CSotD: Okay, I take it back …
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Willie & Ethel proves that not all cartoonists are ignoring the economic news.
Meanwhile, the quote of the week comes from Warren Buffett, on yesterday's highly watchable edition of "This Week with Christiane Amanpour: "There's been this increasing disparity between the rich and the poor. We've found out that a rising tide just lifted all yachts, not all boats." On a weekend when it would have been tough to assemble a panel anyway, Amanpour put together a program of interviews with Buffett, Ted Turner and Bill and Melinda Gates on the need for the wealthy to step up and give back.
It's an interesting collection of rich folks: (1) Gates simply invented something that everybody wanted and handled it wisely, while (2) Turner's wealth came from doing that but in part from his relentless energy and need to be competing and (3) Buffett became rich from manipulation of economic factors.
For all that people disparage the "Evil Empire" of Microsoft and tsk-tsked over the personal excesses of "Captain Outrageous," Gates and Turner made their money building better mousetraps.
In fact, in 1976, when I was working at a small TV station in Pueblo, Colorado, one of our young engineers left to move to Atlanta because this guy named Turner was really doing interesting things at WTBS and he wanted to be part of it — not in order to become wealthy but because it was going to be really cool. I wish I could remember more of his name than "Ed," because I'd love to Google him and see how it went, but he was simply an electronics geek and a communications fanatic who wanted to see how far the medium could stretch. Talk about getting in on the ground floor!
I think he and Turner would have both wanted to do it, even if they didn't make any money from the experience, just as I think that, while Turner would have hated to sail yachts for someone else, if he could sail yachts without worrying about money, he'd have been happy to do that, as long as the races were incredibly competitive and he were able to rack up frequent wins. And maybe piss off his competitors by doing so — a trophy doesn't matter if nobody else wanted it as much as you did. (I kind of doubt very many people want it as much as Ted, but the same thing could be said of Michael Jordan or Madonna.)
A decade and a half later, I was working at a small newspaper in a small town. The newspaper was part of a small chain owned by a family most of whom had nothing to do with the business but lived comfortably on the profits. However, one branch of the family wondered if they were living comfortably enough and turned to Warren Buffett for advice, whereupon they began a process of attempting to fatten the goose for slaughter.
I remember a meeting where a corporate VP came to visit and we all gathered in the break room for some punch and cookies, and, after his speech, he took questions. Someone asked when we were going to start getting cost-of-living raises again, and the local management reminded us that we did get them. Now, you might be able to tell one person that and send them away mumbling to themselves, but you can't stand in front of a roomful of people who haven't had a COLA in two years and tell them they have. It stopped being a fun place to work, there were cutbacks and there was also a lack of spending on equipment upgrades and suchlike, as they moved to make us look more profitable than a properly run newspaper would have been.
When the longknives came out for my boss and for the publisher, who was one of my biggest fans, I moved on down the road to a family-owned paper that, within two years, sold out to a corporation where the process began all over again.
So my admiration of Ted Turner is pretty untainted, and I like him even more as a fellow-divorced-guy, since that has become such a high-profile part of his story. (Which is to say that a rich bastard becomes more sympathetic when you can also think of him as a poor bastard.) And I don't begrudge Gates his fortune, either, though I recognize a somewhat off-putting tinge of "revenge of the nerd" in his story.
But people like Buffett are more complicit in what happened both to my hometown and my profession, and I have mixed feelings about his sense that the rich ought to share with society. A little less "Isn't that noble?" and a lot more, "You're damn right you should."
On the other hand, as an artist and a child of the Sixties, it's not the money that I care about. I love what I do, I enjoy my life, and "Something will come along; it always does" really is interchangeable with "In God We Trust."
As long as you aren't one of the people who is supposed to be in charge.
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