Rob: Keep going.
CC: Well, okay, I think democracy is easiest one in a way because you can see how when you have, you know, as we now know, 158 families have given half the money in the 2016 presidential cycle. Many of them are in this Forbes 400 list. Half the money. So now our whole system of elections has been taken over by the billionaires. For any candidate to be viable, you need to have your own billionaire. So the reason why the republican primary still has 14 candidates, half of whom you can't remember, is because they all have a billionaire patron that keeps them going. If they had to rely on the campaign contributions of ordinary people, they would be long gone. There would be a, but because they have a billionaire backer, or some of them have multiple billionaires, they can just keep running along and getting their various ideas out there. That's because the billionaire has decided that so and so candidate is a good messenger for my interests. So we are living through the billionnaire wealth primary. Where the billionaires decide who the candidates are with obvious exception of Bernie Sanders.
Rob: And culture, how about culture.
CC: Well culture, I think that you can just look at, how has big money affected art. How has it affected sports. How has it affected what we consider, what's it's done to local culture. We now live in kind of a winner take all culture where one Taylor Swift song, one Adele song is all you hear because, and huge rewards flow to the top and nothing against those artists actually, I think they're great artists, but our whole concept of culture is warped. Culture is what all of us do. Culture is not celebrities. Culture is the music we make together. The theater we create in our communities, the storytelling, the art, the and sport is not the NFL and the NBA and you know Kobe Bryant and whatever, that is not sport. Sport is what all of us do, the games we play. The things that we do to better ourselves and deepen our community ties. We don't even think about this but if you go to a culture where sport has not been billionaire-ized, you see it. You know I know Ireland, there's the Gaelic athletic association hurling and Gaelic football, they're all amateur sports, there are no professional paid athletes in these sports. They're the hugest sports in the country, and they're all athletes who have day jobs, that are not professional. I mean it's fascinating. And so what it means is that if you're a child growing up in that society, you think of sport as something you do, and that maybe someday you will do at the big stadium in Dublin, but you're representing your county and your local parish and your local town. So we can't even think of what our culture would look like outside the incredible influence of billionaire money.
Rob: So when you're talking about the, the effect of billionaires, you're really talking about a massive top down squashing of culture.
CC: It does, it's like, it crushes authentic culture and creates culture for money's sake. You know it's not just a few billionaire, this is the commercialization of culture is a larger issue. But what's driving that are these billionaire communications moguls who are trying to nickel for every song and every touchdown pass they want to get more and more money. And it's corroded the most important things in our culture.
Rob: Yeah. How about community.
CC: Well it's very very hard to have community when there are extreme inequalities. I mean, I grew up in the Midwest, in the 60's there was a certain amount of inequality, we call it sort of the other side of the tracks. But today the rich and everyone else are stratified across really parallel universes. The very very wealthy occupy a rung of existence where they don't have a lot of interaction across economic difference. Except for servants maybe and an occasional employee, but they don't have authentic friendships, reciprocal friendships across the economic divide. And so people begin to get disconnected and they become fearful of one another and they believe mythologies about each other. I mean, you know the presidential campaign candidate who talks about making America great again, how many people is he in relationships with who are Muslims who are Iraq war veterans. You know, he doesn't know anybody. How would he know anybody? He doesn't interact, so he's able to create mythologies in his head and that's essential what happens in an extremely unequal society. So I think too much inequality leads to a breakdown in community, leads to a breakdown in social solidarity which is, hey we're all in the same boat, and injury to you is an injury to me. What happens to your children really matters to me. Like we don't have that level of connection and that's because of these inequalities.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
