Social misfit, homeless con man, interplanetary thief and intergalactic felon.
Fred Fortune is the Earthling you never want to becom
e.

Monday, October 6, 2008

The Real Racketeers

I saw the forest despite the trees long before I was prodded and probed and then discarded on Mars by the bubble-headed boobies most Earthlings refer to as the Grays. Long before I had to give up my little Cape Cod house and my Japanese sedan for an appliance carton and a shopping cart. Back when I still roamed Earth as a citizen and, more importantly, as a consumer.

Yep, even as a regular, everyday type of guy, I could see what was really happening in the arenas of buying and selling. Hell, I knew most American businesses and all of the major corporations were run by racketeers. In other words, liars and cheats. But in corporate America, being a liar and a cheat simply means you're motivated. Ever since the 1980s, anyway, when Yuppie corporate raiders ransacked the Fortune 500 companies and anything else they found on the New York board that had "Take Me, I'm Yours" stamped all over their track records. The corporate raiders replaced the heirs of old money and tossed them all out on their ears. "Old Man Clubhouse Power Broker" was put out to pasture and he wasn't even trotted out when they thought they just might need him back. The raiders simply changed the rules and made it a new game. The world was now the oyster of a new generation of liars and cheats, only they were called movers-and-shakers now and they could do absolutely no wrong.

The new "Masters of the Universe" hired Madison Avenue to sell their shit to a consumer market that seemed to thrive on it by the bucketful. They convinced Americans that they actually needed a pill to make them sleep and one to keep them awake. One to make them poop and one to stop them from pooping. A pill so they wouldn't sneeze or have to blow their noses in public. A pill to help men with their tallywhackers when it was time to make a baby or to simply make whoopee.

The Madison Avenue liars and cheats made so much money for corporations and for Wall Street that no one on Earth wanted the lying and the cheating to stop. Americans were so convinced that they needed to be wired-in to their families and their significant others and to stay abreast of the moving-and-shaking world that no one would ever be caught dead without a pager or a cell phone or PDA or iPOD or all the rest of the electronic gizmos that can be replaced by simple foresight and planning. In other words, commonsense.

TVs were tossed out for home theaters costing ten times as much. A personal computer became a life raft if you were to stay in touch and keep up with all the multimedia happenings around the globe. Most of which any fool could do without.

A simple cup of coffee became a two-dollar, high-end, caffeine-injected experience, where the ambiance was not so much in the cup as it was on the cup's label and under the trendy European umbrella where it was imbibed. Cheap little Japanese cars morphed into luxury sedans rivaling anything in America or the best German imports. No one in America wore sneakers anymore. They were referred to by their brand names and their three-figure price tags were quick to be pointed out.

By the new millennium, it was all over. No one on Earth knew the true value of anything anymore. But it didn't matter to them as long as they still tuned in the next reality show on TV, not realizing that reality is what they once had, in full color and in stereo, just by waking up in the morning. And most of it was free.

Compared to contemporary corporate America, the Chicago gangster and racketeer, Al Capone, was just a kid with a lemonade stand.

Man, I wouldn't go back to Earth to take a shit.

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