One of my conclusions drawn from my experience with being briefly fabulously wealthy (worth several hundred million $$), is that nobody makes that kind of money without cheating/stealing/raping to do it.
This theory continues to be proved out daily.
Yves has the details on how hundreds of billions in taxpayer money is being shoveled into deals that enrich the owners of Goldman Sachs (one of a long string of gimmes to Goldman).
Another great quote: 'Truly great wealth isn't earned, it is acquired.' - C. Wright Mills
"There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.”
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin was definitely something.
Posted by: gmoke | November 12, 2008 at 10:38 PM