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Michael Moore
Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and best-selling author
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Just to help you kick your week off on a positive note, please enjoy this heartwarming story from the state of Tennessee:
Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.
A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.
Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.
The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.
As our infrastructure crumbles -- while Wall Street just had its best September since 1939 -- let's take another moment to honor that great Roman Crassus and how he became so wealthy:
Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives was an influential Roman politician from the Late Republic...
[H]is rise to political prominence was primarily due to his enormous wealth. Crassus’ wealth was acquired through a combination of his silver mines, trafficking in slaves, and the purchasing of land and houses. The latter was the foundation for his reputation for greed, as his real estate acquisitions occurred under unsavory clouds. Under Sulla’s reign of terror, Crassus benefited by purchasing the property of proscribed citizens at cutthroat prices. Even worse, in the eyes of his fellow citizens, was his habit of buying burning homes. Rome had no fire department at the time, and Crassus maintained a personal firefighting force that would rush to the site of a burning building along with Crassus himself. Once there, Crassus would bargain for the fiery structure, as well as for the buildings surrounding it. Once he had made as many deals as he deemed profitable, his army went to work extinguishing the flames.
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