The Way the World Works

A rich man in Europe owes me a small fortune.

I will never see this money. The European artists he exploited, and then completely screwed over, took him to court. It was an arduous, expensive and painful process. Even though they won the case, in the end the artists got very little because the lawyers took almost all of it. It made no sense for the foreign artists to then sue. Between translations, the paperwork nightmare and mandatory court appearances it would have cost us even more and we might have received less because he would have had time to hide all his assets.

I'd almost forgotten about him--I'd blocked it in the interests of letting go, moving on, and finding some peace--until a friend reminded me last night.

This is not an isolated case. "The side that has the most interest in pitting raw financial power against the opponent in the suit is probably going to win."

That last link comes from this piece in The Daily Kos, from the POV of someone who temped at a large, international bank. I temped a lot back in the day, between media jobs, while writing. Most of my employers were great. For months I worked for a consultant firm in Washington, a great and ethical company, that specialized in helping failing and otherwise wayward banks get back to the straight and narrow and make a fair profit. I had to type up a lot of documents detailing what had gone wrong. The word 'embezzlement' came up so often it began to appear in my dreams.

A Chelsea neighbor used to work for a very rich family with a popular department store among other holdings. She told me they routinely paid their big mainstream suppliers and not the artisans who made the store's reputation. Why? Because the big suppliers could afford to sue them. The artisans couldn't, not simply for financial reasons, but also because they'd be labeled troublemakers and find it harder to get their work into other big stores. And if they had pursued it in a class action? The owners would hide their assets and declare bankruptcy, and/or sell the company, which IIRC is what they did anyway.

That family is still filthy rich.

Bankruptcy is a pip if you're wealthy.

At the time, I thought my neighbor was just grinding an axe against her former employer but I later met artisans who had been bankrupted by the store.

Extrapolate, and you see that this is what has happened to the entire world economy.

This was not the only time I was screwed over by someone wealthier, but not all rich people are bad--and I was helped out at the time by a wealthy woman in New York who assists many artists, and helped too by family and friends (some of whom had little more than I had). The American Dream characterizes the rich as people profiting from their talents and creativity, like Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg. But these deserving individuals seem to be the exception, not the rule.

When a CEO earns 100 or 1000 times more than the people doing the work for him or her and pays proportionally less in taxes, yet still has massively disproportionate influence over the government, things are FUBAR. With the stroke of a pen the corporate elite can lay off those workers, then pressure the congresspeople they own not to extend benefits to the unemployed. Most galling is the way their Ho's in government cut benefits to veterans and their beneficiaries, many of whom have actually risked their lives/lost loved ones fighting wars that shamefully profited corporations.

Read this: It's the Inequality, Stupid.

Then read this: 7 Core Demands from the Occupy Wall Street Movement. These are very clear demands, and seem very reasonable ways to take power from the moneyman and return it to the people. Whatever else people want, environmental laws, alternative energy programs, whatever, will be easier to fight for (or against, depending on your POV) once financial and electoral reform--a real democracy1--is achieved. That's what Occupy Wall Street is about, replacing plutocracy with democracy.

1 Yes, I know people have the vote, but what does that mean when they can redistrict, manipulate the number of voting booths, or just hack the electronic voting machines, which turns out to be surprisingly easy. (Thanks to Max Adams for leading me to that last bit and to the 7 Core Demands.)

K-FLEX The Congressional Pimp