christmas?!

Last Saturday I heard my first Christmas song of 2007. In October. I complained so loudly that my friends were embarassed. But that's another story.

Apparently Christmas is just around the corner. And so in that holiday spirit I offer this article from Crave, cnet's blog:

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9798241-1.html

It's not very long and definitely worth the read. The things we spend our money on are telling of where our lives live.

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Sometimes people ask me if peace would actually work. It's not our natural inclination to be kind, to turn the other cheek, to return evil with good. Surely peace is not sustainable they suggest. But have we actually ever tried? Every year America spends billions of dollars (yes...literally billions. over 100 billion in the last year on Iraq alone) on war and its supplies. Peace has never had that kind of payroll. It's had the poverty of Ghandi. The passion of Martin Luther King Jr. But it's never had the profits of our Fortune 500's or the taxes of our goverments leveraged in its favor.

This Christmas I want more than eye-candy. I want some hope. Some hope that I could offer peace and happiness to my neighbor. And my enemy.

One tall stack of cash...

The richest man in India, worth roughly $28 billion, is building a $1 billion dollar house to live in the center of Mumbai, which also happens to house Asia's largest slum (6.5 million people).

Apparently I'm not the only one who finds this innappropriate:

"In a modern, democratic society, business must realize its wider social responsibility. The time has come for the better off sections of our society - not just in organized industry but in all walks of life - to understand the need to make our growth process more inclusive; to eschew conspicuous consumption; to save more and waste less; to care for those who are less privileged and less well off; to be role models of probity, moderation and charity"
-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

Read the full article on the quote and the tower.

But what really turns this on its head for me is realizing that as much as this outrageous display of oppulence is a travesty to me, wouldn't my $4 mocha be a similar display to someone who earns $4 in a week (such as the 1/3 of the world's population that lives on less than a dollar a day). So then where does the line get drawn? What does simple living really look like?

A Buffett Blast...

Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world, chided the US government's tax system recently at a political fundraiser. Apparently, though he's worth about $52 billion, he only had to pay 17.7% on the $42 million he made last year, as opposed to his secretary, who cashed in $60,000 last year (see full article here). Politics aside (and that perhaps he ought to pay his secretary more), Buffett had these wise word to say:

" If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

Wow. That's pretty rich. Take a minute and click here to find out where you rank in the echelons of prosperity. What are you doing today to think about the rest of the world?


>credit relevantmagazine.com