Greetings,
It's been a little while since I went off about the Man, so I guess it's high time we had some of that. I have been suffering the Man's bullshit with a grain of salt the last few months because I had other fish to fry in my life (which, by the way, is the Man's greatest weapon - keeping us distracted so that we won't notice the toll that som'bitch is taking on us.), but last night I saw a Visa commercial with the song Today, by Smashing Pumpkins on it. This made me sad, and it made me think.
When I was about fifteen or sixteen and musical angst was still a bit new to me, I knew this kid that was a couple of years older than I was. He was a classic punk - Mohawk haircut, ripped up, faded jeans and shirts, spiked black motorcycle jacket, etc. I thought he was pretty cool, and one time I heard him going off about all of the newcomers to the punk/grunge music scene in the mid 90's. I will always remember one particular comment that he made. He said "...I was listening to Smashing Pumpkins when those fuckers were listening to Bell Biv DeVoe." Because of this, I have always associated Smashing Pumpkins with rebellion.
And now their music is on a Visa commercial.
This sucks almost as much the fact that when I saw the Rolling Stones in concert in 2002, the tour was sponsored by E-Trade and there were E-Trade banners all over the Tacoma-Dome.
As a musician, it begs the question, what is the point of writing rebellious songs? Furthermore, what is the point of rebelling at all? I mean, is this what we're all destined for - to eventually have our most sincere feelings of discontent sold to the highest bidder, regardless of that bidder's moral fortitude? If the Stones (a band that practically invented counterculture) and Smashing Pumpkins (a band that is synonymous with the second generation of counterculture in the 90's) will sell out to companies like Visa and E-Trade, what hope do any of the rest of us have?
Please understand, I am not against an artist selling his music. I would just like a little integrity and discretion with regard to the buyers they serve. Visa and E-Trade? Come on.
Our current economic conditions are proof that credit card and financial companies will allow every bit of their "business sense" to fly right out the window when their greed goes unchecked. We are seeing first hand the fruits of that greed. Now it seems some of the artists I look up to are no better.
I can understand Smashing Pumpkins selling Bullet With Butterfly Wings to the Discovery Channel for use as the theme song to a series. I can even begrudgingly accept the Stones selling Start Me Up to Microsoft a few years back, but I just can't be ok with either band's music being use to sell financial services. Especially since neither band is apparently hurting for cash. The Stones are, well, the Stones; and the Pumpkins put out a new album just last year, and from what I heard, it was pretty well received by even today's kids.
It all comes back to greed - which leads me onto another little rabbit trail that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
During the presidential campaign, a lot of the McCain supporters, and the GOP in general, were up in arms over Obama's plan to "re-distribute the wealth" or "share the wealth." (remember Joe the Plumber?) Letter after letter to the editorial board of my local newspaper said that if Obama got elected we would all be socialists overnight. This never quite sat right with me, and the more I think about it now, I think I've finally figured out the real problem with "trickle-down" economics.
The first part of the problem is that the distribution of wealth in the U.S. (and, for that matter, the world) is disfigured like some grotesque character from a Flannary O'Connor story. According to Wikipedia, 10% of the U.S. population controls 71% of the wealth, with the very richest 1% controlling 38%. So if we plug in some made up, but approximate, numbers to represent the population and GDP values for the US, it would look something like this: Let's say that the U.S. population is 300 million, and that the GDP is 14 trillion. This would mean that 3 million people (1%) control $5.32 trillion (38% of GDP), the other 27 million people that make up the top 10% of the population would control $4.62 trillion (a combined total of $9,94 trillion, or 71% of the GDP), and the remaining $4.06 trillion would be divided up amongst all 270 million of the rest of us.
Now, these astronomical figures are a little bit hard to fully grasp, so, just for fun, lets divide the dollar amounts up evenly amongst the populations that control them - this might help us get a little better idea of what this distribution looks like on a per-person basis (disclaimer - this is just a rhetorical example - reality is obviously much more complicated.) The 3 million richest people would have an average of $1.773 million each, the next-richest 9% (27 million people) would have an average of $1.711 million each, and the other 270 million of us would have an average of only $15 thousand each. Ok, so most of us make more than $15K a year, but the ratio is what's important.
Basically, the entire U.S. economy is a giant pyrimid scheme, and if that's reality, then that's reality. The problem I have with that is when conservatives tell us that the prosperity from the top will trickle down to the bottom.
Wrong.
The trickle down formulas don't work when you account for greed and marketing. You see, greed insures that the people at the top don't want to give away their money, and marketing makes people believe that they actually need to live like Hugh Hefner or, for that matter, Bruce Wayne ('cause really, 15 Lamborghini's just isn't enough).
The people who support trickle down economics want us to believe that everyone can work their way into wealth like this. Sorry, but they just can't. We need garbage men. We need janitors. We need clerks. None of these professions are ever going to produce enough wealth to break into the top 10% - no matter how hard you work. So we get this system in which trickle down trickles a little bit, but it stops right around upper management level. Garbage men, janitors, and clerks get nada.
And really, you can't tell me for one instant that a Vice President of Marketing works harder than a janitor, or a waitress. Sorry - I don't buy it. I don't have any hard data on this, but in my own experience, the upper management doesn't do much in the way of real work. I guess if you consider taking three hour lunches, skipping out early in the summer to play golf, or traveling to lavish resorts for "business meetings" work, then they work pretty hard, but I think they've got it quite a bit better off than the guy who has to clean the toilets in a truck stop in Butte, MT.
This is really the heart of the matter. Traditional, conservative, laissez-faire capitalism is flawed. The idea is, if you work hard, go to college, and play your cards right, you can get anywhere you want to go in life. That's the American Dream, right? Well, the truth is, it doesn't work that way, because there's a very small amounts of seats at the top, and not everyone can get there. So, for a nation that is supposedly founded on equality, and equal opportunity for everyone, does this really seem like the best system? Maybe a better system would be one in which the people who are driven and determined can work their way to the top, but the top isn't quite so lavish. That way, the rest of the people, for whom "life happened," can still be prosperous.
I tried earlier to paint a numerical picture of the distribution of wealth in this country, but I think now that maybe a better picture would be this juxtiposition. There are a few Americans that can afford to buy a wristwatch that costs more than the majority of Americans' houses. Seriously. Look at a watch catalog sometime. There are watches out there that cost over $350,000. There are people in Las Vegas that drink $10,000 bottles of champagne - but for every 27 million of them, there are 270 million who sometimes struggle just to pay $3.00 for a gallon of milk.
I am all for rewarding hard work. I am all for making sure people don't leech on the system. I just think that nobody really needs a $350,000 wristwatch in addition to four or five multi-million dollar homes and 17 exotic cars. Not while there are honest people being kicked out of their homes.
I am also just really tired of people demonizing progressive reform as "socialism," or "Marxism." People who do so are completely ill-informed about what actual communism and socialism were, and are so far removed from reality that they would be hard pressed to see it if it were tsunami racing toward them. I hope, however, for all our sakes, that those people are becoming more and more rare.
I am the Reverend Humpy and I have approved this message.
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