I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It by Charles Barkley

little kids? This is sick, and yes it is serious enough to make people pay for their actions. I believe in forgiveness and tolerance, but I also believe in punishment. This doesn’t really have anything to do with Catholicism. Yeah, in this case it involves the Catholic Church. But I don’t care who it is. If violating our children doesn’t call for punishment, what the hell does? If we’re not going to get angry and put a stop to this, then when are we going to?
    If I see something that isn’t right, I’ve got to hit it. This is why I can’t wait to do the CNN show this fall. We’re going to call it like we see it and we’re not ducking any issues and we’re not sugarcoating anything, especially the serious stuff.
    Probably nothing is as serious as children being abused, but there’s other stuff that needs addressing. First it was Enron and then it was WorldCom involved in all this financial fraud. I was watching television one night this summer when the WorldCom scandal first broke, and there was a woman with tears in her eyes asking, “When are these people going to jail?” And I’m talking to the TV, saying, “Lady, rich folks don’t go to jail; poor folks go to jail.”
    If some penny-ante drug dealer gets caught making a $10,000 drug deal, he’s going to jail and his house and car are going to be confiscated, which is what ought to happen. But Martha Stewart ain’t going to jail. She’ll sell all of her stock the day before the company announces huge losses. We can’t possibly think Enron and WorldCom are the only ones guilty of this stuff, can we?
    I’m sitting there riding the stationary bike and watching these lying, stealing executives on TV. The top executives refuse to testify before Congress about a $4 billion accounting scandal. The financial markets are in turmoil. The employees are losing their jobs and their pensions and their 401(k)s, and these guys—top guys, mind you—are refusing to talk to Congress. Come on now. Constitutional right to not talk? What about working people’s rights not to be ripped off and defrauded?
    How many billions did WorldCom underreport or improperly account for? Four billion, right? How do you simply misplace $4 billion? Four billion doesn’t just disappear. Look, $50,000 is a mistake. But four billion? Four billion is stealing. Those are damn crooks. A guy buys a $15 million house in Florida with money that ain’t his and he’s not in jail? That guy’s got to go to jail except . . . we all know he ain’t going to jail. What’s the worst that’s going to happen to his ass? He’s going to resign. Resign! Why the hell would he need to work if he’s already paid for a $15 million house? And by the way, where was the SEC during all this? Why shouldn’t we think that the people who are supposed to be holding people accountable are in cahoots with the crooks? The only thing that’s going to come out of this, and out of Enron, is that some poor people are going to be poorer ’cause they’ve been robbed of the little money they had in their pensions and retirement funds and the crooks are going to walk away with a slap on the wrist, if that.
    Poor people and working people just have no voice at all. They get bombarded by people trying to take what little they have. I want to do a show on what a rip-off credit cards are. Credit Cards enable somebody who barely makes ends meet to buy a $300 item and over time pay $900 for it because of 19 percent interest rates. And the ones who have bad credit pay a higher rate than that. Tell me this isn’t a rip-off. Make the guy who can least afford it pay more. I use two credit cards, both of them American Express, where you have to pay off the balance every month. The biggest obstacle for poor people, besides having no money, is giving in to instant gratification and deferred payment. You’re trying to make ends meet, so you keep paying the minimum to have some money left over, except the interest and the growing