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Most people become rich through mutually positive sum trade with others, at least these days.
Bezos didn't become a billionaire by "taking resources" from others, he sold a product that people were willing to buy, in the form of something as incredibly useful as Amazon. I reject the "and opportunities" part because it means nothing of significance, sure, someone else might have come up with the idea later or perhaps executed it well enough to capture the value, but they didn't, and I fail to see how it's Bezos's fault for that.
This is broadly true for anyone who isn't wealthy via being a corrupt politician or oligarch.
I certainly disagree, at least with an attempt to clump such an amorphous group under the same banner as Soros and Co. Most of them aren't ideologically motivated to make us bugmen.
Besides, that's driven by (grossly wrong) opinions on the sustainability of modern capitalist growth, and I see no reason to assume they fetishize that for its own sake.
Barring the invention of FTL, dividing the light cone is a process of billions of years. I remind you that merely making everyone else supremely wealthy by modern standards is nothing next to that, even if they're not made true equals.
If they even tolerate our existence and subsidize our lives, then the additional expense of keeping us that way is nothing at all. I'm not claiming the former is a given, just that going to the latter when you're already there is no big deal, in much the same way that almost anyone who cares enough to tip a beggar isn't also going to the trouble of finding the smallest denomination of currency in the world to give them.
All it takes is one entity holding a non-negligible portion of the cosmic endowment having charitable urges, and they can take care of us for geological timescales. My opinion of the elite is nowhere low enough to think that low bar can't be met.
Can you point out the proper sublist from this list that are the big fry ye olde riche who are determining the lives of us proles? Please include their numeric placements on the original list.
They certainly have faces and names, though. Do you know those names? Or are they just shadowy figures that you could imagine being "out there" somewhere?
the easy ones are the more blatant power brokers (Probably incredible rich too), like Xi and Putin; they have their fiefdoms and control absolutely (apparently). But there are subtleties to this issue:
The power brokers for what is acceptable to be commercialized at a global scale: The Visa and Mastercard CEO's and their team/Their board of directors
What is acceptable to be discussed online: the ones in charge of the different Online stores be it the AppStore or the Google Play Store. It's probably a team effort, something like a security and inclusion team or something.
What is acceptable to be watched online and/or on TV: the CEO's of the different production companies (Netflix, Hollywood Studios execs, etc.) for the mainstream stuff; for the YouTubes of the world the power is more diffused between the security and inclusion teams in each company, the big spenders in adds (Coca-cola, Banks, Automotive companies) and the Journalist class.
And so on and so forth in every aspect of your life.
You're preaching to the choir when it comes to the dangers of that type of censorship power, but censorship powers and the cultural/political dysentery they produce don't really hit on what was claimed:
I was only giving some pseudo-examples of "the real power" Ether was talking about. In Rusia and China they are more similar to what is being asserted, in the west the power is a little more diffused and is focused in narrow niches of your life.
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