[USA] Walmart Is Still Putting Ebenezer Scrooge to Shame
Infamous for its starvation wages, Walmart just posted staggering first-quarter profits. The surge is a result of its strategic shift toward catering to affluent shoppers while its full-time workers continue to rely on Medicaid and food stamps https://jacobin.com/2024/05/walmart-living-wage-medicaid-snap/
Ah, #capitalism. Neoclasical (mainstream) economic theory tells us it ensures resources will be put to the best, most efficient use. However, ignores the obvious: wealth equals power, so that what is "best" for society is what the richest value.
Like chasing everlasting youth by getting weekly blood transfusions from your teenage son and $40,000 gym membership add-ons.
#Capitalism#Monopolies#Antitrust#Competition: "Capitalism's theory proceeds from the idea that we are driven by our self-interest, and that competition turns self-interest into communal sentiment. Take away the competition, and all that's left is the self-interest.
I think this is broadly true, even though it's not the main reason I oppose monopolies (I oppose monopolies because they corrupt our democracy and pauperize workers). But even if capitalism's ability to turn greed into public benefit isn't the principle that's uppermost in my mind, it's what capitalists claim to believe – and treasure.
I think that most of the right's defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations – but there are people who've absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It's worth developing these critiques, for their sake."
“Today #tech companies and their #billionaire CEOs are becoming increasingly demonized, and some people are questioning whether they should even exist at all.”
“The jumpers that I bought from Marks & Spencer in the 80s, I’ve still got some of them. They’re brilliant. And the jumpers that you buy now, they’re total shit. This is what’s happened in clothing, in footwear, in the homes that we live in. Does that make our lives any better? Does it bollocks. We’ve binned five and a half million jobs making these things well, and it’s absolutely killed communities.”
Al of humanity lives in abject poverty; lives of harsh conditions, and they die young.
Millenia pass.
Humanity had advanced to the point where homeless people carry about more computing power than all of humanity commanded just a couple hundred years earlier.
More people worldwide suffer from overnutrition than malnutrition.
Millions of people rise out of poverty annually.
Infant mortality plummets.
Pandemics are met with vaccines in the space of months.
Les milliardaires techbros libertariens sont vraiment la plaie de l'humanité.
Les déchets volants de Musk pourrissent les images scientifiques de Hubble 😱
Humans are not inherently evil or corrupt by nature, but even if they were, capitalism is the worst system possible as it enables and promotes these aspects. #anticapitalism#capitalism
Yup #capitalism will encourage people to let a 70+ yr old #disabled, #displaced woman and her 40 yr disabled daughter and an innocent #rabbit all survivors of #trauma to slowly die of heat and starvation
While everyone pats their backs for recycling or watching some politically charged #propaganda on #netflix or some shit
#Boeing is killing whistleblowers like they're #Russian dissidents, so please DO keep with the #guillotine imagery. The oligarchs are afraid. That's why they're killing us. They need to be more afraid, though.
As far as #Boeing executives go, we're past the point of intimidation. Some Boeing execs and probably some #shareholders need to die to make this right. They aren't going to stop killing us otherwise.
If I believed laws would be upheld and executives put in prison, I would accept that. But we're past that point if you've been paying attention. #Capitalism is over. We're witnessing a new era of #Mercantilism that the powerful are trying to bring about. Boeing is doing a flex; they want to appear sovereign and above being governed by us.
If we band together and organize, we are more powerful than #Boeing. We could always try a strike if you're feeling sympathetic towards #Billionaire necks.
just a reminder that poverty is always relative to the amounts of wealth and resources hoarded by the oligarchy, not by whatever material possessions are owned by the poor.
"To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyse Customer Data (e.g. messages, content and files) submitted to Slack as well as Other Information (including usage information) as defined in our privacy policy and in your customer agreement."
@gerrymcgovern I deleted 79,125 'promotional' emails from my Gmail account yesterday.
Didn't think I really needed them.
Didn't think they were useful.
Why do I get so many of these completely useless messages?
Why is so much time and energy expended on these hopeless things that most people completely ignore?
And why should we keep storing them, year after year?
"The literature on degrowth routinely argues (appropriately so) that the global north rather than the global south must be the target for change, but it may well be that the vanguard for degrowth resides, paradoxically, in the global south. It may be that subconscious bias causes us to believe that the global south must catch up with the economic production of the wealthiest states, rather than encouraging us to imagine that the wealthy states need to catch up to the level of consciousness displayed by the most radical societies in the global south."