Wasted Money

I just don’t know how anyone could be worth $7211.54 per hour. This is, as I see it, a big part of the problem. I saw this morning, that the host on American Idol, signed a deal, for 45 million, over three years. Over one year I figured, working 40 hours a week, for 52 weeks, this is his pay per hour. I’m a carpenter, my pay amounts to about $45 per hour. If this guy is going to live in a house that I help to build, don’t you think I should get a little more than scraps? I am only talking of this deal, because it is what was on the news this morning. I wrote a little about Girard College, and the founder Stephen Girard last week. He did mass a very large fortune, but he did something to earn it. He also did things with it, that helped our world. I don’t have issues with being rewarded for being productive, but when so much disparity exists, it can’t go on. I become priced right out of the market. I saw the effect of this on Venice, a town that I called home, a town I can no longer afford to live in. Sure, I could just shut it all down, become homeless and live on that beach, but that’s the only way. I can’t see why this guy is worth more than our President. I don’t understand why someone sitting in some office, not a drop of sweat falling off his forehead, commands so large a pay package, aren’t the days of serfs and the pleabs a part of Medieval History, is history repeating itself? Is this a situation that can’t be fixed? Am I the only one who sees this as the root of our problem? Let’s talk about Baseball, about Football. When I was a kid, my Father took me to the Stadiums, to the Arenas, today what we have is corporate sport. How can a normal man, afford these prices? Are these fat cats better people than the rest of us? What about the stock brokers,the CEO’s of corporations, are they a productive part of our society, or are they all a drain? They get there money off the backs of the common man! I always heard that money is power, I saw the power, when money people noticed poor people were living at the beach. There collective consensus was, we got to put an end to this. They went into Ghost Town, the Venice Ghetto, and drove out families who had called this neighborhood home for generations. Where is the justice, when you have people sitting in offices, doing nothing, making tens of millions, and you have people, who for many years have been productive, living in squaters camps? The people in Russia revolted against the czars, offended by, fed up by, their opulent ways. What offends me most of all, this is my generation that is at the core. We saw this, there was an understanding, movement away from materialism was a worthy concept. What the hell happened? I don’t say that there is no one is deserving of massing great wealth. I do believe the ones that are, accept the responsibly that goes with it, to use that wealth, making for a stronger society. I just went for a short walk. While I walked, I passed the freeway, it was jammed. This started me thinking about all the pollution, about the plan to start to reduce it. Well they want to make cars that burn fuel more efficient. They still want to drain every last drop of oil from the earth, burn every bit of it, throw just as much poison into the air. I think about the oil industry, all of the fortune they have acquired, killing us with smoke. I know the men manning the rigs aren’t getting rich doing the hard and dirty work, I know the pipeline workers aren’t getting rich either. Certainly, big oil will have to pay a little more, to run their ads on American Idol, you know, the ads that tell us of their great concerns of our environment, of all the good work they do for society. Let’s face it, American Idol, will have to charge more for those ads, in order to pay the host his $7211.54 per hour. I don’t think the network executives are going to kick down any of their pay to come up with this guys raise, to the contrary, they most certainly will expect a raise as well, you know they are doing such a great job. The end game is oil will cost more. It takes money to feed the machine, the machine that poisons our world. We all know the ones that are making the really big money, are the slugs, sitting in the corporate towers.