On Sunday I talked to a friend of mine who works for a consulting firm for big business. His firm's clients are some of the biggest corporations in the world. "Working in the belly of the beast", he said has given him an interesting perspective on the mind set of some of the richest people in the world. "They want your last $5.00," he said and "they'll do almost anything to get it." "What about power" I said, "don't they want that?" "They are interested in power in order to make more money."
With this perspective, we no longer need to waste our time feeling outrage when big business tries to scam us. We simply need to be prepared to do the work necessary to stop them from succeeding with their greedy game. Case in point. Recently we decided to pay Verizon to provide a "gateway" for our web site credit purchases. We were given a month to set it up and try it out. After a couple of weeks we discovered that it was going to cost us too much per month for the amount of traffic we were generating and figured we'd provide access to PayPal instead. Psychic Chuck cancelled the service with Verizon. When I discovered that the service had not been refunded on our credit card, Chuck called the company. They said they had no record of him cancelling the service, even though he had a copy of the fax to prove it. They are either completely disorganized or they were hoping that we wouldn't notice that the charge had not been taken off the credit card. With my friend's perspective, I'll choose the latter. He told us about a problem that he had with Amazon. If he hadn't been persistant to resolve it, he would have been hoodwinked into paying for a book he had returned.
Not only can you utilize this perspective on big business, you can also use it when trying to understand the Republicans. Except for a few exceptions like billionaire, George Soros, they are essentially one and the same.
For example: several days ago another friend of mine, Paddy, told me that she thought Arnold might be not so bad after all, even though she had certainly been against him when he was running for governor. She was impressed with his inauguration and how pleasant he was, particularly to the outgoing governor, Gray Davis. She also thought that he might be influenced by the Kennedys and their liberalism. I told her that "he'd have to dance with the people that brung him," and that in order to save the rich some money he was going to have to take it from the poor who are powerless to stop him. Today on the phone I read her an article about Arnold's proposed budget cuts that was published in the newspaper. Just as I told her ,it was money kiped from the poorest of the poor to make up for the rescinded car registration fees that Davis has originally imposed to try to patch the leaky budget. "Bloody bastard," Paddy said, referring to Arnold. "He's just like that bastard Bush. Why was I such a Pollyanna?" I told her that the Republicans try to pull the wool over our eyes so we don't know what they're really up to. Bush, for example, has regularly met with a group, like the Boys Club, for a photo op, and the next day cuts the funds for the same organization he praised the day before. Paddy is a real Clinton fan so I told her that she was probably drawn to Arnold's apparent sunny personality because he and Bill Clinton are same sign, Leos. But on an emotional level with his Moon in Capricorn, Arnold is cold and calculating while Clinton's Moon in Taurus makes him sensuous and affectionate.
Today, Steve, another friend of mine told me he was depressed because he feels that we're heading for a complete disaster in this country and he feels powerless to stop it. Indeed, fear and powerlessness are the common emotions many of us are feeling as we contemplate this disastrous "money is the end all and be all" perspective. It is the chief feature of our present Acquisitor age, as discussed by Indian economist, Ravi Batra. There are no morals, no values. All art, politics, and religion, every aspect of our culture has become irrelevant unless it makes big bucks.
Thousands have been killed in Iraq so Halliburton and Dick Cheney could make more money. Our environment is destroyed and the poor are raped in order for the rich to keep their money and make more. Will this miserable age end in chaos like Batra predicts or is there anything that can stop it? What can we do?
Many disasters have been averted because people woke up and became conscious. That is our task today. We must continue to be alert, stay awake and help others to do the same. We must not try to escape or be lulled back into the stupor of sleep. It's easy to not think, to be brainwashed by FoxNews, to lose ourselves in shows like Survivor or Joe Millionaire or watch Arnold in Terminator 3. It's easy but we can't do it. We must be vigilant if we want to keep our self-respect and protect our loved ones.
AND, WE MUST VOTE BUSH OUT OF OFFICE IN 2004.
