Late Capitalism Arrives On Time
ARKANSAS GOVERNOR SANDRA HUCKABEE-SANDERS, whose dad was also a Governor and whose brother once (allegedly) tortured a dog to death, recently signed a law rolling back child labor protections, removing the need for employees to prove that they are at least 16 years or older. Republicans are trying to frame this as the removal of red-tape preventing kids can get wholesome summer jobs like Paperboy or Fast Food Employee or Catamite At The Bohemian Grove. It’s all part of a nationwide trend being pushed by business interests through laws and strategically-placed op-eds. And, as it turns out, some of these jobs are not for kids!
Well, not for the kids of the people pushing the laws, anyway. It’s a way to drive down the cost of labor while reducing the need/funding for public education. The key here is this: once a cost-saving measure becomes permissible in capitalism, it will eventually become mandatory. If your family is poor, socioeconomic pressure will tell you that you’re actually being irresponsible by NOT sending your kid to work at the slaughterhouse at age 10. It’s not like the local schools are great, right? Not like they have a shot at becoming a doctor or anything.
It’s why selling your organs is (for now) illegal in America, because if it was legal than corporate news outlets would be bombarding us with op-ed pieces about how selfish and lazy poor people are for not selling their kidneys to rich people in order to feed their families. Although I guess we’ve already dipped our toe in those (bloody) waters, like in 2015 when Judge Marvin Wiggins told destitute people that they could avoid going to jail for fines if they donated plasma.
I REMEMBER A STORY in The Atlantic from 2005 about A.Q. Khan, the scientist who delivered the atomic bomb to Pakistan and earned a rather charmed life in that country. He went on to build a mansion on the shores of a water reservoir for the city of Rawalpindi, which was forbidden by law because the construction and dwelling runoff might contaminate the drinking water for two million people. But Khan built it anyway, because the area was pristine and neighbor-less, and because it was a sign of status that he could flaunt the law. Of course, soon the nation’s most prominent generals, government officials, and People of Power became jealous and started building their own houses there on the reservoir, which probably did eventually affect the water supply.
At the time, the anecdote was positioned with equal parts smugness, caution and relief from the American writer, who implied that such a thing would not be tolerated in the United States, because of our environmental laws and respect for the common good.
Turns out, all you need to do is change those laws and then ‘Everything is Permitted’.
BECAUSE AS SADLY PREDICTED in last month’s missive, the Thomas/Alito Supreme Court has officially gutted the EPA Clean Water Act. This was done on behalf of a rich couple seeking to build their ‘dream house’ 500 feet from Idaho’s fresh water Scenic Priest Lake, which is fed by surrounding mountains and federally-protected wetlands. The conservative majority ruled (5–4, with Kavanaugh siding with the libs) to weaken the EPA’s authority to safeguard the nation’s waterways at large. Now every corporate overlord or petit bourgeoisie tyrant can poison their neighbors and kill the surrounding wildlife in pursuit of profit, or just to build their ‘dream home’, because there can be no limits to American freedom (if you are wealthy).
This would only be a concern for all Americans if the nations’ waterways were less like veins and arteries, and more like intimately connected like blood vessels joining everything and everyone.
THE WRITER’S GUILD OF AMERICA IS NOW STRIKING, and the Screen Actor’s Guild may follow. One ‘cool’ thing we have learned during the recent strike that is that Netflix likes to structure its deals with creators and showrunners by underpaying (according to market rates) for the first season of a show, then promising progressively larger bonuses for each subsequent season renewal. Sounds good, right? Well, it turns out that- according to a recent Vulture article- Netflix prefers to cancel shows around the first or second season to avoid making these bonus payouts. They also withhold viewership numbers from the creators to undercut any argument as to why the shows should remain, or even just to prove that the creators can deliver an audience for their own future projects. This may help to explain why only eight Netflix shows have reached the five season mark in its entire history. It’s simply more cost-effective to shut it all down.
Add to that Netflix’s bold new initiative to ‘teach’ AI to ‘help’ do film editing as a way of saving money (and eventually firing human editors), you have a film industry run by rapacious plutocrats who don’t care much storytelling and honestly couldn’t give a damn if quality filmmaking becomes a lost art.
BECAUSE ALSO, ALAS YES, AS SADLY PREDICTED in my missive from two months ago, the recent trend of giant media companies erasing content for profit-pioneered by David Zaslav at Discovery/Time Warner-has migrated to other services and platforms. Disney has just secured a $1.5 billion write off by purging its streaming services of over 50 titles and series, many of which are not available on physical media. It’s the 1980s all over again, where you had to subscribe to a number of services to be able to see all of the things you want, except that THIS time there are no video stores and you can’t copy anything (legally) off of the service. Better buy up on those blu-rays before they phase out physical media (which WB announced it had already started doing in 2022)!
CULTURE CORNER:
Barry: (2018–2023) I’m guessing they must have pitched this around Hollywood as “Wacky SNL funnyman Bill Hader plays a hitman who wants to leave the killing behind and become an actor.” The first season certainly fits this, but as the show got more popular and he got more freedom, Hader and co-creator Alex Berg turned the lights down and did the show that they clearly wanted to make from the beginning: a darkly funny, surreal, and fundamentally unsettling show that explores malignant narcissism, sociopathy, US military atrocities, abusive relationships, the decline of the arts, parasitic mentors and directly questions whether artists can find redemption or even satisfaction in their work. The cartoonish murder sequences in season 1 give way to some truly nightmarish sequences in Season 3 and 4. It’s not really a ‘fun’ show to watch by the end, but it speaks to the human condition in a way an AI never could.
The Face of Another: (1964) Hiroshi Teshigahara’s dark, almost experimental sci-film is part of Japan’s 60s New Wave. After ‘Mr. Okuyama’ (played by the brilliant Tatsuya Nakadai, who would later star in Ran) becomes self-loathing and isolated from a disfiguring accident, an amoral doctor offers an experimental treatment granting him a new face. The doctor theorizes that the man’s personality will change under the influence of his ‘new mask.’ Mr. Okuyama, on the other hand, just wants to use his new identity to seduce his estranged wife and prove she’s a whore. If Godzilla is a movie about the devastation of the atomic bomb, then this one is about about a war-scarred nation coming to terms with the idea that they are now all expected to be a different people (i.e. Americans).
