My friend I agree, absolutely- the discrepancy between the ultra rich and really, TRULY, everyone else, including the plain old rich, is horrifying. It's beyond exponential. The CEO of Wal-Mart could lop off a fraction of his salary for just one year, split it into a hundred fragments and solve the problems of a hundred families.
Also agreed that it's an injustice that the top tier personnel get to remove themselves from the conversation of value. The story I told about the guy who ultimately got canned because he added no value, yet took down $200k a year, speaks to that.
There's no doubt that it is immoral for the upper, upper management of a corporation to get that much more money than the bedrock of that business, its workers. Unfortunately I also think it would be just as immoral to force someone to give money to others just because they're suffering. What is the solution? Beats the hell out of me, seriously. Ideally we would have kind, loving people in charge who would simply give to people. I'm not smart enough to devise what structure would best fit such a dynamic (that is optimistic at best), but it would have to start with people caring for other people. It has to. Nothing else is acceptable because nothing else would work without devolving into utter tyranny. People dying in the streets while others have yachts with pools in them with yachts in the pools should not be tolerated. But neither can we tolerate what ultimately amounts to theft, even if there's a Robin Hood factor in it. Therefore it has to be the only thing that can work, the only thing that has ever worked-- the strong being kind and compassionate upon the weak. The smart have to take care of the stupid. I'm not being sanctimonious either. There's a case to be made that we don't need the stupid, and even that the stupid and weak get in the way of progress. But we DO need at least some of the stupid. And we absolutely need to regard all human life as, for lack of a better term, holy. Smart, dumb, weak and strong.
Good and evil, different beast. The situation we're seeing is the result of evil. I denounce the wealth disparity. And yet I truly empathize with people who are super rich. If I were the CEO of Wal-mart would I be inclined to give even a fraction of my wealth away? No way. I'd be spamming bootstraps rhetoric like any of them. I don't think it would be good to say that being super rich is equal to being evil, but I would happily agree that the two often coincide. Maybe being rich turns people evil. Or perhaps, a more depressing thought--- being evil turns people rich.
Shit I don't know what to do. But I know the answer has to be in that realm: that the powerful/rich/smart, need to have compassion upon the weak/poor/simple.
I would make one last addition to my disorganized thoughts here: almost all our politicians are scum. When I talk about not forcing people to do certain things, I make an exception for our so called leaders. They're supposed to be working for us, and they are all working for themselves. That is also evil and I eye that evil as a roach that needs to be stomped.