The Pay Down

I beat this drum a lot but MAN ALIVE wouldn’t it be nice if the people that did some of the most harm in the world had to, you know, actually suffer consequences for that harm?

How many times do we see Billionaire X take a HUGE risk on something only to have it not work out and the worst thing they have to do is post an ice cold message about how ‘this one’s on them’ as they fire thousands of people. 

The ding is to their ego, and to a bank account that is worth more than many nations. 

Oh but, you know, their bad. 

Or you have the celebrities that say whatever they want, their fans cheering at their insane rantings, until corporate culture realizes that, ‘oh, the press says this stuff was bad, we better act’ and the idiot loses sponsorships. Sure, they lose money, but these people are in such rarified air that they can shrug off a few hundred million dollars as if it’s nothing. 

THAT is the world we have built. 

A world where if you are rich enough or powerful enough, there are no consequences. 

Not that this is NEWS but good god!

Look at Trump, who claimed he could shoot someone on a street corner in New York and not face charges and here was that same man inflaming people with false narratives about election fraud which led to deaths on January 6, 2021. 

He’ll never REALLY pay for anything. 

He gets to shrug and say, hey, it was just pillow talk, baby. 

Sure. 

I cannot imagine how hard it is to be one of the employees for these idiots who always know best, who are always the smartest people in the room, but have these egos and obsessions that lead them into brick walls. What an awful feeling to know that they screwed up and that you’re going to pay for it. 

Gosh though, they’re sorry.
Their bad, boo. 

Wow. 

We worry and fret over someone getting ‘canceled’ and ‘losing their livelihood’ when most of the people you hear about that happening to are rich. 

The ‘cancel culture’ stuff is a WHOLE other topic, for sure, and has a lot of nuances, but why do we worry over some celeb not being able to work when they don’t NEED to and we’re struggling to make ends meet?

Why are we so obsessed with all of these people?

Sure, the corporate lunkheads we may work for, willingly or reluctantly, but at what point is it not worth it?

The problem is though that jobs are hard to find, and well paying ones even harder to find. I get it. We don’t always love who we work for but we all need a job. When you’re in the tech sector there’s a lot more risk/reward and it comes with often volatile company heads. 

But when did we, the ‘bootstraps’ nation that loves to tell people how to succeed and make money and all that, stop holding people accountable?

Here in Flint we’ve had a succession of superintendents come and go through our failing school system and over and over they either get fired or quit and still get to keep their huge golden parachute as they head for greener pastures. 

Another job I worked had a short lived CEO that signed a contract for well over 100K and when they were let go during a power struggle – after about six months on the job – they got to adios back to their life and find another gig with that money in their pocket. 

Sure, they feign humanity, and compassion, but it lasts as long as their attention, and that isn’t very long.
They ARE geniuses, after all. 

Pfft. 

You see it in sports, too, where people who fail are fired and get to keep their money. 

Here on the earth though, whether we screwed up or not, we get to try to get unemployment and figure out how we pay for our houses. 

And we wonder why the world is so screwy!

I know I try to make sense of it all, to try to find a reason but man, it’s hard to. In this new era of the ridiculous rich and their need to always be the focus of attention, it’s hard to reckon with the fact that consistently they want the world to change the rules for them because well, BECAUSE!

It’s strange that we seem to hate ideas that counter consumerism in the country when we are shown over and over how caustic it is and how damaging it is when companies, overextending themselves or just not running their businesses well shrug and fire thousands and then go about their business. 

Welcome to the new world. 

Same as the old world.
The rich run the world and the rest of us struggle to find ways to sneak our way up the ladder to get a little closer to that dream of ours. 

And we wonder why our economy is so jacked up.

Look who is running it.

Woof. 

…c…