“How old are you, mate? Does this look like Jackanory to you?! I know you’ve lost a lot of money, but you won’t find a penny of it in them books. If you wanna know what’s happening in the world, take a look at the world. Go take a walk down the high street. See all the shops closed down. Look at the homeless people under the bridge. Go home, and ask your mum about her financial situation. Ask your friends, ask your friend’s mums. The time for books is over, mate. You’re here now. Look at the world with your fucking eyes.”
That’s pretty damn sobering, and accurate. We’re so use to being told what to think, and my whole takeaway from this, apart from “Eat The Rich”, is to look for yourself. What he wrote after that paragraph is something we all should be doing. Looking at housing prices, looking at where real people are squeezed, and to act based on that. We’re just cattle.
I look at the US primaries and caucuses and I see nothing but bullshit, “cute moments” as described in this article that won’t help us at all. I look at Bernie Sanders’ bill about the 32 hour workweek and I think about the weak willed moderate Democrats who won’t vote for it, and all the scumbag Republicans who are not even hiding that they’re part of this exact problem of enriching the rich while removing wealth from everyone beneath them.
Capitalism can work, when its heavily regulated with active oversight and robust enforcement. We haven’t had a free market in many decades, the joke is on all the BS Republicans are peddling.
What do you mean by work in the statement, "Capitalism can work?"
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am asking what normative criteria you are using to assess the system. There is no non-moral objective notion of a system working without some ethical goal in mind
What I mean specifically is the Gilded Age, vs the period of middle class growth during and post WW2. Concepts such as the Public Trust became important during these periods due to the Gilded Age itself and the postwar priorities emphasizing we lift up the nation instead of just the rich. I mean that capitalism is just the tool, albeit with heavy regulations, that generated a great deal of prosperity from the late 50’s through to the 70’s.
That’s the time period a person could graduate from High School and then earn enough to purchase a home and viably support a whole family.
Texas removing tenure is going to have this effect too—chasing your experts away might seem like a republican utopia but I promise the people will follow the experts eventually.
The only thing I wish men’s attire had that women’s has is thumb holes on hoodies. This article has to be bulkshit otherwise because, yeah, pockets are cool.
Super rare for men’s but almost standard issue for women’s. I was given a school hoody when I started my Masters program that had a thumb holes. I said, “wait a minute”, checked the tag and it was a women’s. Super bummed I spent $45k and no thumb holes when swapped for the men’s.
Women’s pants don’t have pockets because putting stuff in your pockets causes weird bagging on your upper thighs and ruins the silhouette of the pants. However, I do agree the utility of having pockets is hard to live without.
Women’s pants don’t have pockets because it’s a way to force them to buy purses.
Every person ever who has said that this is purely due to women’s choice needs to go shop for pants once. It’s a miracle to be able to find a single pair of pants that either isn’t 6 inches too long or 3 inches too wide at the waist. Women don’t have luxury of choosing pockets when most pants are either so long they drag through every puddle or too wide to the point of showing the whole ass crack when sitting down.
You say that as if altering clothing isn’t something that takes time to learn, time to do, risks of ruining your clothes, affect it’s durability, and difficult to do well. If it were so easy no one would pay for it to be done. Go to your local tailor and ask how much it is to hem a pair of pants or take the waist in.
Imagine everytine you buy a pair of pants you have to mentally prepare yourself to put the time and effort into sewing your own pants, something that most guys don’t have to do.
I have the exact same problems finding men’s pants. The leg length never makes sense with waist size. Not to mention being a skinny guy having one pair of pants in my size in the entire store, if I’m lucky. I almost always have to settle for at least one size to big.
I don’t like him but I have to vote for him because the alternative is worse
as you will be doing for the rest of your life; never voting for the candidates you like and you’ll never be given the chance because of democrats. meanwhile your political opposites will perpetually be getting the candidates that they do like and a plethora of choices.
Ehh South Park is aggressively centrist. They “both sides” their arguments constantly and provide zero alternative progressive solutions. It’s become satire for satire’s sake.
There is a book "From Mondragon to America" which goes into excruciating detail about how it all works. It's not just a few factories there are credit unions, food coops and more all doing business together.
Didn’t the Biden administration instate something a few months ago that if a business retaliates or tries to prevent unionization the union gets automatically created?
However, if an employer who seeks an election commits any unfair labor practice that would require setting aside the election, the petition will be dismissed, and—rather than re-running the election—the Board will order the employer to recognize and bargain with the union.
if you’ve ever worked food service in your life you should instantly be able to calculate how fucked wages are. in 1 hour you make dozens of meals that cost $10+ while getting paid maybe $10 or $15 per hour. it’s obscene
Good sentiment but not really a true conclusion. Most restaurants sell their food for a little over cost. The majority of their sales profits come from the drinks. It’s insane. A 5 gallon bag of Coke syrup is good for $1,000+ in drink sales but costs most businesses less than $100. Regardless, I agree that workers should be paid more, but not because the food is so expensive.
This is 100% the result of Reagan's trickle down economics, a policy his own Vice President called 'voo-doo economics.*'
In 1980, 'middle class' was still seen as one income supporting a family of four. By the time Bush Sr. was through, 'middle class' meaning two jobs was established as the norm.
*Bush used the phrase before Reagan offered him the Number 2 job; suddenly he was fine with it.
It's not just Reagan. The same is happening all over the world, including Europe. And his policies were 40 years ago. At some point, we need to own our own problems.
The real issue is that the rich people worldwide have figured out how to mostly avoid paying taxes, while the middle class bears the brunt of taxation - which prevents them from becoming wealthy - and the lower class gets nothing.
That wasn't Reagan, it would have happened even if FDR had become an immortal vampire and had the New Deal lasted a century.
What we really need is to start taxing the rich and to greatly reduce taxation on the middle class. And we need to really get serious about it.
The US government can spend millions to track down and kill a Shepard in Syria, but they can't find the capital gains on Jeff Bezos portfolio.
And his policies were 40 years ago. At some point, we need to own our own problems.
I've been echoing this online for a while now, glad to know I'm not alone. Ronald Reagan isn't some ghost controlling the country like a Sith Lord. That fuck's been dead for decades by now. Everytime I see someone dredge up Reagan's name for problems we're experiencing right now, I can only think about how the people perpetuating those problems are getting off essentially blameless.
Nobody's arguing that he's still pulling strings man. They're saying he got the ball rolling. That is policies have reverberated up until this day. That he started a trend that others continued.
Reagan had one of the highest approval ratings in modern US history; he didn't force these policies on an unwilling country and he sure as hell didn't draft them himself. My original point still stands that blaming current problems on an administration from forty years ago is harmfully reductive. The people we should be blaming are alive today and hold seats in Congress right now. We can worry about the historiography later.
Do you feel anyone who's blaming the Reagan policies is claiming we shouldn't do anything about today? Are you suggesting they're all pining for time machines? In fact I'll go further and ask this do you really think you can address the problems of today without understanding how they began? How can you even approach economic policy reform without looking back and understanding what went wrong?
Also there's a long long history in our world of horrible evil brutal leaders being popular at the time. So I don't think we need to go into that absurd argument any further.
A financial crisis that was caused by those and the policies that sprung from those policies. The trends that were started then. The idea that you look at something as gargantuan as the economy and think that it's not affected by things that happened decades before is insane. Also weird to complain about culture War when that's what Reagan began. Though it's policy that we're concerned with at the moment. Policy.
Also the 2008 financial crisis started under Bush. I dont know why you think you could change history on that one.
Not changing history. Just saying that democrats had all the power they could want and failed to implement change to make things better. Literally after running on a campaign of Change.
People were talking about it during Reagan's Presidency.
There were giant homeless encampments in all major cities throughout the 1980s.
Read Hunter Thompson's book "Hell's Angels." There's a chapter that talks about the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist circa 1970. A part time waitress in New York could afford to support herself and her musician boyfreind. A biker could put in six months as a Union stevedore and make enough to hit the road for two years of carousing.
And the idea that Obama caused the melt down of 2008 is pretty hilarious.
The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.
Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.
Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.
Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.
Use bribes campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.
No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.
Dude, I'm really sorry, but the 19th century sent a letter by pony express and they want their economic theory back.
There are struggling "capitalists" that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business.
And then there are rich as hell "workers" like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can't.
And I think most people don't have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.
But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.
A million middle class Americans making $100K are still out earning Jeff by a huge margin, but they are collectively also paying way more tax than Jeff, so Jeff can keep investing his money, while those million Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
There are struggling "capitalists" that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business.
And then there are rich as hell "workers" like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can't. And I think most people don't have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.
These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.
Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.
There's also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.
But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.
More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn't fall from the sky. It isn't just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.
So how do you address the problem: "Rich people don't pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much."
I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can't make the government adopt these policies?
This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you're doomed to keep asking the question "Why don't they just do this?" It's not a new idea, but it's still relevant.
If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.
You are stuck at step 1, I invite you to move on to step 2 and actually start looking at how we are gonna solve problems.
You can go back all the way to colonial times and feudal times and even earlier to discuss how societies have become less egalitarian since the invention of agriculture.
But we are here, right now and it's best to identify the actions we can take today, for a brighter tomorrow.
It’s an income issue as well as a cost of living issue.
I have some friends who had a kid a couple years ago. Both work in tech, and have salaries in the 6-figure range, and childcare was going to be so insanely expensive that they were debating whether or not one of them should straight up quit to be a full time parent for a bit, because childcare was going to be more expensive than one of their monthly take home salaries.
And simultaneously, we have politicians wondering why birth rates are plummeting.
Here's the list of top 100 ‘low-wage’ US firms that are fucking over their employees (listed in the full 'Institute for Policy Studies' report):
Lowe's
Home Depot
Walmart
S&P Global
Linde Plc
Autozone
O'Reilly Automotive
Nike
Target
Dollar General
Analog Devices
Sherwin-Williams
McDonald's
Mondelez Intl
Amazon.com
TJX
MGM Resorts Intl
Best Buy
Starbucks
Kroger
Johnson Controls
Seagate Technology
Colgate-Palmolive
Philip Morris Intl
Marriott Intl
Cognizant Tech
Solutions
Fleetcor Technologies
FedEx
Estee Lauder
TE Connectivity
Domino's Pizza
Constellation Brands
YUM Brands
Ulta Beauty
Coca-Cola
Stanley Black &
Decker
Mosaic
Ross Stores
Hilton Worldwide
Bath & Body Works
Corning
Becton Dickinson & Co
Amphenol
Dollar Tree
Tractor Supply
Tapestry
Whirlpool
LKQ
Skyworks Solutions
Advance Auto Parts
Carrier Global
Amcor Plc
Assurant
Darden Restaurants
Walgreens Boots
Alliance
Costco Wholesale
Chipotle Mexican Grill
Mohawk Industries
Microchip Technology
DXC Technology
ON Semiconductor
Hershey
Kimberly-Clark
Ralph Lauren
Tyson Foods
Wabtec
Baxter Intl
Align Technology
Smith (A.O.)
VF
Robert Half Intl
Genuine Parts
Avery Dennison
Kraft Heinz
Borgwarner
Factset Research
Systems
PPG Industries
Newell Brands
Fastenal
Carnival
Viatris
Live Nation
Entertainment
Wynn Resorts
Garmin
Cooper Cos
Extra Space Storage
Aptiv
Mccormick & Co
Epam Systems
Royal Caribbean
Group
Norwegian Cruise Line
Iron Mountain
AES
Teleflex
Western Digital
Caesars Entertainment
Copart
Las Vegas Sands
Monolithic Power
Systems
Public Storage
The article is about a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies which identifies the top 100 ‘low-wage’ US firms. The full report is linked from the article to here: https://ips-dc.org/report-executive-excess-2023/ , I opened the PDF and pulled out the full list.
They are not only fucking over their employees. They're fucking over all tax payers and straining the countries they are allowed to operate in, while funneling those dollars to top executives and shareholders.
These companies rely on social programs like welfare and food stamps to support their front line staff. They drain those programs for their own profits, and leave the governments less able to help their people. This is vampire capitalism.
Its really fascinating to see how cyclical our culture is. Ive heard historians say that we are experiencing a very similar time period compared to the late 1800s and the early 1900s.
Lets hope that this trend doesn’t lead to another world war and a depression. But I think what these experts have been trying to convey is its likely we will find ourselves in a new social revolution in the coming years. It happened back then, it will happen again.
Theory of alienation in action. Only solution is to get involved in the growing labor movement. A big reason my wife is adamant in organizing is setting the example for our kids, as they get closer to becoming teenagers, that you don’t have to just become a doomer and act like there is nothing to be done.
I mean, it’s not for no reason - if the system doesn’t change, almost no one who doesn’t have strong financial security already has a light at the end of the tunnel. And the system has only changed for the worse for most of us - less freedom, less protection for individuals, and no efforts to reign in corporations. Most young people aren’t going to be able to retire, and most people are unable to get ahead at all
People can’t imagine the structural changes we need to take back control of our democracy and make it work for us again, let alone how to get there… There’s a lot of (designed) learned helplessness. It’s hard for people to imagine things actually improving, we’ve had almost no wins in my lifetime - just going back and forth on social issues as worker rights backslide so far we’ve literally gone back to child labor
Something like 70% of greenhouse gasses are produced by 100 companies globally. This is like using a cup to empty an Olympic sized pool: yes, it does something, but not enough.
We need to maintain focus on the big producers and affect change there first and foremost.
It’s their products causing it. Cutting down on gas burned because we focus on more people working from home is focusing on big producers.
Ask yourself this, aside from real estate investors, who is most likely to lobby against legislation that incentives work from home? Car companies (Elon already is) and gas producers I’m sure are on the list right?
This article talks specifically about energy usage, not consumption of products. Work from home likely wouldn't have an impact in consumed goods.
I'm a WFH employee, and my company has no plans to change it. I'm all for WFH. I brought up the issue of 100 companies producing 70% of greenhouse gases because to me this article lines up with the idea of us reducing our individual carbon footprint, which we've found out in the last few years was just a coordinated effort by the fossil fuel industry to deflect their responsibility to us.
All of these efforts are good. WFH is good, renewable energies are good, EVs are debatable (depending on where you stand on how the rare materials needed for the batteries are sourced) but overall better than gas and diesel. But at the end of the day, if your tub is overflowing you need to turn off the tap first before you pick up the mop.
I hear you about the articles bias towards personal responsibility when tackling an issue that is structural.
And my point stands. Elon, for example, has come out heavily against WFH because fewer people will be driving his cars. In other words, WFH is bad for the car and oil/gas lobbyists and good for the planet.
If governments started offering incentives for WFH, it would be one way of turning off the tap.
theguardian.com
Top