Raise a glass to the bosses!
Toiling away in their chrome steel towers, a secretary on the lap and a Cubano going out in the ashtray, they pull the levers that make you and me dance.
A hundred years or a little more ago there was open warfare between the bosses and the workers… the workers had the numbers — after all were the ones doing the work — but the bosses kept the money, or most of it. And they pumped a fair bit of it back into protecting the system they had worked to perfect, hiring private armies to beat back the roiling masses outside their towers. When voices and placards were met with fists, and fists were met with clubs, and clubs were met with guns, guns were met with bombs… there was war in the streets and in the factories.
It wasn’t good for anyone.
There’s self interest and then there’s enlightened self interest. But there wasn’t a whole lot of that, then. It took years, decades to turn a hard-fought and uneasy impasse into a period of relative productivity, peace, and even prosperity for… more, if not all.
The Good Book (pick your favorite) seems to suggest that greed is the root of evil.
And that’s always made a lot of sense to me.
People who think their needs are so important that they are justified in taking from you… people who become trapped in a self-built prison of compulsive aquisition, as though they were saving up for the afterlife… we know what they do to society.
But what do they do to themselves? The malignancy of their greed eats them from the inside out, even as the wealth piles up around them…
And the Company Says
previous versions
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
lyrics
And the Company Says
You walk into town
and you look all around
and it doesn’t take long
to see that something is wrong
very wrong
the people stand around
with their eyes on the ground
it doesn’t take long
to see that something is wrong
and the company says
it’s a company town
now, if you don’t like that
don’t ya hang around
and the Company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
sell a penny on the pound
give ‘way
One man stands
says I don’t run
but the goons come around
with their clubs and guns
and they knock him down
and they kick him around
and they drag his body
to the edge of town
and the company says
he’s better off dead
than fightin’ with us
and the company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
we’ll put you in the ground
and the Company says
it’s a company town
now, if you don’t like that
don’t ya hang around
and the Company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
sell a penny on the pound
give ‘way
and the company says
he’s better off dead
than fightin’ with us
and the company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
we’ll put you in the ground
(C)1986, 2007, TK Major
