"The founder & CEO of Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit card processing company, made an abrupt announcement to his 120-person staff last week. All employees will now be making a minimum of $70,000 a year." S.M. Gibson writes in an article on the "Anti Media" website on April 14.
He did this by lowering his salary from a million to $70,000. Everyone would be paid the same.
We presently have very high paid tiers of government bureaucrats and politicians speaking out from on high on the giving of money to subsidize cultural workers in the Nova Scotia film and television industry. Haven't taxpayers been subsidizing these silk tied dandies' overly abundant wages for years? Do these gussied-up poseurs really think they're worth what they get paid? Why not reduce every single high cost person in government's salary to $70,000 including the ministers and the premier?
In fact, not too long ago, when I was on a jury at the Department of Culture for grants to writers, the department came up short, real short. Out of seventy applications, of which we, the jury, felt at least twenty-five were really fantastic and should be funded, the money dried up at lucky #13. When inquiring about the administrative side of the department, I learned four levels of managers over the project officer who administered the grant application and the deputy minister called this meagrely-funded department home. Six levels of bureaucracy including the minister had sucked the place dry and the people it served got crumbs.
The cultural industry has to stand by and listen to accusations by a fishmonger billionaire about how he never took a cent of government money he didn't repay. Of course he didn't. He just fished the resource out until he had his own private jet to fly around the world on, polluting the atmosphere after he'd emptied the ocean. The film and television industry doesn't have any "fish" to sell, just skills, two planks and a passion. We're not complaining that he took all our fish. Why does he resent us so much?
The film industry must "reel" in their "fish" from afar and, to do so, they need bait [bread] from the overpaid government workers. With this bread, they perform Jesus miracles multiplying the fish and loaves fourfold for thousands of their fellows to feast on equally. How do government employees multiply the money they get, which comes from us? They don't. They just consume and hoard it until the golden day they get their really big pay-off--a platinum pension--and all for spouting platitudes for as few as two years on the job.
Gibson again: "That business owner, Dan Price, in Seattle, called a company meeting after reading an article about how earnings have a powerful effect on one’s outlook on life.The story concluded that although money does not buy happiness, it does offer satisfaction when one thinks about his/her own life."
It's funny the delusions by which money-saturated people rationalize their lives. They believe they actually deserve everything they got while their fellow citizens, probably with more talent in their big toes, deserve nothing. In fact, the more the powerful have, the less they think others are worth. That's an illusion worthy of a film script but I prefer the storyline starring Price. He has the right spirit. He thinks everyone deserves the same. Would the government here cut a piece of humble pie for what they don't deserve--their fat wallets and platinum payoffs and serve it to the thousands of folks that do?
And shut their mouths about miracle workers who deserve what they get from government and more.
