{"id":4604,"date":"2015-09-22T12:37:56","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T19:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=4604"},"modified":"2025-11-02T09:49:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T16:49:19","slug":"greed-money-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=4604","title":{"rendered":"Greed, Money, Capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"arguing\"<\/a>I’m primarily a Liberal.\u00a0 But I’m also a writer.\u00a0 And what that means is I don’t arbitrarily hate what is different from me.\u00a0 Not saying that Liberals do… nor their Conservative counterparts…. what I’m saying is I can see the logic and benefits of many sides of any issue.\u00a0 I guess some would call me a Centrist in attitude and a Liberal in practice.<\/p>\n

Couple months ago I went to a financial planning institution to straighten out my investments.\u00a0 See, a few years back I did SUCH a good job at cutting costs (streamlining) and sales at my mother’s business that I got a SEP contribution.\u00a0\u00a0 My (then) husband was a trained financial planner so he opened a TD Waterhouse (now Ameritrade) account with it.\u00a0 What he neglected to impress upon me<\/del> tell me was I<\/strong> had to take charge of where I dispersed it.\u00a0 And since I was raising 3 kids (4 if you counted him), working and going through peri- menopause, I completely ignored that account for 4 years.\u00a0 Where it sat there, not even collecting interest!<\/p>\n

In calling the company that handled my Roth IRA investments to see about name changes, etc last year I found out it wasn’t set up the way I wanted it originally.\u00a0 See 17 years ago when I left a job to marry and move to Texas I had somehow accumulated a pension.\u00a0 So I rolled it over into a Roth IRA through my new brother-in-law who worked for AmEx Financial Planning (now Ameriprise – don’t you love the erie similarity in names).\u00a0 I told him I wanted it put into socially responsible mutual funds.\u00a0\u00a0 He frowned but I was firm and so I thought he’d done that.\u00a0\u00a0 I contributed to it a bit in the early years of our marriage but after the third kid, pretty much left it alone.\u00a0 It grew.<\/p>\n

After the recent phone call though I found out it wasn’t in socially responsible funds.\u00a0 And after talking to him I didn’t feel he was willing to help me move it to where I wanted.\u00a0\u00a0 And then after talking to the Ameritrade woman, personally, I realized this attitude was a permanent structure in the entire investment community.\u00a0\u00a0 Those who lived and breathed Capitalism would never understand or connect with the likes of me.\u00a0\u00a0 They were ruled by the “More money at any costs” greed aspect that extreme Capitalism generates.<\/p>\n

Her explanation that an investor had the right to expect “as much return as he could get” from a company just because he had chosen THAT company in which to invest his money.\u00a0 Yes, it had a level of logic.\u00a0 And I saw that logic.\u00a0 What I noticed was SHE didn’t see was the greed in the statement “as much as he could get.”\u00a0\u00a0 And that is the true core problem in Capitalism.\u00a0 Yes, investing in companies with great ideas moves forward progress and is a wonderful way to use excess money to benefit society.\u00a0 BUT (and this is a HUGE but, a Baby Got Back butt) it should NEVER become more important than the people in the company working for the company or the customers supporting\/benefiting from the company.\u00a0 And THAT is a part of Capitalism that Greed has blinded most people from realizing.<\/p>\n

She sited GM and Unions as an example.\u00a0 I kept my mouth shut.\u00a0 Yes, the Auto Union in GM seemed to have wound its way into wounding the company.\u00a0 Yes, many of the positive need for Unions had disappeared as we grew a social conscience as a society.\u00a0 But did she see that cutting salaries from the top down makes more of a social impression than gutting pensions?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 And I knew at that moment she never would.\u00a0\u00a0 So I didn’t bring up Costco vs Walmart as a better business plan.\u00a0 I didn’t bring up how big business has finagled into their pockets all the gov. subsides meant to help the smaller business [farms].\u00a0 I didn’t mention the business owner who took a giant pay cut so his employees could all make $70,000 a year.<\/p>\n

I didn’t say any of that, because she was old school.\u00a0 I could tell this from her over tanned, bleach blond, fake nail manicure, over 50 at least appearance… and her conversation of tickets to the Derby opening as Santa Anita and how she had 2 horses running.\u00a0\u00a0 Times are changing, albeit slowly, and she and I will be dead before we see the complete change, but social media is allowing people to put their money where their beliefs are and more and more people are standing up against greed.\u00a0\u00a0 Not as many as their needs to be in my opinion, but I also think (or perhaps I’m being idealistic)\u00a0 the NEW entrepreneurs are going to go more in the way of the Costco, Starbucks business model than the GM or Walmart.<\/p>\n

Either way, I realized then that, again, I was on my own in making sure this investment went where I wanted it to go.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I’ve got some research to do on socially responsible mutual funds.\u00a0 And maybe a quick tutorial on “balancing” a portfolio lol.\u00a0 But I was firm about TWO stocks I wanted to buy.\u00a0 Costco and Tesla.\u00a0\u00a0 She babbled about how no one purchases stocks unless its in 50 share bundles because that’s how you sell it.\u00a0 But when I went online to handle my account, the computer had NO problem using half the funds to buy what Costco stocks I could afford and the other half to buy what Tesla stocks I could get with the balance.\u00a0 See… what she doesn’t understand is I don’t plan on selling these.\u00a0 This is my way of letting my money support business’s I believe in.\u00a0 If it makes a profit, yay… if it doesn’t, well, it’s money that was more of a gift than earned.<\/p>\n

I would rather live a poor but happy life than get sucked into the level of SOULLESS GREED is see at the top.<\/p>\n

Go Bernie Sanders!!!\u00a0 heeheehee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m primarily a Liberal.\u00a0 But I’m also a writer.\u00a0 And what that means is I don’t arbitrarily hate what is different from me.\u00a0 Not saying that Liberals do… nor their Conservative counterparts…. what I’m saying is I can see the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4604"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4668,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604\/revisions\/4668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}