Ah, Khuxford. I know that Kevin Huxford of Schwapp Online has been a controversial cat over the years. However, he's also been my friend. Another Best Shots guy that came over to Shotgun, Kevin felt many years ago that he had to split both because he'd become something of a lightning rod. He promptly founded his own blog and enjoyed his gadfly role ever since. One thing that you need to know is that Kevin has a rigid code of principles. And even if you don't agree with it, you should respect it. Today, he takes a hard look at something that affects all of us.
Union membership has waned.
Reality TV, populated by talentless gloryhounds, has supplanted a lot of (openly) scripted entertainment.
The Supreme Court says corporations are entitled to all the rights of personhood.
And the electorate is brainwashed into believing that leaving more money with rich folks and corporations leads to new jobs and trickle down even more than they were in the 80s, it seems.
There's two recent developments where this has become more disturbing to me on a personal level.
Gary Friedrich sued Marvel to try to obtain ownership of Ghost Rider. The merits of his case are, at best, debatable. The Ghost Rider name existed prior to his involvement and testimony says that a lot of editorial direction went into the creation. But there's no doubt he played a significant role in the creation, leading some to believe it would be the right thing for Marvel and/or the studio behind the movie to throw a sum (insignificant to them, but significant to the destitute Friedrich) for his past contributions.
And in come all the folks defending the corporations blindly. The only moral obligation Marvel has is to shareholders (i.e. it is a moral imperative that they maximize profits). If they pay this guy, what about the other contributors? What about cases where it is more difficult to break down contributions? It's not the corporations fault that it's too complicated for them to pay anyone something in consideration of how their past work has now manifested into unforeseen millions of dollars.
Doing the right thing would just too complicated and, besides, all the creators signed those horrible contracts without a gun to their head back in the day. Because, you know, it'd have been easy to refuse to sign away rights on everything, forego payment for that work and be blackballed by at least one publisher going forward. We've all done that countless times, amirite?
We have this lovely contradiction of folks who tend not to see the moral consequences of illegally downloading (I'm not trying to throw digital stones here; I don't justify my downloads), yet try to defend corporations trying to make and keep as much money as possible. It's confounding.
More personal to me is the current state of unions and how much the public is being turned against them.
I guess it shouldn't surprise me that folks rail against a democratically run & elected organization meant to protect their rights, seeing as how so many seem to hate our system of government these days. Any failings of either largely can be laid at the feet of the voters. We've all become an odd combination of busy and lazy where we make all of our judgments on a cursory knowledge of the subject, the hottest sound bites and then often fall short of actually voting.
But the latest round of attacks on unions is particularly galling.
Take the Employee Rights Act (http://employeerightsact.com/), for instance.
Nearly everything they suggest openly to the public for this legislation is already enacted on the union level. They complain about money spent on politics; you have to select to donate to the campaigning arm of a union or else none of your money is used in that manner. There are already laws against threatening workers to coerce their vote (though this is normally needed to keep businesses from intimidating their workers, not the other way around).
But the main point they really want is that will force unions to have to recertify every three years. This will start by effectively decertifying all unions as soon as the legislation passes: it forces a recertification vote at the start. Why would they do this? Because it would make nearly all unions be put up for a vote simultaneously. Gee, wouldn't a targeted ad campaign at that very moment (with a lot of lies and half truths that would have very little time to be corrected) be terribly effective at tearing down a good number of unions? And then the surviving unions would be available for targeting again in three years? A war of attrituion that corporations are in a great position to win.
This campaign is put together by Rick Berman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Berman), the man behind movements in past years to stop laws requiring restaurants to have non-smoking sections, to defend high fructose corn syrup from detractors and to keep the minimum wage from being increased.
People are being led to the slaughterhouse by corporations, while dragging unions with them. Corporations are arguing they have the interests of the worker more at heart than unions do...and folks are believing them. And they'll keep believing them, because they have far more interest in seeing if the fellas are still doing their "GTL" thing, who gets a rose and what emaciated idiot wins the next immunity challenge than they are at researching the political movements that might keep them from being able to afford their cable bill next month or their electric bill next year.
If you have the moment, you should check out REAL Employee Rights (https://www.facebook.com/realemployeerights) so you can learn more about the lies the PACs and legislators are trying to pass off to eat away at your rights. But most will never stop to question what $10 million ad campaigns from corporate interests tell them is the truth.
We live in interesting...nay, EXCITING...times for corporations.
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