Tamika Flynn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dieofliving) wrote2017-09-08 10:04 am
dieofliving) wrote2017-09-08 10:04 am
Quotes RE: Capitalism
A collection of relevant quotes and points on capitalistic systems:
Claiming that capitalism is a rational economic system seems faulty when one only looks at how banks function. If a person does not have any money in their account, they are thus charged a fee for this.
Yet in contrast, if a person already has a sizable amount of money in their bank account (ex. 30,000,000), they are rewarded with interest (ex. 3,000).
This is an example of how the capitalistic system benefits those already rich while keeping the poor in a spiral of never having enough money to help themselves.
******
So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:
This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.
Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?
This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.
Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:
This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.
How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.
Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.
Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.
But we’re not done yet.
The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?
Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.
The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).
The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.
And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.
If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.
But we’re not done yet.
Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.
This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.
In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.
Let this sink in next time someone tells you capitalism allocates wealth according to contribution. It’s empty ideology meant to shield billionaires from a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and power.
******
– A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren, pg. 34 - pg. 36
I guess I had so completely absorbed the prevailing wisdom that I expected people in bankruptcy to look scruffy or shifty or generally disreputable. But what struck me was that they looked so normal.
The people appearing before that judge came in all colors, sizes, and ages. A number of men wore ill-fitting suits, two or three of them with bolero ties, and nearly everyone dressed up for the day. They looked like they were on their way to church. An older couple held onto each other as they walked carefully down the aisle and found a seat. A young mother gently jiggled her keys for the baby in her lap. Everyone was quiet, speaking in hushed tones or not at all. Lawyers – at least I thought they were lawyers – seemed to herd people from one place to another.
I didn’t stay long. I felt as if I knew everyone in that courtroom, and I wanted out of there. It was like staring at a car crash, a car crash involving people you knew.
Later, our data would confirm what I had seen in San Antonio that day. The people seeking the judge’s decree were once solidly middle-class. They had gone to college, found good jobs, gotten married, and bought homes. Now they were flat busted, standing in front of that judge and all the world, ready to give up nearly everything they owned just to get some relief from the bill collectors.
As the data continued to come in, the story got scarier. San Antonio was no exception: all around the country, the overwhelming majority of people filing for bankruptcy were regular families who had hit hard times. Over time we learned that nearly 90 percent were declaring bankruptcy for one of three reasons: a job loss, a medical problem, or a family breakup (typically divorce, sometimes the death of a husband or wife). By the time these families arrived in the bankruptcy court, they had pretty much run out of options. Dad had lost his job or Mom had gotten cancer, and they had been battling for financial survival for a year or longer. They had no savings, no pension plan, and no homes or cars that weren’t already smothered by mortgages. Many owed at least a full year’s income in credit card debt alone. They owed so much that even if they never bought another thing – even if Dad got his job back tomorrow and Mom had a miraculous recovery – the mountain of debt would keep growing on its own, fueled by penalties and compounding interest rates that doubled their debts every few years. By the time they came before a bankruptcy judge, they were so deep in debt that being flat broke – owning nothing, but free from debt – looked like a huge step up and worth a deep personal embarrassment.
Worse yet, the number of bankrupt families was climbing. In the early 1980s, when my partners and I first started collecting data, the number of families annually filing for bankruptcy topped a quarter of a million. True, a recession had hobbled the nation’s economy and squeezed a lot of families, but as the 1980s wore on and the economy recovered, the number of bankruptcies unexpectedly doubled. Suddenly, there was a lot of talk about how Americans had lost their sense of right and wrong, how people were buying piles of stuff they didn’t actually need and then running away when the bills came due. Banks complained loudly about unpaid credit card bills. The word deadbeat got tossed around a lot. It seemed that people filing for bankruptcy weren’t just financial failures – they had also committed an unforgivable sin.
Part of me still wanted to buy the deadbeat story because it was so comforting. But somewhere along the way, while collecting all those bits of data, I came to know who these people were.
In one of our studies, we asked people to explain in their own words why they filed for bankruptcy. I figured that most of them would probably tell stories that made them look good or that relieved them of guilt.
I still remember sitting down with the first stack of questionnaires. As I started reading, I’m sure I wore my most jaded, squinty-eyed expression.
The comments hit me like a physical blow. They were filled with self-loathing. One man had written just three words to explain why he was in bankruptcy:
Stupid.
Stupid.
Stupid.
When writing about their lives, people blamed themselves for taking out a mortgage they didn’t understand. They blamed themselves for their failure to realize their jobs weren’t secure. They blamed themselves for their misplaced trust in no-good husbands and cheating wives. It was blindingly obvious to me that most people saw bankruptcy as a profound personal failure, a sign that they were losers through and through.
Some of the stories were detailed and sad, describing the death of a child or what it meant to be laid off after thirty-three years with the same company. Others stripped a world of pain down to the bare facts:
"Wife died of cancer. Left $65,000 in medical bills after insurance."
"Lack of full-time work – worked five part-time jobs to meet rent, utilities, phone, food, and insurance."
They thought they were safe – safe in their jobs and their lives and their love – but they weren’t.
I ran my fingers over one of the papers, thinking about a woman who had tried to explain how her life had become such a disaster. A turn here, a turn there, and her life might have been very different.
Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job. A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.
******
The most lingering comment I ever heard someone make about Millennials was an older man I was talking to about the way we think about finances–when he dreamed about being a millionaire as a young man, he talked about yachts and mansions and trips to the Bahamas; when I did, I talked about living debt-free and being able to buy dinner out without looking at my monthly budget. He heard me out, took me seriously.
And at the end of it all, he nodded and looked at me and asked, “Do you know who you remind me of?”
And I said no, no I didn’t, and he nodded some more.
“My mother. She grew up just before the Depression hit, and she saw people lose everything left and right. And whenever she talked about finances, she sounded just like you.” He paused for a moment, and said, “I never really thought about what growing up like that would do to a generation.”
He still brings that conversation up, years later. He hasn’t made a single derisive comment about Millennials since.
******
I firmly believe that not only should we raise the minimum wage, but we should also create a maximum wage. There is no reason in which an orthopedic surgeon, which is the highest paying doctor, will make an average of $464,500 a year, while the top 10 CEOs earn well over $33 BILLION a year. If we even so much as cap their earning potential at $1 billion, which is more money than anyone should really need to live a happy fulfilling lifestyle, then it would force them to put that money toward the company or be punished. This means giving their employees better health insurance, giving them more vacations, better wages, paying for their college or their children’s education, creating more jobs, and improving the functionality of their companies. Perhaps even force them to invest in the communities they are serving.
For those of you who are still skeptical… let me put it this way… the highest earning CEO “earned” $156,077,912 in 2014.
Let’s boil this down. There’s about 52 weeks in a year. Let’s say that he works 40 hours a week. So a total of 2,080 hours a year. That’s $75,037 an hour. The median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is $50,502 per year. He’s earning 1.5 times the amount per hour than the average household makes in a year. That disparity is absurd.
To put that even further into perspective, the average NEUROLOGIST earns $219,000 a year according to a 2014 statistic. Every single one of the CEOs on the 100 highest paid CEOs earn at least 93 TIMES the amount that a NEUROLOGIST makes.
Something needs to change. People shouldn’t be starving for the sake of someone else’s greed.
******
The most disturbing thing about economic imperialism is that governments will literally kill their own citizens using a military if they protest working conditions because they work with a wealthy company. Companies encourage that. They’ll allow workers to be punished for trying to form a union.
Banana Republics are the first thing that comes to mind here.
From 1932 onwards the indigenous population of El Salvador was systematically targeted and exterminated by its military forces for protesting against coffee corporations buying the vast majority of arable land and empovirishing local farmers.
Those same corporations applauded the Salvadoran president at the time, regarding him as “having the iron fist necessary to protect economic interests.”
Throughout the decades those who even resembled members of the indigenous community were shot and killed in their homes and in the roads.
People had to abandon their identity in order to survive. Nowadays, the indigenous population of El Salvador practicing their culture and speaking the indigenous language is limited to small settlements also targeted by gang violence.
The people in charge covered this up for years. They only started teaching this at school recently. I graduated high school from there about a year ago.
Capitalism is cruelty. Capitalism is violence. Capitalism is death. There is nothing benign about a system that prioritizes capital over human lives.
******
One of the reasons the De Beers Group is arguably the most evil capitalist entity ever to exist is that they literally funded death squads and fomented rebellion and violence to maintain their absolute control over the world supply of diamonds. That’s how conflict diamonds entered the international market — De Beers would be the ultimate buyer, if they didn’t straight up trade weapons for diamonds, because every single diamond mined passed through a De Beers Group company. They stockpiled diamonds to both induce artificial scarcity (driving up prices) and so they could flood the market should a competitor try to undercut them.
Their monopsony and monopoly started unraveling around the turn of the 21st century, but they still control some 35% of the global diamond trade. That they’ve never faced even a shred of meaningful accountability for the plunder and bloodshed makes them a prime example of the devastation wrought by imperialist, colonialist capitalism.
******
When your boss' income has risen 937% since 1978 and yours has increased by only 5.7%, it's time to stop blaming minorities for your woes.
******
- War Machine (2017)
"Heroin is the only thing bringing money in. Money keeps the people happy, so we're rolling with that."
"Can't they grow something else?"
"Yeah, they could grow cotton... Cotton could grow here."
"Why don't they grow cotton then?"
"Because the United States Congress will not allow any United States aid and development funds to be directed towards the cultivation of a crop that will end up on the world market in competition with U.S. farmers. So we're growing heroin instead."
******
This is a large part of what “there’s no ethical consumption under late capitalism” means. On top of everything else, when the same company owns both the product you’re boycotting *and* the “organic, free range, fair trade, no prison labor” version of that product, your choice is literally meaningless. Even before you factor in the strong possibility that those labels are lies, you’re still just choosing one prong of a two prong marketing strategy meant to capture 100% of the market. Your objections to their cheaper, less ethical brand are being used to wring more money out of you, money that all goes to the same place. Your morality is being used to exploit you, and they still win.
******
I feel like with all these streaming services popping up, pretty soon cord cutting won’t actually be much if at all cheaper than having cable if you want to keep up with all the trendy new shows.
“Having everything” is the number one quality that I want in a service, whether it’s streaming or a brick-and-mortal rental place, and that’s quickly becoming unobtainable as we start to get shows that have exclusive contracts with particular services. I hope we end up with a stable model that lets me access everything without subscribing to half a dozen services, but it’s starting to look like streaming is going to more closely resemble video game console wars a few years ago where there’s a split between multiplatform and console exclusive games.
Catalin Cimpanu and many others predicted this was going to happen a few years back. Studios are getting greedy and they're killing Netflix without realizing that Netflix killed more torrent portals than any of the MPAA/RIAA lawsuits. People will go back to online piracy soon. No way anyone is paying $10 at 15 different streaming services just to watch a few shows once in a while.
******
One of the important, non-Moloch arguments against capitalism is to remember that the actual people who execute capitalism are dumb. They are not perfectly rational profit-maximizers, they have big ideas they want to implement that are often giant wastes of money.
Licensing popular media is a perfect case in point. The easy, low effort way to make money is to license your content to some aggregator. But who wants to do that? Bold executives want to build a brand, a media empire, a dynasty. So they forego easy profit now, for the hope of wild profit later and a reputation as a “bold innovator.”
It’s asinine. And it locks off a lot of content people would happily pay to see.
Music is different from movies because of compulsory licensing laws that force music companies to license a song if a certain amount is paid. This means… more people get to listen to music on the radio and streaming sites, and publishers still make plenty of money.
******
If you're unemployed, it's not because there isn't any work.
Just look around: a housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as there's unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done.
So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs? It's a world where work is not related to satisfying our needs, a world where work is only related to satisfying the profit needs of business.
This country was not built by the huge corporations or government bureaucracies. It was built by people who work. And it is working people who should control the work to be done. Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else's profits, the work won't get done.
******
"I keep seeing things on here about that we need unions, but everywhere I look I see reasons why unions are bad? My parents agree with those reasons too. Could someone explain?"
Speaking as someone in a labor union: the only reason they’d be considered “"bad”“ is becaise they take a very miniscule part of your paycheck (like $20 a week or so) to have enough funds to maintain their status as a union. The benefits definitely outweigh the cons, such as:
-Fixed hours and paid overtime
-Manadatory SUBSTANTIAL yearly raises
-required sick leave and vacation
-a system of people you can talk to if you feel like you’re being unfairly treated that will ACTUALLY LISTEN TO YOU AND TRY TO HELP
My union rep is trying to get everyone at my contract’s wages up to at least $16 an hour by the end of the year, for example. I’m never forced to work more than 40 hours a week, unless I volunteer to. I get paid sick leave and I’ll have two weeks of paid vacation at the end of August. Unions are definitely a good thing in a capitalism-based society, because our worth is often overlooked as unskilled labor (even though I’m required to carry qualifications for my job on me at all times that cost $130 once a year to renew).
******
It’s popular to hate unions and to say that they protect lousy employees–my dad, who used to be a radical, now loves to rail about how teachers unions protect bad teachers. i’m like "I think stagnant wages, underfunded and overcrowded schools, undermining by scab corps like Teach For America, being forced to teach to the test, and being too broke to retire creates lousy teachers who are in debt and can’t try new careers..."
But unions are the ONLY things protecting any workers in the U.S. And unions have largely been gutted by “right to work” laws, which sound great (“oh i have the right to work, how nice”) until you realize it’s the right to work without any protectionsL protections against whistle blowing, retaliation, trying to organize for better conditions, etc.
Many unions are gutted and useless now but you have unions to thank for the 8 hour day, for any standards in wages, for basic workplace safety protections, an end to child labor, the weekend, etc. Unions used to work together to protect people’s housing. They found childcare and food for strikers. People DIED creating unions and fighting for what unions got us.
The sharing economy and the status of independent contractor are both tactics to undermine worker solidarity and to keep workers from having the protection and power of a union.
In today’s economy, unions need to change and expand. We need service industry unions, independent contractor unions (ICs have no rights as ICs, but again are almost always illegally misclassified, whether it’s strippers, uber drivers, hair dressers, massage therapists? amazon workers) collectives where people are supported by each other through the tough times of organizing and inevitable threats from companies, to force them to treat people ethically and to pay living wages and offer benefits.
A business that can’t do this for its workers does not deserve to stay in business.
******
In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
******
"So if we somehow magically went full-on socialism, stateless, classless, workers owned means of production, etc. What's stopping all the able-bodied people who just want to sit around and contribute absolutely nothing and just consume?"
Have you ever sat around your house and done nothing all day for days on end? No neurotypical able-bodied person is gonna do that. It’s miserable. Besides we’re so efficient as a society most of us don’t even have to work to be honest, but that's neither here nor there.
What stops you from just sitting around at home and not doing your dishes? You don’t get paid to do them. What stops you from sitting around at home and not eating? You don’t get paid to eat. What stops you from sitting around and not doing your laundry? You don’t get paid to do laundry.
Like come on your question is absolutely absurd. Neurotypical and abled people don't sit around all day, it’s by definition neurodivergent, it’s literally a mentally ill person thing or a disabled person thing.
People get BORED if they aren’t doing something and you know what? We can redefine what that something is, because under capitalism a lot of people’s jobs are just busy work we can automate or eliminate entirely, and allow them to do things they’d rather be doing. For some people that’s teaching, for some people that's playing video games, but frankly people already make ungodly amounts of money playing video games so you shouldn’t exactly act as though this is a shock that there would be more jobs available to all people.
People are like “but if we don’t force people to clean the sewers or collect garbage or to pick up litter it would never get done” but it would. You don’t have to force people to do it because it’s already something that people will do to make sure they live in a clean environment. The only thing capitalism does is force people to do this work for low pay in bad conditions with no autonomy. If people did this work freely, we’d very quickly find ways to make it easier and safer and more pleasant. People would invent new technology to do it, especially since the people doing it would be free to learn science and engineering. Worker freedom is a boon for progress and increases productivity.
******
As many of you all know, I’m a public school teacher in Texas. This post will be heavily Texas centric, since this is my experience. But this past school years STAAR Standardized Test results have been released, and, well, the entire state did worse than ever.
This is troubling.
First, we need to acknowledge something really sinister about standardized tests: they don’t actually measure the quality of a school. The biggest predictor of standardized test results (not just for STAAR, but the SAT and ACT as well) is the wealth of the child’s family. There’s a lot of reasons for this- wealthy kids are given access to more enrichment opportunities at home, wealthy kids are given better nutrition and healthcare, and wealthy kids go to better funded schools.
In Texas, our schools are paid for, primarily, with property taxes. Which means rich kids in rich neighborhoods go to rich schools. Poor kids in poor neighborhoods go to poor schools. Does that sound unconstitutional? It might be!
But here is where it really screws people- All schools do get some funding directly from the state. And now, how a school performs on the STAAR affects how much money the state gives them. Yes, schools that do well get MORE money than schools who struggle. So rich kids at rich schools get MORE funding to do even BETTER, while poor kids and poor schools have funding taken away. It’s a system that directly worsens the achievement gap here.
Now, the reasons why we have standardized testing at all is a long and complicated story, but a big part of it is this: It’s profitable. In 2013, Texas gave the testing company Pearson a $500 million dollar contract to write and score the tests. There’s money to be made in supplemental materials and teacher training and remedial curriculum.
But why tie it so directly to school funding?
Because the conservatives want public schools to fail.
They want public schools to look bad, to be underfunded, understaffed, and threatened with closure. Because if they do, they can push, harder and harder, for school vouchers, because they can make money on private schools.
Break the public school system, push for vouchers, turn education into a privatized, profitable business.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is happening.
******
"California public school teacher over here. We take the CAASP which is a form of the Smart Balanced Assessment Consortium. As a Title one school we have no chance at scoring high. My school is in the rough part of an affluent town. These kiddos come from gang families, most are single parent homes, and I could list all the issues they face daily but shit it would take all day. So, that low score says these kids don’t know enough. It dictates how much money we get. People like DeVos infuriate me. No experience and no knowledge but sure let’s let her run the education department…"
"I’m in a Title 1 school as well. Though it’s a rural little town, bad economy, very little for kids to do (There’s a park and a pool. No movie theater. No arcades. Not even a fucking bowling alley.) Drugs and teen pregnancy are a big risk. Low test scores aren’t a reflection of these kids’ worth or potential, it’s a reflection on how poverty has stripped their community of opportunities. DeVos makes me want to pull out my hair."
"Standardized tests also test cultural knowledge. And what cultural knowledge are they testing? Cultural knowledge common to American/Canadian born, wealthy, white families. These tests are absolutely biased against immigrant children, poor children of color, and poor children in general."
"Oh absolutely. And that’s not even getting into how the History, Science, and Math tests all require above grade level reading abilities to even understand the questions. And how they don’t actually tell teachers what a passing grade on each test will be BEFORE it’s administered (Some years its 40 questions some years its 45, some years its 43. We literally don’t know.) AND I could talk for days about how the writing tests are absurd, don’t reflect any practical writing skill or real world writing process. AND how they keep raising the standard for what is a passing rate for schools. They keep making the “acceptable” rate higher and higher, so even if the school finally reaches what was passing last year, they are STILL considered “failing” this year."
******
It is the same in Sweden. It is so funny every time an american company opens up offices here and then tries to do it the american way and all the unions go “I don’t think so”.
Like when Toys ‘r Us opened in sweden 1995.
They refused to sign on to the union deals that govern such things as pay/pension and vacation in Sweden. Most of our rights are not mandated by law (we don’t have a minimum wage for example) but are made in voluntary agreements between the unions and the companies.
But they refused, saying that they had never negotiated with any unions anywhere else in the world and weren’t planning to do it in Sweden either.
Of course a lot of people thought it was useless fighting against an international giant, but Handels (the store worker’s union) said that they could not budge, because that might mean that the whole Swedish model might crumble. So they went on strike in the three stores that the company had opened so far.
Cue a shitstorm from the press, and from right wing politicians. But the members were all for it, and other unions started doing sympathy actions. The teamsters refused to deliver goods to their stores, the financial unions blockaded all economical transactions regarding Toys ‘r Us and the strike got strong international support as well, especially in the US.
In the end, Toys ‘r Us caved in, signed the union deal, and thus their employees got the same treatment as Swedish store workers everywhere.
The right to be treated as bloody human beings and not disposable cogs in a machine.
And this story right here? is exactly why Republicans in the US work so hard to bust unions. It’s because unionizing WORKS and they’re terrified of workers actually having some power.
So I want to point out for anybody who didn’t get it that those companies would not be operating stores in these Nordic nations if they were not STILL PROFITABLE - even when forced to pay reasonable wages and give reasonable benefits. People STILL PATRONIZE them - they are not priced out of the ability to buy a burger or a watergun, or the stores would have shut down.
Read up on the story of Wal-Mart failing in Germany, and how badly they messed up, especially when it came to unions and firings
******
Why does “you get what you pay for” only apply to consumers and not employers?
Why do employers offering minimum wage expect dedicated, hard working, knowledgeable, experienced employees instead of just someone who shows up and does the job?
If you’re only willing to pay the minimum, you should only expect to get the minimum.
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Capitalism stops the growth of knowledge. When one is forced to work endless hours to simply survive, they never get a chance to research and improve their surroundings. There is no way you can argue it’s the most efficient way to “advance” society technologically, academically, etc.
This even goes beyond the whole “humans always have to work to survive” rhetoric. Most of us are working far more hours than humans did a hundred thousand years ago to survive, and they had far more free time than we did.
There’s no excuse for the amount of hours people are forced to work, when the vast majority of it is simply busywork that does nothing to improve the lives of people, and creates grotesque amounts of excess waste never to be used.
Under capitalism, research only gets done when you can find someone to fund it.
While there are non-profit bodies that fund research without immediate economic benefit, the vast majority of funding, especially in the sciences and engineering, goes to research that is profitable, or at least can be presented as such.
Not does capitalism diminish the potential pool of researchers and ancillary staff, it actively disincentivizes research in a potentially infinite range of areas.
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I guess if I was an American and saw all the wildly exorbitant medical bills people would get, I would wonder how universal healthcare got paid for too.
Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.
Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.
This explains a lot. And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.
And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that. Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given. It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.
People also don’t seem to realize that insurance companies artificially inflate the cost of healthcare and then offer “discounts” to get health care providers to accept or suggest their insurance brand.
Healthcare should not be a for-profit industry, but instead a universal right, and insurance companies are predatory con artists making billions of dollars off of human suffering and death.
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Teenagers still deserve a livable wage when they're doing the same job an adult is. This idea that "teenagers first jobs" should be paid down and less meaningful is:
1. completely fabricated and
2. 2) completely ignores the fact that many teenagers NEED INCOME TO SURVIVE they’re living on their own, they’re going to college, they’re helping support their families
AND REGARDLESS OF ALL OF THAT… They’re still doing the same work as an adult, they’re still putting their time and effort into a service our society requires at the moment to function.
“Student minimum wage” is also bullshit because it allows a place to hire a ton of kids under 18 and not have to pay them properly on top of not having to give any form of benefits and let’s face it so they can ignore current employee standards because kids don’t know their rights as well.
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Now amount of "hard work" the 1% has done can justify them hoarding all that wealth when there are people working full time jobs who can't afford to feed their families.
Some earn 400x what the average worker does. It's impossible to work that hard. They're leeches who profit off underpaid labor.
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We are short staffed almost 97% of the time at my retail job. Because corporate has figured out you can overwork 4 people at minimum wage instead of paying for the 8 people you should probably have to be on the clock.
Baby boomers grew up with stores that were adequately staffed, with workers who most likely had weeks of training for their jobs as opposed to the 1-2 shadow shift training we get now. Also those workers most likely were able to be full time if they wanted. Now retail, except for management positions, is mostly made up of part time workers, because you don’t have to give them benefits. So you have a workforce of perpetually underpaid, overwhelmed, undertrained people trying to do their best all while dealing with an entire generation of people who refuse to acknowledge that the system has changed and the average retail worker has NO control over that change and is being taken advantage of.
Like we got our customer surveys back, and almost every single one mentioned that they couldn’t find someone to help them or we needed more people on register because it was TOO SLOW, but what did management tell us instead of scheduling more people? We need to be quicker on register and call for backup if necessary. Which makes no sense because we can’t call for backup THAT ISN’T THERE.
Y'all my parents haven’t worked retail since the 70s and they absolutely never believe me about the things that happen at work. I explain the schedule for next week gets hung up on the Friday before and they scoff and go “well when i worked at X they had it a month up your manager is just lazy.” No mom, its company policy to only do “two weeks” in advance. They won’t give you a full month’s scheduling in advance cause it let’s you plan for a world outside of work.
Or about the hours, workload or anything. They just assume its an individual’s failing instead of corporate mandate. Or, if they do believe me (that its company policy) they call it ridiculous and point out some survey that argues its Good Business to do (insert decent thing here).As if they think the higher ups don’t know this and are simply ignorant of Good Business Practices. They don’t understand that retail has completely shifted from caring about its employees to squeezing out every penny now instead of investing it for later.
Cause that isn’t how it was when they worked and they just can’t seem to see otherwise.
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The millennial experience is tied to growing income inequality and the indentured servitude of student loan debt
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If you can't afford to pay a living wage, you can't afford to be in business. Asking people to work below poverty wages so you can own a business is entitlement at best.
You are asking human beings to use their lives to subsidize your desire to own a business.
If a job is worth being done, it's worth being paid enough to live.
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Someone told me socialism is evil on a tweet about universal healthcare, and their pinned tweet is a Gofundme for their baby who has cancer.
I mean, when there are perfectly good systems used throughout the developed world that adequately provide care for people’s children without forcing them to turn to GoFundMe for the chance at some charity, maybe it’s worth supporting them?
I don’t know, the idea that people are required to beg for healthcare on the internet in the richest country in all of human history will never make sense to me. Ever. Healthcare will always be a right in my eyes, plain and simple.
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Every time I see someone talk about how capitalism allows for innovation, I'm like "Imagine how much innovation there would be if everyone had access to resources".
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
–Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb
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I don't think people really understand how vastly different someone being a millionaire is from someone being a billionaire. People have this idea that it's basically the same thing but billionaires are just normal rich people who can afford more stuff than millionaires when a billionaire is a completely different breed. To put it in perspective 1 million seconds is almost 12 days while 1 billion seconds is 31 years. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is the difference between 12 days and 31 years.
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The idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious.
Shifting the guilt to the consumer is an intentional marketing ploy. The same was done when soda companies switched from bottles to cans.
Originally soda machines had a place for you to return your bottle which the company would collect, sanitize, and re-use. Consumers paid a deposit when they bought the soda, then got it back when they dropped the empty bottle in the slot. Bars and restaurants also had to pay the deposit and redeem the bottles for a refund
Then companies decided it’d be cheaper to use disposable aluminum cans. Soda is something people often consumed in public places like parks and in front of stores. Increased public trash led to a litter problem. Environmentalists pressured the soda companies to fix the problem by bringing back the deposit and recycling programs. Instead, the companies started anti-liter campaigns that placed the guilt wholly on the consumer.
This was decades before curb-side recycling existed. Recycling plants were few and far between, and consumers would have to save up cans then cart them to one of these facilities to recycle them, which few individuals had the time and transpiration to do. The ad campaigns led to people demanding more public garbage cans, which did reduce liter, but those were purchased and maintained at city expense and the contents went to landfills. It also led to the general public believing littering and landfill problems rested squarely on the shoulders of consumers even though the corporations had a perfectly good recycling system that they could have continued.
Big business wants you to blame yourself and each other for problems they caused, and they’d rather spend money on guilt shifting ad campaigns than use that money for something good.
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Millennials value work that has meaning above work that pays well and they hate that as well. It means we can’t be shut up with busy work while they’re made to seem like they’re running a well oiled machine. They come from a generation of a boss being someone who says “do what I say because I told you to” and we come from a generation who values a boss that says “what can I do for you that will help you excel at your job?”
Millennials do not cope well with meaningless busy work so their boss looks better. They don’t cope with being talked down to or not being assisted by their boss when they have a problem. They do not deal well with their innovative ideas being shut down because “that’s not how we do it here.” and I don’t see how any of those things is a problem.
Millennials are also the first generation since the internet was a prominent thing to utilize it as a source of information in a way that is empowering for each other. A single millennial can buy a product and then inform anyone who wants to know about the quality of said product. It only takes a handful of millennials to say “this is a substandard product” to render all the millions of dollars spent on advertising that product completely useless.
Big business has been a blotch on millennials lives since before most of you could even assume a role in adulthood to effect it, so you trust one another more than you trust advertisements or sponsorship, etc.
On the flip side, though, you enthusiastically will push and promote things that you love.
Big business and their baby boomer CEOs and presidents HATE this. Because it means that they can no longer provide a substandard product while making the consumer feel there is nothing better out there.
In the past, if every dish soap was awful, you just had to continue using awful dish soap. Now, you can crowd source an alternative. You can post in a forum, your facebook, a mass text, etc and say “I hate every dish soap, what can I do?” and you will be directed to actual good brands or you will be taught how to brew your own.
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I’d love to buy a house, but I can’t afford a down payment and can’t be certain that I’ll have the same income levels for thirty years and I don’t actually know whether the banks will accept my highly-fluctuating, self-employed-and-seasonal-labor income as stable enough or high enough to be approved for a mortgage.
And also every new housing development I’ve seen in the past five years has been “Executive Housing, Starting At 390K” and the realtor websites are full of last decade’s foreclosed subdivision homes in the $275K region, and there’s legit no one, including the zoning board, that’s going to help me find or make a cute little house on a tenth of an acre in the region of $50-60K, let alone every other millennial who might like to settle down in a place that suits her desires and means.
Oh, and that same zoning means five people aren’t allowed to share that $300K, 5-bedroom McMansion.
And what else? The refrigerator that recently conked out on me was manufactured in 1967. That thing lasted almost fifty years, and today if I walk into a big box store’s appliance department to buy a new refrigerator they will tell me I should really buy a warranty to cover the apparently-substantial risk that it will break within two to five years.
Oh, and there’s apparently a $400ish premium to buy one with a convenient configuration because if you want the refrigerator on top and accessible without bending down for anyone taller than your average first grader there aren’t any of those in the entry-level price range.
Then there’s the labor market itself, where “entry level” positions want three-to-five years of experience, and everybody won’t shut up about the trades but even that requires a $5K+ outlay to go to school for it, and every fast-food restaurant out there has a permanent “Now Hiring” sign up because they drive employees away as fast as they can replace them.
And so many food-service jobs involve being forced to throw away loads of food as it expires but if you eat it or take it home it’s viewed as stealing, and retail jobs sometimes require you to smash perfectly good computers with a sledgehammer so nobody can use them, and so, yes, I’m gonna make my own laundry detergent from a recipe I found on the internet, and I’m gonna buy as much of my vegetables as possible in seed form, and I’m gonna read the consumer reviews on things before I buy them and I’m going to source a refrigerator from Cragislist for approximately the price of the warranty on a new one, and if The Market wants me to buy a house, it can bloody well wait for me to have the money.
Because seriously, with its “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy” mindset and historic, far-reaching nonsense, the business side of the equation has little room to complain about millennials being the selfish ones.
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A person should not have to take an advanced law degree to avoid being taken advantage of by a multi-billion dollar company.
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In his new documentary series "War on Waste", Reucassel reveals that up to 40% of bananas are thrown away by farmers because they don't fit standards set by supermarkets. Basically they are too bent, too straight, too long, too short, too fat, or too thin.
"I was shocked by the waste," Reucassel told news.com.au. "These bananas are highly edible but they don't fit the cosmetic look. If they are too curved, they are thrown out. If they are not curvy enough, they are thrown out."
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What blows me about this is what happened to conservative capitalism? The free market? If industries are dying they need to either rework or die(under capitalism) so the free market bullshit stop applying to things when stuff they like are going out of business. Then it’s “millennial are killing this business! We have to save them.” Like a bunch of commies.
And I can attest, as a former employee, in Sears’ case, Millennials have nothing to do with it, that 100% the CEO bleeding the company dry for every penny they can at the cost of it employees and customers.
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Claiming that capitalism is a rational economic system seems faulty when one only looks at how banks function. If a person does not have any money in their account, they are thus charged a fee for this.
Yet in contrast, if a person already has a sizable amount of money in their bank account (ex. 30,000,000), they are rewarded with interest (ex. 3,000).
This is an example of how the capitalistic system benefits those already rich while keeping the poor in a spiral of never having enough money to help themselves.
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So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:
This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.
Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?
This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.
Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:
This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.
How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.
Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.
Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.
But we’re not done yet.
The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?
Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.
The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).
The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.
And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.
If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.
But we’re not done yet.
Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.
This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.
In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.
Let this sink in next time someone tells you capitalism allocates wealth according to contribution. It’s empty ideology meant to shield billionaires from a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and power.
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– A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren, pg. 34 - pg. 36
I guess I had so completely absorbed the prevailing wisdom that I expected people in bankruptcy to look scruffy or shifty or generally disreputable. But what struck me was that they looked so normal.
The people appearing before that judge came in all colors, sizes, and ages. A number of men wore ill-fitting suits, two or three of them with bolero ties, and nearly everyone dressed up for the day. They looked like they were on their way to church. An older couple held onto each other as they walked carefully down the aisle and found a seat. A young mother gently jiggled her keys for the baby in her lap. Everyone was quiet, speaking in hushed tones or not at all. Lawyers – at least I thought they were lawyers – seemed to herd people from one place to another.
I didn’t stay long. I felt as if I knew everyone in that courtroom, and I wanted out of there. It was like staring at a car crash, a car crash involving people you knew.
Later, our data would confirm what I had seen in San Antonio that day. The people seeking the judge’s decree were once solidly middle-class. They had gone to college, found good jobs, gotten married, and bought homes. Now they were flat busted, standing in front of that judge and all the world, ready to give up nearly everything they owned just to get some relief from the bill collectors.
As the data continued to come in, the story got scarier. San Antonio was no exception: all around the country, the overwhelming majority of people filing for bankruptcy were regular families who had hit hard times. Over time we learned that nearly 90 percent were declaring bankruptcy for one of three reasons: a job loss, a medical problem, or a family breakup (typically divorce, sometimes the death of a husband or wife). By the time these families arrived in the bankruptcy court, they had pretty much run out of options. Dad had lost his job or Mom had gotten cancer, and they had been battling for financial survival for a year or longer. They had no savings, no pension plan, and no homes or cars that weren’t already smothered by mortgages. Many owed at least a full year’s income in credit card debt alone. They owed so much that even if they never bought another thing – even if Dad got his job back tomorrow and Mom had a miraculous recovery – the mountain of debt would keep growing on its own, fueled by penalties and compounding interest rates that doubled their debts every few years. By the time they came before a bankruptcy judge, they were so deep in debt that being flat broke – owning nothing, but free from debt – looked like a huge step up and worth a deep personal embarrassment.
Worse yet, the number of bankrupt families was climbing. In the early 1980s, when my partners and I first started collecting data, the number of families annually filing for bankruptcy topped a quarter of a million. True, a recession had hobbled the nation’s economy and squeezed a lot of families, but as the 1980s wore on and the economy recovered, the number of bankruptcies unexpectedly doubled. Suddenly, there was a lot of talk about how Americans had lost their sense of right and wrong, how people were buying piles of stuff they didn’t actually need and then running away when the bills came due. Banks complained loudly about unpaid credit card bills. The word deadbeat got tossed around a lot. It seemed that people filing for bankruptcy weren’t just financial failures – they had also committed an unforgivable sin.
Part of me still wanted to buy the deadbeat story because it was so comforting. But somewhere along the way, while collecting all those bits of data, I came to know who these people were.
In one of our studies, we asked people to explain in their own words why they filed for bankruptcy. I figured that most of them would probably tell stories that made them look good or that relieved them of guilt.
I still remember sitting down with the first stack of questionnaires. As I started reading, I’m sure I wore my most jaded, squinty-eyed expression.
The comments hit me like a physical blow. They were filled with self-loathing. One man had written just three words to explain why he was in bankruptcy:
Stupid.
Stupid.
Stupid.
When writing about their lives, people blamed themselves for taking out a mortgage they didn’t understand. They blamed themselves for their failure to realize their jobs weren’t secure. They blamed themselves for their misplaced trust in no-good husbands and cheating wives. It was blindingly obvious to me that most people saw bankruptcy as a profound personal failure, a sign that they were losers through and through.
Some of the stories were detailed and sad, describing the death of a child or what it meant to be laid off after thirty-three years with the same company. Others stripped a world of pain down to the bare facts:
"Wife died of cancer. Left $65,000 in medical bills after insurance."
"Lack of full-time work – worked five part-time jobs to meet rent, utilities, phone, food, and insurance."
They thought they were safe – safe in their jobs and their lives and their love – but they weren’t.
I ran my fingers over one of the papers, thinking about a woman who had tried to explain how her life had become such a disaster. A turn here, a turn there, and her life might have been very different.
Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job. A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.
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The most lingering comment I ever heard someone make about Millennials was an older man I was talking to about the way we think about finances–when he dreamed about being a millionaire as a young man, he talked about yachts and mansions and trips to the Bahamas; when I did, I talked about living debt-free and being able to buy dinner out without looking at my monthly budget. He heard me out, took me seriously.
And at the end of it all, he nodded and looked at me and asked, “Do you know who you remind me of?”
And I said no, no I didn’t, and he nodded some more.
“My mother. She grew up just before the Depression hit, and she saw people lose everything left and right. And whenever she talked about finances, she sounded just like you.” He paused for a moment, and said, “I never really thought about what growing up like that would do to a generation.”
He still brings that conversation up, years later. He hasn’t made a single derisive comment about Millennials since.
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I firmly believe that not only should we raise the minimum wage, but we should also create a maximum wage. There is no reason in which an orthopedic surgeon, which is the highest paying doctor, will make an average of $464,500 a year, while the top 10 CEOs earn well over $33 BILLION a year. If we even so much as cap their earning potential at $1 billion, which is more money than anyone should really need to live a happy fulfilling lifestyle, then it would force them to put that money toward the company or be punished. This means giving their employees better health insurance, giving them more vacations, better wages, paying for their college or their children’s education, creating more jobs, and improving the functionality of their companies. Perhaps even force them to invest in the communities they are serving.
For those of you who are still skeptical… let me put it this way… the highest earning CEO “earned” $156,077,912 in 2014.
Let’s boil this down. There’s about 52 weeks in a year. Let’s say that he works 40 hours a week. So a total of 2,080 hours a year. That’s $75,037 an hour. The median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is $50,502 per year. He’s earning 1.5 times the amount per hour than the average household makes in a year. That disparity is absurd.
To put that even further into perspective, the average NEUROLOGIST earns $219,000 a year according to a 2014 statistic. Every single one of the CEOs on the 100 highest paid CEOs earn at least 93 TIMES the amount that a NEUROLOGIST makes.
Something needs to change. People shouldn’t be starving for the sake of someone else’s greed.
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The most disturbing thing about economic imperialism is that governments will literally kill their own citizens using a military if they protest working conditions because they work with a wealthy company. Companies encourage that. They’ll allow workers to be punished for trying to form a union.
Banana Republics are the first thing that comes to mind here.
From 1932 onwards the indigenous population of El Salvador was systematically targeted and exterminated by its military forces for protesting against coffee corporations buying the vast majority of arable land and empovirishing local farmers.
Those same corporations applauded the Salvadoran president at the time, regarding him as “having the iron fist necessary to protect economic interests.”
Throughout the decades those who even resembled members of the indigenous community were shot and killed in their homes and in the roads.
People had to abandon their identity in order to survive. Nowadays, the indigenous population of El Salvador practicing their culture and speaking the indigenous language is limited to small settlements also targeted by gang violence.
The people in charge covered this up for years. They only started teaching this at school recently. I graduated high school from there about a year ago.
Capitalism is cruelty. Capitalism is violence. Capitalism is death. There is nothing benign about a system that prioritizes capital over human lives.
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One of the reasons the De Beers Group is arguably the most evil capitalist entity ever to exist is that they literally funded death squads and fomented rebellion and violence to maintain their absolute control over the world supply of diamonds. That’s how conflict diamonds entered the international market — De Beers would be the ultimate buyer, if they didn’t straight up trade weapons for diamonds, because every single diamond mined passed through a De Beers Group company. They stockpiled diamonds to both induce artificial scarcity (driving up prices) and so they could flood the market should a competitor try to undercut them.
Their monopsony and monopoly started unraveling around the turn of the 21st century, but they still control some 35% of the global diamond trade. That they’ve never faced even a shred of meaningful accountability for the plunder and bloodshed makes them a prime example of the devastation wrought by imperialist, colonialist capitalism.
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When your boss' income has risen 937% since 1978 and yours has increased by only 5.7%, it's time to stop blaming minorities for your woes.
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- War Machine (2017)
"Heroin is the only thing bringing money in. Money keeps the people happy, so we're rolling with that."
"Can't they grow something else?"
"Yeah, they could grow cotton... Cotton could grow here."
"Why don't they grow cotton then?"
"Because the United States Congress will not allow any United States aid and development funds to be directed towards the cultivation of a crop that will end up on the world market in competition with U.S. farmers. So we're growing heroin instead."
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This is a large part of what “there’s no ethical consumption under late capitalism” means. On top of everything else, when the same company owns both the product you’re boycotting *and* the “organic, free range, fair trade, no prison labor” version of that product, your choice is literally meaningless. Even before you factor in the strong possibility that those labels are lies, you’re still just choosing one prong of a two prong marketing strategy meant to capture 100% of the market. Your objections to their cheaper, less ethical brand are being used to wring more money out of you, money that all goes to the same place. Your morality is being used to exploit you, and they still win.
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I feel like with all these streaming services popping up, pretty soon cord cutting won’t actually be much if at all cheaper than having cable if you want to keep up with all the trendy new shows.
“Having everything” is the number one quality that I want in a service, whether it’s streaming or a brick-and-mortal rental place, and that’s quickly becoming unobtainable as we start to get shows that have exclusive contracts with particular services. I hope we end up with a stable model that lets me access everything without subscribing to half a dozen services, but it’s starting to look like streaming is going to more closely resemble video game console wars a few years ago where there’s a split between multiplatform and console exclusive games.
Catalin Cimpanu and many others predicted this was going to happen a few years back. Studios are getting greedy and they're killing Netflix without realizing that Netflix killed more torrent portals than any of the MPAA/RIAA lawsuits. People will go back to online piracy soon. No way anyone is paying $10 at 15 different streaming services just to watch a few shows once in a while.
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One of the important, non-Moloch arguments against capitalism is to remember that the actual people who execute capitalism are dumb. They are not perfectly rational profit-maximizers, they have big ideas they want to implement that are often giant wastes of money.
Licensing popular media is a perfect case in point. The easy, low effort way to make money is to license your content to some aggregator. But who wants to do that? Bold executives want to build a brand, a media empire, a dynasty. So they forego easy profit now, for the hope of wild profit later and a reputation as a “bold innovator.”
It’s asinine. And it locks off a lot of content people would happily pay to see.
Music is different from movies because of compulsory licensing laws that force music companies to license a song if a certain amount is paid. This means… more people get to listen to music on the radio and streaming sites, and publishers still make plenty of money.
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If you're unemployed, it's not because there isn't any work.
Just look around: a housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as there's unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done.
So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs? It's a world where work is not related to satisfying our needs, a world where work is only related to satisfying the profit needs of business.
This country was not built by the huge corporations or government bureaucracies. It was built by people who work. And it is working people who should control the work to be done. Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else's profits, the work won't get done.
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"I keep seeing things on here about that we need unions, but everywhere I look I see reasons why unions are bad? My parents agree with those reasons too. Could someone explain?"
Speaking as someone in a labor union: the only reason they’d be considered “"bad”“ is becaise they take a very miniscule part of your paycheck (like $20 a week or so) to have enough funds to maintain their status as a union. The benefits definitely outweigh the cons, such as:
-Fixed hours and paid overtime
-Manadatory SUBSTANTIAL yearly raises
-required sick leave and vacation
-a system of people you can talk to if you feel like you’re being unfairly treated that will ACTUALLY LISTEN TO YOU AND TRY TO HELP
My union rep is trying to get everyone at my contract’s wages up to at least $16 an hour by the end of the year, for example. I’m never forced to work more than 40 hours a week, unless I volunteer to. I get paid sick leave and I’ll have two weeks of paid vacation at the end of August. Unions are definitely a good thing in a capitalism-based society, because our worth is often overlooked as unskilled labor (even though I’m required to carry qualifications for my job on me at all times that cost $130 once a year to renew).
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It’s popular to hate unions and to say that they protect lousy employees–my dad, who used to be a radical, now loves to rail about how teachers unions protect bad teachers. i’m like "I think stagnant wages, underfunded and overcrowded schools, undermining by scab corps like Teach For America, being forced to teach to the test, and being too broke to retire creates lousy teachers who are in debt and can’t try new careers..."
But unions are the ONLY things protecting any workers in the U.S. And unions have largely been gutted by “right to work” laws, which sound great (“oh i have the right to work, how nice”) until you realize it’s the right to work without any protectionsL protections against whistle blowing, retaliation, trying to organize for better conditions, etc.
Many unions are gutted and useless now but you have unions to thank for the 8 hour day, for any standards in wages, for basic workplace safety protections, an end to child labor, the weekend, etc. Unions used to work together to protect people’s housing. They found childcare and food for strikers. People DIED creating unions and fighting for what unions got us.
The sharing economy and the status of independent contractor are both tactics to undermine worker solidarity and to keep workers from having the protection and power of a union.
In today’s economy, unions need to change and expand. We need service industry unions, independent contractor unions (ICs have no rights as ICs, but again are almost always illegally misclassified, whether it’s strippers, uber drivers, hair dressers, massage therapists? amazon workers) collectives where people are supported by each other through the tough times of organizing and inevitable threats from companies, to force them to treat people ethically and to pay living wages and offer benefits.
A business that can’t do this for its workers does not deserve to stay in business.
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In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
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"So if we somehow magically went full-on socialism, stateless, classless, workers owned means of production, etc. What's stopping all the able-bodied people who just want to sit around and contribute absolutely nothing and just consume?"
Have you ever sat around your house and done nothing all day for days on end? No neurotypical able-bodied person is gonna do that. It’s miserable. Besides we’re so efficient as a society most of us don’t even have to work to be honest, but that's neither here nor there.
What stops you from just sitting around at home and not doing your dishes? You don’t get paid to do them. What stops you from sitting around at home and not eating? You don’t get paid to eat. What stops you from sitting around and not doing your laundry? You don’t get paid to do laundry.
Like come on your question is absolutely absurd. Neurotypical and abled people don't sit around all day, it’s by definition neurodivergent, it’s literally a mentally ill person thing or a disabled person thing.
People get BORED if they aren’t doing something and you know what? We can redefine what that something is, because under capitalism a lot of people’s jobs are just busy work we can automate or eliminate entirely, and allow them to do things they’d rather be doing. For some people that’s teaching, for some people that's playing video games, but frankly people already make ungodly amounts of money playing video games so you shouldn’t exactly act as though this is a shock that there would be more jobs available to all people.
People are like “but if we don’t force people to clean the sewers or collect garbage or to pick up litter it would never get done” but it would. You don’t have to force people to do it because it’s already something that people will do to make sure they live in a clean environment. The only thing capitalism does is force people to do this work for low pay in bad conditions with no autonomy. If people did this work freely, we’d very quickly find ways to make it easier and safer and more pleasant. People would invent new technology to do it, especially since the people doing it would be free to learn science and engineering. Worker freedom is a boon for progress and increases productivity.
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As many of you all know, I’m a public school teacher in Texas. This post will be heavily Texas centric, since this is my experience. But this past school years STAAR Standardized Test results have been released, and, well, the entire state did worse than ever.
This is troubling.
First, we need to acknowledge something really sinister about standardized tests: they don’t actually measure the quality of a school. The biggest predictor of standardized test results (not just for STAAR, but the SAT and ACT as well) is the wealth of the child’s family. There’s a lot of reasons for this- wealthy kids are given access to more enrichment opportunities at home, wealthy kids are given better nutrition and healthcare, and wealthy kids go to better funded schools.
In Texas, our schools are paid for, primarily, with property taxes. Which means rich kids in rich neighborhoods go to rich schools. Poor kids in poor neighborhoods go to poor schools. Does that sound unconstitutional? It might be!
But here is where it really screws people- All schools do get some funding directly from the state. And now, how a school performs on the STAAR affects how much money the state gives them. Yes, schools that do well get MORE money than schools who struggle. So rich kids at rich schools get MORE funding to do even BETTER, while poor kids and poor schools have funding taken away. It’s a system that directly worsens the achievement gap here.
Now, the reasons why we have standardized testing at all is a long and complicated story, but a big part of it is this: It’s profitable. In 2013, Texas gave the testing company Pearson a $500 million dollar contract to write and score the tests. There’s money to be made in supplemental materials and teacher training and remedial curriculum.
But why tie it so directly to school funding?
Because the conservatives want public schools to fail.
They want public schools to look bad, to be underfunded, understaffed, and threatened with closure. Because if they do, they can push, harder and harder, for school vouchers, because they can make money on private schools.
Break the public school system, push for vouchers, turn education into a privatized, profitable business.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is happening.
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"California public school teacher over here. We take the CAASP which is a form of the Smart Balanced Assessment Consortium. As a Title one school we have no chance at scoring high. My school is in the rough part of an affluent town. These kiddos come from gang families, most are single parent homes, and I could list all the issues they face daily but shit it would take all day. So, that low score says these kids don’t know enough. It dictates how much money we get. People like DeVos infuriate me. No experience and no knowledge but sure let’s let her run the education department…"
"I’m in a Title 1 school as well. Though it’s a rural little town, bad economy, very little for kids to do (There’s a park and a pool. No movie theater. No arcades. Not even a fucking bowling alley.) Drugs and teen pregnancy are a big risk. Low test scores aren’t a reflection of these kids’ worth or potential, it’s a reflection on how poverty has stripped their community of opportunities. DeVos makes me want to pull out my hair."
"Standardized tests also test cultural knowledge. And what cultural knowledge are they testing? Cultural knowledge common to American/Canadian born, wealthy, white families. These tests are absolutely biased against immigrant children, poor children of color, and poor children in general."
"Oh absolutely. And that’s not even getting into how the History, Science, and Math tests all require above grade level reading abilities to even understand the questions. And how they don’t actually tell teachers what a passing grade on each test will be BEFORE it’s administered (Some years its 40 questions some years its 45, some years its 43. We literally don’t know.) AND I could talk for days about how the writing tests are absurd, don’t reflect any practical writing skill or real world writing process. AND how they keep raising the standard for what is a passing rate for schools. They keep making the “acceptable” rate higher and higher, so even if the school finally reaches what was passing last year, they are STILL considered “failing” this year."
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It is the same in Sweden. It is so funny every time an american company opens up offices here and then tries to do it the american way and all the unions go “I don’t think so”.
Like when Toys ‘r Us opened in sweden 1995.
They refused to sign on to the union deals that govern such things as pay/pension and vacation in Sweden. Most of our rights are not mandated by law (we don’t have a minimum wage for example) but are made in voluntary agreements between the unions and the companies.
But they refused, saying that they had never negotiated with any unions anywhere else in the world and weren’t planning to do it in Sweden either.
Of course a lot of people thought it was useless fighting against an international giant, but Handels (the store worker’s union) said that they could not budge, because that might mean that the whole Swedish model might crumble. So they went on strike in the three stores that the company had opened so far.
Cue a shitstorm from the press, and from right wing politicians. But the members were all for it, and other unions started doing sympathy actions. The teamsters refused to deliver goods to their stores, the financial unions blockaded all economical transactions regarding Toys ‘r Us and the strike got strong international support as well, especially in the US.
In the end, Toys ‘r Us caved in, signed the union deal, and thus their employees got the same treatment as Swedish store workers everywhere.
The right to be treated as bloody human beings and not disposable cogs in a machine.
And this story right here? is exactly why Republicans in the US work so hard to bust unions. It’s because unionizing WORKS and they’re terrified of workers actually having some power.
So I want to point out for anybody who didn’t get it that those companies would not be operating stores in these Nordic nations if they were not STILL PROFITABLE - even when forced to pay reasonable wages and give reasonable benefits. People STILL PATRONIZE them - they are not priced out of the ability to buy a burger or a watergun, or the stores would have shut down.
Read up on the story of Wal-Mart failing in Germany, and how badly they messed up, especially when it came to unions and firings
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Why does “you get what you pay for” only apply to consumers and not employers?
Why do employers offering minimum wage expect dedicated, hard working, knowledgeable, experienced employees instead of just someone who shows up and does the job?
If you’re only willing to pay the minimum, you should only expect to get the minimum.
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Capitalism stops the growth of knowledge. When one is forced to work endless hours to simply survive, they never get a chance to research and improve their surroundings. There is no way you can argue it’s the most efficient way to “advance” society technologically, academically, etc.
This even goes beyond the whole “humans always have to work to survive” rhetoric. Most of us are working far more hours than humans did a hundred thousand years ago to survive, and they had far more free time than we did.
There’s no excuse for the amount of hours people are forced to work, when the vast majority of it is simply busywork that does nothing to improve the lives of people, and creates grotesque amounts of excess waste never to be used.
Under capitalism, research only gets done when you can find someone to fund it.
While there are non-profit bodies that fund research without immediate economic benefit, the vast majority of funding, especially in the sciences and engineering, goes to research that is profitable, or at least can be presented as such.
Not does capitalism diminish the potential pool of researchers and ancillary staff, it actively disincentivizes research in a potentially infinite range of areas.
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I guess if I was an American and saw all the wildly exorbitant medical bills people would get, I would wonder how universal healthcare got paid for too.
Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.
Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.
This explains a lot. And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.
And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that. Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given. It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.
People also don’t seem to realize that insurance companies artificially inflate the cost of healthcare and then offer “discounts” to get health care providers to accept or suggest their insurance brand.
Healthcare should not be a for-profit industry, but instead a universal right, and insurance companies are predatory con artists making billions of dollars off of human suffering and death.
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Teenagers still deserve a livable wage when they're doing the same job an adult is. This idea that "teenagers first jobs" should be paid down and less meaningful is:
1. completely fabricated and
2. 2) completely ignores the fact that many teenagers NEED INCOME TO SURVIVE they’re living on their own, they’re going to college, they’re helping support their families
AND REGARDLESS OF ALL OF THAT… They’re still doing the same work as an adult, they’re still putting their time and effort into a service our society requires at the moment to function.
“Student minimum wage” is also bullshit because it allows a place to hire a ton of kids under 18 and not have to pay them properly on top of not having to give any form of benefits and let’s face it so they can ignore current employee standards because kids don’t know their rights as well.
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Now amount of "hard work" the 1% has done can justify them hoarding all that wealth when there are people working full time jobs who can't afford to feed their families.
Some earn 400x what the average worker does. It's impossible to work that hard. They're leeches who profit off underpaid labor.
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We are short staffed almost 97% of the time at my retail job. Because corporate has figured out you can overwork 4 people at minimum wage instead of paying for the 8 people you should probably have to be on the clock.
Baby boomers grew up with stores that were adequately staffed, with workers who most likely had weeks of training for their jobs as opposed to the 1-2 shadow shift training we get now. Also those workers most likely were able to be full time if they wanted. Now retail, except for management positions, is mostly made up of part time workers, because you don’t have to give them benefits. So you have a workforce of perpetually underpaid, overwhelmed, undertrained people trying to do their best all while dealing with an entire generation of people who refuse to acknowledge that the system has changed and the average retail worker has NO control over that change and is being taken advantage of.
Like we got our customer surveys back, and almost every single one mentioned that they couldn’t find someone to help them or we needed more people on register because it was TOO SLOW, but what did management tell us instead of scheduling more people? We need to be quicker on register and call for backup if necessary. Which makes no sense because we can’t call for backup THAT ISN’T THERE.
Y'all my parents haven’t worked retail since the 70s and they absolutely never believe me about the things that happen at work. I explain the schedule for next week gets hung up on the Friday before and they scoff and go “well when i worked at X they had it a month up your manager is just lazy.” No mom, its company policy to only do “two weeks” in advance. They won’t give you a full month’s scheduling in advance cause it let’s you plan for a world outside of work.
Or about the hours, workload or anything. They just assume its an individual’s failing instead of corporate mandate. Or, if they do believe me (that its company policy) they call it ridiculous and point out some survey that argues its Good Business to do (insert decent thing here).As if they think the higher ups don’t know this and are simply ignorant of Good Business Practices. They don’t understand that retail has completely shifted from caring about its employees to squeezing out every penny now instead of investing it for later.
Cause that isn’t how it was when they worked and they just can’t seem to see otherwise.
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The millennial experience is tied to growing income inequality and the indentured servitude of student loan debt
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If you can't afford to pay a living wage, you can't afford to be in business. Asking people to work below poverty wages so you can own a business is entitlement at best.
You are asking human beings to use their lives to subsidize your desire to own a business.
If a job is worth being done, it's worth being paid enough to live.
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Someone told me socialism is evil on a tweet about universal healthcare, and their pinned tweet is a Gofundme for their baby who has cancer.
I mean, when there are perfectly good systems used throughout the developed world that adequately provide care for people’s children without forcing them to turn to GoFundMe for the chance at some charity, maybe it’s worth supporting them?
I don’t know, the idea that people are required to beg for healthcare on the internet in the richest country in all of human history will never make sense to me. Ever. Healthcare will always be a right in my eyes, plain and simple.
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Every time I see someone talk about how capitalism allows for innovation, I'm like "Imagine how much innovation there would be if everyone had access to resources".
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
–Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb
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I don't think people really understand how vastly different someone being a millionaire is from someone being a billionaire. People have this idea that it's basically the same thing but billionaires are just normal rich people who can afford more stuff than millionaires when a billionaire is a completely different breed. To put it in perspective 1 million seconds is almost 12 days while 1 billion seconds is 31 years. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is the difference between 12 days and 31 years.
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The idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious.
Shifting the guilt to the consumer is an intentional marketing ploy. The same was done when soda companies switched from bottles to cans.
Originally soda machines had a place for you to return your bottle which the company would collect, sanitize, and re-use. Consumers paid a deposit when they bought the soda, then got it back when they dropped the empty bottle in the slot. Bars and restaurants also had to pay the deposit and redeem the bottles for a refund
Then companies decided it’d be cheaper to use disposable aluminum cans. Soda is something people often consumed in public places like parks and in front of stores. Increased public trash led to a litter problem. Environmentalists pressured the soda companies to fix the problem by bringing back the deposit and recycling programs. Instead, the companies started anti-liter campaigns that placed the guilt wholly on the consumer.
This was decades before curb-side recycling existed. Recycling plants were few and far between, and consumers would have to save up cans then cart them to one of these facilities to recycle them, which few individuals had the time and transpiration to do. The ad campaigns led to people demanding more public garbage cans, which did reduce liter, but those were purchased and maintained at city expense and the contents went to landfills. It also led to the general public believing littering and landfill problems rested squarely on the shoulders of consumers even though the corporations had a perfectly good recycling system that they could have continued.
Big business wants you to blame yourself and each other for problems they caused, and they’d rather spend money on guilt shifting ad campaigns than use that money for something good.
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Millennials value work that has meaning above work that pays well and they hate that as well. It means we can’t be shut up with busy work while they’re made to seem like they’re running a well oiled machine. They come from a generation of a boss being someone who says “do what I say because I told you to” and we come from a generation who values a boss that says “what can I do for you that will help you excel at your job?”
Millennials do not cope well with meaningless busy work so their boss looks better. They don’t cope with being talked down to or not being assisted by their boss when they have a problem. They do not deal well with their innovative ideas being shut down because “that’s not how we do it here.” and I don’t see how any of those things is a problem.
Millennials are also the first generation since the internet was a prominent thing to utilize it as a source of information in a way that is empowering for each other. A single millennial can buy a product and then inform anyone who wants to know about the quality of said product. It only takes a handful of millennials to say “this is a substandard product” to render all the millions of dollars spent on advertising that product completely useless.
Big business has been a blotch on millennials lives since before most of you could even assume a role in adulthood to effect it, so you trust one another more than you trust advertisements or sponsorship, etc.
On the flip side, though, you enthusiastically will push and promote things that you love.
Big business and their baby boomer CEOs and presidents HATE this. Because it means that they can no longer provide a substandard product while making the consumer feel there is nothing better out there.
In the past, if every dish soap was awful, you just had to continue using awful dish soap. Now, you can crowd source an alternative. You can post in a forum, your facebook, a mass text, etc and say “I hate every dish soap, what can I do?” and you will be directed to actual good brands or you will be taught how to brew your own.
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I’d love to buy a house, but I can’t afford a down payment and can’t be certain that I’ll have the same income levels for thirty years and I don’t actually know whether the banks will accept my highly-fluctuating, self-employed-and-seasonal-labor income as stable enough or high enough to be approved for a mortgage.
And also every new housing development I’ve seen in the past five years has been “Executive Housing, Starting At 390K” and the realtor websites are full of last decade’s foreclosed subdivision homes in the $275K region, and there’s legit no one, including the zoning board, that’s going to help me find or make a cute little house on a tenth of an acre in the region of $50-60K, let alone every other millennial who might like to settle down in a place that suits her desires and means.
Oh, and that same zoning means five people aren’t allowed to share that $300K, 5-bedroom McMansion.
And what else? The refrigerator that recently conked out on me was manufactured in 1967. That thing lasted almost fifty years, and today if I walk into a big box store’s appliance department to buy a new refrigerator they will tell me I should really buy a warranty to cover the apparently-substantial risk that it will break within two to five years.
Oh, and there’s apparently a $400ish premium to buy one with a convenient configuration because if you want the refrigerator on top and accessible without bending down for anyone taller than your average first grader there aren’t any of those in the entry-level price range.
Then there’s the labor market itself, where “entry level” positions want three-to-five years of experience, and everybody won’t shut up about the trades but even that requires a $5K+ outlay to go to school for it, and every fast-food restaurant out there has a permanent “Now Hiring” sign up because they drive employees away as fast as they can replace them.
And so many food-service jobs involve being forced to throw away loads of food as it expires but if you eat it or take it home it’s viewed as stealing, and retail jobs sometimes require you to smash perfectly good computers with a sledgehammer so nobody can use them, and so, yes, I’m gonna make my own laundry detergent from a recipe I found on the internet, and I’m gonna buy as much of my vegetables as possible in seed form, and I’m gonna read the consumer reviews on things before I buy them and I’m going to source a refrigerator from Cragislist for approximately the price of the warranty on a new one, and if The Market wants me to buy a house, it can bloody well wait for me to have the money.
Because seriously, with its “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy” mindset and historic, far-reaching nonsense, the business side of the equation has little room to complain about millennials being the selfish ones.
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A person should not have to take an advanced law degree to avoid being taken advantage of by a multi-billion dollar company.
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In his new documentary series "War on Waste", Reucassel reveals that up to 40% of bananas are thrown away by farmers because they don't fit standards set by supermarkets. Basically they are too bent, too straight, too long, too short, too fat, or too thin.
"I was shocked by the waste," Reucassel told news.com.au. "These bananas are highly edible but they don't fit the cosmetic look. If they are too curved, they are thrown out. If they are not curvy enough, they are thrown out."
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What blows me about this is what happened to conservative capitalism? The free market? If industries are dying they need to either rework or die(under capitalism) so the free market bullshit stop applying to things when stuff they like are going out of business. Then it’s “millennial are killing this business! We have to save them.” Like a bunch of commies.
And I can attest, as a former employee, in Sears’ case, Millennials have nothing to do with it, that 100% the CEO bleeding the company dry for every penny they can at the cost of it employees and customers.
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