Contrary to the beliefs of some of Curmie’s more conservative acquaintances, he is not, in fact, a socialist (although he’s been accused of worse). His retirement nest egg is tied up in things like stocks and bonds and mutual funds (oh, my!), he believes in personal property, and he advocates for equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes.
That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s a fan of malignant capitalism. While the Venn diagram of the extremely rich and the legitimately praiseworthy doesn’t quite look like Little Orphan Annie’s eyes, it’s a hell of a long way from concentric circles. Curmie offers two examples from recent headlines. Both involve corporate entities, but one of those enterprises really boils down to a single person. Let’s start there.
There do remain a few absolute truths in the world: water is wet, dry ice is cold, and Elon Musk is an asshole. We all know about his narcissism, his hypocrisy, and his unwillingness to take responsibility for the damage he routinely causes. He has demanded that Twitter engineers allow him to bypass the algorithm to make certain his tweets are seen by millions, and he was particularly incensed that Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet was seen by more people than his was. Just as a side note, Biden’s was actually kinda cute; Musk’s, now deleted, consisted of three American flags, “Go @Eagles!!!,” and three more flags. Boring is as boring does.
Oh, and of course a couple weeks back he fired an engineer who had the audacity to tell him the truth instead of what he wanted to hear. Hanging out at the Super Bowl with Rupert Murdoch wasn’t going to do his independent-thinking and anti-media credentials a lot of good, either. Indeed, the difference between Musk and Murdoch is that the latter is at least honest about his belief in unfettered capitalism and his country-club neo-Fascism.
But alas, Gentle Reader, it gets worse. In one of the most perverse tweets in history, Musk first brags that “Starlink [another of his companies] is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed,” then tries to defend his unconscionable decision to restrict Ukraine’s ability to use the service to control drones because, get this, “we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.”
This was in response to a tweet from former astronaut and Navy captain Scott Kelly, who wrote “Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost.” The rest of us would say “well, duh.” Musk, of course, prefers to spout inanities.
Dude, you’re looking into the wrong end of the telescope again. Russia are the invaders, the aggressors, and, frankly, the evil ones. (Curmie saw that look, Gentle Reader: no, not the Russian people, the Russian government.) All Ukraine wants to do is to keep their country, and they’re looking for a way to do that. It’s not Zelenskyy who’s threatening WWIII; it’s the other guy.
It’s unreasonable, of course, to believe that a wealthy buffoon like Musk would do the right thing, or that he’d refrain from butting in where he had no business (Ukraine’s outgoing ambassador to Germany told him that “F--- off is my very diplomatic reply to you”), but when he’d been (or pretended to be, back when it was more fashionable) a vocal supporter of Ukrainian sovereignty, it might not have been too much to ask that he not actively do the wrong thing.
Many questions have now been answered, but one remains: who is Elon Musk’s most admired world leader in history—Vladimir Putin… or Neville Chamberlain?
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The earlier mention of Musk’s Super Bowl tweet and his presence at the game ties in with the other manifestation of corporate arrogance run amok. Curmie refers, of course, to the National Football League. There’s this concept called a “Clean Zone” that the NFL has been pushing for years. This year, this nonsense forbade “temporary signage,” including “Banners (cloth or vinyl), Pennants, Flags, Window paintings, Posters/Flyers, Balloons” in an area of almost two square miles for five weeks, beginning four weeks before the Big Game (you can’t mention the Super Bowl by name, of course, and the NFL actually tried to trademark “Big Game,” too) and extending a week after the game. This latter provision doesn’t make any sense even if corporate greed is somehow a sufficient justification for the restrictions.
As is often the case, a writer for FIRE provides really good snark: “Sorry parents, but the decorations for your kid’s birthday party will now need the approval of the NFL and the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee.” Think that’s an exaggeration? Well, the food trucks in Houston in 2017 had the audacity of having the wrong brand of tire. They had to be painted over. Yes, really. This time, though, someone decided to do something about it… more on that in a moment.
According to an article by Sam Borden and Sara Coello on the ESPN site (linked above), this abuse of wealth and power came as a response to a ploy by another corporate behemoth, Budweiser, in 1999. Apparently Bud was not an official sponsor, but found ways of getting messaging out in the area surrounding the stadium. Jim Steeg, the NFL’s chief goon special events head marketing dude for a long time, whines that “All of a sudden, there were inflatables or signs—they’d buy [parking] lots up and put up things advertising their brands, while your official guys were only getting what was inside the stadium. We had to do something.”
No, you self-righteous prick, you didn’t. You could have accepted the fact that you can make whatever restrictions you want on properties you control, but neither you nor local city councils can deprive citizens of their first amendment rights just because you can acquire more lucre by doing so. Oh, but the NFL says Clean Zones aren’t just about money: they’re “an important tool in protecting public health, safety and welfare” according to a hosting document for the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis. If you believe that, Gentle Reader, Curmie has an ocean-front property you might be interested in purchasing. It’s in Kansas, but you’re not biased against the Midwest, are you?
Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon, or a specifically American one. Curmie wrote about the utter stupidity that surrounded the London Olympics in 2012. The London organizing committee actually hired 286 “enforcement officers” who had no responsibilities other than to protect the interests of corporate sponsors, at the expense of Londoners and out-of-town spectators alike. Curmie is not an expert on British law, but it’s his understanding that there’s no equivalent to the US’s 1st amendment, so what happened there was unconscionable in ethical terms but probably legal.
Not so, west of the Atlantic. It’s been clear for a long time that the NFL has no scruples and city governments have no spines. This is not news. But there’s a point at which someone has to say enough is enough. That person this year is a man named Bramley Paulin, a property-owner in the affected area. He got the Goldwater Institute involved, and filed suit.
Quoting the ESPN article here:
Judge [Brad] Astrowsky, the Phoenix judge, made his views clear: The original Clean Zone ordinance, which gave the NFL or host committee approval power over signage, was “totally antithetical to the principles of limited government” because the host committee is clearly “an entity interested in protecting NFL sponsors and the NFL” as opposed to serving the people of Phoenix.
The city of Phoenix managed to drag out the process enough to all but make the situation moot, however. It wasn’t until the Wednesday before the Super Bowl before Paulin could install signs advertising a company called Max Guard. A few hours later, two men brought a ladder, cleared the fence into Paulin’s property, and removed the signs. They’re caught on tape, but as far as Curmie can ascertain, they’re still at large.
Curmie, of course, is the embodiment of blissful naïveté, so he would never suggest that the NFL and/or city officials might be implicated in that theft. Were he of a cynical disposition, however, he might suggest that anyone confident of those organizations’ innocence might want to add to that Kansas property noted earlier with a similar one in Iowa.
Rich people—absurdly rich people, at least—whether as individuals or gathered into an organization or corporation, really think their wealth ought to compensate for their lack of ethics. All it actually does, though, is to aggravate their moral failings.
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