The Exploited Class

Exploitation
I was sittin' here thinkin'...
("Rock was my pillow/cold ground was my bed last night")
...thinkin' in the blues idiom, another concept I've latched onto these cold days...
so cold, I was trying to listen to Odetta sing again last night and once again in my life I turned her off...
The only time I ever saw Odetta perform was in the late 1970s. It was still very politically active here in New York City then. I was still politically active; I was married to a politically active woman, a charter member of NOW, an original kid for Kennedy, JFK. There were still anti-Vietnam War rallies being held here; the Black Panthers were still active; Rapp Brown was living here then; the Young Lords (Geraldo Rivera, Pablo Guzman, et al.) were actively marching and protesting; James Brown was filling the radio waves with soul, with his Flames first, then his brand new bag, then his sex machine, then his "This is a man's world..." BUT totally worthless without a woman--and who knew that better than James Brown...
And that was New York City back in the 1970s. Young people were shaking free from the bondage imposed on them by their Great-Depression-surviving hard-toiling parents--Latino young people were kicking off the chains of tradition and moving on into a stand off against THE MAN...
Black young people raised on quiet anger against the oppressive White Master Race had courage and quiet determination instilled in them by their just-out-of-slavery-raised parents--deciding intellectually that enough was enough, it was time for young blacks to break the chains of Jim Crow and defy the Whites Only rules of a land that was forced on them...
White young people were tired of the tight-fisted rules of their Great-Depression parents; young White people whose fathers had served their time in national servitude in the horrific World War II, their fathers having served their time in national servitude in World War I--and these NEW young white kids were tired of the war mentality--they wanted peace--peace to enjoy the monies they had made off their WWII inheritances--wanting joy and social happiness for all and wanting dancing and moving to NEW musics...
And the musics of the 1970s amalgamated, the young black, white, Latin, whatever, into a NEW music, new beats, new meanings of lyrics, new directions in modality, new directions in terms of the music intellect--the influence of folk music, blues, and jazz on our lives...
And in 1976 at the Joyce Theater here in New York City, I and a party of a couple of my current girlfriends, one whose husband was along, and a couple of my conspiracy-minded nonworking philosophically blatant buddies, we had met for dinner at the Buffalo Roadhouse, attended a benefit for Pacifica radio station WBAI-FM that was headlined by Paul Krasner, Mae Brussel, and Odetta and her husband at the time, Louisiana Red.
Mae Brussel, by the way, was the insane California woman who tied every conspiracy theory ever into the Kennedy Assassination--a great crazy reader and clipper of newspaper articles and using her huge collection of clippings as references for her going back in time to the world's first-ever conspiracy, whatever that was! All conspiracy theories are by the nature of their being conspiratorial fabulous--and Mae Brussel was a fabulous human being--insane, but fabulous!
And Odetta and Louisiana Red were marvelous that night--he from Louisiana and she from Los Angeles--and yes, folks, there was racism heavy in Los Angeles in Odetta's time growing up out there--she was born in 1930--and Odetta was a beautiful young Afro-ed Nefertiti-looking woman when she first came on the scene in the fifties...
Interesting her response to Tavis Smiley when he asked her about Bob Dylan. Dylan claims one of Odetta's early albums influenced him into going folk! And you thought Woody Guthrie was the basis for that fake hillbilly accent Bob so immaculately developed! Nope, it was Odetta. And Odetta's response to Tavis Smiley (where the hell did he come from?) and his Bob Dylan bait was that because of that statement Bobby Zimmerman made about her she got a fame that she might otherwise not have gotten. Her album sales zoomed up. She appeared on stage at Martin Luther King's March on Washington--that great day in 1963--and there was Odetta up there singing her freedom song! However, she wasn't all that excited about a white guy having to bring her fame by mentioning her as the influence on his IMITATING her...
That imitation aspect of Bob Dylan is what turned Odetta off...though in her act she did a splendid slow-drag version of "Masters of War."
But, truthfully, I never liked Odetta...
About ten years ago, theryefarmerfromqueens told me he was producing an Odetta CD for this guy in whose band I had been the keyboardist for a while in the 1990s and who'd gone into the recording business with his own label when I was in the band--so I knew of his intentions in terms of starting his own label. That Odetta CD went on to win the W.C. Handy Blues Award and be nominated for a Grammy...
That CD was Odetta singing the blues and I didn't like it at all...
Odetta wasn't a blues singer...
She was a folk singer...
She could sing blues, yes, don't get me wrong...
But she approached them from another side...
She was more at home with Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson than she was with say Mamie Smith or Bessie Smith...
or even Dinah Washington...
Odetta was the original Tracy Chapman...
But I never liked Odetta, sorry, and I was trying to watch and listen to an old concert of hers the other night and her pianist, a big gawky-looking white boy, was playing so damn loud and too many notes I flipped her off then, too...
Muddy Waters while playing a gig in Mississippi with Johnny Winters said after Johnny had white-boy screamed a spine-tingling million-note solo during Muddy's "Hoochie-Coochie Man," "Man, you white boys sure play a lot of notes. I can't play that many notes...." 'Nuff said. Muddy was the man. We American musicians owe Muddy so much.
The originators: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Peter Chapman (Memphis Slim), Herman "Junior" Parker, Jimmy Reed, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, the Amazin' Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Otis Blackwell, Doc Pomus (How'd that white boy get in here?), Sam Cooke...
I could keep rattlin' them off...
Instead of Odetta, I'm now listening to Mister Ives...
But then I'm always listening to Mr. Ives these days...

Exploitation (cont'd)
And after thedailygrowlerhousepianist had dropped by late last night and after we'd drank several drops of the last of my bottle of Baker's Best (Baker Beam, a Jim Beam relative) bourbon and he left for home (he was actually gonna stop by my favorite Irish pub on his way home--the Lawdy Lawd knows where he ended up--maybe up in the northern Bronx at the Westchester County border), I got to reading Theory of the Leisure Class (quite a departure from Jane Eyre) in a half-bombed state. Veblen was roaring on stirring and mixing and shaking up his theory of a "forever" ruling class he called the Leisure Class. They were the Leisure Class because of EXPLOITATION...
There capital gains were based on unpaid or low-paid labor...
The working class became the EXPLOITED class...
Oh boy, that got me up out of bed and pecking at the closest laptop I could employ...
Think about the computer as being a woman...
And how about women in terms of exploitation?

ex·ploi·ta·tion (ksploi-tshn)

n.

1. The act of employing to the greatest possible advantage: exploitation of copper deposits.

2. Utilization of another person or group for selfish purposes: exploitation of unwary consumers.

3. An advertising or a publicity program.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Ooooh, what a thrilling word. It sings. Ek-sploi-ta-shun! Taking advantage of... Users of slaves... Advocates of low wages... Advocates of poverty... A PR gimmick... EXPLOITATION--what a wonderful word...
We should worship words...
EXPLOITATION would be a god word.
_________________________From C. Wright Mills, Power Elite____________

The trend within the corporate world is toward larger financial units tied into intricate management networks far more centralized than is the case today. Productivity has and will increase fabulously, especially when automation makes it possible to interlock several machines in such a way as to eliminate the need for much of the human control at the point of production that is now required. That means that the corporate executives will not need to manage huge organizations of people; rather, in Business Week words, they will be 'operating great mechanical organizations using fewer and fewer people.'

All this has not been and is not now inevitable; certainly the enormous size of the modern corporation cannot be explained as due to increased efficiency; many specialists regard the size now typical of the giants as already in excess of the requirements of efficiency. In truth, the relationship of corporate size to efficiency is quite unknown; moreover, the scale of the modern corporation is usually due more to financial and managerial amalgamations than to technical efficiency. But inevitable or not, the fact is that today the great American corporations seem more like states within states than simply private businesses. The economy of America has been largely incorporated, and within their incorporation the corporate chiefs have captured the technological innovation, accumulated the existing great fortunes as well as much lesser, scattered wealth, and capitalized the future. Within the financial and political boundaries of the corporation, the industrial revolution itself has been concentrated. Corporations command raw materials, and the patents on inventions with which to turn them into finished products. They command the most expensive, and therefore what must be the finest, legal minds in the world, to invent and to refine their defenses and their strategies. They employ man as producer and they make that which he buys as consumer. They clothe him and feed him and invest his money. They make that with which he fights the wars and they finance the ballyhoo of advertisement and the obscurantist bunk of public relations that surround him during the wars and between them.

Their private decisions, responsibly made in the interests of the feudal-like world of private property and income, determine the size and shape of the national economy, the level of employment, the purchasing power of the consumer, the prices that are advertised, the investments that are channeled. Not 'Wall Street financiers' or bankers, but large owners and executives in their self-financing corporations hold the keys of economic power. Not the politicians of the visible government, but the chief executives who sit in the political directorate ... hold the power and the means of defending the privileges of their corporate world. If they do not reign, they do govern at many of the vital points of everyday life in America, and no powers effectively and consistently countervail against them, nor have they as corporate-made men developed any effectively restraining conscience .

__________________________________________________________________
That last sentence up there is pretty scary. "...no powers effectively and consistently countervail against them, nor have they as corporate-made men developed any effectively restraining conscience." Them's powerful words. No restraining conscience. That means no regulation. That means crime and quantitative management are the same. That means that exploitation and overexploitation (in Economics it's the Law of Diminishing Return) are just ruling utilizations...
So workers get killed in unsafe workplaces! So what!

Deny, deny, deny.

G.W. Bush did it. He denied, denied, denied. And G.W. Bush stole more money than has ever been stolen from the US taxpayers--why, G.W. Bush stole more money than We the People had--so what does he do, why he has his Wall Street stooges borrow us into the worst debt in the history of Civilization (manmade)--and how many of those borrowed dollars did G.W. and his gang of big-time criminals steal! These corporate criminals made money off borrowed money and charged it to We the People.

Why do we continue to pay taxes? Why do we continue to allow our sons and daughters to voluntarily join the US military establishments to be exploited by this corporate ruling class who gives not one iota of shit about American soldiers getting blown away in Iraq and Afghanistan, their two great wars of exploitation?

Yet, Bush is a free man. Free to live out his worthless life filthy rich. Bush has turned failure into success!

A phony rat-bastard never-honestly-elected "president"--a failure as a spoiled rich brat--yet a member of the privileged Power Elite--a good ole boy who's having a good ole time--ruining the lives of millions upon millions of "common ordinary people" just to maintain his Leisure Class comfort zone! "How sweet it is," as Jackie Gleason used to say. Jackie was a poor ass Irish shanty lad from Brooklyn, New York, who hoofed and shenanigan-ed his way to fame and fortune and a backdoor pass to the Power Elite through the entertainment industry. The good life eventually kills you--it killed Jackie--but oh how sweet it was while it lasted!

Exploitation.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler