Capitalism is trash

One weekend in November moviegoers dropped $104 million on tickets. Of the total spent, 88 percent was spent on the top 10 movies, according to yahoo.com.

68 percent of ticket sales were for the top four movies: "Charlie's Angels", "Meet the Parents", "The Legend of Bagger Vance" and "Remember the Titans". "Charlie's Angels" cornered 38 percent of ticket receipts alone.

This does not look like a diverse group of people expressing the tapestry of American culture. It looks like everyone is gobbling up the same slop and abandoning authentic culture. So much for free speech.

The capitalist influence on culture, which supposedly promotes the highest degree of culture through competition, is only stifling what we will call authentic culture ó the culture from the streets and communities where people live.

The top four movies mentioned were distributed through Universal, Dreamworks and Disney. These companies distributed 25 of the top 125 movies that weekend, raking in a cumulative 50 percent receipts for all movies.

Another four companies, Artisan, Fox, Warner Bros., and Paramount put out another top 28 movies that week. Combined, eight companies put out more than half of the 125 movies offered to the public that weekend. They also ate up 90 percent of the profits from that weekend.

The promised "freedoms" of capitalism are hard to find in this picture. On top of this massive concentration of the profits of culture, the mindwash message of these flicks is a concentrated effort to make Americans oblivious to worldwide struggles against U.S. imperialism and exploitation.

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