Big Brother/Sister is watching you and you are giving him everything he/she wants

 You might find this interesting if you believe you support "capitalism":

Time to wake up because Big Tech is running your life.

Time to become a Luddite. This tells you the problem and how to fight it.

BTW,  Facebook's owner Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230bn (£169bn) on Thursday, in a record daily loss for a US firm.

The company's share price slide saw chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's net worth fall by $31bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The drop in Mr Zuckerberg's personal fortune was equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of Estonia.

Analysis of this from the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60255088):

It's clear that Meta is facing a whirlwind of different problems.

Last year Apple brought in its App Tracking Transparency policy.

It lets people choose whether or not they want to be tracked around the internet by companies, like Meta, who can then sell that information to advertisers.

That is a major problem for Facebook, because finding information out about you and selling it to advertisers is exactly how it makes money.

Its quarterly results showed advertising income falling, partly for this reason.

 Get off of social media since YOU are the product. The Billionaires are getting rich off of YOUR information.

 

Robin Hood revolution

I've not really paid that much attention to The GameStop thing, but it points out something I have been pointing out about how the current "market capitalism" works: Or Las Vegas on Wall Street.

The short form is that a group on reddit decided to invest on GameStop since the Hedge Funds were looking at it. Their purchases were aided by a broker called Robinhood Investing, which offers no fee trades. I have some idea of how hedge funds work and it sounds as if the reddit crowd were doing something which the "big players" have been doing for a while.

The big problem is that it was a group of small investors making money instead of the few, wealthy getting rich(er).

That goes against the rules. The powers that be are upset that people outside their circles are using their methods to make money.

It also highlights that the people in power are the ones who caused the problems with the economy of a while back. And they were the ones who got bailed out: not the little guy. 

The current US political situation is also run by pretty much the usual suspects, which is one of the many reasons why I demexited in 2016. I see the power people circling their wagons to put down the revolution.

Unfortunately, the dam has broken.

The powers that be had their opportunity to make a clean transfer of power, but their bets were on the status quo. Unfortunately the best way to handle a revolution once one gets started is to try and control it. Try to keep the forces of change in control.

The problem is that is an option which is being applied FAR too late in the game. The time for real change was 2016, but the powers that be opted for the status quo.

Now it's going to be hard to blame any of the mess ups on anybody else than the people running the show.

What if capitalism and free market forces worked to regulate firearms in the US?

The Constitution protects you against governmental actions. it doesn't protect you against the actions on non-governmental bodies.

One of the things mentioned in this clip is a landlord's prohibition on gun ownership in the lease not being a violation of the Second Amendment.

Do property rights overrule the Second Amendment?

Let's toss in for good measure that the Heller-McDonald decisions were very limited in their scope (in addition to contradiction prior Supreme Court precedents of Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 [1886] and US v Miller, 307 US 174 [1939[).{1}

Anyway, the firearms market is pretty much saturated with companies going bankrupt.

It may not be the librul-progressives that kill this insanity as much as market forces working to limit it.


Footnote
{1} US v Miller States that "With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces, the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view." This is the exact opposite conclusion from that drawn by the Heller-MCDonald decisions.

Labor Day Edition - Labor Compared to Management

The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer... form the great body of the people of the United States, they are the bone and sinew of the country men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws.
Andrew Jackson

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
Karl Marx

When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.
Leland Stanford (legendary U.S. tycoon, and founder of Stanford University

The Laborer is worthy of his hire. 1 Timothy 5:18

I would assert that executives are overpaid.  I would contend that underpaying labor is contrary to the words of the Bible.  I would argue that the wage and income gap represents a very real failure for labor to have genuine equality of pay for work.  This is what the 99% is unhappy about in the Occupy movement.

They do NOT receive their compensation on merit; they do not receive their compensation packages at the discretion of the real owners of the business they work for - the stockholders.  They used to receive far less during earlier periods where they were arguably as important if not more important for fulfilling their roles as executives.  Now executives are handing each other excessive pay, bonuses and benefits, even when they make disastrous decisions that ruin companies.

That should be contrary to real, legitimate capitalism.

Any doubts - look at the bonuses paid to the executives at the companies receiving bail outs. It is true even when they do clearly dishonest and risky things - like altering the LIBOR rate or falsifying credit ratings.

From earlier this year at  the LA Times:

U.S. CEO's pay 231 times higher than that of average workers

May 02, 2012|Marla Dickerson

 

So much for the new austerity.

The average U.S. chief executive earned more than $11 million last year in salary, stock options and other compensation, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about 231 times more, on average, than workers.

That ratio has shrunk a bit since the height of the dot.com bubble, when a ballooning stock market inflated CEO compensation to 411 times that of working stiffs.

And it’s smaller than the pay gap calculated recently by the AFL-CIO, the umbrella federation of unions representing about 12 million U.S. workers. Their analysis concluded that the typical CEO of an S&P 500 Index company made 380 times the average wages of U.S. workers in 2011.

Whatever. What's clear is that the pay gap between U.S. CEOs and rank-and-file workers is higher than anywhere else in the developed world. And it has been accelerating over the last few decades. In 1965, the U.S. CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was roughly 20 to 1.

Here are some additional stats to put the oh! in CEO:

-- 725%: That's how much average CEO compensation increased between 1978 and 2011, according to EPI.
-- 5.7%: That’s how much the average worker’s compensation increased over the same period.

Bottom line: It pays to be CEO.
********************

And yet at the same time, we have some of the highest productivity.  In the list of GDP/per hour worked, we were 4th, after Norway, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and just ahead of Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Australia.  You know - those mostly European countries that Romney and Ryan don't want us to be like.

Perhaps a better visual of what has happened to labor and wages, in spite of strong, steady increases in productivity, in contrast to that spike of 725% of executive compensation since 1978 is this:

Just to put this all in a visual perspective, here are some graphs from the Mother Jones article, Overworked Americans.

In the past 20 years, the US economy has grown nearly 60 percent. This huge increase in productivity is partly due to automation, the internet, and other improvements in efficiency. But it's also the result of Americans working harder—often without a big boost to their bottom lines. Oh, and meanwhile, corporate profits are up 20 percent.

You have nothing to lose but your gains

Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

And for those of you who buy into the false notion that union workers are overpaid.......compared to management, and especially CEOs and other C-class (CFO, etc.), look at this:

Median yearly earnings of:

Union workers: $47,684
Non-union workers: $37,284

This reflects the growing gap in wealth and income between the 1% and the 99%.