Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions of Pounds, Billions of Pounds (Corruption, Corruption)

jump-you-fuckers, matthewnstoller, 2008

It's World Cup time, not that I've seen much so far. It seems whenever I go to BBC iPlayer to watch a game it's audio only because fucking ITV have the broadcast rights to that particular fixture. So I had the misfortune of enduring commercial television for the first time in quite a while. I already knew the rampant commercialism of sport is sickeningly omnipresent, but it's still aggravating to see product after over-priced Chinese slave-laboured product so-tenuously linked to the World Cup being hawked as if there's no tomorrow.

There's nothing more disgusting than the way cold hard cash has crept into everything - art, sport, politics. You name it the fuckers have costed it. Football was (excepting F1) naturally the first to embrace advertising and sponsorship as one of the more globally popular sports. The inflow of cash is the reason it's better to be a professional diver than an amateur sportsman - not that the cost of a ticket has gone down. A number of years ago I noticed golf, cricket and tennis were also succumbing to this. I have little interest in cricket, but there's something wrong about seeing eleven Vodafone logos running around the green. The Olympic Games are still amateur, but really in name only - how else can athletes spend so much time training? A lot of the blame for its commercialisation is laid at the Los Angeles 1984 games. Since then it's been about marketing bullshit like 'official Olympic dihydrogen monoxide' and 'official meat-flavoured sandwich'. In contrast, F1 was always something of a rich man's sport but I gave up on it when the sponsor's name starting appearing before the team's.

It's almost as if corporations can't gain their own respect from the consumer people - they have to latch onto something and suck credibility like a mosquito. Corporations are not persons, despite the law. They are collections of people chipping-in money to get more of it. Some are more responsible than others. When individuals buy shares they pool wealth and distribute risk. They also diffuse responsibility - even Adam Smith recognised that. Private business operate(d/s) on building loyalty through quality over the long-term. The Tyrells can act with impunity because when the trial ends, some middle-manager will take the fall and the sociopaths at the top will collect a pay package that could feed Niger.

A lot of what are now brand names were once family owned businesses. Their reputations rode on providing, for example, food that wasn't cut with rat-poison or sprinkled with lead. Henry Ford may have been a fascist but you didn't see him killing his customers with defective Model-Ts (the cigarette business model).

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
-Narrator, Fight Club

When a corporate entity is finally held accountable or becomes disreputable, it fades away only to reappear under a different name. Many a murder wishes they could elude the courts with a simple name change and fake moustache. Possessing no collective ethics or morals or conscience, the corporation feels no shame nor embarrassment at getting filthy rich at anyone or anything's expense. And when their gambling debts caused the economy to implode; the governments of the world, beholden to them, covered their loses.

To get back to football, it's nothing short of ironic that the sport of the poor South African should be so expensive as to exclude them. Closer to home, I took note of this comment on The Register some time ago:

Proper football's in the Football League. Standing out on the terraces, all weathers, watching a proper team getting muddy and working for normal money, not prancing around a manicured lawn in a covered stadium and getting paid £100k a week, and rolling around in agony if someone else breathes on them. The sooner Sky-watchers (excluding Patrick Moore of course) understand this concept, the better - and the little clubs might get a fairer slice of the money-spinning pie, whatever one of those tastes like.

Some things have social value. For everything else there's...

[774]