Olivia
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Whatever you want to change, ultimately economics kicks in, essential reading for activists of all persuasions, to understand the common political guff to deny progress.
@seltbram https://t.co/jn6huT4Kxn
Not "leftist" per se, but can be harnessed for "left"/"progressive" policies.
@dominictsz Taxation is a delete process, it is the equivalent of burning dollars, but apart from that… China clearly invests in its people and the needed infrastructure
Empire rots the soul at home.
Not with dramatic, visible corruption.
With the slow normalization of the unacceptable.
The homeless person outside the office building of the wealthiest corporation in human history. Normal.
The insulin-rationing. Normal.
The politicians who enter public service at a middle-class salary and leave as multimillionaires without anyone in the serious press treating this as something requiring serious explanation. Normal.
The children in the richest country on earth doing active shooter drills. Normal.
The veterans sleeping under bridges in the cities of the country that thanks them for their service at every football game. Normal.
Normalcy is the most powerful political force on earth.
Not ideology. Not propaganda.
Just the daily, accumulated, habituated sense that this is how things are, this is how they have always been, this is the weather, not the architecture.
Empire produces this normalcy deliberately.
It requires it.
A population that sees the abnormality clearly would ask questions about the infrastructure of the abnormality.
The infrastructure prefers not to be questioned.
So it makes the abnormal normal, and the normal invisible, and calls the people who point at it idealistic, naive, or dangerous.
And the rot continues.
Quietly. Politely. On schedule.
@Pistolla81 @LogicProXGaming A modest 85k down payment, 5 years out of college
Saving almost 20k per year
0…k
@TheRealEddieC @geniebouchard Like most governments that operate a fiat currency, it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to be broke… political choices to not fund necessary infrastructure, is the EVIL norm unfortunately
this is where you look stupid and mention inflation…
@robprogressive Taxation is a delete process, removing currency from existence
Why did our ruling class not invest in decarbonising faster to avoid this acceleration in deadly heatwaves that scientists warned would come? Because of the capitalist law of value.
Capital invests in what is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for humanity, so our ruling class keeps ploughing investment into fossil fuels and SUVs, while we get far too little in renewables and public transit, even while the world burns around us.
We have more than enough capacity (labour, factories, technology) to address the climate crisis, but as long as capital controls investment and production we are prevented from doing it.
We are trapped by the capitalist law of value, living in a miserable shadow of the world we could have.
Here's a thought experiment they don't teach in American schools.
Imagine a foreign power, significantly stronger than the United States, decided after a disputed intelligence assessment that the American government posed a threat.
It assembled a coalition, invaded, removed the government, disbanded the military, releasing hundreds of thousands of armed men into unemployment, and installed a transitional authority composed largely of exiles who had been living in the foreign power’s country for twenty years.
It then spent the next decade conducting night raids on American homes.
It ran detention facilities where Americans were held without charge and in some cases tortured.
It operated checkpoints in American cities where American citizens were stopped, searched, and sometimes killed by foreign soldiers who did not speak English and could not distinguish a civilian from a combatant and in many cases did not particularly try.
A generation of American children grew up in this environment.
Would you describe those children's resulting hostility to the foreign power as:
(A) A rational response to their lived experience
or
(B) Evidence of a cultural pathology that requires theological and anthropological analysis?
You already know the answer.
You knew it before I finished the sentence.
The exercise is only necessary because the question is never asked the right way around.
@theficouple @MarketPalmer_ Assholes don’t realize the privilege they have received when growing up when housing was 3-4 annual salary, compared to 8+ now.
It’s not lifestyle choices you prick
@ZosoGraffiti @redrumlisa @by_niels21222 Tech junkie can’t actually observe reality and think for themselves
@AndrewOBoyle69 @LBC @NickFerrariLBC Baby brain Andrew Boyle, can’t take the challenge of reality and has lived in the neoliberal myths for so long that he believes them.
And of course he is put out by big numbers without understanding that the infinite source of the £ is from the government run fiat currency
🤡
@AndrewOBoyle69 @LBC @NickFerrariLBC Aaah you think the kids don’t deserve to be learning in comfort, needing funding to get staff and books and AC units is not a finance problem, it’s a political choice, funding is NEVER the issue.
Fadhel Kaboub, a prominent Tunisian-American political economist beautifully explains why countries like Kenya, Pakistan, Argentina etc have followed the economic prescriptions and conditionalities of the IMF and World Bank for decades yet remain deeply trapped in debt, these institutions are either incompetent or intentionally engaging in economic entrapment.
@AndrewOBoyle69 @LBC @NickFerrariLBC “If you say no to a tax increase” shows EVERYONE that you don’t understand macro economics , pathetic.
It’s a political choice, and both labour and conservatives are neoliberals, the same choices for the same absurd reasoning.
@Scholesy18T @naomi2009 @LBC @NickFerrariLBC Liberal darling wants to make sure we re-use our compostable shopping bags and drink with futile paper straws because less than 1% of the world population in his mega brain, should not have air conditioning, cos they don’t already have it yet.
Genius.
In 'The Road to Serfdom', Hayek claimed that price discovery communicates dispersed, localised knowledge of what people need and want, which no planner could possess. It relies on perfect free-market competition.
I'm convinced that Hayek and his close followers knew fine well that in reality market competition is riddled with violence and corruption. Prices are not 'discovered' but, enabled by such violence and corruption, administered in ways that create monopolistic winners - 'market power'. I learned this very early in life, when a friend of mine was beaten senseless after he tried to set up a rival stall on Consett's Saturday market.
Winners buy political power, abolish competition and crush democracy. Hayek et al. were not naive idealists dreaming of democracy but manipulative and quite malevolent ideologues working on behalf of powerful financial capitalists.
Market competition is an inherently evil, tragic, self-destructive system that empowers entirely the wrong people and leads to oligarchy, political capture, widening inequality and moral decay. Once more, we have arrived at that destination. We need to move on to a democratic socialist system of controlled markets. Nothing short of that will do.
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