Every year, the richest person in America is declared the “Winner of Capitalism.” They get a badge. Then all of their wealth is donated to charity and they have to start over at $0.
This procedure results in the worlds richest people donating excessive amounts of money ahead of the event in an attempt to avoid being hit by a real life blue shell. Thus adding to the overall annual donation.
Y’all think this is a joke but that’s literally how taxes are *supposed* to work
Tag: capitalism
Step 1: Look at the Price.
Step 2: Look in the Trash
because there can be a store like this full of food and people on the same block starving because they don’t have enough pieces of paper to trade for it.
because the people who planted, maintained, harvested, and inspected all that produce are compensated barely enough to sustain themselves
because in order to drive down the prices of bananas, the us government and american fruit corporations destroyed the democratically elected leftist governments of numerous central american countries, placing murderous despots at the head of these “banana republics”.
because the scars of these crimes against humanity still haunt millions to this day.
I work in a grocery store. We are considered one of the better chains for produce quality, and out of the stores of this kind in the local area, we actually have good produce sparing procedures. Despite all of that, we waste 40% (FOURTY) of all the produce we receive. I throw out my own body weight daily in produce. I am not exaggerating or joking. This is capitalism.
Don’t waste it get all your groceries for free every Saturday at 3:20pm Lafayette and Marcy in Brooklyn. Save $400 a month
Not to mention, in order to put acceptable produce on shelves tons of it is thrown away before reaching the store. Most produce grows in thousands of varietals that are suppressed to make Supermarket ideals of produce for the public. Generic strains tend to be less healthy than wild versions, corn is a good example. But the idea of plenitude is what capitalism loves to sell. Unless it’s Amazon, then there’s only 2 left, buy it now!
this is what the rise of pedophile culture looks like–little girls are being indoctrinated into beauty rituals at earlier and earlier ages to feed the misogynistic pedophilic male gaze.
this is what the intersection of capitalism and misogyny looks like–fashion and beauty products are being marketed to females no matter their age as long as is generates profit and feeds the male gaze.
this is what porn culture looks like–due in part to the widespread availability of porn, females are considered sexual objects before they are considered human beings and so no matter what, a female must always be sexually available and presentable to men.
^Exactly. Please, when you see young girls who look like this, remember not to blame the literal children for their own oppression. They’re just trying to “fit in” and be accepted by their peers. Blame the fucking adults who sell them this image and profit from it.
Thank you for explaining what bothered me about children looking like that. I could never quite put my finger on it.
I say this every time I argue for raising the minimum wage. I never hear anyone else say it and I’m glad I found this.
If you build your business and your bonus on the backs of others who you don’t pay a living wage you don’t deserve to be in business.
this is making capitalists bleed from the ears keep reblogging it
Since I tend to get into this with people who argue that robots will replace minimum wage workers if they get too expensive, I like to lean into the robot metaphor.
If you have a machine performing a valuable talk for your company, the upkeep of that machine is part of your operating cost. You have to pay to power it, to upgrade it, to fix it when it breaks. And if you can’t afford the machine, the manufacturer doesn’t have to do business with you. They’re free to take their service somewhere else where they think the price is fair.
For humans, a living wage is the operating cost. If you can’t afford to pay your worker enough to live nearby, feed themselves, and get basic health care – all of which are things they need in order to be able to work for you – you’re failing to pay for the cost of their service.
The difference is that humans have to eat, like, all the time, so they often don’t have the option of taking their business somewhere else if the price isn’t fair – even insufficient food and shelter is better then starving on the street. But that means those people are not really able to act as agents in a free market, and it’s easy to exploit them under the guise of “the market setting the price.” People can’t act like reasonable economic agents when they’re desperate. As for as I can tell, that’s the whole point of having a minimum wage.
Keep reblogging this, it’s making capitalists mad and reaching out to the working class
Lewis Black – Black To The Future
Funny thing? He almost certainly did it on purpose.
And I don’t mean that as “actually he knows what he’s doing.” I mean it as “he has been committing one of the longest running and most blatant cases of fraud in the history of business and it’s only due to the limitations of our legal system that his entire business history is not classified as a Ponzi Scheme.”
Because he didn’t just bankrupt a casino.
He bought two casinos in Atlantic city, exaggerated the shit out of their profits to lure in investors, and began work on building a third casino. He was overextended in the market in a way that had him competing against his own businesses. He also snubbed contractors, threatened and litigated a ton of small businesses out of their jobs, and raised capital through issuing hundreds of millions of dollars in junk bonds (high risk high reward, they’re below investment grade but some people like to bet on them because the interest rate in the case of a payout is very large).
So what happened? He leveraged his ownership in a way that allowed him to strip out a ton of assets (which he legally owned), while leaving the corporate side totally overloaded with debt financing from the junk bonds, and then he drove all of it into the ground. Hard.
He went to bankruptcy court like 3 separate times over casino projects. While in bankruptcy court, he relentlessly fled from personal liability (his equity stake in the companies was extremely minimal because of the debt financing strategy) and managed to pay back a tiny fraction of his actual debt (this is why he always handles his debt in bankruptcy court; you can get away with paying back pennies on the dollar when you supposedly have no money). He also issued like 300 million more in junk bonds to pay himself and his legal fees, then went back to bankruptcy court and frauded all of THOSE investors.
Now you’ve probably heard the term Ponzi Scheme before, but if you’ve never heard a proper explanation of how one works, here’s a basic breakdown. First, you borrow money from one investor. Then, you borrow money from a second investor, and use that money to pay back the first investor at an impressive interest rate. Then you can start selling the scam to people by showing them how good your investors are doing, and hook more people in. You pay back earlier investors with the influx of cash from the new ones, while raking in the profits for yourself.
Now think about this business model. Use debt financing to start up a business. Litigate, fraud, or drive your contractors out of business so they don’t have enough money to sue you for what you owe them. Leverage the capital structure so you have minimal liability personally invested in the company. Strip out assets before a collapse because hey, you own it. Raise more debt capital to keep the illusion running as long as you can, and when you can’t keep up with what you owe your investors anymore, file for bankruptcy and pay them back scraps. You’ve made a ton of money, frauded a ton of investors, and they can’t come after you for it because you were leveraged behind a corporation and your personal liability was very small. You make more money off a flop than a hit. Rinse and repeat.
BUT YOU CAN’T GET CAUGHT FOR SETTING UP A PYRAMID SCHEME BECAUSE IT DOESN’T LAST LONG ENOUGH. YOU NEVER SET UP THE CYCLE OF INVESTORS AND INSTEAD YOU GET OUT OF PAYING THEM BACK BY ACTING LIKE YOUR BUSINESS WAS AN ORDINARY FAILURE INSTEAD OF BY STEALING MONEY FROM SUBSEQUENT INVESTORS.
That’s what happened in Atlantic City.
Now think about the rest of his business failures. Trump Airlines? That’s an industry that requires huge startup investment (debt financing) and the owner gets to sell off expensive assets when it fails. Trump Steaks? He sold those at THE SHARPER IMAGE, where it was guaranteed to fail because it was completely the wrong market for that kind of business. Trump University? Never even TRIED to be successful with that, he just tricked people into giving him as much money as he could squeeze out of them, and provided no actual service in exchange. He paid a $25 Million settlement on the lawsuit, but MADE $175 Million off the actual scam, so he walked away with $150 million for doing absolutely nothing. A LOT of his businesses, if you look closely, were practically DESIGNED to fail.
Because that’s how he operates.
Donald Trump is not a good businessman. He never even tried to be a businessman. What he is, is a con artist. Everything he ever made was fake.
The only really successful business he owns is the real estate business … which he inherited from his father and has grown at a slower rate than inflation even as he drives contractors out of business and targets undocumented laborers so they have no legal grounds to sue him for fair wages or working conditions.
Donald Trump is the CEO equivalent of The Producers.
Further reading and WILDLY paraphrased (from memory, from last year) source for the above commentary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html
The Tweeter In Chief Strikes Again. This time, it’s the US economy he’s going to blow up.
I misspoke when I said we have gone 24 hours without a Trump twitter controversy. This one’s less likely to start a war, though in some ways it’s more disturbing.
So, at around 8:00am this morning, Trump fired off a tweet which suggested he was going to take the contract for Air Force One away from Boeing. When I say ‘suggested,’ what I mean is that the tweet ended with the words, “Cancel order!” Boeing’s stock began dropping.
There was a lot of confusion abroad about why Trump would just up and do this. Then Jake Tapper from CNN, who appears to be a man on a mission when it comes to Trump, noted that Boeing’s CEO had been quoted in a Chicago Tribune piece as being critical of Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric.
Evidently, Trump read this article, got pissed off, and decided to punish Boeing because its CEO dared to oppose him. I’ve figured out, incidentally, why Trump is so addicted to Twitter. It provides him with an instant gratification that he cannot obtain in any other way. He thinks it, he tweets it, he basks in the attention. The attention is what’s important to him, not the consequences. No wonder “Trump’s Unpredictable Style Unnerves Corporate America.”
All right. Let me see how succinctly I can explain why, in a capitalist economy, when you are the incoming or actual President of the United States, Words Have Consequences, and why even those of us who kind of hate corporate America share some of their unnerved-ness.
Steel Phoenix Studios 