#Robber barons

[thatsbelievable]

[mylionheart2]

"Republicans are exploiting this moment to roll back civil liberties and write their wealthy friends in the private prison industry an $83 billion check. They aren’t working for you. They are lining their own pockets and hoping that drumming up immigrant panic will cover up their own profiteering." - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[al-gorythym]

Gonna leave this here.. from a Bluesky rando

[shrinkrants]

"When people react to a floating signifier, it’s because something is simmering beneath the surface. When the tension at the surface breaks, and that underlying hurt begins to boil, the instigating action and actor should not be our primary focus. The question is, what can we do with the energy and outrage that is clearly roiling?"

"If it sounds like I am romanticizing violence, please understand I am merely assessing conditions–conditions that I and the rest of the working class did not create. I do not romanticize gun violence. However, it bears mentioning that gun violence happens every day and that the average person barely takes notice. We are surrounded by violence. Premature death is manufactured every minute of every day in the United States and in the many places where this country’s corporate and militaristic tentacles extend. That churn of suffering and death is generally treated as background noise. For some people, the death of a CEO was an exception to that norm–they were disturbed that this man was gunned down and that so many people expressed sympathy or support for his killer. For others, it was the background noise itself that was amplified by this moment. The normalized hum of organized abandonment, failed Gofundmes, insurance denials, pained screams, and senseless loss became a collective wail.

"People are furious and heartbroken, and they know they have been wronged. Some are working themselves to death, laboring through illness or amid the deterioration of their joints or spinal discs, because they can’t afford to stop. Some pay insurance rates they can barely afford and still receive astronomical medical bills. Many have watched their loved ones suffer and die needlessly or while in unnecessary pain. Still more are constantly struggling to get the basic tests and medications they need to maintain their health. They know that people like themselves are dying when they could be saved. If they are not suffering today, they know that they could be tomorrow–that they could be struck by chronic pain or a chronic illness that would render them surplus and disposable in a billionaire’s world. The working class is marked for violence, as corporate policies and algorithms decide if our bodies are worthy of maintenance–or if we should simply be left to die.

"Could this moment be ground zero for the class awakening we desperately need? As the United States becomes an unapologetic mafia state and a new era of smash-and-grab politics gets underway, could a new wave of popular outrage begin not with a tent, but with a bang?"

[rednblacksalamander]

Honestly kinda surprised this hasn't happened more often...

[chowdergal]

This man will beat you at Monopoly™️

Drew this picture of Wendell Carroll in between pages for my webcomic! I can't wait to draw more of this monster for my story 🤣

[muchtooold2]

I know intellectually that Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and the like were these ruthless capitalists who all definitely went to hell but when I think Carnegie I think of libraries and music halls. And when I think of Rockerfeller I think of like Rockefeller Center and massive donations to national parks. What fucking legacy are the tech robber barons leaving that even approaches this? Like…they’re so obsessed with legacy but what of public value are they leaving when they’re gone???

[frankidacre]

There’s that one myth about Cornelius Vanderbilt being a major factor in the creation of potato chips…. I couldn’t help but just run with this idea 😭

[cheekymagicxiv]

Hey. Get off of Meta.

[isawthismeme]

[mylionheart2]

Robber Barons

[thepoliticalvulcan]

I think its extremely valid to both feel that newspapers should not endorse candidates and be deeply, profoundly disturbed that Jeff Bezos is openly tearing down the firewall at WaPo to override the wishes of the WaPo editorial team.

I'm someone who thought that the firewall mostly really was real although not impenetrable. That Bezos' presence at the paper created a sort of gravitational pull that influenced the paper without him dictating what stories to run and what to kill.

But!

If you never thought the firewall was real, the counter argument defending the firewall is such an uphill climb that I would not personally expend energy making that argument, even though I do think it was *mostly* real although far from cast in neutronium.

[racefortheironthrone]

Read your post on "disruptors", loved it, and made me wonder why so many have a cult of personality spring up around them. Were there similar cults of personality for the mega wealthy in the past; like was Rockefeller worshiped the way so many worship Musk? Or is it a more modern trend fuelled by our constant connectivity and consumption of media? Thanks!

You raise an interesting question.

It was certainly true that the robber barons of the 19th century - Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Gould, Frick, etc. - were larger-than-life figures in the media (especially the part of the media that covered high society). It is also true that with a lot of these figures, there was this popular myth of the self-made man that sought to turn them into quintessential rags-to-riches, up-by-your-bootstraps American sucess stories.

But for the most part, the robber barons of the Gilded Age were hated for their monopolistic behavior and their use of violence to suppress the working class - and these magnates often had to go to great lengths to repair their reputations. Andre Carnegie's library-building campaign, for example, was very much a PR move meant to soften his image after the Homestead Strike. In fact, my great-grandfather Humphrey Attewell helped to organize opposition to the construction of a Carnegie library in Northampton, because he and other working-class people felt that the funds for the library were blood money distributed by a murderer. Likewise, it's not an accident that John D. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Foundation right around the same time that the Ludlow Massacre turned him into a monster in the eyes of the American public.

I would argue that we start to see more of a cult of personality around the mega-wealthy a bit later - say, 1900s-1930s - and the major turning point was the career of Thomas Edison. While Edison was every bit as ruthless and grasping as the robber barons before him - hence the war of the currents, his penchant for patent theft and/or stealing credit for inventions, the very existence of Hollywood - the fact that he was an inventor with so many world-changing patents to his name made Edison into a very different kind of media figure. Thomas Edison became a star of pulp fiction and dime novels, a sort of proto-superhero Science Hero - in addition to Edison's Conquest of Mars (an unauthorized sequel to the War of the Worlds in which Thomas Edison gets revenge for the Martian invasion of Earth by launching a counter-invasion of the red planet with his superior technology), there was a whole genre of Edisonades all about young inventor geniuses who use their inventions to save the day and/or explore the "savage frontier."

I think you can draw a line from the cult of personality around Edison to the cult of personality that formed around Henry Ford in the 20s and 30s as not just a car manufacturer but a visionary who had created a new age of modernity, and from there to the legend of the Packard garage, and from there to contemporary Silicon Valley.

[ablogofcourage]

[cartogaffe]

fighting game idea

Want a robber-baron fighting game where Vanderbilt has insane linear combos via railroad-themed attacks and Carnegie swings a great big steel bar at you yelling "Fore!" because he is from Scotland

Call it: Gilded Rage