 |
Greed |
 |
 |
||
America's Disease is Greed |
| Published on Friday, August 20, 2004 by the Chicago Sun Times by Andrew Greeley |
Excerpts: Greed has produced rash tax cuts that have given money to the rich and in effect taken it away from the poor. Greed has led to the immigration policy in which hundreds of poor men and women die every year as they struggle across the desert for the jobs that el norte promises them. Greed accounts for the efforts to take profitability out of the pensions and health insurance of working men and women. Greed is responsible for the fact that so many Americans have no health insurance... Greed is responsible for the obscene salaries of CEOs. In the '90s the ratio of CEO compensation to average workers' compensation was 250 to 1, meaning that the boss earned on his first day of work during a year as much as the worker did in a whole year. In European countries the ratio is closer to [only] 100 to 1. Recent estimates put the current ratio at 500 to 1 -- the boss makes as much before lunch as the worker does all year. Greed is the cause of the high wages paid to the bosses even if the company is failing. ...Greed is responsible for outsourcing, which is incapable of comprehending that the employees who lose their jobs are also the consumers who sustain the economy. ...Greed is the reason that only the wealthy are benefitting so far from the economic upturn that is allegedly happening. Greed is responsible for the success of big box stores that tax the poor with low wages to provide bargains for affluent suburban shoppers. Greed is the reason poor white Appalachians, poor African Americans and poor Native Americans must fight the wars that the wealthy start. ...Greed is the reason why the country is being run by those whom the president has described, however inelegantly, as the ''haves and the have mores.'' No one said during the bizarre deification of President Reagan that he taught us that greed is good and that we should feel good about our greedy country. Greed is the reason that the country is being run by the insurance, pharmaceutical, weapons and petroleum industries. Greed may have been a more serious problem for Americans, say, in the era of the robber barons. But the Garys and the Morgans and the Carnegies were a small bunch of men. Now their greed has seeped down to a much larger segment of the population. Ambition is not evil within limits. The struggle for success is not bad within limits. [Although] It is not good to take from the poor and give to the rich, that's exactly what this country is doing today. Postwar ProfiteersA select group of U.S. construction firms now bidding on a lucrative government contract to rebuild a postwar Iraq contributed a combined $2.8 million -- 68 percent to Republicans -- over the past two election cycles. The U.S. Agency for International Development asked Bechtel Group Inc., Fluor Corp., Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, Louis Berger Group Inc. and Parsons Corp. to submit bids last week for the $900-million contract... Bechtel, the engineering giant that employed the likes of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, former Secretary of State George Schultz and former CIA Director William Casey before they took their government posts, gave $1.3 million in individual, PAC and soft money contributions between 1999 and 2002. As it prepares its bid for the postwar project, Bechtel is facing allegations that it contributed to Iraq's military buildup nearly two decades ago. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that a German journalist uncovered a document prepared for the United Nations by Iraq that says Bechtel was among 24 U.S. companies that supplied the country with weapons during the '80s. ^ top |