Michael D'Antuono's Art And Response

Corporate Greed – Turns Out – Not So Good

[arve url=”https://youtu.be/VYtJW0J7rNM”]

Remember all those long torturous hours as a child playing Monopoly? One kid (Mr. Moneybags) would buy all the utilities or matching properties, creating monopolies and quadrupling the rents and fees on everyone else. If you weren’t Mr. Moneybags holding all the cards, you inevitably lost everything. It seems like a whole generation of moneybags grew up to live by that “winner take all/greed is good” ideology.

We live in an age where the corporate elite or 1% have monopolized representation, wealth and worst of all, opportunity. But it’s not a game and people are suffering more than boredom. Does it sound right to you that the Walmart family owns as much wealth as the bottom third of all Americans? Or that middle-class taxpayers have to subsidize the Walmart family’s employees with healthcare and food stamps. Or that saying middle-class taxpayers is redundant because most large corporations have rigged the system so that don’t pay any taxes. in fact

The conservative Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling made it so much easier for the corporate elite to buy elections and co-opt our democracy. It is no coincidence that America’s food is less safe than other countries or that our healthcare is more expensive, that more of our citizen are killed by guns than any other country, that our rivers and oceans aren’t being properly protected or that the wealth gap continues to grow.  The few moneybags or 1% are in charge and will stop at nothing to satisfy their greed.

But we can and must fight back. As an artist, I have created a scathing indictment of corporate greed in the form of a lighthearted but biting video called Dear Mr. 1% (http://youtu.be/…). It exposes the corporate co-opting of democracy through the eyes of a child in just over 3 minutes. I have posted it on youtube in hopes that it will go viral and serve as an inspiration to the working class to take back our democracy. I can only hope that all reading this will share the link with as many people as possible as a recruiting tool in the class warfare that the 1% has waged against the general populace.

Tell Everybody!