Your point? Would you donate half of everything you own or all of it? Probably not. At least they’re helping.
People complaining about rich people not donating more are hypocrites, cause I don’t see any of you donating too or donating the percentage of what you earn/ have in the bank that you think they should be donating.
If they donate half of what they own they would have more money than they and their family and their ancestors could ever spend. If i donate half my money, i can’t pay rent anymore.
That’s why it’s good that people are donating to funds like these. Celebs donate big amounts. Even if it’s less that 1% of their worth. Who cares? It’s 10mil, that’s a lot of money and can do a lot of good.
My point was, I notice the people who screech about celebs not donating enough either don’t donate themselves or wouldn’t even consider donating the percentage of their money that they feel these people should be donating. It’s hypocritical.
The rock is a good person, he’s worked to get where he is. He’s entitled to his money just like every other Tom, dick and harry is.
As much as I dislike shitty rich people, looking at you Elon, it’s still their money. And if we screech about how they should spend their money, it’s only fair that we can then be told how to use ours too. Would it be nice if people like him used money for good, yes of course. But end of the day, it’s their money to do with as they choose. And even a donation that isn’t huge to them, is huge to others in need. So it shouldn’t be complained about. It should be seen as good.
Does she need that much more than us, and why doesn’t she feel the need to give it all back to help people who are in that situation she started out in?
Please stop mocking the rock. for the love of Pete and everything that is holy, please leave the fact he makes more on a single movie than most of the small towns and villages of the area are worth. Oh please stop mocking the rich and super well off whoa are asking everyone to give money they could give themselves in, but only want to give so much.
How is rock going to be rich if he’s just helping useless assholes who can’t afford to help themselves?
you probably don’t even give when wal mart tells you to.
That’s not how charitable donation tax breaks work! You can’t claim a donation that was contributed by someone else. This is a common misperception, but it’s a dumb one because people say it all the time when it’s not true and then people don’t donate when they may otherwise have.
In this particular example, The Rock and Oprah are acting as collectors of charitable contributions. They can only claim against their tax any money that they themselves donate. If you contribute to their collection, the only person who can claim your donation is you, against your taxes.
It’s the same when the grocery store asks you to round up to charity. The store can only claim against their taxes if they are using their own money, for example contributing a portion of all sales or using previously earned funds. If you round up to donate to charity then you are the one who can claim, if it’s above the threshold.
What you are suggesting they are doing is actually illegal, and the IRS could go after them for it.
People on here are just as misinformed as everywhere else, it appears.
Is it their money though? They didn’t make it by themselves, they have whole teams they depend on and people that, in this case, watch them. The simplest answer is that they shouldn’t have to give because they should be paying enough taxes (i.e. more than they pay now) that they shouldn’t have to worry about aid programs not having enough money to help.
"Problem 1: Never trust a billionaire.
Problem 2: When a billionaire starts a fund, DON’T GIVE THEM MONEY.
Problem 3: How do you think a billionaire becomes a billionaire?
Thank you Sabby for exposing these rich frauds.
DON’T GIVE THESE PEOPLE ANYTHING"
@lawrencefine5020
If you don’t know how the wealthy class use non-profits and other “philanthropy” to funnel money, here is a clip below that explains.
This video presents no evidence and asks ‘questions’ about it that answers can easily be found to online and then gives the worst possible interpretation just to shit on them.
For example, Oprah misspoke and so the video interprets that as ‘one’ resident will receive $5,000,000 when the fund details that all affected residents over 18 will receive $1200.
Asking questions about ‘who’ is staffing the fund, when it’s the local community and elders who will oversee it.
This is just outrage bait, and you have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
I honestly dont care either. I get sick of people telling others how they should live and what they should do with their own money. Be happy they donated 10 mil. That can do a lot of good.
If people are willing to tell others how to spend their own money, they should also accept others telling them how to use their money too.
Its like the free speech bullshit. People think it’s fine to police others speech just because they don’t like what they’re saying, but if someone tried to police their speech they get butthurt. Stop trying to police people and just be happy when someone does something good.
I think we need to differentiate between rich people who got rich through honest work, and rich people who got rich through deliberate exploitation.
Most if not all billionaires are part of the second group, and they do not deserve the money they have. People who got rich like that are the whole reason others depend on charities and donations to get by in the first place.
Oprah is definitely an exploiter. She’s exploited her audience for years, pushed crooks and frauds to the fore (Jenny McCarthy and her stupid anti autism shit, Dr Phil/Oz,), and (my personal least favorite) she promoted a faith healing rapist which likely got some of her fans raped.
People complaining about rich people not donating more are hypocrites
This is the trap of marketing and communication. They donate for the image, to hide the image of the rich disconnected from the reality of the poorer.
I’m all for the rich to contribute to pay and help the people, but not through charity. The rich must be taxed, and these taxes serves to help with government jobs, so everyone has a word to say. With taxes, we help the poorer, we help in case of natural disasters, we found the researches, we give access to healthcare, we… With charity, we help the riches to keep an oppressive system of power over the poorest. It’s a system to keep the huge gap between rich and poor.
The rich are taxed. They pay way more than you do. They pay way more than the non rich people combined. The top 10 rich people pay more taxes than all the non rich people. So don’t come at me about taxes. Your tax contribution is basically nothing. Whereas they pay insane amounts.
In my country. You pay 40% tax if you earn over 100k a year. Which isn’t even rich, but you basically give up nearly half your wage you work fkn hard for. So don’t try pull the tax bullshit.
Do you honestly think someone who earns 100k a year works twice as hard as someone who earns 50k a year?
And if the 50k earner only pays 20% and the 100k earner pays 40%, they are still earning 50% more than the low earner. Even theoretically it’s not particularly unfair.
The most shocking thing to me here is the tax rates. Everywhere I’ve lived, the lowest bracket of income tax rate is 20-30% rising to 50% for high earners. The fact that the highest earners in the US (literally multi-millionaires and billionaires) are only paying 25% is outrageous to me. The average income tax paid for the 1% bracket is $400k, meaning they are still going home with at least $1.2mil a year. Why are the bottom 50% even paying anything? It’s obscene.
To earn near or just over 100k a year you need to be a specialist surgeon for 10 years. That’s not including the years it takes to become a surgeon anyway.
And so what? In this one hypothetical, the skilled experienced surgeon still gets more money to take home than the less skilled, less experienced worker.
Exactly this. Last year I paid so much in taxes that I almost had to cancel one of my ski trips to the Swiss alps and had to think really hard about whether to hold off on buying a new private jet (my old one is already several years old and it makes me feel embarrassed when my friends have a newer one than me).
Meanwhile, lazy poors walk around crying like I’m not paying enough when what do they pay? A few thousand dollars? Basically they pay the price of one dinner? Stop complaining, ingrates!
I donate 10% of my income every month, which is as much as I can and also 33.3x more than 0.3%. Don’t paint everyone with the same brush, especially not to defend the haves from the have-nots.
So you are saying it would have been better for them to donate nothing and not stir you and everyone else up?
You know what though, you can be angry and bitter because of your situation all you want, and those two can still be happy with themselves because they have donated a lot of money over the years to charitable causes. I know I wouldn’t care what some dumbasses on the internet think when I’ve donated $10,000,000 to help people and am creating a fund to maintain it. And this isn’t the first time either, it all adds up, and it’s a lot of money that will help people.
Loving your life this bitter at people better off than you isn’t healthy. I have had hard times and didn’t blame anyone else or feel like I was owed anything. I just did what I had to do to get out of it, and tried to help others when I could.
I agree with this so much. It is becomming a standard response. Like, let’s see you donate that percentage of your net worth (and oftentimes these people donate to multiple causes over the years). I’m also not saying ‘those poor multimillionnaires’, there is enough wrong worh our system. But they are doing something while you only go full keyboard warrior.
People keep bringing up “percentage” like it means anything at all. If I donated 10% of my net worth to Maui, I would have to skip groceries for a couple of months to get by. If Oprah were to donate 90% of her net worth, she would still have more money than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. Percentages mean nothing to the lifestyles of billionaires.
I never thought I would be sort of ‘defending’ extremely rich people on here. I guess my point is, we shouldn’t get distracted and entitled about how people who earned their money relatively fairly (as far as I know) by current society standards in the normal system should spend it, instead we should focus on reforming the system to one where inequality is less of a problem
I agree, but don’t forget that holding the overprivileged responsible to society for the wealth that society gave them is one of the necessary steps towards that reform. Without a culture of giving back, the change we want will never happen.
It’s just not the same. If Oprah donated 50% of her money, she’d be fine. If I donated 50% of mine, I’d be fucked, and have to spend over a year getting it back.
I’m not disagreeing on the notion that she would be fine. And for the record, I am not a fan of glamourizing billionnaires at all. But someone who is poorer than you are (just the fact that you have acess to the internet suggest that stayistically many people in the world are worse off than you are) could say you would also be ‘fine’ giving away half your posessions.
My point is don’t hate the player, hate the game. We need tax increases on wealth to invest heavily in education, infrastructure, health, social security. The current distribution of wealth is, in my view, ethically indifensible. But it sounds entitled to me when people just hate on these donators instead of the system that creates them or the rich assholes to donate to industry lobby instead of people in need
So we should… praise them for their donation even though they know they are materially contributing to wealth inequality in their country?
Yes the rest of us are also part of a system of exploitation (and that’s bad and I hope you are all combating against it as best you can), but we’re much more beholden to it, seeing as how our actual survival requires full lifelong participation in that system.
If there’s anyone that could be considered “above capitalism” it’s the billionaires. They actually have some individual power to shift the rules of the game they know is crooked. Or at least not take take take take and still want praise for giving away a micron of a rounding error of their wealth.
I don’t think my argument was a straw man fallacy, I was merely illustrating my point. But I do get that it is not the same, you and Oprah. Also, I didn’t see you criticising the system, just the one person. But I am fine to agree to disagree.
Exactly. I’m not saying poor rich folk. I just saying it’s nice they donated, and the amount can do a lot of good.
I can’t afford to donate. So I’m thankful someone can. I swear these people would complain if a rich person just randomly gave them 10k, cause they could afford to give them more.
If I’m at a birthday party and we’re only getting cake crumbs and someone comes by and offers me a slice, then yeah it’s nice for me, but how can they afford to just be giving away cake at a crumb party? It’s not just charity, it’s inequality and people with more money want credit parting with the surplus they’ve accumulated.
I’m not even talking about millionaires. They’re down here with the rest of us as far as I’m concerned. You can earn millions by directly working for it.
But anyway when I give money to the local animal rescue, it stings a bit, because that’s money out of my pocket that I would have otherwise spent. And I’m well off compared to most.
A billionaire is so far beyond that you may as well not even call it “money” for them, because it’s so different then what you or I associate with the term. Their lifestyle will never be at risk of having to change because they spent too much.
They have insane, unethical, embarrassing, pernicious, criminal amounts of available capital.
More like you give a homeless person food and they start telling you how evil you are for not buying them an apartment and financing the rent for 12 months.
Sure, you can be happy that they donated money to a cause. But billionaires are the reason donations and philanthropy are necessary in the first place. You don’t become a billionaire unless you’re doing unethical shit and/or exploiting a lot of people (there’s inheritance, but that’s another problematic topic altogether).
Pocket change to them, while they maintain the system that ensures that some people have to rely on charity in the first place while they hoard millions if not billions.
Do you really think The Rock is thinking to himself, ‘yes, I must keep the masses poor so that I can maintain my wealth and power’? Or is he just a guy trying to help out after a tragic disaster?
He’s not actually thinking “I must keep the masses poor”, but he’s also not thinking “I’m incredibly rich, it would be ridiculous of me to ask other people for money when I could just pay for it myself”.
And, while he may not actively do things to hoard money, he almost certainly employs accountants and lawyers who do everything possible to reduce the taxes he pays, including lobbying for loopholes in the laws if that would help their client (Mr. Rock) pay less in taxes.
It creates a subordination to the rich. The poor will be dependant of the charity to live.
The charities should not exist at all. It’s neoliberal to privatize everything so the state is smaller and smaller and create a direct control of the masses by the rich. This system is even more perverse. The rich can make the own rules and own regulations to give even more control on the poorer.
The work done by the charity must be done by the state itself with it’s own employees. It finances these programs through the taxes and regulations. The state must be strong. You have your word here what’s not the case with charity.
The best thing is to remunerate the work at its fair value. The workers thus recover the majority of the money earned by the company. This also solves the problem of profits and dividends.They are used to pay workers properly, which is not the case today.
At least they have donated $10 million to the fund.
Only a cool 0.3% of their combined networth.
I mean if you have a car then 0.3% of your net worth is probably at least $1
If you don’t want to donate $1 because you think someone else should be donating more then you’re worse than them
I’m not saying you should, just that if you don’t you shouldn’t judge them
Yeah, nah mate.
My bank balance is in the negatives until payday, when I get paid it’ll be back to negative within the week.
I’ll fucking judge them until they’re no longer living multiple lifetimes of luxury while others suffer.
Your point? Would you donate half of everything you own or all of it? Probably not. At least they’re helping.
People complaining about rich people not donating more are hypocrites, cause I don’t see any of you donating too or donating the percentage of what you earn/ have in the bank that you think they should be donating.
If they donate half of what they own they would have more money than they and their family and their ancestors could ever spend. If i donate half my money, i can’t pay rent anymore.
What a silly argument. I guess next week they can donate the other half of their wealth for the next disaster and just be a broke poster on lemmy, eh?
Let’s see the receipt for your donation of .03 of your net worth, then?
Wanna see mine? I don’t have one, but I’m not sitting here complaining about people who donated 10M, either.
Boot taste good?
Lol, the comeback of teenagers communists everywhere.
I sent in a nickel, so Oprah and I are in the same level now with philanthropy.
I am barely surviving.
I feel you. Me too.
That’s why it’s good that people are donating to funds like these. Celebs donate big amounts. Even if it’s less that 1% of their worth. Who cares? It’s 10mil, that’s a lot of money and can do a lot of good.
My point was, I notice the people who screech about celebs not donating enough either don’t donate themselves or wouldn’t even consider donating the percentage of their money that they feel these people should be donating. It’s hypocritical.
The rock is a good person, he’s worked to get where he is. He’s entitled to his money just like every other Tom, dick and harry is.
As much as I dislike shitty rich people, looking at you Elon, it’s still their money. And if we screech about how they should spend their money, it’s only fair that we can then be told how to use ours too. Would it be nice if people like him used money for good, yes of course. But end of the day, it’s their money to do with as they choose. And even a donation that isn’t huge to them, is huge to others in need. So it shouldn’t be complained about. It should be seen as good.
It’s simple: I also worked where I am (arguably harder than a movie star) and I don’t have a fucking mansion and 10 million to throw at charities.
It’s not fair so don’t expect us to treat them fairly.
deleted by creator
Now ask yourself 2 things:
Who got fucked to get her where she is?
Does she need that much more than us, and why doesn’t she feel the need to give it all back to help people who are in that situation she started out in?
deleted by creator
If you think making movies is so easy, then go and do it.
If it’s way easier than what you do then it shouldn’t be that difficult right?
Oh ffs you know what I mean, stop that.
You can’t force people to learn.
All we can do it try.
Hope y’all have a great day!
Please stop mocking the rock. for the love of Pete and everything that is holy, please leave the fact he makes more on a single movie than most of the small towns and villages of the area are worth. Oh please stop mocking the rich and super well off whoa are asking everyone to give money they could give themselves in, but only want to give so much.
How is rock going to be rich if he’s just helping useless assholes who can’t afford to help themselves?
you probably don’t even give when wal mart tells you to.
deleted by creator
That’s not how charitable donation tax breaks work! You can’t claim a donation that was contributed by someone else. This is a common misperception, but it’s a dumb one because people say it all the time when it’s not true and then people don’t donate when they may otherwise have.
In this particular example, The Rock and Oprah are acting as collectors of charitable contributions. They can only claim against their tax any money that they themselves donate. If you contribute to their collection, the only person who can claim your donation is you, against your taxes.
It’s the same when the grocery store asks you to round up to charity. The store can only claim against their taxes if they are using their own money, for example contributing a portion of all sales or using previously earned funds. If you round up to donate to charity then you are the one who can claim, if it’s above the threshold.
What you are suggesting they are doing is actually illegal, and the IRS could go after them for it.
People on here are just as misinformed as everywhere else, it appears.
We are told how to use our money. That’s what taxes are.
Is it their money though? They didn’t make it by themselves, they have whole teams they depend on and people that, in this case, watch them. The simplest answer is that they shouldn’t have to give because they should be paying enough taxes (i.e. more than they pay now) that they shouldn’t have to worry about aid programs not having enough money to help.
You have fallen for wealthy classes trap.
Hope you keep learning!
"Problem 1: Never trust a billionaire. Problem 2: When a billionaire starts a fund, DON’T GIVE THEM MONEY. Problem 3: How do you think a billionaire becomes a billionaire?
Thank you Sabby for exposing these rich frauds.
DON’T GIVE THESE PEOPLE ANYTHING"
@lawrencefine5020
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=aHs6DXUm21U
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This video presents no evidence and asks ‘questions’ about it that answers can easily be found to online and then gives the worst possible interpretation just to shit on them.
For example, Oprah misspoke and so the video interprets that as ‘one’ resident will receive $5,000,000 when the fund details that all affected residents over 18 will receive $1200.
Asking questions about ‘who’ is staffing the fund, when it’s the local community and elders who will oversee it.
This is just outrage bait, and you have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
The person in the video has real world experiece in mutual aid and manny other things
to a degree everything we see is emotionial bait, so my tolerance has increased a lot as times flys by
I like people that show emotion while also backing up in what they talk about
Thank you for letting me know, that is great information you posted!
Miss me with youtube, I’m not giving them clicks.
I honestly dont care either. I get sick of people telling others how they should live and what they should do with their own money. Be happy they donated 10 mil. That can do a lot of good.
If people are willing to tell others how to spend their own money, they should also accept others telling them how to use their money too.
Its like the free speech bullshit. People think it’s fine to police others speech just because they don’t like what they’re saying, but if someone tried to police their speech they get butthurt. Stop trying to police people and just be happy when someone does something good.
I think we need to differentiate between rich people who got rich through honest work, and rich people who got rich through deliberate exploitation. Most if not all billionaires are part of the second group, and they do not deserve the money they have. People who got rich like that are the whole reason others depend on charities and donations to get by in the first place.
Oprah is definitely an exploiter. She’s exploited her audience for years, pushed crooks and frauds to the fore (Jenny McCarthy and her stupid anti autism shit, Dr Phil/Oz,), and (my personal least favorite) she promoted a faith healing rapist which likely got some of her fans raped.
Also, if honest work was all it took to get rich the world would be completely unrecognisable.
I can’t force you to keep learning.
When youtube link is posted a bot will post an alt link or you can choose whichever you prefer alt to yt.
Have a great day!
This is the trap of marketing and communication. They donate for the image, to hide the image of the rich disconnected from the reality of the poorer.
I’m all for the rich to contribute to pay and help the people, but not through charity. The rich must be taxed, and these taxes serves to help with government jobs, so everyone has a word to say. With taxes, we help the poorer, we help in case of natural disasters, we found the researches, we give access to healthcare, we… With charity, we help the riches to keep an oppressive system of power over the poorest. It’s a system to keep the huge gap between rich and poor.
The rich are taxed. They pay way more than you do. They pay way more than the non rich people combined. The top 10 rich people pay more taxes than all the non rich people. So don’t come at me about taxes. Your tax contribution is basically nothing. Whereas they pay insane amounts.
In my country. You pay 40% tax if you earn over 100k a year. Which isn’t even rich, but you basically give up nearly half your wage you work fkn hard for. So don’t try pull the tax bullshit.
Do you honestly think someone who earns 100k a year works twice as hard as someone who earns 50k a year?
And if the 50k earner only pays 20% and the 100k earner pays 40%, they are still earning 50% more than the low earner. Even theoretically it’s not particularly unfair.
deleted by creator
The most shocking thing to me here is the tax rates. Everywhere I’ve lived, the lowest bracket of income tax rate is 20-30% rising to 50% for high earners. The fact that the highest earners in the US (literally multi-millionaires and billionaires) are only paying 25% is outrageous to me. The average income tax paid for the 1% bracket is $400k, meaning they are still going home with at least $1.2mil a year. Why are the bottom 50% even paying anything? It’s obscene.
deleted by creator
So here I will use doctors as an example.
To earn near or just over 100k a year you need to be a specialist surgeon for 10 years. That’s not including the years it takes to become a surgeon anyway.
And so what? In this one hypothetical, the skilled experienced surgeon still gets more money to take home than the less skilled, less experienced worker.
Exactly this. Last year I paid so much in taxes that I almost had to cancel one of my ski trips to the Swiss alps and had to think really hard about whether to hold off on buying a new private jet (my old one is already several years old and it makes me feel embarrassed when my friends have a newer one than me).
Meanwhile, lazy poors walk around crying like I’m not paying enough when what do they pay? A few thousand dollars? Basically they pay the price of one dinner? Stop complaining, ingrates!
deleted by creator
I donate 10% of my income every month, which is as much as I can and also 33.3x more than 0.3%. Don’t paint everyone with the same brush, especially not to defend the haves from the have-nots.
Church tithing doesn’t count as donating to charity, IMHO.
I agree. I don’t go to church. I donate to a children’s hospital in my city.
Oh, look.
A tithe Jesus would have agreed with.
They’re giving the equivalent of 150$ for someone who make 50k/year… In isolation I would say that yes many people donate a higher % of their income.
Realistically, it’s one of many causes they donate to.
Hell if you’ve given your pocket change to a panhandler in the last few years you’re probably being more generous, comparatively
I’m in debt and barely able to live. My retirement plan is basically to kill myself when I’m old.
They have the means to donate far more and still live a life of opulent luxury, if anything need donations.
So no, that’s a shit argument for why we should be happy they threw some scraps at the issue and asked others to donate their livelihood.
So you are saying it would have been better for them to donate nothing and not stir you and everyone else up?
You know what though, you can be angry and bitter because of your situation all you want, and those two can still be happy with themselves because they have donated a lot of money over the years to charitable causes. I know I wouldn’t care what some dumbasses on the internet think when I’ve donated $10,000,000 to help people and am creating a fund to maintain it. And this isn’t the first time either, it all adds up, and it’s a lot of money that will help people.
Loving your life this bitter at people better off than you isn’t healthy. I have had hard times and didn’t blame anyone else or feel like I was owed anything. I just did what I had to do to get out of it, and tried to help others when I could.
Holy fuck you’re an idiot.
Go simp for the rich elsewhere.
Lol is that all you’ve got?
I’m as disappointed as your father lol
half > 0.3%
Yet more proof that the only people who defend billionaires are billionaires and people that can’t do math.
While I think every little helps, if everybody they ask to donate would donate that much they probably still would be around 10 mil
I donate 3% of my salary to charity each month.
I agree with this so much. It is becomming a standard response. Like, let’s see you donate that percentage of your net worth (and oftentimes these people donate to multiple causes over the years). I’m also not saying ‘those poor multimillionnaires’, there is enough wrong worh our system. But they are doing something while you only go full keyboard warrior.
People keep bringing up “percentage” like it means anything at all. If I donated 10% of my net worth to Maui, I would have to skip groceries for a couple of months to get by. If Oprah were to donate 90% of her net worth, she would still have more money than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. Percentages mean nothing to the lifestyles of billionaires.
I never thought I would be sort of ‘defending’ extremely rich people on here. I guess my point is, we shouldn’t get distracted and entitled about how people who earned their money relatively fairly (as far as I know) by current society standards in the normal system should spend it, instead we should focus on reforming the system to one where inequality is less of a problem
I agree, but don’t forget that holding the overprivileged responsible to society for the wealth that society gave them is one of the necessary steps towards that reform. Without a culture of giving back, the change we want will never happen.
True, I agree
It’s just not the same. If Oprah donated 50% of her money, she’d be fine. If I donated 50% of mine, I’d be fucked, and have to spend over a year getting it back.
I’m not disagreeing on the notion that she would be fine. And for the record, I am not a fan of glamourizing billionnaires at all. But someone who is poorer than you are (just the fact that you have acess to the internet suggest that stayistically many people in the world are worse off than you are) could say you would also be ‘fine’ giving away half your posessions.
My point is don’t hate the player, hate the game. We need tax increases on wealth to invest heavily in education, infrastructure, health, social security. The current distribution of wealth is, in my view, ethically indifensible. But it sounds entitled to me when people just hate on these donators instead of the system that creates them or the rich assholes to donate to industry lobby instead of people in need
Some players have enough wealth to make the rules of the game. So I have to disagree.
So we should… praise them for their donation even though they know they are materially contributing to wealth inequality in their country?
Yes the rest of us are also part of a system of exploitation (and that’s bad and I hope you are all combating against it as best you can), but we’re much more beholden to it, seeing as how our actual survival requires full lifelong participation in that system.
If there’s anyone that could be considered “above capitalism” it’s the billionaires. They actually have some individual power to shift the rules of the game they know is crooked. Or at least not take take take take and still want praise for giving away a micron of a rounding error of their wealth.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
Uhhh, happy for ya money buckets, but people with that kind of money ARE the fucking game.
Bit of a strawman, there. I am criticising the system, not the people. These two are just emblematic of it.
I don’t think my argument was a straw man fallacy, I was merely illustrating my point. But I do get that it is not the same, you and Oprah. Also, I didn’t see you criticising the system, just the one person. But I am fine to agree to disagree.
So, what is the reason such people are so rich and have no obligation to help beyond what they choose? Oh yeah. The system of neoliberal capitalism.
Exactly. I’m not saying poor rich folk. I just saying it’s nice they donated, and the amount can do a lot of good.
I can’t afford to donate. So I’m thankful someone can. I swear these people would complain if a rich person just randomly gave them 10k, cause they could afford to give them more.
If I’m at a birthday party and we’re only getting cake crumbs and someone comes by and offers me a slice, then yeah it’s nice for me, but how can they afford to just be giving away cake at a crumb party? It’s not just charity, it’s inequality and people with more money want credit parting with the surplus they’ve accumulated.
I’m not even talking about millionaires. They’re down here with the rest of us as far as I’m concerned. You can earn millions by directly working for it.
But anyway when I give money to the local animal rescue, it stings a bit, because that’s money out of my pocket that I would have otherwise spent. And I’m well off compared to most.
A billionaire is so far beyond that you may as well not even call it “money” for them, because it’s so different then what you or I associate with the term. Their lifestyle will never be at risk of having to change because they spent too much.
They have insane, unethical, embarrassing, pernicious, criminal amounts of available capital.
More like you give a homeless person food and they start telling you how evil you are for not buying them an apartment and financing the rent for 12 months.
Sure, you can be happy that they donated money to a cause. But billionaires are the reason donations and philanthropy are necessary in the first place. You don’t become a billionaire unless you’re doing unethical shit and/or exploiting a lot of people (there’s inheritance, but that’s another problematic topic altogether).
Pocket change to them, while they maintain the system that ensures that some people have to rely on charity in the first place while they hoard millions if not billions.
Don’t play along
Do you really think The Rock is thinking to himself, ‘yes, I must keep the masses poor so that I can maintain my wealth and power’? Or is he just a guy trying to help out after a tragic disaster?
He’s not actually thinking “I must keep the masses poor”, but he’s also not thinking “I’m incredibly rich, it would be ridiculous of me to ask other people for money when I could just pay for it myself”.
And, while he may not actively do things to hoard money, he almost certainly employs accountants and lawyers who do everything possible to reduce the taxes he pays, including lobbying for loopholes in the laws if that would help their client (Mr. Rock) pay less in taxes.
I copy paste one of my comments about charity:
It creates a subordination to the rich. The poor will be dependant of the charity to live.
The charities should not exist at all. It’s neoliberal to privatize everything so the state is smaller and smaller and create a direct control of the masses by the rich. This system is even more perverse. The rich can make the own rules and own regulations to give even more control on the poorer.
The work done by the charity must be done by the state itself with it’s own employees. It finances these programs through the taxes and regulations. The state must be strong. You have your word here what’s not the case with charity.
The best thing is to remunerate the work at its fair value. The workers thus recover the majority of the money earned by the company. This also solves the problem of profits and dividends.They are used to pay workers properly, which is not the case today.
If you don’t know how the wealthy class use non-profits and other “philanthropy” to funnel money, here is a clip below that explains.
Oprah’s Maui Fund QUESTIONED (clip)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHs6DXUm21U
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=aHs6DXUm21U
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
They pledged $10 million. Which means that they just will pay whatever people paid. Not their money.
I don’t think that’s how it works
Yeah this shit is so cringe.
How many mouths do you think OP’s cynicism feeds?