Just a bunch of plutocrats utilising their free-speech rights..
Report
Pro-Israel billionaires pushed NYC Mayor to use police on pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University.
They donated to him & offered to pay for private investigators to help break up the demonstrations.
The group included Howard Schultz, Michael Dell, Bill Ackman & Joshua Kushner, with Daniel Lubetzky, Daniel Loeb, Len Blavatnik & Joseph Sitt also associated.
Just a bunch of plutocrats utilising their free-speech rights..
Report
Pro-Israel billionaires pushed NYC Mayor to use police on pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University.
They donated to him & offered to pay for private investigators to help break up the demonstrations.
The group included Howard Schultz, Michael Dell, Bill Ackman & Joshua Kushner, with Daniel Lubetzky, Daniel Loeb, Len Blavatnik & Joseph Sitt also associated.
Just a bunch of plutocrats utilising their free-speech rights..
Report
Pro-Israel billionaires pushed NYC Mayor to use police on pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University.
They donated to him & offered to pay for private investigators to help break up the demonstrations.
The group included Howard Schultz, Michael Dell, Bill Ackman & Joshua Kushner, with Daniel Lubetzky, Daniel Loeb, Len Blavatnik & Joseph Sitt also associated.
There is a urgent need for populist movements invested on real participatory democracy. Real Democracy is what we need to fight Capitalism's tech zealots.
#Tech#SiliconValley#Plutocracy#SanFrancisco#Authoritarianism: "Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.
Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision."
There is a difference between telling both sides of stories, and hedging your bets.
Some once respected news outlets have been hedging their bets when reporting on fascists.
If the fascists succeed, those same softball throwing talking heads will be replaced along with those who called out lies with hard facts.
The strings of nepotism would then be controlled by new puppeteers. Nip it in the bud.
🧵
Here comes another puppet to replace the puppets who didn't nip it in the bud. Rumor has it, AI is eyeballing all their jobs anyway. Ronna the RNC wrecker is in the NBC house now. ???
I just read an article on #Slate that I will NOT link to espousing the virtues of “the pull-out method” when it comes to #contraception. The headline asks, “Withdrawal is a perfectly effective form of contraception. So why are some doctors and sex educators so against it?”
I don’t put a lot of stock in conspiracy theories, but when shit starts staring you in the face…
#Inequality#Capitalism#Plutocracy: "The decisions made by this small handful of men have a huge impact on almost every area of our lives — including our wages, our rents, and the temperature of our planet. And yet they exercise this extraordinary amount of power with little to no accountability.
No one in their right mind would argue that this is a rational way to organize an economy. Most mainstream economists argue that people like Jeff Bezos don’t really have as much power as we think they do. Amazon’s decisions are, they argue, determined entirely by wider trends within the market. Bezos doesn’t make decisions; the market does.
Yet in a world characterized by extreme levels of inequality, high rates of market concentration, and corporate capture of the state, this view becomes much harder to defend. When ten men could lose almost everything they have and still be wealthier than almost everyone else on the planet, it is absurd to argue that they’re not in control because the market is.
These men are the market — literally, in the case of Jeff Bezos."
Plutocracy in America How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor
The growing gap between the most affluent Americans and the rest of society is changing the country into one defined—more than almost any other developed nation—by exceptional inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity.
"I do not believe in seizure. There are better alternatives, including regulation, taxation, and competition."
In principle, I agree. However, since last year, I did not believe that this is possible anymore in the US. It truly is a #plutocracy (I've written several threads on this during the past year. A tipping point was #CitizensUnitedVsFEC.*)
Elmo has become the most powerful fascist in history.
E.g. just #Starlink:
On Gadigal land, outside the office of Australia's federal Environment Minister @TanyaPlibersek's office, with a large group of school students and their allies, demanding the Australian government #EndFossilFuelSubsidies and commit to #NoNewFossilFuels. #SS4C
Stop repeating their talking points & narratives (not sure which commonly-repeated tropes are part of their decades-long #ClimateDisinformation campaign? Never too late to learn)
Consider the stakes: life as we know it is incompatible with the public business plans of the most powerful corporations on the planet. One/both of those realities will definitely change. Will you?