Q: How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. If the lightbulb needed changing, the market would have already done it.
Anyone concerned with democracy should be worried that the seam between Wall Street and the government is almost invisible.
Interesting. So, when I repost things from MSM or Counter-punch, and then put in my own blur — “Oh these white devils, these MAGA Gestapo-wannabe’s, these Hitler-adoring fellows and gals,” that’s it for Fuck-You-And-the Horse-You-Rode-into-Town-On Facebook.
There is so-so much crap on Fuck-You-Book, and the lies, and the hundreds of millions of pure unadulturated manure and bile, on people’s pages, on their comments.
Now, those algorithms pull up words like “Hitler” or “Nazi” or Goebbels” or “SS” or what have you, and then, banned from posting.
DURING AN internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack.
On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees.
The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”
Intercept, Lee Fang
I have been in this war for decades. Fucking age 63, and I can tell you at age 13 I was fighting against abuse of power, racists, pigs in school, coaches, sports teammates, my Army Regular Old Man, the entire project that is white supremacy. I am not kidding, one half a century.
I fought the players on my own football teams, my wrestling teams. I fought the assholes who were on dive boats I was helping get certified. I have fought every big-shot asshole boss, and here I am, one foot in the grave, really — that economic grave.
Does it wear me down? To be honest, no. I am never surprised, but I am always saddened and pissed off at the level of colonized minds within the framework of who I have had to deal with daily:
- fellow reporters
- fellow teachers
- fellow adjuncts
- fellow social workers
- bosses
- administrators
- public officials
- students
- military (I was a college instructor at military bases, in programs)
- publishers
- readers
You get the picture. Daily. The amount of stupidity, fear, genuflection to almighty dollar, almighty god, almighty boss, almighty corporation, almighty political party, almighty country, almighty men/women in uniform, almighty military industrial complex, almighty superficial consumerism, almighty Holly-Dirt, almighty nothingness, almighty value of zero.
Many others I know and communicate with daily also know this. They might call it living in the Matrix, or worse, in some parallel Dante Hell Universe.
Banned from Facebook, Deplatformed from Linked In, blocked from commenting over at Off-Guardian, and on and on and on, that’s my pedigree. The unholy bastards and bitches of penury, two-bit dominions, two-bit power games.
Then to see this human stain and his human stain of a spouse —
You know the world is not right when these fuckers are the masters of the universe —
You get the picture. Human stains. All of them, yet, they dominate the news, dominate politics, dominate the economy, dominate the celebrity culture, dominate the trajectory of society, dominate us.
And they all are sociopaths, and now, the flip of an algorithm switch, and you get banned from Linked In and shut down from Facebook.
And for what? DO we incite violence by stating, No Blue Lives Matter? DO we incite war when we say, All Billionaires should be frog marched to the gallows? DO we get our hands slapped when we point out the Nazi and Hitleresque tenancies of so-called leaders, like those here, United Snakes of America, Hungary, Philippines, Brazil, and, well need I say more?
This is another human stain, former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. In October 2008, as the Bush-Obama financial crisis was in full gear, Greenspan testified before the House Oversight Committee. He was questioned by the committee’s chair, Democratic Congress member Henry Waxman.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Dr. Greenspan, you had an ideology, you had a belief, that free, competitive — and this is your statement: “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.
You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the question previously posed?
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality —-
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working.
ALAN GREENSPAN: That it had a -— precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Dr. Greenspan, you had an ideology, you had a belief, that free, competitive — and this is your statement: “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.
You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the question previously posed?
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality —-
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working.
ALAN GREENSPAN: That it had a -— precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
<a href="http://<iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/122125016/122207585" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player">Capitalism Overload And ‘The Value Of Nothing’
And, I mean, I think that we’ve been beguiled by markets. We understand prices, or we think that we understand what’s going on when we’re faced with a price. But, in fact, we miss a great deal about how the economy operates, if we believe in prices. And we’ve come to believe that the only way we can value things is by sticking them in a market. The trouble is, of course, as we’ve seen through this recession, that markets are a tremendously bad way of valuing things, tremendously fickle, and systematically unable to put — to actually incorporate a great deal of what we find valuable.
You know, just to put some flesh on those bones, think about the price of a hamburger. I mean, you know, if you go to your local burger joint, you will find, what, a $4 hamburger. But researchers in India did some calculations a few years ago looking at what would happen if we started to include the environmental costs that are part and parcel of the production of that hamburger. If, for example, that burger is produced on land that once used to be rainforest, well, then you’ve lost the rainforest, you’ve lost the ecosystemic services that that rainforest provides, you lose the carbon, you lose the biodiversity. And all of a sudden, when you start imputing those environmental costs, it turns out that the price of a hamburger should be nearer $200 rather than four. And that, of course, is just one element of the costs that are squeezed out of our food and pretty much everything else.
But sticking with that hamburger for a moment, I mean, if that hamburger is consumed in the United States, then the chances are that the tomatoes on that hamburger will come from southern Florida, where, since 1997, over a thousand people have been freed from conditions of modern-day slavery and where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, of tomato pickers in southern Florida, have been campaigning for a living wage for quite some time. And, of course, the cost of slavery doesn’t feature in that hamburger, either. And that’s, of course, just on the production side.
Of course, there are consequences to the cost of consuming junk food. And in the United States, one in five healthcare dollars is now spent on taking care of someone who has diabetes. And the rise of diabetes, in no small part, is related to the fact that we don’t pay the full costs of the way we consume when we buy our food. Of course, we pay those costs in the end. But the corporations that sell us that food are able to exclude those costs out of the price. And it’s important for us to have new ways of valuing things other than the market.
Raj Patel
So this all begs the question of what is the value of Google and Facebook? Think hard, now. When the spooks and FBI and the other spies are packed in a sweaty van with their greasy fingers on the revolver, the tape-recorder, the cameras, while spying, the new spy, the new peeping Tom, the new weaponized anti-democracy tool is that algorithm, that Peter Thiel, that F/Zuckerberg, those Google Boys aned Apple Pukes.
That Facebook is marketing Workplace as having built-in labor union suppression tools comes at a time when more and more Americans are likely using Facebook to organize.
A recent memo to employers, first reported by The Intercept, warned that the coronavirus pandemic has sparked widespread support for labor unions, and that online networking tools have become a powerful vector for organizing campaigns.
Employers have long attempted to stifle lawful workplace organizing by monitoring social media. One study of the phenomenon found that between June 2009 and April 2011, the National Labor Relations Board received about 100 charges that employees had been fired or disciplined due to online posts, largely on Facebook, around labor organizing.
Lee Fang, Intercept
If a corporation is indeed a person, it’s long been thought they are a sociopath. … Both sociopaths and corporations exist for the sole purpose of self-centered goals — sociopaths want a variety of things (money, power, sex, etc.) while corporations are solely focused upon making money.
Paul Haeder, Author 