Ugh.
2022-01-31
Gotta hand it to Professor Wolff.
He sure knows how to sum things up.
More recently, mainstream U.S. politicians—again, establishment figures from both major parties—applied the denial and displacement mantra to the problem of inflation in the U.S. economy. The denial with which they confronted inflation was oddly focused on the future. Americans were officially assured that the inflation would be limited in extent and would be merely transitory. Its possible depth and duration were denied. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and others down the bureaucratic ladders confidently predicted inflation’s future decline. When the lack of evidence behind such denials about possible future decline in inflation became clear when the real inflation data were announced, attempts at displacements by politicians and bureaucrats grabbed the limelight. The no longer deniable inflation was dutifully blamed on supply chain disruptions, Federal Reserve monetary policy, the Democrats’ fiscal policies, the Chinese, Trump, or Biden.
Yet again, virtually nowhere did politicians or media commentators refer to capitalism’s role in causing this inflation. As every business school teaches its students and as capitalists have repeatedly admitted, profit is the bottom line, the goal of business decisions. One such decision is setting prices to maximize profits. After nearly two years (2020 and 2021) of a depressed profit situation for most businesses, employers across the U.S. wanted to recoup their lost profits. They hoped to do so by raising their prices as much as the market could bear. In capitalism, employers (a tiny minority of the population) exclude employees (the vast majority) from making price decisions. Especially in the latter half of 2021, many employers raised prices of their goods and services. They thereby caused an inflation to improve their profit situation: what they are in business for. For the employees, who are in the majority and were already hurt badly during the two years of the ongoing pandemic plus the 2008 economic crash, an inflation, especially one outrunning their wage increases, was unspeakably bad news.
Denial and displacement indeed.
Well my Monday is off to a great start.
Basically working pretty much non stop for the last 5 hours. It's amazing that there's even time to take a piss.
2022-01-28
2022-01-27
This represents the true failure of the criminal justice system in Crapitalism.
If an individual sentient human being was doing something like this, we'd be in jail.
But a large multi-national corporation with deep connections to various US Government agencies and departments - including the CIA and the military - they just get to shut down with what amounts to a dollar-ed slap on the wrist:
On the surface, this might seem good, right?
"Consumers lose when corporate giants like Amazon fix prices to increase their profits," Ferguson said. "Amazon unreasonably restrained competition in order to maximise its own profits off third-party sales. This conduct constituted unlawful price-fixing."
This is the failing part -
To settle the investigation, Amazon has agreed to shut down the "Sold by Amazon" program nationwide and provide the Attorney General's Office with annual updates on its compliance with antitrust laws.
Amazon will also pay $2.25 million to the Attorney General's Office that will be used to support its antitrust enforcement which does not receive general fund support.
What - no charges? No trial? No verdict? No jail time? Lot's of press.
Zero substance, and absolutely no accountability - or justice.
2022-01-26
The betrayal of the working class continues.
This time, sadly it's Bernie Sanders who's on point:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/26/king-j26.html
In one revealing episode, Sanders asked Cordova how it was that workers at the largest supermarket chain in the country could not afford to buy enough food. Sanders, however, was posing this question to someone who is jointly responsible for such conditions with management. The UFCW as a whole has been an active participant in the destruction of its members’ livelihoods for decades, allowing mega-corporations like Kroger to turn a once stable career into a position of starvation wages and oppressive working conditions.
An appearance by Sanders has increasingly become a mark of death for strikes and other forms of protest by workers. Whenever Sanders appears on the picket line, or at a rally or town hall meeting, it is the clearest indication that the unions are in the process of betraying and shutting down a struggle.
This was the case, for example, in an appearance last month at a rally organized by the BCTGM union in Battle Creek, Michigan during a weeks-long strike by Kellogg’s cereal workers. Sanders did not even acknowledge the existence of a tentative agreement (TA) which had just been announced by the union the previous day, and a leaked management email shortly after Sanders spoke revealed that the new TA was virtually identical to the one which workers had rejected weeks ago, and that Kellogg’s was relying on the assistance of the union to push it through.
A sandwich shop (i.e. meal corporation) collecting employees' fingerprints?
I always get very uncomfortable and suspicious of any entity collecting employee personal data.
2022-01-25
You know one's life is fucked up ...
... When your 4-year old celebrates all the kills they made in a Roblox game.
And one feels a twinge of both revulsion, and pride.
Fucked up - yes I know.
Got this gem of snippet in an email from a bank.
'... build good money habits this year with a debit card for kids'
Pretty transparent attempt to turn my kids into future debt-ridden customers.
Pretty fucking sick also.
A somewhat contrarian view of what Elizabeth Holmes' guilty verdict means.
It boils down to 'only the investors matter'.
https://kitoconnell.com/2022/01/16/elizabeth-holmes-late-capitalism/
Hard to argue with it, I'd say.
Well what do you know! Employees are more productive in a remote work situation.
The 20th Century view -
Previous models of productivity-focused on several now-outdated approaches to measuring the “quantifiable” results of an employee’s work. This included measurement of outputs, such as units and/or deliverables completed, and production line management’s (and its white-collar equivalent’s) assessments of hours worked by watching over a sea of workers, cubicles, and offices.
The 21th Century view-
The new workplace is where the work lives: the shared physical and digital environment used by organizations to enable the workforce with the right tools to get work done.
Context here: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/blog/human-capital-blog/2021/remote-work-productivity.html
Got this from TechRepublic.
2022-01-22
2022-01-21
2 really succinct articles from the Black Agenda Report.
https://blackagendareport.com/biden-plantation
But now the bloom is truly off the rose. The campaign lies and the failure to address the covid pandemic make it difficult for all but the dead enders to support Biden and vice president Kamala Harris. The Black political class will fulfill their role and continue to put lipstick on the pig. The people aren’t fooled though and they won’t turn out in the numbers needed to keep democrats in control of congress. Although democratic control means very little. The military industrial complex gets $770 billion in funding regardless of who is in control. Biden has pledged not to provide medicare for all and he didn’t even present a public option for health care. As for claims that the democrats are more environmentally friendly, Biden has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public land than the Trump administration did.
A major principle of Marxism is that the contradictions of capitalist society have a tendency of becoming antagonisms which cause tectonic shifts in political and economic relations. The loss of confidence in the Biden administration is part and parcel of the sharpening contradiction between its public relations image as the U.S.’s savior from the so-called evils of Donald Trump and the fact that Biden and company are functionaries of the very ruling elite that produced Trump in the first place. Said differently, Trump is a byproduct of the general crisis of capitalism that Biden’s long career of service to the ruling class helped produce. The capitalist, imperialist, and white supremacist roots of the American Empire are rotting from within. Capitalism is at a dead-end and is faced with an impossible choice: either accept reforms that cut into finance capital’s ill-gotten profits or terrorize workers and oppressed people for everything they have.
For the ruling class, this really isn’t a choice at all. When faced with economic and political crisis, capital always chooses to reproduce itself over the needs and interests of society. The Biden administration’s arrogance in the face of crisis represents a breakdown in the state’s capacity to govern an empire in decay. Capital is banking on the fact that no mass movement yet exists that is mature enough to confront the contradictions of duopoly rule. Any genuine revolutionary must take up this task as Biden moves sluggishly past his first year as president of the United States. American exceptionalism is dead, and the time is now to build revolutionary movements and leaders who are ready to bury the American Empire with it.
2022-01-19
The Habs won ANOTHER game!
Great to see.
Great to see some players who've been out due to injury or COVID coming back.
2022-01-18
Make no mistake about what the challenge is.
It's to overcome a system of rule that the rich and the powerful have placed over all of us.
It's rooted in racism, endless consumption, and ongoing profit and power.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1483085972975890437
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