A thought about our culture of punching down.

[PatrickforB]

Hello, all. I have just been thinking about getting kicked while you are down. Because I have been there. While the American people are generally good, we have a system - shareholder primacy capitalism - that nickels and dimes pretty much everyone to death.

For example, I pay for cable streaming. In August 2023, the company I use for high-speed internet, cable TV and yes, a land line (I know I'm a dinosaur), suddenly raised my monthly subscription price by 10.7%. I went into the soul-sucking black hole that is this company's 'customer care' system. After two marathon four or five hour sessions, I finally was connected with what can be called a 'churn manager,' which is a person who has just enough power to lower your price to where it is close to what you were paying - just a little higher, but hey, better than 10.7%.

This last month, I noticed they once again raised my price around $8 per month.

All about shareholder profits. That Wall Street bull be hungry!

My wife and I were watching John Oliver's show on student debt, and there was a young lady who had a loan balance of $80K to begin with. She has PAID ON THIS LOAN for ten years. Ten years, and she has paid in over $100K!

She still owes $76K. In the video, she asks, "How is this fucking possible?"

Oliver did a nice shout-out to Biden on that too, because he has acted to forgive billions in student debt. Biden's a good guy, and has been a really good president.

Anyway, I'm thinking about Trump. For years he has been the personification of zero-sum (for me to win, you must lose) capitalism. He has a long record of failing to pay people who provided goods and services to his business, and there are dozens, possibly hundreds of businesses who did work for Trump in good faith who are now bankrupt because he did not pay them.

He has also mocked individuals who have disabilities, incited violence and so on.

It is ironic how he now cannot come up with the money he needs for these settlements. Years of punching down, and now he is finding out what it is like to not have the money he needs.

My career life has been dedicated to bringing the peace of having enough to those who are victimized by economic violence. Because make no mistake. Poverty - simply not having enough is economic violence. Actual war accelerates this, as we see with the plight of Palestinian civilians, and the millions in Ukraine and Russia who have had their lives destroyed because of one monster.

But poverty is a slow burn. Grinding, perpetual economic violence. I'm talking about the people who are victims of poverty, hunger. People who do not have enough. Eleven people a minute on this planet starve to death. Millions of people in the US, including children, go hungry once in a while. Our kids are saddled with forever loans that keep them enslaved to predatory lenders. Like the young woman who still owes $76K after paying over $100K on a student loan originally in the amount of $80K. Old people like me continue to work because of HEALTH CARE DEBT.

This is economic violence. Working your ass off for $7.25 per hour, working two jobs because one won't do. Being a sick kid or flat tire away from losing your job. Being homeless because this country is so unforgiving to its poor. Kick 'em while they are down. Greed is good. That's the mantra. Privatize, deregulate and GUT government programs.

Anyway, the proverbial chickens are coming home to roose for Trump. No one will give him any money. I'm sure he 'went to Jared' who got $2 billion from the Saudis, but Jared isn't coming through. In fact he's been talking about expelling Palestinians from the beachfront in Gaza so he can profit off development.

Shareholder primacy capitalism is rotten to the core.

You wonder why the media is now reporting Trump is considering 'little Marco' as a running mate? Why they perpetuate the horse race narrative? Why they continue to tout poorly constructed polls that show Biden is supposedly 'deeply unpopular,' while it is their own failures in reporting the actual truth that has caused this hypothetical unpopularity.

Here's the thing to know:

CORPORATE OWNED MEDIA COMPANIES ARE PUBLICLY TRADED.

This means that their corporate officers, essentially everyone in managerial roles, including executive producers and directors have NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR TRUTH IN NEWS REPORTING.

Nope. Their ONLY fiduciary responsibility is to generate profits for shareholders. Back to my earler story about my cable company - MSNBC and NBC are owned by Comcast.

That Wall Street bull be HUNGRY, and that is why we do not get truth in news.

Punching down? Wall Street is a master at that, and we are all affected by their insatiable greed.

Oh well, rant over....

[Wounded Bear]

1. Righteous rant, and a pretty accurate description of predatory capitalism...nt

[SharonAnn]

2. Most excellent point! Says it perfectly. I'm reading Upton Sinclair's book "Brass Check"

about how the “news industry” promoted or prevented certain news from appearing in “their” newspapers. Capitalism at it’s best for over a hundred years.

[Ponietz]

3. Dollars are people too in this fucking dystopia

[Johnny2X2X]

4. I try to focus on who is fighting for me

And who is fighting for regular people. The Democratic Party, lead by Joe Biden, is fighting hard on all of thes efronts. Fighting for workers, fighting against corporate greed. Fighting to save our planet, for women's rights, for the rights of LGTBQ Americans, and for getting health care to people. Fighting to strengthen Social Security.

Right on down the list of grievances, it's obvious who is fighting for us and who is working for Wall Street and the greedy corporations.

[PatrickforB]

9. I'll go with that. Biden and the Democrats have done more for working people than

the GOP ever dreamed of, particularly from 1933 on, when FDR went to the White House.

[dawg]

5. It's not even "shareholder" primacy capitalism; it's "insider" primacy capitalism.

If you're a small shareholder like me, they won't hesitate to throw you under the bus for the sake of their directors, officers, and sociopolitical class in general.

I was a shareholder in Bear Stearns, and watched in horror as management used "my" money to bail out wealthy hedge fund investors who were supposedly big boys and girls who knew the risks they were taking. I immediately sold my stock and side-stepped the majority of the losses that would follow. But it was obvious that the Company was not being managed primarily for the benefit of the ordinary shareholders.

[PatrickforB]

10. 100%. I have a few shares too, but you're right because little investors get screwed regularly while

the big shareholder groups - the hedge funds and so on, get more bloated with riches every day.

[Farmer-Rick]

14. Thanks for explaining that

Remember when Reddit tried to turn around GameStop stock?

They got crushed.

"Experts said Wall Street's reaction showed just how high the deck was stacked against small investors."

"Keith Gill, the day-trading member of the Reddit group Wall Street Bets who is widely credited with igniting the recent GameStop trading frenzy, claimed in late January that he had turned his $54,000 investment into a $48 million fortune.

Days later, it had been sliced by more than half to $22 million, and regulators had set their sights on Gill, investigating him over potential disclosure violations."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/reddit-wallstreetbets-traders-failed-war-wall-street-proves-system-rigged-2021-2%3famp

They want you to think that investing in stocks is fair and equitable. That a dollar is a dollar and everyone is treated the same.

But it's not. The big guys are always looked after while the rest of us have to deal with the "free" market.......

[Zeitghost]

18. The GameStop/Reddit issue

Was caused by people trying to artificially inflate the price of a stock in order to screw over those who had shorted the stock.

They temporarily forced the stock well above the value that the companies financial situation would ordinarily warrant. And of course, reality eventually set in, the initial instigators pulled out with massive gains and the stock crashed back into the real world where it should have been trading all along.

[Farmer-Rick]

19. Well when all was said and done the big investors won out

Weather the stock was overpriced or not.

And the little investor was muzzled. The brokerage app Robinhood was forced to restrict its users from buying certain stocks.

[Zeitghost]

20. Reality won out

n/t

[Farmer-Rick]

21. Yeah,

Reality always tends to win out.

[PatSeg]

6. Excellent rant

[CrispyQ]

7. Corporations have personhood rights, too.

No other artificial entity has that. Labor unions, civic orgs, etc, none of them have personhood rights. Seems like corporations have become a way for rich people to shield their personal assets from the consequences of their bad behavior or bad decisions.

Slavery is the fiction that people are property;
corporate personhood is the fiction that corporations are people.

https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/#current

[limbicnuminousity]

8. Great rant!

Thank you for posting.

[JMCKUSICK]

11. Social Security Disability applications are

Another example of us getting beaten down by the system. I'm having my entire lumbar section of my spine fused at the end of next month because the three previous operations in that area failed. I can't sit it stand for more than about thirty minutes at a time and yet I'm staring at homelessness in a month or two because it intentionally takes forever to process a SSDI claim.
This one fact will make anyone shudder.
Did you know that unless your case qualifies for a "compassionate exemption", they make you wait six full months before anyone even looks at it.
The torture of the wait, the full expectation that you will have what you need to survive a year without any income is so incredibly ludicrous that I can't come up with even a cynical justification for the wait. Think of it! Six months before anyone even looks at it.
Sorry, I'm anxious and afraid of the upcoming surgery and the dilemma of how I'm going to pay my bills til August or even beyond.

[Farmer-Rick]

15. I am so sorry you are going through this

Capitalism is ruthless and cruel. It makes so many people suffer.

[JMCKUSICK]

16. Thank you

[pandr32]

12. Good rant!

This is what needs to be talked about everywhere. Also, Christian Nationalism and its lofty goals, also patriarchy and how deeply it is baked in, also racism and sexism and religious bigotry.

[yonder]

13. K&R

[appalachiablue]

17. Super rant! Battling Verizon Vulture Cust Service for a month, I hear you..

[Trexmaster]

22. People forget the origin & true meaning of the stock market

We've all read something about how the stock market (the concept of it) came into being.
We've read, heard, the stories numerous times: pay X amount of liquidity to receive back Y dividends.

But there's another reason for existence of these markets, and people will either not believe or laugh about it: battling inflation.
How do people seem to forget that stocks and bonds were/are the original NFTs is beyond me but it gets crazier.

During the era of empires – the OG imperialism/colonialism – in Western Europe, Spain was filthy rich. Disgustingly rich, from a pecuniary point of view. It had imported gold and silver by the barrels & shovels. At first, it was a relief, because Europe was starving of legal tender (mostly silver), but soon it became a burden.
What was the effect of all this silver and gold? Exactly: inflation.
Gold & silver were so available as medium of exchange between goods & services that it became a problem in itself into acquiring tangible goods. Mother Nature was the original printing machine go brrrrrrrr joke.

When the Dutch put into place the first iteration of the stock market, they must've argued about the effects of available legal tender that hindered prices through the roof. They must've known. So they invented a 2nd-tier mechanism, transforming legal tender into certificates (bond, securities...). It "nullified" silver & gold into the circulation per se, issuing an equal in value token or tokens. It maintained (or gained) the existing gold & silver but without causing ripple effects against the prices on the proverbial shelves at that time.

Now, it gets into question whether these markets really fulfill their original mission for which they were created in the first place: to "burn" inflation by extracting money from the dynamic pool.

[PatrickforB]

23. Nice post. And welcome to DU. I would like to take a moment to weigh in on

the question whether these markets really fulfill their original mission.

They do not, and I will tell you why.

The neoliberal position is a billionaire-driven ideology that calls for 1) privatization of everything possible in government, 2) massive deregulation so the markets can 'function efficiently' and 3) gutting all New Deal programs, including the privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Note that Republicans are now on record as wanting massive cuts in Social Security, raising the retirement age, and making Medicare Advantage the 'default' enrollment option for seniors getting into Medicare.

Now, the Medicare Advantage programs are mostly under investigation for overcharging the government (otherwise known as fraud), and when you get 'bad old' - over 80, their beancounters routinely deny coverage. Insurance companies, which now rule our healthcare system, have an 18% administrative overhead. The government Medicare Program has a 2% administrative overhead, putting the lie to the assertion that the private sector can always do things 'better, faster and cheaper' than government. Because that was bullshit when they first said it, and it is bullshit now.

The current system does not work the way it was intended because the legal doctrine of shareholder primacy (if you want to read more I highly recommend the late Lynn Stout's The Myth of Shareholder Value. It is a really good read from a distinguished corporate law professor).

See, the reason we had the 'great recession' in '09 is because shareholder primacy had driven the mortgage derivative bubble that nearly brought the world into depression. And the Wall Street greed lizards walked up the steps of the US Capitol with a 3/4 page typed document that demanded a taxpayer bailout of $750 billion. And the Bush Administration gave them that.

Then Obama was forced to ARRA (the stimulus) which did add to the deficit, BUT the reality is that the government must necessarily be the 'spender of last resort.' Because of these bubbles created by Wall Street's quest for profits at the expense of everything else, the government has to spend (unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare, and other things like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and so on) in order that demand for goods and services doesn't go off the cliff and cause a panic.

The other thing that applies here too is banking regulations. You would think that banks would be required to keep a certain percent of cash assets to offset their loans, but we have seen the Silicone Valley bank failure and a host of others because they loaned out too much and did not keep enough reserve.

Anyway, I could teach a full year course on this stuff, and what I've said is probably enough for now, but I stand by my statement that the current legal doctrine of shareholder primacy capitalism poisons everything it touches, and pressure from the billionaires (AOC is quite right that EVERY billionaire represents a massive failure in tax policy), has 1) caused irreversible climate change that puts the habitability of the planet in jeaopardy, 2) squeezed our middle class - once the envy of the world - nearly to the brink of extinction, and 3) made everything super expensive. Friends do tell me that it is much cheaper to live in a number of countries, and you know the Danes, who are very heavily taxed but enjoy cradle to grave healthcare, free college and graduate education, and a host of other social democratic policies are generally happy and have little real stress even though their climate is not optimal. Same with the Scandanavian countries and Iceland.

Oh, and last I cannot resist telling you that the Fed, which is supposedly 'quasi-governmental' but is filled with people from JP Morgan Chase and Citi, has the mission of monetary policy. Essentially, they control the money supply by changing interest rates. See, it is not government presses that make money, it is lower interest rates making loans more easily available to a wider consumer market that creates most of the money supply. By raising interest rates, they will in theory reduce the ability of that wider market to get loans, which is thought to lead to less demand for goods and services, which drives prices down and creates layoffs, which drives wages down.

The problem is our population has not been growing fast enough to supply new workers for all the jobs being created through economic growth. This is why the incidence of foreign born workers in the US labor force went from 9% in 1990 to nearly 20% in 2023. See, the Republicans call themselves the party of business, but that is a lie because what are they doing? Two policy things would immediately and materially help US businesses across the board - a business friendly immigration policy where we can process asylum seekers, train them up and put them to work quickly (greater metro Denver averages about 100,000 unfilled jobs a month, at least in 2023, and Republicans are sabotaging the border bill because Trumpy wants to campaign on it. Building a wall is a bullshit solution).

The second thing they do is consistently block publicly funded universal healthcare. Because that is one of the biggest cost centers every single business has to contend with, especially in a scarce labor market. Nixon tried to make that happen clear back in the late 1960s, but even then the for-profit healthcare, pharma and insurance lobbies fought tooth and nail against it. Every time you hear a commercial saying essentially 'we don't want no socialized medicine' and 'gummint doesn't belong in our healthcare' we must ask two questions:

1. Who is funding those commercials?
2. Why do Republicans want to get into women's reproductive healthcare? How can they have it both ways? We allow beancounters to deny lifesaving care and meds, we allow Wall Street to up the price of drugs like insulin (Biden took care of that, though), but that lady in AZ who has a DEAD fetus still had to have her doctor read her a bunch of bullshit about adoption, parenting and worse, have a transvaginal ultrasound in the misguided hope she will 'fall in love' with the fetus when she sees it. It's DEAD, though and these old white Christian guys have decided she has to do that. Essentially that makes her life worth less in the eyes of the law that the 'rights' of an already dead fetus.

Oh, don't get me started on that. I'm thinking women across this country will literally crawl over broken glass to vote these Republican zealots out of office so we can once again have abortion access.

Sigh.

Well, warm regards, and again welcome to DU.

[True Dough]

24. 'Working your ass off for $7.25 per hour, working two jobs because one won't do.'

This arsehole can take a good portion of the blame:



Great post, PatrickforB!