Dictynna

Independent Lefty
Don't mind me, I'm just driveby extroverting...

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[David Sirota @davidsirota]

The commitment to memory-holing literally everything — his role in NAFTA, financial dereg, killing the public option, the coverup of the murder of a teenager — is deeply sociopathic, as is the national media‘s complicity.

A perfect encapsulation of this whole era of nihilism.

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

In the 1950s, scientists tried to define "normal" humans. The problem? They couldn't find any.

The Normals, a #SciencePodcast🎙️ series that explores this story, is a finalist for The @signalawards!

Today is the last day to support us for the listener’s choice award. Cast your vote here: https://t.co/O56R37N1VM

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

Hegseth influence operation targets upcoming elections

https://t.co/ENGkiUGCW7

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ @schwarz]

For 30 years America's most vicious billionaires have invested huge amounts of money in propaganda about Social Security. It's been so successful that millions of Americans robotically repeat the propaganda at every opportunity. https://t.co/bUL6VpGX0t

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[ProPublica @propublica]

The White House says SNAP beneficiaries are defrauding the food stamp program, but Americans on food assistance are more often the victims of fraud, as criminal groups empty accounts to purchase and sell goods for a profit.
https://t.co/q3ayCPqKfs

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[ProPublica @propublica]

Despite assurances from the Trump administration, ProPublica found the government has turned its vast security and surveillance apparatus against the Tohono O’odham Nation.

“The drones flying over us all day,” one tribal member said, “it’s a lot.”
https://t.co/8pQ3CdWnMm

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[ProPublica @propublica]

We reviewed FBI documents that showed a sweeping pay-to-play investigation involving Sen. Susan Collins was in motion. Then Trump shut down the unit in charge.

Had we found a road map to corruption in Congress? We decided to dig deeper.
https://t.co/kDswW8idcH

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

https://t.co/oVrMSKosYl

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The problem with this argument is it rests entirely on the widely misunderstood concept of labor productivity.

Many people, especially non-economists, hear calls to "increase the average labor productivity of Brazilian workers" and think that means the reason Brazil is so much poorer than Switzerland is because Brazilian workers are supposedly lazy and don't work as hard as Swiss workers. But that is false and absurd.

Labor productivity is simply defined as worker contribution to real GDP per hour of labor.

The reason labor productivity is low in Brazil, and in the periphery in general, is because of the productive structure of the economy.

Brazil, like most of Latin America (and the periphery as a whole), has an economy centered on exports of agricultural goods, minerals, energy, and other commodities. These are very low value-added, labor-intensive sectors with lots of international competition (and therefore low profit margins).

The reason Switzerland's labor productivity is so high is because it has monopolistic "moats" in some very high value-added sectors like specialized financial services (ie, banking for global oligarchs) and advanced manufacturing.

A Swiss banker working on a computer in an air-conditioned office will have an exponentially higher labor productivity than a Brazilian farmer or miner (or even a Brazilian banker), not because the Swiss banker works harder (they objectively don't), but because they work in specialized high value-added services and can simply charge exponentially more for their labor.

These high value-added industries can't just be magically recreated in the periphery. Every country in Latin America and Africa would love to be the next Singapore (and many have tried), but you can't skip stages of development.

Not everyone in the world can just work in the high value-added service sector -- especially when the high labor productivity in the advanced economies fundamentally depends on cheap energy, food, and minerals produced by workers in the periphery.

When we talk about the global value chain, we're really talking about a highly stratified global division of labor. And it is very, very difficult to move up it. That takes years of careful planning, investment, education, training, infrastructure build-out, technology transfer, etc. -- which in turn requires political stability and the ability of the state to implement long-term planning without significant disruption.

Neoliberalism was never as simple as "the government must spend less". It was about the state giving power to markets and the investor class to decide what the priorities of political-economy policymaking would be.

This investor class (consisting of both foreign investors and the domestic compradores) prioritizes maximizing return on investment, not developing the productive capacity of the local economy. That's why it primarily invests in the extractive commodity export sector.

This also explains why Brazil (and most of Latin America) significantly deindustrialized during the neoliberal period, and has become even more dependent on the low value-added export of commodities.

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[The Nation @thenation]

Private equity exec Jeffrey Leerink is gutting the healthcare and life sciences sectors. https://t.co/AXhjbNnGY3

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[The Nation @thenation]

"The climate community has rightfully looked at fossil fuel infrastructure. But those companies have a military that works on their behalf. The US military is basically the enforcement arm of global capitalism. The military has always been a force for extractive industries to maintain its own force around the world." https://t.co/1sxDB2PqVz

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

Zohran Mamdani Cannot Fire Jessica Tisch https://t.co/9S2i2edAZV

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

Vegetables half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s https://t.co/mpSMNMDBoz via @@YahooNews

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

NEW: Anthropic is now eying a $2 trillion IPO, potentially the largest of all time.

At the same time the company is trying to shield itself from responsibility by saying its AI agents are autonomous, even sentient.

We investigated Dario Amodei, the man behind the curtain.

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a $30 million investment in an NYU quantum lab, and in exchange for the investment from the city the university will give 15% of all profits back to the city.

This deal, the first of its kind secured in NYC history, will ensure that public investment actually gets generates wealth for public usage.

It's an important break from the public subsidizing the private sector, while a few private individuals reap the profits.
https://t.co/DPR8BxGqdA

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The Wall Street Journal wants you to believe that rent stabilized apartments are sitting vacant because landlords can’t afford to repair apartments.

The truth is that these landlords delay repairs for years and decades, and are now trying to force New York to let them rent at market value so they can make more money.

We broke it down.

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

Colby has done fantastic work drilling down into the numbers on PBC’s purchase of Israel Bonds from a completely neutral “is this sound investment policy?” standpoint. This is a great thread

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

Tonight Matt Gaetz featured the Israel Bonds scandal out of Palm Beach on his show.

This afternoon a new lawsuit against Gaetz dropped from 2 woman accusing him of “sex trafficking” dropped.

The whole honeypot scam was orchestrated by Joel Greenberg (who TMZ chose to call by his middle name in their coverage)- who at the time was the Seminole County Tax collector and therefore in charge of issuing state IDs- after he helped these “girls” steal the identities of residents who had had come into Greenberg’s office to renew their licenses.

Greenberg pretended to make a mistake on the license, and said he needed to make a new another one- he then took the discarded one, put the picture of the underage girl on it instead- and badda-bing badda-boom they were now of age according to their very real Florida state IDs. Matt Gaetz had no clue until Joel was arrested on other charges and tried to weasel his way out by saying he could give the DOJ a congressman on a silver platter.

After the DOJ learned the whole story they declined to prosecute since the “victims” in the case were literally committing identity theft, a felony, and the accused (Gaetz) had no way of knowing what their real ages were. (Which, by the way, they turned 18 just 3 months after first meeting Gaetz)

See how these honeypot schemes work? See how they can follow you around for years? See how they seem to always pop up at the most convenient times for Israel? None of that is coincidence.

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

In February 2025 Candiru was acquired by Integrity Partners, an investment fund founded in 2021. This purchase allowed Candiru to circumvent the sanctions it was under after being placed on the US sanctions list by the Biden administration.

In 2022 Integrity Partners also tried to purchase NSO Group, the Israeli tech firm responsible for the Pegasus spyware. That deal ultimately fell through.

But at the time we learned that founders of Integrity Partners, Chris Gaertner and Elad Yoran, are "former American soldiers" who both went to West Point and have strong ties with the administration officials and the Pentagon.

So the question becomes, why are these retired American servicemen so interested in buying Israeli tech companies that have been sanctioned by the US government and helping them to avoid the consequences of their actions?

[Dictynna @Dictynna8]

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[James Medlock @jdcmedlock]

We effectively don't have an estate tax anymore.