"For the Love of Money"
By SAM POLK - JAN. 18, 2014
(Sam Polk is a former hedge-fund trader and the founder of the nonprofit Groceryships.)
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...I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.
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Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html?ref=opinion
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And when those who do have kids murders a few, they get probation. Yada, yada, yada.
- It's called greed. The only cure is REVOLUTION.
K&R
...it was during that scene when Agent Smith is waxing so magnificently arrogant with his disconnected earpiece and his snobbish, condescending demeanor, that Neo and Trinity are down below in the lobby kicking the Matrix's ass. Ha!
Actually though, it's not that humans 'per se' create the world's problem(s):
- ''It's more that they won't lift a finger to help solve the problems because they're AFRAID to even try. Their FEAR is of those who do create the problems.''
Molyneux has his moments. But I detest labels and roundly refuse to accept them from anyone.
- But truth is truth, no matter from whence it comes.....
While I applaud anyone trying to make a difference, it is telling that his model of addressing "a hungry Mom (or Dad) struggling to put food on the table, especially in a world where the cheapest food is so unhealthy?" by treating it as food addiction:
The second hour of each weekly meeting is structured as a support group, where we discuss the challenges and struggles of adopting a healthier diet in such an unhealthy environment. We discuss things like addictive foods (and the associated withdrawal symptoms), emotional eating, and family-specific belief systems around food.
I may be mistaken, but I think there may be far bigger problems facing hungry people living in poverty - like food deserts, and the lack of transportation to get out of the food desert to buy anything which is not available at the corner 7-11. To be fair, there is a stipend available for each family - but participation in the program is tied to using that money to buy "whole, plant-foods," which - in, my experience, are easily accessible to the hungriest Moms (or Dads).
No wonder he's still worried about running out of money when his last bonus would keep me, without even being particularly thrifty, for the rest of my life.
