Opinion by Thom Hartmann
Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:
“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”
“To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”
What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?
Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.
Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.
It wasn’t always this way.
— At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Weal. Continues here
