When you manage a fabric store in a midwest town, you see this played out in real time. Young women coming in during that first year of marriage - when their husbands go to dental college - pert, bubbling with creative plans. Then, four years on, you help them shift to the reality of balancing budget with creativity - and they learn the value of that inexpensive flatfold table that they used to badmouth - to make that 2nd & 3rd baby their own quilts. And they're exhausted. And they're scared. And they are 1000 miles away from family.
And you have your staff play with their kids while you hold them in the tiny restroom as they come completely undone because they just found out that their golden boy husband is having an affair with the someone he's been doing residency with for the past three years.
He confessed that he'd rather be with the other woman but she's of a different faith and it's more important to have kids than to be happy. And no. No he will not grant her a divorce. And he will not stop seeing the other woman - because he's a man. It's his right.
TRUE story.
Also - She was NOT THE ONLY ONE to fall to pieces in our store for similar reasons.
I loath the ideology of "tradwives". It is a false doctrine preach by Patriarchy not a divine being.
This is 100% what happened to the host mom I've been au-pairing for. And to many other moms my friends have been au-pairing for.
Married out of college, 4 kids, he spent 15 years building up his career while she took care of the house and the kids. When he was earning $600k a year suddenly he started to pull away - she wasn't as pretty anymore, the kids were loud, the house was a mess... She wasn't good enough anymore. He got himself a flat. He got her me and my precedessors to help with the kids. No, they can't divorce, that would make him pay her money for the kids and he didn't like that. Every once in a while a bill would be unpaid. My weekly checks would bounce. We lived in a $1,5mil house around DC and our gas or water was turned off more than once.
Somehow he was always out of money.
By accident she learned from a friend of a friend that he was actually seeing a young lady lawyer for a few years now. It wasn't her, it wasn't lost interest. He was just a piece of shit.
Thankfully, she had family that took no shit and they stood behind her and borrowed her money for lawyers to force the divorce now that she had proof of him cheating. She's spent tens of thousands to get there while he was resisting every step of the way - because without divorce he wouldn't have to pay her alimony, he could just throw scraps whenever he wanted and still pretend to be a good dad.
She's spent tens of thousands and two years to free herself from this man, and when she could finally go to work (thank fuck she finished college) she was earning $25k a year.
She only managed to get away with the support of her parents and family. Through the au-pair grapevine I've known other families like that. Too many. Lady down the street tried to commit suicide when same happened to her - she was from Taiwan and had no support to get free. And people around scorned her for being "dramatic" - women who held on to their places with their fingertips talked shit about her, because their own husbands would never...! Right?
This? This is the kind of shit that first wave feminists and suffragettes were fighting against. Hell, even into second-wave feminism.
This? Is why conservatives want to take away no-fault divorce--because if some dude says no to a divorce and you don't have any (IRON-TIGHT) evidence of cheating? Then you're stuck in that situation and he doesn't have to pay a drop toward you and your kids. He can go get a flat, fuck his mistress, and you will starve with your kids until you can get some kind of proof of him cheating and a judge who likes you.
Now imagine all of this horror movie shit, AND you can't open a bank account without this piece of shit opening it with you. That was what women dealt with until about the 70s when we were finally allowed to open bank accounts with a man's signature.
That is what conservatives and fundies want to take you back to. When this shit was just the fucking norm.
There are old white guys still alive who remember who damn nice it was when a woman couldn't open a bank account without a man's signature and his dad could go live a double life with a mistress with zero repercussions and oh how they slather and drool for those times. And how they have waxed poetic about these halcyon days to their desperate daddy-issues sons now eager to please and without the social skills or emotional maturity to understand the fucked up nature of it all.
I'm willing to bet there's like 2 or 3 Tradhusbands(tm) out there for every Tradwife you see, they just haven't found someone they can sink their claws into. Which should maybe terrify you. This Tradwife(tm) movement should really be considered a canary in the coal mine.
It took me a few moments to realise that these people are inside a warehouse type building and have opened a door to show the wild weather outside
they are not in fact outside opening the door of their warehouse to show us the weather they are keeping inside
Okay, but I've seen this argument thrown around for years, and I never believed it because it's been pushed into my brain since I was a child by my extremely Christian parents that abortion is fundamentally evil because it goes against the Bible. But I'm taking a 2nd Wave Feminism course and I finally found out that this is actually 100% true? Until the Reagan campaign and associated Republican politicians tried to find another social issue to sway Southerners, especially Southern women, in their favor, abortion was not a primary issue for churches. It was only when feminists started mobilizing and, as a result, many institutions such as the Catholic church tried to mobilize against them that churches started advocating against abortion. Abortion did not become an issue of morality for the right until the 70s. Before then, abortion was simply not discussed because most things relating to sex weren't publicly discussed. So no, according to popular belief, the argument that abortions are killing babies did not always exist, it was just an argument crafted when the Republican party needed another social group to oppress for political points
It's even worse than mentioned above because the Southern churches that started the anti-abortion movement weren't originally fighting against feminism, they were fighting against desegregation.
The Christian Coalition was founded to bring racist Christians of all denominations together after religious schools were desegregated. However they realized early on the support for segregation was limited to the South and they needed to focus on some other cause they could use to undermine Supreme Court rulings and push a "state's rights" agenda. They decided that overturning the recent Roe V Wade ruling would be their fight of choice - I suspect they vastly underestimated how popular Roe V Wade would be.
No fault divorce also allows men to escape abusive wives, or women to escape abusive wives, or men to escape abusive husbands, or spouses to escape abusive spouses of indeterminate gender. Don't play into their bullshit by letting their ideas of gender roles sneak into your activism
No-fault divorce is also why couples where neither person is abusive, and they both agree the marriage isn’t working out, no longer have to work together to fake evidence of one of them committing adultery or abuse, or have one of them move to a state with more liberal divorce laws and live there for six weeks so they qualify as a resident of that state, just so they can get the courts to let them get divorced.
My ex and I are good friends now, but we were fucking miserable being married to each other, in part bc I am gay as fuck.
And while at the time we both had a girlfriend, holy shit it would have been terrible for us and for her to drag her through court so she could be The Other Woman. Terrible for our kid, who was 3 at the time, to have to see all of this. Terrible for... well, just everybody.
We could have made the laws work for us, but it would have been fucking horrible, and so much more traumatic for everybody. IDK if we'd still be friends if we'd had to go through that.
That’s what always happens in capitalist societies. They say that if you don’t want to be poor, there’s a certain thing you have to do. But then everyone does it, so it’s no longer effective. The system depends on making sure that there’s always a supply of poor people to exploit.
can confirm, the switch from “just get a degree, any degree, it’ll show employers that you can commit longterm and follow through, and most skills are transferable” to “lolol dumbass millennials got underwater basket weaving degrees as if they’d ever help you get a job and now they’re paying off student loans with their Starbucks jobs and it’s all their own dumbass fault, idiots!” was instantaneous
no i don't want to use your ai assistant. no i don't want your ai search results. no i don't want your ai summary of reviews. no i don't want your ai feature in my social media search bar (???). no i don't want ai to do my work for me in adobe. no i don't want ai to write my paper. no i don't want ai to make my art. no i don't want ai to edit my pictures. no i don't want ai to learn my shopping habits. no i don't want ai to analyze my data. i don't want it i don't want it i don't want it i don't fucking want it i am going to go feral and eat my own teeth stop itttt
The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street
I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
Walmart didn't just happen. The rise of Walmart – and Amazon, its online successor – was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law. Walmart may have been founded by Sam Walton, but its success (and the demise of the American Main Street) are down to Reaganomics.
The law that Reagan neutered? The Robinson-Patman Act, a very boring-sounding law that makes it illegal for powerful companies (like Walmart) to demand preferential pricing from their suppliers (farmers, packaged goods makers, meat producers, etc). The idea here is straightforward. A company like Walmart is a powerful buyer (a "monopsonist" – compare with "monopolist," a powerful seller). That means that they can demand deep discounts from suppliers. Smaller stores – the mom and pop store on your Main Street – don't have the clout to demand those discounts. Worse, because those buyers are weak, the sellers – packaged goods companies, agribusiness cartels, Big Meat – can actually charge them more to make up for the losses they're taking in selling below cost to Walmart.
Reagan ordered his antitrust cops to stop enforcing Robinson-Patman, which was a huge giveaway to big business. Of course, that's not how Reagan framed it: He called Robinson-Patman a declaration of "war on low prices," because it prevented big companies from using their buying power to squeeze huge discounts. Reagan's court sorcerers/economists asserted that if Walmart could get goods at lower prices, they would sell goods at lower prices.
Which was true…up to a point. Because preferential discounting (offering better discounts to bigger customers) creates a structural advantage over smaller businesses, it meant that big box stores would eventually eliminate virtually all of their smaller competitors. That's exactly what happened: downtowns withered, suburban big boxes grew. Spending that would have formerly stayed in the community was whisked away to corporate headquarters. These corporate HQs were inevitably located in "onshore-offshore" tax haven states, meaning they were barely taxed at the state level. That left plenty of money in these big companies' coffers to spend on funny accountants who'd help them avoid federal taxes, too. That's another structural advantage the big box stores had over the mom-and-pops: not only did they get their inventory at below-cost discounts, they didn't have to pay tax on the profits, either.
MBA programs actually teach this as a strategy to pursue: they usually refer to Amazon's "flywheel" where lower prices bring in more customers which allows them to demand even lower prices:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaSwWYemLek
You might have heard about rural and inner-city "food deserts," where all the independent grocery stores have shuttered, leaving behind nothing but dollar stores? These are the direct product of the decision not to enforce Robinson-Patman. Dollar stores target working class neighborhoods with functional, beloved local grocers. They open multiple dollar stores nearby (nearly all the dollar stores you see are owned by one of two conglomerates, no matter what the sign over the door says). They price goods below cost and pay for high levels of staffing, draining business off the community grocery store until it collapses. Then, all the dollar stores except one close and the remaining store fires most of its staff (working at a dollar store is incredibly dangerous, thanks to low staffing levels that make them easy targets for armed robbers). Then, they jack up prices, selling goods in "cheater" sizes that are smaller than the normal retail packaging, and which are only made available to large dollar store conglomerates:
Writing in The American Prospect, Max M Miller and Bryce Tuttle1 – a current and a former staffer for FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya – write about the long shadow cast by Reagan's decision to put Robinson-Patman in mothballs:
They tell the story of Robinson-Patman's origins in 1936, when A&P was using preferential discounts to destroy the independent grocery sector and endanger the American food system. A&P didn't just demand preferential discounts from its suppliers; it also charged them a fortune to be displayed on its shelves, an early version of Amazon's $38b/year payola system:
They point out that Robinson-Patman didn't really need to be enacted; America already had an antitrust law that banned this conduct: section 2 of the the Clayton Act, which was passed in 1914. But for decades, the US courts refused to interpret the Clayton Act according to its plain meaning, with judges tying themselves in knots to insist that the law couldn't possibly mean what it said. Robinson-Patman was one of a series of antitrust laws that Congress passed in a bid to explain in words so small even federal judges could understand them that the purpose of American antitrust law was to keep corporations weak:
Both the Clayton Act and Robinson-Patman reject the argument that it's OK to let monopolies form and come to dominate critical sectors of the American economy based on the theoretical possibility that this will lead to lower prices. They reject this idea first as a legal matter. We don't let giant corporations victimize small businesses and their suppliers just because that might help someone else.
Beyond this, there's the realpolitik of monopoly. Yes, companies could pass lower costs on to customers, but will they? Look at Amazon: the company takes $0.45-$0.51 out of every dollar that its sellers earn, and requires them to offer their lowest price on Amazon. No one has a 45-51% margin, so every seller jacks up their prices on Amazon, but you don't notice it, because Amazon forces them to jack up prices everywhere else:
The Robinson-Patman Act did important work, and its absence led to many of the horribles we're living through today. This week on his Peoples & Things podcast, Lee Vinsel talked with Benjamin Waterhouse about his new book, One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America:
Towards the end of the discussion, Vinsel and Waterhouse turn to Robinson-Patman, its author, Wright Patman, and the politics of small business in America. They point out – correctly – that Wright Patman was something of a creep, a "Dixiecrat" (southern Democrat) who was either an ideological segregationist or someone who didn't mind supporting segregation irrespective of his beliefs.
That's a valid critique of Wright Patman, but it's got little bearing on the substance and history of the law that bears his name, the Robinson-Patman Act. Vinsel and Waterhouse get into that as well, and while they made some good points that I wholeheartedly agreed with, I fiercely disagree with the conclusion they drew from these points.
Vinsel and Waterhouse point out (again, correctly) that small businesses have a long history of supporting reactionary causes and attacking workers' rights – associations of small businesses, small women-owned business, and small minority-owned businesses were all in on opposition to minimum wages and other key labor causes.
But while this is all true, that doesn't make Robinson-Patman a reactionary law, or bad for workers. The point of protecting small businesses from the predatory practices of large firms is to maintain an American economy where business can't trump workers or government. Large companies are literally ungovernable: they have gigantic war-chests they can spend lobbying governments and corrupting the political process, and concentrated sectors find it comparatively easy to come together to decide on a single lobbying position and then make it reality.
As Vinsel and Waterhouse discuss, US big business has traditionally hated small business. They recount a notorious and telling anaecdote about the editor of the Chamber of Commerce magazine asking his boss if he could include coverage of small businesses, given the many small business owners who belonged to the Chamber, only to be told, "Over my dead body." Why did – why does – big business hate small business so much? Because small businesses wreck the game. If they are included in hearings, notices of inquiry, or just given a vote on what the Chamber of Commerce will lobby for with their membership dollars, they will ask for things that break with the big business lobbying consensus.
That's why we should like small business. Not because small business owners are incapable of being petty tyrants, but because whatever else, they will be petty. They won't be able to hire million-dollar-a-month union-busting law-firms, they won't be able to bribe Congress to pass favorable laws, they can't capture their regulators with juicy offers of sweet jobs after their government service ends.
Vinsel and Waterhouse point out that many large firms emerged during the era in which Robinson-Patman was in force, but that misunderstands the purpose of Robinson-Patman: it wasn't designed to prevent any large businesses from emerging. There are some capital-intensive sectors (say, chip fabrication) where the minimum size for doing anything is pretty damned big.
As Miller and Tuttle write:
The goal of RPA was not to create a permanent Jeffersonian agrarian republic of exclusively small businesses. It was to preserve a diverse economy of big and small businesses. Congress recognized that the needs of communities and people—whether in their role as consumers, business owners, or workers—are varied and diverse. A handful of large chains would never be able to meet all those needs in every community, especially if they are granted pricing power.
The fight against monopoly is only secondarily a fight between small businesses and giant ones. It's foundationally a fight about whether corporations should have so much power that they are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.
Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Anti-voting rhetoric will be the death of the left. Literally.
Not a single fucking Republican voted to protect roe. It was fucking overturned in the first place bc trump got three Supreme Court appointments.
Every fucking thing wrong in this country is almost certainly the result of Republicans being in power. In 2020, Texas cut half of the polling places in black neighborhoods, and doubled them in white ones, regardless of population. It was Republicans bitching about mail in voting, and constantly, constantly fearmonger about voter fraud. Literally, their platform is about making civil rights harder to practice.
Would you like to know why? It’s because Republican politicians know better than anyone that higher voter participation means higher republican loss.
But what do I see from the online left, champions of the oppressed?
“Voting doesn’t do anything, the parties are the same, the system is rigged, etc, etc”
Don’t sit here and tell me you give a fuck about marginalized people if you aren’t ready to march your ass to the voting booth and vote out the party actively stripping their rights away.
Protest, donate, community build, unionize, and vote, vote, vote.
By the time direct action is the only option, it will be too fucking late.
Plenty of highly intelligent people end up getting sucked in to cults because they just wanted people to hang out with. There are antivaxxer nurses. Your ability to act on empirical reason breaks down fast if your social and emotional needs aren't being met.
Like, I reject this idea that people end up becoming tradwives or antivaxxers or cult members because they were dumb. These groups prey on people by filling the social and emotional needs of vulnerable people. They look for people who need help, and give it to them on predatory conditions.
It is important to understand that there is a conspiracy theory that could push your particular buttons and get you, there is a cult that could offer you the right support at the right moment and get you.
Thinking 'this can't happen to me' plays a big role in not noticing when it is in fact happening to you.
Go participate! Go see every movie. See the bad ones, the good ones. Watch movies with the sound off and you can see how a movie's made. If you ever think your movie you're making is too long, it is. If you ever wonder, "Should I cut this?" the answer is, "Yes." And somebody has to like it beside the person you're fucking and your mother.
