I have a dream.

One in which no color or ethnicity is demonized, but all are given respect and considered equal.

One in which our elected officials are not beholden to special interest groups, but work with their brethren to move this country forward.

One in which facts reign and opinion is just that.

One in which every boy and girl is given opportunity and every man and woman goes to bed knowing they can find a job and if not they still have a roof over their head and can put bread on the table.

One in which the poor are not told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps but are lifted up by those who have more.

One in which sports and entertainment are not seen as the only way out of poverty.

One in which those doing the hard work of our society, the teachers and the police, who are on the front lines every day, are lionized, not demonized.

One in which a white man is not afraid when a black man steps into an elevator.

One in which white workers don’t think their jobs are stolen by brown workers.

One in which elites don’t think they’re better than the rest because they’re educated and rich.

One in which government is not demonized and taxes are used to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.

One in which guns are used for hunting animals but not shooting people.

But right now this dream is shaky.

I’d hate to be a police officer right now. With a target on my back. As of this writing we still do not know exactly what happened, but we do know multiple officers are dead.

But I’d hate to be poor and black even more. Seen as second class before I’m even known. Branded by my skin. Shut out unless I’m the court jester, putting a ball into a hoop or rapping.

How did our society become so coarse? How did we go from togetherness to division? And who is responsible for this?

Let’s look at right wing talk radio and Fox News, which have been telling their constituents again and again that the government and the poor people have undermined the American way of life. It’s a disinformation campaign folks. Just because there are two sides that does not make them equal. Sure, Democrats get it wrong sometimes, but not as frequently as the right and certainly not with the same intentions.

But the Democrats in power have disconnected from the rank and file. They’ve blinked in the eye of right wing propaganda, stood by as unions and safety nets have been eviscerated. Afraid of offending the vocal right, they’ve been silent.

And both sides are beholden to the money. It’s fine to cut school programs and underfund the TSA when your kids are educated in private institutions and you fly NetJet, especially when that flight is paid for by a billionaire whose bill you support.

This is not about policemen.

This is about opportunity.

This is about the soul of America. A country built on freedom and upward mobility. The right keeps screaming about freedom being taken away yet they vote for surveillance, they’re the ones voting for guns which make our entire nation afraid. And the left pays lip service to the underclass but does little to lift it up.

And everybody’s afraid of having their chance stolen, they don’t want others to take their seat at the table and be left out.

The fact is upward mobility is worse in the United States than the European Union. And the safety net over there is much better than it is here. But ever since the Iranian conflict way back when it’s been USA!, USA!, all the damn time.

All I know is I’m sick and tired of people saying something and doing nothing.

I’m sick and tired of protections instituted for the rich while absent for the poor.

I’m sick and tired of white people demonizing blacks while their kids embrace African-American culture.

I’m sick and tired of drugs being criminalized when they’re a social issue which needs to be addressed via treatment.

I’m sick and tired of black men’s lives being sidetracked in prison, with their families forever fractured.

And I’m sick and tired of a political system where lies run rampant. They tell us to be honest while they’re not.

Ain’t that America, a two-tiered system.

Want to end violence?

Give people jobs. Give them upward mobility. Educate their young. Don’t spread hate, saying that one group or another is responsible for your fate.

And realize your well-being is dependent upon society. Your company is worthless without customers. That the rank and file prop up this great nation of ours and they need to be embraced, paid more than lip service, which they rarely get anyway.

I have a dream all this can come true. Or at least we can move forward.

But it would require you to weep for a deceased black man as much as a dead white.

It would require you to accept that the President was born in America and is still the head of the government, even if you didn’t vote for him.

It would require you to admit America’s a great country, but it still has problems, it still needs work.

And it would require you to acknowledge the future is here and we can’t go back to the past, that we can’t abandon the losers in the new economy but we must support them and find them a slot.

But these are just words.

The oppressed are waiting for action.

There’s no buzz.

How long until HBO cancels Bill Simmons? It’s gonna happen, hell, the new regime scrapped the second season of “Vinyl” after the show had already been picked up. You see the ratings sucked. And TV lives by statistics, they trump friends every time. Sure, it’s great to be in business with Mick Jagger and Marty Scorsese, but not when you’re losing money, or could put something much more profitable in their place. HBO is all about premium content, a cut above, that you can’t get anywhere else, and as soon as something substandard airs, they cancel it.

Bill Simmons spoke truth to power, he angered his ESPN bosses. But leaving was like graduating from high school, once he was gone no one cared, there was nothing to rebel against, just another overaged teenager wondering what to do next.

HBO rescued him.

But is there a need for a sports talk show on the outlet? One based on the personality of someone most find edgy and offensive? Once again, it’s like taking someone from nowheresville and putting them in the big leagues, a high school thespian in Hollywood, does anybody really care?

Only if you’re great out of the box.

And Simmons was mediocre, a deer in the headlights. If they give him enough rope he’ll get better, he might find himself, but this is not Bryant Gumbel transferring from the “Today” show. Or Bill Maher moving “Politically Incorrect” from ABC. Simmons had essentially no television experience, and like David Lee Roth trying to replace Howard Stern, he failed. Broadcasting is a skill, and so far Simmons doesn’t have it.

And then there was the endless repetition of the arrogant promos, wherein Simmons looked like nothing so much as what he is, an overeducated boy/man bitching from the sidelines about a game he was unable to participate in. Why couldn’t they make more than one clip? Why couldn’t they have had a teaser campaign online? Released video on YouTube in advance?

We either need the show or the personality must be transcendent. Or, the story can be so good that it hooks us. Simmons laid goose eggs on every level. Proving that the institution is bigger than the individual, that’s the story of the past few years. Ezra Klein left the “Washington Post” claiming he was gonna reinvent news for the millennial generation. No, the millennials all go to social media sites, Vox has no traction whatsoever.

Don’t step out on your own, in a cluttered world of endless messages he who already has traction is king. Media stars can jump from one platform to another, but starting a new one from scratch… That’d be like Kevin Durant forgoing the Warriors to play in Dubuque on a team without a television contract. He’d claim you could see the games online, but could you tear yourself away from cat videos and porn and the rest of the cornucopia of short form material that overloads us online?

Which brings us to the Ringer. Simmons’ replacement for Grantland. What if they launched a site and no one went there? I have never ever been sent a link from the Ringer. I’ve never ever seen it mentioned in anything I’ve read. Sure, it’s new, but today you’ve got to start with a splash. And do we really need one more Bro site with snarky comment mixed in with overlong analyses of that which we don’t care that much about to begin with?

Simmons will walk away with his money and his identity. He does an informative podcast, he shines there. And there’s room for his antics on other sports platforms.

But he cannot build it himself.

It’s kind of like Trent Reznor leaving Interscope to reinvent the wheel. No, he went back to the major label, the majors have relationships, they do stuff better than you, they can cover all the bases.

ESPN is challenged by cord-cutting. But it built its rep in a pre-internet era and not only do its bona fides survive, it has assets and traction. You harness those to get ahead, as opposed to trailblazing from zero. It’d be one thing if Simmons’ HBO show was innovative, but you can get the same crap elsewhere easily. As for the internet, it’s a haven of opinions. We want news, facts, and stars. Simmons is a star in print, as for the rest of the people on his site? Kind of like fivethirtyeight.com, there’s Nate Silver and twenty no-names I don’t want to read the work of.

This is not about Bill Simmons.

This is about television. HBO is competing with the revamped Starz, run by its old majordomo, Chris Albrecht, that service now eclipses Showtime in subscribers. And Netflix and Amazon and Hulu. Being artist-friendly is not enough, you’ve got to deliver great consistently. Used to be HBO was the only playground, now it’s not. They haven’t got time to let you develop, like a deejay in Des Moines honing his chops before he gets to L.A.

This is about the internet. It’s much less rogue and up for grabs than you think it is. It’s about established players fighting for market share. Facebook is going into video, what was that site that was gonna compete with YouTube by paying the creators more? It’s already history. Only established players can compete with YouTube.

And only established players can compete in news. Bezos injects cash into the WaPo which is run by Marty Baron of “Spotlight” fame and Bill Simmons thinks he can compete with that?

And that’s what the Ringer is competing with. It’s an attention economy. And if I peruse the Ringer I’ve got less time for the authorities.

So, you want a name at an established place.

Otherwise you’re just pissing in the wind.

This is the world we’re living in.

P.S. The name of that video site was Vessel. It was run by Jason Kilar, the former CEO of Hulu. Hulu is still standing, it’s triumphing. Kilar and Vessel are in the rearview mirror. Don’t get caught up in the cult of personality. NBC just needs someone to host the “Tonight Show,” not Jimmy Fallon. And if ratings suck, they blow you out, despite you having a contract, just ask Conan O’Brien. Does anybody watch his show anymore?

“Bonnaroo ticket sales drop by 28,000, hitting an all-time low”

The name wasn’t bigger than the lineup.

Ever since Coachella went on sale without a slate, we’ve come to believe it’s all about the experience. Isn’t that what we’re told millennials want?

But the drastic decline in Bonnaroo attendance tells us this isn’t so. Coachella might be a rite of passage for SoCal teenagers, despite the press fawning over its musical bona fides, but every other festival in America other than EDC lives and dies on who is performing.

And the acts performing at Bonnaroo were aged, appealing to the wrong demo.

Millennials don’t care about the Dead, certainly not Pearl Jam. And LCD Soundsystem peaked years ago. And only millennials want to camp out in the heat and endure the crowds to see acts in the summer in Tennessee.

Conversely, baby boomers are flocking to Oldchella because of the lineup, as stellar as has ever been put together, eclipsing even Woodstock, which didn’t have either the Beatles or the Stones, but they’re part of the Desert Trip. That’s the buzz in L.A., who plays next year? And believe me, Goldenvoice wants to do this next year, create an institution. Do the oldsters flock for a reunion of the Kinks or to hear David Gilmour or can this only be a one time event because the assets have been strip-mined and the landscape is now empty? Furthermore, there might be a backlash, these are people who are used to being up close and personal and inherently they won’t be, not with hard seats and this many in attendance, so, buzz… No, let’s not kid ourselves, baby boomers will testify as to how great it is no matter how bad it is, unless it’s an utter disaster. It’s all about their image. We think youngsters worry about how they’re perceived? Oldsters care even more, after spending thousands they won’t complain. But they may not return.

But they keep coming back to EDC, the Electric Daisy Carnival, because that’s a culture, that’s a scene, the headliners aren’t everything. But the truth is the headliners are everything to the rest of these music-focused festivals.

So it is about who you book.

And these festivals have to start booking youngsters. The acts millennials really want to see.

Like Bieber. He’s now credible, after working with Skrillex and Diplo. He should headline Coachella next year, usher that festival into the new paradigm, illustrate the changing of the guard. Millennials don’t care about reunions, they weren’t there the first time around!

So it’s all about headliners. And it’s all about scarcity. Country business has faltered because these acts go out every year. Why go to the festival to see them when they’re in your hometown on a regular basis? Whereas there’s far more demand for Drake than can be fulfilled, Beyonce too.

And we’ve got to stop hearing how good the festival site is, all the smoke the promoters blow out their ass, patting themselves on the back, trying to believe it’s about them.

It’s never about them. As long as people don’t get trampled to death, as long as there’s enough water and bathrooms, people will flock to a field in the middle of nowhere to see the right talent.

But what is that talent?

“Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley”

Maybe we should all read this together.

I’m serious. You’ve got a smartphone, probably a tablet too. The Kindle app is free, you go to Amazon (Amazon won’t let you buy the book through the iPhone or iPad app, it doesn’t want to cough up 30%), purchase the Kindle version of the book, which is presently $12.99, launch the app on your device and then download the book from your library in the cloud. It’s just that easy.

Aaron Ross Sorkin broke the book. You know, the boyish financial columnist in the “New York Times,” the one you see on Bill Maher’s show on HBO. You should be reading Sorkin, along with Eduardo Porter, the “Times'” other financial reporter, I used to depend on the “Wall Street Journal,” but in its dash to cover everything and become the right wing paper of record it’s faltered in the financial sphere.

And when Sorkin speaks, people pay attention.

And now there’s a buzz on this book.

I’d like to tell you it’s highly readable, that it cuts like butter. But Antonio Garcia Martinez is no Michael Lewis. And speaking of Lewis, when you’ve finished reading this column immediately pull up the “Big Short” movie, it’s on Netflix. I’m talking now. Obey me, I’m not getting paid here, it’s for your own benefit. The film is the best illustration of herd mentality I’ve ever seen. Not only do so many have faith in a failed system, even those questioning it have no problem profiting from it. There’s fraud in America people, WAKE UP!

But as I was saying, just because you’re educated, wrote papers in college, that does not mean you’re a good writer. Writing is a developed skill, and Martinez is not quite there yet. Not that he’s completely off the mark, Martinez references Shakespeare and so many other things with which I’m unfamiliar. But what keeps me reading is his delineation of the Silicon Valley sphere, I’ve never read anything like this, ever. He names names, he tells the truth, you might hate his personality but he’s brimming with facts, he knows the territory, and you can’t believe all this is hiding in plain sight, but it’s not. That’s the dirty little secret of America, you only see the topsoil, what’s beneath is hidden, intentionally, it’s the code of silence.

So, unwilling to finish his PhD, Martinez goes to work at Goldman Sachs as a quant. If you don’t know what that is, Martinez explains it. he explains everything, yet you still don’t quite understand what Martinez is saying half the time, but you get the gist. And that’s just the point, they don’t want you to know.

His compatriots at Goldman?

They end up fired, in jail.

Michael Lewis started at Salomon Brothers. But he’s been removed from the trenches for decades.

Then Martinez answers an ad and goes to work for Adchemy, in Silicon Valley. After revealing the shenanigans at Goldman, the eating contests, the other frat boy behavior.

And there’s a lot of drinking at Adchemy. As a matter of fact, Martinez gets stopped for drunk driving right away. But he negotiates his way out. He teaches you how to negotiate from a position of weakness.

That’s right kiddies, this is a business book, filled with so much insight you’ll feel inadequate. And I’ll tell you not to obey the learned rules, just know that experience counts and if you don’t play you know nothing, everything you say is theoretical, and you don’t know what you don’t know, which is death.

Like if only one man at the enterprise is still standing that’s a bad sign. What did he do to survive? That’s gonna impact you.

And making money is also a bad sign. Because frequently you can do this without customers. Sounds counterintuitive, I know, read the book, you’ll get it.

And now I’m at the point of Y Combinator.

Read “Wired” or “Fast Company” and you’ll know the name, but you truly have no idea what goes on there. Yes, it’s an incubator, but… How do you qualify? Who’s in charge? What are they looking for?

And most of what they back bombs. Despite millions going in.

Martinez ends up at Facebook. That’s how the book starts. We’re so busy lionizing Sheryl Sandberg that we don’t see her as a real person. She’s just that high-ranking female exec who tells us all to lean in. But she does have a job, and so far it looks like it’s being Zuckerberg’s gatekeeper. And Zuck lives up to his rep, as being autocratic and idiosyncratic, but he just doesn’t have enough time to get down into the weeds.

It’s every man for himself in today’s world. If you’re working for the man and evidencing loyalty you’re just a mark waiting to get screwed. Drinking the kool-aid and investing good cash in stock options that will be worthless when the company crashes. Doing favors before those above you squeeze you out.

Let me tell you some of the things I’ve learned so far…

Your enterprise has to have a leader, you can’t be egalitarian. Someone has to plot strategy and make the hard decisions, even if they’re wrong. That’s the story of bands. If there’s no leader, failure or breakup or both is on the horizon.

Pick your partners wisely, you’ll spend more time and know them better than your spouse. As the chapter title says…”Like Marriage, but without the F___ing.”

Don’t start small, Mom & Pop are mercurial and you don’t have enough manpower to service them. You can help them and they’ll still fire you.

“Dogfooding” means to use your own product, to give the illusion of demand when one may not even exist. It derives from those old Alpo commercials, wherein Lorne Greene’s dog eats the product. You’ve got to know the terminology, otherwise you look like a rube.

As I referenced above…

“Never trust the survivor of a massacre until you know what he did to survive.”

That’s from Kurt Vonnegut, there are quotes throughout the book, but the point is when the CEO of the record label is the only one left standing is there opportunity in the offing or death?

“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”

There you have it folks, from Marcus Aurelius himself, not only is a couch potato not worth much, they’re going to hold you back. Hook your star to those with big desires.

Friends are soon enemies. They’ll hold your immigration status over your head, quit and they’ll report you to the government and have your ass deported.

And I’ll give you one of Martinez’s lists, full of wisdom:

“Investors are people with more money than time.

Employees are people with more time than money.

Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.

Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money.

Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.

Company culture is what goes without saying.

There are no real rules, only laws.

Success forgives all sins.

People who leak to you, leak about you.

Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.

Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.

Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.

Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.

Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player – investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer – is complicit.”

Antonio Garcia Martinez is the anti-millennial. One who pooh-poohs the trophy just for participating who is not busy fitting in and being a member of the group.

Forget the celebrity feuds. The truth is the hoi polloi, the weaklings, are so busy getting along that they cannot triumph. The winners have sharp edges. You’re not gonna like Martinez, but you are gonna marvel that he was able to play the game and move up the food chain, even if he ultimately got canned at Facebook.

And that’s the lion’s share of the book and I haven’t even gotten there yet, I’m only 18% of the way through.

Want an easy life? Read a thriller, a mystery, go for “The Girl On The Train.”

Want to learn something, want insight you can get nowhere else, want to see how the world really works? Then read “Chaos Monkeys.”

We live in an on demand culture with instant gratification. This book is only a click away.

But you won’t take the risk. You hate digital books. You’re worried about the $12.99. You’d rather watch Netflix.

Pussy.