Dear Editor: Not long ago, there was a report on CEOs’ and executives’ outrageous compensation of $10 million or more and other disgusting benefits.
Let me quote what the renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, had to say: “The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
You have to wonder how these detached, self-absorbed people justify their unconscionable greed as a right. But I guess it’s not hard for the one per centers to be detached from real life, a life in which, for instance, the two richest families in the Canada, the Thompsons and Westons, have as much wealth as the poorest 30 per cent, or about 12 million citizens.
These are the same people who rail against paying taxes and many of whom have millions, if not billions in offshore accounts in such tax havens as the Cayman Islands.
I wonder how they can look in the mirror or sleep at night, knowing that in this rich country, poverty prevails with children going to bed and to school hungry and more and more people, among them seniors, going homeless. In B.C., we have, for example, about 800,000 people living in poverty, of which 172,000 are children and 100,000 are seniors.
But I guess Keynes was right to refer to it as semi-criminal, disgusting or a pathological mental disease. Are these people without a moral or social conscience, or can one just pass it off as our capitalistic, corporate society – a society based on the law of the jungle, the bottom line neoliberal ideology, about austerity, not people, a system that has, according to the well-known economist, Peter Fleming, outlived its usefulness?
I’m optimistic that the system we live under now is on its way out. This system of “I’m all right, Jack,” without common cause and a fair sharing of our natural wealth, sustainable and in tune with nature, cannot continue.
It’s time for change, time to move on.
As Tommy Douglas, voted our greatest Canadian and a socialist, said: “Courage, my friends, it’s not too late to build a better world.”
Bill Zander, New Westminster
