TOM MORELLO GETS DOWN WITH THE WGA

You may or may not have heard in the past week about the fact that the Writer’s Guild of America – the union of writers for film and television – is on strike (you can find excellent ongoing coverage here). The mass media isn’t giving the strike much coverage because, well, the mass media is largely owned by the same conglomerates that the writer’s are striking against. See, the gist of the conflict is this: right now, when you a buy a DVD, the writer of whatever film or tv program is on said DVD gets about four cents, and the writers would like a raise so they make a whopping eight cents on each DVD; furthermore, writers currently aren’t paid when their work is streamed on a network website (usually complete with paid commercials) or downloaded on iTunes, which is to say: they’re not being paid for their work. Of course, GE and Time Warner and Viacom don’t want you to see it that way; they want you to think that the writers are greedy assholes and they want you to be upset that by the end of November, there basically won’t be anything on tv save for re-runs and reality shows (You won’t feel the effect in movie theaters until about 2009, when every shitty script the studios rushed into production to beat the strike is released. Seriously: the last time Hollywood thought there was gonna be a writer’s strike, Fox immediately gave a green light to… the re-make of Planet of the Apes. Chew on that.).

ANYWAY, leave it our favorite heavy metal crusader, Tom Morello, to take a stand for the writers, joining picketers at last week’s rally outside Fox. Video below:

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-AR