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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Huckleberries Online

Joker: We Are To Blame For Mess

Obama's stimulus package has good things and bad things. Nobody will be perfectly happy with it. The bigger questions regard society's values. Americans are addicted to merchandise. We've been busily buying things with money we don't have for a long time. We've leveraged our selves with credit cards, second mortgages, and loans. Mix out of whack wage structures, soaring health care costs and corporate greed and you've got middle class families struggling to make it. The more we buy, the futher we fall into debt. It's cliche, but the rich get richer and poor get poor. At some point, the whole thing has to collapse/The Joker.

Question: Do you agree w/The Joker that the financial collapse reflects the condition of many households in America today?

There is no easy fix. We have to look at how we do things in things and start making moral decisions. Should a CEO make $5 million annually when his employees make an average salary of $45,000.

The CEO needs to take responsiblity and invest that money back into the company, through higher wages, better benefits, better facilities and improving the product.

We've got to quit caring only about ourselves and start looking at the bigger picture. Until we do that, Congress can pass all the stimulus packages it wants, but the core problems will remain.



Huckleberries Online

D.F. Oliveria started Huckleberries Online on Feb. 16, 2004. Oliveria's Sunday print Huckleberries is a past winner of the national Herb Caen Memorial Column contest.