Plutocrat Math.

I, for one, have never quite understood phrases like "the agency model is broken." I always figured that language so obtuse, so cliche and so inherently without meaning was masking a Hoover's Dam worth of bullshit, bombast and blather.

The fact of the matter is, there's nothing wrong with the agency model that the guillotining of the 1% of the 1% wouldn't remedy

I am reeling, frankly, from having gotten a gander at some of the publicly announced compensation packages of the holding company chieftains. (I think they call them 'holding companies' because they hold you by the balls like a hawk with a snake in its talons. To be more accurate, perhaps they should call them 'twisting companies.')

In any event I'm trying to make sense of how much a $20 million pay package is. Or a $40 million one. Or a $60 million one.

It's so much money, it's hard, I think, for us working stiffs to reckon with. But here's how I think of it.

With $50 million put into an agency's payroll rather than the overseas account of a corporate plutocrat, an agency could hire 500 $100K workers for a year.

Think of that next time you hear that bonuses are non-existent, raises are frozen and the finance people are hocking you about a $12 cab ride home at 2AM for a shoot you had to cover because there's no one else.
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Maybe it's the corporate rot, decay and corruption but it all reminds me of Graham Greene's Vienna as depicted by Carol Reed in "The Third Man." So, if you can, listen to Anton Karas' zither. And read Greene's opening.