Left and right are terms that have been redefined by the ruling classes to place each of their talking points within the realm of acceptable conversation.
No longer is a leftist argument one of worker rights or nationalization of industry. Leftist themes revolve around the non-revolutionary issues that donât rock the boat. Also, conservative dialogue is no longer about sustainability or the environment or appropriate allocation of public resources. Rightist dialogue is now inflammatory but innocuous to the oligarchy
Great power comes from fomenting hate among the people over things that donât challenge your power.
Karl Marx went deep into this argument. He believed that technology would free laborers from the constraints of capital by enabling them greater productivity and consumption with less work. That didnât turn out to be the case. Capitalists controlled the technology, so they pocketed the value difference created by it, and just had laborers working for less money.
The people will only gain from the growth in productivity if those gains are not co-opted by our masters. The mastersâ plan is to use the technology and make the workers obsolete and destitute. The jobless and poor are the easiest to control.
Michael Hudson talks about the neoliberal strategy of shifting public goods into the hands of private managers.
1. Destabilize the public good. Cut teacher salaries. Donât improve infrastructure. Cut jobs. Put public services in a position where they cannot perform as theyâre supposed to.
2. Complain about government âinefficiency.â Preach that everything is better if privatized.
3. Offer to privatize. Hope people donât notice the 20% profit being raked off the top, which was not part of the public service in the first place.
Is there money in a public sector? Letâs make it crappy, make people mad, prevent the government from working as it should, then offer an alternative that enriches usâŚ
Just let it happenâŚ
Syncing the last bit of the Blockchain takes the longestâŚitâs like when the pizza arrives on the table but itâs too hot to cut. Youâre waiting like an animal, drooling over the that pepperoniâŚ.or over your participation with the financial sovereignty of the rest of humanityâŚ
Pensions should be community management of community funds, with a shared risk and a shared purpose of wealth preservation above all else.
The finance industry thinks pensions should provide the privatization of gain with the socialization of risk. A massive pension fund last year put a large percentage of workersâ wealth in FTX. Workers are the ones who lost, and the likely had never heard of FTX. That negligence is characteristic of financialisation of systems designed for the public good.
For sure. Nothing wrong with the concept of a pension, so long as self-interested actors canât run off with the value within it. Social security is a great example. Itâs a solvent fund that plays an important role, and it is (currently) held conservatively and doled our predictably. If the banking industry convinced congress to let them manage social security, all bets are off. Itâs a big carrot for them, which is why they try to foment hatred toward the system, calling it an inefficient entitlement system. Itâs perfectly efficient since itâs front-loaded and since the financial industry canât siphons off a percentage of it.
Excited to have the White Paper deep within my Apple OS. No wonder I like this computer so much.
For pensions, the theme of the Bitcoin motto applies:
If you cannot control it, it isnât yours.
Pensions have become an illusion of worker compensation.
Give the people a pension, let the financial industry invest it for them, pump up the stock market for the wealthy, extract 2% for âmanagement,â make it legal for managers to speculate with other peoplesâ money rather than focus on its preservation, and leave laws in place that allow pension managers or states to bankrupt themselves out of their payment obligations.
Thatâs a good one. This community seems acutely aware of the existence of a tyrant.
What people seem to disagree on, is who exactly that tyrant is.
Awful. Corporations writing their own deregulation to pull in greater profits at the expense of wages, safety, and the environment.
All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individualâs own.
â Herbert Marcuse
I recommend Chris Hedges to anyone interested in the suffererâs side of imperial policies.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-war-that-went-wrong
âSpreading democracyâ is a euphemism for enacting foreign governments that are complicit with US foreign policy interests.
When every country in the world considers you to be the greatest risk to world peace, you probably are.
đ¤ˇââď¸Weâve never had a true free market. We have always been net exporters of food with the exception of products that do not grow well here. That export value is subsidized by our government because true market cost would be much lower if developing countries were allowed to grow their own food, and we would be unable to incentivize farmers here to grow enough to flood the world with surplus otherwise.
đ¤ˇââď¸Weâve never had a true free market. We have always been net exporters of food with the exception of products that do not grow well here.
A predominant reason why the US has 850+ military bases around the world is to maintain a state of energy and food dependence within developing nations. The US had a great interest in impairing a countryâs ability to grow its own food, and to instead to flood it with cheap grains.
Central banks in developing countries end up having to issue bonds denominated in dollars or euros or yen to keep their exchange rate artificially stable. But by doing this, theyâre stuck in a permanent debt trap.