Every merchant you patronize has to charge more - or reduce quality, or both - in order to pay this #Danegeld to two of the largest, most profitable companies in the world. Visa/Mastercard have hiked their fees by *40 percent* since the pandemic's start. Forty. Fucking. *Percent*. Tell me again how #greedflation isn't real?

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Here's an example: one especially pernicious form of junk fee is the "#SwipeFees" that credit-card companies charge merchants. In an increasingly cashless age, these companies - dominated by the #Visa/#Mastercard duopoly - have figured out how to scrape 3-5% out of *every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy*.

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What's a plutocrat to do? Well, it turns out that culture war bullshit can make right wingers point (metaphorical) guns at their own junk - all plutocrats need to do is put the word out that getting rid of junk fees is "#woke" and low-information right-wing thumbsuckers will *demand* the right to be charged junk fees.

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Take the campaign against #JunkFees, which have ticketmastered every part of your life with "fees" for things like "paying your rent by check" and "*not* paying your rent by check":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/30/military-industrial-park-service/#booz-allen

There is no broad constituency for junk fees. Scam artists (including scam artists in the C-suites of Fortune 100 companies) love them, sure, but junk fees make everyone else furious.

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You *are* a temporarily embarrassed millionaire - but the riches you deserve have been snaffled up by welfare queens and DEI consultants.

Cruelty isn't the point of #CultureWarBullshit: the point is *power*. Cruelty is merely the *tactic*:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Culture war bullshit is a *very* reliable way to get turkeys to vote for Christmas.

11/

To relieve the pressure, plutes scapegoat other people based on their gender, sexual orientation, race, or nationality.

This provides an important resolution to the cognitive dissonance of meritocracy. The reason you're doing so badly isn't that you lack merit, it's that #AffirmativeAction has elevated unworthy people to the positions that *you* deserve.

10/

Remember 2020, when gun-nuts got "revenge" on gun safety scolds by photographing themselves pointing loaded guns at their own penises? The participants insisted that they were just trolling, and they were...by pointing loaded guns at their dicks:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

Plutocrats understand that there are limits to irony, and that at a certain point, irony poisoning becomes so acute that your rank-and-file literally start blowing their balls off.

9/

By definition, their lack of wealth and power is their own fault, and not merely their fault, but the fault of their genes. Being on the bottom is proof that you deserve to be there. Your failure to rise proves that you don't deserve to rise.

No wonder the right is so irony-poisoned.

8/

This is why plutocracy always turns into aristocracy: the idea that some people are suited to rule because they have "good blood." Eugenics is, above all, a way to excuse inequality. Fitness to rule is determined primarily by whose orifice you emerge from, and only secondarily by any obvious competence or skill.

So right wing footsoldiers are mired in a terrible and shameful swamp of self-loathing.

7/

The story that we're all just "#TemporarilyEmbarrassedMillionaires" who can rise to the top with hard work and smarts falls flat in the face of the reality that nearly everyone at the top was born there. If the system selects rulers based on merit, and if everyone the system selects was born rich, then the rich must have some *genetic* trait that makes them destined to rule.

6/

So plutocrats need to find ways to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. One important trick is to convince us all that the system is fair, guided by an #InvisibleHand that performs mystic passes over our heads at birth and locates the very best of us and elevates us to the apex of the social pyramid.

But there's a problem with this: plutocracy is self-sustaining.

5/

This is essential for the creation, maintenance and expansion of #plutocracy. In a plutocracy, a small minority owns most of the property (we live in a plutocracy). By definition, plutocracy isn't popular, since it's a system that benefits a small minority at everyone else's expense. In its natural state, plutocracy is only popular with its winners, and not the vast majority of losers it creates.

4/

For right populists, the property rights of pharma giants are human rights, so anything that interferes with those rights is equivalent to any other human rights violation.

This is not only wrong, but it's also a huge vulnerability in the right populist mindset. It's a button that, when pushed, produces a reliable and reflexive outrage.

3/

Which is to say, both the left and the right can be populist, but the populist left seeks to improve peoples' lives, no matter what that takes, while the populist right is *only* willing to make the world better when that doesn't interfere with the interests of property owners.

This is how you get the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire equating publicly produced, free insulin with forcing enslaved Black people to pick cotton in the fields:

https://newrepublic.com/post/174485/libertarian-party-suggests-former-black-lawmaker-pick-crops-free

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"#Populism" isn't intrinsically left or right. The distinction between the two is often obscured by jargon, but there's a simple litmus test (courtesy of #StevenBrust): "ask what's more important: human rights, or property rights. If they say 'property rights are human rights,' they're on the right."

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

1/

nostr:npub10lyakmsx90gycg8jpn6ctt3du5j2qsklu2dt98kn9n0662hrp7kqq5wwx5 nostr:npub1wqqrpw7q0jznagzr3r8vwceun9umetxvn5wd0t3rtv8tdzmsxc4qxk7eyl Yes, but you can only play the audible books you keep if you continue to use audible-authorized players.

#5yrsago Wealthy investors are buying Long Beach’s old low-rent buildings and evicting everyone, making them homeless https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-evictions/#

#5yrsago Facebook takes down a legitimate anti-far-right protest page, calls it “inauthentic” https://www.aaronswartzday.org/facebook-mistake-shutitdowndc/

#1yrago The high cost of "self-funded" Democrats: Rich dilletantes will not save us https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/02/oligarchs-r-us/#hooray-for-slugwell

#1yrago "View A SKU": A plan to turn Amazon into a dumb pipe https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/01/dumb-pipes/#original-asin

10/

Forcing your computer to rat you out: Self determination starts with the right to decide who can know which facts about you.

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/110820989821648268

3/

Starting with #Microsoft's #palladium they theorized a new "#SecureComputing" model for allowing companies to reach into your computer long after you had paid for it and brought it home, in order to discipline you for using it in ways that undermined its shareholders' interest.

Secure Computing began with the idea of shipping every computer with *two* CPUs. The first one was the normal CPU, the one you interacted with when you booted it up, loaded your OS, and ran programs.

25/

To invoke #DMCA1201, a company must first add the thinnest skin of #DigitalRightsManagement to their product. Since 1201 makes removing #DRM illegal, a company can use this molecule-thick scrim of DRM to felonize any activity that the DRM prevents.

More than 20 years ago, technologists started to tinker with ways to combine the legal and technical to tame the wild general purpose computer.

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