-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- The top 250 individuals and families on Earth own more wealth than the bottom 2.5 billion people put together! The distribution of wealth is such that the top 250 people on Earth own more than the bottom half of humanity. There is something fundamentally, consciously rotten about this system that the top 250 persons and families would gorge their greed while billions go hungry on the same spaceship. The top 250 people include the owners of the petrochemical and nuclear civilization that is destroying Earth's environment. How do you feel about this distribution of wealth, power, and anti-environmentalism? Geri & Alfred January 12, 2000 LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD $$$$$?????!!!!! WASHINGTON -- I woke up feeling intensely guilty. When I was young, I used to go into a dark box at church and confess all kinds of guilt: about talking back to my parents, about unkindnesses, about impure thoughts. But now I feel guilty about just one thing: not being a millionaire. On the glowing boxes of my adulthood, the TV and computer, people are constantly getting rich quick. When Time Warner merged with AOL, some predicted the end of print, and my life passed before my eyes. But I was far more disturbed that I had lost yet another opportunity to cash in, or to cash out. I worked at Time in the early 80's. The magazine was not on the cutting edge of technology then. When Time made the computer "Man of the Year" in 1982, we were still pounding out our stories on typewriters. I didn't hold onto my Time stock. And on Monday many of my old colleagues became multimillionaires. If there's a way to lose money, I'll find it. I called a Washington psychoanalyst named Justin Frank. I told him I didn't want to feel deeply inadequate just because I didn't know how to day-trade. He confessed his own feelings of inadequacy. "As a psychoanalyst, I subjectively feel like a dinosaur because I am exploring things in depth, and in the meantime everyone around me has gotten rich. "Yesterday I was driving somewhere and my children said, 'Dad, you're smart and funny and hip. Why didn't you invest in Internet stocks? What's wrong with you?' I told them, 'I'll take this under advisement.' "We are moving into an era of decisiveness as opposed to an era of thoughtfulness. People feel guilty if they have a subconscious identification with Hamlet." To trade or not to trade. I never cared about money before. It was not what Country Joe and the Fish taught me to value. Once upon a time, money was an occasion for guilt. The robber barons who had exploited the poor would cleanse their lucre by buying great art or pouring it into charity; the Guilted Age. But now the only remorse that people feel about money is, why haven't they made more? "Once, new money tried to disguise itself as old money," says Michael Lewis, who wrote "The New New Thing," about a Silicon Valley billionaire. "It gave some of itself away. It dressed itself up in airs and pretensions. Now old money cringes in the face of new money. Now even new money gets stale fast, and has a sell-by date." We are obsessed about making money with our money. Making an honest living does not seem like a particularly sensible thing to do anymore when you can simply hold onto a stock that rises to the stratosphere. "I have never seen so many disgruntled people at the peak of a bull market," says James Stewart, the author of "Den of Thieves," about the Wall Street scandals of the 80's, who is now an editor at Smart Money. "People look at their portfolios going up 40 percent last year and they are whining and complaining to me that they didn't own Qualcomm. They don't even know what Qualcomm makes. If they had Qualcomm, they whine they wish they had more of it. "Everybody brags about their gains. Nobody talks about their losses. As a subject for boasting, portfolios have supplanted sports and sex." Jim Cramer, the money manager who founded TheStreet.com, agrees: "People used to be mortified to talk about how much money they made. Now they get in my face and say, 'I caught 79 points on Oracle, what did you catch?' " In the old days, you had to be intrepid or an M.B.A. to get in on a gold rush. Now your personal trainer knows as much about one-day price movements as Warren Buffett. "It's not like a land grab, where you had to go out west, brave native Americans and horrible rains and run into the Donner party," Mr. Cramer says. "You don't have to brave anything at all. You just have to have a predilection not to sell." So the generation that prided itself on its idealism has finally found its true signature. And the question that the children will ask is: "What did you do in the bull market, Daddy?" ===== <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
