And now you know why Hollywood hates capitalism.

Anyway, more desperate and counter-productive behavior from an industry increasingly unable to create a product the customers would like to own:

Warner Bros., which was the first to impose a 28-day embargo on the release of DVDs to Netflix, RedBox, and other cheap rental companies, is likely to double that delay this year, according to published reports on Thursday. The studio, which is believed to have taken a big hit on DVD sales in the third quarter, is expected to announce the new delay at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. Universal and 20th Century Fox, which also impose 28-day embargoes on Netflix and Redbox, are also expected to double that time period.

This will fix nothing. Oh, there might be a small bump for pay-per-view and brick-and-mortar Blockbuster, but the real money is in sales, and not only are we losing our passion and the all-important “impulse” to buy new films, we are also getting used to waiting for a longer period of time to see them. And that’s a huge mistake on Hollywood’s part. Sixty days after the release-hype dies down, the movie is released to two of the biggest outlets on the planet. Moreover, this genius move will only hurt sales. That’s how short-sighted  and desperate it is.

In reality, all, these panicked studios are doing is conditioning us to wait longer to see their product. In the long-term, this is beyond dumb. The best way to convince us to buy their product is to offer a test drive. One of the reasons fewer people are buying DVDs is because fewer people are going to the movies. So the only other way to convince us to buy a movie is to let us get a look at it for a buck on Redbox.

I simply don’t know a whole lot of people willing to buy a $15.99 film they haven’t seen. At least not these days when chances are better than not that once the credits roll you feel more than a little cheated.

If you make better movies, Hollywood, we will want to own them.

Duh.

However, if you insist on making us wait to see your product, we’ll find other ways to entertain ourselves. And we will get used to those other ways, which will make what you do less relevant in our lives.

King raised $242,370. Not too shabby. Clearly, this is a commendable and gracious effort on the part of King. It says a lot about his character. But when you bring it into context with past King quotes and his overall liberalism, it brings up an interesting hypocrisy in what famous liberals and 1 percent types do and say.

In the past, King has stated that he thinks people who make as much as he does should be taxed as much as 50 percent. Why? Has King fully thought about a world where 50 percent of his money is taken by Big Government and then they decide where it goes? Just because it goes to the government with the “best intentions” does not mean it will help heat fellow Mainers’ homes. Yet liberal entertainers like King continue to beg Obama to tax them more when they are fully capable as individuals who have found financial success to use their disposable income anyway they see fit, including helping those they see as needy.

How Stephen King has not connected his actions with his beliefs is really quite amazing.

Has he imagined a world where the government taxed him less? Imagine how much more good he could do with that disposable income!? Or not. It’s really his choice. When giving becomes forced giving, then the whole act has lost merit. Why is it liberals cannot imagine a world where people with money make the right decisions? Why is it they oppose choice so often, yet turn around and exemplify choice with their own income?

King not only raised almost a quarter of a million dollars in the name of charity, but he also owns the very radio station through which the contest was held. Think about that. King, as a 1 percenter, is able to provide jobs not just through his writing but through his radio station. In the dystopian future where liberals want to take us, there is no such thing as men earning a living, becoming successful, starting businesses, providing jobs and giving back to those in need. In their world, there is a defined upper class that pays for the lower classes as they deem appropriate. The whole capitalist system becomes handicapped and people become trapped. King, himself a liberal, gives into this philosophy of taking in order to give when he is a perfect example, in some respects, of opposition to that liberal philosophy. He became successful at what he loves, then started a business that provides jobs and regularly gives back to those in need.

King is the most successful author in the world, and he shows no signs of slowing down. His new novel, “11/22/63,” has become a New York Times Bestseller, and he has a new miniseries, “Stephen King’s Bag of Bones,” on A&E. But this article is not meant to criticize the man’s art. His art is almost beyond criticism because of its wild success and popularity. This article is simply meant to point out the common sense of situations that so many liberals seem to miss. They applaud men like King when they talk about needing to be taxed more and then they applaud him again when he creates jobs and helps others with his disposable income. Yet they cannot put together the obvious points.

Men like King exemplify the best of capitalism. He found what makes him happy and then became financially successful doing it. Would he be able to do such philanthropic things if he made half what he makes now? How much more could be do with all the money he earns? With his money he provided a better life for himself, his family and others by creating jobs and donating. He did this all in a system of choice and American capitalism.

Why is this so hard for King and other liberals to see?

Weekly Standard:

[David] Mamet had been brought to campus by Hillel, and the subject of his talk was “Art, Politics, Judaism, and the Mind of David Mamet.” There wasn’t much talk of Judaism, however, at least not explicitly. He arrived late and took the stage looking vaguely lost. He withdrew from his jacket a sheaf of papers that quickly became disarranged. He lost his place often. He stumbled over his sentences. But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it.

It was as nervy a speech as I’ve ever seen, and not quite rude—Mamet was too genial to be rude—but almost. The students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed. The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd. Two couples in front of me shot looks to one another as Mamet went on—first the tight little smiles, then quick shakes of the head, after a few more minutes the eye-rolls, and finally a hitchhiking gesture that was the signal to walk out. Several others followed, with grim faces.

It was too much, really. It’s one thing to titillate progressive theatergoers with scenes of physical abuse and psychological torture and lines like “You’re f—ing f—ed.” But David Mamet had at last gone too far. He’d turned into a f—ing Republican.

Much, much more here.

And don’t miss Powerline’s take, either.

First, I see no problem with Moore suing the Weinsteins. If Moore’s audit showed irregularities, he should go after the dough. As someone who’s seen this very issue first hand, I can tell you that it is extraordinarily painful to see someone else spending your money on a big, expensive lunch, while smiling at you from across the table. Moore sued, they’ll likely settle, nobody will be happy, and in their unhappiness, they’ll all know they got a good deal.

But Mike Moore (and to some extent, the Weinsteins) has made a living espousing socialism and communism, wherein the government divvies up the money. You don’t like the result? Well, you can go fuck yourself, because you ain’t suin’ the government. And if you do, your monthly bag of government rice might come with a little hole in the bottom that allowed half of it to leak out during transit.

And that juxtaposition is what we in fly-over country most dislike about Hollywood. While we dig the music and the shallow celebrities we follow on TMZ and provide the bulk of the ticket receipts for the flicks, it’s the juxtaposition of big, rich guys using the system we espouse – where courts ARE one of the few Constitutional functions of government to help settle such disputes, and where we think Mike, Bob and Harvey should be able to make ungodly amounts of money and spend it however the hell they want – versus the ideology of slavish socialism they wish to inflict on those of us who can’t fly to Cannes on a private jet at any given moment.

It’s not just hypocritical (as my friend Penn says of hypocrites: “If someone does one thing and says another, it only doubles their chances of being half right”), but I think it’s immoral. It’s immoral to literally strive and campaign for your fellow Americans to lose their rights to do the things you have done to take yourself from being unemployed in Davison, Michigan to a “multi, multi-millionaire” (and let’s give Moore credit, he IS a self-made “multi, multi-millionaire”).

America can remain the place where you can say anything you want and even make a boatload of money doing it. We’re creative and innovate and brilliant. Sadly, now that he has everything he could want in life, Moore wishes to cast a cold, gray cloud of sadness over the shining city on the hill, so that no others may discover its wonderment.

And while the rest of us try to scrape by, Moore still wants his movie check.

Deceiver:

And really, what’s one or two predominantly situated Dunkin’ Donuts cups? It’s not like there’s some laundry list of other products that bought their way into the movie. Oh, hang on . . .

This production of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps is brought to you by:

Shun Lee
Barton Perreira Halston
Bulgari
CNBC
Moët
Ducati
Vacheron Constantin
Belstaff
Lay’s
Bed Bath and Beyond
NY Daily News
Nintendo
NY1
Jaeger-LeCoultre
Ferrari

Toyota
Jack Daniels
Ferragamo
Dunkin’ Donuts
Voltz
Dow Jones
Blackberry
Gucci
The New York Post
Heineken
Degree
Johnnie Walker
Cracker Jacks
Forbes
Perrier
CNN
Bloomberg
Borders
Arai
LG
Patrón
Dell
Qdoba
Red Bull
CNBC
Apple
The Bowery Hotel

. . . and the director who hates capitalism.

Read the full piece here.

—–

Here’s the clip. We start with scenes of New York majesty followed by a street slum, followed by rows of project apartment buildings as urban blight. Then, at the end, we’re shown gleaming glass towers which are the product of free market capitalism. The project buildings were products of President Johnson’s war on poverty which spent billions and did exactly what you’d expect billions of tax dollars thrown at an abstract problem like poverty would do. Those apartment buildings would have gone up in the 60s. The film was shot around 1979. Less than 20 years. Think on that when you watch the clip above.

That’s government in action right there. Some of those buildings were barely 20 years old, if that. And they want to take over 1/6th of our economy, the health care business, and manage it the way they do everything else. You know, as effectively as Medicare, Social Security, The Post Office, Amtrak which are all about to go under. Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae? Failing badly. Hey, why not just show the government debt while we’re at it to see how well they run things. They’ve created trillions in debt based on promises they made. Promises made by politicians that you and your descendants would be footing these bills. They didn’t ask for your consent. Just as they are ignoring the public’s will with the health care bills.

Governments don’t produce, they consume. They take from the people who create things and convert some of those resources into “benefits”. These benefits are, more often than not, bribes to ease us into letting them keep spending our money like mad. At some point, a long time ago, they stopped caring about wanted and started telling us what was good for us. They began taking more and more tax dollars and bribing the least productive citizens so they’d have voters who can override the productive citizens if they complained too much.

They used a divide and conquer strategy. They promised every splinter group what they wanted, but what they got is something else.

Nothing the government does is created out of thin air. It’s made from the wealth it has taken from others. While the free market has created many wonders on its own, most of the government’s great works are in the distant past and they’re falling apart from neglect. Or they’re maintained local governments or free enterprise. Most of the great towers of Manhattan and other cities were built by companies who earned their own wealth to build them. The rotting projects that have fallen into disarray were neglected by a government that promised those people they’d be lifted from poverty. Instead it segregated then into a decaying hell and trapped them into a cycle of dependence.

Tax dollars don’t solve problems. Neither does government.

I am a huge fan of Frank Capra.   And whereas it pains me to do so, I must call a proper spade a spade.  In my (what I presume will be ‘lonely’) opinion…this single movie has done more to undermine  America than any other in memory. 

And yes, I realize I’m about to infuriate both the Left and the Right… Christians and Atheists… Socialists and the ACLU… Jimmy Stewart fans, movie buffs, my entire readership, and my mother…but I have to say it:  There is an insidious lie placed smack dab within the heart of this otherwise exquisite movie.  And the strange thing is – along with hundreds of millions of people worldwide — it is still one of my favorite movies of all time.  And therein lies the rub. 

The most dangerous and injurious of falsehoods is the one that is shuffled in with the Truth.

Let me back up.  I first saw this movie sometime around the early eighties, and since then one of my most anticipated traditions has become watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Christmas Eve.  I love the humor, the performances, the depth of character, the twists and turns, the entire story.  And mostly, (the part that really gets me in the gut) is the central theme of two of the greatest human attributes known to man:  humble gratitude and self-sacrifice.  The nobility of George Bailey forfeiting his plans and dreams for his father, his wife, his family, his neighbors…and his eventual ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment of epiphanic appreciation of how truly rich he is…leaves me choked up every time I watch this timeless classic.

“So why, Gary Graham, are you so hell-bent on disparaging this fine work?”

Because it attacks, denigrates, demonizes and attempts to dissemble one of the main ingredients to the American experiment – Capitalism.

Picture the Baileys.  A fine, upstanding family working to make the American dream a reality for themselves and their community.  But hold on, there’s a major obstacle in everyone’s way – the Rich Guy – Henry F. Potter.  Seems he owns pretty much the entire town.  And he seems to delight in squeezing his patrons.  Business is hard and brutal and has no place for ‘sentimental hogwash’ dontcha know.

Mr. Bailey puts it like this:  “This town’s no place for any man unless he’s willing to crawl to Potter.”  His son, George, fidgets from the specter of returning to work in his father’s savings and loan association, and of sacrificing his dream of college and creating ‘something big’ with his life.  And the father’s answer is, “You know George, in a small way I think we’re doing something important here…supplying a need …[for a man] to have his own roof, and walls and fireplace…”  But nonetheless his father urges him to escape from the ‘dreary’ town of Bedford Falls and go off and get an education.   George leans forward and says, “Pop, you want a shock?  I think you’re a great guy.”  (Side note to Capra’s ghost:  The line “I think you’re a great man” would have had tons more power.  But I digress…)

Ask yourselves this:  What was preventing Mr. Bailey, Sr. from being not just a great guy…but, in fact, a great man? 

Attitude, for one.

“This town’s no place for any man unless he’s willing to crawl to Potter.”  What a loser attitude!   I mean, come on…   What if instead of a building and loan, Mr. Bailey owned an NFL team.  And on that given Sunday you’re playing the reigning Superbowl champs.    What do you tell the team pregame in the locker room  – “Dudes…we don’t stand a chance.  Let’s just slip out back and get on the plane.”

Had Mr. Bailey, Sr. had more tenacity and drive, (and most importantly, belief in himself) he could have built his business into a standing success; and instead of scuttling about in desperation, helped hundreds, maybe thousands more to realize their dream of owning their own home.  (And without all those Fannie-May/Freddie-Mac shenanigans.)  Had he used more God-given ingenuity and creativity he could have taken on Potter in the arena of business competition and kicked butt, undercutting Potter’s prices and gaining market share.  As his clientele grew, he could expand, hire more people and build more houses cheaply (and finally put that alky moocher Uncle Billy in a home … ha — just kidding!).  

You take my point.   Capitalism is what advances not only the practitioners, but the entire community, radiating out with ancillary benefits as far as the mind can see.  Just because one rich guy buys up the town doesn’t keep someone else or a bunch of someone else’s to come in and throw up their shingle and compete for the business.  I mean…it’s not like Potter was the government. 

“It’s a Wonderful Life” depicts capitalism as a system in which only the jackals can excel…only the crooks prosper…and only evil can flourish.  The system is fatally flawed and the only hope we the people have…is to rely on the good nature and charity of our friends and family.

It’s a complete and total lie.

It burns me that so many fine artists…and politicians…don’t have a clue about what makes our system of Capitalism work…and how you build a business.  Sadly, these well-intentioned framers of public opinion – and policy – are the ones who insinuate themselves dead center in the middle of private business. 

FDR (and Woodrow Wilson before him) perpetrated the myth and passed it down to generations of ‘progressives’.  Self-gain is evil.  Self-interest is a sin.  If one person can’t get ahead, then no one should.   And tragically — government’s heavy-hand solution to this is to tear down those getting ahead in the misguided attempt to advance those who are not.  (Or at least convince you that that’s what they’re all about when, in fact, they are all about securing your vote and building their personal political power.  But…again …I digress.)

We still hear the echoes of that latest most popular catch-phrase, “creating jobs”.  But a job is not created by government fiat, wishful thinking, praying, or an angel named Clarence.  Jobs are created by a business owner looking to fulfill a business necessity. 

Self-interest drives an economy; not government bailouts, laws, restrictions, taxes or Congressional committees. 

I was always fond of exclaiming, while watching the TV show, “The West Wing” – “Amazing!  Liberalism works like a charm every time…in fiction.” 

But what about the main antagonist in Bedford Falls, what about this figurehead of evil, this personification of greed and selfishness?    The image of Mr. Potter and his sniveling, smirking cratchityness (Is that a word?  It is now!) is forever indelibly ingrained within our corporate memories as the ‘typical rich guy’.  Mr. Potter – the archetypal money-grubbing, tight-fisted, cruel, conniving, plotting, scheming, twisted old wretch of a geezer — such a stereotype as to have been crafted by either Beelzebub or Dr. Seuss.  The poster boy for Class-Envy…the paragon of non-virtue…everything to ensure that our kids grow up resenting, even hating, ‘the rich’. 

Ya see how they treat the little guy?  The man be keepin’ us down.

Rubbish.  Yeah, of course you get the occasional Howard Hughes…the ‘he-was-a-genius-‘til-he-became-a- nut-job’.  And then there’s the twisted saga of the Koch brothers.  But these specimens are the exception, not the rule.

In my experience, what we call ‘rich people’ are hard-working and creative individualists who rely on themselves and their wits and ingenuity to survive and build their enterprises up into organizations that make innovative products and provide invaluable services that enrich all mankind. 

And oh yes – along the way they create tens of millions of jobs.

This is America.  Accept no substitute.

I grew up hearing, and believing, all the old lies about rich people.  “The rich get rich and the poor get poorer.”   Can I have a show of hands – how many have ever been hired by a poor person?  “It takes money to make money.”  How many famous industrialists started as poor immigrants with less than $500 in their pockets?  I don’t know either, but I know there have been many. 

As I’ve grown and experienced, I’ve realized that a man having money is no sin.  It’s what he does with the money that defines his character.

Riches have corrupted those who are not up to the responsibility of their money.  And those who have cultivated misguided notions of what that fabric is of a full and rewarding life tend to chase excess, hedonism and desperate reflections of their own bloated significance.

I am a big fan of those beautiful commercials that run these days… ‘commercials’… that are selling nothing more than human goodness.  They’re done by The Foundation For a Better Life.   In one, a new student can’t find a seat in the cafeteria, is rebuffed by ‘the populars’ and sits lonely…until a brave student reaches out in friendship.  In another, a youngster has wandered up onto an empty concert stage and embarrasses his parents by playing ‘Chopsticks’ on the concert grand piano…until the maestro approaches…and joins him in an impromptu and beautiful rendering, to everyone’s delight.  In still others…people playing, smiling, families loving, living, and giving…the goodness of life.  At the end of these beautiful vignettes a single word appears… Character…Respect…  Encouragement… Generosity…and then …Pass it on.

 These little spots run for barely 27 seconds.  But in that brief time, they often move me to tears.   Some common note is struck, some universal chord resounds.   Some beautiful reminder about what it means to be truly alive.

The man responsible for these spots is a multi-billionaire named Philip Anschutz.  He seeks no publicity, hasn’t done an interview in 35 years, gives millions to many, many charities, goes about his business quietly and efficiently and values his family’s privacy. 

The next time you’re tempted to look upon all rich folk as Henry F. Potter… think twice.  You just may have been sold a bill of goods.

It is possible to build a wonderful business…in a wonderful America…and have a truly wonderful life.

–

This “noble savage” archetype, embraced by the romantic primativists of the past and today by those who stopped their intellectual development as UC Berkeley sophomores, has been around for centuries.  In Avatar, James Cameron substitutes his blue-skinned Na’vi aliens for American Indians and it’s off to the races with Seen That Before taking an early lead and Gimme A Break a close second. 

Now, the purpose of this cliché is to critique Western culture by comparing the culture of the children-of-the-Earth, in-touch-with-nature, “authentic” natives with the hero’s repressed, emotionally-stunted, alienated-from-nature, technology-obsessed Western culture.  This cliché requires that the natives be portrayed as paragons of moral and physical perfection – and that those of the hero’s culture be shown as just the opposite. 

But in doing so, filmmakers necessarily infantilize the natives.  To portray any group as flawless is to make them something other than human – they stop being individuals and start being caricatures instead of characters, symbols instead of people.  American Indians, contrary to the old Hollywood stereotype, were not just bloodthirsty savages.  But in contrast to the new Hollywood stereotype, neither were they just paragons of virtue.  Instead, they are human beings, with strengths and weaknesses – but treating them like human beings doesn’t help the agenda so their humanity must be sacrificed on the altar of political expedience.

The other problem is that embracing the cliché means ducking the hard questions.  In Avatar, apparently civilization will end if the humans do not get the minerals beneath the Na’vi land.  So, is Cameron’s view that we should just sit back and die as penance for despoiling the Earth?  He doesn’t dare answer that question.  Certainly many of the climate change scammers would be thrilled to see our civilization crumble as punishment for our refusal to shiver in the cold and darkness of their Luddite utopia, but most of us don’t embrace the notion that our only moral course of action is ritual suicide. 

Filmmakers can decry the conquest of North America, but they never actually grapple with the implications of their position.  Would they really prefer the Europeans had lost?  The brutal struggle between Native Americans and the Europeans had plenty of atrocities on both sides, but the world is enormously better off by the rise of the United States and Canada.  Would Cameron have it otherwise?  Well, at least we wouldn’t have to put up with the hype about Avatar.

What is also interesting is how this view simultaneously slags our culture and that of the indigenous people.  It holds that our culture must somehow be controlled, regulated and constrained in order to control these horrible capitalist/military tendencies.  Clearly, this is a job for our liberal overlords.  But the natives themselves, being innocent children, must likewise be protected and overseen.  Why, that’s also a job for our liberal overlords.  Funny how giving liberals more power to control people’s lives always seems to be the answer no matter what the question is.

And we’ve seen the practical consequences of this attitude suffered by the American Indians.  The liberal prescription during the last century was to bureaucratize the reservations, creating what James Watt memorably called “an example of the failure of socialism.”  The only thing that got the liberals madder than Watt’s accurate assessment is the fact that many tribes have finally found the prosperity they deserve thanks to capitalism – their casinos are a wonderful example of prospering by finding a need and filling it.  

Now, simply because a Western character encounters members of a non-Western culture does not necessarily trigger the cliché.  Lawrence of Arabia was the true story of an Englishman’s work with Arab tribesmen during World War I.  It hardly portrayed the Arabs as perfect – in fact, much of the film’s conflict revolved around their failings.   

Other films use Western characters solely as eyes to allow the audience to see into the native culture.  In Zulu the European missionary is merely an observer as the Zulus prepare for battle.  His dialogue with his daughter and interaction with the warriors provide the viewer information, but in no way does he have any influence on the situation.  Of course, the Zulus did not need any help – they were one of the few native peoples to ever fight a large Western force and win.

In Avatar, the white guy (representing Western civilization) coming along to save the natives meme is particularly heavy-handed, but then the movie is hardly subtle about anything.  His natives aren’t noble savages; they’re just noble.  We’re the savages.  But we savages are also the noble natives’ only hope.  Or something like that.  

But trying to decode the mixed messages of movies like Avatar will only give you a migraine.  So save yourself some time and some Tylenol – just accept that Western civilization is the root of all evil and the message will have come through loud and clear.