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March/April 2000 issue (#44)
Once known only to a select few, now everyone can learn
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That's right, friends, I, Bill Comiskey, am going to tell you a fool-proof way to get rich. If you do what I will be setting down in the next few paragraphs, you will become richer than you ever thought possible!
Now, the first thing you're going to say is, " If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?"
My answer is that there is no correlation between intellect and wealth. As a matter of fact, most of history's great minds have found wealth to be odious.
But that's enough philosophizing. Let's get on with making you rich!
Notice that you work every day, every week, every year. Now, here comes the most critical fact: THE TRULY RICH DON'T WORK AT ALL! If you work and are not rich, and they don't work and are rich, what's the answer? That's right- you did the work but they got the money!
It doesn't matter what you do for a living now, wether you work in a plant, drive a truck, punch data into a CRT or pick peas. You can get rich with the same formula thousands of other people have used to become fabulously wealthy.
Understand here and now that this is no gimmick. This is not some shady real-estate scheme or a hot tip on the stock market or a fast horse. The rich make money in the stock market and with real estate, but only after they've already become rich. As for the horse, only a fool tries to get rich at the track.
Before I tell you how to get rich, let me tell you why you are not rich now. It is important that you know this, so don't skip this and go to the " how to" part. In order to understand "how to," you've got to know why. So go along with me step by step and envision yourself as the worker in this example:
You're working in a factory making fishing reels (it could be anything, but we'll use reels as an example). You're paid $10.00 an hour for an 8-hour day, 40-hour week, or $400 per week. $10.00 an hour is the most you can get. So if you want to make more money, you have to work more hours.
Let's say you take a second job, again at $10.00 per hour, and you work an additional four hours each day. Now you're making $600 per week. The only way you can make more money than that is to work more hours, but working more hours doesn't make you rich, just dead.
Sure, you're making more money than you were before, but you still can't stop working and go lie on the beach for the rest of your life.
Why not?Because as soon as you stop working, the paychecks stop. Besides, $600 a week isn't going to make you rich. And as a working man or woman, you are limited to how much money you can make by the number of hours you are able to work. If you never had to sleep and never stopped to eat and worked every available hour in the week, you would still not get rich; rich, that is, the way the ultra-wealthy are rich.
Well, now we get to the "how to do it" part. In order to make more money you have to do one very simple thing-you have to have someone else work who will give you a portion of the money they earn. Once you have done this, your income is no longer restricted to the number of hours in a week. If you can get 2 or 10 or 20 or more people to donate what they earn in 20 or 30 hours of their work each week to you, YOUR INCOME WILL SOAR INTO THE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS A DAY. Now you're ready to go shopping for that yacht!
Don't scoff at this and condemn it as a crackpot idea. I you bear with me I'll show you how this is the way rich people got rich and this is the way the stay rich. And if you don't believe it can be done, prepare yourself for a shock, because I'm about to tell you one hard, cold, fact that you're not going to like, and that fact is this:
THE RICH ARE DOING THIS TO YOU RIGHT NOW. They've had you donating hours of your work to them every day for as long as you've been working! And that, fellow worker, is why we're the working poor and they're the idle rich.
All right, you say, prove it!
Ok, follow along. We're going to continue with the fishing reels, but it doesn't matter if you're cutting meat, welding steel or typing letters, this example applies to you.
I you can make 3 fishing reels an hour and each reel has a value of, say, $10, you are producing a value of $30 per hour. In the first 2 hours and 40 minutes of each day you have produced $80 of value. That's fine! But you're getting paid $80 for the day and you've still got 5 hours and 20 minutes to work producing fishing reels for which you will not get paid.
If you've produced $80 worth of product in the first 2 hours and 40 minutes, and you're paid $80 for 8 hours of work, where does the value of the other 5 hours and 20 minutes go?
You are donating those hours of your labor every day to someone else's welfare. And welfare is the correct word. We hear a lot of complaining about welfare these days. Hardly any one wants to pay welfare to the poor anymore, but rarely do you hear complaints about welfare to the rich.
Imagine now that you've found several hundred or even several thousand workers who are each donating 5 or 6 hours per day to your income. Think about the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars you would be raking in daily!
This is not a fantasy. This is real life. There are people out there doing it right now. And we, the workers, are here toiling away day after day, year after year, to keep them in the Rolls Royce. In biology books they're identified as parasites. In America they're called priveleged. So if you think you can't make YOURSELF rich, think about how many OTHER PEOPLE you've already made rich.
But there is a catch. (You knew all along there'd be a catch, didn't you?) Well, it's really a two fold catch, so let's address them one at a time.
First, you need two traits: greed and callousness. You have to be greedy enough to be concerned only with your own comforts and callous enough to not care about the poor bastards who are struggling to support you.
The second catch is that the misery you cause in the world will eventually catch up with you. The very wealthy are less and less able to enjoy their stolen wealth. As the world becomes more aware of how they acquired their wealth and of their pillage, they have to keep a low profile. Some live almost in hiding.
They can no longer flaunt their wealth as they once did. They know that the misery they have sown is rapidly growing into a violent harvest. Look at crime in the streets. Look at terrorism throughout the world. Look at the rise of worker awareness and solidarity. Look at the world sitting at the brink of Armageddon.
So you want to be rich? Good, go ahead, do it. But you're going to have to share the consequences. Why, you ask, can't I get rich and the rest of the world leave me alone to enjoy it? Because no one can get rich, I repeat, NO ONE without stealing it from someone else.
And therein lies the rub. If 500 people have to be poor so one person can be rich, there will never be peace in the world.
Sociologists, criminologists, penologists and the police will give you 9,000 reasons for crime in America and 9,000 ways to combat it. There answers to the problem are more and bigger prisons, more executions, gun control-the answers and excuses go on and on. Very few people want to face up and admit that the prime reason for most crime, terrorism and world turmoil is poverty, the poverty produced by capitalism.
So now you know how to become a millionaire. If, however, you lack the essential qualities of greed, callousness and cruelty, you have two other choices. You can continue to work without protest while the wealthy steal what you produce. Or you can work toward eliminating a system that allows parasites to live off the sweat, labor and anguish of millions of people.
Now that you know how the rich get rich, perhaps you don't want to be one of them after all. Not when you can live in a new society where everyone's life would be enriched.
"How To Get Rich!" is brought to you by the NEW UNION PARTY. The grassroots workers' organization that seeks a new, democratic economic system. In a democratic economy, workers will be their own bosses. We will together own and control the product of our labor, and will use the wealth of the nation for the benefit of all. find out more:
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