I told myself and others there wasn’t much to say about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Too random.
What is consistent, however, is sad. The 99% are still consuming the products of the 1%. They’re not powerless, they’re just publicly refraining from actually using their power.
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered.
We live in revolutionary times, where you don’t need a publisher to create capital in the form of a book. You don’t need a publisher to create real product as a musician. Heck, you don’t need a gatekeeper to be heard, to create, to build capital.
There may not be jobs. There is always work.
Before you occupy Wall Street, before you occupy Main Street, go occupy yourself.
Old Guard Distributists put out this flyer to be distributed among Wall Street protesters.
Somehow I think a movement fed by Anonymous is really going to take up a banner of an organization whose motto is “To serve God is to Reign” - in Latin, no less -, has a pro-life plank mentioned right on the flyer, and identifies itself entirely with the Roman Catholic church.
I do like the tagline: Let’s put Americans back to work, for themselves.
Microcapitalism/Distributism/Independence of workers is a small-c catholic (i.e. universal) movement. It’s a human movement. But it does have to be differentiated from unbridled capitalism.The phrase “vanity publishing” was almost certainly invented by traditional publishers years ago in order to squash the competition from entrepreneurial authors.
It worked.
By ridiculing and publicly shaming self-published authors for daring to invest in their own talents and abilities, publishing houses were able to elevate themselves to god-like status. What they’re saying, when an author believes in his abilities to the extent he’s willing to invest his own money to publish a novel, he’s writing purely for his vanity!
I have to give credit to the geniuses that came up with this hogwash, because publishing is the only business in the world that has managed to make such a ridiculous notion seem plausible.
When I invested my own money to start my insurance agency no one accused me of making a vanity investment. When I invested my own money to buy a life insurance company no one called it a vanity investment. When I paid cash for my first office building, planning to lease it out for a profit, no one accused me of making a vanity investment.
When Bill Gates and Paul Allen invested their time and money into developing code for the Altair computer, no one accused them of writing vanity code. But if Bill Gates and Paul Allen invest their own money to write a book, they’re no longer businessmen, they’re vain! And any company that charges them to publish that book is catering to their vanity! How absurd is that?
Just $2.99 on the Kindle.
Arrested Development is coming back.
This strikes me as a show that the fans, the actors, and the crew all seemed to enjoy working on, and wanted it to go on.
So how come it didn’t? (You can ask this about Firefly, but no news on that front)
There is an actor’s guild. A screenwriter’s guild. Plus other Hollywood guilds. The idea of a guild is that the workers of the craft are given a pool of resources, talent, experience and connections to make their projects come to life. So if you have the actors, the writers, and the customers all lined up, no power in the ‘verse can stop you. A guild empowers a craftsman.
Unions, on the other hand, take a piece of the action and apply a lowest-common-denominator test to limit who works how much and for whom so it’s all “fair,” at least in the eyes of the collective group, including the bottom ranks. It’s a factory solution.
Make sure you use the right name, please. We need guilds, not unions.
