capitalism

When I first started calling Silicon Valley’s business model “people farming” I was told I was being hyperbolic and alarmist.

I don’t get told that much anymore.

#SiliconValley #BigTech #AI #surveillance #capitalism #PeopleFarming

HEADLINE: "Oil Industry Deceived Public on Plastics Recycling for More Than 50 Years"

Is anyone surprised by this? Of course they lied. That's what capitalists do. They ALWAYS put profits ahead of truthfulness, ahead of human rights, ahead of a healthy biosphere.

Here's more...
____________________________

The plastics industry has ‘sold’ plastic recycling to the American public to sell plastic, according to a report by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a nonprofit organization that advocates for legal action to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable.

Petrochemical companies and the plastics industry have known of the technical and economic limitations that make plastics unrecyclable for more than half a century, and “have failed to overcome them,” the report states. “Despite this knowledge, the plastics industry has continued to increase plastic production, while carrying out a well-coordinated campaign to deceive consumers, policymakers, and regulators about plastic recycling.”

“This evidence shows that many of the same fossil fuel companies that knew and lied for decades about how their products cause climate change have also known and lied to the public about plastic recycling,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a press release. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history.”

Plastics manufacturers and industry groups, including some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, have spent more than 50 years funding and pushing plastics recycling in order to stave off regulatory action – all while knowing that only a small fraction of plastic waste could ever be recycled.
____________________________

FULL STORY -- https://www.desmog.com/2024/02/15/recycling-plastic-center-for-climate-integrity-report-fraud/
REPORT SOURCE -- https://climateintegrity.org/plastics-fraud

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #Greenwashing

ALT

If you've been cruising the Fediverse recently, you've no doubt seen a number of amusing posts under the hashtag #CDCSays, about why the U.S. Center for Disease Control is probably trying to kill you for capitalism; in particular as that relates to their updated COVID isolation guidelines. While these posts are objectively hilarious, the simple truth is that these aren't really jokes, and pretty much everyone who understands this virus and how it works, thinks the CDC has sold us all down the river for capitalists, corporations, and the bosses, to keep the fuckbarrelTM churning.

Of course, there's only so much these folks can communicate in a joke on social media, so today I thought I'd share a recent article by Reina Sultan on Self.com. Inside, she talks to three medically qualified experts who work in this field about why the CDC's new guidelines, and the drastic reduction of the isolation period recommended if you've contracted COVID, are wishful thinking at best and quite possibly capitalist death cult propaganda:

https://www.self.com/story/cdc-new-covid-19-isolation-guidelines

Although it's definitely worth reading the entire short article, let's look at some important highlights here for folks who're absolutely not gonna click on a link about COVID because they'd rather pretend everything is fine:

- reducing COVID isolation recommendations from 5 days, to 24 hours "if you’ve been fever-free" and "your symptoms are improving" will "likely make more people sick—and this approach increasingly places the burden of public health on individual people, which is dangerous for everyone, but especially for those at a higher risk of complications from the virus."

- changing testing from a way to determine if you can leave isolation, to merely something you might want to use to "assist" your decision making, is a terrible idea.

- COVID is most certainly not over; "wastewater analysis data suggests there are still more than 760,000 new cases of COVID a day in the US—meaning roughly 1 in 63 people are actively infectious."

- Michael Hoerger, PhD, MSCR, says "There is no evidence to suggest that these waves (of COVID infections) are becoming smaller on average over time, or that we're having fewer waves.”

- Lara Jirmanus, MD, MPH says "that the CDC’s messaging implicitly communicates two falsehoods: that COVID has “ceased to be a threat,” and that it “stops being transmitted when people stop having a fever.” According to Dr. Jirmanus, "infectiousness has little to do with specific symptoms, since you can be sick (and contagious) without a fever and with few, mild, or even no symptoms at all. And if you’re testing positive on rapid tests, you’re very likely still able to infect others, even if you feel fine."

- Shortening the isolation period "supports economic interests and is not in the interest of protecting health." Yes, this means that the bosses and capitalists are okay with making you sick and maybe even killing you, so they can keep extracting wealth from our labor.

- In fact, Kaitlin Sundling, MD, PhD says the CDC’s updated recommendations are moving in the wrong direction. “COVID isolation should be expanded, not reduced or eliminated. There is no change in the scientific evidence around COVID transmission that would support reducing the recommended isolation period below five days... Extending isolation beyond five days would be a safer approach, both to prevent viral spread and to allow people adequate time to recover.” Ideally, she recommends you isolate "for 10 to 14 days, if you have that option, and take two rapid tests with negative results at least 24 hours apart before going about your daily life as usual again" but acknowledges that without sick leave, this will be impossible for many workers, who she then advises to wear "a well-fitting respirator and limit in-person activities only to what is essential.”

Additionally, these experts point out that long COVID is real, remains poorly understood, and is therefore something we should absolutely not be fucking around with as a society by continuing to "let er rip" and reducing protective measures; which is precisely what the CDC has done here with its joke ass updated isolation guidelines. Finally, all three experts also remind us that these policy updates all seem to be designed with non-disabled, non-immunocompromised people in mind; which is pretty alarming when you realize that roughly “4 out of 10 Americans have chronic diseases that put them at higher risk of COVID.” All of which just reinforces the argument I've been making for a while; rich people and their captured regulatory bodies will absolutely toss disabled people, sick people, and the elderly into the furnace for five points a share.

Look folks, I get that we're all tired of this virus and this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but these are highly qualified doctors telling you in so many words that "it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you." And the CDC at least, sure is.

#COVID #Capitalism #CDC

“CEO Jim McNerney…repeatedly invoked a slur…Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving…He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing…development…The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors.”

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

#boeing #capitalism

Are you old enough, like me, to remember the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, a disastrous oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989?

Here's some important info about that event from Greg Palast...
________________________

"Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable of the Drunken Captain"

The true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was the oil giant breaking their promises, cynically and disastrously, in the 15 years leading up to the spill.

As for Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar.

But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

Today, three decades after the oil washed over the Alaskan beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The Fable of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.
________________________

FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.gregpalast.com/dont-buy-exxons-fable-of-the-drunken-captain-2/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #Pollution

Are you experiencing job insecurity, burnout, high-stress levels, unaffordable healthcare, housing insecurity, debt burdens, social isolation, mental health issues, or poverty? You may be suffering from #capitalism. An immediate extraction is recommended for your health and safety. If an immediate extraction is impossible at the moment, please contact your nearest #IWW chapter for further instructions.

Every day for the last 50 years, the oil and gas industry has brought in $3 BILLION in profits. Not revenues. Profits.

EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

See — https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/revealed-oil-sectors-staggering-profits-last-50-years

That’s 💵 💵 💵 $52 trillion 💵 💵 💵 in pure profit, their payoff for happily destroying our climate and biosphere.

We need system change NOW.

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

ALT

Getting personal for a minute:
If a company describes itself as "a family"

RUN! It's a huge red flag.

I'm 54 and am of the generation told to go to college, land a good job, work your way up "the ladder," and remain until you retire.

I quickly discovered that is capitalist propaganda.

During my 20-year corporate career, I experienced overt and subtle racism, and denial of career advancement opportunities.

I witnessed inexperienced and untrained individuals be hired and promoted due to nepotism. I've witnessed folk sleep their way to being promoted. I've dealt with toxic bosses, inane office politics, and shifty business practices.

Several years before the pandemic, I began working for myself, remotely. BEST decision I've ever made. My intent is to never work in a corporate office again.

Companies do not care about you. Period.

#capitalism #anticapitalist #remotework

Follow the money…

#War #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

ALT

There's only so much you can "learn" from a movie, particularly one about dancing, but when I was young one of my formative experiences involved watching a flick called "Swing Kids." In many ways the film was typical Hollywood fare; a group of teens who love swing music and are alienated from the society around them are determined to dance the nights away even though adults don't understand and regard swing music as a dangerous moral perversion. The catch however, is that the teens are German, and the society they're alienated from is a country falling step by step into Nazism during the 1930's.

Like many movies loosely based on historical events, the film took a few liberties with the source material, but the part about it that stuck out to me is the way it depicted a fascist effort to target young people by simultaneously stamping out forms of expression that threatened Nazi cultural hegemony, and actively educating (and re-educating through coercion) German youth with fascist ideology, sometimes against the will of wiser adults around them. Unlike many films about Hitler's "Third Reich," Swing Kids didn't pretend fascism was something that "just happened" but instead actively explored the idea that racialized hatred, extreme nationalism, and fascist ideas were something you had to indoctrinate people into, and that the Nazis knew it would work better if they got to their targets while they were young.

Of course, it was just a movie; yet even then it instilled in me a desire to spend a significant portion of my life studying the question of "how fascism could happen." Astonishingly, when I later found myself studying the rise of Nazism in Germany, I discovered that this silly movie had in fact gotten that bit right; the Nazis succeeded in part by targeting German youth and teaching them to be the kind of monsters that could support Nazism without question and would even turn on their own parents.

I bring this up because I'm concerned that adults in the Pig Empire haven't been watching what fascists (of all stripes) have been doing to our education system and the young people we're sending off to be shaped by it:

https://truthout.org/articles/the-rights-push-to-whitewash-history-is-a-precursor-to-fascism/

The Right’s Push to Whitewash History Is a Precursor to Fascism

"Beneath this sweeping repression aimed at silencing dissent, free speech and critical inquiry lies a series of right-wing policies that threaten to undermine education’s role as a democratic public sphere and its commitment to fostering critical thinking. In this environment, we can expect a sustained assault on critical pedagogy, historical understanding, informed judgment, faculty job security, critical literacy, civic awareness, and any effort to connect learning with civic engagement and democratic values.

For instance, far right legislators in states like Florida, Tennessee and Idaho are banning books and prohibiting the teaching of concepts related to race, LGBTQ+ issues and social justice. Public and higher education institutions are being defunded, particularly if they address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many public school libraries are being stripped of resources, with some being transformed into detention centers. Students are bankrupting their future because of high tuition costs and staggering student debt."

While the quote I featured here naturally focuses on the fascist American right's attempt to erase history and thereby legitimize white supremacy, extreme nationalism, and the demonization of LGBTQ identities, it's important to understand that this transformation of education centers into a functional arm of a reactionary police state is by no means restricted to the Republican Party and its adherents. The transformation of American students and educators speaking out about and opposing extractivism, imperialism, and an unfolding US-backed genocide by Israel in Gaza, into criminals, terrorists, and "violent antisemites" is widely supported by so-called "liberal" administrators and lawmakers in the "brave new world" of our modern Pig Empire. Teaching and enforcing fascism via coercion remains the same, serves the same purpose, and produces the same results no matter who is doing it or what justifications they offer for doing so.

The uncomfortable truth here is that as our society becomes increasingly authoritarian across a bipartisan spectrum and as dictated by capital, this repression, indoctrination and assault on critical thinking is both a logical outcome, and a perquisite condition. After all, if you're going to kill billions of people as neocolonial capitalism boils the planet like soup for the benefit of ruling class billionaires, you can't rightly teach the next generation of leaders and drones that this is morally unacceptable and must be fought. How do you expect folks to make the trains run on time while that slaughter continues if you don't teach them to be fascists while they're young?

#Fascism #Education #Propaganda #Imperialism #Capitalism

#HappyDisabiltyPrideMonth #fediverse

I'm celebrating by being slowly killed by #capitalism and #facism

Isn't it great to be a #disabled full-time caretaker for my elderly disabled mother and dying slowly?

What are you doing this #DisabilityPride Month?

Let me know, tell me all your secrets to #MutualAid and #SupportDisabledArtists

Yup... I'm a pissy bitch

$96/$600 Hotel *Due 07/25*
$330 Car Payment *Due 07/29*
-$169 July Deficit
$96/$1099 Weekly Goal
$1062/$5135 Raised Monthly Goal

Changing tracts for a moment; scientists have made an incredible discovery that alters not only how we understand the deep ocean, but also may alter what we know about the Earth's supply of the very oxygen we breathe - and unsurprisingly, capitalists are already working on fucking that up without the slightest care in the world for the harm it may cause our biosphere.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c728ven2v9eo

Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean

"About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. But, before this discovery, it was understood that it was made by marine plants photosynthesizing - something that requires sunlight.

Here, at depths of 5km, where no sunlight can penetrate, the oxygen appears to be produced by naturally occurring metallic “nodules” which split seawater - H2O - into hydrogen and oxygen."

The article goes on to describe how we discovered these deep sea nodules which may take millions of years to form, what it means that oxygen is being produced without marine plant photosynthesis, and how this probably changes our understanding of deep sea life that likely depends on that oxygen (fish need oxygen, they just get it differently than we do.) Science lovers are encourage to read the whole piece.

What I want to focus on here however, is the fact that immediately after we've discovered this natural wonder, deep sea mining companies and resource-hungry capitalists are looking to literally rip these metallic nodules from the sea floor with virtually no concern for how that might affect our oceans, or even life on Earth.

"And because these nodules contain metals like lithium, cobalt and copper - all of which are needed to make batteries - many mining companies are developing technology to collect them and bring them to the surface.

But Prof Sweetman says the dark oxygen they make could also support life on the seafloor. And his discovery, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, raises new concerns about the risks of proposed deep-sea mining ventures."

Are life-giving, water oxygenating metallic nodules our only source of lithium, cobalt, and copper? Nope. Have deep sea mining companies studied the potential harm harvesting these nodules might cause? Nope. Might ripping them out of the water affect the delicate balance of not only ocean life but potentially how the oxygen we breath is distributed across multiple ecosystems and even the whole planet? Yeap. Does capitalism give a shit about any of that? Apparently not. The simple truth here is that we don't know how important these nodules are, and if the capitalists have their way we're going to start destroying them to make batteries before we even find out.

Look you can call me an alarmist if it'll make you feel better, but this story is merely a microcosm of the entire reason you're living on a boiling planet, facing down a mass extinction event that may well wipe out billions of people and destroy a habitable biosphere for countless other species as well.

We live in an extractivist culture, driven by the capitalist profit motive, where time and time again the need to keep stacking money for incomprehensibly rich ghouls is prioritized over not only nature, but the very survival of the human species. Capitalism is killing us, and literally nobody in the wealthy ruling classes, or the governments they've bought lock stock and barrel is doing anything about it, or shows any signs of even *trying* to do anything about it.

I don't know if tearing metallic nodules that produce dark oxygen from the ocean floor to make more Tesla batteries will compromise the planet's supply of the precious air we all breathe or not. But neither do the rich bastards that want to do it anyway. And you and I both know that if even if they did know, they wouldn't care.

At some point the human species is going to have to get serious about prioritizing life on Earth over the material demands of capitalists and rich people, or we're going to run out of life to commodify; or you know, the very air necessary to sustain our own existence as animals on a planet uniquely capable of supporting that life. One thing I *can* tell you is that after hundreds of years of capitalist predation of our shared biosphere, it is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither the capitalists, nor the states they own, are going to make the right choices to ensure our survival, for us.

#ClimateCrisis #DarkOxygen #Capitalism #OceanLife

Mao Zedong planted the seeds of people's power, while Chiang Kai-shek* pruned the old dying branches of bourgeois and reactionary nationalism.

*Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) was the leader of the Republic of China from 1928 until 1949 and then as the leader of the government in Taiwan until his death. He was the head of the Kuomintang (KMT), or the Nationalist Party, which was opposed to the Communist Party of China (CPC).

#communism #socialism #capitalism #maozedong

https://www.reddit.com/r/CommunismMemes/comments/1faj097/my_contribution/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

ALT

3 step guide to become a #socialist by recent scientific evidence!

1 - #Inequality is connected to social issues: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/evidence-base/the-spirit-level-at-15/

2 - #capitalism is the cause of the rising inequality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

3 - the #needs of everyone on Earth could be met with 30% of our current economic output: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

If people thought about real issues and needs…

#Capitalism #Consumerism #Humor

ALT

#capitalism #nobillionaires #TaxTheRich #EatTheRich #darwin

ALT

This is bad news, obviously, but let’s not pretend things weren’t already terrible. Led by the Biden administration, the US became the world’s #1 producer of fossil fuels.

That’s what you get when short-sighted capitalists take complete ownership of the political system and the government — under both parties.

Now it will just get worse.

➡️ https://grist.org/politics/trump-climate-actions-day-one-energy-emergency/

#Politics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism

ALT

Well, there's a headline that certainly captures the moment: Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential.

“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month."

"The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time."

"Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17."

https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-banks-predict-catastrophic-warming-with-profit-potential/

h/t @ai6yr
#GlobalWarming #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #Banking

Corporations will not stand up to fascism. They are engines to create profit for shareholders so protecting profit is their only guiding principle. They will bend to the felon-in-chief rather than face costly repercussions from a petty tyrant who wields unconstitutional power without any oversight.

#USPol #Fascism #Democracy #Capitalism #Greed

My blog, misaligned markets is named so because market capitalism has caused markets to become misaligned from the purpose they're supposed to serve. But what is misalignment?

Read about Aristotle's great insight about greed and how it applies to everything from money to climate change.

https://misaligned.markets/mammon-as-maloptimization/

#blog #philosophy #markets #capitalism

CEOs have a paternalistic attitude towards those below them in the economic and social hierarchy.

Tech CEOs doubly so.

This is another reason to more equally distribute power and wealth among workers.

#antiCapitalism #oligarchy #techOligarchy #capitalism #socialism

Marx's "Capital" Explained in 8 minutes

#socialism #communism #capitalism #marxism #anticapitalism #revolution #classwar #politics

https://youtu.be/kQscKTYaue8

If you live in America, print out copies of this image and give them out to people in your community, put them up on street poles, and leave them in places for people to take. The time for the working class of America to organize is now!

#socialism #communism #capitalism #anticapitalism #anticapitalist

ALT

To congradulate themselves on cutting benefits for disabled people, UK MPs give themselves pay rise to almost £100K.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07krpmlnv8o

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/cost-of-living/dwp-benefits-cuts-full-six-31165262

#uk #capitalism

Trump is a disaster. No question about that. But our troubles did not begin with him.

Corporate Democrats are just as eager to sell us out and destroy everything for the sake of Business As Usual, Wall Street, and Big Oil.

Listen to the clip below from an interview Barack Obama gave last year.

He says climate change might be a problem, but we can handle it. Although there's no way now to keep global warming below 2°C, that shouldn’t be so bad. And if we work hard, we might be able to stay at around 3°C … but the important thing is, stop worrying! Don't complain about the system. Everything is under control.

This is absolutely criminal. That much extra heat will destroy modern civilization. Billions of people will die, along with millions of species of plants and animals going extinct. The world as we know it will end.

There still *could* be a way to prevent all that. But it requires system change. The end of capitalism. It requires #Degrowth.

And no one in a position of power wants to hear that.

▶️ https://youtu.be/jAYVKZSWXhY?t=929

#USA #Trump #Politics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual