The Root of All Evil

Money is the bane of my existence and has been for a long time. I sometimes believe that the reason that I'm living this particular life at this particular time is to learn to understand money. If that's the case, then I feel like I'm doomed to repeat it… because I just ain't getting it.

I wrote a while back about how I struggle with the whole time/money thing. I honestly can't figure out how middle class people manage to find both the time to do the things that they want AND time to make the money to do them. It's a puzzle.

In the meantime, I can't help but wonder… am I the only person pissed off at CEO's in this country? Really? We don’t seem to mind too much that these guys will have a hundred of us making ten dollars an hour fired as a "cost-cutting" measure so that they don't have to give up their solid gold, Cristal-filled toilet. Our economy is being screwed by these guys, but them and their shills, the republican party, have us so brainwashed that if we say anything about it we feel guilty of "class warfare".

Class warfare? You bet. But we didn't declare it - they did. We just have to fight back.

I mean right now what we've got is less class warfare - since they aren't taking any casualties - and more class genocide. The middle class and the poor are being wiped out, and we… the members of these classes… are doing nothing to stop it.

I was watching one of my favorite TV shows, House, the other day and something in it really struck a chord with me. Doctor Lisa Cuddy, was fighting to get a higher reimbursement rate for her hospital from an insurance company. She stormed in on the CEO eating lunch somewhere and made her case. Later, one of the characters commented to her that the CEO could be fired for malfeasance, but his termination package would be more than most of us make in our lifetimes.

Look, I'm not advocating that no one should be rich. Hell, I aspire to richness myself if I can ever get my damned books published or screenplays produced. What I advocate is that if these people's riches come at the cost of your job or my job or some little Chinese girl making ten dollars per day to work in a dangerous sweatshop, then they shouldn't be allowed to do it, God damn it!

Last year's health care debacle is the perfect example. How many of us feel that it's okay for one person to profit from the misery of another? A few? No one? Not more than a handful, I bet. And yet we've allowed these people to bully us into believing that if we don't allow the CEO's of insurance companies to do exactly that then we are not really Americans.

How stupid and backward is that? We're cutting our own throats, smiling all the while, so that these people can drink our blood.

And think for a second about this financial mess that we've been in for a couple of years. Guess who it's a financial mess for? Us. Why? Because some rich CEO would rather close stores and lay off employees than to take a personal pay cut from 1.4 billion dollars per year to only 1 billion. That's bullshit.

Sorry, I can't bless us with peace at the end of this one. All that I can say, is that if they want it, they should have it, but it's up to US to give it to them.

War.

Rev. Randal