The most enduring legacy of “capitalist realism” is to hide what can and should be done behind pillars of disappointment marking what was done in the past but cannot *[and/or] should not be done now.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/capitalist-realism-mark-fisher-k-punk-depression
There are times when I suspect that the business press is actually written by secret communist revolutionaries…
But investors in Uber probably don’t care if it never makes a profit, so long as it gets to an IPO that enables them to cash out with a big payoff. If Uber did go public at a valuation of $120bn, for example, the Saudi royal family alone would have a $16bn (£12bn) payday from their investment.
So basically paternalism is alive and well.
I like how the respondent brought it back to how these jobs are undervalued, not necessarily “easy” jobs.
It’s always so weird how these anti-welfare types nevertheless believe you should be paid according to age, gender, and race, not skill level or experience.
They own our tools now.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
I like the line about the perils of automating rather than informating.
with Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University who studies that subject.
Thread:
This tribalism, even or rather especially amongst progressive types, is really getting to me.
People are getting publicly humiliated or worse for pointing out basic facts. High-profile people are doing hot takes based on reading the first paragraph of a news report (if they read it at all) and then losing it if anyone points out they’ve done an inaccurate hot take.
Sometimes they’re just losing it because it’s pointed out they’ve done a hot take at all. They’re so invested in their judgement they don’t want to hear they may have to alter it, as in this case.
The author sees it as a rich people thing, but I’ve seen “Twitter famous” but not-rich people doing it, as recently as last night. I can’t help but think it’s self-destructive. It’s not good for anyone, but especially not good when we need at least some sort of unity on the progressive front.
And the FSM help you if you did something non-PC in your past and then change your mind/learn better. The influencers will be asking for nothing less than public self-flogging and a total apology, followed by a complete withdrawal from public life.
Oh. Oh I like that one. That’s exactly it.
No shit. What’s wrong with these shithole countries? And States? Whether the tax load is progressive or not, that’s what.
And lest you think it’s just one of those rather tedious “blame russia” pieces,
The defining document of our era is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The ruling didn’t just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of indifference—the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.
In other words, the United States has legitimized a political economy of shadows, and it has done so right in step with a global boom in people hoping to escape into the shadows.
While the history in that is generally accurate and interesting, I have a lot of trouble swallowing the underlying premise that American oligarchs were basically noble of heart until they were corrupted by evil foreign influence.
Have you read this?
Nope, but it looks like my sorta thing. 
I would buy that they were frightened of politicians listening to rich foreigners with money over rich locals with land and slaves. But then there is also the bit about “the noble intentions of the PATRIOT Act”, a phrase that sounds like selective memory on its own.
To intelligently comment,I’d really have to see this original anti-money-laundering scheme, before it was revived and incorporated into the patriot act (along with a host of other provisions which clearly infringe on civil liberties)
From two years ago, but still very, if not more, true.