Posts Tagged ‘capitalism’

50% Under 30 Living at Home in #America

Posted: February 17, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Is there a difference between societal norms and cultural norms?

Have either of those changed in the past generation (20 years)?

How about the past half century?

Living at home with one’s parents into adulthood used to be akin to the scarlet letter. At least for men. A forehead tattoo with a capital L for the child, and there parents.

Go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, die


Millennials and Gen Z went to school, more than any other generation in history. Millennials and Gen Z got jobs. Yet more of us are living at home with our parents than ever before.

Nearly half of adults under 30? That’s a lot of lazy freeloaders. Or is it something else?

Are the most educated generations of men and women in history failing the system or is the system failing them? Are they failing society or is society failing them? Are they failing culture or is culture failing them?

Wages hadn’t kept up with productivity for half a century before the pandemic and the historic aftershocks of inflation. How many mind fucks can developing brains take before they’re permanently fried?

Both my parents are dead, so I’m happy to hear so many people 18-29 have living parents that they can live with. But I have a feeling they would rather leave the nest if they didn’t have to choose between rent and eating.

An upside to living at home is that it gives more time for organizing.

The empirical data on this issue seems to keep moving in one direction. Capitalist bootlickers will gaslight and deny saying that unemployment and the stock market are doing better than ever. As if either of those things has anything to do with suffering and quality of life for actual human beings.

Every year, every election cycle, every generation the rank and file seem to be asked to take less, do more, have less, save more, enjoy less, suffer more, think less, feel less, be less so that those with the most can have that much more.

Is this sustainable? Is this ethical? Is this tolerable? Is this how it’s always been? Is this how it will always be?

Publicly Traded Private Club

Posted: February 6, 2024 in Excess and Algorithms
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What is the stock market? A central marketplace to buy and sell stock. The NYSE dates back to 1792. It was likely never explicitly stated that it’s a private club. Because of the term publicly traded company, many people probably assume the public interest is being served or that the stock exchange is a public place. It is not.

10% of the populated owns nearly 93% of the stock market. As the late, great George Carlin used to say “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”.

10% of the population
wow, and the government gave them how much bailout money in 2008?

I wonder how the public could have benefited from that money? Healthcare, pot hole repair, college debt forgiveness, homeless sheltering, food banks, community gardens, jobs programs, etc. But that’s going into fantasy land. A fantasy where the rich don’t get richer.

Is there a middle ground where the poor don’t have to get poorer?

It is something to see so much data and evidence pile up that America is living in a capitalist controlled oligarchy. The illusion of direct democracy fades for all but the heavily propagandized. Unfortunately the heavily propagandized is still the majority of the civilian population of America.

The evidence of that fact shows up every election season. Red vs blue, republicans vs democrats, neighbor vs neighbor. Tribalism weaponized to keep the unwashed masses fighting amongst themselves rather than looking upwards and their oppressors.

That third parties are still relegated to joke status because the duopoly has people convinced lock, stock, and barrel that they need to vote between the lesser of two evils OR ELSE, is also really something to behold every election season.

How many billions need to be spent on war and corporate welfare each year before something changes? Is there a number? Is there a flash point? Is there a turning point? Do we as a people have it in us?

It is easier to just get by. Take less and be lead. Settle on the sidelines and complain through small talk or comment sections.

However, it is also getting harder to deny reality. Even in a time of compounding misinformation and infinite propaganda, a study that shows that 10% own 93% of the stock market comes out. The same stock market that is used by every mainstream news source as the indicator of whether the economy is doing good or bad for the whole country.

So if 10% are doing good we’re all doing good? No. But every news anchor and every politician in America talks about how good or bad the economy is doing based on how the stock market is doing. So what does it mean if the stock market is doing good, 10% of the population are doing good, the media and politicians all in unison say we are doing good as a whole, but the vast majority are experiencing the toughest times of the past century?

#Capitalism / Cannibalism

Posted: January 23, 2024 in Excess and Algorithms
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Wage slaves with Stockholm Syndrome that wrongly identify themselves as capitalists love to use theory as a defense to the practical horrors and injustices of late stage capitalism that we’re currently living in.

The most frequent meme of this is when they use pictures or scenes from capitalist economies as a visual aide to show the theoretical horrors of socialism.

Those types also like to ignore the socialized aspects of many developed, first world countries throughout Europe and South America. They play dumb when you bring up Universal Basic Income and the results of the studies and trial programs that have been enacted over the past decade. They play dumber when you ask them about tax cuts and bailouts for billionaires and corporations.

What’s the difference between feudalism and historic income inequality and wealth gaps under capitalism?

Technology.

Humanity posses the technology to ease the burden of work of the individual so they may devote more of their life to things other than “earning a living”.

Yet the small minority of people with the greatest concentration of wealth, resources, and therefore power choose to use this technology as a weapon against the masses rather than an aide by forcing competition amongst the people and the technology that can do their jobs better, faster, and cheaper.

What of the people at direct risk of homelessness and starvation because of technology being weaponized against them rather than being put to use for their benefit? Well I guess there’s always prison. And prison labor is the cheapest labor of all.

#Cost of Living

Posted: January 17, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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There are so many things in life that we just don’t think about.

So many physical things that exist that we don’t think about. So many phrases in our language that we don’t think about.

Cost of Living.

The term implies that we don’t deserve to live. We don’t deserve to be alive. So much for the pro-choice crowd. Once the fetus is born, its on its own.

Self help gurus and the toxic positivity crowd like to talk about what a statistical miracle it is to be alive. Good for content, great for someone whose doing well in life to feel even better about themselves. That concept smacks into a brick wall of the externally, measurable, physical reality of any capitalist controlled civilization.

The paramedic will save your life and tell you that it was a miracle, then the clerk sends you a bill that puts you into medical bankruptcy. The politician tells you it’s a miracle to be alive in the richest country in the history of the world, then votes against universal healthcare.

Cost of living. Trade ⅔ of your life in the service of being to survive the other ⅓ while you’re not working. Five days on for two days off. Fifty weeks on for two weeks off. If you’re a worker with a white collar maybe. What is a weekend? What is a holiday? Sick days? Suck it up and turn your gear on the machine plebe.

Cost of living. You mean the mental and emotional toll that simply existing, maintaining sanity and decorum takes on us? You mean the unanswerable questions about existence? What is consciousness? What happens when we die?

The consequences of the body decaying as we get older as the positive alternative to dying young? The feeling of being alone in rooms full of strangers? Wondering if anyone will ever really get us? Not knowing who we can actually trust? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does absolute power corrupt absolutely? What does living up to my potential mean? Are we alone in the universe? Isn’t there a risk of dying at any moment? That cost of living?

No, not the immaterial cost of living. The other one. The material cost of living. The one that says if you don’t trade your time for money often enough, for enough quantity, you’ll be left to die of dehydration and starvation on the streets. That cost of living.

Economic #Ecological Adversity

Posted: January 16, 2024 in Frackishima
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Why does it seem like climate change is only getting worse?

Why do the institutions, organizations, and countries that can have the greatest impact only pay lip service to combatting climate change?

Why is that even regular everyday people who aren’t skeptics seem apathetic to the prospects of positively reversing climate change?

Capitalism.

Profit motive > anything & everything

Until the many are able to unite against the few, things are only moving in one direction.

Getting people to understand that countries and cultures that are completely identified with capitalism are not going to change positively because the changes required to change would require a temporary loss in profits in large amounts for large quantities of current beneficiaries of the capitalist system.

And we know how we human can justify doing the wrong thing if it benefits us. Every human being has done it at some point in their life. An action either on purpose or on accident that negatively impacts another person or thing. But we believe we’re a good person, we didn’t mean it, we deserve better, etc.

Just scale that up to that of communities, countries, civilizations and corporations.

An aspect of human nature that works in our favor on tackling climate change is the inner drive humans have to help each other. You see it all the time when disaster strikes. There are always helpers. People helping people.

There is no benefit to losing faith in humanity. There are enough of us who want to help each other on a mass scale by helping the planet. There are enough people on the wrong side of capitalist policies to unite and drive change forward. That is where my hope lays.

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