You could get angry, or you could get smart. Or I guess you can be angry, but don't let it be all you do.
Why does it have to be "or"? I'm very angry at the situation we're all in. And I'm managing to live an okay, if poor, life.
This is disingenuous - all production of goods and services should maximize some kind of profit, otherwise it's waste. I agree there are arguments about how to prioritize various aspects of 'profit' - profit doesn't just mean "cash in minus expenses over some defined time period." I mean, when I spend money to buy some food, I have a form of profit in that I've exchanged unsatisfying coins or electrical signals for tasty food and sustenance.
Hardly disingenuous. We're in a capitalist society. Therefore the market prioritizes capital. We need to be prioritizing our well-beings. The leaders are not. wellbeing is not profit in any way.
Be careful with this one - you can only be paid more now if someone else is not paid more now. You cannot be paid more now out of thin air. You can possibly be paid more in the future if you take your pay later, rather than be paid now, if productivity increases. And for those that say CEOs get paid too much: for megacorps with the crazy-high CxO pay levels, those companies have so many employees that you would get not much benefit by slashing their salary. Consider a company like, oh, GM. The CEO compensation was valued at $22M. GM has 170000 employees. Spread it out evenly and that's a whopping $129 per employee per year. The math just doesn't work like people want.
But - you also don't need to get more pay to be environmentally friendly. The most environmentally friendly thing you can do is consume less, period.. The problem with that is - if everyone cuts back, how are you going to be "paid more"?
Counterpoint, why do we need money at all? All of our modern amenities were made in the public sector. Computers, smartphones, the internet... All done without profit in mind, by the government. They were only co-opted by the market. People will make cool things regardless of if there's a cash incentive. See: all Free and Open Source Software.
It's not as bad, and worse, than that: The wealthy don't see "you" at all - they just see statistics.
Heh, not statistics. We're labor. Another form of capital. They're extracting value from us and paying us only the barest minimum of what we need to live. And even not that all the time!
Wal-Mart, for example, keeps so many employees so underpaid they have to supplement their incomes with government assistance. Wal-Mart abuses the system to pay their workers less.
I actually agree with this observation - the media (both "big media" and the social-media mob) like to use a shame/guilt/blame culture. We need to break that cycle and stop blaming, take ownership (after all, becoming owners ourselves is the only way to really address issues - to have the authority to control resources and policy), and hold ourselves accountable.
Cool, glad to see you're on the socialism train. Choo choo! Unless you mean supplanting ourselves onto the boards of the companies which is a laughable pipedream for 99.9% of society.
But remember, they are people too - and most of them are probably "middle management" and just trying to make their own ends meet. And remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch - somebody somewhere has to make stuff, or make the robots that make stuff...
I'd love to humanize the people whose fault it is for the state of society, but when Coca-Cola literally hires mercenaries to keep the workers in line in South America, and the fact that only 100 companies are responsible for 70% of all the greenhouse emissions and pollution in the world, they need to be held accountable for their actions.
