#plutocrats

[grrlscientist]

in recognition that TODAY is ECONOMIC BLACKOUT DAY, i ask us all: "When did firing park rangers, scientists and air traffic controllers become a better idea than simply TAXING BILLIONAIRES?

[azspot]

The branches of innovation at which modern-day, billionaire-positive America excels most remarkably are things like bailouts, monopolies, executive compensation, luxury-home design, and fraud. Especially fraud. From the president on down, the United States is home to the world’s greatest innovators in fraud, endlessly cranking out new models of stock-market hype, toxic securities, bogus bond ratings, and fake inventions. We develop amazing new forms of insider trading; of make-believe currencies; of junk fees and dynamic pricing. We dream up self-serving ideologies that everyone momentarily believes. Forms of populism that strengthen the ruling class—and forms of antipopulism that strengthen it even more. These things have made America a kind of Renaissance Florence of fraud, a civilization in which everyone wants to become a billionaire by way of some creative new rip-off.

Thomas Frank

[ir-tg-curvy-mature-feetworship]

Un-elected co-conspirators

[di-kot-o-me]

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. - Antonio Gramsci They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace - Tacitus

[charliejaneanders]

You have a group of the wealthiest people on the planet saying that they want to take control of our city,” he said. “Do these handful of billionaires and tech folks own it, or do we? It’s not more complicated than that.

My latest newsletter is about the rich people who are spending ungodly sums to control San Francisco

[tomorrowusa]

« Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect. »

— Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (archived).

We're living in an age of greedy narcissists. And they are upset that their massive wealth doesn't buy them respect and admiration from a majority of people.

This narcissism and self-absorbtion has spread through much of the population. This has led some to embrace a form of nihilism.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Miners

The men who would strip the future for parts.

Elon Musk is the product of a mining magnate. To the degree that he is a self-made man, it is because he made a powerful illusion of himself, and marketed it to other illusionists, none of whom value anything human.

Thievery has moved beyond the concrete schemes of past centuries and into a digital void that ordinary people do not know how to navigate — other than to identify what plutocrats stole from them.

And that our country is one of those things.

And that the earth is one of those things, and it screams as they mine it again — for contrived currency and artificial intelligence. For replacements for human beings as they work towards global depopulation.

We used to live on borrowed time, but now we live on stolen time, because the oligarchs are taking that too. They are deleting our data and records and history. The final step is deleting people, the last repositories of memory.

The faster this disaster happens, the slower moves my mind.

No official stops it. No one explains how such distant predators got in or how to keep them out. So do not fault me for visiting the past, when the people who inaugurated the destruction of the future at least had the decency to mourn it in a poem.

There is nothing I can write to derail this catastrophe that I haven’t written already. I am worn from warning. What is a warning, anyway, but a declaration of what you love and want to protect?

It’s not that my heart’s not in it. It’s that my heart is in everything.

[Sarah Kendzior's newsletter]

[chuckbbirdsjunk]