Tag: capitalism

thebibliosphere:

lizardtitties:

withasmoothroundstone:

robstmartin:

titleknown:

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

This….

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.

This explains a lot.  And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce.  Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.  

And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that.  Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid.  Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given.  It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.

I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:

https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2016/01/06/healthcare-in-iceland-vs-the-us-weve-got-it-so-good/

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

Eat the rich. Resist.

teathattast:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

Apple: Literally design their phones to become an expensive toxic brick within a few years

Gas Companies: Actively work to prevent anything being done to develop, promote or in any way make green energy sources widely known of available or affordable to anyone because slowly murdering the planet makes them millions of dollars

Big Companies: Literally dump toxic crap where it will cause serious harm to the earth and the species on it

Governments: Clearly what we need to do to save the earth is make people pay money to use carrier bags so they can actually carry their shopping home

AND BAN DRINKING STRAWS

This, my friends, is called Individualization of Responsibility, aka holding the citizens accountable for the destruction caused by corporations :/

larkandkatydid:

tenderstatue:

republicanidiots:

animesocialistparty:

Capitalists will have children go without food before they give up even the tiniest part of their wealth.

I’ve actually asked Republicans why they’re against feeding children.  They believe the kids are hungry because their parents aren’t working hard enough.  Republicans think people will work harder if their children are hungry.  In other words, they believe it’s okay to TORTURE CHILDREN to get their parents to do what they want. 

re-reblogging because THAT’S SOME SOCIOPATHIC SHIT

More and more large urban school districts are switching to universal free lunch and eliminating even the mechanism for “lunch debt”.  They found it was cheaper and more effective to just use Federal Free Lunch money (through a specific grant) to give everyone free lunch rather than fund the bureaucratic steps of having parents register for free lunch.  

Houston is the most recent.  New York City adopted it last year.   It looks like this tweet might have been part of a campaign to convince Buffalo Public Schools to adopt the same program.  I can’t find a clear news article on it but it looks like they may have rolled out this program in Buffalo in the fall of 2017.

This is a really good issue to pester your city official and school district about. 

thesylverlining:

santorumsoakedpikachu:

autistic-knight-errant:

I honestly think that we would eliminate one of the major causes of ableism if we stopped basing people’s worth off how much revenue they generate.

This measure is worthless. Actually, it is worth less than nothing.

I used to be a programmer for a spammer. Being rather young, naive, and also desperate for some kind of income, I had no idea what “lead generation” meant and had no idea that the fact that they didn’t talk about how their nebulous product actually helped anyone was a huge red flag. I took the job, slowly learned the codebase, and it took me months to figure out what kind of practices this place actually employed.

I was asked to put in obnoxious popups, but hide the popups for traffic coming in from Google so that Google wouldn’t cut off their sponsored traffic because the site violated their standards, a few months into my time there. That was when I began to realize the kind of place I was working at. Then I was asked to create a throwaway email account to test something, and I found out what actually happened to the poor people who put their information in for Free Insurance Quotes. They were inundated with spam. I found out the company had no site of its own, just hundreds of these “Free Insurance Quotes” sites all with slightly different stock photos and slightly different forms and a “complaints” page that was very hard to find with an email that was never checked.

I was a Hardworking Taxpaying American when I worked at that job. I was, according to this capitalist logic, contributing to society and of much more value than a disabled person who supposedly is a leech on society.

I was making the world worse by working at that job. I would have been making the world better if I did absolutely nothing but stare at the wall all day rather than work that job.

Many jobs are like this. Anyone who works at an oil company is making the world worse. Anyone who works at a tobacco company is making the world worse. People in various abusive therapy industries are making the world worse. I’m sure you can name plenty of other jobs in this category. The world would be better if those jobs did not exist.

Now, I am disabled. I am chronically ill, and I cannot even work a sedentary job because having to sit up for eight hours at a time would make me have to lie in bed for days.

I am making the world much better now by replacing the invasive grasses on my front lawn with strawberries that attract native bees, by sealing my house to increase its energy efficiency, by taking care of a flock of chickens and doing my best to ensure that they have a good happy life, by replenishing the soil in the yard with compost and chicken manure, than I was at that job. And I don’t do very much – I can’t.

Equating the arbitrary numbers one accumulates for oneself to one’s actual value or contribution is a dangerous lie, and it is poisoning the planet.

This is so incredibly important. Thank you for this.

rowantheexplorer:

gorgonsach:

justgfy:

gorgonsach:

x

Unions are trash. Theyll Destroy a whole company for firing a shitty worker.

unions are the reason you aren’t paid 2.50 an hour with steel beams about to bust ya head open shut up lol

Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.

You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.

Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.

And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.

howlfromthecore:

freelancerkiwi:

questbedhead:

bahorelfanclub:

colacharm:

captainjack1999:

colacharm:

benditlikegumby:

spirit-of-science:

colacharm:

adults, while forcing all children above the age of 5 to sit still, be silent, and obey orders for 7-8 hours a day with minimal breaks, reducing their exposure to fresh air and sunlight to almost nothing, forcing them to alter their natural sleeping patterns to increase productivity, and repeatedly telling them their self worth depends on their being able to follow these instructions perfectly for 13 or more years: kids these days are so lazy! they never go outside! they never want to do anything! clearly it’s not because of us!

The way we treat children is extremely inhumane, but so many adults want to dismiss it because it’s so normalized

You… You do realize that’s what it’s like to be a working adult…? And our days are even longer.

thats because an 8 hour work day is extortion and should be illegal. next question.

Either you’ve never had a job or you’re just lazy af. There’s nothing wrong with 9 to 5 jobs. Nobody is forcing people to work them and people need the hours to make more money. People get breaks too.

Please take a biology class & get some help. People shouldnt have to do work 80% of the day to survive.

@captainjack1999

1. the eight–hour work-day is cruelty

2. capitalism is forcing people to work. i could just quit my job and hang out at home – but then i would lose my house and most likely starve to death, because of the way our economy works.

3. breaks for most establishments are a mere 30 minutes for an 8-hour shift; at my first job, for a 6-hour shift, your break would only be 15 minutes and any longer shift would only get 30. studies say people are more productive if for every hour you work, you get a 15-minute break – meaning, for an 8-hour shift, you’d need an hour-long break, and so on and so forth.

the way modern society views work is unhealthy for loads of reasons, not just what i mentioned here. the fact that we’re preparing children for such a torturous lifestyle is horrific.

Also like…. small children are not adults. Small children should not be held to the same standards as adults. Even if the 8 hour work day WAS healthy, it would be inhumane to hold a small child to the same standard.

The school system was literally designed to train people for factory work back when child labour was legal so that should tell you how fucked that is

And the 8 hour workday isn’t some gold standard or ancient tradition. It’s just the best that the union warriors could get at the time. They were hoping we’d build on their victories.

sanguinarysanguinity:

profeminist:

rosecityriveters:

themasculinevoice:

revengeoftehblackbirb:

tami-taylors-hair:

maritsa-met:

goalsandpriorities:

That 2017 #look

On the other side of the dressy scale there was a 7 months pregnant lawyer sitting on the floor at IAD

At O’Hare there was a lawyer who was about five minutes away from giving birth sitting there in her sweatpants with a sign that said “I’m a lawyer and I speak Hindi/Urdu”. Just her and her sign and supersized tea from McDonalds. 

I’ll say it again. MOSTLY WOMEN.

Why does their being mostly women matter?

Because, statistically speaking, 64% of lawyers in the United States are men, meaning that the majority of the demographic showing up should reflect this.
It is also interesting to note that only 27% of American born lawyers are female- that means that a lot of these women are likely immigrants or foreign born.
We have a majority of women showing up in a field where they are a minority; women who dropped everything to help defend human rights and the country.
There’s no cis-male equivalency to pregnancy, but if you fail to see the importance and stength of a woman who might feasibly go into labour at any second still standing up for what is right and good whilst the majority of politicians are cowering, then I can’t help you.

Why most of the lawyers you see battling Trump’s immigration order are women

“I have been working non-stop for three
days and I have not made a penny,” [said a female lawyer who had been at a Texas airport and asked not to be quoted by name]. A friend, who is a male
immigration lawyer, went on vacation over the weekend, she said, because
he felt it wouldn’t be lucrative. “Male immigration lawyers look at
this and say ‘This is not a business opportunity for me,’” she said. 

thesylverlining:

santorumsoakedpikachu:

autistic-knight-errant:

I honestly think that we would eliminate one of the major causes of ableism if we stopped basing people’s worth off how much revenue they generate.

This measure is worthless. Actually, it is worth less than nothing.

I used to be a programmer for a spammer. Being rather young, naive, and also desperate for some kind of income, I had no idea what “lead generation” meant and had no idea that the fact that they didn’t talk about how their nebulous product actually helped anyone was a huge red flag. I took the job, slowly learned the codebase, and it took me months to figure out what kind of practices this place actually employed.

I was asked to put in obnoxious popups, but hide the popups for traffic coming in from Google so that Google wouldn’t cut off their sponsored traffic because the site violated their standards, a few months into my time there. That was when I began to realize the kind of place I was working at. Then I was asked to create a throwaway email account to test something, and I found out what actually happened to the poor people who put their information in for Free Insurance Quotes. They were inundated with spam. I found out the company had no site of its own, just hundreds of these “Free Insurance Quotes” sites all with slightly different stock photos and slightly different forms and a “complaints” page that was very hard to find with an email that was never checked.

I was a Hardworking Taxpaying American when I worked at that job. I was, according to this capitalist logic, contributing to society and of much more value than a disabled person who supposedly is a leech on society.

I was making the world worse by working at that job. I would have been making the world better if I did absolutely nothing but stare at the wall all day rather than work that job.

Many jobs are like this. Anyone who works at an oil company is making the world worse. Anyone who works at a tobacco company is making the world worse. People in various abusive therapy industries are making the world worse. I’m sure you can name plenty of other jobs in this category. The world would be better if those jobs did not exist.

Now, I am disabled. I am chronically ill, and I cannot even work a sedentary job because having to sit up for eight hours at a time would make me have to lie in bed for days.

I am making the world much better now by replacing the invasive grasses on my front lawn with strawberries that attract native bees, by sealing my house to increase its energy efficiency, by taking care of a flock of chickens and doing my best to ensure that they have a good happy life, by replenishing the soil in the yard with compost and chicken manure, than I was at that job. And I don’t do very much – I can’t.

Equating the arbitrary numbers one accumulates for oneself to one’s actual value or contribution is a dangerous lie, and it is poisoning the planet.

This is so incredibly important. Thank you for this.

noteventhetip:

hungry-skin-vacant-meat:

diamond-radfem:

useful-lesbian:

The very concept of a training bra is so gross like,

“hey dear, you may be prepubescent, but we gotta acclimate you to having a piece of elastic wrapped around your lungs for the rest of your life. Let’s get an early start on those little indentations you’ll have on your shoulders forever. The boys snapping your straps will prepare you for all the misogynistic harrassment in your future too.”

Me: The what now?
“In 2006, Target stores began stocking a range of bras for three- to four-year-olds, Bratz bras for three- to four-year-olds, Saddle Club bras for four- to six-year-olds, and a lightly padded Target brand bra for eight- to 10-year-olds. Australian retailer Big W’s added a Just Girls padded bra for eight- to 10-year-olds and a My Little Pony bandeau bra for two- to three-year-olds, and Bonds in February 2006 marketed the “My First T-Shirt Bra” for ages eight and up.

“

What??? WHAT??? TWO YEARS???

W T F

THIS IS PEDOPHILE CULTURE

WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

My mom told me it was so people couldn’t see “my buds” through my shirts