One Comment to “Free eBook from Oprah and Suze Orman”

1. 
   End Wage Slavery Says:
   December 16th, 2011 at 1:30 pm

   Suze Orman’s an idiot anyway. I don’t see why anyone listens to her. I don’t think she’s worked a real job for a day in her life. Her financial advice is as inconsistent as the day is long and she has no empathy for the average working poor person.

   I managed to catch a little of one of her seminars today in which she told some college kid who is being crushed under student loan debt that “he might not be able to get the career of his dreams when he graduates.” Great, anyone keeping abreast of the news for the last decade could tell him that. She goes on to tell this kid that his best bet is (I’m not making this up) that no matter what crap job he ends up with he should go in and stay a few hours extra each day (first of all you’re generally not allowed to do that at regular entry-level jobs; they make a schedule for a reason, in other words they don’t want people to be on the clock beyond what they’re scheduled for and working off the clock is almost always prohibited because they’re afraid you’ll document it and sue them, claiming you’re made to work off the clock) and to go in on saturdays and sundays to see what you can do to help out. In this way, she says, the worker will get the business owner “dependent” on them and “that’s when you have them where you want them.” Then, she says, you can go ask for a 5% or 10% raise and they will pick the lower number so there you go! You’ve just gotten a 5% raise!

   So basically she’s telling this guy to work his guts out at a crap job where he’s getting paid only a tiny fraction of what his labor is worth in the hopes of one day being able to approach his boss and ask for another 5% more in wages. Even then he’d still be making just a fraction of what his labor is worth, would have worked his guts out to get that extra 5% and now will be EXPECTED to work at that workaholic level indefinitely if not EXCEED it because, hey, now he’s making a higher wage. Suze Orman has no concept of what it is really like in the real working world.

   My question for Suze Orman is: “Considering that capitalism literally cannot function without there being a huge gap between the value added to a company by a worker’s labor and what that worker is getting PAID for that same labor, in other words capitalism can’t survive without the mass exploitation of the vast majority of the workers in this country, what are your suggestions for making capitalism into an economic model that DOESN’T rip off tens of millions of regular people every day of the year? And if you can’t come up with a solution to making it equitable and non-exploitative (none exists, trust me, without mass exploitation the wheels come off the capitalist car so to speak) then how about using your position as a well-known financial celebrity speaker to advocate for abolishing capitalism and replacing it with direct worker ownership of the productive assets?”

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