Free Markets Solve Everything

The Worst People In The World, Utterly Toxic Capitalism Division

by Tom Levenson| November 7, 20217:53 pm| 116 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

I threw up in my mouth reading this:

Elsie Saunders told a reporter that her husband, “a World War II and Korean War veteran,” who died of COVID-19 in August, wanted to perform one more act of service, donating his body to “help advance medical science.”

That’s not what happened:

David Saunders’ body ended up in a Marriott Hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, where DeathScience.org held an “Oddities and Curiosities Expo.” At the October 17 event, members of the public sat ringside from 9 am to 4 pm—with a break for lunch—to watch David Saunders’ body be carefully dissected. Tickets for the dissection sold for up to $500 per person.

What is DeathScience? It appears to be a fairly thin-on-the-ground attempt to make a few quick bucks “disrupting” curiosity about death. On its website you can buy death “merch,” prepay for courses promised for 2022 to learn “death investigation” and the like. (I’m not sure I’d trust an education provider that offers a one paragraph pitch that ends “The information is taught with professionals…in the field that science.” Maybe I’m an old fart, but how hard is it to proofread less than 100 words?)

Also: soon, they promise, you could sign up for more events like the one in Portland where David Saunders was turned into entertainment.

There’s a hideous tech-bro vibe to the whole enterprise, and every individual involved in this grotesque mockery should suffer as much shame and opprobrium as we all can muster. IANAL and I have no idea if there’s anything actionable here, but I hope there is, and that Mrs. Saunders turns them all into paupers.

I guess I’m a little perturbed by this.

But for all that, the ghastly excuses for people directly involved in treating Mr. Saunders as an oddity are symptoms, not the problem itself.

Late stage capitalism is a social phenomenon. In a place and time when not only everything can be financialized, but it is seen by many as a moral imperative to do so, this is what you get. It seems particularly horrific because of how easy it is to see ourselves in David Saunders: lives we’ve led reduced to a few hours’ bread-and-circus in some chain hotel with a good formaldehyde supplier nearby.

But this is just an indicator of how much we’ve already lost to the idea that all of experience can (and, to many, should!) be financialized, that those who can, should dip their beaks into every shift and turn of daily life, including its end, siphoning off the money to be made by turning each such moment into a transaction.

This wasn’t an explicitly political act by the techbro ghouls. But it is a reflection of our politics, where one party uses all its considerable power to make the world safe for death tourists and every other financial engineer. Not the world I want to live in.

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln.

Open thread, and, as an apology–a cat picture or two…

Tikka shares my opinion of the miscreants in the story above:

2: Champ simply allows us to bask in her pure awesomeness:

Image: detail from Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Rocco in the hospital, 1549

The Worst People In The World, Utterly Toxic Capitalism DivisionPost + Comments (116)

You Done Put Me In A Trick Bag

by ruemara| September 7, 202112:39 am| 33 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads

The national & international news has been a LOT the past week and I doubt this week will change that. I just want to draw your attention to a hyper local election that happened over a month ago and what it might mean for the CA recall and other races going forward.

Definitely not picking any sides on the recall

August 27th I had the “honor” of attending a rally outside the Sacramento Capital building. It’s not abnormal for me to attend a rally, I’m often there to document things. This was a first, though. How in the heck was I there to cover a labor event that seemed to also be an anti-mask, anti-vax, Larry Elder fan meet-up? I did a little digging and, hey, it’s kind of a funny story.

A while back, SEIU Local 1000 had an election and the outcome was quite curious. Long time president, Yvonne Walker lost her bid for a 14th term to a newcomer, Richard L. Brown, who’d never held office before. The turnout was ridiculously low – less than 8k votes out of a possible 55k eligible voting pool of the 96k membership. Not everyone who benefits from union membership actually decides to be a dues paying member but unions seem to forget that not every dues paying member is pro labor. They’re pro themselves. It seems that Freedom Foundation dipped their grubby anti-union paws into the SEIU Local 1000 election. In fact, they gloated about it. Full disclosure, while many members suspect that Freedom provided campaign funds, there’s no proof. Also, even if there was, I didn’t see anything in the bylaws that said outside orgs couldn’t fund candidates.

This week, our outreach efforts paid off in a big way when it was announced that long-time president Yvonne Walker was unseated by a self-proclaimed “outsider.”
You heard right. Walker’s 13-year reign of terror over the largest state employee union in California is officially over, and it is a direct reflection of Freedom Foundation’s success in the Golden State.
Walker is now the third SEIU local president, after David Rolf (SEIU 775) and Kim Cook (SEIU 925), to either leave or lose their job after we conducted sustained outreach efforts to their members.
Freedom Foundation blog – Rachel Wiegel, June 2, 2021

So, that’s how a progressive union wound up holding an apolitical rally about not being able to negotiate a vaccination or testing mandate for their workers that also seemed to feature a lot of pro-recall signage, anti-vax signage (loved the one comparing it to rape) and speakers that wouldn’t wear masks including one that felt that things were gestapo like. And it still didn’t beat the new president telling the mostly Lassen county crowd that the Susanville Correctional facility wouldn’t be closing if they were Black people. Yes, he’s saying that this red county was being punished for supporting Trump & being 2nd amendment, God-fearing white people. Does he have proof? No. Does he need proof? Also, no. They ate it up. In fact, they’re delighted by him. He’s got a rock star quality in their eyes. For once, the union is being represented by the kind of conservative that’s normally fighting the unions. He won with 33% of the vote. I have to admit, when I read that in my research, all I could think of was Kung Fu Monkey’s 27% Crazification Factor. If the vote wasn’t split between a bunch of more progressive people, it’s doubtful R. L. Brown would be president. But, let’s be honest, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the idea of winning with a committed 30% of the vote. It’s just the first time it’s been successful.

SEIU Local 1000 is, or rather, was a very politically active chapter of of SEIU and my personal feeling is that this was a very well timed loss that put a pretty active, organized group out of commission just in time for a recall. Odd coincidence that both the recall and this hyperlocal election seems to have been affected by outside money. We’ll see how the loss of their manpower affects things.

Local 1000’s social media pages are fairly contentious nowadays. The union president having a chummy video chat with a libertarian anti-union activist certainly seemed to raise eyebrows. However, I think most of the membership is just trundling along, blithely unaware of whom is at the helm and will continue to be, until something goes very wrong.

This is the 3rd SEIU union leader ousted by Freedom Foundation and all they had to do was target the conservative members who would hang together as a group way more than everyone else, who will be derailed by future leaders feeling it’s their time, older leaders still clinging to power and the way folks on the middle and left who tend to fall into fanhoods. What’s worse is that there’s no real way to prevent this. This is internal. Any member can run for office. Anyone. If conservative dark money groups can undermine union organizing and political power, cut off the flow of not just political donation money, but union workers putting time in for getting out the vote – we on the left will not just be hamstrung, but gutted. Many other writers are pointing out the astroturfing going on right now with attacks on school boards, but I hope international union heads are paying attention to this. Every election matters. Just ask Local 1000 members astonished that the union filed a cease & desist to insist on a meet & confer over mandating vaccines. Whether he won with less than 3k votes or with 30k votes, Brown is president. You either voted for someone else, for him or you allowed him to be president by not voting at all. Complacency & apathy are dangerous. I hope workers are paying attention. Gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. Happy Labor Day.

You Done Put Me In A Trick BagPost + Comments (33)

Reason ∞ Why I Hate Republicans, Dixie Fire edition

by Tom Levenson| August 5, 20216:10 pm| 108 Comments

This post is in: Climate Change, Free Markets Solve Everything, Hiking, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Wildfires

What can we count on the GOP to deliver?

Here’s a couple of things:

Inaction in the face of climate change.

Refusal to regulate vital industries.

I haven’t got confirmation from the ground yet, but the latest fire maps leave little room for doubt. The Dixie Fire exploded yesterday, burning through the mountain town of Greenville, surrounding the next place up the road, Chester, and pushing north into the Warner Valley and the southeast corner of Lassen Volcanic National Park.

So, be warned: all this may be of interest to no one but myself. If that’s the story for you, just read on by…

My family owns two little cabins in the Warner Valley, our plot bordering on two sides on the park itself. They’re nothing special–one is a 20×24 ft. single room (plus bathroom) with a murphy bed in the corner. That was the one my mum built as her personal shelter; the other, larger, was the family cabin of my childhood. Built in 1964, it too was basically a single room: the three bunkrooms and the room my parents used were separated by partitions, not floor-to-ceiling and noise proof walls.

No, I still don’t know what mom and dad were thinking.

Now they are almost certainly gone. The latest fire maps show the leading edge of hot burn well up the valley from our cabins. That means all our neighbors places are gone too.

This wasn’t a zillionaires’ retreat, btw. The Warner Valley is a strictly seasonal destination. No one ploughs the road, and there are a half dozen or so little clusters of cabins in the area that no one can get to from roughly November to May. It’s hella remote–5 hours or so from the Bay Area, with minor roads for the last bit of the journey. It’s the kind of place folks in Chico build what folks in Maine call a camp to escape the summer heat at lower altitudes. It is, or was, just a gorgeous stretch of mountain country that extended-locals and a few of us lucky outlanders got to enjoy.

Reason ∞ Why I Hate Republicans, Dixie Fire edition — Lassen from the Warner Valley-Juniper trail; our cabin is down slope (heading left-of-frame) from where this shot was taken.

I spent every summer there growing up, and every year since I was about 30 I, and soon my own family, would spend a week or so there. Totally off grid: cell phone service didn’t reach our corner of the valley; there was no town electricity, and for the last few years we gave up on our generator; no internet, of course. Paradise in other words.

And now it’s gone. I suppose I can still hope for one of those fire miracles, but realistically, the structures are tucked up against the base of a really steep slope (Mt. Harkness, at whose summit fire lookout tower Edward Abbey completed Desert Solitaire) and are surrounded by large and bone dry trees. The immediate ground around the two buildings is bare and clear…but it won’t take many embers to do the job. Dammit.

The Dixie Fire is the product of two American political tendencies. The first has been to ignore climate change, an core plank of Republican posturing for two decades. That part of the world is in the second year of one of the deepest droughts on record. There is essentially no residual moisture in the soil, plants or air. Temperatures have been high, humidity during the fire has often dropped into single digits, which combined with the wind patterns has produced what are called “red flag” fire conditions several times in the three weeks and counting the Dixie Fire has burned, including yesterday and today, when the blaze burst past the containment plans that aimed to hold it off the north side of Lake Almanor, Chester, and the national park. That red flag status will hold until at least tonight.

[That’s Lake Almanor in the distance, photographed from the trail from the Visitor Center to King’s Creek Campground. Crumbaugh Lake is in the foreground]

On the parochial level, the one that has me torn up right now, there really was nothing to do once the fire did jump that line: there’s only one small road into Warner Valley, so fire crews couldn’t safely get ahead of its front edge. It will keep on going until it hits the next plausible defensive position or the weather and winds change dramatically.

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Globally, this is the new normal. Climate change is not a theoretical exercise anymore. It hasn’t been for years. What’s changed is how obvious and widespread the signal and the harm has become. Fire season in the west used to be an autumn thing, the tail end of the gap between the end of the spring snow and rain and the resumption of the wet season in the fall. Now it starts in June, sometimes earlier, strikes more widely, costs more, and imposes so much more loss. The GOP’s success in blocking any meaningful response, from carbon reductions to the construction of infrastructure capable of withstanding the shifts we know are coming, are here, is directly implicated in what’s happening all over the Mountain and Pacific states this year, just as they were in the Texas freeze and power massacre, the floods and so on. And they’re damn well responsible–in part and indirectly, but responsible–for my personal loss, those two little repository of the memories of the happiest days of my life.

So yeah, I fucking hate Republicans for their willed stupidity in the face of a global, existential crisis.

Add to that this factoid. Some of you may recall that a faulty power line owned by the power company, PG & E, sparked the Camp Fire, which in November 2018 destroyed the town of Paradise, California, killing at least 85. PG&E filed for bankruptcy two months later, citing anticipated fire liability losses. In December, the company pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. It ultimately settled with victims, promising to pay $13.5 billion, in stock in the reorganized company.

Fast forward to today. No investigations are complete yet, understandably, but PG&E is implicated in both the Dixie Fire’s start–it seems it didn’t maintain its power line routes well enough, and a falling tree may have knocked down a section–and the company has already suggested that its equipment may have caused the Fly Fire, which started on its own but later merged with the larger blaze.

PG&E has a reputation for being a crappy company. It’s able to be so because the American approach to corporate oversight is to avoid it–a stance that is as near a tablets-from-the-mountains pillar of modern Republican politics. There’s no reason PG&E should exist in any form at this point: its assets should have been sold after the Camp Fire to satisfy its victims, the taxpayers on the hook for the fire response and cleanup, and any other creditors. Its functions should have been taken up a new/other power companies–and yeah, the entire sector needs to be closely regulated with on-the-ground enforcement so they don’t forget to do the basics, like trim trees that can knock down high voltage lines. If corporations are people, then when they commit serious enough misdeeds they should face the corporate analogue to the death penalty.

But our Republican market fundamentalists/privatize-profit-socialize-risk asshole “betters” have not permitted anything like that stringency, and will go to the mattresses now to prevent it.

I look forward to selling my shares of re-re-organized PG&E stock the second that judgment hits my account. Fuck them and fuck the GOP that allows its monied masters to wreak such misery on its way to the last extractable dollar.

And yeah. This post is a way of putting some of my grief outside my head. I can’t convey in words what this place has meant to me over each of the seven decades of my life. To my whole family.

To be real: I’m grateful for these memories. No one has died so far in this fire, a record I devoutly hope continues. This isn’t my home; I have a roof over my head tonight and comfortable bed to sleep on, with my son and spouse safe with me. My three siblings and I can and probably will rebuild, and its a certainty that when/if we do so the new cabin will be vastly more comfortable than the beloved lost building born of mom and dad’s genuinely odd choices. In time, the forests will come back.

But damn. This is a bad day. And yeah. I blame the GOP assholes who do their best to ensure we can’t have nice things.

I’m not going to let those fuckers have the last word. Have some more images of that part of the world, taken in much better times. I know some of the Jackals are familiar with the area. I hope these bring back some good memories for you as well.

Reason ∞ Why I Hate Republicans, Dixie Fire edition 2 — Mt. Lassen again from Horseshoe Lake, which may also be at fire risk in the next couple of days.

This is one of the Sifford Lakes on Flatiron Ridge, which forms one of the walls of the Warner Valley. There’s no trail to this little snowmelt pond. You have to know it’s there.

And here’s Mt. Shasta, photographed from Inspiration Point, above Lake Juniper.

Last one. This is the view from Lee Meadow in the Warner Valley. When I was a kid, this was still a working cattle ranch, summer pasture for the herd. Now all that’s left is the scraps of the old corral in the foreground. Scorched earth now, almost certainly, but that doesn’t take away the recollection of the joy on every first Saturday in July, when the station wagon would take the turn at the corral and we’d know the cabin was only 500 yards further down the road. Summer began here:

Talk about this sad story, or anything else. The thread: it is open.

Reason ∞ Why I Hate Republicans, Dixie Fire editionPost + Comments (108)

Repub Stupidity Open Thread: The Fragile Snowflakes of the Federalist Society

by Anne Laurie| June 3, 202111:54 pm| 44 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

A Stanford Law student sent out this objectively hilarious FedSoc parody (“The Originalist Case for Insurrection feat. Josh Hawley”) and the FedSoc chapter filed just about the dumbest, whiniest complaint imaginable, and now the guy’s degree is on hold pending an investigation ?? pic.twitter.com/iiokPL4EgP

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis) June 2, 2021

This week’s #WATB Award goes to the Federalist Society, for attempting to salve its wounded fee-fees by cancelling an irreverent law student, because free speech only applies to the Right kind of speech.

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Repub Stupidity Open Thread: The Fragile Snowflakes of the Federalist SocietyPost + Comments (44)

They’re Criming Right Out in the Open

by John Cole| January 28, 20216:38 pm| 160 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything

To add to Mistermix, it was not hard to predict what would happen with this. There are rules for you and me, and there are rules for everyone else:

And that’s precisely what they did. When Robinhood and others froze trades on Gamestop, what they did was lock EVERYONE who had purchased through them into their trade, and not allow them to make any action. So if you are a trader bought at certain price and wanted to sell at a certain price, you’re just fucked. You own that stock and Say you bought at 180, and wanted to sell at 100. Tough shit. You eat the loss as it rides to zero as the big money boys manipulate the price down. ** APPARENTLY THIS IS WRONG AND I AM UNINFORMED BOOB WHO HATES HEDGE FUNDS AND WALL STREET SO MUCH HE IS SOMETIMES HASTY, NEITHER OF WHICH SHOULD SURPRISE LONGTIME READERS.***

It’s class warfare Calvinball, and you know what? They’ll fucking get away with it. Because as George Carlin noted, it’s a big fucking club, and you ain’t in it. Robinhood is legit now stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

They’re Criming Right Out in the OpenPost + Comments (160)

I Only Play for Money, Honey

by $8 blue check mistermix| January 11, 20212:18 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything

Hey, if you’re a Republican PAC and you sent money to one of the traitors who voted not to certify the election, the list of companies that won’t give you a fucking dime is getting longer every minute. Different companies are taking different approaches — some are just suspending all donations for a while, while others are targeting PACs that gave to traitors. MasterCard, which isn’t on the list in the piece linked here, won’t be giving any money to those PACs either (Jud Leglum has an internal memo to that effect.)

To be clear, both American Express and MasterCard have stopped giving money, but they’re still processing payments. It would be very damn interesting if they stopped processing transactions for WinRed, the Republican equivalent of ActBlue, until WinRed said they wouldn’t support these traitors. I’m gonna guess that’s not coming, but who knows?

I Only Play for Money, HoneyPost + Comments (67)

Short (Ha!) Parler Explainer

by $8 blue check mistermix| January 10, 20218:58 am| 96 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything

Last night Amazon announced that they would stop hosting Parler tonight. This comes on the heels of Apple banning Parler from the App Store, and Google banning them from the Google Play Store.

The short answer of what this means for Parler is that they’ll probably be down for a few days until they find a new host, and there will never be a Parler app on a mobile device. In other words, their status on the Internet — meaning how they will be treated by other tech companies and potential investors — has been demoted from something like Twitter or Facebook to a porn site. I don’t mean that as a joke, and if you want to understand why, read on.

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In order to be a first-class Internet social media company, one that investors are willing to think can make them billions instead of millions, you need (at least) four things, in roughly this order:

High Quality Cloud Host Provider – This is essentially access to computers installed and maintained by Amazon or a similar provider (like Google). This allows your tech staff to increase capacity at essentially a push of a button, and a number of time-consuming things like backup, redundancy, etc. are handled by the host, not you.
A Mobile App – Only mobile apps allow usable push alerts, an easy way to post pictures and video, etc. These are approved and distributed by either Apple or Google on their app stores.
Advertising and, more importantly, Advertisers – Specifically, mainstream advertisers who participate in ad networks, because they pay better than, say, My Pillow.
Credit Card Acceptance – This might not be obvious, but a good number of social apps charge a small fee for higher tier services. Reddit Gold is one example.

Until a few days ago, Parler had all these things. Today, they have none of them. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be able to function as a social network, but they will do so in exactly the same way that porn sites do:

Hosting – None of the big cloud providers will host porn. I assume (it isn’t well reported) that they pay second tier data centers to co-locate servers. This adds expense and inconvenience, but that’s it.
Mobile Apps – There are no mobile porn apps, since they violate the terms of service of the app stores. The best that Parler will have is a mobile-friendly website.
Advertising – Tide and GM do not advertise on porn sites. Parler will have to find advertisers willing to have their ads appear next to violent calls for insurrection. A lot of the ads will probably be for right-wing scams.
Credit Cards – This is precarious. Pornhub recently purged 2/3 of their videos because MasterCard and Visa stopped processing their transactions after a Nick Kristof story broke that they were hosting revenge and child porn.

Pornhub got a lot of attention from that Kristof piece recently, and it turns out that (surprise) their owners are very shady (I know, shocked face!) Parler is financed in part by Rebekah Mercer.

Whether or not the Mercers or the Kochs or whatever other big money Republicans who are thinking about starting up “Instagram for Insurrectionists” or whatever will be deterred by the fact that it will now cost more and probably won’t make them much money. But they will still exist and they will still spread hate.

Short (Ha!) Parler ExplainerPost + Comments (96)

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Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

The revolution will be supervised.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Republicans in disarray!

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Let there be snark.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

No one could have predicted…

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The Worst People In The World, Utterly Toxic Capitalism Division

You Done Put Me In A Trick Bag

Reason ∞ Why I Hate Republicans, Dixie Fire edition

Repub Stupidity Open Thread: The Fragile Snowflakes of the Federalist Society

They’re Criming Right Out in the Open

I Only Play for Money, Honey

Short (Ha!) Parler Explainer