Thursday, April 29, 2010

Turning Rebellion into Money

One of my favourite Conflict records is a double LP of live stuff called 'Turning Rebellion Into Money' and on the back of the sleeve it takes the idea full circle declaring 'Turning Money Into Rebellion.' The first part of that is what sprung to mind reading about the cash rake-in of Sarah Palin;
Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune and shows no sign of slowing down. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year, according to people familiar with the deal. In March, Palin and Burnett sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.

Woah - there's a lot of profit in pointing out how communist America has becomes. This right-wing rebellion is a whole eco-system of cashing making that anyone who's been to a festival would recognise...
A young woman named Bethany Owens was sitting at a small table, pulling bills from a leather satchel. The 20-year-old daughter of black conservative entrepreneurs William and Selena Owens, Bethany had spent the morning at her parents’ booth selling books and CDs, like her mother’s title The Power Within a Conservative Woman ($9.95) and her dad’s motivational CD Answers Beyond the Rhetoric ($19.95). Bethany began stacking up bills, doling them out like a Vegas dealer. “One hundred, two hundred, three, four, five hundred,” she counted. “Ugh! I gotta start over.”

“Five, six, seven, eight, nine hundred. Okay, that’s $3,300,” she said, piling bills into neat rows.

“Are there corn dogs here, somebody?” yelled Melanie Morgan, a blonde conservative talk-radio host sitting nearby. Just then, Russo informed her that he’d heard Palin had agreed to speak alongside Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh at Morgan’s upcoming charity event for the troops, which would mean more care packages. “Oh my God! This is fabulous. Sal, brilliant. I could cry I’m so happy,” she said. “That’s gonna be so many hundreds of thousands of dollars more.”

Except, there is no hypocrisy here people - yes I suspect some in the tea party movement might wince at the profiteering from what is supposed to be a principled fight for America's soul rather than a big money-fest, but this is what they preach - profit is good, greed is good, the individual making cash above all is good.

Simples.

However, this does kind of throw a spanner in the works of the idea that people like Palin are the same folk are the rank-and-file. Palin won't have problems with healthcare with $12 million in the bank. Ever.

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