There is an unshakable feeling of horror to where American capitalism is heading. A sense we have conjured something we cannot control. A sense that on our collective tombstone, it shall read only Hubris. We have been voyeuristically watching one another live our lives and yearning for wealth thinking there is no baggage involved.
I get it.
We are buckling under the weight of debt, poor health, and dreams deferred and the idea that money can save us, can help us is something that we all imagine. Why wouldn’t we?
We see the lives these rich people live and we want that too.
We want it…without seeing the cost, and the cost is our humanity.
With the writer’s strike and now the actor’s strike we are seeing how very ugly our corporate face is. That there is a willingness to let people go broke, go hungry, and go homeless in order to make sure the boards stay ultra-wealthy and the CEOs stay rich is utterly chilling. That families could lose everything because studios don’t value the people that actually do the work they put out is crazy.
But it’s not new.
Being in Flint, I know too well how nasty labor struggles are and how dangerous and deadly they can become.
I have never been in a union but even if I don’t use one I understand that they were on the front lines making sure labor didn’t treat their workers like wage slaves.
We are so obsessed not just with wealth but with having wealth that insulates us from the world that we’re willing to do whatever it takes to get and keep it.
We are using AI for everything we can, not out of need but out of curiosity and greed. I absolutely believe it can be a valuable tool but, like guns, we don’t want tools, we want toys.
We want power.
We want to cut out two to three people so we can get closer to the top.
We can make the world a better place.
We can make the world a safer place.
We can make work less taxing and more profitable.
Or we can just cut humanity out and let the rich pull themselves away from society and reality while the rest of us fight over a dying world.
Why’s it dying?
Because we won’t stop bleeding money from it long enough to save it.
We’re purportedly a Christian nation that is YOLOing itself into oblivion because, darn it, good people go to Heaven.
Sure, we put people out of work, and we damaged the planet, but we gave money to charities for the write-off.
We DID!
We totally told everyone we were Christian and judged people unlike us.
We’re worthy!
And it’s disgusting that these people hold sway over our politics because they can afford to push policy and pull interest. They can cut workforce, while being a billionaire, and then drop millions on their chosen pet candidate – claiming they have higher interests to save the world etcetera.
Sure.
But how many lives have been lost because some board or some CEO decided there weren’t enough profits coming in so they cut people’s jobs?
Corporate heads can squander millions, can make huge blunders, and they rarely pay any price while the working class is consistently shrugged at as we have our federal and state safeguards shrunk.
And it’s always the wealthy that lectures on how we need to bootstrap it and not rely on handouts.
They are always the ones who tell us to get a side hustle to earn that cheddar when their side hustle was knowing someone’s daddy with a big corporation or grifting on to fame with some idiotic influencer nonsense.
Hollywood’s elite would rather see all of the people that do the work, and who made the movies and entertainment what it is go broke and homeless than to figure out how to make things better for them.
Say you make twenty million a year, will cutting five really hurt you?
Or ten?
OH, but my vacations, and my houses and this and that.
And there’s no moment of self-realization where they say – ohhhhh, I get it.
Because they never will.
They jet off to private parties to schmooze one another at financial key parties while their workers walk the picket line. The negotiations are rarely about money as much as power. They want to make sure the worker bees don’t get too full of themselves and forget they are worker bees. The money is game money for them, it’s not THEIR money, it’s a corporation’s money that is stacked in cyberspace.
Hollywood doesn’t want change or reinvention or art.
Hollywood only wants to rob graves and chase trends.
In time we’ll just have TikTok ‘stars’ in ‘movies’ that are little more than videos of them doing stupid stunts to make themselves look human as they mock people for likes. ‘Here’s a hundred dollar bill sir, aren’t I generous?’ they ask before they hop into their expensive sports car and head back to their mansion.
It’s just so strange to me that we’ve become so warped as to believe reality television is in any way real, that rich people care about anyone but themselves, or that social media is a reflection of reality. It’s sad that we value ourselves so little that we think the world is normal and that having at least two jobs is just how you get ahead.
How you get yours.
We are a nation full of abandoned stores, homes, and buildings.
We would rather let those things return to the earth, unused than let someone have it for a price we don’t think is ‘fair’ to us.
We’d rather shrug off the empty mansions that are abandoned and left to rot because we think it’s better to let our toys sit in the rain, unused so long as no on else gets to have it.
Not that there’s always an easy answer, but there is ALWAYS a better answer.
Companies gobble one another up only to mismanage the new business and then cut staff, sell things off, or they just crater it all together. It’s better to own all the toys than it is to stay in your own lane. It’s all in the name of diversifying the portfolios of the rich with interest in another businesses assets, but not their staff, history, or value. It’s just about money and owning things. Beloved brands are acquired only to be drained of all the allure and magic they held, every last penny drained from it, and then it is discarded because of its greedy mismanagement. We see this with franchises all the time, especially with a brand like Disney, which wanted to control everything, then strangled their trophies until there was no life left, then they made it seem as if the problem was the franchise and not its management.
It’s a big game for the rich with no real stakes for them because even if they were to get fired they leave with pockets full of cash and eventually end up ‘working’ for a friend or ‘consulting’ for the rest of their days.
They just get richer and richer and richer and further from the people that work for them.
The world shouldn’t have billionaires.
No one should ever have that much money because if they do it means they are no longer human because their money is more worthwhile than the people they share the planet with.
You could save cities and people with that money.
Could change the world.
Instead, they isolate themselves and hoard it to buy things they’ll forget they even have.
And I wonder sometimes, if there’s a silver lining, and on days like this, all I can say is ‘no, there isn’t’.
…c…
Currently listening to the album ‘The Complicated Futility of Ignorance’ by Fudge Tunnel
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 