My Weekend Solidarity Crush

Forgot Hot Girl Summer, we’re celebrating Strike Solidarity Summer this year. For the first time in six decades the writers’ and actors’ guilds are striking together to get a fair contract from Hollywood. The AMPTP, which represents the major studios and streamers, has refused to share the wealth –quite literally – with the people most responsible for creating the television and movies we all love and makes them billions of dollars.

This fight is an actually not so small micorcosm of all of our struggles in this moment (and truly most of history). The rich get richer. Periodt. The rest of us, well, we just keep working harder for less. I can rant about Late Stage Capitalism with the best of them. But all we really need to know is that the already obscenely wealthy CEOs of these massively profittable media companies are purposely making decisions (like not releasing whole-ass movies and pulling rafts of too titles from their streamers) that further enriches the already rich (keep in mind, the richest 10% of Americans own 89% of all the stock/mutual funds). So, essentially we’re watching two rich dudes who already hae megayachts keep throwing money at each other as they keep buying more megayachts.

And, no, I am not bullshitting you with these numbers. In fact, they’re even worse than you think. The 1% (a.k.a. the grossest wealth hoarders of them all) own 53% of all stocks/mutual funds. Yes, you read that right – 1% owns more than half of the stock market. Think about that the next time a megacorporation does anyother major stock buyback. That’s all going to the Elons and Marks and Jeffs of this planet.

Look, we all know the concept of capitalism meritocracy is a lie they tell to get us to work harder. Of course, people can have success by working hard. But as they say, exceptions prove the rule. For too long, the American Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps mythology has been just aspirational marketing for trickle down economics. Profit has become too divorced from the labor that makes something profitable in the first place. And that’s wrong.

Instead, these companies pray at the altar of endless growth/stock market expectations at every single worker’s expense. Again, workers make these company profitable and then as thanks these companies turn around and give those profits to people who had absolutely no hand in making anything and are already insanely rich. Vive la revolution!

And, we haven’t even talked about the most insidious undertones of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA current negotiations that will soon bleed out to almost every industry: AI. If these rich bastards can find ways to cut us out entirely and just hand money directly back-and-forth between each other they will have achieved their ideal society of infinite wealth for the already infinitely wealthy being propped up by a chronically underpaid worker class of everyone else. Yes, I do belong to a union and have sat across the table during contract negotiations many, many times. Why do you ask?

As I was saying, it’s Stike Solidarity Summer and we should all be hot and extremely bothered. Pay your writers. Pay your actors. Pay workers everywhere. Solidarity forever. Go get ‘em, Fran! Happy weekend, all.