Jenny Walty

I've been posting a lot more about life than art these days; it's great to have an outlet for my opinion as well as my art practice. Because my art is inspired by the world--current events, politics, and history--connecting my source material to my artwork directly enriches the viewing.

In my research at Cornell this week I was put on the trail of payola in the wake of Eliot Spitzer's investigation and successful settlement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment for illegally bribing radio stations--with prizes, travel, and cash--to play specific songs to boost their ratings on the charts. While payola has a long history in the music industry, similar practices exist in other industries in which producers pay distributors for placement or prominent display. Commonly cited examples include shelving fees in markets, marketing payments for officially recommended funds in mutual fund "supermarkets" (if the fund will not pay the supermarket for placement, then the transaction fee is passed on to the consumer), and featured sites and preferential listing on internet search engines.

Though corporations have used these practices illegally, they are generally legal if the sponsorship is identified to the consumer (in the case of radio and search engines), or the corporations practice of paying or requiring payment for placement is public knowledge (in the case of mutual funds and shelving fees).

Whether legal or not, the possibility of manipulating the market and misleading the consumer certainly exists in all of these cases. For example, when Sony BMG paid for advertising spots which identified the song as "brought to you by Sony BMG" it was legal. However, the monitoring agency which determines the Billboard Top 10 List couldn't differentiate the paid advertisement from regular radio play and so "Don't Tell Me" by Avril Lavigne vaulted up the charts after being played 109 times in one week, on one station alone, as an advertisement.

Sony BMG has acknowledged legal wrong doing and apologized but laws are broken by corporations all the time and currently as long as they are contributing to the Republican party, they are getting away with it.

The lobbying industry practices similar feints to exchange money for influence. A lobbyist (in a similar role to the "independent promoter" in radio) is being paid to fill the ear of a lawmaker with chatter from the special interests, and has already paid for the priveledge of access to that ear.

Perfect examples of illegal lobbying are the scandals involving Tom DeLay: over $230,000 in plush golf trips to American Saipan, Scotland, England and Russia, a bunch of illegal contributions with promises of specific legislation in return. Beyond all this illegal income, funneled through his PAC, there were also crony payments of $500,000 to his wife and kids.

The laws regulating lobbying are not effective in addressing the real problems; reforms focus on financial reporting and banning government officials from working as lobbyists after leaving office but the current crisis is that industry interests, including lobbyists, are being appointed to run the agencies which are supposed to regulate their former industries. The corruption is so widespread in the current administration with industry insiders posing as public servants that they are rolling back laws regulating the environment and ensuring safety standards. The goverment has been slowly starved so that the resources don't even exist to enforce the laws that are on the books.

Dave forwarded the link to an excellent speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. which I will excerpt with the encouragement to read the entire speech .

"In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. If we want to measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon its jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.

If on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill, which is to treat the planet as if were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joyride. They're going to pay for it with the muted landscapes, poor health, huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time and that they will never, ever be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children."


It's great speech, I highly recommend taking the time to read the whole thing (it is quite long). In another part of the speech, Mr. Kennedy makes the point that corporations are legally required to be amoral, they cannot be altruistic, they are required by law to extract profit for their shareholders.

Right now, corporations are running our democracy into the ground, and Mr. Kennedy points out that the confluence of government and corporatism is fascism. Fascism is what we have now and there is an urgent need to restore our democracy; change direction before it's too late.

A friend of mine has had a vivid dream of nuclear apocalypse and truly believes it to be in our future. The logical conclusion of our current policies do point towards a terrifying world, rising global temperatures, rising sea levels, (as one person put it the Katrinafication of America's large cities), increasing global violence and state conflict, increasing capacity for nuclear destruction, loss of natural resources, diseases morphing into global epidemics, peak oil and the end of the supply of cheap energy that Western society is based on.

My optimism is rooted in human beings' ability to recognize problems and CHANGE. There are a lot of smart people offering suggestions, solutions, and we desperately need to listen to them and change our culture, our consumption, and our passivity. Stirling Newberry wrote an inspiring account of the problems we face, and he also sketched out some solutions:

"The core is that we face the end of extraction. The extractive economy rewards people for finding things to extract, and extracting them. This is called "property". This model is so pervasive that we even turn cultural goods into an extractive model. Our entire financial system looks at everything as an oil well that will run out one day.

To change this requires changing how we see ourselves. Instead of being miners extracting value from society and the world, we have to be builders, designers and doers The progressive answer to these challenges is to create the infinite economy."

If we are to meet the challenges of this century, we must start by restoring democracy to this country. We need to be active citizens, raising each of our voices and creating CHANGE together.