1989
Well-Known Member
I don't deserve $108 an hour.
I drink your milkshake! a metaphor for capitalism
- Thread starter rickyb
- Start date
i am very interested to know how much UPS makes off its drivers every hour. if they knew, they would be very pissed!
Is Bezos laughing at the United States Postal Service, to which he has given – for the time being – much business for shipping Amazon’s packages? Bezos has no intention of this being a long term arrangement. Imagine Amazon with its own fleet of driverless vehicles and drones. Amazon is already using part-time workers to deliver its wares." - ralph nader
capitalism is based partly on secrecy. workers have no idea what the CEO's plans are for automation, and what kind of job, if any, they will have in the future. this is what happens when you centralize decision making / power.
capitalism is based partly on secrecy. workers have no idea what the CEO's plans are for automation, and what kind of job, if any, they will have in the future. this is what happens when you centralize decision making / power.
weve gone over this before:
NOAM CHOMSKY: If you look at what you describe is a form of hypocrisy but the same is true of saying that we should not support tax-funded institutions. The financial sector is basically tax-funded.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Of course.
NOAM CHOMSKY: You recall the IMF study of the leading American banks, which determined that virtually all their profits come from their implicit government insurance policy, cheap credit, access to higher credit ratings, incentives to take risky transactions which are profitable but then if it’s problematic, you guys pay for it, or just take the basis of the contemporary economy, which actually I’ve been privileged to see developing in government-subsidized laboratories for decades. MIT, where I’ve been since the 1950s, is one of the institutions where the government, the funnel in the early days was the Pentagon, was pouring in money to create the basis for the high-tech economy of the future and the profitmaking of the institutions that are regarded as private enterprises. It was decades of work under public funding with a very anticapitalist ideology. So according to capitalist principles, if someone invests in a risky enterprise over a long period and thirty years later it makes some profit, they’re supposed to get part of the profit, but it doesn’t work like that here. It was the taxpayer who invested for decades. The profit goes to Apple and Microsoft, not to the taxpayer.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Indeed, indeed. If you take an iPhone apart, every single technology in it was developed by some government grant, every single one.
NOAM CHOMSKY: And for long periods.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: And some of them by government grants from other countries, like WiFi from the Australian Commonwealth.
NOAM CHOMSKY: And it’s—you see an interesting picture of it from a place like MIT, or other major research institutions. So if you walked around the building where I work fifty years ago, you would have seen electronic firms, Raytheon, ITech, others, IBM, there to essentially rob the technology that’s being developed at public expense and seeing if they can turn it into something applicable for profits. You walk around the institution today, you see different buildings, you see Novartis, Pfizer, other pharmaceutical, big pharmaceutical corporations. Why? Because the cutting edge of the economy has shifted from electronics based to biology based, so therefore the predators in the so-called private sector are there to see what they can pick up from the taxpayer-funded research in the fundamental biological sciences, and that’s called free enterprise and a free-market system. So speak of hypocrisy, it’s pretty hard to go beyond that.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Quite right. This hypocrisy is fundamental to the whole enterprise culture of capitalism from 250 years ago.
NOAM CHOMSKY: From the beginning.
you should encourage people to protest btw. voting does little to change things. obama and trump are good examples.
wkmac
Well-Known Member
JAMES CROMWELL: We are, all of us, engaged in a struggle, not to protect a way of life, but to protect life itself. Our institutions are bankrupt. Our leaders are complicit. And the public is basically disillusioned and disenchanted with the entire process. There is a direct connection between the plant in Minisink—
AMY GOODMAN: Where is Minisink?
JAMES CROMWELL: In Wawayanda. It’s in upstate New York. They call it upstate. It’s not too far above the New Jersey border. Between that plant and the Middle East. We’re at war not only with Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Yemen. We’re at war with Dimock, Pennsylvania, where the gas comes from, with Wawayanda, that uses the gas, with Seneca Lake, where it was to be stored, and with Standing Rock.
And it is time, actually, to name the disease. Most people can’t put their finger on the cause of it, but everybody perceives the threat. Capitalism is a cancer. And the only way to defeat this cancer is to completely, radically transform our way of living and our way of thinking about ourselves. And I call that radical transformation revolutionary. So this is the revolution.
AMY GOODMAN: Where is Minisink?
JAMES CROMWELL: In Wawayanda. It’s in upstate New York. They call it upstate. It’s not too far above the New Jersey border. Between that plant and the Middle East. We’re at war not only with Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Yemen. We’re at war with Dimock, Pennsylvania, where the gas comes from, with Wawayanda, that uses the gas, with Seneca Lake, where it was to be stored, and with Standing Rock.
And it is time, actually, to name the disease. Most people can’t put their finger on the cause of it, but everybody perceives the threat. Capitalism is a cancer. And the only way to defeat this cancer is to completely, radically transform our way of living and our way of thinking about ourselves. And I call that radical transformation revolutionary. So this is the revolution.
"The reality of working in a factory making clothes for Ivanka Trump’s label has been laid bare, with employees speaking of being paid so little they cannot live with their children, anti-union intimidation and women being offered a bonus if they don’t take time off while menstruating.
Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory
Throughout her marriage to her husband, Ahmad, one or both of them has always worked. And yet, says Alia, the couple can never think about clearing their debts. Instead, what she has to show for years of work at PT Buma is two rooms in a dusty boarding house, rented for $30 a month and decorated with dozens of photos of their children because the couple can’t dream of having enough money to have them at home. The children live, instead, with their grandmother, hours away by motorcycle, and see their parents just one weekend a month, when they can afford the gasoline.
a monthly bonus of $10.50 if they don’t take a day off for menstruation.
Seven workers also said they were subject to verbal abuse, being called things like “animals, maroon and monkey”. Otang said this, too, was fairly common."
imagine what capitalists call the workers when theyre not around. the jokes on us.
Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory
Throughout her marriage to her husband, Ahmad, one or both of them has always worked. And yet, says Alia, the couple can never think about clearing their debts. Instead, what she has to show for years of work at PT Buma is two rooms in a dusty boarding house, rented for $30 a month and decorated with dozens of photos of their children because the couple can’t dream of having enough money to have them at home. The children live, instead, with their grandmother, hours away by motorcycle, and see their parents just one weekend a month, when they can afford the gasoline.
a monthly bonus of $10.50 if they don’t take a day off for menstruation.
Seven workers also said they were subject to verbal abuse, being called things like “animals, maroon and monkey”. Otang said this, too, was fairly common."
imagine what capitalists call the workers when theyre not around. the jokes on us.
This from the guy who played Stretch Cunningham on All in the Family. He didn't mind making his millions in that most American bastion of capitalism, Hollywood. It's been tried before but these guys never learn. Capitalism is bad, but Communism or some soft peddled version of it is worse. And so much of this is envy of the haves. I could care less how much they have as long as I'm paid fairly. But if I'm not paid fairly I'm not going to tear the country apart over it. Complain, sure. Figure out a way to do better for myself, absolutely. Get a lot of people hurt or worse when I'm not starving, they're not attacking me, I have access to goods and services? Why? We aren't serfs in Russia. We aren't living in shacks in Nicaragua. We have big screen tv's, iPhones, SUV's. But the guy on the hill has a yacht and a private jet and I don't. Life's not fair! People's minds are poisoned by the Chomskys of the world.
oldngray
nowhere special
your definitely not paid fairly if you simply look at inequality or the fact wages havent risen since '73. and yes they are bringing back serfdom with declining wages and rising debts. for more see michael hudson who famously predicted the US housing bubble.
i dont see any hypocrisy in speaking out against excessive environmental degradation especially whether your rich or poor. pollution doesnt discriminate.
half of america is in poverty or near it.
peoples minds are poisoned by not listening to enough chomsky.
"capitalism is bad, but Communism or some soft peddled version of it is worse." sounds very similiar to the argument when were told we only have a choice between republicans and democrats.
Half of America is in poverty or near it? Seriously? Not to make light of the impoverished but you'd have us believe that almost half of this country doesn't know where it's next meal is coming from. More alarmist demagoguery from those who want to bring down the system.
Sportello
Well-Known Member
I try to never reply to a post from @rickyb, or a comment on one of his posts or a child to his posts, but to be fair, America has 10 million more people in poverty than Canada has all together. Percentage-wise, our poverty rate is about 50% higher than our non-walled neighbors to the North.
Canada has what, 9% of our population in a resource rich country. If you want to work Canada is a good place to be.
Sportello
Well-Known Member
I never said otherwise. I'm just pointing out that a Canadian's perception of the US may not match reality.
Canada is a great place to live, apart from the weather, which is why they all head South as soon as practical in the cold months.
ill provide some articles to support this statement that half of america is in, near, or just above poverty.
originally i heard it from cornel west and tavis smiley. chris hedges also mentions it.
there are a ton of articles which go over wages, savings, debt. the unemployment numbers are much worse than they are.
If half of America is as you say, that's roughly 160,000,000+ people. Do you really believe that? 50,000,000 maybe. Which is too many. And the crazy thing is the last administration did little to alleviate their plight and yet people want to attack this president for saying he wants to help, to fix things. Even Bill Clinton said during the campaign that the working man has little to look forward to when he gets up in the morning.
1989
Well-Known Member
The official poverty rate is 13.5 percent, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 estimates. That year, an estimated 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty according to the official measure. According to supplemental poverty measure, the poverty rate was 14.3 percent.
Individuals also transition into and out of poverty over time, though many of those who are poor at any given time will spend multiple spells in poverty. Research shows that transitions into or out of poverty often happens after major life events such as marriage, divorce, or sudden changes in income. These transitions also can be associated with larger shifts in unemployment or wages.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services develops their Federal Poverty Guideline income thresholds based on the official poverty measure estimates. These income thresholds are used to determine eligibility for federal safety net programs, such as Medicaid or WIC.
What is the current poverty rate in the United States? - UC Davis Center for Poverty Research
Sounds like the poverty level statistics doesn't give us a true picture
Individuals also transition into and out of poverty over time, though many of those who are poor at any given time will spend multiple spells in poverty. Research shows that transitions into or out of poverty often happens after major life events such as marriage, divorce, or sudden changes in income. These transitions also can be associated with larger shifts in unemployment or wages.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services develops their Federal Poverty Guideline income thresholds based on the official poverty measure estimates. These income thresholds are used to determine eligibility for federal safety net programs, such as Medicaid or WIC.
What is the current poverty rate in the United States? - UC Davis Center for Poverty Research
Sounds like the poverty level statistics doesn't give us a true picture
im the only one at my job who works to rule which means i go alot slower than everyone. there are some who just 
off entirely; i call them militants. some of hte guys with different job titles work even slower than me. but for the most part, its widespread brain damage.
Naomi LaChance liked
DSA Portland Oregon @PortlandDSA 23h23 hours ago
E-Trade is accidentally stumbling into socialism in this commercial
off entirely; i call them militants. some of hte guys with different job titles work even slower than me. but for the most part, its widespread brain damage.Naomi LaChance liked
DSA Portland Oregon @PortlandDSA 23h23 hours agoE-Trade is accidentally stumbling into socialism in this commercial
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