political tweets

In all my decades, I’ve never heard of a Judge ruling that
neither side can call the dead people ‘victims.’

I mean, I can understand the defense calling them looters
etc, if they have some credible evidence of that, etc,
but to rule that neither side can call them victims
is….something I’ve never heard of.

w
v

Surely the prosecution can get around that, though, by referring to them as “fatalities” or “Killed person #1” or something.

Excuse me. Freight rail is all privately owned. The government got out of it when they sold Conrail. Do you mean to tell us you’re going to give money to BNSF, Union Pacific, and Norfolk Southern to modernize their own tracks? https://t.co/WOmnDMU0nF

— Jack'sHouseOfPancakes (@RegimeChangeInc) November 7, 2021

Who does the actual work of making cars Tesla profits from? How much would Tesla be worth if it was just Elon putting together one car at a time without a labor force to exploit? Billionaire bosses aren't "makers." They're "takers" who steal nearly everything from their workers. https://t.co/hGY5ybDnXv

— Harpreet Chima for Congress (@HarpreetChima) November 15, 2021

I don’t know if this is “political,” per se, but here’s a thread of tweets I agree with.

Most people are deeply unconscious and patterned. Ruling elites are no exception, in fact they're MORE unconscious. It's a common mistake to think of these people as rational actors; really their minds are running on autopilot in response to conditioning put in place long ago.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 6, 2021

Billy_T wrote:

It seems pretty obvious that the problem is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. Best way to reduce the impact of the rich and powerful is to dilute that power and wealth, end those concentrations, disperse that to the four winds.

My wife and I took the unusual step of sitting down in front of the TV while we ate dinner last night, and when I turned on the TV, it was on CBS because I watched the end of the 9er/Hawks game earlier. It was during 60 Minutes, and whatshername was interviewing a Chinese economist about China’s moves to limit wealth, specifically some billionaires who had to cough up money to the government. You can see the skepticism from whatshername, who also interviews some Hoover Institute wealth apologist, and you can just see the Overton frames out loud. The idea that wealth concentration is good because those accumulators are the geniuses who make all the wonderful things in the world. You know.

But the whole thing made me a fan of China suddenly. I mean…I haven’t given the whole thing much thought, other than to observe that China is ascending, and will soon become the world’s superpower as the US continues to decline, but…these Chinese horrors all sound pretty good to me.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/xi-jinping-china-capitalism-60-minutes-2021-12-05/

Billy_T wrote:

I read the transcript. The video seemed to stop early.

A few observations: Stahl likely makes eight figures, and works for people who make nine or more. She isn’t going to tell the truth about capitalism, which is why she seemed intent on trashing China’s attempt to rein in its evil.

Capitalism killed off “free markets” on the way to becoming world hegemon — violently, thru slavery, genocide of Native peoples, and the mass theft of their lands and resources. I wish people would stop using that term as a synonym for it.

There is nothing capitalism produces than can’t be produced by a non-capitalist mode of production, and for far less, and with far better pay for the rank and file. It baffles me that so many people think that if we replace capitalism with economic democracy, suddenly all innovation dies and we’re living in caves again. Actually, the vast majority of innovation due to capitalism has been in the realm of squeezing more profits from workers, not in production of beneficial goods and services. Those have always come from the public sector.

No extra value is ever added by paying management or ownership hundreds of times more than the rank and file. In fact, and this is too obvious, all of that money hoovered up to the top radically reduces values for consumers, and dramatically suppresses rank and file wages. A company that pays its workers roughly the same amount, and its team leaders and management slightly more, has a ginormous amount of extra cash to invest in higher quality production, wages, etc. etc.

Every Bezos, Gates, or Musk is a horrible drag on the economy, on productivity, on consumer value, on wages, and inequality kills overall consumer demand, not to mention morale.

America has got to be the most gaslit nation in history, especially when it comes to capitalism, and we weren’t always that way. We used to know it was a terrible, immoral system. People just figured, “Well, we’ve got to make the best of it, right?” But roughly from Reagan on, that common sense/fatalism was replaced by a kind of religious devotion to a lie. No major party has the guts to tell the truth about it, tragically.

I agree with that. I coulda said it myself, but I would have said it in an angrier and less coherent way.

Great response from AOC, Zooey.

I don’t know the exact percentage, but judging from total numbers of American businesses with employees, this is probably close: Roughly 99% of the people in this country are NOT capitalists. Employees and sole proprietors are not capitalists. They may think they are, but they aren’t. It’s a bit like NFL fans who think they’re NFL players. Um, no.

An analogy to show the difference:

1. You build custom chairs for a living, with your own two hands. You don’t have any employees. You do the initial craftwork, the sales, the transport, the accounting yourself. Everything. You’re not a capitalist, even if you live in a capitalist society.

2. You hire people to build those chairs for you, and you appropriate the surplus value they generate as if you did all the work. You are a capitalist. M-C-M.

It’s not even really a matter of how much money you have, though “capital” is generally defined as money in excess of what you need to pay your bills, your debts, your necessities, so you no longer need to work for others. But you still have to employ others and appropriate the surplus value. It’s still a matter of using that capital to purchase labor power (as a commodity) to produce commodities for money.

Pre-capitalist economies are usually some variant of C-M-C. Commodities sold for Money to buy other Commodities, etc.

I love AOC.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by Billy_T.

Some further elaboration/refinements:

A person with plenty of capital could start a business, hire employees, but turn it into a non-capitalist enterprise, and rather easily.

Democratize the company. Relinquish control and the ability to appropriate the surplus value. Worker-control, instead, over the who, what, where, why, and when of production. Share the surplus value equally. Non-profit co-op or WSDE, etc.

Ironically, a Gates, a Bezos, or a Musk could do this easily, and still retain billions. They could set up truly non-capitalist enterprises, or go even further. Purchase islands, say, and set up an entire non-capitalist economy there. Or do this on large swaths of land inside America and elsewhere. Individual artisans, family farms, home production — the way it used to be. Plus scale up if needed to company size.

Far better still: A nation would set that up via democratic processes. No plutocrat or oligarch in the mix at all. Public monies for public benefit, controlled entirely by the public. We the People, directly.

I think Americans would end up loving this far beyond the current setup, and would vote to make it the social and legal norm. To me, that’s the way to make the transition non-violently, democratically. Start with public sector creation of non-capitalist, non-profit, publicly owned enterprises. Show they’d result in far more benefits for society, far lower prices for consumers, and far better rank and file compensation. That’s guaranteed, if there’s no private sector boot on their neck.

Biden is approving more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands than Trump, analysis finds – The Washington Post https://t.co/gwdc5zZaUj

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) December 10, 2021

1. Trump's "media company" is currently valued at $2 BILLION.

It has no product, no customers, and no revenue.

But it's much worse than that.

Follow along if interested. pic.twitter.com/YKyrgn2Hx6

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 11, 2021

Starbucks has taken their union busting campaign to a new level for the next 3 Buffalo stores preparing for a union election. They changed their strategy from playing the ‘nice guy’ to waging psychological warfare on partners. Here’s what’s going on at the Depew location:

— SBWorkersUnited (@SBWorkersUnited) December 14, 2021

This is what we fear most about living in the US with a child. My mom taught for years at VA Tech, site of several mass assaults (and one huge shooting). The political economy of guns in US needs to be added to this important chart.https://t.co/p1IIIIQuWq

— Leigh Claire La Berge (@marxforcats) December 28, 2021

If ya scroll down to the ‘Jimmy Carter calls for boycott’ tweet,
you’ll see even worse news:

On January 4th, 1980, US president Jimmy Carter called for the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, citing the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan as the reason. pic.twitter.com/aGX6oDc3UA

— katya (@kazbek) January 4, 2022