Silly Girls In Dresses

Alright, so I’m sure most of my fellow young Philadelphians remember the rumours floating about Philebrity.com and NoLibs about Philly Bike Share. So far, nothing has happened…in Philly. Washington DC, which in my opinion is more international (and therefore better and smarter), has decided to embrace the bike-sharing idea…..good, right?

Yea, its good…until you find out that fuckin Clear Channel is funding it. Check out the article in the New York Times.

Alright. Let me step back. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing that Clear Channel is funding this project, right? This is the argument made in the article:

“That technology comes with a price, which is one reason cities and advertisers started joining forces to offer bike-sharing. The European programs would cost cities about $4,500 per bike if sponsors did not step in, Mr. DeMaio said.

Cities realize “they literally have to spend no money on designing, marketing or maintaining” a bike-sharing program, said Martina Schmidt of Clear Channel Outdoor. Washington will keep the revenue generated by the program.

Bike-sharing has become a ‘public service subsidized by advertising,’ said Bernard Parisot, the president and co-chief executive officer of JCDecaux North America, an outdoor advertiser that made a proposal to bring bike-sharing to Chicago.”

So, Clear Channel is doing a “public service”. Because people don’t want to pay taxes.

Still doesn’t sit right with you? Yea, me neither.

See, I’m still of that old-skool belief that government can actually be beneficial. Call me crazy, but socialized programs worked in the post-depression era, so why not now?

Yea….why not now?

Alright, I’ll give it to the other side that a lot of government programs are total crap. They are run down and shady and dirty and underfunded. But there is the key word: UNDERFUNDED! Starting in the Reagan years, and continuing into the Bush years, we’ve gone through a tax-cutting craze that each time has hurt our public services and pushed us into debt. So, i still maintain the belief that if government programs were properly funded and staffed, they would work beautifully.

Clear Channel is doing just that. They are stepping in where the government has failed. They have the money, so they are providing the proper funding for an exquisite public service in exchange for advertising space. In the short term, this may be all well and good, but in the long term, I see disaster.

At the basic (really really basic) level, what I see taxes as is everyone chipping in a small portion of their income to create services that everyone can benefit from, but could not afford on their own. Like roads. And sanitation. And public libraries. And schools. The beauty is that all these services are provided by the people; the government is only a middle man, and there are no other agendas besides using this money to provide the best service possible.

The equation has gotten twisted. If we start to depend on corporations for our public services, we are dependent not on the government (and therefore ourselves) for our basic needs, but we become dependent on multinational leviathans who’s actual goal is to make profits; not to serve us. The clear, simple connection between people and the government is broken. If we are so dependent on these corporations for services that the government is supposed to provide us, how then can we expect the government to regulate the corporations when they do something wrong? It would be like biting the hand that feeds us!

So, government’s other job (regulating corporations, esp the big ones), would be completely compromised. We would be indebted to corporations. They would be providing our public services, so we could not regulate them in their other activities without fear of backlash.

This is not the first time corporations have been picking up the slack left by government failures. Coke and Pepsi sponsorships of public schools has been extremely detrimental to children’s health, even while giving schools much needed funds. These schools get money in exchange for selling soda and junk food to kids. If they don’t sell enough product, they don’t get as much money. But the kids are getting calculators. So what can ya do?

But, the Republicans keep scaring us with “Taxes! Taxes!” Screw that. People SHOULD pay taxes. The phrase was not “No taxation” it was “No taxation without representation”. If our government is doing its job and giving us the services we need, we should be GRATEFUL to be paying taxes. If we’re getting something out of it, then I’m fine with paying taxes.

I’m just a little worried that our government is getting smaller and smaller and multinational corporations with profit-hungry agendas are taking over.

I was randomly in Bethlehem PA the other day, and began reading a section in a local newspaper called “News of the Weird”. Basically, its a collection bizarre-but-true news stories happening around the world. Here’s one that really intrigued me:

“The Kibera neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Dahravi section of Mumbai, India, are two of the planet’s most appalling slums, but residents have recently discovered well-of international visitors roaming their toxic, fetid urban hells as voyeurs on travel agency-arranged tours.

‘(T)hey want to come and take pictures…tell their friends they’ve been to the worst slum in Africa,’ lamented one resident of Kibera (which has one toilet for every 1,440 people), speaking to a Reuters reporter in February, but a March Smithsonian magazine piece quoted a Dahravi tour entrepreneur as promising to show ‘the positive side of (the) slum’ (for instance, the community spirit that discourages street beggars, in a nation otherwise teeming with them).”

-Pulse Weekly, March 19th 2008

Im sorry…..whathefuck????

I guess this means the mindset of American disconnection and pretention had been exported, like so many McDonalds. Welcome to the new era of social globalization and subsequent stratification.