... person event.
That would suggest that the person that got in had to have $50,000 of backing to get in.
My theory:
Most progressive organizations do not have that kind of money to use to infiltrate anything like this.
The person taking the video could be
1. a right-winger who wanted to just take a sneak video for themself...
2. a friend of a right-winger whose tab was paid for who took the sneak video...
3. a progressive with that kind of money who took the video themself....
I have been and still am #2.
For years, I have had a friend who is a mega-1%-er.... like 0.1%-er, actually.
I got to know him over here in Japan.
I got to know him at a time when I had no idea he was one.
Even here... in the land of the rising sun (and national health insurance)... they have the same 1%-ers with the same mentality.
They don't want to pay into the national health insurance system.
They don't want to pay into their equivalent of social security.
They don't want to pay the taxes that provides the very infrastructure that allows business to flow in the first place.
They don't want to pay into unemployment insurance.
They hire people as contract workers or part-timers en-mas so as not to hire them as real employees to avoid paying into anything that supports the social contract. (Hire someone as a full-timer here and they have to pay... sounds familiar?)
He complains about not being able to attract multilingual staff...
I ask him about the cost of rents and food and whatnot in his area.
He knows all of the details off of the top of his head.
And then I ask him if he thinks that someone could afford to do more than just subsist on that pay, considering that just to find the job he's posting, they would have needed to already be paying for a mobile phone and mobile phone contract as well as need their own computer and internet access just to apply.
Even after factoring all of that in, he still insists that he needs a solution that would allow him to pay the low wage and get what he wants.
Even when I make points about the benefits of paying enough so that the workers can be active customers affording not just his products, but others... he seems to get it... then weeks later has totally forgotten. Then I am back to square one again.
But he is my friend.
And sometimes, he brings me along into his world.
A world of tax dodgers.
People who want to pay the lowest wages possible regardless of the costs.
People who see any contribution to society on their part as a burden to them.
But... I get to sit with him.
And talk with these people.
And it scares me to the core.
* The same thing happened to me in Latin America... I got to sit and talk with the upper class 0.1%-ers there. Because of the contact that introduced me to them, they opened up and explained to me the blueprint for how I could open a company in their country producing textile products, have the [pro-business] government allow it to be set up in a tax-free zone, how many guards to hire, what kinds of fencing, what kind of security detail, how many hours you could work people, how little you could pay, how much you could charge American purchasers, how much profit, on and on... I smiled and was polite... the maids of course served the meals... as they served the food and drink, I would always thank them... my host told me that I did not need to thank them.
I often wish I was deft enough to have a camera running... but I am just not that good.
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