On Friday, a federal grand jury ordered Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 in “damages” to the Recording Industry Association of America. His crime? He illegally downloaded thirty songs on his computer using peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The verdict came not long after a Minnesota woman was fined a gaudy $1.92 million for downloading twenty-four songs. Clearly, with millions of Americans guilty of this same crime, the fascistic RIAA was looking to make an example of these unlucky sons-a-bitches in order to deter future piracy (good luck with that), but what’s more, these cases are a microcosm of the almost fully developed corporatocracy that has all but replaced democratic republicanism in the United States.
Take the taxpayer-funded bailout of the Wall Street companies who happily took our money and proceeded to pay many of its employees bonuses despite the fact these people oversaw, and in many cases were responsible for, the biggest financial collapse in a generation. In Corporate America, it isn’t necessarily your performance that matters, it’s who you are, or who you work for. So for example, at everyone’s favorite corporate whipping post, Goldman Sachs, the company used some of its bailout money from us, the taxpayers, to dole out big bonuses to executives who—in any just universe—would be tied down and have their pee-holes stretched open, at which point everyone who lost money in this largely Goldman-driven clusterfuck would take turns pouring isopropyl alcohol on the agape dickheads.
But we don’t live in a just universe, or even a just country. We, my fellow Americans, live a plutocratic corporatocracy where Wall Street can do whatever the fuck it wants, can be reckless with the money of investors and shareholders, and take solace in the fact that if the economy goes south (for reasons which may include its own insatiable avarice) its puppets in Washington will be on hand to give out enough of our money to get them out of their self-induced financial jam and maybe even turn a first quarter ”profit” of a few billion dollars mere months later. Meanwhile, Joel Tenenbaum, a broke-as-shit grad student, gets slapped with a $675,000 fine, because he downloaded some songs and engaged in file sharing. Now, Tenenbaum didn’t issue tons of subprime loans. He didn’t sell securities backed by said shit loans. He didn’t cost innumerable people their savings and retirement money. He didn’t take any money from the taxpayers. He didn’t use taxpayer money to give himself a bonus. You don’t have to condone what Tenenbaum did to see that something is horribly, horribly wrong here. This is the corporatic culture at work in the U.S. If instead of downloading a bunch of songs whose artists and corporate copyright holders are already disgustingly wealthy, Joel Tenenbaum had peddled what he knew to be junk mortgage securities to unwitting investors on a massive scale, then proceeded to bet that the value of those same securities would plummet and wipe out people’s savings and 401Ks in the process, he may very well have been given billions of taxpayer dollars by the government, with enough left over to give himself a sweet bonus. To top it off, Tenenbaum would be lauded by business pundits such as Mark Gimein, who would instruct us to “resist the urge to punish success” as he did last month in one of the most insulting, outrageous, and shameless Op-Eds ever published in the Washington Post—a piece of propaganda so fallacious and fellatious, one has to read it to believe it. Furthermore, Tenenbaum could take great comfort in the fact that everyone will want to do business with him—no matter how bad he fucked up in the past, or will fuck up in the future—because his investments and deceit will always be backed by the full faith and stupidity of Wall Street’s political wing: the U.S. government.
So to reiterate: we are a nation whose vast majority of people are working stiffs—suckers, really—barely getting by, who are basically regarded as disposable by the wealthy ruling class, whose recent collective gross incompetence didn’t make them think twice before rewarding their own disastrous handiwork with fat bonuses. It’s true that we Americans enjoy some of the most extensive human rights and civil liberties in the world, but when you get right down to it, power in America rests primarily with the business interests of this country. And despite the increasing financial inequalities in America, no one seems to give a shit. Either that, or the workers in this country do give a shit, but nonetheless allow themselves to be smacked around by their fatcat oppressors. In this way, the U.S. is the perfect incubator for the cancer of corporatism. In my next post, I’ll explain why this is so.
- Max
No comments:
Post a Comment