn’t stop Facebook from changing social media forever.
Mr. Zuckerberg was already a child prodigy, building computer programs even before he went to college. By the time he reached Harvard he was already a computer legend and then he built Facebook.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also taken the pledge to give half his wealth to charity and is part of the Bill Gates Foundation. He has also given 99% of shares to his own foundation built with his wife. His salary for Facebook is $1.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s wealth was built on our need for instant communication about our lives and the lives of the people we know. It was built because businesses knew that in order to continue to sell you product they had to be on social media. Facebook changed the technology world by satisfying our instant gratification.
Is it evil to change the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Howard Schultz was a man who grew up in a poor Jewish neighborhood. He was an athlete that won a scholarship to college being the first person in his family to go to college.
He worked as a salesman until he became GM for a coffee company. In a trip to Italy while working for Starbucks, he found the way they serve coffee as being something to do in the US. He raised money to start his own coffee company and eventually bought out the Starbucks name. Starbucks was being created on every corner and not franchised so that they would always follow the Starbucks philosophy.
Starbucks has been one of the leaders in business giving part time employees health care, giving away food to the needy and good customer service. When McDonalds gave competition they closed down their stores and said let’s change our structure to make sure they give customers what they need. They were one of the first companies to do payments from cell phones.
Mr. Schultz is married and has 2 children. He has a foundation that helps in areas of veteran’s assistance.
Mr. Schultz’s wealth was built on our need to have good coffee even though it was at an expensive price. His wealth was built on his intelligence for making sure the business is run correctly.
Is it evil to put the customer first?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Schultz
The final 1% would be hard for a lot of people to call ‘evil’. In fact, this person should be the poster child for how to overcome adversity in the country to become one of the wealthiest and most respected people in the world. That person is Oprah Winfrey.
Ms. Winfrey was born in poverty in Mississippi. She was born to an unwed teenage mother. She wore dresses made from potato sacks. She was spanked if she did not do her chores and her mother was on welfare. She had siblings die of drug use and AIDS. She was molested by family members. She gave birth at 14 but the baby had died. She was a rebel but eventually graduated and earned a scholarship to a university. She did crack cocaine and had an affair with a married man.
She began working in a news station in high school and continued in television until her break that eventually led to the Oprah Winfrey show. She built the show from tabloid format to the format of more issue related. She has since created films, books and even her own television network.
Ms. Winfrey has held a non-marriage relationship for 30 years and said she did not want to have children because of the life she grew up in.
Ms. Winfrey has been very vocal in politics but has also given over $400 million dollars for educational purposes. She also created the Angel Network for charitable work.
Ms. Winfrey’s wealth has grown from our fascination with tabloid television and soap opera type of shows. However, most of it was built on the intelligence and compassion of the woman herself in every aspect of what she does. It was built out of our respect for the person not the race or gender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey
Other 1%:
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg whose wealth was built on us watching their movies
Candy Bar empires built on our vice of chocolate.
Beer empires built on our vice of drinking.
Perfume empires built on our need for self-beauty
Supermarket empires built on our need to eat
Casino empires built on our vice of gambling
Stock Market investors built on investing in companies that were built on basis of the above. If the companies were not popular they would not want to be invested.
The Walton Family built their empire on the basis of consumers need for cheap items despite the fact that they pay cheap labor and have many items built from overseas terrible business practices.
When someone says the 1% we automatically see red because as usual we need someone to blame. However, when you look at some of the people, one can see that these people should actually be promoted as what can be done with determination and hard work. They give back to the communities and charities where we can’t because of the positions that we are in. They didn't all start with a silver spoon in their mouth but so what if they did, aren't we all working to give our children better lives. Yes they may get some special treatment but when did it become a crime to create an empire or make money.
At the same time, how can we sit and not take responsibility for our part in the creation of the 1%. Our vices, need for outer beauty and the technological revolution have allowed these people to build the empires. They provided something that we desired, otherwise they could not be in the position that they are in. We created the monster and now we are angry that the monster is now beyond our control. One of the only ways to stop this is to stop our vices and insecurities, are we willing to do this to stop the 1% from getting even more wealthy?
So maybe instead of sitting behind our computers at home or protesting on the capitol because a movie star wants to hold a $300,000 a plate fundraiser, maybe we should start to find out where that anger comes from hope or jealousy. In the end, maybe we need to stop our anger at an illusion of a puppet master and start focusing on the 1% and 99% working together to help fix the issues of this country.