Who can say? But certainly some of their advisers, attorneys and accountants are watching Fox and reading the Wall Street Journal, which are often on the same wavelength when it comes to this stuff.

They do not. Poor people watch the news and hoard. Poor people buy gold in a declining economy. Wealthy people do not, otherwise they would become poor. Only a person who is born in poverty, and is blind to anything beyond their own poverty, can believe such nonsense.

I'm glad you feel confident to speak on behalf of all wealthy people. Poor people do watch the news; around here Fox News is popular and many poor people work against their own self-interests on the advise of Fox "journalists" because they are uneducated and ignorant. But I guarantee you that none of the poor people I know (and I know many) are hoarders, unless you count keeping 15 guns as hoarding. They pawn many of their luxuries and never get them back to survive. They may sell drugs or food stamps to survive, but they are still integrated into the economy. Harrumph. You know nothing about the daily lives of the poor, Neutrino--that much has always been clear to me.

I don't understand why some poor people are so cynical that they actually believe that the wealthy want to bring war and suffering to all of humanity. They do not. If all your money problems were gone tomorrow, would you dedicate your life to bringing suffering and hardship to all of humanity? Perhaps you are a sociopath and you would, but I would hope you would not. There are occasional sociopaths like Bernard Madof, but these people are rare and are always exposed and disgraced within their lifetime.

Knock down straw men much? I don't know anyone who believes the wealthy are all a bunch of sadists. But many of them do feed into and continue to support a system that necessarily keeps the poor down, I think, even if they don't understand the full implications of it. Many of the wealthy are social right-wingers, which is understandable. Think about it: if you oppose abortion, you are assuring that many poor will be saddled with children they can't support and will never be able to get ahead. Gays don't have kids and are often upwardly mobile. That disturbs fundies, who wish to maximize their power with wealth and keep it out of the hands of political groups they dislike. Read up on C Street ⚠️ ↗ and the "Family." ⚠️ ↗ I think there are a lot more rich assholes than Madoff out there who never get caught. Madoff got caught because of the sizeof his Ponzi scheme. What about all those traders who operate in the dark pools? Wealthy businessmen who can afford to hire lawyers who can pore over tax laws and find all the loopholes? The list of corporate hi-jinks is nearly boundless. Unlike with poor people though who might make 50 or 60 dollars on their food stamps, these guys are ripping off millions of dollars at a time.

Real wealthy people are not animalistic devilish characters who exist only to bring suffering to the world, as you seem to believe. Quite the opposite. With their financial problems taken care of, they concentrate on their legacy, and use their power to benefit humanity. What kind of human being would do otherwise, and for what reason?

Straw man. Again, I didn't say they were all like that and/or they were all doing it deliberately. But the impact of, say, just 10% of them ripping off the gov't or consumers is phenomenal. They are playing with millions of people's lives and are completely out of touch with the realities of living in poverty, no matter how they may portray themselves otherwise.