Rasputin: "Trust me on this one. Rich people will be okay. I am officially giving you permission to not give a rat's ass about them. When a person achieves a certain amount of wealth, they become permanently okay forever. In fact, the only thing that can ever unseat them from this vaunted status is their own grotesque stupidity. Now, you don't feel bad when poor people manage to get themselves fucking killed, why should you feel bad when rich stupid people get themselves thrown in jail or rendered poor?"
Posted by DrMabuse at March 8, 2004 01:06 PMIt always amazes me, America's fascination with the rich and famous. (I suppose it's something the UK is also guilty of - though a more rigid class system there makes seeing the privileged in dire straits a bit more of a curiosity.) I mean, so this woman might go to a minimum security prison for a year. So what? She pretty clearly broke the law - bought a *much* better defense than most could afford, and was convicted. What of the thousands of poor that go to prison each day? What about the fact that a great majority of these people are non-white? Or maybe that's why people only pay attention when it's someone rich and famous (and therefore - almost always white.) Actually now that I think about it, a good number of black hip hop musicians do time - but that doesn't seem to capture the national zeitgeist nearly as much. Conservative estimates put the number of *innocent* we convict in this country at about 40 people a day. What about that?
I mean fuck - I spent a year of my life washing rich people's used dishes at a fancy restaurant. While I was a free man - it was a highly unpleasant job which economic circumstances thrust upon me. If you told me now that I could go back and spend that year in a minimum security Federal prison, reading, learning, and OK - maybe getting the crap beat out of me and sodomised a few times - BUT - at the end of that year I would be awarded a multimillion dollar fortune like many of the restaurant's patrons had - I'd do it in a heartbeat. He makes an excellent point.
I love this part:
Work is mandatory," said one of the CNN correspondents, "up to six to eight hours a day.
Wow . . . 6 to 8 hours of work a day - the horror! And they don't have to ride the bus two hours each way and then go pick up their kids, then go work *another* 4 or 8 hours a day to make ends meet like a lot of Americans do.