The NYT Strikes me as an organization that would rather attempt to continue to exist under Trump than try to fight the rising fascist tide he’s riding.

They’ve always been that high on themselves, and they’ve always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas.

When’s the last time you’ve heard of a pizza delivery person going to the wrong house and killing someone?

Doesn’t happen.

The GOP establishment, which the Federalist Society that now controls the SCOTUS represents, never liked Trump.

They spent decades turning their base into conspiratorial, counterfactual nitwits through the media they own because then they could easily tell them “climate change isnt real! Give rich people all the money! Poor people made bad decisions!” etc, and rob everyone blind to thunderous applause and their nitwits defending the owner’s grift from the rest of us.

Then one day a notorious opportunist got up on stage, said the quiet parts out loud, co-opted that engineered willfull ignorance, and stole their nitwit brigade right out from under them. Remember, the turning point for Trump was the day he told the crowd he’d like to take protesters out back and “beat the shit” out of them. Prior to that he was hiring extras to attend his rallies.

The Machiavellian Mitch McConnells and John Roberts have been quietly seething ever since. Trump makes them feel dirty because he embodies the crassness of the con they’ve been leading their nitwit voters around by from a sterile distance. Their crass nitwits aren’t supposed to bleed into their halls of power! Their careful, coordinated long game grift compromised by a 2 bit snake oil song and dance grifter.

AGI confirmed.

They’ve already surpassed our wildest imaginations.

My dad cooked steak like this.

I thought I hated steak until I became an adult and tried a properly prepared one.

I miss r/scarysigns

I don’t believe in God, but man, Republicans do a bang up job of making them look like a raging asshole unworthy of anyone’s worship.

If this is what the Christian God is actually like, Lucifer had the right idea.

To err is human, friend, no worries!

To admit to error makes you cooler than most.

Jack Welch was all about investors first and only. He wasn’t the first, but he was the most historically prominent of CEOs betraying the social work contract on the businesses end as Reagan converted his supposed opposition party into bribe taking neoliberals as they rigged the game legislatively beyond all sanity and called it turning the bull loose, to the applause of working class morons cheering their own destruction.

Edit: completely agreed and well said!

The upside of living inside such a shitty, cruel, selfish civilization is that leaving it just sounds like peace at last.

Honestly I’d need more data. What did the family make annually relative to the non-family workers, etc.

That said, I wouldn’t consider them the primary villains, possibly more symptomic of a larger problem. Kind of a when in Rome situation of “well I have enough capital to start something small, and I won’t exploit my workers as badly as faceless corporations, which makes me good by comparison” kind of thing.

I don’t believe the people that throw money from previous capital gains at a proposal to build the means of production deserve as much back as the people that LABOR day in and day out to run those Machines and produce value from them, let alone orders of magnitude more than the laborers as they do.

I think being a business owner/investor should mean getting a tiny cut of the final net profits, most of which goes to the people whose blood, sweat, and time they’d rather be spending elsewhere produced widgets of value that society wanted.

So no, if your family payed anyone who wasn’t family less than family despite them running or accounting or whatever their role was harder than your family LABORED, merely because the family owns/leases the building and machines, the worker deserved more of the net profits than your family on the projects they labored on. Not Bezos evil, but not right either.

I think it’s deeply, deeply wrong for someone to just throw money they got from god knows where and who they hurt to get it at a potential profitable business, walk away and not be part of building it using their own hands and headaches, and then expect not only a lot, but most of the net profits. It’s perverse that our society rewards such activity and punishes doing the work by comparison.

Is a family in and of itself a parasite if they sell lemonade on their front lawn and split the profits at the end of the day? No.

Is the Walton family a family of Parasites? Obviously.

State your point if you have one. Also your link lead nowhere for me.

Specifically not for a co-op. Literally every business in America should be a co-op where the active laborers benefit proportionate to the company’s profits.

“DAWI estimates that there are closer to 1,000 worker co-ops operating in the U.S., with 10,000 workers.”

https://www.fiftybyfifty.org/2022/02/latest-worker-co-op-survey-shows-more-co-ops-but-fewer-workers/

That said, co-ops in the US almost don’t even exist, because the capital laborers would have to start such things together is eaten by the oligarchs by design. Part of the whole maintaining a monopoly on the means of production and keeping workers separated from said means thing that capitalism is all about.

Not to mention our entire economy and tax structure was designed to benefit private owners that sit above their workers imbibing capital gains taxed at a lower rate, not cooperative/communal(gasp!) ownership and profit.

10,000 workers is a rounding error here. Co-ops reflect almost no American’s circumstances at large.

I just go on such rants to feel sane in a cruel, insane world.

I have no hope for it changing or getting anything but worse in any of our lifetimes. Too many safeguards. Too much propaganda dividing those that would revolt. The oligarch class owns the media, the means of production, they control the curriculum from Kindergarten through colleges of economics, and if it comes to it, they captured their own regulators and government and thus also own the means of state violence.

I shout it to feel sane, but I’m aware most ears it would fall on are willfully deaf.

There was a time, prior to the Reaganomics Jack Welch Wall Street takeover, where many companies subscribed to the 123 rule: customers first, employees second, investors third, because when customers and employees are happy, the profit comes, as they’re the ones that generate it.

That meant security, promotions, real pensions, benefits, a sense of partnership in the work being done and, in this case, EMPLOYEE BUY IN.

now it’s investors 1,2, and only. That’s why service sucks when you’re a customer, and why most correctly treat their employer as an adversary. When employees are treated as disposable drains on company time, nickeled and dimed and underpaid at every step, threatened, scolded, and basically given zero respect, you have to be a sucker to care about your employer’s needs.

When your employer has a problem and you aren’t on the clock, not your fucking problem. Your employer has a problem outside of your job description’s scope, also not your fucking problem.

The workers didn’t set these terms, yet the owners and their blindly devoted bootlickers seem outraged when we recognize them and respond appropriately, as if it’s a personal affront when you don’t just take the abuse with a smile, falsely conflating being a doormat and a mark with being a “responsible adult.”

And zis, vat does zis von look like?

As fucked as we are because of it, there is a darkly funny poetry in Wall Street panicking over losing control of the legions of the willfully ignorant regressionists they created by robbing the commons , propagandizing division and hate, and making society compete against itself while destroying its only habitat, just to make the rich sociopaths richer.

This Trump hoard is Reagan’s monster all growed up, a literal cult of willful ignorance, and it has been trained to distrust any inconvenient facts (worked well for things like preventing addressing climate change or a rational, equitable economy), but now it’s self sustaining. It doesn’t even trust what daddy job creator says anymore.

TLDR: It sucks they’re eating all of us, but its satisfying to see them also pushing into the building of the Pharmaceutical that made the zombie virus out of reckless greed to begin with.

And I’m sure most heroin people don’t understand most meth people and vice versa. We like the drugs we like.

Our people don’t deserve a leader like him.

Our people prefer charismatic liars that tell us we can get moooore than our neighbors if we play the rigged game and work against one another.

Our people would much rather have a 0.1% chance of lucking into a lifestyle of perverse gluttony than have a 100% chance of everyone having a roof, a bed, and a full belly at night.

Our people are selfish and cruel.

I haven’t and won’t vote for any Republican ever, but I will admit, Donald Trump is the perfect reflection of the United States of America. We couldn’t ask for a mascot more reflective of our practiced values. He is the USA personified. All the toxic, antisocial traits we celebrate about ourselves: proud Greed, proud willfull ignorance, vanity, arrogance, all the - isms, unearned confidence, cruelty, gluttony, schadenfreude, nepotism, you might as well run him up a flag post and sing the star spangled banner while eating apple pie at a baseball game.

Everyone has at least one vice.

This one was adrenaline.