It's Christmas time in the city.

Woke up early, made coffee, was joined on the sofa by Roi . . .

. . . my only Christmas Day companion until this afternoon, and I turned on the tv to see what was going on in the world. Whilst looking through the channel listings I saw something called Pirate Television, which I'd never heard of before, so I decided to have a look. A middle aged white guy in a sport coat, white shirt, and no tie was standing at a lecturn in front of a red curtain. I stopped to listen. And I was immediately captivated. The man was Chuck Collins, author of Born on Third Base (which I want to read asap) and he was talking about his own experiences in having been born into a wealthy family, how he came to realize how much wealth inequality there was in the U.S. of A., and how he decided to do something about it. Since I came into that speech in medias res, I'm not sure about his personal story, but it sounded like he had given away all of his inherited wealth and then went to work with a group called Program on Inequality and the Common Good. His basic message seems to be that wealth inequality presents a grave danger to our democracy--as well as a violation of moral precepts. 

Which sounds great, for sure. But I have to admit that I immediately thought of the time I saw Steve Earle at Headliners, and that at one point in the concert Earle made a comment about how you can't trust rich people and / or that rich people are evil. Well, I love Steve Earle's music, but the man is worth $18 million. Which makes him, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, "a rich man in a poor man's shirt." Which is just bullshit. So I looked up Chuck Collins's net worth. And I found . . . nada. The Celebrity Net Worth site said that it was under review. But there was a little bio that had some interesting details. Chuck is . . . or was, I suppose . . . one of the heirs to the Oscar Mayer fortune. Now Oscar Mayer is a pretty big deal, so I'd think we were talking about hundreds of millions of dollars there--though a little Googling did not give me much beyond the facts that it was once a Fortune 500 company and that in the 60s it was making almost $300 million in revenues. So when I read that Chuck Collins had given away his entire fortune of $500,000, I wondered what that really meant. But maybe I'm just being ovey suspicious there. 

And at any rate, what Mr. Collins had to say was very valuable and poignant, and it made me want to know more. The library doesn't have Born on Third Base, but it does have a few other books, so ahmo check out at least one of them: 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.

More news as it happens.

And oh yeah . . . Merry Christmas.

P.S. Whilst writing this, Pirate Television went off the air and I flipped over to Focus on Europe on KET2. There was a story about a group of homeless kids who were living underground in tunnels, and a video of them putting up a little Christmas tree.