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Conservatives Discover Conservatism, Don’t Like It [Schadenfreude Special Edition!]
Posted by KTK

Who would ever have thought that bottom-dwelling conservative hack shop Regnery Publishing was sleazily ripping off its own sleazy authors? Not those authors, apparently. Now the moral beacons who brought us Swiftboating and various hack jobs attacking Bill Clinton and praising George Bush have suddenly discovered that the press that was low enough to publish their bilge was also not above stealing their royalties. Forgive me while I laugh my goddam ass off . . .

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi [founder of the Swift Boat Vets], Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.” . . .

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.” . . .

The press negotiated a standard advance fee/royalty package with the authors, but added a clause providing lower royalty percentages for books sold at discount. It then began selling as much as half their books at cost to its own subsidiaries, to use as incentive gifts or to re-sell at a profit. Because the books were sold at or just above cost, the authors got virtually no royalties on them, but the company got to keep the profits from the resale by its own subsidiaries. The authors got double-screwed because the giveaways don’t count in the standard industry calculations of sales volume, thus leaving them at a disadvantage when they later tried to negotiate deals with other publishers.

Now, that’s just straightforward fraud. But what’s delicious about it - aside from the fact that the authors so righteously deserved it - is that these writers seem so nonplussed that an explicitly conservative business operation would rip off the people who provide their saleable goods! What’s that? A privately-owned right-wing business is underpaying its workers and chiseling its contracted partners out of greed? There’s something about fuck-you capitalism that actually works to the disadvantage of the people under its thumb? That’s . . . amazing. Somebody should do something about this! Why didn’t anyone warn them?!

It really just sums up right-wing hackery in a nutshell. These tools, having made their careers on the fringes of the self-congratulation society that is right-wing “scholarship”, really believed that they’d be taken care of. They figured that the cushy deals and uncritical flattery that rain down on AEI think-tank lapdogs like Dinesh D’Souza would be guaranteed to them also, simply because they were equally willing to say what their overlords wanted to hear. They forgot that Regnery was a profit-making enterprise - and quite possibly they’d never been on the supply end of the profit equation before. Their dazed sense of injury is just priceless:

Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

Dude: because they can.

What a maroon. He actually believed they wouldn’t screw him if they got a chance. He really seems to think that capitalist companies don’t act that way - that there’s something unreal or cartoonish about it when they do. He stumbles to the obvious conclusion but still can’t bring himself to believe it: the company is making money off its workers and paying them as little as possible, just like critics of capitalism have always said they do. Somehow, he manages to call that a cartoon while simultaneously complaining that it’s really happening to him. He is obviously stunned that his preferred fairytale, in which companies gladly provide wealth and comforts to anyone who can build a better mousetrap for them, doesn’t actually work, but he shows no sign of abandoning that fairytale in favor of the descriptive narrative of capitalism that he himself provided, and which he himself states is actually true in this case, but he still implicitly insists is false. Well, he’s one step closer to seeing the light. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

November 7th, 2007 General, Politics, Legal Issues, Economics, Culture, Libertarian Problem Solving, News & Current Events, How Capitalism Will Ruin You | 7 comments