Be-Labor Day.

To my readers outside of the be-nighted states of amerika, today is Labor Day in amerika. We celebrate Labor Day in September in this nation to remove from a day celebrating workers any possible association with May 1st, or May Day, or International Workers Day, which to the recidivists in the be-nighted states has an association with Communism or Socialism, or equally rancid in the eyes of so many powerful amerikans, any semblance of workers' rights.

Over the last fifteen years or so as the giant advertising agencies and holding companies have massively consolidated and, along the way, shed tens of billions of dollars in market value, many in our industry and its periphery have assigned blame for the industry's collapse to a variety of forces, as if those forces, and not their behavior is responsible for that sucking sound.

Divestiture of media is blamed, as is media's fragmentation. AI is blamed, as are FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and lately, MANGO (Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI.) Or even MANGOT (all of the above, plus tesler.)

Others cite silly ideas like "the big idea is dead," or today "people are post-consumer."

The point no one seems to bring up is the pillaging of the advertising industry by the very people who are meant to be running the advertising industry, nominally protecting and promoting the industry.

CEO pay in all of industry is out of whack in relation to that of typical workers. The ratio was about 20:1 when I was a teenager. If a worker made $10,000, his boss made $200,000. Now it's almost 350:1. If a worker makes $100,000, his boss makes $35,000,000.

No one points out, for instance, that Mark Read's compensation has increase as the holding company he used as his personal ATM decreased in value from roughly $31Billion to $5.5Billion, an almost 84-percent decrease in value in just a decade.

What Read and his ilk have done is increase their pay vis a vis their workers while decimating the number of workers (the people actually doing the work clients nominally pay for) and therefore the market cap of the companies they're supposed to be running. They're selling the milk from the cow while they're selling off the meat.

In sports, if the owners sold all the best players, saw the team get worse season after season, and saw attendance and broadcast revenues plummet accordingly, sooner or later, people would blame the greed of ownership for destroying that which yesterday was strong.

Somehow in advertising, we blame exogenous conditions and excuse the malfeasance and bad faith of management. I'd betcha, for instance, Read will be paid by WPP for the next 25 years. Martin Sorrell, Read disgraced predecessor after all, is still being paid by that company.

And as anyone who's watching knows, Mark Read is no Bobby Bonilla.

He's worse.

Or as Eugene O'Neill wrote in "The Emperor Jones," “They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak."