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If Only My Parents Had Raised Me Right

I was deceived in my childhood by parents who taught me that the way to make money was to work hard and earn it. Boy, did they steer me wrong. I will never forgive them. One of the best ways to learn is to observe. And I've observed a lot, I'll tell you. From what I can tell our country has turned from a country of hard-working wage-earners into a country full of jobless, whining, crybabies. Those that make the rules benefit from the rules and us poor working-class bums ain't going to change a thing - no matter how much we whine.

Having been cunningly misled in my youth to believe the American fairy tale that hard work will yeild great rewards, I find myself facing the realization now that I missed the boat an it's too late and I'm too old to hop aboard. My ship will never come in.

As I watch those money-sucking leaches at AIG walk away with millions, I am sitting here in my office, working hard and have been since 5:10AM this morning. It's not even lunchtime yet and I've already put in six hours. "Just work hard son, and you'll make it". Yeah, dad. Right! Those immoral, self-aggrandizing, Wall Street vampires made more money with one push of a button Sunday than I'll make in my entire lifetime. More than I'd make in two lifetimes I were allowed. Some of those money-sucking leeches don't even work anymore, they quit. I'll tell you what, if someone gave me 4.2 million dollars, I'd quit too and get out of Dodge before somebody made me give my purloined loot back.

But I haven't screwed up enough yet to deserve that kind of bonus. Failure bonuses are all the rage these days. We'll go down in history as the era of failure bonuses, social networking and cloud computing. What a brilliant legacy we will leave behind.

I recently inherited some property and my lawyer called me yesterday to tell me about my tax obligations. That was nice of him. If he wouldn't have called I would have never known I had any tax obligations. Anyway, seriously, he told me if I sold my portion of the property, I would only have to pay a capital gains tax of 10%. So I got to thinking. Let me see. The money I work veru hard to earn gets taxed at twenty-some percent, but the money that I didn't earn gets taxed at ten percent. Makes sense.

Then the epiphany struck me: All that stuff my parents taught me about working hard, and all that sophistry about nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel? That was all just a bunch of middle-class propaganda - those good old values that make America great. I'm the son of bourgeois propagandists! No wonder I'm not rich - my parents raised an idiot with brain full of fairy tales and middle-class values. I have seen the light and the light does not shine on me. The rich make the rules and if they make the rules guess who those rules favor? Not this good old hardworking, middle-class clown. Nope.

So now that I'm too old to start over again, I start to realize that the only reason I have anything at all is because of all the collateral dribbles, leaks if you will, that drip down on me from above. I get the tiny leftover crumbs that unintentionally fall unto my dumb little head. Yep. I'm just a powerless, middle-class, schmuck. It would be funny if I weren't talking about me.

What really irks me too is everyone is looking to place the blame. Gotta have someone to blame! Taking heads love to blame someone. They've blamed Bush, Obama, Geithner, Paulson, Congress, et. al. that all this stuff has happened.. Ha! Do you really think this is something new? This kind of stuff was going on long before this all happened. Did you ever hear of the robber barons. This is nothing new. It's been going on for decades at companies like AIG and their ilk. Us dumb schmucks down here in the middle - and those poor, powerless peons at the bottom - were just too busy working to realize what these financial wizards were up to. How come they arrested Madoff for running a Ponzi scheme and not the executives of AIG? They were sure as heck running a Ponzi scheme. They had over $1 trillion in liabilities and a couple hundred billion in assets. So, did we put those scumbags in jail? Heck no, we - and I do me we, the taxpayers - gave these Ponzi-running leaches millions of dollars. Better yet, these money-bilking bozos knew they didn't deserve it but they took the money anyway and spent it before we could take it back. I saw yesterday that one of those slimeballs bought a new house with our money. Do you supposed he'd might have us over for dinner? Isn't taking money that you know doesn't belong to you called "theft". For us, yes it's theft. For the rich? It's not called theft - it's called a bonus.

Nope. We can't blame congress, Obama, Bush, Paulson, Geithner, Attila The Hun, Katrina, or anyone else for this. It's our fault. These venal, arrogant, blood-suckers didn't just crawl out from under the kitchen cabinets like so many cockroaches yesterday. These money-grubbing vampires have been sucking it up long before this debacle. But we were just too complacent to care. Now that the proverbial feces has hit the fan, we're all suddenly outraged at the avarice, arrogance and audacity of these rich, immoral, rotten slimebags. Ha! Ha! The jokes on us. It will always be on us - because we don't make the rules. If we made the rules, the rules would favor us. But, alas, it's the rich and powerful who make the rules and it has always been thus. If you don't like it, too bad.

When this whole thing is over and a new band of louche Wall Street money-suckers will has taken over, it will be business as usual. You can bet whatever rules are changed that don't favor the rich will be changed back to favor the rich as soon as we aren't looking anymore. The economy will improve eventually and us poor workin' class stiffs will keep on working hard while they party on in New York. The champagne will continue to flow, the bonuses will continue to be paid, and we'll slip back into our comfortable little middle-class world waiting for Wal-mart to put summer clothes on sale. And, in a few years we'll forget about the thieves who stole our money, ruined our economy, and stabbed us all in the back. It will business as usual for the rich and for us middle and lower-class bums who are lucky enough to have a job.

If only my parents had raised me right I might be making the rules now, instead of following them.