Enjoy!

Thanks go to our friend, Jim Smith, for writing this guest essay for Greed Pollutes.

Greed is the weakness that we so often recognize in others and not in ourselves. Donald Trump has been quoted as saying, “The point is you can’t be too greedy.” Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone put a famous line in their film Wall Street that refers to greed: “Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed will save the U.S.A.” Both of these quotes refer to the machinations of the business world and the accumulation of wealth. Another quote used in relationship to business that my Father loved to use after the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s was “The only way to loosen the jaws of greed is to break them.” Somewhat revolutionary.

But what is greed? The study of greed is a fascinating trip into self-knowledge and universal truth. By nature the human being seems to be selfish. Watch young children play and they are very fond of the words “mine,” “give-me,” and “no” when asked to share. Children seldom share unless it is to their advantage or unless they have lost interest in what they are sharing. Frequently we will hear expressions similar to “let me play with your truck and you can play with my shovel”; “if you let me play with your dolly, tomorrow you can play with my dolly.” This bartering lasts a lifetime and stretches into the stock market, real estate, manufacturing, and almost every other aspect of business life, as we know it. What most of us don’t know is that greed is also an intelligence test.

Greed is not new. St. Paul, in the first century, in his letter 1 Timothy, parrots Phocylides, sixth century B. C., when Paul says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Then Chaucer in the 12th century repeats the same concept in the Canterbury Tales when he states, “Avarice is the root of all evil.” An old saying—source unknown—may say it best, “Avarice is the only passion that never ages.” Basically, if we study what are known as the seven capital sins—pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth—greed appears to have tentacles in most of the capital sins. We can often recognize in children the weaknesses that lead to the capital sins and some of these imperfections appear to last longer than others. For instance, some people are subject to greed and pride all the way through life. Their final expression of greed and pride may be to demand the largest tombstone in the cemetery. If their children have seen enough examples of a parent’s greed and pride, the parent had best order and pay for the tombstone before death—after death the children will determine how better to spend the wealth. A corpse does not argue well.

Percy Bysshe Shelly had an insight into such greed and pride when he wrote his famous poem “Ozymandias.”

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look at my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Sure, if a reader thinks about this poem, it is as much about pride as it is about greed. What is important is that the greed came first and the pride followed. Some people are buried in an unmarked grave and some, like Ozymandias, may have their names known for a few thousand years. But what is a few thousand years or a million years as compared to the life of the universe?

Another poem worth mentioning here is Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe.” After describing how the man has been mistreated, Markham, in the last verse, gives a warning to those who have done the man wrong.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

And how are today’s politicians, executives, millionaires, and billionaires going to answer in the next life the questions of the child who was given an inferior education, the family who was forced to sleep on the streets, the person who died in pain because there wasn’t any medicine, the soldier who died not for truth but for a lie. So many wealthy people profess to believe in an afterlife and yet they have a distorted view of an accounting for what they were given in this life. Very convenient for this life; very scary for the next. Perhaps all wealthy or powerful people should be required to read the famous morality play of the middle ages: “Everyman.” Only “good deeds” will accompany a person into the next life, and good deeds are the opposite of greed.

Today, we have what might be called a bad case of social greed.

• The top one-hundredth of one percent of the nation’s population now makes an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent is $31,244. The richest 10 percent control 2/3 of the nation’s net worth. (University of California, Berkeley.)
• The 10 richest members of congress are worth $2.8 billion, and 100 percent of them voted to extend the Bush tax cuts. (Sources: Center for Responsive Politics; U.S. Census; Edward Wolff, Bard College)
• Between 2007 and 2009 Wall Street profits went up 720 percent; the unemployment rate rose by 102 percent; American’s home equity dropped by 35 percent. (Sources: New York State Comptroller, Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• The average CEO takes home a paycheck that is 185 times bigger than the average worker’s paycheck. (Source: Economic Policy Institute)
• In 1945 a millionaire’s tax rate was 66.4 percent; in 2000, 36.4 percent; today—after the Bush tax cuts—32.4 percent. (Source: The Tax Foundation)*

But how is greed an intelligence test? I have tried to explain it by example. At the end of our life we are only worth what our body is worth—less than two dollars for most people. If you have a gold tooth or a hairpiece, you may be worth more. Anyway, what we have accumulated in life will be divided and shared by family members, lawyers, bankers, and even the state. Doesn’t it seem strange to observe an individual such as Donald Trump spending an entire lifetime accumulating a fortune that will be lost in his last moment?
Should thinking about money and financial concerns distract from the beauty of a sunrise or sunset, from the opportunity to communicate with another, from listening to music, or from just enjoying the moment? Greed can be a horrible distraction and can actually cause a person to miss what life is all about.

* The statistics used in the section with bullets are taken from the article “Plutocracy Now” which appeared in the March – April, 2011, issue of Mother Jones., pages 22 – 29.