In the land of milk and honey...and Maybachs.

I spent the weekend in San Diego. My yuppie sista had an emotional emergency and I responded. As we were driving towards Carlsbad, a nice and very expensive beach community, I spotted a beautiful car that I did not recognize.

It was a Maybach. At least the nameplate on the ass end announced it as a Maybach. The logo was nothing I had seen before:

My sista thought it was part of the Mercedes family of cars. The vehicle was simply gorgeous. When we got home I googled the sucker and learned the following:

They don’t call dealerships..dealerships. They are ’studios’. A used Maybach can start around $200,000.00 and a new one goes for, depending on the options you want,  around half a million devalued american bucks.

I shit you not..check it out if you don’t believe me. And my sista was right..they are part of Mercedes Benz.

As we sat around her living room..I asked her and her husband, both upwardly mobile, hard working individuals, how much they thought Maybach’s went for..both said $100,000.00. That is a price range seen for Bentley’s, Lamborghini’s and the Rolls-Royce Phantom..to name a few.

The Maybach’s price makes those other vehicle prices pale in comparison.

Conspicuous consumption is something that really jerks my chain.

Especially when you consider that almost fifty million american’s can not afford health insurance, whole families are homeless, millions go to bed hungry at night and the official number of poor in the US in 2008 was 39.1 million people or 13% of the population..children of color make up the majority of the poor with 34% of them African-American and over 30% of them are Hispanic. And our way of measuring poverty is grossly flawed at best.

In America people..in America.Of course the neocon Heritage Foundation will tell you otherwise and actually call it all bullshit. But I have seen poverty and it sure as hell exists, many times generation after generation in the same family. I have looked into the eyes of a hungry child who was too ashamed to admit that the only decent meal they got each day was the fucking free breakfast or lunch at their school. It broke my heart..then it made me so mad I can’t begin to describe it here.

Sure, the top one percent or “ultra high net worth” households (roughly 1 million people in the US) can drive whatever the fuck they want, and I can marvel at the beauty of such a vehicle. But that doesn’t make it morally right.

Heaven help those Maybach owners if all the poor folks ever rise up and want to even the fucking score. It would make the russian revolution look like a walk in fucking Central Park on a sunny day.