Categorical Aperitif

Mmm, nothing like a rich dose of irony—or is it poetic justice?—first thing in the morning (via Drum, via Atrios):

Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, 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.”

Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s “Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security” and Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.” In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

Um, yeah. When it's factory workers and grocery clerks and shelf-stockers and whatnot being screwed, you guys usually call that "the marketplace." It's funny how, when the Invisible Hand picks your pocket, y'all suddenly call it "injustice." My favorite lines have to be these, though (emphasis added):

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” 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?”

Um...maybe because—and I hate to say it, 'cause I'm not a Marxist, I'm a liberal, and I think that social democracy offers a better prescription for curing the ills of capitalism than communism ever did, and hey, that's what Michael Moore was trying to tell us Sicko but I guess y'all were too busy whoring for the right-wing propaganda machine to listen—Marx had a point. Maybe, left to its own devices, the profit-obsessed bourgeoisie really would create, in the end, only a disgruntled, dispossessed army of its own gravediggers. Maybe that "cartoon" is more of a portrait than you'd like to admit.

Slap on some just regulations and a safety net, though, and maybe we can turn these productive forces in directions that'll make us all better off—rather than just making a few people obscenely rich thanks to their ability to siphon off an inordinate share of the wealth created by the labor of others.

I hope that this nose-rubbing in the realities of the pimp/ho relationship proves educational for these guys.