I love football. But look at what it has become. Every year rates for everything related to the Super Bowl must grow at a rate above inflation. That is the magic of our form of capitalism. A non-obvious form of wealth transfer.
Super Bowl 54: Wage increases should work this way
Sporting News put much into perspective that few would give a second thought but I will.
As if being a high-stakes NFL game with an extended halftime break didn’t make watching the Super Bowl enough of a chore, you’re also expected to pay attention to its commercials.
Companies paid a lot of money to earn this coveted time, so it’s up to you, the viewer, to ensure they get good return on those commercials by talking about them, even though you’re probably going to say they’re not as funny as they used to be, just like you’ve done each of the past five years.
It’s also an election year, so there’s likely to be even more heavy-handed and transparent attempts at displaying “corporate values” than usual. The campaigns for Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg both shelled out millions for commercials during the Super Bowl this year.
Yes, the companies want you to talk more about them to give them more exposure. But only those who have the capital in the first place can even vie for a spot, an automatic advantage for companies that our corrupt markets choose to capitalize irrespective of the quality of their products or services. They are the chosen ones.
And of course, the corporations who are under fire for the bad deeds inherent to their charters — shareholder value maximization and pricing to whatever the market will bear: AKA takes all the money they can from you for products and services you are dependent on — are trying to indoctrinate us all into believing they are anything but extractive.
Look, many of us will watch a well designed Super Bowl and we will enjoy most of it. Unfortunately at the same time all the elements are there that take the average Americans for what they are worth. As we are happy and enjoying they are in our pockets.
So how do we ever solve the human deficiency of most that make ourselves the useful stooges of the plutocracy? We must educate ourselves and make structural changes that recoup the extraction, the legal theft. And that is where progressive policies come in. We support Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Pay-It-Forward college tuition, family leave, subsidized child care, and student debt forgiveness. The money is there. We simply must extract it from the extractors.
