My far-too-modest and self-effacing friend JL was going to post this as a comment, but I prevailed on him to allow me to put it here, lest this example of his talents as the thinking man's storyteller be overlooked. Take it away, JL!
Please allow me to present my opinion of what's wrong with our system of capitalism from an old linthead's point of view.
Once there was a young manager at a huge textile plant where I worked. This fellow's shrewdest career move had been his marriage into the family that controlled the company.
He had been quickly promoted and his advancement into into the upper echelons of management was swift and unimpeded. His matrimonial tailwind precluded him having to tarry on low-level jobs long enough to actually learn much about the ins and outs of cotton-milling.
By the time he reached thirty, he was living the good life, had nice cars, a fancy house -- which had been a gift from his in-laws -- and considered nothing more important in this world than a round of golf.
While he didn't know that much about his chosen field of employment, he could find Callaway Gardens Golf Course blindfolded on a moonless night.
He was the highest-paid person in the plant. Surprise!
On the other hand, the lowest paid person in the plant was a middle-age black fellow who opened the bales of cotton that were fed into the mill's gaping maw at the start of the manufacturing process. Like Sisyphus, this guy was condemned to a never-ending struggle.
This Opening Room job was a hot, nasty, brutal, minimum-wage backbreaker. This fellow lived in a rented single-wide trailer down a dirt road. He didn't have a car.
One summer, this young manager and his princess bride spent several weeks frolicking on a cruise to the Greek Islands. Since his inferiors who had spent their lives in the mills actually ran the place, few people in the plant realized this well-compensated, important and mighty leader was actually out of the country.
However, one morning during this time, while the king of the hill was away, the black fellow who "laid-down the cotton" was an hour late for work because the fellow he rode with couldn't get his old car started.
Since no one realized at first that this low-paid, unimportant cotton-mill drone wasn't on his job in the cotton warehouse, the mill quickly shuddered to a halt.
The hapless dude caught pure hell when he finally showed up. Who did he think he was being an hour late?
On the other hand, the important mill manager, the rock the company was resting on, was floating on the blue Agean Sea, sipping Dom Perignon and eating steamed mermaid tails, totally oblivious to the chaos in Alabama.
He had been gone nearly a month and the mill hadn't stumbled a tick.
The bale-breaker was an hour late coming in and the mill shut down.
What's wrong with this picture?
Oh, I know some will say that's just the way the system works. Get used to it.
My answer would be: In some parts of the world, folks have always practiced genital mutilation on their girls, too. That doesn't make it acceptable.
Some things just ain't right!
To all this, of course, the ol' Bloviator lends his heartiest "Amen!" A very insightful British journalist once observed that "in America, the poor don't hate the rich, they envy them." Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but the signals i'm picking up from polls, letters to the editor, etc. suggest to me that our current misery may have at least exhausted our tolerance for the born-on-third base types who act as if they actually earned what they have--or had. Since Wall Street is widely perceived as having way more than its share of these folks, maybe that crowd ought to think about being a little less particular about the terms on which they would be willing to allow us to bail them out.
