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'The Language of Capitalism Isn't Just Annoying, It's Dangerous' (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: When General Motors laid off more than 6,000 workers days after Thanksgiving, John Patrick Leary, the author of the new book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, tweeted out part of GM CEO Mary Barra's statement. "The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future," she said. Leary added a line of commentary to of Barra's statement: "Language was pronounced dead at the scene." Why should we pay attention to the particular words used to describe, and justify, the regularly scheduled "disruptions" of late capitalism? Published this month by Haymarket Books, Leary's Keywords explores the regime of late-capitalist language: a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that he argues promulgate values friendly to corporations (hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies) over those friendly to human beings (democracy, solidarity, and scrutiny of new technologies' impact on people and the planet).
These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.
These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.
This doesn't require a book, everyone knows about corporate speak. Write your thoughts on a blog. You will get a couple of thousand readers.
When companies have the power to disrupt societies, one manager thinking and taking bullshit can do a lot of damage. It always has been that way but these days or highly optimised society has become more fragile which makes bullshit more likely to cause damage.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not the language of capitalism.
You know, after you run out of other people's money.
Like the millions fleeing Venezuela have discovered.
Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?
You probably have a weak argument if you put it into the passive voice so you don't have to admit that it originates with you. I pronounce good writing dead at the scene of this shill's Twitter account.
it's a common propaganda technique. We all laughed when the Iraqi information minister tried to do it since he was completely doomed.But when you control the media the technique's the same every time.
Put another way: "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.".
Works too. This is why we need to teach critical thinking via the humanities in school. Critical thinking _can_ be taught, but you need a subject that's simple enough for folks who don't do it naturally and where being 50% right has value. STEM doesn't work for that. You'll note the wealthy make it a point to give their kids a well rounded education. This is why.
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Every person has the power to disrupt society. However their effect is dependent on how many people are listening to them. The thing is it isn't the quality of their message, but enough people listen to them, they will get followers and cause damage.
Companies have bosses who employee thousands of people so what they say there is a number of people listing to them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The wall will spend other people's money so I guess it's a wall built by socialism.
How about you build a personal responsibility wall around your own property?
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"late capitalism" is better than "late socialism". You know, after you run out of other people's money. Like the millions fleeing Venezuela have discovered.
False dichotomy and false equivalence. Authoritarianism is what ruins economies, not socialism. Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.
Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?
Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive. If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts.
That's new? What were they doing in 1955 then if not having '"belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts'?
Or is this some value of "new" that I am not familiar with?
...the reality is the reason we have so many problems is because people who are irrational have equal power with the people who are rational.
For those who rail at these words, the reality is right now we live in a lawless oligarchy that's has been basically stealing everything that is nailed down and has been since the US's founding. To even suggest any modern capitalist state "is a democracy" is just utter bullshit when it has been owned lock stock and barrel by corporations for most western states history with brief interruptions of world war 1 and world war 2 and the cold war to try to soften the ruthless harshness of capitalist societies.
Now with the fall of the USSR corporations are unchecked and out of control and being enabled by a heavily indoctrinated public.
Don't think so? Every time IP law came up for review to benefit the public it was pushed to benefit the rich and their corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The reality is the general public in the US worships their robber barrons. George carlin said it best about americans.
Carlin
Look at the distribution of wealth, it is just insane, anyone who thinks they live in a society that benefits the many is uninformed.
US distribution of wealth
https://imgur.com/a/FShfb
Wealth in america
The Yellow Vests seem to disagree with you that France is doing fine. But true enough that US interference in other countries is a big factor in our refugee "crisis." Look at how we made of mess of Honduras recently.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Seriously, what we do to all of the Southern continent with our foreign police really pisses me off. We wreck their economies and governments and then we bitch that refugees from the disasters we caused come up her and take our jerbs.
The term "jerbs" is what really pisses me off.
"jerbs" = "someone else's jobs"
When it comes around to your own job though, suddenly people around here don't like the H1B program. Funny, that.
Hmmm...you mean like Nicaragua? Daniel Ortega, that paradigm of left wing-nut populism, is currently throwing opponents into jail and refuses to allow the people to unelect him. Last we heard, the U.S. hasn't had squat to do with Nicaragua for several decades during which he became Dear Leader, stopped being Dear Leader, and now is Dear Leader again...for life...which may not be long for him.
Cuba has had an exemplary left wing-nut government for many years...still sucks. Try starting a political party there and see what Castro's goons (they are still there after he went all stiff and incommunicado) do to you.
Last we checked, the Central American gangs were winning the drug war, and they won't brook any opposition to their loving rule. Yep, those countries should be breaking out into Left Wing Heaven any day now.
The only reason that markets have been enshrined, is that the left has done everything in their power to destroy anything that looks like a religion (unless it a poorly copied imitation of a eastern religion that ignores everything other than sitting with your eyes closed and chanting while wearing strange clothes).
There has been a strong push to have government take the place of religion (so said leftist can have some control over it) along with the spiritual and charity functions it once assumed, with an equal and opposite push-back to not let the government have those powers and responsibilities. The only place for those powers and responsibilities to land is the free market.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Some pointy-haired types talk all in buzzwords. It's annoying, in fact, it's just as annoying as the author, who uses phrases like "deploying language".
Meanwhile, capitalism remains the only system to heave literally billions of people out of poverty. Generally speaking, the only people who have a problem with capitalism are either pure socialists (who believe that all your marbles belong to the government) or corporate cronyists (who believe that all your marbles belong to companies - enforced by the government). And sure enough: this book was "inspired by a previous work of a similar name: the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society."
For your reading delectation, I leave you with the concluding paragraph from one of his papers, if you can stand this sort of navel-gazing prose:
When we consider innovation’s religious origins in false prophecy, its current orthodoxy in the discourse of technological evangelism—and, more broadly, in analog versions of social innovation—is often a nearly literal example of Rayvon Fouché’s argument that the formerly colonized, “once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age” (2012, 62). One of the additional ironies of contemporary innovation ideology, though, is that these populations exploited by global capitalism are increasingly charged with redeeming it—the comfortable denizens of the West need only “stand back and admire” the process driven by the entrepreneurial labor of the newly digital underdeveloped subject. To the pain of unemployment, the selfishness of material pursuits, the exploitation of most of humanity by a fraction, the specter of environmental cataclysm that stalks our future and haunts our imagination, and the scandal of illiteracy, market-driven innovation projects like Mitra’s “hole in the wall” offer next to nothing, while claiming to offer almost everything.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I'm an anti-capitalist but calling the language of capitalism "dangerous" is a bit of a stretch. Certainly, the language is extremely annoying, pompous, and overused. It sounds like a bunch of business majors jerking each other off and using a bunch of larger words often incorrectly to appear educated. When I think of dangerous, I think of immediately life threatening. I will need to buy a new car come February and it won't be a GM. Citizens wrongly bailed those assholes ou.
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada are all capitalist countries. I'm not really sure what point you were trying to make.
I do agree with you that we should just stay the fuck out of other countries business though. If they want to try to build their own little socialist utopias, let them.
Corporations are no longer stewards of society in general, and only looking after interests of shareholder. As such corporations have no reservations to damage society to the benefit of shareholders. This, in itself, is what will doom Western society.
You can't have powerful agents (i.e. corporations) act as sociopaths and have society as a whole succeed. There are two solutions to this - reduce power of corporations (i.e. socialism) or change rules governing corporate behavior to disincentivize antisocial behavior (i.e. strong regulation and anti-monopolist laws). Without this, we will have a new era of Robber Barons. Arguably, silicon valley technocrats are already there.
... everything else, including the workers of a company, is little more than a means to that end. You can parse the words of press releases all you want, but, in the end, Capitalism is all about maximizing profit of the owners at the expense of everything and everyone else.
I think people are overly concerned about the MBA-speak used, but aren't paying sufficient attention to the actions of said MBAs.
"Late-stage capitalism" or whatever you want to call it is about squeezing every single drop of productivity out of an already-stretched system. This is where the disruption comes in...everyone is focused on removing every pocket of slack. Replace taxi companies with a phone app that summons drivers directly to you to kill taxi companies. Outsource every single corporate service to the lowest bidder rather than hiring people directly to lower your costs. It's a race to the bottom and if you ask me, it is beginning to have an effect on society in general.
When I graduated in the late 90s, it was still very common for people to have decent mid-level jobs at large companies. A generation before, it was even more pronounced. Now, in the name of agile and disruption, businesses are killing any stability that was there in favor of contracting positions and outsourcing functions. The problem is this...in a previous time it was possible to party your way through a management degree, get randomly selected for some generic position at a company, and use that position to establish a decent family life. The societal change that's happening is that fewer people are able to stay employed in an area. This will eventually lead to people being more nomadic, having fewer children, renting apartments instead of buying houses, and not contributing to any sort of community.
Once you're out of your 20s, most people aren't really excited about pulling up stakes and moving across the country over and over again to chase yet another contract position. Those plants GM is closing are going to dump a ton of previously well-established workers into the nomad pool, chasing lower-wage positions. Union factory work used to be the only way for people with less education to earn enough to support a decent quality of life. This is the disruption people need to think about. If you put the work in by getting educated, your reward should be a stable living that lasts a career. The problem is that these cycles of consolidation and slack-removal are growing shorter and people are likely to experience a major disruption more than once in their working lives.
Economies that have humans involved need slack. The current system just assumes we're machines.
Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.
This does not appear to be the case.
It still allows the elite to collude and, say, form effectively a bi-partisan" one party system out of it. Or allows a bunch of parties that collude to throw up a "cordon sanitaire" to keep the popular ("populist") voice out of it. Or allows a guy to get himself elected president, then president-for-life. Say the guy who said that "democracy is like a train; you get off when you get where you want to be." (US, various countries in Europe, Turkey(!); other obvious references would be to Russia and, amazingly, the EU with its toothless EP and its many unelected EU-commissars, sitting on top of ostensibly "democratic" countries.)
That is, democracy by and of itself is not sufficient, for it can itself be subborned. You have not shown it is necessary either. Eg. with a vigorous king who regularly chops heads off of his uppity barons so the rest'll keep their heads down (and who otherwise doesn't do much more than give barons jobs to do) you might have decent checks on power as well. Barbaric, yes. Effective, that also. No democracy, yet functional checks on power.
Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive.
Read: The "progressives" like their labour cheap and don't like nay-sayers.
This is a 70s era sociology department trick: If you agree with it, it's true. If you disagree, it's "relative", or the sayers are "disinformed", or what-have-you. Most of the "progressive" "discussion" consists of criticaster character assassination. I see you, too, lack actual arguments. If I were unkind I might surmise you're a liberal arts grad.
Before you continue your character assassination spree, I don't particularly think a big wall is the ultimate answer. Nor is welcoming as many "refugees" as possible. I'm in Europe and my plan would include buying a big chunk of land south of the mediteranean sea, and sending all asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, together with our "we must do something!" do-gooders there. "We'll do the security (for now), and if you want to know how to do something, ask and we'll gladly tell. We might even pay for the initial outlay of materials. But actually doing the thing is up to you. Now go build yourself a country."
If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.
I don't agree that disagreeing with the party line constitutes "wilful ignorance". If you think you know better, show us. Merely claiming you know better makes you an acolyte, not a teacher.
Please note: I do not claim to know better, but I do make an effort to show. Somehow I expect that all that'll do is enrage you. Now, if so, why is that?
The laws of supply and demand don't apply anymore. Can you actually buy what you want? What you want can probably not even be built because some corporation holds a patent hostage that doesn't allow someone who would build it for you to build it, so you have to instead buy their inferior, spyware riddled crap. Can you get the internet access you want? Or does the monopoly of a certain cable company hold you hostage to pay through the nose for a crappy line with nonexistent support because they bought the local government to ensure that nobody can compete with them? Can you get the food you want? Or did some soda corporation decide that it's not in their interest to offer the flavor you want and they bully the local cornerstore into not offering any competing sodas if they want to get the discount they need to stay competitive?
The laws of supply and demand would meant that you, as the customer, decide in the end what gets produced because producers would want to supply what you demand because you would buy what you want and those not offering what you want are left out in the cold and will eventually die off, and if nobody offered it, someone would step in and open a business to offer it for it is what the market demands. That is what the law of supply and demand would dictate.
Do you honestly feel like this is the case?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Those countries (like most of Europe) run what is called a social democracy. Basically it's a democracy on a capitalist framework that respects property rights and such, but where the state assumes the duty of providing a basic level of care for everyone, and where they acknowledge (and act on) the need for government to regulate the market to some degree, either to address market failure, or to correct what they think are unacceptable inequalities.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Those are all extremes and fail because they are so. Capitalism has worked best in the past when properly regulated. The keyword is properly. Breaking up Ma Bell was great for telecommunications in this country. Unfortunately we don't do this anymore. The very idea that we have banks or other companies that are too big to fail should be a sign that we're not regulating properly.
It is a difficult task and even harder to maintain over the long haul as corporations have way too much influence in government and also will do what they can to corrupt the intent of many regulations whether it be through lobbying congress or embedding stooges like Ajit Pai. Too many regulations or regulations that don't make sense and you stifle innovation, not enough and corporate greed leads right back to its destructive roots.
Growing up in Vermont when I did was during the birth of Ben and Jerry's. They had a novel concept that local companies should support the local community every way they can. They instilled a corporate morality into their company and it provided a great example where a corporation can actually do a lot of good and still make a lot of money. They pooled dairy farms in the surrounding area helping those farmers even to this day. They've grown so they are helping even more farmers today despite being sold to a much larger corporation. Most business owners border on the sociopathic though and will not see spending money on the local community as anything but a loss of profit.
Ford had it right while not being perfect he understood that to make a product you have to pay workers enough to afford your product. That is overly simplistic of course as there is a lot more to society than a paycheck. If Ford helped build roads and schools they would have had even larger demand and people to fill the demand. I've yet to work for a company in my professional life that understood the concept of soft dollars without just seeing it as sunken costs. Hard dollars is all a lot of people seem to understand.
Economics reboot? "Here's one I've prepared earlier!" - https://civil.money/about
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False. "France...seem[s] to be doing fine" is EXACTLY what the parent claimed. And the Yellow Vests would indeed disagree, based on what many of them have actually said. The truth or falsehood of their beliefs is not relevant to my statement, which is they would disagree with parent's statement.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
In other words, we didn't have enough checks on capitalism in the law. But people were more moral before so it wasn't a huge problem. Now, capitalism is suddenly in dire need of checks and balances.
PS - Sweden is capitalist. Note that they have a stock market...
Venezuela does too, it is called the Caracas Stock Exchange. So Venezuela is just as capitalist as Sweden, and I guess the U.S.
So why are righties always claiming that Venezuela is socialist through-and-through and proof that socialism always fails?
Because they define all successful economies as "totally capitalist, man!" and all failed economies as "proof of the universal failure of socialism everywhere". In other words it is plain dishonesty. All economies in the world of any size are mixed economies, with some level of regulation for the capitalist component (and the socialist component as well, for that matter).
Venezuela's economy tanked because its government was taken over by corrupt incompetent authoritarians whose only interest is self-aggrandizement.
But don't worry, that can't happen here.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The humanities typically include black and feminist theory courses, often with an emphasis on oppression by white male European decedents. I'd say that tying together that and the resultant behavior isn't a fallacy at all.
As far as the impact, one need look no further than the variety of violent protests to conservative speakers to dismiss your point as foolish. Not that the political ideology is relevant, merely that someone they disagree with was coming to speak on campus and thus they protested.
So much for the humanities being the appropriate place to foster "Critical Thinking".
I think the STEM area would be more appropriate; to become a scientist you have to accept the world as it is and accept that sometimes you are wrong; two key elements in critical thinking. Math doesn't care about your feelings, for instance, nor do experimental results change because you believe them to be wrong.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
of the episode of South Park it came from. Randi Marsh didn't care until it was his job, then he was furious and joined the chorus of "They took our jerbs".
This is why we need to push real solutions to the problem. There are a ton of out of work construction workers seeing Mexican and South American immigrants doing the jobs they used to do. Just like there's a mountain of out of work tech workers seeing their jobs go to H1-Bs. Workers in America need to learn solidarity. They need to understand that if you make a living by working you are a member of the working class no matter what color your collar.
If us techies don't start doing that then the blue collar guys are going to get tricked into voting for folks that'll screw us all over. Maybe "tricked" is the wrong word. If they've been abandoned what's the point of caring if the elites in Silicon Valley get screwed? That's where the concept of "stigginit" comes from. Where you're just lashing out.
What's frustrating is that in 2018 we should be able to see these things for what they are: common tactics by our ruling class used to divide and conquer the working class. Race, religion, collar color, wedge issues. Over and over again we see the same pattern. We even have numerous examples of the ruling class talking about how they're going to create issues to separate us (go google the history of how abortion became a political issue in America sometime).
The tricks are all there out in the open, but nobody really seems to call them out on it. Bernie Sanders does I guess (he repeatedly tries to bring folks together) but not sure how far he's gonna get. They're already running adverts on TV against him and he hasn't even announced he's running for the primary...
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How is the U.S. any different in that regard then? We have the same types of social programs (social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) as well as government organizations that regulate businesses or markets (FTC, FCC, etc.) and many other similar qualities. You might argue that the various implementations and institutions are better/worse for some metric, but to argue that the U.S. is somehow an unfettered free market libertarian dream state while Europe is a glorious bastion of socialistic thinking is ignorant.
See some videos here
The TL;DW (didn't watch, it's youtube after all) is that the World Bank set an arbitrary definition of "poverty" ($1/day or so) and then periodically changes the numbers to make it seem like folks are lifting out of poverty (now it's $1.06/day and a million more are making $1.08/day, congrats, 1 million "lifted out of poverty").
Meanwhile the actual quality of life of those million people hasn't changed in the slighest...
It's a trick meant to keep you from questioning the establishment. Worked too.
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The 'G' word: Growth. That one really grinds my gears. Why is everything about growth? Ok, great, a little growing is good for us but on a planet with finite resources a bit of perspective would be useful.
The laws of supply and demand don't apply anymore. Can you actually buy what you want? What you want can probably not even be built because some corporation holds a patent hostage
I disagree - the laws of supply and demand still apply. You can buy whatever you want, but due to lack of demand, what you want may be really expensive - If you really want it, you can buy the patents, maybe buy some politicians, and pay to have what you want produced.
so you have to instead buy their inferior, spyware riddled crap
Demand isn't about what you (or I) individually want to buy, it's about what the market as a whole wants to buy. You may not want to by spyware riddled crap, but spyware riddled crap sells well because most people (the market) don't care about the spyware and most people find that the lower price (as enabled by the presence of the spyware) is preferable to paying a higher price for a product without the spyware. If enough people want to purchase and are willing to pay for systems without spyware, systems without spyware will be produced.
Or did some soda corporation decide that it's not in their interest to offer the flavor you want and they bully the local cornerstore into not offering any competing sodas if they want to get the discount they need to stay competitive?
Perhaps the soda flavors that are available are the flavors that the majority of people want to buy? Granted soda manufacturers advertise to generate demand and sway consumer opinion, but if enough people wanted a particular flavor, those people could pay to advertise as well.
I agree that it sucks to be in the minority on the demand side, because it means that I can't buy what I would like to at a reasonable price, but that doesn't mean that supply and demand is dead, it means that it is alive and well.
I absolutely cannot. Because Communism is always destroyed by the first person who succeeds. The effect of greed is such that while the greediest spout about egalitarianism , but their greed causes them to want anything but competition. If I want all of the power that is possible to have , upon success, I will do everything to take others things , and ascertain that the deck is stacked in my favor.
You aren't wrong. I hope you weren't trying to disagree with me. Any pure 'ism destroys itself because it makes fatally flawed assumptions.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ben and Jerry's used capitalism to sell mediocre ice cream to sheep willing to pay a higher price to feel good. Starbucks and Apple do the same thing. Apple and Microsoft used capitalism to take pre-existing ideas, repackage them, and sell the result. Apple wrapped them in a pretty package and sold them for more. Microsoft wrapped them in a brown-paper wrapper and sold lots. That is the nature of capitalism, find a consumer for your product. Not everyone wants to wait in line at Starbucks for mediocre, overpriced coffee.
Including banks in the 'too big to fail' comparison of capitalism is wrong. Banks were too big to fail because of the amount of capital they had, not because of their impact on capitalism itself. If Google or Facebook or Twitter failed tomorrow, we would all still move on. Because no one really needs Facebook or Twitter, and many of Google services exist in other forms or software such as Android is freely available.
It was a lie that GM and Chrysler were too big to fail, another company would have purchased them, renegotiated all of the union contracts, and not cost the American taxpayer one dime. The lie was told so politicians could benefit.
The breakup of Ma Bell was good because they owned technology no one else had. Google could be broken up into pieces, ads, tech, etc. But it isn't a matter of no one else having the tech, it's a matter of Google doing it 'better' and attracting more customers. Those subsidiaries would still have a perceived advantage, I'd still buy Android phones because IOS is a POS, in my opinion.
And no, I don't have a Google phone. Because they don't have a monopoly.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Ben and Jerry's used capitalism to sell mediocre ice cream to sheep willing to pay a higher price to feel good.
Once upon a time, they made better than average ice cream. Sadly, those days are gone. Now it's pretty crappy ice cream, and lots of the other ingredients are crap, too.
The breakup of Ma Bell was good because they owned technology no one else had.
The technology was well-understood, as it was simple. It was good because they had a monopoly, and consumers suffered predictably.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
outside of a fringe left (encouraged by the right who use them to scare blue collar workers and who would love more of that sweet, sweet cheap labor) nobody is calling responsible immigration policy "racist".
There's a couple of problems here:
1. There's a growing right wing media engine that makes good money scaring folks with SJWs. The Youtube skeptic community has been overrun by them. It's not hard to see why. Nobody likes SJWs. Not even other SJWs. They're annoy little jerks who completely miss the point when it comes to actual social justice. Case in point: They fight over a 1-3% gender pay gap and barely mention the 20% decline in wages since the 70s.
What I'm saying is, SJWs are an easy target to get views and Pateron donations. This lead to the Youtube skeptic community dog piling on them. Add to that right wing think tanks who cheerfully fund top members of the Youtube skeptic community to rail against them (SJWs make a great replacement for blacks, Mexicans and Muslims as a right wing boogie man to distract from real economic issues) and you've got a recipe for disaster
2. We actually do need those immigrants. Go look at Japan. They've got major problems because in a modern, industrialized economy folks don't have enough kids to maintain the population. Without population growth your 401k becomes worthless. Have fun figuring out what the hell you're gonna do in your 60s when nobody will hire you and you've got maybe $300k in the bank adjusted for inflation (don't forget to do that).
3. While we need the immigrants, right now our Winner Take all trickle down economy means those immigrants have very little benefit for workers in general and the lost wages due to excess labor supply means they're positively harmful.
It's not hard to see the solution here. More social programs (Medicare for All, A Green New Deal, expanded SNAP, Tuition free public Universities and perhaps even Social Security for all, aka UBI). Take the wealth generated by those immigrants and make sure everybody gets a piece. Meanwhile like I keep saying end our destructive and evil foreign policy.
But the right wing already have answers for all of this. Social Programs fail because "The problem with it is sooner or later you run out of other people's money" (you don't actually, unless your economy stops growing, but that's a complex thought compared to the simple phrase that it's responding too). Oh, and we need to secure our national interests; e.g. over throw democratically elected leaders. And heck, Americans like being #1 and, since we can't seem to get there through hard work we'll do it by sabotaging everybody else. After all, we're still #1 if the way we got there is not by getting better but instead making everybody else _worse_.
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The thing is that a lot of folks reduce this whole topic down to a binary point of capitalism versus socialism. That's not just you saying, better of two evils, but there others that would say, "socialism is the only cure to capitalism" or some BS like that. The whole thing is that our current model of capitalism isn't good. It encourages less diversity and bigger more centralized, more too big to fail companies. I'm not saying ditch capitalism, but clearly our current approach is less than ideal.
Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?
I have no idea what that has to do with anything other than sounding edgy. I'm not progressive in the sense of economics or security in any sense, but even I think the wall is a silly idea. The US as a nation doesn't adequately fund anything, hell we've got bridges that have millions of people going over it that have spent the last two decades needing repairs. But some wall that 99.995% of the nation will never see is going to kept tip-top? Call me skeptical, but even if the wall got built, I'll put my dollar here on parts of it falling down and the number of people caring about that, being countable on one hand in two/three decades hence.
regressive taxation and right wing, anti-worker policies.
Just because France is doing OK doesn't mean they don't have to fight tooth and nail against their ruling class to keep it that way.
I remember there was a comedy group that dressed up as stereotypical billionaires and went around to Republican rallies thanking the (obviously working class) people there for all the tax cuts and deregulation. Not one person called them out for being trolls. They couldn't tell. That's the trouble with the American Working class, they don't see themselves as oppressed fighting for their rights, they see themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.
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My current fantasy solution approach would be a progressive profits tax linked to market share. Any company that dominates a market too much would face a choice between reproducing by splitting into competing companies or paying extremely high tax rates. The division into competing companies would give people more choice and freedom while reducing the tax rates so the shareholders received better returns. The other option of paying high tax rates would pay for the government to regulate the monopolist more carefully while funding research to break the monopoly.
If you have a better solution idea, I'd be interested to hear it. Your comment suggests you have a pretty good grasp of the problems created by corporate cancers.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.
This does not appear to be the case.
It still allows the elite to collude and, say, form effectively a bi-partisan" one party system out of it.
It's true that Democracy in the US needs some improvement in representation, such as ranked voting.
Or allows a guy to get himself elected president, then president-for-life.
once you stop having elections to replace leaders, you stop being a democracy.
That is, democracy by and of itself is not sufficient, for it can itself be subborned.
Absolutely correct. Democracy needs people to maintain it.
You have not shown it is necessary either. Eg. with a vigorous king who regularly chops heads off of his uppity barons so the rest'll keep their heads down (and who otherwise doesn't do much more than give barons jobs to do) you might have decent checks on power as well. Barbaric, yes. Effective, that also. No democracy, yet functional checks on power.
If the barons can be killed on a whim then are not the power, the king is. In your model, there is no check of power on the king.
Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive.
Read: The "progressives" like their labour cheap
If that is true then why are "progressives" also advocating for a higher minimum wage? Do they want cheap labor only to pay them more money?
This is a 70s era sociology department trick: If you agree with it, it's true. If you disagree, it's "relative", or the sayers are "disinformed", or what-have-you.
No, I'm talking about people being fed information that is known to be false under the guise of news but legally protected as "entertainment". Which is to say, they disinform people for profit.
Most of the "progressive" "discussion" consists of criticaster character assassination. I see you, too, lack actual arguments.
How do you argue with someone who obliquely rejects scientific evidence? I'm not saying this as a hypothetical, I'm saying there are a large contingent of individuals who get there information from a single source which is the equivalent of a tabloid. Those tabloids keep hammering home that scientists cannot be trusted and everyone is lying to them. When you present them with factual information, they disregard it as "fake news" and move on to conspiracy theories about it's origin.
If I were unkind I might surmise you're a liberal arts grad.
Only if you count compsci as a liberal art. ;)
I don't particularly think a big wall is the ultimate answer. Nor is welcoming as many "refugees" as possible.
I agree, refugee should be a temporary status, not a permanent one. We should work to restore order to their nation of origin and then (gradually) expel them when it's stabilized.
I'm in Europe and my plan would include buying a big chunk of land south of the mediteranean sea, and sending all asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, together with our "we must do something!" do-gooders there.
If a sufficient government was put in place to ensure their basic human rights were respected then that would be a valid plan.
If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.
I don't agree that disagreeing with the party line constitutes "wilful ignorance".
The latest wave of anti-immigrant sentiment is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much denial of science and anti-intellectualism that I'm not sure you fully comprehend how bad it is
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The U.S isn't different. In fact several of those countries are more free economically than the US and have far less government interference.
The only thing different about the US is you spend a lot of your money invading other countries instead of providing health care for people. That's about it. And in fact your government spends more per capita on health care than other advanced countries, but your health care system is so screwed up that spending doesn't actually provide health care for most people.