James 4.1 - 5.6

James 4.1 - 4.6:

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?  Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you don't ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.  Adulterers!  Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?  Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.  Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, "God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to swell in us?"  But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

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James 4.13 - 4.17:

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money." yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life?  For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that."  As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.  Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.

James 5.1 - 5.6:

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you.  Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten.  Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen!  The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.  You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.  You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.

(Excerpt from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd Edition, 2001.)
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These passages are acrimonious and not representative of most of the texts in the New Testament, but in a way I think it serves as a wake-up call for those who are fallible but still with integrity, and especially for the wealthy, to reexamine their manner of living and attitude towards the downtrodden and impoverished.