A World that Helps the Rich to Help Themselves
The Universe
(September 01, 2002)
I can well understand what Jesus meant when he said the it would be easier of a camel to pass through the eye of an needle than a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven when I read about the sumptuous life style of the wealthy and the their sinful conspicuous consumption. The Wall Street Journal reported that the president of a US company redecorated his apartment for $11 million, using company funds, which included a shower curtain that cost $6000 alone, and a birthday party for his wife costing one million dollars.
Corporate corruption is crippling the world economy dragging it to recession by throwing hundreds of thousands out of the jobs into hunger and poverty. In the UK a massive increase in the number of fraud cases in the first six months of this year has created a whopping loss of $400 million.
When 25 of the biggest US corporate failures occurred this year 94,182 people lost their jobs while the chief officers scooped up $3.3 Billion in the sale of stocks and then walked away while the company slid beneath the waves of bankruptcy. Companies in Britain and Ireland were affected too. The Financial Times reported that the kings of corporate
America pocketed for themselves as much as $100 million and caused investors to lose $210 million.
I can't imagine that amount of money but surely the $100 bank notes piled up would reach the top of Trafagular Monument. How many AIDS infected babies and parents or starving people of the famine plagued countries of Africa could be saved from a terrible death with that money.
On the feast of the assumption the gospel of St. Luke puts on the lips of Mary the promise and hope of world; "He has put down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the downtrodden, he has filled the hungry with good things and has sent the rich away empty". That is our hope and sometime we see it happening when non-violent uprisings of the oppressed and poor crying for justice topple mighty tyrants and dictators from their thrones as happened in our own times with fall of the Berlin? Wall and the Marcos and Estrada dictatorships in the Philippines.
Yet the reality of the Kingdom is what we have to strive to bring about by prayer and working for justice. The rich hardly ever get sent away empty when they do wrong and cause untold suffering and injustice. They buy their way out of trouble with the vast fortunes that they stole and swindled. Repentance and restitution is not there way rather they gouge and gallop off into the sunset of regal retirement.
They don't go away empty, they have $11 million dollar apartments and sumptuous shower curtains to comfort them at the baleful hour of bankruptcy. Others harvest an awful lot of money in comparison to the lowly one dollar a day earned by the billions of impoverish people on this planet as they struggle through this most unequal world. According to writer Jeff Gates, 400 of the wealthiest Americans identified by Forbes magazine earned $240,000 every hour in the last few years.
Such massive corporate avarice and economic plunder is as evil and devastating as any terrorist attack. Yet the opposite view holds say. The laws are designed to favor them and take pity on their tax burdens. George W. Bush passed a bill that gives a hefty ten year tax cut to the rich putting another $342,000 into every pocket of the richest 1 percent of Americans according to the Citizens for Tax justice as quoted by John Balzar in the Los Angeles times.
In the developing world there are no social welfare nets. Pensions, unemployment benefits, health services, home care assistance as provide in a Western social welfare system are all unheard of. You either have the money for food and medicine or loving friends and relatives to support you, or you die, and millions do, uncared for and rejected. The is much we can do to change this by writing to politicians telling them to cancel unjust debt and give more well spent aid to help the poor to help themselves
