Ted Turner
"To foster evil actions, to make them commonplace among all men, nothing is as powerful as money. It destroys cities, driving men from home. Money trains and twists the minds in worthy men, so they then undertake disgraceful acts. Money teaches men to live as scoundrels, familiar with every profane enterprise." – Sophocles, Antigone
I liked Ted Turner. He was funny. One view I have of people is if you’re funny, you can’t be a complete asshole. That said, as a class, billionaires shouldn’t exist. No one should be allowed more than say one hundred million dollars. If you can’t make your private life as debauched as you’d like with a hundred million dollars, well too bad, life’s unfair.
Money has a direct correlation with power. When you have more than a hundred million, your wealth is no longer private, it's public. It’s too great a concentration of power for any sort of functioning democracy. That’s Political Science 101. As far as a right to be a billionaire, there is none.
Eastern Kentucky theoretical physicist Dr. Collier amusingly says, we all have 27 skill points and “every billionaire has like seven luck points and 20 evil ones.” She’s funny too. Turner was an outlier. He always talked about luck as an essential element to this success. He also had a couple integrity points, including courage and a certain honesty, elements most lacking in America today.
Turner’s wealth, as all wealth in America over the last two centuries, was founded on technology. In 1975, he read an article about communication satellites and figured he could take a small television station in Atlanta and with satellites and burgeoning cable technology create a new network.
He was always fighting against the three broadcast network TV monopolies. At his weakest, he lusted to own one. The fight of cable against the broadcast networks is now lost to history. Here’s a great short speech Turner gave in 1989 about that fight. Unbeknownst to most at the time, the fight was already over, cable won. Pay special attention towards the end, where he goes after military contractor General Electric, "the most corrupt corporation in America," who had just bought NBC. It’s both acutely astute and funny.
Turner’s bludgeoning of America’s military spending and its corruption was not a one-off. In the 1980s, he was one of the few to stand up to the Reagan Revolution idiocy of more military will set you free. He went publicly and directly against this stupidity. Understanding we all shared this small planet, he talked to and acted with the evil Soviet empire. There was no room for nuclear weapons, not just no room for Iranian nukes, but America's.
In '92, I discovered satellites and cable enabled a campaign for the presidency to get around the stranglehold the three broadcast networks had on the process, though that campaign had no luck just a fool’s determination. Today, network censors no longer control politics by shaping and withholding information, instead there's infinite internet puke, billionaire funding, and spineless minion hacks.
In the late 90s, I worked in California with Gorbachev’s environmental organization, pushing renewable energy, partly with Turner funding. I briefly met Turner at a dinner where he was receiving recognition. Turner’s views on energy were, let’s say American, but he was an ardent conservationist and there’s no more important or radical environmentalism than conservation, none.
Whatever else you say about him, Turner lived. In certain ways, he was an exception to America’s billionaire curse, an exception proving the rule.
He was a funny son of a bitch. God love Ted Turner.
