Something just doesn't seem very right here

In light of recent loss of American jobs, a crumbling mortgage market, and increasing costs passed onto consumers, i.e. United's $25 luggage fee there's just something unsettling about a company that posts record annual and quarterly profits for a product that's tied to global warming and our war on terror.

Exxon made $40.6 billion in profit by providing petroleum products in 2007. Annual revenue was at $404.5 billion. This isn't the company's first record-breaking honor, either. They posted $10.49 billion in the third quarter of 2006, the second largest quarterly profit ever posted by a publicly traded American company.

I know we need to continue to suckle from the gas teat a bit more, but when we're facing economic concerns and a country-wide identity crisis, having Exxon stand out as the most profitable entity ever just doesn't seem right. It seems...evil. Our spending on maintaining offense, or rather, defense, is egregiously high, and our penal system is a cash cow.

Why aren't we spending less on prisons and 'defense', and allocating more on beefing up our horribly arcane education systems that consistently fails to produce enough graduates needed for 21st Century jobs...that is unless you're the fortunate handful who come from money (or score a scholarship) and get to enroll at Andover and fast-track your ass to Harvard.

I don't buy the notion that folks who sell dimebags are going to ruin the country. Folks like Skilling and Lay will, though.

I get the laissez-faire capitalist mantra that the market will provide, but there needs to be a measure of equality introduced because the market players aren't concerned about making just enough money...it's about maximizing profits, an approach that places value on products and services that see a faster turnaround. This explains why educators and social workers make pennies compared to a code monkey: efforts spent on people don't always equate to a dollar value unless studied under under a longitudinal lens, while software elicits a *relatively* immediate return of investment.

Why anyone these days gets their Masters or Ph.D in education or social work should be canonized, because it's HIGHLY unlikely they're ever going to make it back. I digress into bitterness...excuse me.

Well...at least Romney's out of the race. Sorry, but his spooky Mormon ass spooked me. Any politician from a religion that's an 'American' brand of Christianity (i.e. Joseph Smith finding lost Golden Plates containing ancient script only decipherable by him and that can't be viewed by anyone) is spooky.

Yep. I'm rooting for the Creationist because, heck, I think the separation of Church and State is downright heretical. You disagree? You must be a minion of Lucifer...
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Not really.