#corporatists

[ndntighnari]

If i flubbed that interview bc i struggle to code switch to White Formal from Native Chatter im gonna cry.

[xbuster]

“Crunchyroll is run by a bunch of liberals, so obviously they’re going to censor Angel Cop, they ruin everything that’s based and redpilled.”

“Oh, they didn’t censor it? Well… haha… that clearly won’t last long. No, I won’t admit I was wrong, I have to pretend the people I don’t like have an agenda of censorship to push.”

[fasizmasgyvena]

"I do not know ho chi minh, but in view of his record and his efforts to expel the japanese, first, the chinese next, and the french later, we must give him credit for being a patriot who cannot be indifferent to the annihilation of his country, and apart from his well-known reputation as being a tough adversary, he could, without doubt, be the man of the hour needed by vietnam"

- francisco franco, letter to president lyndon johnson

[21st-century-minutiae]

In the early twenty-first century, financial systems and contract laws have solidified into a steady state. Corporations, which are a structure of private company ownership defined by the dilution of ownership across fungible 'shares', exist both as a private contract matter and a federally recognized legal institution.

A component of both the contract law and the governmental law that forms corporations defines and restricts the actions a corporation can take due to the nature of ownership. To protect the diluted owners from the executives who manage day to day business, the corporation has a fiduciary duty to investors, meaning they have to legally consider and protect the interest of their investor's wealth. Without this fiduciary duty, a scam artist could, say, sell off a minority stake in the company, then drain the wealth of the investors for their personal pockets, ruining the company. This happened enough in history to enough influential people that laws were enacted to set about this fiduciary duty.

BECAUSE of this legal fiduciary duty, companies are legally required to prioritize shareholder profits at all times, or else they could be fined, sued, or even jailed. This has created a horrifically perverse situation, where short term stock value has more value than near any other metric. If a CEO is in a position to choose between taking a moral, sane choice and a choice which can increase stock value, such as giving their workers a raise versus buying back stock, they risk being punished for choosing the sane option, and much be prepared to actively justify their decision to do a reasonable thing.

Comparatively, actions that lead to an increase in shareholder value are, by default, assumed to be the correct one no matter how heinous they may be. A CEO may be sued if they ever go above and beyond the absolute bare minimum set by government regulations. Consider a case where federal law might mandate that all construction workers get a minimum of 15 minute water breaks every 4 hours when the temperature outside is above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If a company chooses to offer all workers 20 minute water breaks every 2 hours regardless of the temperature, they open themselves up for potential lawsuits by shareholders, since the 'productivity gap' versus the bare minimums theoretically costs shareholder value. The Company would be forced to justify why the objectively better situation isn't costing shareholder value.

While it is not the case that every shareholder would sue in every situation like that, it is a chilling effect that, in aggregate, moves all companies towards taking actions that can only blatantly value shareholders at the cost of employees, customers, and the world at large. Price gouging, for example, will never run into an issue with shareholder fiduciary duty, so companies will have to justify to shareholders why they DON'T price gouge up to the legal limit, using only monetary terms. This isn't impossible. One can use 'customer relations, employee retention, brand value, and getting ahead of incoming government regulation to justify ethical actions. But it takes active time and effort to make these arguments, and there is a chance they will fail.

In this sense, government regulation can act as a powerful tool to get self interested, passive companies to behave more ethically. But it also encourages companies to invade politics and dismantle regulatory agencies, since that has 'clear shareholder value.' Fiduciary duty might REQUIRE that companies engage in political corruption up to (or beyond) the legal limits of bribery/lobbying.

This whole situation is ultimately bad for everyone, including shareholders, as short term profits are prioritized even over long term profits, and customers, employees, and bystanders are left in the lurch.

100% of baffling business decisions do not need to be resolved through conspiracy but by simply remembering that it is not the CEO's job to provide a good product, or to make the company sustainable, or even to make the company money. it is the CEO's job to convince the shareholders / owner that the company is going to grow next quarter

[blackbirdblackbird]

lmao apple fans losing their damn minds.

[purpleopossum]

I hate when I hear people talk about victorian factories and child labor (in the USA) as if it's a thing of the past, something that happened "back then" but that we are too good and enlightened to do now. Child labor is alive and well. We just shipped it overseas, sent it away with the power of Globalism so we could have our cheap stuff and not think about the exploitation involved in it's creation. We need to be going forward, fighting corporations that use exploitative labor practices overseas, not go backward and erode the progress we made here.

also let's ppl as young as 14 drive the death machines we call cars to and from their job late at night

let me re-emphasize this part:

[super-ultra-mega-deluxe]

The actual consideration of what fascism is is rather something of general import. A number of folks here have deferred to Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, and while I wouldn't discourage it, it is a text from the perspective of semiotics; that is to say, from the perspective of what signifies fascism, not what it is per se. Hence also why Eco emphasizes that none of the fourteen ways he describes are strictly necessary or sufficient for fascism, just that fascism as it has emerges coalesces around such signifiers. The aesthetics and rhetoric of fascists is rather succinctly summed up in Ur-Fascism, but what fascism is in a more direct, structural sense is a somewhat different consideration.

The governing structure of fascist Italy, as an example, retained many of the facets of the liberal democratic system from which it emerged, with a legislature, a judiciary, and an executive. Mussolini was legally the prime minister- though he adopted the title of Duce, literally "leader"- and was appointed by a legislative council- though a new one created by the fascist party called the Grand Council of Fascism that by and large excluded the previous legislature- and the prime minister could legally be dismissed by the head of state, the king, after a sustained vote of no confidence similar to the UK's formulation. Fascist Italy also redoubled- rather than invented- Italian colonial policy, promoting the settlement of Italians into Libya and other African colonial projects and the genocide of local populations. The domestic economic policy of fascist Italy was also much more explicitly in the interests of private business: in 1939, the whole of Italy was explicitly proposed to be legally divided into 22 corporations which appointed members to parliament; labour organization outside of the appointed corporate structures and striking as a practice were banned. The interests of fascist Italy's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois, and their economic policy is often referred to as specifically corporatist.

Nazi Germany was similar in structure, though while the German parliament- called the Reichstag- was maintained, a series of laws were passed which enabled the Chancellor- Hitler, who was appointed such by President Hindenburg- and the cabinet to implement laws without parliamentary or presidential approval. The Hitler cabinet is generally considered to have been the defacto ruling body of Nazi Germany, though members of the Reichstag obviously still convened and drafted laws and ran elections and generally supported Nazi rule and the judiciary remained a distinct body. The Nazis also wanted to redouble their colonial policy in specifically Africa- a theatre in which they were snubbed compared to other European powers- but were by and large unable to secure resources there for continued expansion due to the British opposing them in protecting its own colonial projects. A rather infamous and demonstrative guiding principle of Nazi economic policy, Lebensraum- literally "living space"- sought specifically to appropriate land and other productive capital to give to Germans that they might be made petite bourgeois and small artisans; de-proletarianized and bourgeoisified, at the same time that the people such capital is expropriated from were made slaves to fuel further expansion or killed outright. This was imposed both within and, once the resources of social underclasses at home ran dry, without. The interests too of Germany's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois.

What all of this is to say is primarily that fascism as a governmental system is a legal permutation of liberal democracy, rather than a strict departure from it. The overriding interests of fascist states are also commensurately the interests of the bourgeoisie of those nations. It's an entirely logical progression of liberalism, to be frank, and a rather stark example of why liberal states should be opposed. The most violent fascist policy at home is often simply what liberal states have as their explicit foreign policy, for instance. As for whether this or the other politician in a liberal democracy is a fascist, I'd ask first and foremost that it be known that the Nazi policy of expansion was based first on the US policy of expansion; the cart isn't pulling the horse, as it were.

[lenbryant]

(Long post) How Sinema's exit is a measure of Democrats' success

She didn't steal the thunder so much as she revealed she's been beaten at her own game as Democrats surged

by

Michelangelo Signorile (love you, but I think she spells it "Kyrsten")

It’s been a few days of digesting what it means for Democrats that Arizona’s Senator Kirsten [sic] Sinema announced she’s leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent. 

After reading many takes, I now think there’s been just a bit too much hand-wringing over her selfishly stealing the spotlight and throwing 2024 into stark relief (and I engaged in some of that myself), and not enough celebrating that the moment of Sinema’s departure underscored how big Democrats won in the Senate, how far they’ve come and what their strategy should be for the future. (And special thanks to Dan Rather and Eliott Kirshner, who sent me in this direction.)

Imagine yourself for a moment in Sinema’s stillettos earlier this year. 

Like the rest of us, she watched as the corporate media railed on for months about a red wave coming, with even the possibility — which, weeks before the election, morphed into the probably — that the GOP would take the Senate.

According to the media narrative — which was super-fueled by biased GOP polls that dominated the polling averages — John Fetterman was rapidly deflating. Herschel Walker was likely going to beat Raphael Warnock. Catherine Cortez Masto? Finished before she even began. Mark Kelly was in trouble, and Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hamsphire could be taken down by a crazed election denier. Even Patty Murray in deep blue Washington was at great risk, the headlines blared!

Surely, Sinema was intoxicated by all of that.

She’d plotted in meticulous, years-long maneuvers, positioning herself as the brilliant center-right Democrat who knew the future — not only in her own state of Arizona, but also for the entire country. And, in her mind, if the media narrative of the 2022 election played out, Sinema would be vindicated: Democrats will have gone too far to the left, causing a gargantuan disaster for their party. 

All those activists who hounded her, demanding she hold town meetings, imploring her to save their rights — some of whom even followed her into a public restroom to plead with her — would be proven completely out of touch with reality, she surely imagined. 

The only Democrat to be proven right, Sinema certainly envisioned, would be Kirsten [sic] Sinema, whose own Arizona colleague Mark Kelly (who, by the way, she didn’t lift a finger to help in his re-election campaign), will even have gone down to defeat. 

“If only Mark had listened to me,” Sinema surely was thinking she’d be saying, even if only to herself — “If only they’d all listened to me!”

So, you can then only imagine what was going on in Sinema’s well-coiffed head as election results came in one-by-one on the night of November 8th and in the days following.

Every one of those Democrats ran as supporters of raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on the wealthy and ending the filibuster so we could codify Roe v. Wade into law and pass voting right legislation — all of which Sinema opposed, sometimes in dramatic fashion.

And some of those incumbent senators were in states in which the environment was enormously difficult, such as Cortez Masto, who won in Nevada even as Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak lost, and Raphael Warnock, who prevailed even as Republicans won in every other statewide race in Georgia.

Share The Signorile Report 

Oh, yes, the one-two punch had to be the Georgia Senate runoff, in which Sinema might have been secretly praying Walker would win, which would help her salvage something out of her grave miscalculations. Maybe she could then announce she was becoming a Republican (or an independent caucusing with the GOP), and hand control of the Senate to the GOP?

Instead, Sinema was left with no moves except the risky one she took.

She looked at the polling and realized she couldn’t win a Democratic primary in Arizona in 2024. While her running as an independent in the general election might split the Democratic vote and hand the seat to a Republican — and thus, announcing she was becoming an independent was a way for her to send a warning to Democrats about challenging her — it could also go the other way, as I noted over the weekend. Sinema could be left high and dry in a 2024 race while Democrats vote for the Democratic candidate, Republicans vote for the Republican candidate, and independents split between both. 

So, it’s risky, but it’s all she’s got. It’s two years away, and surely there will be lots of discussion about what could happen — and a lot of planning by Democrats to thwart Sinema’s move.

But what is clear is that Arizona’s electorate has shifted much more rapidly than Sinema, as well as many political observers, had previously thought. The 2020 election in fact helped to speed that movement, something that became clear to many. Sinema, however, was so wed to the fantasy she’d created of being the new John McCain that she opted for self-delusion. She was so full of herself, believing she was so politically savvy — and surely being told that by sycophants around her — that she didn’t feel the desert earth shifting beneath her.

In that way, Sinema’s withdrawal from the Democratic Party is a vindication for many of us of how wrong her strategy was and how right the strategy of all those Democratic candidates who won — who ran on getting the base out, rather than pandering to the mythical middle — is for the Democratic party moving forward.

None of this is to downplay how self-centered and narcissistic Sinema is as a politician, nor how detrimental her action can be for Democrats in 2024, during a dangerous time in America. She’s ruthless, and vile, putting herself before democracy and the American people. And we can’t underplay that as we plan for 2024.

But it’s pretty fantastic that, after the 2022 mid-terms, Sinema, rather than crowing that she was right, is in a political crisis of her own making. She’s running scared as Democrats have surged, as they’ve cemented a blueprint running on abortion rights, voting rights, threats to democracy, and progressive economic policies. Her exit is indeed a measure of the party’s success.

[musclesandhammering]

It kills me how people forget that primaries even exist. Like, there’s a way to get a candidate in the general election who you DON’T feel is equally as bad as the opposition… just participate in the primary election. And yet most people who don’t vote because “tHeY’rE bOtH tHe SaMe” couldn’t name two primary challengers if you offered them a million dollars. Like, just say you don’t care and move on

Forever thinking about how, on election day in 2016, I wore a shirt with an American flag on it because it was what was clean. And the 20-ish year old bagging my groceries made a snide remark about it, followed by 'I didn't vote, they're all the same anyways.' And a fellow grocery worker chimed in agreement that he wasn't voting for the same reason.

And now I can't go to a local drag event without having to walk through a gauntlet of nazis.

I realize that the election is a year and a half away, but please don't fall for the 'they're the same' rhetoric this time around. Both candidates will suck, but they'll suck in different ways and one of them wants my community dead.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Working class Dems who campaign on economics beat Trumpists in elections

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me FRIDAY NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The Democratic Party Pizzaburger Theory of Electioneering is: half the electorate wants a pizza, the other half wants a burger, so we'll give them all a pizzaburger and make them all equally dissatisfied, thus winning the election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

But no one wants a pizzaburger. The Biden administration's approach of letting the Warren/Sanders wing pick the antitrust enforcers while keeping judicial appointments in the Manchin-Synematic universe is a catastrophe in which progressive Dem regulators (who serve one term) are thwarted by corporatist Dem judges (who serve for life):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

The Democrats – like all parties in two-party systems – are a coalition; in this case, a "progressive" liberal-left coalition with liberals serving as senior partners, steering the party and setting its policies. These corporate dems like to color themselves as "neutral" technocrats with "realistic, apolitical" policies that represent what's best for the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

This sets up the left wing of the party as the starry-eyed, unrealistic radicals whose policies are unpopular and will lose elections. But for a decade, grassroots-funded primary challenges have made it possible to test this theory, by putting leftist politicians on the ballot in front of voters, especially in tight races with far-right Republicans (that is, exactly the kinds of races that the corporate wing of the party says we can't afford to take chances on).

The 2022 midterms included enough races to start testing these theories – and, unlike traditional midterms, these races enjoyed high voter turnout, thanks to the unpopularity of GOP positions like abortion bans, book bans and anti-trans laws. Jacobin teamed up with the Center for Working-Class Politics, Yougov and the Center for Work and Democracy at ASU and analyzed those races:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/11134429/CWCP-Report-2024.pdf

Their conclusion: candidates from working-class backgrounds who campaigned on economic policies like high-quality jobs, higher minimum wages, a jobs guarantee, ending offshoring and outsourcing, building infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back to the US won with a 50% share of the vote in rural and working-class districts. Dems who didn't lost with a 35% share of the vote:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-03-18-how-actually-existing-democrats-run-for-office/

In other words, in the kinds of districts where Trumpist politicians are beating Democrats, running on "left populist" policies beats Trumpist politicians.

That's the good news: if Dems recruit leftist, working class politicians and put them up for office on policies that address the material reality of voters' lives, they can beat fascist GOP candidates.

Now for the bad news: the Democratic establishment has no interest in getting these candidates onto the ballot. Working-class candidates, by definition, lack the networks of deep-pocketed cronies who can fund their primary campaigns. Only 2.3% of Dem candidates come from blue-collar backgrounds (if you include "pink-collar" professions like nursing and teaching, the number goes up to 5.9%):

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-populists-working-class-voters

All of this confirms the findings of Trump's Kryoptonite, an earlier Jacobin/CWCP research project that polled working-class voters on preferences for hypothetical candidates, finding that working-class candidates with economically progressive policies handily beat out Republicans, including MAGA Republicans:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/08125102/TrumpsKryptonite_Final_June2023.pdf

Since the Clinton-Blair years, "progressives" have abandoned economic populism ("It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money" -T. Blair) and pursued a "third way" that seeks to replace half the world's of supply white, male oligarchs with diverse oligarchs from a variety of backgrounds and genders. We were told that this was done in the name of winning elections with "modern" policies that replaced old-fashioned ideas about decent pay, decent jobs, and worker power.

These policies have delivered a genocide-riven world on the brink of several kinds of existential catastrophe. They're a failure. The pizzaburger party didn't deliver safety, nor prosperity – and it also can't deliver elections.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/20/actual-material-conditions/#bread-and-butter

[ynneleac]

America is not a corporatist country.

Corporatism does NOT mean a country is "run by companies and business interests." The term for that is corporatocracy or oligarchy.

The "corporations" of "corporatism" refers to social corporations (i.e., groups such as farmers, factory workers, etc etc) and not business corporations.

There are two countries in the world which are corporatist in any recognisable way: Slovenia and Ireland.

In Slovenia, the upper house of Parliament, the National Council, has 18 seats elected corporately: 6 for non-commercial activities, 4 for employers, 4 for employees, and 4 for the crafts and trades.

In Ireland, the upper house, Seanad, has 43 seats elected corporately, called the vocational panels: 7 for public administrative positions and social services, 11 for agriculture and aquaculture, 5 for education, arts, and culture, 9 for industry and commerce, and the remaining 11 for general labour.

[memecucker]

So you're saying secular Jews are... culturally Jewish. ;)

If someone mentions that Mussolini’s early anticelricalism was quickly washed away by the reality of the fact that despite his individual views on religion, fascist regimes tend to adopt a religious-identitarianism as part of the ultranationalistic ethos and aim to brainwash their masses into developing a corporatist-spiritualist sense of “you belong to us and only to us” and you go “ah so you’re saying atheist Italians are still culturally Catholic deep down?”

Well I think that would make you an idiot.

[coralillough]

Again, for the ones who had any trouble understanding:

"Is it racist for us to complain about tokenism now?"

YOU KNOW HOW WE'VE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS THAT "DON'T SAY QUEER" IS TERF RHETORIC?

extra points for "big corporations are sponsoring the trans activists" like that doesn't smell of nonsense conspiracy

[morgan5451]

They do not just want to end Trump. They want to end what he represents -- People taking back control over their own Nation and their own Lives. The Globalist Left has already told you -- "By Any Means Necessary." And they have proved it for four years in which they did everything from destroying the very Borders of the Nation to weaponizing the entire Judicial System against Donald Trump. What Trump said was accurate, -- "It's you they are after. I'm just in their way." If the Globalist Leftist Corporatists succeed, they will not herd some Americans. They will herd all Americans. And yes, Democrats and Independents, that includes you. -- One last chance to restore the Nation you had hoped to hand to your Children. One last chance. #Trump 2024

[originalleftist]

Liz Cheney announced that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, would be joining her in voting for Kamala Harris.

Just... stop and think about that. Donald Trump is such a complete fucking loser that he managed to get Dick Fucking Cheney to vote Democrat.

And, to be clear, this is not "Dick Cheney is now a good guy." He's still the same corrupt, war-profiteering, made-a-guy-apologize-to-him-after-shooting-him-in-the-face sack of shit he always was.

Nor (because I know some third partiers/Russian bots will try to play it this way) does this mean that Harris is really a Republican, that both parties are the same, or that her policies would be the same as Dick Cheney's.

But it really says something about how colossal a failure as a leader and a person Trump is, that the personification of the corporatist conservative war criminal would look at him and go "Yeah, this is too much even for me". And not just stay away, but actively vote contrary to how they've previously voted in order to stop him.

[wageronancap]

Anarchists actually do want the Mad Max future

Not the gangs

The cars that are (1) metal as fuck, designed without a hint of environmental regulation in mind; (2) low-tech enough to be maintained by the owner in their own garage; and (3) low-tech enough not to record and send information to technocratic corporatists and cops