COMMENTARY: Wall Street Exploits Kids More Than Hollywood

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) The real exploiters of our young are not movie makers or the publicity hungry politicians who […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) The real exploiters of our young are not movie makers or the publicity hungry politicians who investigate them but the Wall Street crowd that finances the films and contributes to congressional campaigns, never letting their right hand know what their left is doing. Money, of course, confers a feeling of moral superiority on its possessors more surely than a monsignor’s robes.


The faith of the money obsessed is more in the market than in the creed. Their idea of “things unseen” is the Invisible Hand of Capitalism rather than that of Divine Providence. Mobsters believe in the crooked trade of laundering money while many financiers believe money launders every crooked trade.

The congressional hearings on the movie industry’s exploitation of children, a.k.a. the Olympics of Hypocrisy, tell us that pre-teens, formerly known as children, have been turned into Hollywood consultants. If the Pentagon seeks the biggest bang for its buck, Hollywood wants the biggest buck from the bang of bloody violence in films and, mocking the gospels, they decided a little child could lead them.

Horrors, cried the pols, as, sadly exemplified by Vice President Gore and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who clucked solemnly and, telling the studio heads not to take them too seriously, hurried to cash in at Hollywood fund-raisers managed by the same tycoons.

The money culture’s playing on the youth of the country is spread before our eyes every day in advertisements and news stories.

Item: South Carolina schools now offer “bonuses to teachers and rewards, like discount coupons for pizza parlors to students … in an effort to raise test scores.” If you have ever wondered what “making friends with the mammon of iniquity” means, this is it, degrading learning, along with teachers and students, by making it a means to instant money instead of a long-range investment in the self.

Item: One commercial suggests that knowledge of money and markets is the source of the virtuous life. Arguing for nurture against nature, the ad promises that a child raised reading the financial news will be rewarded with power, money, girlfriends, mansions and limousines. In short, a modernization of the temptations raised by Satan and rejected by Jesus. His twin, separated at birth and raised on outdoor magazines, is doomed to dolthood.

Item: A 15-year-old New Jersey boy has been charged with using the Internet “to manipulate small-company stocks, reaping gains of $272,826. … It was the first time the SEC has alleged that a minor committed stock fraud.”


Where did this knack for fraud begin? “We have CNBC (a television financial news station) on a lot,” his mother explained. It was through a stock-picking contest for students sponsored by this same station that introduced him to the thrills of investing.

Are such stations, along with other parties who want investment courses in the early school years, caring for the sheep or preparing them for a fleecing?

Avarice may have a slower pulse but, as a capital sin, it is ordinarily ranked ahead of lust and anger, the counterparts of sex and violence that get our attention.

Which, in the long run, exploits children more _ fantasy movies or subtler invitations to translate all of life into money and equate net worth with salvation and estate planning with eternal life?

The money-obsessed exploiters can’t observe themselves and have no saving sense of irony about how they destroy a feeling for life by applying their bureaucratic calculations to everything human.

Second prize this year goes to the Roman Catholic paper that decries the loss of taxpayers as a result of abortion.


But first prize must go to the pas de deux between the Internal Revenue Service and an inquiring taxpayer: If their child were kidnapped could parents take a deduction for him or her in the years they were missing? No, said the IRS in a now infamous memo, taxpayers could not take an exemption after the first year because they could not prove that they provided more than half of the child’s support.

After much criticism, the memo was revised but not before it revealed that the source of the worst exploitation of children, and of our very ideas about children, is in those who so monetize life its humanity is permanently discounted.

Jesus was hardest on the hypocrites who invoked piety to cover their exploitation of others, those who slyly figured out how to work on the Sabbath or clogged God’s temple with man’s commerce. Indeed, Jesus saved his fierceness for the moneychangers who so misunderstood what really counts in life. He would have no doubt about today’s most dangerous exploiters of American youth.

DEA END KENNEDY

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