#no you aren’t responsible for the climate changing actions of billionaires | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bustedbernie · 3 years

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You can't actually think that the average person is as much to blame for climate change as billionaires who erase years of progress with their own personal space race. Right? Tell me how me using paper straws or freezing in the winter/roasting in the summer is going to counter a CEO ordering a forest cut down a day.

Think you're being obtuse lol. That post isn't about the damage the rich do alone. It's about how leftists are using that harm to refuse their own accountability and their own ability to make small changes and in doing so, they are giving up their collective power to make larger changes. Experts have made it clear that it's not just about "billionaires," so you can shut up with that.

The crisis is going to demand LARGE changes from all of us - and yes, some of those changes are going to be uncomfortable. Set your thermostat at 80 in the summer and at 60 in the winter. Bodies adjust and those temperatures are safe for most everyone. In many climates, AC isn't necessary for more than 3 weeks of the year. Including where i live in the Southwest.

Stop using straws altogether and get rid of disposable items at restaurants - it's not hard. And if you're not the few who may need a plastic straw, then stop hiding behind them to avoid your own ability to change. Take the bus, and plan where you live so that you can. Live in a smaller space. Get a bike. Eat less meat and keep red-meat to an absolute minimum. And yes, vote and advocate for people who can make real change and regulations at the top to make changes for US easier to do in our daily lives while also multiplying the impact.

but don't forget that these corporations function toward demand - and they do listen - and they do know change is coming and preparing for it. If you can afford to, start using the power you do have, and you DO HAVE it, and stop hiding behind some convenient wall so that you can think you're exempt from making any changes in your own life - assuming you actually care about the climate crisis at all and aren't just using it to channel pure anger at an "other" (this case the rich or the billionaire class).

Anger is a secondary emotion and I think the way it is discharged, including in your ask, is not helpful to you or the crisis. You're just discharging blame. Accountability is a two-way street, and if you actually do make changes, you will be living YOUR values, which is valuable and it does matter. If the paper straw makes you feel more aligned with your values (and it does make a difference, no matter how small), then that is a good thing.

What you've done with this post is what they love to see. They don't actually care that you or I think they're evil, shortsighted, or whatever. Because you hiding behind that is just allowing yourself to remove yourself from the system (which can't be done btw) and enables you to keep buying the products made by the evil billionaires. It's funny how that works, isn't it? Saying it's all the fault of the billionaires while changing nothing you are doing is what they love to see.

why is it that you all talk about how each individual can create a massive collective action leading to a revolution or whatever, but you don't see how that is true, if not even MORE true, on this subject? Critical Mass bike rides have politically made it possible for cities to invest in more bike infra. Using reusable jars and containers on bulk items at your local coop reduces plastic individually, and also demonstrates a market for less plastic packaging. You might still need to buy certain things in plastic, but the more you buy available in other packaging helps enable even more. Even Target is now selling deodorant tubes made of paper and toothpast sold in aluminium tubes. I get bulk shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, soap, and cleaning products at my Coop (I in fact now have a plastic free bathroom and nearly plastic free kitchen!).

And like i said, i know my impact is marginal, but it is still an impact. On a personal level, the impacts benefit my mental health, they align with my values, and I find my life more enjoyable. I have a small apartment, but can take the bus or bike everywhere, and I have become more and more a part of a community that shares those values and lifestyles which is enriching. So yes, billionaires are doing a lot of damage, but we live in a society and all play a part. We can work toward holding them accountable and making those changes at the same time we make changes at home. But i have very little respect for people who think they can't make any change or who discharge all their responsibilities on others.

In my 15+ years advocating this way, we have accomplished a rapid transit project in my city that has massively improved public transport in the core, made plastic free options possible at several local Coops and shops, increased commuter bus service from the suburbs, created a commuter rail, grown our bike lane and cycle track network by many, many miles(more than doubling our number of bike commuters),invested in community bike maintenance classes and FREE bikes for low-income or unemployed folks and folks experiencing homelessness, banned plastic one-use bags, have gotten our city and state to use more water capture and permeable concrete in construction, and are helping support a large wind and solar industry (things our region should be especially good at). So idk, If we can make these changes in a sprawling, desert city in the middle of nowhere, then I'm sure there are changes you can start taking part in and advocating for in your city, too. You do have power, and when you put that power to work with other like-minded people, it can be game changing.

But i was recently in Philadelphia talking to someone who had a similar view. They lived 3 blocks from the subway and worked next to a stop, but said "the subway isn't a good option for me" and insinuated they thought it was gross (it's old but perfectly fine and I thought wonderful). They drove to the shop despite living walking distance from a super market. They channeled a lot of the same attitude that I see in your ask. Obviously this person is unique, but I have found a lot of folks with this attitude have similar low-hanging fruit that they are just refusing to take because it would require a modicum of effort. Hate to tell ya, but you've been lied to if you think we can solve this crisis without you evaluating making some changes.

#long and ranty

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robertreich · 4 years

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How Big Money Corrupts Our Politics (And How to Fix It)

Corporate money is dominating our democracy. It's difficult to do anything – increase the minimum wage, reverse climate change, get Medicare for All, end police killings, fight systemic racism, shrink our bloated military – when big money controls our politics and dictates what policies are and aren't enacted. The pandemic has made that clearer than ever. The CARES Act, passed in late March as our pandemic response began, quietly provided huge benefits to wealthy Americans and big corporations. One provision doled out $135 billion in tax relief to people making at least half a million dollars, the richest 1% of American taxpayers.

This $135 billion is three times more than the measly $42 billion allocated in the CARES Act for safety-net programs like food and housing aid. It’s just shy of the $150 billion going to struggling state governments, and vastly more than the $100 billion being spent on overwhelmed hospitals and other crucial public health services. As Americans are still suffering massive unemployment and the ravages of the pandemic, lobbyists are crawling all over Capitol Hill and the White House is seeking continued subsidies for the rich and for corporations — while demanding an end to supplemental assistance for average working people, the poor, and the unemployed. It’s corruption in action, friends. And it’s undermining our democracy at every turn. Ask yourself how, during a global pandemic, the total net worth of U.S. billionaires has climbed from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion, when more than 45.5 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits. Is it their skill? Their luck? Their insight? No. It’s their monopolies, enabled by their stranglehold on American democracy… monopolies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which have grown even larger during the pandemic. It’s also their access to insider information so they can do well in the stock market, like Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose husband happens to be chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Both were fully briefed on the likely effects of the coronavirus last February and promptly unloaded their shares of stock in companies that would be hit hardest. And it’s the tax cuts and subsidies they’ve squeezed out of government. You are paying for all of this — not just as taxpayers but as consumers. When you follow the money, you can see clearly how every aspect of American life has been corrupted. Take prescription drugs. We spend tens of billions of dollars on prescriptions every year, far more per person than citizens in any other developed country. Now that millions of Americans are unemployed and without insurance, they need affordable prescription drugs more than ever. Yet even the prices of drugs needed by coronavirus patients are skyrocketing. Big Pharma giant Gilead is charging a whopping $3,120 for its COVID drug, Remdesivir, even though the drug was developed with a $70,000,000 grant from the federal government paid for by American taxpayers. Once again, Big Pharma is set to profit on the people's dime. And they get away with it because our lawmakers depend on their campaign donations to remain in power. As you watch this, Mitch McConnell is actively blocking a bill drafted by Senate Republicans to reduce drug prices — after taking more than $280,000 from pharmaceutical companies so far this election season. Big Pharma is just one example. This vicious cycle is found in virtually every sector, and it’s why we continue to be met with politicians who don’t have our best interests at heart. So how do we get big money out of our democracy? A good starting point can be found in the sweeping reform package known as H.R. 1 — the For the People Act. The bill closes loopholes that favor big corporations and the wealthy, makes it easier for all of us to vote, and strengthens the power of small donors through public financing of elections — a system which matches $6 of public funds for every $1 of small donations. The For the People Act would also bar congresspeople from serving on corporate boards, require presidents to publicly disclose their tax returns, and make executive appointees recuse themselves in cases where there is a conflict of interest. These are just a few examples of tangible solutions that already exist to rein in unprecedented corruption and stop America’s slide toward oligarchy — but there’s much more we can and should do.

The important thing to remember is that the big money takeover of our democracy prevents us from advancing all of the policies we need to overhaul our racist, oppressive system and create a society that works for the many, not the few.

#video #videos #corruption #Big Pharma

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emilywhite1999 · 4 years

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WE ARE FUCKED! Read The Facts Before You Call Me A Criminal

WE DESERVE THE TRUTH

People have been blinded. Blinded from the facts, the information and knowledge necessary to bring us all together to fix the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. If we do not act immediately the world we live in now will be a very different one in the years to come. We as a human race could be extinct before we know it. You may think I am being a little dramatic but I can assure you that is not the case once the facts are presented. Why have I not read these facts you may ask? Well that’s because our government doesn’t want us to be able to read the full story and know the truth. Boris Johnson claims we have a free press yet it is owned by billionaires. The press could bring us all together to fight the climate and ecological emergency yet they sell easy stories to bring about confusion while pretending to be the voice of the British public. They report on the consequences but not the underlying causes. Extinction Rebellion are only asking the press to do what they already claim to do and that is Tell The Truth!

(’Are Humans Next On The Endangered Species List’ Photo via Instagram @emilywhite1999)

WE ARE NOT ALL JOBLESS

I have only been part of Extinction Rebellion for 2 months and the reason for that is because I was not aware of this huge problem we face! I had been blinded myself but as I began to read the facts and the stories from young people my own age, who had dropped out of university to help this cause, I felt compelled to do my part. The reason some of the younger members of Extinction Rebellion (XR) decided to drop their university degree is because they realized the jobs they were working towards wouldn’t be there much longer if they didn’t help save the planet. There is nowhere to work on a dead planet. In XR there are doctors who are trying to make people aware that more people die every year from climate change related issues compared to any other cause. Scientists speak at our demonstrations to speak the facts that don’t get publicized enough. Mothers and fathers come to protest for the future of their children and their future grandchildren. Yesterday at the London protest there was a march for the Indigenous women of the Amazonia because their home, the Amazon rainforest, is being lost due to climate change and us as humans destroying it. So many people of all ages and walks of life come to XR protests because they know the truth and they refuse to sit and do nothing about it. I saw online a lot of people commenting on social media that we must all be work shy clowns and that we need to go get jobs. Most people in XR do have jobs, my parents for one. They have been working their whole lives while supporting Extinction Rebellion on the side. A lot of people give up their spare time for XR actions because they know the urgency this matter demands.

(My beautiful mum at the protest this week! Photo via Instagram @del_photos)

WE AREN’T THE BAD GUYS

In the press over the past few days Extinction Rebellion has been labelled as an organised crime group which is totally unfair on the thousands of ordinary citizens who support it and its cause. We are peaceful protesters who are using the laws regarding protesting to get our message across. We have also been accused as a group of giving Covid-19 to the police who don’t all wear face masks or social distance while we all try to. We have been targeted by the press to look like the ‘bad guys’ to hide their own mistakes and the mistakes of the government. I have so much respect for the police and would never do anything I thought was morally wrong or breaking the law. It is clear at the protests this week the police are being used to clear up the governments mess which is not right. They have denied food and water to protesters in trees (which is a human right) and cleared us in some areas because of covid but allowed us in other areas. They seem to just being using the best excuse at the time to get rid of us. Just the other day they blocked bike riders on a bridge and gave no warning of arrest but told everyone there they were going to be arrested. Under law they are not actually allowed to do that but they did all to stop our message getting across. The press once again in this situation made us look like the ‘bad guys’ by reporting that we prevented an ambulance getting to its destination which was not the case. The rebel riders did not block the road in this case, the police did for no real justified reason but the press didn’t tell you that did they?

I DIDN’T BLOCK A ROAD FOR THE REASON YOU THINK

I did find myself helping block some of the roads in London this week but I will tell you why because a lot of people moaned about the disruption we caused. The reason I personally blocked the road was because I wanted to help raise awareness of the situation we face. The situation is we are heading towards mass extinction. If we carry on with our lives the way we are like the public was trying to do on that day it is a certainty that we will be extinct before we know it. I wanted to help show that by acting now we can bring about great change. I wanted to help try and get the media attention to try and just get some of the truth out there so people can see it for themselves. We wanted to get your attention as well to show you the truth because we all deserve the truth. A few days of disruption is nothing in comparison to what will happen if nothing changes.

(Photo via Instagram @emilywhite1999)

THE FACTS

Our climate is changing faster than it ever has for at least 65 million years. Closer to 252 million. We as humans are responsible for this because we are ignoring the signs and the science. Governments have refused to take the positive action within their power allowing relentless consumerism and irresponsible industry to pillage and pollute our only home. The science is hard to hear, horrifying in fact. There has been an average of 60% decline in wildlife populations in just 50 years. The insects that pollinate our planets are dying. No pollination means no food. The birds that protect our crops from pests are dying. This means an increase in the risk of famine and disease. Our oceans are heating up which is killing the coral supporting 1/4 of all ocean species further destabilizing all life on earth. This is not science fiction it is happening right now. Governments and Industry are not acting fast enough to safe guard our future. Sea levels are rising faster than scientists first predicted meaning our sea side towns will start to disappear soon. More pandemics are also likely to happen due to climate change because an unhealthy planet means unhealthy animals.

(Photo by John Keeble at gettyimages)

THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO LISTEN

XR last year demanded that the government acknowledged the emergency that we face. They did as they declared a climate and ecological emergency but said they will not act until 2050. That is far too late. The point is to act now if we are to stand any chance of changing the course we are currently set for. This year we are demanding the passing of the CEE bill to end decades of inaction. If it is passed it will make new UK law so that we have to take responsibility for our entire carbon footprint and protect nature which our very lives depend upon. It will draw together ordinary people in an emergency Citizen’s Assembly to find a way out of the worst crisis we have ever faced. On Wednesday the bill was taken into parliament and only 21 out of 650 MPs supported it. They kicked it down the line for another 6 months again prolonging the process and putting off what needs to be done. This is a government that declared an emergency but now will not act on it.

(At XRSouthend ‘Tell The Truth’ banner drop. Photo by Gaz De Vere)

TREES

There is a great solution to this huge problem that we face. There is a magic machine that sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little and builds itself. It’s called a tree. A tree is an example of a natural climate solution. We have to restore what we have destroyed to try and balance our earth again. Other solutions alongside this would be needed but this is one of the best ones. That is why we have people at HS2 camps in the trees there as we speak. HS2 is the high speed railway the government is building using taxpayers money. Nobody asked for it and nobody is asking about it. To build this railway hundreds of ancient woodlands are being destroyed killing animal habitats in the process. This is a great example of how we are destroying our planet rather than helping it. That money could be better spent trying to fix our problem not make it worse.

(Photo via Instagram @artbyemily1999)

SUPPORT FROM CELEBS

Celebrities like Harrison Ford, David Attenborough and Stephen Fry have been trying to help warn us of what is to come. They tell us to not loose hope and to not give up when fighting for the future of humanity. We must not forget nature. The destruction of nature accounts for more global emissions than all the cars and trucks in the world. If we can’t protect nature we can’t protect ourselves. Powerful or powerless, we will all suffer the effects of climate change. Those least responsible will bear the greatest costs.

ACT NOW OR IT WILL BE TOO LATE

Extinction Rebellion aims to bring about the changes needed to fix the problem we face. Whether you agree with how we do this or not is up to you and I respect others and their opinions also. I’m sure you can not deny though that the changes we demand need to happen. Doing something is better than doing nothing. When I have a child one day I don’t want my child to be brought into a world that is doomed. Where they may have to fight for each meal, where they don’t get to see and appreciate the beauty of nature and its animals. We have become too busy and distracted looking at our screens, sucked into fake news and jobs that take over our lives that we have forgotten to look at the truth that is right in front of us. It is time to step outside and bring about the change you want to see in the world. Covid did not stop me stepping outside and protesting because if I don’t protest now the climate emergency will only bring about more pandemics. There is no better time than now.

(Credit to Extinction Rebellion science sources, YouTube and Twitter where I gathered some of my information and words from)

(Photo via Instagram @emilywhite1999)

#actnow #savetheplanet #extinction rebellion #kindness #courage #climate change #facts #tellthetruth

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nebris · 4 years

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How Freedom Turned Sociopathic in America

Why Crackpots, Lunatics, and Extremists Rule American Life — Even in a Lethal Pandemic

When I look around the world today, it strikes me that we’re living in the age of the sociopath. I don’t just mean that in the technical psychological sense of the word — a certain head of state and his goons come to mind — but first, in a deeper, truer, broader sense. Sociopathic: hostile to the idea, the notion, the purpose, of society. Not just “their” society or “mine” or “yours” — but the great and historic ideal of society itself. Sociopathy to the point that nations like Britain and America were simply unable to lock down in time, to protect society’s most vulnerable. Sociopathy to the point that Americans sunbathe on beaches while the death rate is the equivalent of a 9/11 every day. Sociopathy to the point that despite the fact that the infection hasn’t peaked yet, Trump is still trying to “reopen” the economy.

When you look at a generation of leaders failing ruinously to deal with any of the great challenges of the 21st century — inequality, climate change, mass extinction, stagnation, and now, a pandemic— it’s because most of them are profoundly, immovably hostile that there is such a thing as a society we should and must care for to begin with. When you look at fractured, riven countries, one after the other plunging into authoritarianism, it’s because large numbers of people have become deeply hostile to the notion of living in or being part of a society — not just theirs, but living beside anyone and caring for them, investing in them, nurturing them, period. When you see Americans protesting lockdown, armed with rifles— that, my friends, is textbook sociopathy, a kind of sneering contempt towards the idea that society exists, matters, counts, or is even necessary.

We are living in the age of the sociopath. Wherever I look, I see sociopathy at work. We often say that countries are divided today — but that’s not quite true, at least in the old sense of left versus right. What we should really see is that that many, many people have developed a deep enmity, hostility, antipathy to society itself. The idea of society. Its principles and values. Its founding notions, which I’ll come to. Its very essence. More and more people are simply rejecting “society” itself — not theirs, per se, but the concept itself.

The world is divided now into people that believe in society — and people that don’t, who believe in something more like tribalism, Darwinism, authoritarianism, hate, violence, and rage. That they should be supreme, above all others, that they are the center of the world, that nobody else and nothing else matters but them and their gratification. There is a kind of deep social nihilism at work in the world today — a kind of bitter disbelief that any kind of “we�� exists. And from this hostility, this enmity, comes a surging aggression, bitterness, rage, animus — that’s tearing the world apart today, knocking back to turbo-charged regress. And it is this force at work in Britain and America’s responses to Coronavirus.

You don’t have to look much further than America — the world’s reigning champion of sociopathy — to see all this in action. America’s long championed the idea that, as Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “there’s no such thing as society.” You might not — but generations of American leaders advanced bizarre and strange notions that basically rested upon the idea of society not needing to exist. Hence, Americans privatized everything from energy grids to schools, hospitals and medicine, universities and roads. Generations of Americans came to be staunchly “conservative” — not genuinely interested in conserving anything, really, but only in tearing down whatever remained of a functioning society. They succeeded — to the point that today teachers are being armed in schools, suicide is skyrocketing, the average person’s life has fallen apart, all while billionaires are becoming trillionaires.

Of course, Americans didn’t believe in society because they couldn’t — America was founded on the notion that some people aren’t human at all, so society, in the modern sense, could never exist at all. Only something more like a caste system could, which is why the American elite and what’s left of the middle class (not much) still rejects the idea of society today. “I won’t stay home to save their lives! Those dirty, filthy people!” But much of the rest of the world doesn’t have this strange and grim history. And yet instead of having learned anything from all this, many nations are beginning to follow suit. What the…? And there’s Europe — slashing investment instead of spending.

America’s cautionary tale — its weird, foolish journey of sociopathy — contains many lessons for the future, for the world, even for Americans. Some of them are simple.

There’s a certain kind of American, now legendary the world over, who thinks that carrying a gun to Starbucks, not vaccinating their kids, denying their neighbors retirement, and denying their own families decent healthcare, is the pinnacle of intelligence, civilization, decency, and progress. The rest of the world, and the rest of America, has come to know such people as the American Idiot. The American Idiot, it seems, knows no bounds. Today, for example, their latest and greatest cause is to protest against lockdown, reopen a pandemic-ridden society where the infection rate hasn’t even fallen yet, thus ensuring that death on a mass scale becomes death on an historic one. The question therefore arises: are such people (for whom the idea of a society of equals, who people are to respect, care for, nourish, and protect) simply… sociopaths?

I mean that in this sense: to the American Idiot, society doesn’t really exist. Everyone is an enemy, a rival, an adversary, cannon fodder. Come down with a deadly pandemic? Too bad for you. You must have been weak, and only the strong survive. This kind of attitude, which betrays a stunning indifference to everyone else’s life or death, is surely the essence of sociopathy. So: are we living in the age of the sociopath? And isn’t that one of the things the pandemic proves, despite all the feel-good stories of doctors and nurses? That many of us have become hardened to the point of indiffierence about life and death? But can you have a functioning society made of sociopaths — and if you can’t, what percentage of sociopaths does it take to destabilize a functioning society for everyone else?

One of the things that has gone badly wrong in America is that the idea of freedom itself seems to have turned sociopathic. I carry a gun to Starbucks, so kids have to do “active shooter drills,” and pretend to die, traumatizing them for life. I deny everyone else decent healthcare, access to medicine, a visit to the doctor. I withhold retirement and safety nets, and supports from everyone else. I’m “free” of obligations and responsibilities to care for, protect, and invest in anyone — including myself. But is that really freedom? Or is it something more like irresponsibility, negligence, and self-destruction? In America, freedom now means the right to inflict serious and injurious harm on a whole society. In the rest of the world, these actions are considered uncivilized. But when a society consists of people fighting for freedom as the right to injure everyone else, where can it really go except backwards and downwards, like America has?

If a people believe “society doesn’t need to exist,” they are also going to end up going without all the things that a society provides. Public goods will never develop — like public healthcare, affordable education, safety nets, and so on. As a result, inequality will skyrocket, because people will have to pay capitalists monopoly prices for the things they should have simply given each other. Because there’s little social investment in such a society, it will soon enough grow impoverished — after all, capitalists are hardly interested in sharing the wealth, and the gains they accumulate will simply go to yachts, mansions, and shares. All that describes America perfectly, doesn’t it?

Those economic effects are also accompanied by equally damaging sociocultural effects. No notion of a common wealth, a public interest, shared values can emerge if people don’t believe in society to begin with.That’s exactly what happened in America, too — there is literally no functioning notion of public interest or common good at work left in its institutions, which is why, for example, hedge funds are allowed to “raid pensions” (or, put in plain English, steal your money.)

In the end, these three effects — runaway inequality, growing poverty, which means the collapse of a middle class, and the erosion, the disappearance, of the notion of a public interest — what do they culminate in? They culminate, quite naturally, in the corrosion and eventual collapse of a democracy. After all, a democracy can hardly function when people don’t have anything left in common — when they are at each others’ throats, for the simple stuff of survival, whether money, food, healthcare, or education. Bang! You can see that lesson illustrated in the last catastrophic three years of America, during which democracy essentially imploded into fascist-authoritarianism (and if you think I’m kidding, go ahead and tell me who else puts kids in camps.)

But I think these basic lessons still don’t go nearly deep enough to really come to the heart of the matter. Why does “society” matter? Why should we believe in this thing, this project, this great ideal, this historic endeavour, called “society”?

One of the greatest lessons we’ve forgotten is what a “society” really is. The word “society” comes from “societas,” which means a kind of companionship, a certain association with others, or at least the hunger, the willingness to. But companionship also implies things which are crucial. It says we don’t act in bad faith. It says we regard others as our equals. It says we don’t try to stab them in the back. It says we aren’t just playing games with them, toying with them, for our own advantage — grinning, but only hoping to get one over on them.

All of these things seem to be vanishing, don’t they? And in fact, it’s exactly these things which seem to have vanished in our dislocated, zombified, post-modern age. We aren’t companions any more. We’re something more like adversaries, enemies, opponents. We are constantly battling one another, aren’t we? Our lives have become more and more defined by combat, by opposition, by difference.

But in what? For what are we constantly battling one another? Just the stuff of survival. In America, you are made to battle everyone else for…everything. Nothing is your right, really. You must fight bitterly for education, for healthcare, for a little bit of money, for food to eat, for a roof over your head. How can such people really be “companions” — when they are busy being enemies, opponents, adversaries? And when you look at the world this way, why would you want to stay home to keep others safe? And yet if a society is an organization of companions, of fellow travellers, of pilgrims all wearing humble cloth walking the same road — how can such a thing made of competition ever be a society?

And yet that is what the growth of capitalism to global proportions did. A few brave nations fought it — Canada, Europe, and so on — but in the end, even their resistance is crumbling. They too are slowly giving up on the idea of society as an organization of companions, of genuine equals. People in them too are becoming Americanized — being made to fight each other for the basics.

This kind of gladiatorial mode of organization isn’t a society, in the true sense. It’s just something more like a jungle, an arena, take your pick. I think the most accurate term is Social Darwinism — only the strong survive! Capitalism’s fundamental principle. But it’s profoundly incompatible with the essence of a what a society is. Capitalism says that we’re all greedy, stupid individuals, who have nothing but self-interest, after all, and that our only purpose in life is to blindly obey it, every nanosecond, so that we can maximize our own profits. But this starkly and absolutely incompatible with the following ideas: a public interest, a common interest, shared values, joint investment, public goods, me caring about you, virtue in any sense whatsoever. If the only person I am allowed, encouraged, rewarded to care about is me — then what room is there for a society to exist? If a million such people exist, do they make a society — or something more like its opposite, a ruthless Darwinist machine?

But isn’t that just what our institutions, from companies to schools to thinking itself do — reward people, train them, indoctrinate them, to only care about themselves, or at least care about themselves first and most? It’s no surprise, then, that every single kind of social institution you can imagine, from unions to marriage to friendship is in severe and ruinous decline. If we don’t believe in society, what need is there for any social bonds, really? Ah, but that’s exactly what capitalism wants. What do you call a group of people without social bonds? Prey.

We are going to have to rediscover — and reimagine — this great and beautiful idea of society if we want to survive the 21st century as societies. One of the biggest reasons that our societies are collapsing now is also one of the most obvious, hiding in plain sight — many of us don’t believe in society anymore. Not just in “ours” — but in the idea that there is anything beyond ourselves, our own appetites, our own advantage, our own aggressive, naked self-interest at all. That’s hardly a surprise. This century, middle classes are growing poorer — and people growing people struggle just to subsist.

And yet this sharp turn away from society, and towards narrow self-interest, is having catastrophic effects. It has corroded the idea of the public interest, of the common good, of shared values. It has breaking the back of democracy. It is causing a volcanic surge of white-hot rage to explode around the globe, as little entitled self-interesteers don’t win the power and control and status they need to feel secure. It is legitimating the worst of us, all over again, everything from the supremacism and fascism of Trumpism to the extreme nationalism of Brexit. It is causing the dislocation of technologically depressed generations, who, unable to form real bonds with one another anymore, are turning to drugs and suicide. The turn towards self-interest is especially ruinous in an age in which humanity needs to pull together if it wants to survive in any real sense of the word.

We are not going to make it as little groups of competitive, antagonistic individuals, battling for dwindling resources — playing out games of pointless, meaningless status competition for little capitalist baubles — while the capitalists laugh at our folly, stupidity, weakness, and powerlessness. The fascists and authoritarians that fill their pockets will pick us off one by one — after the tides and seasons have famished and starved us. We are only going to make it through this century as societies. In the end, as a society of the human race for the first time — as one band of companions, walking beside one another, not climbing atop one another, not dragging one another down, all on the same difficult and strange and beautiful road home. The one that leads us through the valleys of stardust and midnight, to our truest and deepest selves.

Umair May 2020

https://eand.co/how-freedom-turned-sociopathic-in-america-963048c59f8f

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bigyack-com · 4 years

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DealBook: Exclusive Details on Michael Bloomberg’s Plan to Rein in Wall Street

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Bloomberg leans left and takes aim at Wall Street

Exclusive: We’re the first to report Mike Bloomberg’s proposals for changing how the financial industry is regulated, which he is planning to announce this morning. The plan features ideas that wouldn’t be out of place for Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.Among Mr. Bloomberg’s proposals:• A financial transactions tax of 0.1 percent• Toughening banking regulations like the Volcker Rule and forcing lenders to hold more in reserve against losses• Having the Justice Department create a dedicated team to fight corporate crime and “encouraging prosecutors to pursue individuals, not only corporations, for infractions”• Merging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac• Strengthening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and “expanding its jurisdiction to include auto lending and credit reporting”• Automatically enrolling borrowers of student loans into income-based repayment schemes and capping paymentsMany of the proposals are a reversal from Mr. Bloomberg’s previous stance on financial regulation. In 2011, he complained that Democrats were taking “punitive actions” against Wall Street that could harm the economy. And comments he made in 2015 linking the financial crisis to the end of banks’ so-called redlining practices have drawn fierce criticism in recent days.It’s a sign of how far left Democratic presidential hopefuls feel they need to go to succeed in this year’s primary — even with a multibillion-dollar war chest. Mr. Bloomberg’s financial transactions tax plan is remarkably similar to one that has the backing of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Progressive critics are likely to argue that it doesn’t go far enough. Many Democrats have also proposed some sort of wealth tax, while Ms. Warren has called for a complete overhaul of the private equity industry and Mr. Sanders wants to break up the big banks.Bloomberg’s campaign insists he isn’t flip-flopping: On the Volcker Rule, for instance, a spokeswoman said: “When it was introduced, as now, Mike was skeptical of regulators’ ability to divine traders’ intent.” His new plan would focus “on the outcome of speculative trading — big gains and losses — rather than on traders’ intent.”We’ll have more soon on nytimes.com/dealbook. Breaking: This morning, Mr. Bloomberg qualified for the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, the first time he will appear onstage with his rivals for the nomination. ____________________________Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York, and Michael J. de la Merced and Jason Karaian in London.____________________________

Apple cuts sales guidance over coronavirus

The iPhone maker was one of the first big companies to reveal how the coronavirus outbreak was affecting its business. The company said yesterday that “a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated” forced it to scrap its guidance for revenue this quarter.There is more to come. China’s central position in global supply chains — and as a huge market in itself — means that the outbreak could ripple through company’s financials for months.Good luck, analysts! The virus outbreak’s negative but uncertain effects are coming up often in earnings calls: “Coronavirus” has been cited in 170 investor presentations by S&P 500 companies in the past month, according to a search of transcripts in S&P Capital IQ. Apple’s forecast for future profits was already more vague than usual “due to the greater uncertainty,” Tim Cook, its C.E.O., said last month.Taking a different approach, Walmart said this morning that its forecast for the current financial year didn’t take into account any potential effects of the virus outbreak.

HSBC makes ‘ruthless’ cuts in U.S. and Europe

The London-based bank said this morning that it planned to cut about 35,000 jobs over the next three years as it retreats from the West to focus more on Asia.“We are intending to exit a lot of domestically focused customers in Europe and the U.S. on the global banking side,” Ewen Stevenson, the bank’s C.F.O., told Bloomberg Television. He said the lender would make “surgical and ruthless” cuts to underperforming businesses.The plan is to accelerate investment in its Asian and Middle Eastern businesses, which already generate nearly half of its revenue. That’s the strategy that Standard Chartered, another London-based, Asia-focused bank, has followed.The initiative may not be enough. Shares in HSBC dropped 3 percent this morning. Alan Higgins, the chief investment officer of Coutts & Company, told Bloomberg that the strategy was “on the conservative side.”

Jeff Bezos pledges $10 billion on climate change

The Amazon chief has announced his biggest charitable donation to date, a fund to study and fight climate change, Karen Weise of the NYT writes.Mr. Bezos is a latecomer to large-scale charitable giving, starting in 2018 with a $2 billion program to combat homelessness created with his then-wife, MacKenzie.Amazon has been under pressure to reduce its carbon footprint. It revealed in September that it emitted about 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, making it one of the world’s top 200 emitters. And employees have called on the company to stop providing services to oil and gas industries.“One hand cannot give what the other is taking away,” said Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers protesting the company’s environmental practices.

Europe’s venture capitalists are getting serious

Atomico said this morning that it had raised Europe’s largest-ever independent tech venture fund, worth $820 million. The London-based venture capital firm’s founder, Niklas Zennstrom, told Michael in an interview that it was a sign of how the European start-up industry is coming into its own.There are now 99 “unicorns” — VC-backed start-ups worth at least $1 billion — in Europe, compared with 22 five years ago. “Companies are taking on bigger challenges, and there’s more ambition and experience,” Mr. Zennstrom said.That enabled Atomico to raise more money for its fifth fund than the $750 million it had originally planned. Among the investors in this fund are founders and early employees of Atomico-backed companies like Spotify, the payments company Klarna and the game maker Supercell. Mr. Zennstrom himself is a Swedish billionaire who co-founded Skype.But Mr. Zennstrom sees hurdles ahead:• Valuation multiples for European start-ups aren’t as high as those for U.S. companies. (There are twice as many V.C.-backed unicorns in the U.S., according to PwC.) Even so, Mr. Zennstrom said that unlike their American rivals, European start-ups were more focused on creating businesses that can become profitable.• Although Europe has plenty of gifted coders, getting them to come to a particular start-up — often in a different country — is a challenge.

Mark Zuckerberg calls for global rules for online content

While on a trip to Europe, the Facebook founder suggested that new rules and standards were needed to promote public trust in tech platforms.“I believe good regulation may hurt Facebook’s business in the near term, but it will be better for everyone, including us, over the long term,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in an FT opinion piece. Facebook also published a white paper with “guidelines for future regulation.”E.U. officials rejected his proposals. “It’s not enough. It’s too slow, it’s too low in terms of responsibility and regulation,” said a European Commissioner. And in response to Mr. Zuckerberg’s opinion piece, George Soros wrote a letter to the FT calling on the C.E.O. to “stop obfuscating the facts by piously arguing for government regulation” and urging him to resign.

The speed read

Deals• Pier 1 Imports filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. (NYT)• Univision is reportedly in talks to sell itself to an investor group for about $10 billion, including debt. (WSJ)• Alstom agreed to buy Bombardier’s train division for up to $6.7 billion to take on China’s CRRC. (Reuters)• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold a third of its stake in Goldman Sachs and a fifth of its shares in Wells Fargo. (Reuters)Politics and policy• The millennial goal of retiring early would be bad news for the Fed if they could manage to do it. (NYT)• Some employees at Oracle are protesting plans by their C.E.O., Larry Ellison, to hold a fund-raiser for President Trump. (Business Insider)Tech• Germany is poised to let Huawei into its 5G wireless network, a blow to the Trump administration’s fight against the Chinese telecom giant. (NYT)• The SoftBank-backed hotel platform Oyo reported a fourfold increase in revenue and a sixfold rise in its annual loss. (Bloomberg)• Palantir revamped its compensation to give employees bonuses in restricted stock, to save cash ahead of a potential I.P.O. (Bloomberg)Best of the rest• BlackRock has become a symbol for anticapitalist fervor in France (NYT)• The N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, said that the league’s rift with China could cost it up to $400 million in lost revenue. (CNBC)• Have global carbon emissions peaked? The short answer is probably not. (Bloomberg)Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Read the full article

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quakerjoe · 7 years

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Trump Has No One Left – Rabbis, CEOs, Scientists, And Independents Abandon The President

His remarks about the violence in Virginia were a tipping point for most people in this country, but even before those remarks happened the President was finding himself with a dwindling list of allies. That list got a whole lot shorter this past week, as even more groups attempted to distance themselves from this disgusting man that we have as our President.

I want to start by asking a rhetorical question here. Does Donald Trump have any friends left? Of course, the answer is, he's got a few, but certainly not as many as he once had, and to be honest, not even as many as he had two weeks ago. This past week, a group of rabbis in the United States, who hold an annual call with the president, regardless of who that president is, decided that this year they were going to cancel the call. They did that because of Donald Trump's disgusting response to the violence that took place two weeks ago in Charlottesville. Furthermore, members of Donald Trump's infrastructure council resigned earlier this week, again in response to his response to the attacks in Charlottesville, as well as I think a little bit had to do with the things that he said during his rally in Phoenix. Scientists this week abandoned the White House again. They resigned their posts because they couldn't take the administration's constant assault on climate change, something we've seen a lot of from the scientific community since Donald Trump took office. We have Catholic nuns out there calling out republicans. Independents are starting to abandon Trump, and that is the group that he needed in order to win, because luckily there aren't enough white supremacists in this country to solely pick the president. Without those independents, there's no possible way Donald Trump could win reelection. Polls show that a majority of Americans are ready to begin impeachment proceedings. Republicans in congress aren't willing to say that Donald Trump will be their nominee in 2020. John Kasich polls better than Donald Trump in head-to-head polls of republican primary for 2020. Bernie Sanders beats Donald Trump in a head-to-head match for president in 2020. Do you see where I'm going with this. There is no one left to defend Donald Trump, unless of course you count the folks at Fox News, but that's not enough to sway voters anymore, because earlier this week, MSNBC became the most watched cable network in the United States for the first time ever. There's nobody left. The White House has stopped sending out their goon squad to TV shows, because even they can't come up with a cogent response on how to deal with the president's actions. People are resigning from this administration left and right. Donald Trump is alienating everyone. A lot of it recently has to do with his response to Charlottesville, but this was happening even before that, and it's only gotten worse since then. Donald Trump's list of allies is dwindling, and pretty soon it's going to be down to zero. We might even see a day when Kellyanne Conway herself has to say, "You know what? Enough's enough. I can't physically do this anymore." It's only a matter of time. The reason this is important is because when we have such an incompetent, insecure, narcissistic president at the helm, the 25th amendment starts looking look a real possibility, if congress decides to invoke that, if Mike Pence decides to invoke that. And if Donald Trump continues to alienate all of his allies in this country, especially those in congress, it's going to be very easy to remove him from office. Trust me, I want that more than anyone, but I'm just talking about from Donald Trump's own perspective, not a real smart move. You're proving that you're really not a smart guy. You should start embracing your friendships. Maybe tone down the rhetoric a little bit. Maybe stay off Twitter for a couple days, because the more the public sees you, the more they get to know you, the more they read your tweets, the less they like you. CEOs have abandoned you. Rabbis have abandoned you. Catholics are abandoning you. Millionaires and billionaire donors of the republican party has abandoned you. Independents have abandoned you, and about 20 to 30% of the republican party has abandoned you. Maybe it's time you stop calling that fake news, and understand that you are actually the problem.

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funnythingshere0-blog · 6 years

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Obama hits campaign trail as Trump spins migrant caravan comments – as it happened

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/obama-hits-campaign-trail-as-trump-spins-migrant-caravan-comments-as-it-happened/

Obama hits campaign trail as Trump spins migrant caravan comments – as it happened

We’re going to wind down the blog for the day, but before we go here’s what you may have missed.

Trump and former president Obama delivered very tonally different remarks today on the campaign trail for candidates in West Virginia and Florida, respectively.

Trump is scheduled to speak again in Indianapolis tonight, and in Montana tomorrow afternoon.

Donald Trump’s recently convicted former lawyer, and increasingly disloyal one-time confidant Michael Cohen told Vanity Fair that Trump “repeatedly used racist language before his presidency”.

The US added 250,000 new jobs in October – well ahead of the 188,000 Wall Street had been expecting. That’s good news for Trump and the GOP.

The Trump administration announced it would be restoring sanctions against Iran and Trump marked the news, which will imperil the health of many in that country, with a parody image invoking the HBO show Game of Thrones.

The Nigerian army, accused of killing 45 demonstrators earlier this week during what Amnesty International called “peaceful protests”, seized on Donald Trump’s remarks about migrants yesterday in defense of its actions. It later deleted the relevant tweet.

We’ll have continuing midterm coverage all weekend – thanks for reading!

Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez)

Fascinating map of what themes TV viewers are seeing in political ads – note health care plays prominently pic.twitter.com/PKw8p5HLv5

November 2, 2018

Earlier this afternoon Trump tweeted a photoshopped image of himself with the slogan “sanctions are coming”. The tweet used typography from the HBO series Game of Thrones, playing on the show’s repeated refrain: “winter is coming”.

Stars of the show have started to respond. Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark on the series, tweeted a snarky “Not today” in response. Her co-star and on-screen sister Sophie Turner simply said: “Ew.”

HBO (@HBO)

How do you say trademark misuse in Dothraki?

November 2, 2018

HBO have requested that their imagery “not be misappropriated for political purposes.” In a tweet from their official account, they joked: “How do you say trademark misuse in Dothraki?”

Bloomberg has this wrap up of candidates twisting and bending their positions, and taking unexpected shots and opponents, at the eve of the election.

“The attempted role reversals in this campaign are just bonkers,” said Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. “Kind of like Bonnie and Clyde portraying themselves as champions of bank security.”

There’s the Republican candidate arguing that his Democratic opponent won’t stand up to President Donald Trump. An ad by the party aligned with the fossil fuel industry tells voters that a candidate of the party that’s antagonistic to coal is weak on climate change. A Democrat promises to back tougher immigration enforcement while several Republicans depict themselves as defenders of Obamacare rules.

Scrapping for every vote in intensely competitive races, candidates are shading, twisting and recasting their own records and those of their opponents, aligning with causes popular in their district or state and distancing themselves from stances that aren’t. It’s a common tactic for candidates, but it’s reached unusual levels this year.

Law enforcement officials intercepted a second suspicious package addressed to California billionaire Tom Steyer Thursday at a mailing facility in Burlingame just south of San Francisco.

Authorities said the latest package appeared to be of the same variety as the more than one dozen packages sent to prominent Democratic politicians, funders and celebrities in recent weeks culminating with the arrest of Cesar Sayoc.

Politco has this dispatch from midwestern soybean country, where despite the fact that his tariffs are hurting their wallets, farmers are still behind Trump.

Sitting atop his combine harvester on a clear fall day, Garrett Hawkins can add up just how much President Donald Trump’s tariffs are hitting his bottom line, from the lower price he’ll get for his soybean crop to the steeper prices he’ll pay for metal grain bins and other equipment.

But like many of his fellow farmers in southern Illinois’ sprawling 12th Congressional District, Hawkins, 37, is still planning to vote Republican on Election Day.

Democrats pinpointed the district this year as one of their most likely opportunities to pick up a House seat, betting, in part, that farmers would abandon the GOP as Trump’s global trade war hits the Midwest. The district went for Obama in 2012, though Trump carried it by 15 points in 2016. But the race is turning into a showcase for how that economic argument alone may not be enough to prevail among voters, even in swing districts.

After running neck-and-neck with his Democratic challenger for months, incumbent Mike Bost began to pull ahead after the divisive September Senate hearings to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

There’s a disconnect between the negative effect of Trump’s policies on his voters in farm country and their unwavering support for him. That could limit the size of the Democratic majority widely expected to take control of the House next year and give Trump cover to prolong his aggressive moves against U.S. trading partners.

The Toronto Star’s Washington correspondent Daniel Dale is usually a live fact checking machine anytime Trump is speaking and today in West Virginia is no different.

Daniel Dale (@ddale8)

Trump repeats his regular lie that San Diego was begging him for the wall. Its city council passed a formal resolution of opposition to the wall. Even the Republican mayor is opposed.

November 2, 2018

Daniel Dale (@ddale8)

Trump lies of the wall: “San Diego, we’re just about finishing it up.” They are not building his wall in San Diego.

November 2, 2018

Daniel Dale (@ddale8)

Trump repeats his regular claim, which no expert agrees with, that the U.S. steel industry would have quickly vanished if not for his tariffs.

November 2, 2018

Daniel Dale (@ddale8)

Trump lies that U.S. Steel is “building seven new plants.” It has made significant new investments in two existing plants. Trump sometimes claims it is six plants, sometimes seven, sometimes eight, once “eight or nine.”

November 2, 2018

From the Associated Press:

Nine months after 17 classmates and teachers were gunned down at their Florida school, Parkland students are finally facing the moment they’ve been leading up to with marches, school walkouts and voter-registration events throughout the country: their first Election Day.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student activists set their sights on the 4 million US citizens turning 18 this year. They’re hoping to counteract the voter apathy that’s especially prevalent among the youth during midterm elections. Many of the activists, now household names like David Hogg, postponed college plans to mobilize young voters. Many of them support gun reform, in the name of their fallen classmates.

Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky and Noami Wadler speak during March For Our Lives on 24 March, 2018 in Washington, DC. Photograph: Noam Galai/WireImage

“It is kind of the culmination of everything we’ve been working for,” said senior Jaclyn Corin, one of the founders of the March For Our Lives group. “This is truly the moment that young people are going to make the difference in this country.” Corin, who voted along with her dad at an early polling site on her 18th birthday, visited a half-dozen cities in just a handful of days last week, getting up at 3 a.m. to board planes.

It has been a whirlwind for the students, with celebrity support from Oprah to Kim Kardashian, a Time magazine cover, late night TV spots and book deals but all of it misses their main target unless it motivates students to cast ballots by the end of Tuesday.

At a University of Central Florida event during the final week of election campaigning, Stoneman Douglas graduate and current UCF student Bradley Thornton escorted fellow students to the campus’ early voting site. UCF student Tiffany McKelton said she wouldn’t have voted if the Parkland activists hadn’t shown up on campus.

“I’ve never voted in a primary election. I actually did it because of them,” said McKelton, a psychology major from West Palm Beach.

In West Virginia Trump concedes Democrats might win control of the house and says the ensuing political battle “will be ridiculous frankly, it will be bad for our country”.

ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics)

Pres. Trump says Democrats taking power in midterm elections “could happen.”

“You know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.” https://t.co/CFdzczE0fE pic.twitter.com/2oRP8AUEIK

November 2, 2018

Former president Barack Obama was in Florida stumping for gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum Friday afternoon, serving up a buffet of the kind of aspirational, “hopey, changey” rhetoric that put him on the political map in 2004 and won him the White House in 2008.

“We have seen rhetoric designed to divide us,” Obama said. “In four days, you can be a check on that kind of behavior.”

Obama’s speech broadly embraced themes of inclusivity and social justice. “You can choose a more generous vision of America… where love and hope conquer hate,” he said, sounding almost anachronistic in the Trump-era.

Obama also spoke more directly to the GOP and Trump specifically with remarks like these:

“When truth doesn’t matter, when people can just lie with abandon, democracy can’t work … And that’s what’s happening at the highest levels. And the only check on that behavior is you. The only check on that behavior is you and your vote.”

“They’re telling you the existential threat to America is a bunch of poor refugees 1,000 miles away. They’re even taking our brave troops away from their families for a political stunt at the border. The men and women of our military deserve better than that.”

“Suddenly Republicans are saying they’re gonna protect your pre-existing conditions when they’ve literally been doing the opposite. That’s some kind of gall. That’s some kind of chutzpah. Let’s call it what it is: it’s a lie. They’re lying to you.”

Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1)

Obama: “While you’re distracted with all this stuff they’re making up, they’re also robbing you blind … They will absolutely take health care away from millions the first chance they get while you are distracted with stuff that is not true.” (via ABC) pic.twitter.com/ETwt2Mxqfi

November 2, 2018

From Reuters:

Twitter deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in Tuesday’s U.S. election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.

“We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter,” Twitter Inc spokesman Ian Plunkett said in an email. The removals took place in late September and early October

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2018/nov/02/us-politics-live-midterms-latest-donald-trump-rallies

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truck-fump · 4 years

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How Big Money Corrupts Our Politics (And How to Fix It)Corporate...

New Post has been published on https://robertreich.org/post/628072680669790208

How Big Money Corrupts Our Politics (And How to Fix It)Corporate...

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How Big Money Corrupts Our Politics (And How to Fix It)

Corporate money is dominating our democracy.

It’s difficult to do anything – increase the minimum wage, reverse climate change, get Medicare for All, end police killings, fight systemic racism, shrink our bloated military – when big money controls our politics and dictates what policies are and aren’t enacted.

The pandemic has made that clearer than ever. The CARES Act, passed in late March as our pandemic response began, quietly provided huge benefits to wealthy Americans and big corporations. One provision doled out $135 billion in tax relief to people making at least half a million dollars, the richest 1% of American taxpayers.

As Americans are still suffering massive unemployment and the ravages of the pandemic, lobbyists are crawling all over Capitol Hill and the White House is seeking continued subsidies for the rich and for corporations — while demanding an end to supplemental assistance for average working people, the poor, and the unemployed.

It’s corruption in action, friends. And it’s undermining our democracy at every turn.

Ask yourself how, during a global pandemic, the total net worth of U.S. billionaires has climbed from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion, when more than 45.5 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits.

Is it their skill? Their luck? Their insight? No. It’s their monopolies, enabled by their stranglehold on American democracy… monopolies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which have grown even larger during the pandemic.

It’s also their access to insider information so they can do well in the stock market, like Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose husband happens to be chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Both were fully briefed on the likely effects of the coronavirus last February and promptly unloaded their shares of stock in companies that would be hit hardest.

And it’s the tax cuts and subsidies they’ve squeezed out of government.

You are paying for all of this — not just as taxpayers but as consumers.

When you follow the money, you can see clearly how every aspect of American life has been corrupted.

Take prescription drugs. We spend tens of billions of dollars on prescriptions every year, far more per person than citizens in any other developed country. Now that millions of Americans are unemployed and without insurance, they need affordable prescription drugs more than ever.

Yet even the prices of drugs needed by coronavirus patients are skyrocketing. Big Pharma giant Gilead is charging a whopping $3,120 for its COVID drug, Remdesivir, even though the drug was developed with a $70,000,000 grant from the federal government paid for by American taxpayers.

Once again, Big Pharma is set to profit on the people’s dime. And they get away with it because our lawmakers depend on their campaign donations to remain in power.

As you watch this, Mitch McConnell is actively blocking a bill drafted by Senate Republicans to reduce drug prices — after taking more than $280,000 from pharmaceutical companies so far this election season.

Big Pharma is just one example. This vicious cycle is found in virtually every sector, and it’s why we continue to be met with politicians who don’t have our best interests at heart.

So how do we get big money out of our democracy?

A good starting point can be found in the sweeping reform package known as H.R. 1 — the For the People Act. The bill closes loopholes that favor big corporations and the wealthy, makes it easier for all of us to vote, and strengthens the power of small donors through public financing of elections — a system which matches $6 of public funds for every $1 of small donations.

The For the People Act would also bar congresspeople from serving on corporate boards, require presidents to publicly disclose their tax returns, and make executive appointees recuse themselves in cases where there is a conflict of interest.

These are just a few examples of tangible solutions that already exist to rein in unprecedented corruption and stop America’s slide toward oligarchy — but there’s much more we can and should do.

#Uncategorized

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kristablogs · 4 years

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Jeff Bezos’ $10 billion to fight the climate crisis can make a difference—if spent correctly

Bezos at the opening of Amazon Spheres in 2018 (Seattle City Council/)

On Monday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he was launching a $10 billion dollar fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, to address climate change. “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “This global initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.” Bezos said that he’d start distributing grants this summer.

After initially dragging their feet, Bezos and Amazon seem to be attempting to use their power to address the climate crisis. However, the announcement is scant on details, and the real impact of these changes depends on how that money is spent—and whether Bezos can follow through on plans to clean up his own company.

A group of the company’s own employees, for their part, aren’t totally satisfied. “As history has taught us, true visionaries stand up against entrenched systems, often at great cost to themselves,” wrote the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice in a statement. “We applaud Jeff Bezos’ philanthropy, but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away.” The group went on to mention Amazon’s business of offering cloud computing services to oil and gas companies, their funding of climate-denying think tanks, and how diesel exhaust from their shipping trucks harms the lungs of those living near Amazon warehouses.

Amazon’s climate action to date seems to stem from the organizing of the company’s employees, writes Brian Merchant in a Gizmodo article. In December 2018, workers posted a letter online calling for the company to adopt a climate plan, racking up over 8,000 signatures. After that, Amazon began to announce concrete goals for reducing delivery emissions and switching to clean power. In September 2019, the company unveiled its commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2040, as well as its carbon footprint—a whopping 44.4 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in 2018.

That’s more than the emissions of some countries, or about the same as a small fossil fuel producer. For comparison, oil company Pioneer has an annual footprint of about 40 million tons, while Exxon’s is 604, explains Richard Heede, co-director of the Climate Accountability Institute, who published an analysis last year on the most polluting fossil fuel companies.

Even so, Heede says he applauds Bezos’ latest commitment. “I thought it was a worthy amount to donate to the world’s most critical issue,” he says. But, he emphasizes, what comes next for climate change largely depends on the fossil fuel industry, since 103 firms are responsible for nearly 70 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. While business leaders like Bezos have made pledges to cut their industry’s emissions, Heede says “we have to fund systemic changes as well on the supply side [of fossil fuels], which is a much tougher nut to crack than reducing net emissions.”

Climate scientists say that that’s the best use of all that cash—using it as capital for market and political shifts that can uproot our fossil fuel fed status quo. Jonathan Foley, executive director of climate change-focused Project Drawdown, says that investing in energy efficiency and transportation improvements is the low-hanging fruit of climate action. If Bezos, for example, used that money to provide start up capital for the electric heat pump industry, that could foster a huge transition in American homes and businesses, which mostly use polluting natural gas for heating. Buildings represent 40 percent of U.S. energy use, and 35 percent of that goes into heating, cooling, and ventilation. Scaling up an existing, energy-efficient technology like heat pumps could create fast benefits for the planet.

Transportation, which generates more greenhouse gases than any other source in America, also needs a revamp if we’re going to curb the climate crisis. That’s why ramping up electric-powered vehicles and public transit infrastructure would also provide immediate benefits to the planet. “I think energy efficiency, buildings, and transportation are the next frontiers,” says Foley. “I would strongly encourage [Bezos] to spend the money immediately, in the next five years.” With swift action, we might stand a chance of meeting the 50 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030 we need if we’re to avert the worst consequences of climate change.

Leah Stokes, political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara studying environmental policy, also thinks that money could go far for the climate, adding that the total may be more than twice the amount of funding currently out there for tackling climate change. Her suggestion for spending it is to help reshape politics, using donations and campaigns to accelerate policies and candidates that support climate action. “My own view is that we really need to catalyze government policy,” she says. She points to Michael Bloomberg’s donation of tens of millions of dollars to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which lobbies to stop new coal plants and shut down existing ones. The campaign credits itself with the retirement of 289 coal plants. “Bezos could take a similar approach aimed at changing climate policy,” she says.

Helping seed climate policy through political donations could reap big climate rewards down the line, says Stokes. If some of that $10 billion was used to help pass a carbon tax, for example, it would raise around $200 billion every year. And some Democratic presidential candidates have proposed spending trillions on climate action. “If you can get the federal government to start acting on climate change,” she says. “You can get a lot more than 10 billion for climate action.”

Though the outsized power and influence of billionaires may make us uncomfortable, $10 billion toward the planet is a big deal. “At the end of the day I think the world is better because someone decided to put $10 billion toward climate solutions,” says Foley. “If invested wisely, it could make a big difference.”

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scootoaster · 4 years

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Jeff Bezos’ $10 billion to fight the climate crisis can make a difference—if spent correctly

Bezos at the opening of Amazon Spheres in 2018 (Seattle City Council/)

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mastcomm · 4 years

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DealBook: Exclusive Details on Michael Bloomberg’s Plan to Rein in Wall Street

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Bloomberg leans left and takes aim at Wall Street

Among Mr. Bloomberg’s proposals:

• A financial transactions tax of 0.1 percent

• Toughening banking regulations like the Volcker Rule and forcing lenders to hold more in reserve against losses

• Having the Justice Department create a dedicated team to fight corporate crime and “encouraging prosecutors to pursue individuals, not only corporations, for infractions”

• Merging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

• Strengthening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and “expanding its jurisdiction to include auto lending and credit reporting”

• Automatically enrolling borrowers of student loans into income-based repayment schemes and capping payments

Many of the proposals are a reversal from Mr. Bloomberg’s previous stance on financial regulation. In 2011, he complained that Democrats were taking “punitive actions” against Wall Street that could harm the economy. And comments he made in 2015 linking the financial crisis to the end of banks’ so-called redlining practices have drawn fierce criticism in recent days.

It’s a sign of how far left Democratic presidential hopefuls feel they need to go to succeed in this year’s primary — even with a multibillion-dollar war chest. Mr. Bloomberg’s financial transactions tax plan is remarkably similar to one that has the backing of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Progressive critics are likely to argue that it doesn’t go far enough. Many Democrats have also proposed some sort of wealth tax, while Ms. Warren has called for a complete overhaul of the private equity industry and Mr. Sanders wants to break up the big banks.

Bloomberg’s campaign insists he isn’t flip-flopping: On the Volcker Rule, for instance, a spokeswoman said: “When it was introduced, as now, Mike was skeptical of regulators’ ability to divine traders’ intent.” His new plan would focus “on the outcome of speculative trading — big gains and losses — rather than on traders’ intent.”

We’ll have more soon on nytimes.com/dealbook.

Breaking: This morning, Mr. Bloomberg qualified for the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, the first time he will appear onstage with his rivals for the nomination.

____________________________

Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York, and Michael J. de la Merced and Jason Karaian in London.

____________________________

Apple cuts sales guidance over coronavirus

There is more to come. China’s central position in global supply chains — and as a huge market in itself — means that the outbreak could ripple through company’s financials for months.

Good luck, analysts! The virus outbreak’s negative but uncertain effects are coming up often in earnings calls: “Coronavirus” has been cited in 170 investor presentations by S&P 500 companies in the past month, according to a search of transcripts in S&P Capital IQ. Apple’s forecast for future profits was already more vague than usual “due to the greater uncertainty,” Tim Cook, its C.E.O., said last month.

Taking a different approach, Walmart said this morning that its forecast for the current financial year didn’t take into account any potential effects of the virus outbreak.

HSBC makes ‘ruthless’ cuts in U.S. and Europe

The London-based bank said this morning that it planned to cut about 35,000 jobs over the next three years as it retreats from the West to focus more on Asia.

“We are intending to exit a lot of domestically focused customers in Europe and the U.S. on the global banking side,” Ewen Stevenson, the bank’s C.F.O., told Bloomberg Television. He said the lender would make “surgical and ruthless” cuts to underperforming businesses.

The plan is to accelerate investment in its Asian and Middle Eastern businesses, which already generate nearly half of its revenue. That’s the strategy that Standard Chartered, another London-based, Asia-focused bank, has followed.

The initiative may not be enough. Shares in HSBC dropped 3 percent this morning. Alan Higgins, the chief investment officer of Coutts & Company, told Bloomberg that the strategy was “on the conservative side.”

Jeff Bezos pledges $10 billion on climate change

The Amazon chief has announced his biggest charitable donation to date, a fund to study and fight climate change, Karen Weise of the NYT writes.

Mr. Bezos is a latecomer to large-scale charitable giving, starting in 2018 with a $2 billion program to combat homelessness created with his then-wife, MacKenzie.

Amazon has been under pressure to reduce its carbon footprint. It revealed in September that it emitted about 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, making it one of the world’s top 200 emitters. And employees have called on the company to stop providing services to oil and gas industries.

“One hand cannot give what the other is taking away,” said Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers protesting the company’s environmental practices.

Europe’s venture capitalists are getting serious

There are now 99 “unicorns” — VC-backed start-ups worth at least $1 billion — in Europe, compared with 22 five years ago. “Companies are taking on bigger challenges, and there’s more ambition and experience,” Mr. Zennstrom said.

That enabled Atomico to raise more money for its fifth fund than the $750 million it had originally planned. Among the investors in this fund are founders and early employees of Atomico-backed companies like Spotify, the payments company Klarna and the game maker Supercell. Mr. Zennstrom himself is a Swedish billionaire who co-founded Skype.

But Mr. Zennstrom sees hurdles ahead:

• Valuation multiples for European start-ups aren’t as high as those for U.S. companies. (There are twice as many V.C.-backed unicorns in the U.S., according to PwC.) Even so, Mr. Zennstrom said that unlike their American rivals, European start-ups were more focused on creating businesses that can become profitable.

• Although Europe has plenty of gifted coders, getting them to come to a particular start-up — often in a different country — is a challenge.

Mark Zuckerberg calls for global rules for online content

While on a trip to Europe, the Facebook founder suggested that new rules and standards were needed to promote public trust in tech platforms.

“I believe good regulation may hurt Facebook’s business in the near term, but it will be better for everyone, including us, over the long term,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in an FT opinion piece. Facebook also published a white paper with “guidelines for future regulation.”

E.U. officials rejected his proposals. “It’s not enough. It’s too slow, it’s too low in terms of responsibility and regulation,” said a European Commissioner. And in response to Mr. Zuckerberg’s opinion piece, George Soros wrote a letter to the FT calling on the C.E.O. to “stop obfuscating the facts by piously arguing for government regulation” and urging him to resign.

The speed read

Deals

• Pier 1 Imports filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. (NYT)

• Univision is reportedly in talks to sell itself to an investor group for about $10 billion, including debt. (WSJ)

• Alstom agreed to buy Bombardier’s train division for up to $6.7 billion to take on China’s CRRC. (Reuters)

• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold a third of its stake in Goldman Sachs and a fifth of its shares in Wells Fargo. (Reuters)

Politics and policy

• The millennial goal of retiring early would be bad news for the Fed if they could manage to do it. (NYT)

• Some employees at Oracle are protesting plans by their C.E.O., Larry Ellison, to hold a fund-raiser for President Trump. (Business Insider)

Tech

• Germany is poised to let Huawei into its 5G wireless network, a blow to the Trump administration’s fight against the Chinese telecom giant. (NYT)

• The SoftBank-backed hotel platform Oyo reported a fourfold increase in revenue and a sixfold rise in its annual loss. (Bloomberg)

• Palantir revamped its compensation to give employees bonuses in restricted stock, to save cash ahead of a potential I.P.O. (Bloomberg)

Best of the rest

• BlackRock has become a symbol for anticapitalist fervor in France (NYT)

• The N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, said that the league’s rift with China could cost it up to $400 million in lost revenue. (CNBC)

• Have global carbon emissions peaked? The short answer is probably not. (Bloomberg)

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.

We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].

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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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True/False 2019: Caballerango, American Factory, The Hottest August, Finding Frances

One of the best films at the festival, Juan Pablo González’s “Caballerango” captures spare haunted moments in Milpillas, a rural Mexican village that has been reeling from a series of suicides. A horse vacantly stares in the camera. A woman pulls the skin off chicken legs. Two men have a sprinting contest while a group places bets. People work while the world changes around them. The landscape remains the same.

These scenes have an indefinably eerie quality that stems from González’s choice to make his camera as invisible as possible. He lingers on events longer than most filmmakers, illustrating the passage of time as much as the action in the frame. He interviews people discussing the various losses that have affected them and their community—a son’s suicide, his sister’s miscarriage, his brother’s friends’ deaths—but the focus in “Caballerango” remains productively unstable. The suicides are treated as individual tragedies while also serving as microcosms for the economic deterioration in the area, an avenue that González would rather gesture towards than didactically explore.

González employs a creative rhythmic strategy to communicate his empathy towards the Milpillas community. He conditions his audience to observe the mundane at length, to “experience the frame instead of someone editing,” as he explained in Filmmaker Magazine to describe his short film “The Solitude of Memory.” Thus, when the unexpected invades the frame, it engenders surprise or awe, like a late-night vigil that stalks the streets. It’s an attempt to inure the audience into the pace of life in Milpillas while also demonstrating how ghosts, metaphoric and literal, permanently disrupt everyday lives. The spectral drives “Caballerango” while the people themselves reside at its center.

“American Factory”

Netflix bought Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s “American Factory” for under $3 million following its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. This might be a drop in the bucket for a streaming service that essentially prints its own money, but it still ostensibly represents a belief that a documentary about a Chinese-owned car-glass manufacturing company in Dayton, Ohio can garner a sizable audience on their platform. Given that the film directly engages with Recession-sourced working class plight, unionization in face of indifferent corporate superstructures, and the difficulties of reconciling different cultures during the height of globalization, Netflix might have made a good bet.

In 2014, Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang opens up a Fuyao manufacturing plant in Dayton. For the locals, this represents a bright new opportunity, especially after General Motors shuttered their factory in 2008. At first, “American Factory” focuses on the humorous side of the culture clash: the Chinese workers, transplanted from the safety of their homes and families, learn about the nuances of their American peers in classroom settings, while the Americans deal with the Chinese workers’ hyper-detail-focused nature and staunch work ethic on the job. Yet, tensions quickly escalate as Chinese management become frustrated with their American counterparts as well as the country’s labor laws. Lax safety standards and the looming threat of automation spark union talks amongst the workers, which erodes all previous good will. The film becomes a chronicle of the age-old war between labor and management, only this time with easily drawn global implications vis-à-vis Chinese economic control and America’s bleak manufacturing future. The metaphors invent themselves when you’re watching irreconcilable worldviews engage with each other in real time.

Bognar and Reichert’s film maneuvers between different tones at ease. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy one moment and a searing indictment of hellacious corporate practices the next. This casual tonal shifts allows the film’s truly horrifying moments to pop, like when an American supervisor tells his Chinese peer that he wishes he could tape his workers’ mouths shut so they wouldn’t talk as much on the job, or Dewang’s underlings expressing disbelief at the idea of Americans not working weekends. There’s probably one too many threads at play in the film, but even the most digressive elements contribute to a modern portrait of American labor fighting upwind against a culture that has all but abandoned them.

What keeps me from wholly embracing “American Factory” lies in Bognar and Reichert’s macro-structural decision to provide everyone, from the factory workers to Dewang himself, an equal platform. On paper, the choice is sound, a necessary step to providing a full picture, but when the film shifts focus to the unionization efforts, it occasionally scans as a blatant attempt for obvious villains to save face. Bognar and Reichert provide a steady, neutral presence, which obviously helps with access and trust, but their inability to express a strong critical viewpoint becomes a liability. Everyone is human, yes, but when certain individuals have the expressed goal of continually putting workers in harm’s way to save a buck, maybe some are more human than others.

I walked out of “American Factory” thinking that no one could possibly watch that film and come away believing that unions are anything less than a necessity. Sure enough, two people behind me were talking about how unions “made sense for a time,” but they ultimately bred laziness and stifled innovation. I don’t for a second doubt Bognar and Reichert’s intentions, but because “American Factory” plays to all time zones, it will inevitably confirm whatever pre-conceived biases you already hold. Granted, it’s not the job of “American Factory” to change minds, but at some point, the choice not to take a tougher political stance weakens the film.

“The Hottest August”

Brett Story’s “The Hottest August” technically focuses on the dark specter of the impending global climate disaster through the voices of New Yorkers over the span of a month, but its larger aim is to encapsulate the sense of dread that currently permeates the world. In August 2017, Story traveled across all five boroughs, either going to a specific event in the city or posting up at a single location, to film conversations about “the future.” Different anxieties fill the air—economic, social, racial, political—and the testimonies directly engage with the ineffable sense of catastrophe that feels like it’s lurking around the corner. Sometimes the responses are measured while others are tossed off. Trump’s recent inauguration hangs over the city, not to mention the violent aftermath of Unite the Right rally as well as the solar eclipse, which Story uses as a structural bookend. In between these interviews, actress Clare Coulter provides clinical, semi-otherworldly narration; she reads excerpts from Marx, Zadie Smith, and a “New Yorker” essay by Annie Dillard. Story’s film scans as a long-form exploration of the most chilling line from Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed”: “This social system isn’t built for multiple crises.”

Story and her editor Nels Bangerter visually and aurally communicate the low-grade terror that now fills our lives quite effectively. “The Hottest August” is freewheeling by its very nature, jumping from topic to topic similar to Story’s borough hopping. The collective fear, and the ways in which it’s expressed, mostly keeps the interviews connected. It’s how a young college graduate worried about job prospects can feel in line with middle-aged Staten Island bar patrons discussing racism, even if the expressed anxieties are diametrically opposed. Story lets her subjects talk freely and jumps in to further the conversation or question the answers. (The best example might be when she questions an art collecting hedge fund manager about the value of capitalism.) She encounters these New Yorkers at a critical point, and while all are self-aware about the respective despair, none feel particularly hopeless. Systemic collapse doesn’t necessarily crush individual hope.

Story clearly reverse-engineered “The Hottest August” from the numerous interviews she conducted, and though that’s a valid creative strategy, the project feels unproductively diffuse at times. It lives and dies by the charisma of her subjects, which vary wildly, and certain participants, like a futurist performance artist, just simply aren’t engaging enough to justify the time spent with them. I couldn’t help but wonder if the film would have a stronger impact on me if the scope were limited exclusively to climate change. At the same time, “The Hottest August” succeeds as a portrait of New York in crisis and I can easily see myself coming around to certain digressive elements on a second viewing. It’s a colossal film, one that I predict will be major if distributed, that bottles up our depressing zeitgeist with maximum insight, and yet I still felt underwhelmed. Maybe just living in this culture will do that to you sometimes.

“Finding Frances”

Though it never occurred to me when it was airing, “Nathan For You,” the satirical docu-reality series co-created by and starring comedian Nathan Fielder, is a perfect fit for True/False. Fielder’s elaborate, counterintuitive marketing proposals for struggling businesses—offering a gas station rebate that’s almost impossible to claim; exploiting the fair use doctrine to rebrand a struggling coffee shop as Dumb Starbucks; using a theatrical construct to help a dive bar get around a smoking ban—always straddled the line between performance art and non-fiction storytelling. Fielder and his team employed many of the principles of documentary filmmaking to pull off their stunts, finding humor in the gaps between their noble-but-misguided intentions and the participants’ willingness to go along with them. “Nathan For You” raises many of the standard philosophical and ethical questions that “serious” documentarians grapple with during their own projects, plus some legal ones as well. (A friend pointed out that Fielder must have kept Comedy Central’s legal team very busy over the course of the series.) All of these qualities make “Nathan For You” pure, unfettered True/False bait.

I won’t restate the plot of “Nathan For You’s” brilliant series finale “Finding Frances” in this space; it’s readily available to stream and you can read multiple recaps or reviews if you wish, including one penned by Errol Morris. However, I will say that watching the film/episode (I’m not getting into this debate) in the Missouri Theatre, where all 1,200 seats were filled with either Fielder acolytes or curious newcomers, was a genuine event. In retrospect, it was a perfect fit for the festival: an audacious crowd-pleaser that not only pushes Fielder’s project to its limit but also vibes neatly with the rest of the programming lineup. It’s no surprise that True/False has apparently been trying to get Fielder to come out to Columbia for some time. Sure enough, the crowd treated Fielder like a rock star when he arrived for the Q&A (the guy sitting next to me jumped to his feet and screamed as if Mick Jagger strolled across the stage). He answered multiple questions in his wonderful deadpan cadence and screened some deleted scenes for the audience. “Finding Frances” illustrates that True/False can indulge in its populist side without abandoning its principles.

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bigyack-com · 4 years

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DealBook: Elon Musk Hits Back at Critics

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Tesla has 105 million more reasons to celebrate

The electric carmaker reported a $105 million quarterly profit yesterday, giving boosters of the company more occasion to crow.“The numbers suggest that Tesla has overcome the problems that plagued it in the first half of last year, when it lost more than $1 billion and scrambled to raise capital,” writes Niraj Chokshi of the NYT.And production of its Model Y compact S.U.V. was ahead of schedule, the company said. Deliveries of the vehicle would begin in the spring, at least three months earlier than expected.Shares in Tesla rose 12 percent in after-hours trading. The company’s market value is currently $104.7 billion, more than double that of traditional rivals like G.M. and BMW. (It also puts Elon Musk closer to fulfilling the requirements for a big bonus.)Mr. Musk taunted critics yesterday, saying, “A lot of retail investors have deeper and more accurate insights than many of the big institutional investors.”But there’s still plenty of fodder for doubters:• Charley Grant of Heard on the Street notes that revenue for the quarter grew just 2 percent from the same time a year ago, while operating income fell 13 percent.• And Tesla warned that car production would outstrip supply this year.____________________________Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York and Michael J. de la Merced in London.____________________________

Markets continue sell-off over coronavirus fears

U.S. stocks are poised to open down today, after Asian and European markets fell amid more signs that the Chinese coronavirus outbreak is continuing to worsen.Here’s the latest:• The death count as of this morning stands at 170, while the number of cases has grown to 7,711 — officially more than in the SARS epidemic.• Countries are quarantining people to prevent mass outbreaks.• Google, Microsoft and Ikea are the latest companies to temporarily shutter offices or prevent employees from traveling to China.S&P futures are down 20 points, while the Dow is set to fall nearly 140 points at market open today. Stocks in Hong Kong were down 2.6 percent, while those in Europe declined about 1 percent.And China’s currency, the renminbi, slipped below 7 to the dollar for the first time this year.It remains hard for businesses and political leaders to figure out their responses to the crisis. “Literally, we are evaluating on an ongoing basis in real time,” said a spokesman for Cummins, an engine maker with operations in China, “and I imagine other places are in the same position as we are.”More: Stop hoarding face masks. That’s doing more harm than good.

Les Wexner, Victoria’s Secret owner, may step down

Les Wexner, who has run the retail empire known as L Brands for 57 years, is in talks to relinquish his C.E.O. title, according to the WSJ and other media reports. His run has been dogged recently by both business underperformance and a longtime connection to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.The business angle: Shares in L Brands fell 29 percent last year, as sales at Victoria’s Secret have dropped amid changing beauty ideals among American women. (The NYT reports that the company is preparing for layoffs.)The Epstein angle: Mr. Wexner had employed Mr. Epstein as his longtime financial adviser, giving him broad authority over his billions. Mr. Wexner has denied knowledge of alleged sexual abuse committed by Mr. Epstein.Mr. Wexner has become an uncomfortable distraction to L Brands. He has already had to address his ties to Mr. Epstein to shareholders.His departure could help L Brands sell a stake in Victoria’s Secret, raising money for the company, according to the FT. One potential investor is Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm specializing in retailers, the WSJ reports, citing unnamed sources.

Why Wall Street’s climate pledges will fall short

Financial giants have made news recently by focusing more on environmental concerns in their investment decisions and threatening to sell shares in some offenders. But Greg Ip of the WSJ presents the argument for why that ultimately won’t amount to much.• Big oil companies aren’t that dependent on stock market investors, Mr. Ip writes, since they “generate plenty of cash and don’t need to issue new equity or debt to finance capital spending; in fact, most are buying back stock.”• If the largest banks stop financing oil exploration companies, regional ones would rush to replace them.• And many oil producers are owned by sovereign governments and don’t need to bow to public opinion.“Divestment isn’t going to shrink the fossil-fuel industry,” Mr. Ip adds. What will is “changing the underlying economics” through financing cleaner energy producers and governmental measures like carbon taxes.More: Venture capitalists are conspicuously absent from this round of the climate change fight.

Facebook’s sales growth hits a speed bump

The internet giant yesterday reported a slowdown in revenue growth, something it had warned would happen. But it’s coming at a time when Facebook faces plenty of tough challenges.The main points of Facebook’s latest earnings:• Fourth-quarter revenue grew 25 percent, to $21.1 billion. That’s the slowest pace in Facebook’s history as a publicly traded company, according to the WSJ.• Expenses also rose, reducing Facebook’s operating margin to 42 percent from 46 percent.• Daily users of the core Facebook platform grew to 1.66 billion, beating analyst expectations of 1.65 billion.But the company also said it would pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its use of facial-recognition technology. It’s the latest sign of the legal headaches that continue to bedevil Facebook, which also include new regulations around the world.Shares in Facebook fell 7 percent in after-hours trading yesterday, with investors worrying that the company has peaked and faces only downside now.Yet some analysts think there’s reason for optimism. Rich Greenfield of Lightshed told Bloomberg that Facebook’s business model “is not broken.” And Tim Culpan of Bloomberg Opinion thinks the company can make more money from its overseas users.

Warren Buffett gives up on newspapers

The billionaire announced an end to his 43-year career as a newspaper owner yesterday when Berkshire Hathaway agreed to sell its 31 papers to Lee Enterprises for $140 million in cash, Michael de la Merced of the NYT reports.The papers being sold include The Buffalo News, which Berkshire bought in 1977, and 30 other papers that Mr. Buffett had acquired over the past decade, including a collection of publishers in Virginia.Mr. Buffett is bowing to reality. In an interview last year, he said that most papers were “toast” because of falling ad sales — a sharp turnaround from his declaration in 2012 that he was an “addict” who wanted to keep buying newspapers.But he’s still going to profit from the news industry. Berkshire will lend Lee $576 million, some of which will pay for the newspaper deal, at a 9 percent annual interest rate.

Japanese billionaire isn’t looking for love (on camera) anymore

Yusaku Maezawa has backed out of an online documentary detailing his search for a girlfriend to take on his trip around the moon on SpaceX’s inaugural tourism flight.“Due to personal reasons, I have informed AbemaTV yesterday with my decision to no longer participate in the matchmaking documentary,” he tweeted this morning.

The speed read

Deals• The casino operator Penn National agreed to buy a 36 percent stake in Barstool Sports, the popular website, for $163 million. (CNBC)• AT&T’s latest quarterly results show the company is still trying to justify its $85 billion takeover of Time Warner. (Bloomberg Opinion)• The investment bank Evercore plans to lay off up to 6 percent of its employees. (Bloomberg)• The parent company of MoviePass filed for bankruptcy. (Business Insider)Politics and policy• President Trump signed into law the new North American free trade deal known as the U.S.M.C.A. (NYT)• The European Parliament approved Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U. yesterday. (NYT)• Mike Bloomberg’s latest attack on President Trump: health insurance protections for people with pre-existing conditions. (NYT)Tech• The E.U. recommended that its members put limits on using Huawei in their 5G wireless networks — but not ban the Chinese company outright. (NYT)• Apple and Broadcom were ordered to pay $1.1 billion in damages for infringing on Caltech patents on Wi-Fi technology. (Bloomberg)• The ride-hailing service Lyft plans to lay off employees in its marketing and enterprise sales divisions. (NYT)Best of the rest• Boeing said that it expects costs tied to the 737 Max to surpass $18 billion. (NYT)• U.S. life expectancy rose in 2018 for the first time in four years, in large part because of a decline in fatal drug overdoses. (Politico)• Why you don’t need to be an accountant to be a modern C.F.O. (WSJ)• Greta Thunberg wants to trademark her name to prevent commercial misuse. (Bloomberg)Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Read the full article

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kansascityhappenings · 5 years

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‘Blade Runner’ predicted what life would be like in 2019. Here’s what the movie got right – and wrong

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Way back in 1982, “Blade Runner” offered a bold vision of the future.

Ridley Scott’s beloved sci-fi movie, loosely based on a Philip K. Dick novel, tried to predict what life would be like on Earth in 2019. It presented a dystopian, industrial version of Los Angeles with dreary weather, humanlike robots and people living in outer space colonies.

In other words, not quite accurate. But hey, the movie is specifically set in November 2019 – a lot could change in 11 months.

Here’s what the original “Blade Runner,” almost 37 years ago, thought our society would be like in the year ahead — and how well its predictions turned out.

We’d have human-like robots called replicants

Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard, is tasked with tracking down rogue replicants – robots who look and act like humans – and retiring (killing) them. The replicants are highly intelligent and so lifelike that authorities can’t tell them apart from real people and identify them by gauging their emotional response to questions.

Verdict: We’re not there yet.

Researchers are vying for a future with lifelike robots — maybe even “Blade Runner’s” artificial animals like Tyrell’s owl or Zhora’s snake. Some labs are even trying to build sophisticated sex robots like the Pris, the movie’s “pleasure model” replicant. And computer scientists have made huge leaps in developing machines – like IBM’s Watson – with artificial intelligence.

But we’re not close to mistaking them as real.

We’d travel in flying cars

What’s a sci-fi movie without a flying car, right? In “Blade Runner” Deckard climbs into a “Spinner,” a police car that can take off vertically like a helicopter and fly like a plane.

Verdict: We have them, sort of.

We’re still many years away from commuting to work in flying cars, but that doesn’t mean that prototypes – like this one, or this one – don’t exist.

We’d be seduced by digital billboards

The Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” is full of blinking electronic billboards for Coca-Cola and other products.

Verdict: Yep, that’s our world.

Just look at today’s Times Square, where standard billboards with splashy photos are child’s play next to ones that scroll and flash and play videos. Some billboards offer to post your selfies, while others target you with ads as you drive by.

Our climate would be miserable

It rains a lot in “Blade Runner.” Like a lot a lot. And it’s dark and dreary … all the time.

Dick’s novel and the movie suggest this is because of rampant industrial pollution and radioactive fallout from a nuclear war. Scott, the director, has said it was more to hide flaws in the movie’s sets than anything else.

Verdict: Well, things today aren’t that bad. But scientists agree our climate is getting worse – with potentially disastrous results.

With its references to off-world colonies – where humans get “a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure” – “Blade Runner” was ahead of its time in introducing the idea that there are consequences to humankind’s actions on Earth.

While we haven’t colonized another planet yet, billionaires like Elon Musk and Richard Branson are working on alternative ways to get us into space.

Companies like Pan Am and RCA would still be around

Verdict: Mixed. Several iconic brands featured in the movie don’t exist anymore. We miss you, Pan Am and Atari.

Others have been reinvented. RCA was swallowed by Sony Entertainment, and the Bell Telephone Company is now AT&T.

But “Blade Runner” bet right on the longevity of Coca-Cola, Cuisinart, Budweiser and Tsingtao.

We’d talk to our computers

“Blade Runner” showed us that one day we would tell computers to do what we wanted. In one key scene, Deckard uses verbal commands to instruct a machine to zoom in on a photograph.

Verdict: Nailed it.

Thanks to voice recognition technology, we now we have computers of all sizes to command. “Alexa, what’s the weather?” “OK Google, how long will it take me to get to work?” “Hey, Siri, set a reminder to take the trash out at 5 p.m.” Some voice assistants are even coming to some strange places, like your toilet.

But we’d go into phone booths to make video calls

Yes, Deckard can make a video call in 2019. But he must use a public phone booth to do it.

Verdict: Way off.

A couple of things to unpack here. First, “Blade Runner” seems to have totally missed the rise of smartphones. (Hello, Skype/FaceTime/every other app with video-calling capabilities.) And second, the movie didn’t anticipate the disappearance of pay phones. When was the last time you saw a phone booth?

We’d smoke like chimneys at our workplaces

In the opening moments of the movie, a blade runner puffs a cigarette as he conducts a test on one of the replicants. The room is thick with smoke.

Verdict: Not likely.

This sure doesn’t look like 2019, where indoor smoking is banned almost everywhere. It’s a minor detail, but one that makes the film seem more dated than futuristic.

Maybe Ridley Scott just liked the atmospherics of shafts of light piercing the hazy darkness.

And we’d really like wearing trench coats

“Blade Runner’s” costume designers went with a retro, ’40s and ’50s look – with some punk touches – to match the movie’s film-noir vibe. Deckard wore a trench coat, while Sean Young’s Rachael sported prim vintage suits and a puffy fur coat.

Verdict: Although classic styles have made a comeback, the movie’s fashions don’t exactly scream 2019.

The film’s shoulder pads are a blast from the past, but maybe they’ll make a comeback by November. Like they say, what was once old will be new again, right?

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2018/12/31/blade-runner-predicted-what-life-would-be-like-in-2019-heres-what-the-movie-got-right-and-wrong/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/blade-runner-predicted-what-life-would-be-like-in-2019-heres-what-the-movie-got-right-and-wrong/

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