Christian Banza
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Is the US becoming a Dystopia ?
Once upon a time the human race had a dream a vision of the future where we had evolved beyond our petty military conflicts where every human was guaranteed equal rights where we had time to spend with friends and family to pursue hobbies and trades and to do meaningful work that we enjoyed not because we had to but because tedious unpleasant labor had been handed off to automated systems leaving humans the time to just live to really experience what life is all about as we approach the year 2022 i think it's safe to say that vision is no closer today than it was a hundred years ago in fact the consensus seems to have shifted away from this utopian vision of the future and towards something much less pleasant in this episode we're going to attempt to analyze some trends in the united states as we creep ever closer to techno dystopia there's a trend in modern entertainment we used to see a lot of optimistic movies and tv shows where the future was depicted as bright happy and peaceful there were exceptions of course but the general feeling towards the far future was one of hope these days that's no longer the case scroll through any list of movies and tv and you'll notice a pattern just about every bit of media dealing with the future now has a decidedly pessimistic tone the hunger games the maze runner divergent oblivion altered carbon snow piercer the expanse even kid-friendly movies like wall-e have a deeply dystopian undertone what's behind this trend well if you take a look around it shouldn't be hard to find the catalyst people today are more unsure about the future than at perhaps any point in modern history every day we wake up and there's a new catastrophe massive wildfires record-breaking heat waves disappearing glaciers melting permafrost political instability new diseases people are afraid and one way we like to cope with our fear and uncertainty is by turning off and watching a movie dystopian fiction is increasingly common these days for a couple of reasons first it's weirdly comforting we can watch snow piercer and say well at least my life isn't that bad another reason is that film and television offer us a way to engage with modern problems in a way that feels less traumatic we can watch altered carbon recognize the problems that mirror those in our own time and come away thinking yeah rapidly increasing inequality is a problem we need to address it's a more pleasant experience than watching a documentary about collapsing ecosystems and runaway climate change but it brings those same issues to mind people like to relate to what they're watching even if the subject matter is unpleasant in a way dystopian fiction performs a useful service in this regard people who would otherwise ignore the news and the challenges we face are forced to see the similarities between these fictional worlds and the one we inhabit but simply recognizing the problems doesn't do much except make the average person miserable we often feel powerless in the face of monstrous crises like climate change and inequality that exceeds that of the gilded age but we're not as helpless as we might feel we'll get to that a bit later but first we need to take a look at where the u.s stands on the dystopia timeline okay picture a generic near future dystopia what do you see grimy cities pollution crushing poverty juxtaposed against glistening neon towers and usually a handful of massive all-powerful corporations running the show that description may already be ringing alarm bells in your head but let's break it down a bit good dystopian fiction usually relies on a handful of tropes some kind of environmental collapse absurd levels of wealth inequality and powerful technocrats ruining lives and often the planet to fund their empire and their megalomania let's evaluate the united states based on these three factors we'll start with environmental issues unless you've been living under a rock you know by now that climate change is happening and it's not looking good the fallout from the rapid warming caused mainly by human activity will be severe and it's already begun as of writing this script greece has been burning for over a week and is showing no signs of stopping thousands of people have had to evacuate under red skies blistering heat and suffocating smoke other countries face similar conditions as we saw in australia not too long ago coastal regions face unprecedented flooding as i saw firsthand while shooting a documentary in the marshall islands we're beginning to see the first climate refugees as entire regions become uninhabitable the ipcc an international group at the forefront of climate research has just put out their most recent paper and it's shocking you may be thinking yeah yeah i've heard this before it's true the entire scientific community has been begging policymakers to listen for decades but guess what it's looking like it's too late the new report is full of data that even the experts didn't expect at least not so soon glaciers are melting at rates that should be happening at higher levels of warming permafrost is melting at rates climate scientists didn't expect we'd see for another 70 years flooding exceeds expectations as do droughts wildfires and extreme weather the bottom line is that 1.5 degrees of warming which has been the number scientists have urged us to try to stay below is going to produce consequences that look more like three degrees of warming the climate crisis is accelerating we can no longer ignore the fallout it's only going to get worse now it's only dystopian if we refuse to adapt and mitigate the fallout right surely world leaders are working tirelessly to solve the problem come on you should know better than that without fail world leaders are refusing to take sufficiently radical steps to stave off the worst effects of climate change in fact here in the us the current administration is carrying on with business as usual while republicans will openly deny climate change to muddy the waters and keep their corporate donors happy plenty of well-meaning americans believe the democrats actually care they do not while they pay lip service to long-establish science the democrats are beholden to the same corporate interests as their more repugnant colleagues for example biden recently said we can't wait to tackle the climate crisis the signs are unmistakable the science is undeniable and the cost of inaction keeps mounting that's nice and yet approvals for oil drilling are on track to reach their highest level since george w bush was president a politician's words don't mean anything if they constantly act in a way that contradicts their flowery language the situation is pretty grim politicians understand this but they are invested often literally in the preservation of the status quo which benefits them and the rest of the rich and powerful read the ipcc report for yourself i've left a link in the description voting for the less awful presidential candidate isn't enough anymore while climate change is definitely the most pressing issue facing our species and many other species dystopian fiction often focuses on smaller scale human-centric problems one of the most quintessential of these is the issue of rampant inequality the wealthy looking down on the unwashed masses from their glittering towers in altered carbon the rich have found a way to essentially become immortal the final hurdle for the elite while the poor are left to suffer and die far below the cloud top utopias of society's upper crust the quest for immortality is something that our own billionaires are absolutely pursuing there's one startup which offers plasma transfusions from the blood of young people in an effort to slow the aging process some of the more dedicated elite like paypal founder peter thiel routinely spend 40 000 per quarter for blood transfusions from 18 year olds we also have the absurdly wealthy going on little joy rides to space just because they feel like it jeff bezos spent 5.5 billion dollars to spend 11 minutes as far above the poor people as he could possibly get meanwhile his workers who do the actual labor that produces amazon's profits face some of the most inhumane conditions in the country to get a sense of just how absurdly rich these people are consider this there was one open seat on the flight the person who had the winning bid nearly 28 million dollars cancelled because of a scheduling conflict can you imagine that sorry can't make it to my 28 million dollar space flight something came up bezos has long been the subject of intense criticism from the left but he's really done it now even older more conservative people saw this little stunt as an obscene waste of money in a way i'm glad it happened it is nearly impossible for people to understand just how much money our modern day robber barons have hoarded watching jeff bezos blow 5.5 billion dollars on an 11-minute joyride helps put it in perspective that 5.5 billion doesn't even put a dent in his wealth while it's easy to point at the richest handful of people on earth and say bad there is still tremendous inequality several rungs below them for example jamel brown a hospital janitor in missouri was awarded employee of the month after contracting kovid trying to keep other people safe for his efforts he was given a six dollar voucher to the hospital cafeteria meanwhile the ceo who has likely never set foot on the premises got a 13 raise to 30 and a half million dollars this executive receives 1 000 times the compensation of workers society called essential for six months and then cast aside jemele brown once considered an essential worker can't afford his own apartment and hasn't gotten a raise in two years absurd offensive stories like these really help to drive the point home for average americans our lives continue to get worse while the already rich continue to get richer here's another example larry fink the ceo of blackrock the world's largest asset manager went on the record to say that americans will have to work longer and make risky investments in order to retire people like fink are the same ones who say the economy is doing great and anyone who works hard can succeed yet here he is with a tacit admission that people can't get by on the same number of years of work as their parents or grandparents people in today's job market simply aren't paid enough money to save for retirement but if you want to get really dystopian let's take a look at how the state treats its least fortunate this video was taken in venice beach here you can see a few people in a makeshift shelter not bothering anyone with nowhere else to go being forcibly evicted by police armed with assault rifles as the country faces a wave of evictions unlike anything we've ever seen remember this video this is how the homeless are treated over 30 million americans are facing homelessness because their savings were destroyed by the pandemic 30 million inequality in the united states now exceeds even that of the gilded age the most extreme disparity in the country's history with every crisis the rich get richer those who consider themselves middle class lose everything and the poor fall deeper and deeper into crushing poverty the final trope in our dystopia comparison is the ever-present hand of the technocrats and the giant corporations i think it should go without saying that this country is run by corporations in all but name why haven't we acted on climate change because exxon has lobbied against it for decades despite being among the first ones to realize their activity would cause problems down the line they fund both parties so does the military-industrial complex companies like lockheed boeing and raytheon why do you think we're always involved in low-level wars it's absurdly profitable for these companies why don't we have universal healthcare like every other industrialized nation because the insurance and pharmaceutical companies make massive donations to both republicans and democrats then you've got the mega corporations like amazon google and disney want to buy something amazon has it cheaper streaming video amazon has it delivery amazon groceries amazon space flight apparently if you have 28 million dollars disney is slowly consuming all other media companies and ips google dominates web traffic this country is run by corporations and they want to make sure it stays that way but let's talk about the really dystopian stuff there's a nevada bill up for consideration that would allow tech companies to create their own cities complete with governments the right to develop their own taxation and essentially equal power to traditional counties that's exactly as terrifying as it sounds your job would have complete control over your life determining what you can and can't do how little they're allowed to pay you how much you owe them in taxes we have this weird fixation on the private sector especially tech in the u.s and it's going to get us into real trouble so-called industry leaders like bill gates also enjoy essentially limitless positive press for even their most alarming projects for example gates wants to shoot dust into the atmosphere to block the sun if that sounds familiar well it just so happens to be the catalyst for one of our dystopian movies then there's every internet dweeb's favorite oligarch elon musk neuralink the company determined to put a computer chip in your brain will be starting human trials in the very near future and musk has just announced that spacex will launch a satellite into space with the purpose of displaying advertisements any interested parties will be able to buy ad space with crypto soon even the night sky will not offer an escape from the intrusion of capital so is the us becoming a dystopia our climate is collapsing inequality is at its worst level ever our politicians are corrupt and in the pocket of massive corporations millions of americans are on the brink of eviction at which point they will be threatened with state violence tax startups may soon have their own autonomous cities where they will have complete control over the inhabitants we've got space billboards on the way and people are lining up to get microchipped by the world's least responsible twitter troll i don't think it's a stretch to say that the us is not becoming a dystopia it already is one we just don't have the flying cars or cyberpunk aesthetics so what can average people do about this i'm not going to lie we face some serious problems including the biggest one humanity has ever faced but we're never powerless the best thing you can possibly do is get involved somewhere every little bit helps want to organize your workplace for better conditions join the iww or another union applicable to your field want to build political power join an organizing group or a socialist party start small see if there's something you can do to help your neighbors look around to see if you can find a local mutual aid effort building community resilience is critical to weathering crises a group of people working together is much stronger than a bunch of isolated strangers if you like to read start a reading group introduce people to anti-capitalist ideas and help them learn about alternatives if you're good at graphic design see if your local union socialist party branch or dsa chapter needs help producing posters or flyers there's always something we can do to lend a hand it may not seem like much to you but by working together we can make a big difference take care of yourself help others where you can and throw sand in the gears of the machine if our elected representatives and their corporate overlords continue to make our lives worse at every turn if they aren't going to fix these massive problems that they've created we need to do it ourselves. i
By Christian Banza2 years ago in Education
Capitalism and monopolies
Vice espn and the history channel what do these three media outlets have in common despite their different target audiences they're all owned by the same company disney what about these three same story they're all owned by comcast if you were to pick a bunch of media operations from a hat odds are the vast majority of them are owned and operated by one of just five mega corporations since the early 1980s the number of media companies controlling the bulk of us media has shrunk from 50 to just five we've gone from a media landscape operated by a reasonable number of controlling interests to a reality dominated by near monopolies just barely sneaking under the enforcement of anti-trust laws in this episode we're going to talk about the consolidation of american media in the hands of a few ultra powerful companies and what that means in a time when the very wealthy have outsized influence over public policy before we begin it's worth noting that corporate deals acquisitions and mergers happen all the time often with little to no coverage it's quite possible that by the time you watch this video some of these data points will have changed but unless something truly cataclysmic happens the vast majority of us media will still be under the thumb of one or more of the five super corporations we're about to discuss so without further ado let's meet the big five comcast disney national amusements news corp and at t taking the spot from time warner which it acquired in 2018 for 109 billion dollars you probably guessed that disney was on the list since they've had some seriously high profile acquisitions in recent years most notably marvel and lucasfilm but i'd be surprised if you've ever heard of national amusements or news corp these incredibly bland names and their lack of public-facing operations are intentional why draw attention to yourself as one of a tiny number of corporate behemoths when people only care about a select few of your properties whether you're watching cbs news scrolling through gamespot or reading a book published by simon schuster you're patting the enormous wallet of national amusements and you'd never suspect that these three very different operations are run by the same company the same goes for news corp they own national geographic fox news and harpercollins altogether the big five are worth over 400 billion dollars controlling something like 90 percent of all u.s media including news networks hollywood movie studios and print publications and they reach nearly 100 of all u.s households and fun fact much of the remaining 10 is owned by only slightly less giant multi-billion dollar corporations like sinclair which as you may remember got itself into hot water by blasting out a propaganda broadcast over hundreds of local us news channels so how exactly are they allowed to do this surely having just five companies dominate the nation's media is considered monopolizing right well no but just barely let's look at what it takes to be considered a monopoly in order to be considered a pure monopoly a single company has to have complete control over a market containing a good or service with no close substitutes so there you go since there are five large corporations that share the us media market none of them qualify as a monopoly but you don't have to be classified as a pure monopoly in order to wield monopolistic power with such a massive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of so few it all but ensures that smaller operations never have the chance to succeed unless you count the very american concept of success which is building a company just large enough to get bought out by one of the big players what we see in the u.s media landscape is more of an oligopoly complete control spread across just a handful of powerful groups there's so much interplay and deal-making within these five mega-corporations that in effect they are a monopoly in every sense but the legal one for example it's not uncommon to see one of the big five hold a massive stake in a property owned by another of the big five but if there were so many more media corporations as recently as the 1980s how did we get to the dystopian all-powerful corporate landscape we see today to make a long story short it all boils down to the passing of the 1996 telecommunications act this piece of legislation was supposedly intended to deregulate the increasingly tangled broadcast and telecommunications markets allowing anyone to enter and compete in the industry whatever the intended result was the actual outcome was simply the rapid consolidation of power in the hands of fewer and fewer massive corporations in the 2003 edition of howard zinn's a people's history of the united states he notes the telecommunications act of 1996 enabled the handful of corporations dominating the airwaves to expand their power further mergers enabled tighter control of information he was right and it only got worse the decade before the telecommunications act 50 companies controlled the majority of the media landscape by 1992 that number had fallen by 50 percent and after the passage of the new tv and broadcast legislation the number quickly shrank even further to just six in the year 2000 and that's roughly where it stayed to this day not because these giant companies wouldn't love to own more of the market but because they physically can't without triggering anti-trust lawsuits to put in perspective just how much of the market the big five control let's have a look at some of the media operations they own we'll start with news corp rupert murdoch's empire owns fox including all of its branches like fox sports and 20th century fox it owns fx gq the wall street journal sky news harpercollins publishing the new york post national geographic zondervan market watch and countless others national amusements owns cbs and its branches it owns paramount nickelodeon mtv bet gamespot vh1 comedy central the smithsonian channel spike showtime simon schuster game faqs cnet and viacom once a major player in the media world itself before being consumed a t the newest member of the big five after acquiring the massive time warner controls cnn hbo cartoon network warner brothers dc tbs truetv cinemax tnt adult swim part of hulu turner classic movies time magazine rocksteady games and time warner cable to name just a few comcast which has a well-deserved reputation as a thoroughly evil corporation owns nbc msnbc usa network sci-fi fandango universal pictures focus features working title films rotten tomatoes bravo oxygen big idea part of hulu mlb network nhl network and dozens of internet ventures and finally everyone's favorite family-friendly corporate overlord disney disney owns abc pixar dreamworks espn lifetime the history channel marvel lucasfilm hollywood records touchstone pictures vice plus a giant swath of the comic book industry thanks to their acquisition of marvel and of course these are only a small sample of the media operations owned by the big five odds are if you can think of a network you watch you'll find it's owned by one of them the one main exception you may have noticed is netflix netflix while not outright owned by any of the big five is owned in part by a number of large interests some of them very shady like the well-known blackrock the world's largest shadow bank so really no matter what your network preferences you're only being offered the illusion of choice in reality almost everything we watch or read whether on tv online in theaters or on the pages of a book newspaper or magazine is just a tentacle of the enormous kraken that is the corporate media landscape no matter what perspectives these outlets offer remember that they're all owned by the same ultra wealthy business interests and they have their own agenda the big five own all the major news networks and the messages they put out are designed to reinforce the status quo peddling minor aesthetic disagreements and diverting attention away from serious societal problems this is simply the natural conclusion of the hyper-capitalist system we have in the united states powerful companies will grow larger and larger consuming smaller companies that can't compete acquiring more and more properties until they've reached the very limit of what could be considered legal thereby dodging anti-trust laws and maintaining the maximum amount of power profit and cultural significance and this is only one area of the american market every other aspect of american life is becoming similarly consolidated from pharmaceuticals to energy to manufacturing the threat of the monopolization of every area of modern life is real and its consequences could be disastrous and far-reaching except for those pulling the strings at the very top
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
Is Capitalism Actually efficient
if you live in what's commonly called the western world especially in the united states you've no doubt heard the claim that capitalism is the most efficient system for the distribution of products and that this is thanks to the miracle of the free market a completely organic system by which the true value of goods and services are determined as i've mentioned in recent videos american faith in the economic structure of capitalism is on the decline but arguments for the effectiveness of the system are still very common in this episode we're going to take a look at one of the more common ones the assertion that capitalism is efficient let's start with that word efficient what is efficiency the dictionary definition is effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost as in energy time and money the capitalist understanding of that definition is where we get into trouble capitalism is driven by the profit motive the pursuit of ever greater financial gain regardless of actual economic performance with that vision in mind efficiency can be defined as making the smallest possible investment or expending the least amount of energy or resources to ensure increasing profits and minimum acceptable function or quality this capitalist translation of efficiency causes some serious problems which we'll explore later but first we need to address some misconceptions espoused by the type of person who tends to claim capitalism is efficient first and foremost there is a common misconception that capitalism is defined by markets that if a system has markets it's capitalism that is not the case take feudalism for example as a system that existed well before the birth of capitalism it cannot be claimed that feudalism was capitalist and yet feudalism had markets serfs produced goods which they handed over to their lords and which those lords then sold in markets sometimes even the serfs had access to markets okay but if capitalism isn't defined by markets if markets existed long before capitalism what does define it opinions can vary but if you ask me i would say capitalism is defined by three core philosophies first the drive for short-term profits over long-term stability second the rigid stratification of the owner class and the working class and third a devotion to imperialist expansion and infinite growth as socialists have correctly pointed out for well over a century the tendencies of capitalism do not lend themselves to market efficiency but rather towards military oppression of foreign populations over-exploitation of workers and natural resources and increasingly frequent economic crises all of these observations have proven their accuracy many times over capitalism relies on the exploitation of workers at home and abroad and this working class is entirely at the mercy of those who own the companies which put them to work in reality these workers are often more excluded from capitalist markets than even feudal surfs because the modern worker does not own any of the goods or services they produce okay why does that matter it matters because if the workers are excluded from the market system that means only a tiny minority of wealthy and powerful people the owner class has access to the so-called free market but the selling of products on the market is only half the equation the other half is production similar to the sale of products by the owner class the production of those products is also controlled by the wealthy and powerful those who own the means of production a factory a pharmaceutical lab a supermarket chain decide what is produced how it is produced when it is produced and so on these people who do not perform any of the actual labor dictate the terms to those who do and when the demanded products are finished they own them in this way the owner class the capitalists have complete control of the free market system from production to sale okay but that's just the creation and sale of the actual products right doesn't the free market still determine the final price and dictate how and what companies produce misguided defenders of capitalism will say of course the market is beholden to the law of supply and demand companies have to produce what the market demands or they won't make a profit this belief in a supposed economic law is not reflected in reality like everything else under capitalism supply and demand is manipulated by those with money and power let's look at one recent example this is one of amazon's biggest uk warehouses in dunfermline scotland and from inside where millions of perfectly good products each year are sent to be destroyed secret footage captured in what's known as the destruction zone and that calls into question the company's environmental and ethical practices an itv news investigation reveals unsold laptops scanned not for delivery but instead marked destroy boxes full of electrical items such as drills shavers headphones even smart tvs the list goes on brand new books still in their wrappers or jewelry or steel cutlery with that same instruction destroyed one former employee who wishes to remain anonymous reveals the scale of what they're asked to do so from a friday to a friday our target was approximately 130 000 items a week the target to destroy from one centre was 130 000 items yes there's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed dyson fans hoover's the occasional macbook or ipad or the other day 20 bins filled with thousands of covered masks still in their plastic wrappers separately we followed another lorry as it headed out carrying non-electrical items the destination a landfill and recycling site only a few miles from where they've been stored and in the main still perfectly usable what's going on here why are these items being destroyed the answer is simple it makes amazon more money to dump perfectly good laptops tvs and silverware into a landfill as opposed to selling it at a loss or donating it to charity too much product availability drives prices down and it's more profitable to keep demand high by artificially limiting product availability when there's no demand for a product on the market companies destroy their stock to create fake demand take car companies for example when a new model is coming out the old ones quietly disappear they haven't all been bought the ones they can't sell to rental companies have been destroyed same with amazon and their mountains of unopened ppe mask use is dropping so in order to maintain profitable prices they simply destroy excess stock and by destroy i mean dump truckloads of non-biodegradable waste in landfills where it will remain forever further polluting the planet for the sake of short-term profits and it's not just consumer goods either look at the food industry during the pandemic american dairy farmers dumped 3.7 million gallons of milk per day and potato farmers destroyed 1.5 billion tons of their crop why because it wouldn't be profitable to find ways to give it all away to their credit some potato farmers put out a call to have anyone come and take as many potatoes as they wanted which is certainly better than nothing but the fact that we have exactly zero infrastructure in place for the emergency distribution of food products is a damning indictment of the soulless for-profit capitalist system and farmers aren't even close to the worst offenders you've probably seen the video of the young dunkin donuts worker who instead of throwing away excess donuts according to company policy bagged them up and donated them to the homeless and his local firefighters for this act of kindness which cost the company nothing this person was fired let's do a little napkin math it's not uncommon for a single dunkin donut store to throw away 5 dozen donuts or more per night that's 60 donuts as of june 1st 2021 there are 9291 dunkin donuts locations in the u.s if we figure 60 donuts per store per night that's 557 460 donuts every night 203 million donuts per year four billion pounds of donuts just thrown away okay but donuts are junk food it's not like they're keeping healthy meals from people well let's look at grocery stores grocery stores throw away over 43 billion pounds of food every year and that's not just expired food according to a recent study a full 50 of the discarded food is still perfectly edible when it's thrown away this is an unconscionable practice when over 23 million americans are food insecure to further hammer home the dystopian nature of our for-profit system during the pandemic we saw armed guards blocking people from retrieving food from dumpsters outside grocery stores think about that for a minute people are desperate enough to dig food out of a dumpster during the worst pandemic in our lifetime and those in power decide not to help distribute food but to defend our corporate waste with the threat of violence the us is not the only country at fault here other capitalist nations act similarly we produce enough food to feed every human on earth with plenty to spare but the inherent traits of capitalism disincentivize a common sense allocation of resources in favor of maximizing profit these tendencies the tendencies to cut corners generate tons of waste and neglect long-term stability exist in every sector we've recently seen the consequences of supposed capitalist efficiency in my home state of texas and in florida during last winter's cold snap millions of texans were left without power or clean drinking water many for days or even weeks on end this was the direct result of the reckless privatization of our electrical grid in order to cut costs and maximize profits ercot neglected to weatherproof our electrical infrastructure the result was catastrophic and future failures will only get worse as the effects of climate change intensify florida is another prime candidate for truly dystopian climate fallout as we speak the florida coast is becoming increasingly unsafe thanks to erosion and rising sea levels and yet luxury accommodations continue to spring up all over miami on june 24th champlain towers south a condo building and surfside collapsed killing and as yet undetermined number of people likely over 100 for years the developers had known about critical flaws in the integrity of the building which would have cost them an estimated 9 million dollars to rectify common sense and a concern for safety would have prompted them to make the repairs the profit motive disincentivized that action and no repairs were made the end result was the entirely preventable collapse of a 13-story building and the loss of dozens of innocent lives florida is one of the more obvious cases of at-risk infrastructure but the rest of the country isn't far behind the pacific northwest has been experiencing temperatures never before seen in that region the heat literally melting electrical wires and buckling roads the efficient thing to do would be to invest the money to repair and weatherproof our infrastructure thereby preventing future shipping shutdowns traffic problems and catastrophic failures like bridge collapses the capitalist notion of efficiency will result in us doing the absolute bare minimum to restore the lowest possible level of adequate function to maintain our precarious operation so what are the takeaways here capitalism's vision of efficiency is predicated not on ensuring the long-term function or sustainability of our systems or the common sense allocation of resources labor or products but on minimizing costs and maximizing profits efficiency is just a euphemism for cost cutting destructive wasteful practices short-sightedness and criminal negligence it removes the human factor from the equation and centers capital instead actual efficiency has to take into account the longevity of systems and the sustainability of practices and products it's not efficient to overproduce and then dump millions of tons of unopened products into landfills it's tremendously wasteful it takes labor power raw materials and carbon emissions to produce those goods which are then discarded and add to the ever-increasing human toll on the environment it's not efficient to let mountains of perfectly good food rot in dumpsters when millions of americans don't have enough to eat even if you take a capitalist approach wouldn't it make more sense to ensure that your workers are properly nourished so that they can work at full performance what about making accommodations for future pandemics or other crises it will be much more expensive to come up with emergency distribution methods during a crisis than to plan ahead and implement those systems slowly same with infrastructure it's not efficient to build high-rises that will collapse into the sea in 10 years or to neglect weatherizing electrical grids roads or bridges nothing this country does is efficient in any real sense it's wasteful short-sighted and inhumane the capitalist notion of efficiency is a sham it exists only as an excuse for the genocidal adherence to the profit motive so no capitalism is not the most efficient system it doesn't deserve to be called efficient at all people are slowly coming around to that fact let's hope it doesn't take many more collapsed buildings statewide power outages or breadlines to put the final nail in the coffin i mentioned climate change a number of times in this video it's a prime example of capitalism's short-sightedness and how we fail to take into account enormous consequences even a handful of years in the future if you'd like to see how climate change and capitalist inefficiency are affecting coastal cities like the one i mentioned earlier i highly recommend you check out miami beach underwater on curiosity stream curiosity stream is an established streaming platform with a solid track record of caring about great educational content and the financial security of those who produce it they've got thousands of non-fiction titles from some of the best filmmakers in the game
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
America's looming housing crisis
Danielle and kristen sills are the perfect first time home buyers they've upped their budget and widened their search of the boston area but the last house they bid on had 29 offers it sold for about 70 or 80 thousand over what the asking price was and it was a 1200 square foot home finding an affordable apartment was hard enough before the pandemic right but now things are even worse some are calling it a crisis the shortage is now critical affordable so-called class c apartments are 96 percent occupied nationally when they go shopping the inventory the active listings they can choose from are down about 30 percent from this time last year that's just a staggering shortage of homes on the market right now he compares this with what happened during the subprime mortgage crisis a decade ago millions of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages and investors came in to buy the properties and convert them into rental housing so you're going to see a lot more of this soon [Music] as you watch this video you're probably sitting somewhere with a roof over your head for many of you it's probably your home either that or you're watching it work in which case i applaud you for stealing back some of your extracted value shelter is one of the most critical needs of almost every species on earth including humans it's integral to the american dream a modest home with a white picket fence two and a half kids and so on homelessness is rightly seen as something society needs to address as most decent people feel that no one should go without shelter in our modern era and yet despite the importance of housing and the significance we place on having somewhere to call home it seems that the us is on a collision course with another housing crisis it may not take exactly the same form as the housing crash of the great recession but it is coming and it's not looking good in this episode we'll explore the state of housing in the u.s and consider what factors are feeding this growing problem before we get into the causes of this looming housing crisis let's take a look at a few statistics if you look at the housing market today you'll notice a few things first there aren't many single-family houses to be had people just aren't selling the houses that do go up for sale are snapped up incredibly quickly typically within a week or even a couple of days having to offer tens of thousands of dollars over the listing price has become the norm if you want to actually have a chance of having the winning bid if you owned a home and you put it up for sale today odds are you'd have at least a handful of offers by the end of the day and many of them would be well over the asking price month-over-month price increases are now exceeding even the absurd levels we saw in 2006 and we all know what happened shortly after that what's going on here a big part of the problem is that the housing market is incredibly short on supply pace of housing production has slowed dramatically contributing to an already serious lack of housing this is partly due to a shortage of construction materials and partly just a continuation of the trend of producing fewer and fewer homes per year as of 2021 the us faces a shortage of roughly 7 million homes that's a lot of demand but a housing shortage isn't the only problem here the big picture is this young people are trying to buy affordable homes but the prices for even the most modest quote starter homes are out of reach these prices have been driven up by institutional money pouring into the housing market to snatch up homes as investment properties including the homes of those recently evicted during the pandemic to make matters worse some large investment firms are lobbying to end eviction protections so that they can acquire even more houses adding to the housing demand and homelessness problems at the same time with single family homes out of reach for the average working american the media has begun trying to frame perpetual renting as a good thing something that benefits young people the problem there is that even renting is becoming prohibitively expensive there are now officially zero counties in the entire country where a worker earning the federal minimum wage can afford a one-bedroom apartment even for those making significantly more than minimum wage things are looking pretty grim there's a common joke that goes something like the bank said i couldn't afford an 1800 a month mortgage so now i pay 3 000 a month in rent the cherry on top is the true unemployment rate if we take the lysep definition for unemployment someone who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage but cannot find one then the true rate of unemployment in the u.s currently sits at a staggering 23.7 percent so even if quote affordable housing were available it likely wouldn't be affordable because nearly a full quarter of americans can't find a job that pays a living wage with that context out of the way let's look at how these problems combine to form the perfect storm for economic meltdown we'll start with everyone's favorite bad guys the billionaires it should come as no surprise that the people putting in bids at 60 80 100 000 over asking price are not your average person they're typically the ultra wealthy usually through investment firms or other real estate poaching groups let's take charles coke as an example one of the billionaire koch brothers charles has donated millions of dollars to three conservative organizations spearheading the push to eliminate covet eviction protections this alone would be reprehensible but since the beginning of the pandemic he's also been heavily investing in real estate snatching up homes left and right to add to his massive portfolio of assets among them the homes of the evicted and desperate in april 2020 he dumped 200 million dollars into amherst holdings a company which brags that has acquired over 30 000 homes since 2012. koch real estate investments was also among the investment groups that recently bought an ownership stake in smart rent a landlord technology company charles koch is not alone in this scheme billionaires investment firms and giant corporations are buying up as many homes as they possibly can which is driving prices way beyond the reach of the average american and they're also betting big on the lucrative future of the rental market it should be clear that very few normal people are going to be able to afford to make offers on homes that exceed the asking price by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars but some media outlets would have you believe that giant real estate firms aren't the bad guys here for example vox put out an article saying things like everybody wants to blame blackrock and wall street isn't to blame for the chaotic housing market to give them the benefit of the doubt yes obviously everything has multiple variables which influence material reality but it's a little on the nose to say blackrock is good actually when the ceo of vox investor general atlantic is on the board of directors at blackrock and even if that weren't the case the vox article makes some strange assertions claiming for example that institutional investors just aren't that interested in single-family homes this is demonstrably false as firms like blackrock have bought up hundreds of thousands of single-family homes since the great recession and they continue to hold them hostage on the rental market then there's airbnb if you go on vacation odds are you'll find dozens of cute freshly renovated two-bedroom units to choose from entire neighborhoods empty except for out-of-state license plates there's no such thing as an affordable home anymore they've all been bought up whether by institutional investors or wannabe real estate moguls and turned into airbnbs or rentals and very few new ones are being built in fact there's a new trend of building suburban neighborhoods not with the intention of selling the homes but of selling the entire development to investment firms who then rent out the houses vox isn't the only instance of media trying to manufacture consent for endless renting the wall street journal says it's generational preferences that are pushing young people to rent instead of buying a home but it's not preference at all most young people would love to have the stability of owning a home especially when mortgages are now typically much lower than rent prices in the same area but they've been priced out of home ownership and now it's looking like they're going to be priced out of renting too companies that have a stake in people renting are pushing for an end to home ownership bloomberg says things like rising real estate prices are stoking fears that homeownership long considered a core component of the american dream is slipping out of reach for low and moderate income americans that may be so but a nation of renters is not something to fear in fact it's the opposite they end their article with this country was always more about new frontiers than comfortable settlements anyway which translates as you will suffer and never be able to afford a home and that's good because it's the american way so we have entire generations of americans no longer being able to afford single-family homes we have rapidly increasing rent prices to the point where an eviction crisis is very likely large corporations are buying up all the available housing and actively trying to get more people evicted so they can snatch up their homes too new communities are being developed not to be used for affordable housing but explicitly for the purpose of making a new suburban renter class that is held hostage by landlords and faceless investment firms and the media is telling us that actually this is what we want and that stability and building equity is bad this all adds up to one serious economic crisis looming on the horizon it's always hard to predict exactly what form the fallout will take but it's usually a safe assumption that the brunt of the suffering will fall upon those who have little say in the matter lower income people who are just trying to get by the major players who are manipulating the market and causing these problems will suffer no consequences and if the great recession is anything to go by they will actually dramatically increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of the population well this all sounds pretty bad what's the solution here how can we avoid another massive economic collapse historically speaking we can't capitalism is built on the maintenance of cycles of boom and bust and they're fairly predictable in their timing these crises are becoming more frequent and more damaging to the average person but also more lucrative for the ruling class and if we know anything about capitalism it's that when the ruling class is benefiting from something it will not change without a massive drawn-out struggle if you're a young person or a person of any age really if you're looking for a home i don't think it would be wise to try to buy one now i know it's easy to say save more money but do what you can to squirrel away a few bucks here and there rent will continue to go up but the chaos surrounding single-family homes can't last forever it's unsustainable even in the fairly short term i think a crash of some sort is likely and hopefully if we can ride out the storm housing prices might come down somewhat afterwards the giant real estate firms will have added many new properties to their portfolio but it's very unlikely that they will have bought them all once supply chains recover from the pandemic construction materials become more available and the home buying frenzy dies down a little bit hopefully there will be some homes available for first-time buyers in the meantime we have some actions we need to take first we need to push back against the media talking points about generational preferences and the benefits of renting they support a predatory exploitative status quo that we should not accept if they want us to rent we need to demand affordable apartment housing with rates that only increase with inflation not at the whims of parasitic landlords we also need to remember that once upon a time owning a home was within reach for just about every american back in the 50s a suburban home only cost two or three times the average salary which meant that not only could people easily afford them they could pay them off in a matter of a few years rather than over the course of three decades like almost everything else under modern capitalism housing has shifted from being seen as a basic necessity to a valuable commodity from which the wealthy can extract massive profits the best thing we can do right now is continue to fight evictions organize tenants unions to build bargaining power against the landlords fight for higher wages across the country and support our neighbors however we can you are an individual but you're also a member of one of two classes either the working class or the capitalist class if you do not own the means by which capital is produced a factory an office building a block of apartments a large company you are a member of the working class and that means your fight is the same as the people at risk of eviction or who make 7.25 an hour or who can't afford their medical bills only by acting in solidarity with your class can you make a significant impact if you do own the means of production if you have wealth at your disposal we need you too we wouldn't have had marks without angles donate to mutual aid funds buy and distribute copies of socialist books use your free time to help in whatever ways you can everyone has a role to play and in the housing crisis or any other fight organizing is key to victory
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
Should the US be considered a democracy?
For well over half a century the United States has enjoyed its status as the world's strongest superpower and awarded itself the title of defender of global democracy many Americans see their country as the world's moral arbiter the shining city on a hill the standard by which all other nations should judge themselves the reasoning for this superiority complex mostly boils down to the notion that US citizens enjoy the purest most untainted Democratic experience the world has to offer free and fair elections equal representation universal rights and countless other indicators of a healthy and thriving democracy for an action is often seen as a threat to our democracy manipulated news is considered extremely dangerous to our democracy and elections are steeped in the language of democracy versus tyranny the u.s. is obsessed with the idea of democracy but if you dig a little deeper you'll find some worrying trends in this episode we're going to discuss what it means to be a democratic nation and take a look at some data that suggests the u.s. is not living up to the standards it sets for the rest of the world before we begin we need to get one thing out of the way there are plenty of people who will say well actually the u.s. is a republic not a democracy and then everyone starts yelling and suddenly no one remembers what we were talking about in the first place I'll try to make this quick the definition of democracy is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state typically through elected representatives the definition of Republic is a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch you can see why people can get a bit confused to make a long story short Americans have been arguing about whether the country is a republic or a democracy since the very founding of the nation and that probably won't change anytime soon the best consensus we can reach is that the United States can be classified as a democratic republic for a representative democracy our system of governance has characteristics of both Republic and democracy people who claim otherwise are generally just out to derail the conversation in this video we'll be discussing the aspect of American life which are supposed to be democratic things like voting and elections the main goal here is not to determine whether the u.s. is a democracy in the Republic vs. democracy sense but whether the nation lives up to the standards it supposedly represents and by which we judge the rest of the world let's start with a brief look at the nation as a whole what is it what does it represent the u.s. is the richest nation in human history home to some of the very wealthiest people on the planet it's also a nation of crushing inequality the richest three people own more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans and Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon and the richest man on earth makes more money in one minute than the average American household earns in almost two years the u.s. is home to the world's most powerful military by far we spend more money on our military than the next ten highest spenders combined in theory this massive force is purely for national defense but the country has proven that it's more than happy to use military action to establish regimes more amenable to US interests for example we've instigated or supported no fewer than 56 coos in Latin America since the 1950s not to mention the Middle East often toppling democratically elected governments this is in stark contrast to our nation's preferred image as the defender of global democracy geographically the u.s. is prime real estate as Otto von Bismarck once put it the Americans are a lucky people they're bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by FISH this geographical luxury has allowed the nation to flourish unbothered by the goings-on of other countries and able to spend its money not rebuilding after the world wars like european nations but in other areas strengthening its military to become the sole world superpower and establishing massive international corporations and yet with all this wealth and superb geopolitical positioning the u.s. still fails in several key metrics some 40 million of its people live in poverty with another 10 million right on the brink American health care is consistently rated the worst in the developed world with thousands dying or going bankrupt every year thanks to the extraordinarily expensive system in 2018 America was added to the list of most dangerous nations in which to be a journalist and that was before the targeting of journalists by police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd these should all be red flags on their own but if we're talking specifically about democracy we need to look at more testable areas of civic life for the rest of this video I'll be drawing some data from a report titled testing theories of American politics elites interest groups and average citizens which was published in 2014 in the journal perspectives on politics you can find a link to the study in the description in this report the off set out to test for theories of American political power essentially trying to measure who's voice matters in American politics these four theories are majoritarian electoral democracy economic elite domination and two types of interest group pluralism majoritarian pluralism and biased pluralism to put it in slightly easier language the groups are average citizens the wealthy and powerful and large organized groups either popular or business oriented in the ideal vision of the country many Americans would want the balance to be skewed towards average citizens and popular mass movements as domination by the economic elites or business interests would indicate less of a democracy and more of a plutocracy or oligarchy that is ruled by a minority of wealthy players if you polled a sample of Americans about what they think the ideal form of democracy would be odds are the vast majority would say one-person one-vote everyone's interests are given the same weight a large portion of the American population believes that we already experienced this ideal form of democracy the authors of the report come to a very different conclusion over the course of their testing by pitting the four dominant theories of American political power against one another using a data set consisting of nearly 2000 policy issues they reached the exact opposite conclusion they state we have been able to produce some striking findings one is the nearly total failure of median voter and other majoritarian electoral democracy theories when the Preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for the Preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule near zero statistically non significant impact on public policy they go on to say interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy and a few groups particularly labor unions represent average citizens views reasonably well but the interest group system as a whole does not overall net interest group alignments are not significantly related to the Preferences of average citizens the net alignments of the most influential business oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizens wishes so not only our business interest not in alignment with the will of the voting majority they are directly opposed to it this should not come as a surprise when extremely wealthy individuals and corporations are allowed to dump as much money as they want into politics it would stand to reason that their desires hold more weight to those receiving the contributions these graphs from the study sum up the findings pretty well regardless of average voter desire for legislation on any given issue the odds of Representatives delivering the desired result is the same contrary to this we see a strong correlation between economic elite and special interest desires and legislative action this should be alarming because if our votes are meaningless then we don't actually have any say in how the country is run that would mean our system is not democratic okay but if our votes are meaningless why do politicians try so hard to convince people to vote for them well think of the optics without a significant number of votes from the population the country would not be considered Democratic at all the illusion of the shining city on a hill would be shattered and the decidedly undemocratic oligarchy laid bare for the rest of the world to see so those votes from average citizens are crucial but by actively seeking votes and encouraging voting politicians open themselves up to the undesirable possibility of being voted out if only there were some way to ensure that vote totals from states would always deliver the desired outcome enter gerrymandering has a quick crash course on state level politics each state is divided up into voting districts of similar population sizes to facilitate the process of voting and establish a number of seats to be filled by representatives make sense but what doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a Democratic standpoint is how these districts are drawn in America much to the bafflement of foreign politicians those currently in elected positions get to draw their own district maps think about that for a second in a democracy the citizens should be able to vote for the representative of their choice what we have is the opposite representatives get to choose their voters they can draw maps that exclude certain populations or pack in as many of a certain type of voter as possible that's part of the reason district maps often look so strange they've been carefully crafted to deliver the desired result think what you will of John Oliver he's got a pretty good episode on gerrymandering here's a useful explainer from the show The Washington Post showed how this can work look at this hypothetical state it's 60% blue voters 40% red and it needs to be carved up into five districts now proportionally you would want three blue and two red districts but if you draw the lines like this you can get three red majorities and two blues and if you draw it like this you can get five blue majorities and no red and if you draw lines like this it looks like a dick which is and before you go calling me a partisan hack I'm opposed to gerrymandering from both parties and you should be too both Democrats and Republicans do it and while it's technically not illegal it should be it gives politicians tremendous control over the outcome of elections and that should not be acceptable in a healthy democracy but perhaps even more egregious than gerrymandering is outright voter suppression there is no right more fundamental to democracy than the right to vote it's always been in the interest of some politicians to dissuade certain voting blocks from casting their ballots or to make it more difficult for them to do so but in recent years voter suppression has reached levels that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of our elections if they were to take place in any other country repressive voter ID laws voter roll purges gerrymandering is also a form of voter suppression but at least those responsible for questionable district maps can hide behind the technical legality of their actions what we're seeing out on the voting trail is much more alarming instead of going to all the effort of trying to convince people not to vote those in power have taken to simply closing polling locations so voters don't even have the opportunity this has been a widespread problem in recent years and it's finally starting to get the attention it deserves take the Kentucky primary on June 23rd in a normal election year Kentucky would have over 3700 polling stations available this time around they slashed that number to under 200 nearly half of Kentucky's black voters live in a single County Jefferson County had just one polling station one polling station for over three quarters of a million residents this will lead to multi-hour wait times that most voters simply won't be able to manage people have to work and if the wait is eight hours long which is becoming more and more common the majority of voters won't be able to cast their ballot the practice of closing polling locations is particularly insidious because those doing the closing can say look everyone had the opportunity to vote there was a polling station open but in reality if you can't afford to wait in line for an entire day you do not have the opportunity to vote what those in power are doing is making it impossible for the people to make their voices heard they are denying Americans their most fundamental democratic rights at what point do we have to admit that our elections are illegitimate and undemocratic we're not shy about stepping in when other countries conduct fraudulent elections so why should we get a free pass to return to the study we discussed earlier in their conclusion the author's state what do our findings say about democracy in America they certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of populistic democracy who want their governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens in the United States our findings indicate the majority does not rule at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes when a majority of citizens disagrees with the economic elites or with organized interests they generally lose moreover because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change they generally do not get it they end by saying we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened and they're absolutely right in fact I'd go even further and say that the United States is no longer a democracy if our districts are gerrymander to all but ensure a certain outcome if our polling stations are closed making it impossible for us to vote if the desires of average voters are disregarded even with an overwhelming majority if corporations and the ultra wealthy can simply buy their desired legislation we're not living in a democracy we're living under an oligarchy the thing we need to realize is that this is not some unfortunate and unforeseeable outcome this is the system functioning as intended at least as intended since the 1980s crippling precarity for the many to build the ever-growing affluence of the few with no way to challenge the status quo by electoral means crumbling infrastructure juxtaposed with glistening new corporate campuses and headquarters tens of millions of Americans laid off during a global pandemic while the richest handful of people become even richer and the stock market hums along nicely we need to come to grips with the fact that there has been a consensus in American politics for decades now the Democrats and Republicans represent two wings of the same party dedicated to maintaining corporate dominance ask yourself whose voice matters in American politics whose desires are taken into consideration our tax laws benefit the rich our environmental laws benefit corporations you ian's have been gutted and all but destroyed to remove workers bargaining power our news networks are owned by the rich and politically-connected our health care system is a massive for-profit industry that turns human suffering into giant checks for politicians and all the while the two major parties put on a bit of political theater slandering each other as the ultimate evil when their economic interest aligned on just about every issue they trade places every few years voters feel vindicated and disappointed then vindicated again as their preferred party goes through the motions with one hand behind their back reaching for corporate donations in a true representative democracy the will of the people would matter our votes would matter you don't have to look very hard to see that isn't the case the United States should not be considered a representative democracy
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
America's overworked obsession
The less you go to the theater the dance hall the public house the less you think love theorize sing paint fence etc the more you save the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour your capital the less you are the less you express your own life the more you have i.e the greater is your alienated life the greater is the store of your estranged being everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity he replaces for you in money and in wealth all passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice the worker may only have enough for him to want to live and may only want to live in order to have that these words penned by karl marx in 1844 are no less true today than they were 170 years ago and nowhere on earth do they ring more true than in the united states as the wealthiest nation on earth the u.s enjoys the privilege of looking down on the rest of the world as quote less successful our people basking in the light of glorious american exceptionalism what we fail to realize is that our concept of success is not only narrow and short-sighted but also fundamentally opposed to human flourishing our population as a whole may enjoy more wealth than some of our peer nations but at what cost our waking hours are consumed by work our life expectancy is on the decline we rate poorly in metrics like happiness and job satisfaction and those of us in the workforce today will never achieve the financial stability of our parents generation in this episode we're going to attempt to divorce the notion of success from the dogged pursuit of the accumulation of capital let's start with the core belief that animates many american workers the idea of the american dream a sort of national ethos the philosophy of the american dream can be summed up something like this everyone has the opportunity for prosperity and success regardless of their background and based solely upon their ability or achievement it's very much a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality a phrase which is also very common in american life the idea that one should be able to succeed without any external help solely through one's own force of will and hard work this notion is of course absurd and is made even more ridiculous by the fact that the phrase has been adopted by so many in a manner completely opposite to its original meaning to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps is obviously impossible and that was the original meaning of the phrase to attempt something that is completely absurd of course in america nothing is impossible so we refitted the expression to better suit our dogmatic obsession with self-reliance america is an interesting case study because unlike many other countries when settlers first arrived here there seemed to be an endless expanse of land to explore and claim this frontier lifestyle gave birth to the restless nature of the american dream one governor noted in 1774 that the americans forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled he added that if they attained paradise they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west this sums up the american relationship to work pretty well what we have is never enough we need to accumulate more and more wealth never satisfied ever striving over the last couple centuries the american dream has evolved into what we see today work hard save money send your kids to college so they can live a better life than you did retire to florida in a lot of ways this is a noble goal the desire for your children to live a better life than you did is what we should expect of ourselves but more recently over the past 50 years or so the benefits of hard work have been stripped away and the things older generations took for granted have all but disappeared jobs are harder to find and pay far less money than our parents were paid for comparable positions pension plans and retirement benefits are rarely offered these days we have some of the worst vacation and parental leave options in the world much of the economy has shifted to gig work which doesn't have to provide health insurance or any other benefits and domestic and global perception of the us is on a decidedly downward trajectory but don't just take my word for it let's look at a few statistics back in the 1960s only 20 percent of american mothers worked this was partly due to the perceived role of the mother as the primary homemaker and caretaker but it was also largely because most households only needed one source of income to provide a financially stable and upwardly mobile life today 70 percent of american children live in households where both parents are employed most families simply can't get by on a single source of income at least 134 countries have laws that cap the maximum length of the work week the u.s does not in the united states almost 86 of men and over 66 percent of women work more than 40 hours per week you've probably heard that japanese workers are some of the most overworked in the world the average american works 137 more hours per year than the average japanese worker we work 260 more hours than the british we work 499 more hours than the french according to the bureau of labor statistics productivity of the average american worker has increased by 400 since 1950. if we're producing value at four times the previous rate that would mean we could earn a comparable living to our grandparents in one quarter of the work hours right obviously that's not the case we're working longer hours at a drastically increased rate of productivity but we don't benefit from that labor well at least we're rewarded with generous vacation and parental leave oh wait no we have the worst rankings in the developed world and worse rankings than many third world countries among 41 studied nations the u.s ranks dead last in terms of paid parental leave we are the only nation out of those 41 that does not mandate some amount of paid parental leave for comparison the smallest amount of paid leave required by the remaining 40 nations in the study is about 2 months 2 months of paid leave in the u.s is unfathomable in 34 of the 41 countries some of the leave is allocated for new fathers there's a reason we only ever hear the phrase maternity leave in the u.s and that's because new fathers are never eligible for leave in order to spend time with their child some countries that rank higher than the u.s include mexico greece croatia even our fellow workaholic japan estonia offers 86 weeks of paid parental leave again the united states offers nothing there are zero industrialized nations on earth that don't have a mandatory option for paid parental leave except the us vacation and sick time is a similar story we don't have a federal law requiring paid sick days nor do we have a law mandating paid annual leave once again making us the only industrialized nation not to do so take a look at this graph you might notice there's a bar missing that would be the united states not mandating any paid leave whatsoever it's especially depressing when you realize that a mcdonald's employee in norway gets more vacation time than just about any american worker regardless of field or salary meanwhile in the united states we abuse our low paid workers and lambast them for being lazy and not finding a better job it's no wonder that our citizens consistently rank poorly for happiness and job satisfaction they're being worked to death are not offered any benefits get no time off and on top of that are abused for trying to earn a living what's perhaps more disappointing than wealthy older people deriding low-paid workers is other workers in precarious positions doing the same for example take gig economy workers while some of them are fully aware that their occupation is based on their own exploitation there's a disappointing subset of people who buy into the notion of quote hustle culture you'll see these people make inspirational instagram posts posting images of jeff bezos using hashtags like rise and grind and going on about how the key to success is to work all day every day until it pays off here's the thing for these people it will never pay off deifying rich people who accumulated their wealth by exploiting others or inheriting vast sums of money doesn't make you smart it means you've bought their propaganda if you drive 15 hours a day for uber you might make a bit more money but you don't have any opportunity for advancement you're not suddenly going to get health insurance or vacation time because you're working hard you're a piece of equipment to them you drive the car you make them money that's all you're worth to uber but this toxic idea that we need to give up hours days years of our lives as a sort of sacrifice to appease the gods of success is not only misguided it's actively throwing away your life hustle culture destroys your work-life balance and those who engage in it see themselves as morally superior to people working traditional jobs for a wage these sorts of false divisions among the working class are exactly what the ruling class wants the same is true of the false division between the working class and the so-called middle class it's a meaningless distinction designed solely to make more comfortable workers feel superior to their lower paid counterparts and therefore at odds with their own best interests if you feel superior to others or see yourself more like the billionaires than your fellow workers you'll never organize against your oppressors because you believe you might one day become part of this upper echelon if you just work a few more hours per week surely you'll be rewarded and gain entrance into their elite club america's cult of overwork destroys our collective imagination it removes every possible motivation beyond the desire for the accumulation of more wealth to many americans there is nothing but work and the possibility of eventual reward work is the only thing that matters but there is so much more to life than what capitalism has conditioned us to pursue if we worked fewer hours we could take time to spend with family and friends we could learn that hobby we've been putting off for years we could write novels produce art create things that enrich the lives of others on a fundamental human level we could take time to just exist when was the last time you just took a day to relax and you didn't feel guilty about it we are so conditioned to believe that we should always be working that even when we're not working it's all we can think about the american dream the obsession that anyone can quote make it if they work hard enough is thoroughly tangled up with the notion of american exceptionalism we think it's because we work so hard that we are exceptional and you know what we are exceptional we're the most overworked population on the planet our standard of living is going down our life expectancy is going down we don't get vacation days sick days or time to spend with our newborn children we're increasingly unhappy our economy is teetering on the brink of the worst financial crisis in modern history we can't protect ourselves from a pandemic that everyone else handled because we're so conditioned to believe that we always need to be working and somehow we still believe that the american dream is a reality so yes we are exceptional but we are exceptional in all the wrong ways if we don't dismantle the oppressive structures that enable this culture of overwork this is the only form of american exceptionalism that will ever exist
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
Is this the beginning of a new labor mouvement
there is a shortage of skilled trades people throughout the u.s economy the department of labor reported only 266 000 jobs were added in april and the unemployment rate for the last month ticked up to 6.1 percent 12 states have cut unemployment aid about three months before federal benefits expire in september at the very moment that unemployment is rising fewer people are working american businesses say they can't find employees and it's obvious they can't go to the nearest strip mall and count the help wanted signs on the doors they're everywhere if you've turned on the news within the last couple months you've probably seen all sorts of dramatic coverage and special panels on the supposed labor shortage that has cropped up in the wake of the pandemic thanks to the covet relief checks tiny and inadequate as they were for the first time in decades many americans found themselves with the tiniest bit of bargaining power against their boss suddenly they could afford to stay home from their low-wage jobs at least for a little while and many took the opportunity to do so and look for better employment this led to a wave of posters and signs outside places like mcdonald's saying that no one wants to work anymore as if it were some kind of moral failing that people were choosing not to slave away over a griddle 10 hours a day for poverty wages but this new bit of tension between workers and employers is just the tip of the iceberg in this episode we're going to explore the possibility that the united states is witnessing the birth of a new labor movement okay time for a pop quiz i'm going to give you a quote and you try to guess who said it here it is labor is prior to and independent of capital capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration who do you think made this assessment of labor and capital if you've seen my other videos you might assume this is a quote by karl marx but you'd be wrong this quote is actually by none other than president abraham lincoln from his 1861 state of the union address lincoln was a contemporary of marx and there is some evidence to suggest that the two may have even corresponded at some point but regardless the fact that a president of the united states a place we today consider the bastion of free market capitalism would make a statement so supportive of labor over capital is probably shocking to many of you believe it or not the united states did not always have the exploitative soul-crushing labor landscape we see today there was a time many years ago now when workers had actual bargaining power where they could come together and say to their boss hey we've got some demands and the boss would have to work with them today that kind of relationship is nearly unthinkable the barest hint of unionization in the workplace is often grounds for termination benefits our grandparents took for granted have been stripped away pensions vacation time paid sick days maternity leave a company car a fair wage all relics of a bygone era consumed by the all-devouring ideology of cost cutting and maximizing profit of course executives never feel the sting of these measures in fact their compensation has only continued to grow to the point where wealth inequality is now just as bad as its peak during the gilded age these days many workers never even meet their boss they're not even considered employees the gig economy has drastically changed the way we look at work and as of the latest available data 36 percent of american workers have turned to gig work to make ends meet combine the lack of livable wages increasing rates of depression lower life expectancy and rock bottom job satisfaction rates with a global pandemic and you've got the perfect storm for a renaissance of class consciousness and labor activity while it may not seem like much to the untrained eye over the past year we have seen workers taking the very first steps towards fighting for better conditions one of the most important developments has been the resurgence of the labor strike in various industries as a tool for forcing change for example in 2020 during the pandemic we saw strikes among nurses teachers flight attendants and auto workers to name just a few in each of these instances the workers typically unionized ones formulated demands that would provide them with better safety measures and wage protection for the duration of the pandemic nurses unions picketed for adequate ppe and better staffing to handle the massive influx of coronavirus patients teachers demanded that schools remained closed until reasonable safety precautions could be implemented to protect themselves and their students from contracting the disease and taking it home to their families auto workers forced the shutdown of plants over social distancing concerns flight attendants negotiated for paycheck protection to be a part of the industry bailout ensuring their economic security through the turbulent pandemic in a time when millions of americans were being laid off from work many from jobs that would not survive the pandemic union workers enjoyed a certain level of protection thanks to their bargaining power and as such they were laid off at a lower rate and often with job or paycheck guarantees this hasn't gone unnoticed after decades of decline in union membership thanks to vicious union busting campaigns and expansion of corporate power in 2020 membership began to tick up again 2019 marked an all-time low for union membership with an abysmal 10.3 percent of workers being represented by a union in the wake of the pandemic that number has climbed just a bit to 10.8 percent while this may not seem significant it represents the sharpest increase in 40 years and the fact that it's increasing at all after four decades of steep decline is very promising this increase in membership corresponds with polling that indicates a majority of americans see the decline of unions as a bad thing for workers and it coincides with the proliferation of labor voices on social media but we'll get to that in a minute one important union action that's currently ongoing as of writing the script at least is the impressive strike by alabama miners who along with miners from several other states traveled all the way to new york city as a group to protest their unfair treatment outside the blackrock headquarters blackrock is the primary shareholder of warrior met coal which operates out of brookwood alabama warrior met miners have been on strike for over four months now demanding a fair contract after saving the company from bankruptcy back in 2016 when warrior met was in danger of going under miners accepted a six dollar per hour pay cut to keep it afloat since that time the company has extracted record profits from their operation netting 309 million dollars in 2019 while the ceo continues to pocket his 4 million salary all of this is on the backs of the people who actually do the incredibly hazardous back-breaking unenviable work down in the mines of course this well-deserved strike has garnered very little mainstream media attention one thing that's very important to note is that class consciousness and solidarity the practice of standing with your fellow workers does not necessarily follow a cut and dry political divide i'm sure there are plenty of fancy business people in new york looking down on the miners as a bunch of rednecks not only their class enemy but opposed to their preferred political team as well while it may be true that many of these alabama miners espouse right-wing politics in general if you listen to their own words about the strike you'll notice there's nothing even the most centrist republican would support the united mine workers association president said we're in new york city because we're simply following the money and demanding that those who created that wealth the miners get their fair share of it while abraham lincoln would certainly have agreed with that sentiment modern politicians are opposed to it in every way both democrats and republicans have fought tooth and nail to destroy unions and make sure workers don't have any bargaining power in order to keep their corporate donors happy and cutting them nice campaign checks the only group in america that supports the striking workers in just about any instance regardless of industry is the socialists what many people have historically seen as a left-right divide is understood by socialists as a capital labor divide the working class of the us is made up of people from all political backgrounds and their class interests are the same regardless of those political beliefs it's no coincidence that membership in socialist groups like the dsa has been increasing in tandem with union membership flowery words from politicians don't mean much to striking workers but actual material support from other workers does and the socialists are always the first to lend a hand specifically because of their understanding of class struggle the dsa is the largest organized socialist group in the u.s currently sitting just shy of a hundred thousand dues-paying members and since the pandemic that number has jumped from 66 000 to its current 92 000. that is a massive increase in a very short period of time it just goes to show that when all politicians have to offer is empty promises and an increasingly miserable capitalist status quo building an economic alternative starts to sound pretty appealing it's no wonder that polling continues to show a decline in favorability for capitalism and an increase for socialism politicians and the ultra wealthy seem to be doing their very best to turn the rest of us against them for example amazon has been at the center of worker rights discourse for a while now and instead of laying low jeff bezos decides to go on a little joyride to space while his workers literally die on the job public perception has turned decidedly against the ultra wealthy and for good reason the only way they're able to amass their vast fortunes is through the exploitation of their workers and the problem continues to get worse right now there's still very little awareness of the nature of class struggle the battle between capital and labor among the american people those in power understand it that's why unions have been all but destroyed since the reagan years the accumulation of ever greater profits requires greater and greater extraction from the laboring masses without a banner to organize behind the american working class lacks the cohesion it needs to make effective changes on a national scale in the past it was socialist labor leaders like eugene debs who offered a path forward and thanks to the bold actions of workers back then we have many things we take for granted today child labor laws the weekend the eight hour workday and 40-hour workweek workplace safety laws and so much more all of these were socialist initiatives supported by millions of hard-working americans with an understanding of class struggle the most critical thing we can do right now is work towards rebuilding that lost class consciousness it will be a challenge but we have more tools at our disposal than ever before social media has proven an effective tool for raising awareness and coordinating labor actions and as the younger generations who grew up with the internet become more politically active we'll likely see social media play an even larger role in organizing and agitating for positive change the dsa isn't perfect but it is a good first step for getting involved and learning how to organize within your community see if there's a local chapter or if there's not reach out to the national branch and start one yourself if you've done the reading if you have a good understanding of the mechanics of class struggle talk to your friends about it each one teach one as the expression goes every little bit helps and we need all the help we can get a new labor movement one that can really force concessions from the ruling class would drastically improve the lives of average americans it could afford us financial security it could give us time to spend with our friends and loved ones and maybe if we're lucky it could even make america the country it claims to be a country that works for everyone not just those with money and power the labor market is constantly changing finding new ways to extract value from human energy if we can organize for better conditions now the future of work might not be as terrible as the present
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
The truth about recessions
we're in a recession Maybe maybe not though it's not super clear are we headed towards a recession it is coming I think we are on a slow bleed into the recession all of our indicators suggest that leading indicators consumer confidence CEO confidence all point to a recession in the U.S economy it's been at least a year since people started talking about a possible recession nobody's really sure when it's coming or if it's already here because rather unhelpfully there are some contradictory signals right now having their fun speculating and we could too just 20 minutes of pure guesswork but we're gonna do this video a recession is coming no matter what we know it with 100 certainty what we don't know yet is exactly when though based on current trends most people expect it to be sometime soon not to be too obvious with my thesis statement or anything but in this video we're going to break down why we know for sure that a recession is on its way we'll also talk about the fact that these crises where profits go down are counter-intuitively a good thing for capitalists unlike what you might hear them say and then we'll take things a step further and talk about preventing recessions because the truth is we could stop recessions almost entirely if we wanted to okay this is a graph you knew that specifically it's a graph of GDP in the United States if you didn't know GDP or gross domestic product is a garbage number that doesn't really mean much but it means a whole lot to governments and businesses so unfortunately they've made it everyone else's problem roughly speaking GDP measures the total value of all the goods and services in a country in a given year GDP doesn't care if one guy makes all the money from this or if we cut down every single tree in the process or if we're all miserable GDP only calculates the value of all the stuff exchanged for money while cutting out the middlemen in the calculation I'm really oversimplifying here but as long as there's more stuff or more services more value produced than the year before on paper the line goes up these shaded areas here are times where that doesn't happen it's in moments like these where GDP goes down for long enough that an official recession is declared by the nber and as you can see there's been a lot of them currently we estimate there's a recession every four to seven years on average like this right here is 2008 the last big recession before covid in the U.S this line going down was accompanied by nearly 9 million people losing their jobs during the Great Recession unemployment went up to 10 percent 8 million homes were foreclosed on and millions of people lost their savings or their retirement funds just trying to get by [Music] this is why recessions are a big deal they're brutal they're not just a few months where you need to cut down your spending on say four dollar artisanal bread to take a completely random example death rates alcoholism suicide all sorts of really terrible things go up during periods of economic contraction and predictably mental and physical health get a lot worse recessions are incredibly traumatic and difficult sometimes even deadly events for millions of people and for some reason they're treated as a natural phenomenon we know recessions happen regularly under capitalism you saw the graph but rather than contest this part of the deal were expected to accept within our current economic system is that whenever there's a brief lull in growth which happens every couple of years this sort of purge-like event will be announced seemingly out of the blue and life will be measurably worse for millions of people through no fault of their own it's just a part of life but it's not recessions happen regularly under capitalism and not for no reason and almost every school of economics has its theories as to what triggers them marxists for example and here I'm pulling from The Economist Richard Wolff in case you're interested often explain recessions like this in periods of growth companies expand that makes sense things are going well so confidence is high and companies receive Investments borrow money from Banks hire more people merge and acquire produce more stuff and sell more things the numbers go up and this works for a while but as more and more companies do the same thing eventually production exceeds effective demand there's too much stuff being produced because almost everyone is chasing growth by producing for the largest market possible and when everybody follows the same strategy they inevitably step on each other's toes not everyone can produce this much and reap the rewards there's just too much stuff in the economy because we aren't producing a according to our needs each company is producing for its own selfish bottom line not only is this obviously terrible for environmental reasons faced with a lack of effective demand many companies won't make the profits they expected to and invested their money for so they'll lay off their workers investors will stop investing and all throughout the economy the repercussions of this failure to grow begin to bounce from business to business as everyone's inputs dry up more people are suddenly unemployed businesses shudder to a halt profits take a dive and GDP the total amount of stuff being bought and sold goes down and you get a recession foreign to note about this is one it's cyclical and two that recessions can begin under capitalism not because of anything bad happening but simply because profits become harder to come by for the tiny minority of business owners steering the ship eventually though the survivors find ways out of the downward spiral either with bailouts buyouts or increased exploitation of suddenly desperate workers looking for literally any job amid high unemployment the economy starts growing again and kicks off the next boom that'll lay the foundation for the following bust it's cyclical and it's why we know that recessions are always on their way Beyond just looking at the historical record capitalist economists tend to ignore the boom and bust cycle either they'll pretend that each crisis is a totally random event and give it its own name to make it seem self-contained or they'll call this the market quote-unquote self-regulating casually ignoring that markets don't self-regulate because governments are always there to set the rules or step in with bailout money and that self-regulating is a really gross way of framing these events where millions of people go hungry and homeless for no good reason and look while there's plenty of debate about the specifics of how recessions work one thing is very clear who the winners are cap The Narrative politicians and capitalists prefer makes it seem like recessions are bad for everyone but with the numbers going down workers losing their jobs and businesses going under but that's not a very honest way of telling the story of recessions there are winners in a recession and part of the reason why recessions happen so often is because it's always the same people who benefit from them here's the data what you're looking at is a graph of unemployment and capitalist share of income when unemployment is high and the red line goes up systematically predictably inevitably three years later so does the black line capitalists get a larger share of the total economic pie three years after unemployment rises in other words when unemployment increases so does inequality and it's always the same group that benefits and it's not a big surprise as to why workers lose a lot of bargaining power during periods of high unemployment and recessions it's just harder to get a job when only so many are available and the competition is rough and that means that capitalists can absorb more of the total wealth even if that total wealth goes down they now benefit from a more dominant position in the economy when employment is high the times where growth is happening in some ways that's actually bad for capitalists they may earn larger profits on paper but they lose control their share of total income goes down with their ability to exploit somewhat counter-intuitively this means that capitalists want high unemployment because it makes their slice bigger than the worker slice and nothing is better at producing high unemployment than recessions but just forget the graphs for a second we can make the same case with a more direct example have you ever heard that Baron Rothschild quote the time to buy is when there's blood in the streets recessions are a boon to capitalists looking to buy during recessions when there's blood in the streets those with the power to spend and buy meaning almost exclusively those at the top are going to find deals 2008 was the perfect case for this the signs were everywhere but now it's official we are in a recession at the height of the recession companies like Blackstone came in and spent billions buying up repossessed homes at a fraction of their cost they had the money most people didn't and housing is a necessity so a few large corporations were ready to spend a little while prices were low to prepare for extracting rent from thousands of families for decades to come all of this mind you is a risky Gambit periods of high unemployment and hunger get revolutionary real quick and that can be scary to capitalists while they may a profit off disasters and use them to take a larger cut of the pie crises risk changing how we organize the pie in general it's not the best analogy but anyway that said so far capitalism has survived its recessions more than that they've been ways to embolden the system so when capitalists find ways to trigger recessions by pushing Marcus to the edge playing with prices and expectations and so on taking that risk often pays off and that's not all this same story of winning in a crisis takes place not just between capitalists and the rest of society but between big and small capitalists big corporations which can steer the economy by raising their prices suddenly restrict or increase production influence policy and even trigger Wars to some extent or in the undeniable winners of recessions over their smaller competitors during times of what's called stagflation a recession or period of economic stagnation combined with inflation small businesses are weak they aren't as adaptable and strong as large corporations so these are the times where bigger companies win not by making crazy profits but simply by beating the average driving their competition out by surviving when others fail let's go back to 2008 for a second and look at JPMorgan Chase even as a bank in a recession centered around the banking industry with its profits being cut in half from one quarter to the next amid quote Rising defaults in its mortgage home equity loans and credit cards JPMorgan Chase still managed to have its stock price Jump by 11 percent the company wasn't doing well by any means it was just doing better than its competitors and that's enough even when everybody is losing being the least loseriest of them all attracts investors allows consolidation and is ultimately beneficial in other words crises aren't that bad if you can come out on top and the largest corporations as well as capitalists in general know this and take advantage of it they can confidently destroy an economy with a clear conscience because once the dust settles they can be relatively certain they'll come out on top [Music] so how do we stop processions right now they seem natural inevitable even every recession is treated as some freak accident rather than the culmination of predictable Trends and they are built into our current economic system capitalism which can also seem inescapable but what if we didn't depend on growth and profit to live fulfilling lives if that were the case a periodic dip in growth wouldn't be a problem in other words what if we just had a degrowth economy the truth is that the only context where an economy not constantly growing is a bad thing is under capitalism when businesses have to choose between satisfying the needs of their workers and the needs of capitalists to generate profits the latter always wins out in the end growth means profits for the capitalist class and decline also means profits for the capitalist class therefore periods of degrowth become recessions and austerity for the rest of the population as businesses and governments scramble to make sure that for-profit companies stay open for business capitalist firms can't afford not to make profits above the mean and capitalist governments can't function without growth so if they encounter a dip it becomes a crisis the burden of which they simply pass on to the rest of us d-growth economies don't work like that in a socialist degrowth economy basic services are provided on a universal basis like housing food Health Care Child Care and so on by taking them out of Market mechanisms and the hands of profit motivated capitalists we remove the imperative for them to grow and with that we get rid of the idea that if growth ever stops that life necessarily has to become worse to make up for it in other words the things that make life good are guaranteed independently of profit they are provided without being tied to the ability of a few to enrich themselves and it doesn't have to just be basic Services we can extend this further for example with a more planned economy with a planned economy we can control more Industries democratically produce in line with our needs not randomly having every company producing as much as possible which not only destroys the livability of our planet but crashes the economy when profits don't catch up instead of relying on profit to guide our investments we could simply invest in the things we want to see happen with democratically run financial institutions instead of privately controlled banks that only follow the logic of growth to assess whether something is worth doing alternatively think of something like a mutual Aid Network today Mutual Aid doesn't do for GDP GDP doesn't have any way of measuring something that's done freely it just doesn't consider it to exist since Mutual Aid networks are often just people working together to improve their lives providing each other with services and sometimes Goods usually without money changing hands as long as those things remain insular to the collective life gets better without GDP moving an inch economies don't need growth for life to be good or for life to improve when the motivation for doing stuff is democratic will not profit life gets better without some rich guy's bank account getting bigger it's the exact opposite of austerity and recessions it's abundance for all even in the midst of bad numbers and I get that this is abstract the bottom line is that when capitalists aren't in charge we don't need to satisfy their needs before Societies or hope that the two coincide it's actually really simple people before profits now does this mean no more crises no definitely not another Global pandemic a massive drought or a war can all still cause problems some things just can't be avoided entirely that's the reality of life we can prepare but we can't always prevent that said within a socialist framework the consequences don't have to be so bad because the first priority isn't company profits an economy that prioritizes human well-being would simply continue to do so even in the midst of a crisis unlike a growth economy which is ready to sacrifice Collective good for a small group of people's numbers to look better a crisis can be weathered instead of becoming an excuse to cut Social Services and grow the capitalist share of the pie like what happens after every crisis in this decaying neoliberal era I know this might sound utopian but it's really not it's necessary it's Common Sense we cannot keep chasing infinite growth on a planet with finite resources and we cannot keep punishing average people for the greed of a few capitalists we can get rid of recessions life can be better for all of us we talked a lot about what recessions look like and who they benefit in this episode so I wanted to take a second to give an example of what recession news coverage looks like using today's sponsor ground news let's take a single story The failure and seizure of First Republic Bank and see what headlines look like from Outlets with corporate or individual ownership remember recessions benefit those with capital so let's see how these news outlets talk about economic downturns here are three headlines from three different groups which most people would say have different interests take a look at how all three convert around the same kind of wording here we have examples of Centrist corporate coverage supposedly unbiased coverage from an outlet with a single wealthy owner and staunchly right wing coverage notice how the story is framed in each ominous comparison but no direct mention of recession deflection by saying this is just a fluke and positive coverage of the prophets JPMorgan Chase will make if you read each of these stories not one of them says the word recession and all of them attempt to reassure the reader that the system works and that JPMorgan Chase has saved the day by omitting certain details or by giving precedence to one quote or fact over another news outlets can frame a story in a way that nudges the reader towards a conclusion that benefits their operation often beholden to obscenely Rich individual owners or a particular flavor of Economics this is something I get asked about a lot how do I help parents or friends break out of their little propaganda bubble it's great to analyze an event like this comparing coverage from different interest groups but it's a lot of work and none of us have time for that that's why I always recommend people check out ground news because it has a ton of really useful tools to make building media literacy skills a lot easier ground news is a web and mobile app that Aggregates over 50 000 news sources and offers intuitive easy to understand comparison tools so you can do things like what we did here see how a particular story is being spun by various corporate Outlets you can also see the political leaning factuality rating and ownership of every single news source right in the app no tedious research required now full disclosure as a socialist I obviously disagree with the placement of some of these outlets for example I don't think CNN should be placed as far left as it is but honestly this might be a good thing when trying to educate friends and family if you come at them with well actually CNN is a right-wing Network they're not going to take you seriously ground news is the perfect first baby step towards media literacy if you're looking for a way to give your friends and family a great set of tools to understand media bias who it serves and how to spot it I highly recommend you check out ground news
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
The myth of capitalist peace
war huh yeah what is it good for absolutely nothing Adam Smith 1969. if it seems like we can't get enough of War right now that's because it's true we love war and everyone thinks it's great but back in the old days people used to think war was bad what people only one people men in funny wigs and tall socks during the Enlightenment liberal thinkers were the first to come up with the idea of having a conscience and morals except when it came to non-white people and women who they cleverly figured out aren't people and therefore deserve jacket nonetheless the early thinkers of liberalism figured out doing good things and not doing bad things including because it's the topic of this video on web domain youtube.com War but instead of being all sad about war liberals also figured out how to fix the world and stop war from happening entirely free trade from the first thinkers of liberalism Smith Montesquieu Voltaire Hume Conte to the greatest thinker of our time Bush Jr the idea that Global capitalist free trade means peace and good times for all has well and truly endured and the momentum of freedom is growing we have reached a moment of tremendous promise and the United States will seize this moment for the sake of peace across the globe free markets and trade have helped defeat poverty and taught men and women the habits of Liberty so I propose the establishment of a U.S Middle East free trade area within a decade to bring the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity look I'm playing it up a bit but the liberal thesis really isn't that complicated war is bad for business and business is good for business so if countries begin trading together and make it easier by dropping things like tariffs embracing capitalism and the Invisible Hand of the market peace will endure because War becomes just too costly by comparison boom just like that the idea is that a Global Network of mutual interdependence ensures the aggressor in any given conflict can't trigger a war without suffering domestic economic repercussions and that means the appeal of War spoils progressively gives way to what we used to call Peace dividends back in the 2000s everyone's happy and the thing about the capitalist peace theory is that if you think of it in very narrow terms it can kind of make sense there's some logic to it and within very specific parameters there's even some not terrible research backing it up but then there's the other side of the freely traded coin capitalist piece is BS really it's a simple story covering up a brutal reality one of colonialism imperialism exploitation and of course profit let's start with recent history and a pretty unfortunate piece of evidence for the Defenders of capitalist peace what you're looking at right now is a graph it's a graph of BP Chevron Texaco Exxon and other oil companies Returns on Equity relative to the average for a Fortune 500 company what's interesting about this graph is whenever these companies start doing badly and not making as much profit as other Fortune 500 companies suddenly out of nowhere who could have seen this coming and energy conflict begins in the Middle East and then not long after but completely out of nowhere again they all suddenly start performing really well eating up market share and getting returns that the average Fortune 500 company can't the researchers behind this graph actually discovered three things about what it says one every energy conflict in the Middle East was preceded by oil companies having a dip in profits relative to the average two every energy conflict was followed by a period during which the oil companies beat the average and three this is the really damning one with only one exception in 1997 oil companies never managed to beat the average without an energy conflict first taking place to simplify all that and state the most obvious thing about wars in the Middle East war is profitable and peace actively sucks but of course Wars are complicated events and never a matter of one single thing but if I didn't know any better I'd be inclined to say that conflicts in the Middle East weren't thwarted by capitalism nor did they teach people the habits of Liberty and peace so much as they grew the profits of a handful of companies in the Imperial core sadly unfortunately for my shot in the dark guess about why Wars start there is absolutely no evidence of people serving in senior government positions during these wars who benefited from or had any sort of important role in the arms and fossil fuel industry the thing is Wars can be cheap Wars can often even be profitable for a range of domestic Industries unlike what capitalist peace assumes it's not always the case that war is the more costly option not just that we know for a fact that corporations exert a tremendous amount of control over government policy so even if Wars are bad for a lot of people so long as they're good for the few with power Wars just happen pair private interests with states that have the muscle to fight Wars free of consequence and all companies need to figure out is an excuse to start one now for those who defend the capitalist peace Theory the fact that these wars are being waged for capitalist profit and in the case of many Middle Eastern Wars to force free trade agreements isn't necessarily a contradiction free trade trumps everything so they might even argue that one war right now in exchange for peace and profit forever is a good trade-off but obviously this is a no good very bad ew gross argument it's never just one quick war in fact it's been centuries of long and brutal conflict let's talk about the enlightenment again liberal philosophies development historically coincides pretty closely with colonialism and the age of European Empires while philosophy Bros waxed poetic about equality a regime of horror that many of them fully condoned or at minimum considered inevitable was busy plundering the rest of the world piece by piece and it wasn't an accident that the two worked together European capitalists got into colonialism not just for fun not just because they could now that they had their better ships and guns but because they needed to domestic capitalist markets steadily become less profitable and the best solution to that entropy problem is and always has been expansion that was on the material front but they needed justification for what would just be straight up murder and for that the liberal philosopher's rhetoric of bringing civilization and trade to the rest of the globe gave them a clear conscience Wars just became part of the process by which capitalism already associated with the ideas of civilization and freedom and soon enough peace would come to take over the world let me rephrase the point is colonialism didn't come out of nowhere profit demanded that Wars had to be waged just like today powerful countries and the companies that made them up wanted their hands on foreign resources people and markets we don't usually think of colonization as a process of War making nearly as much as we do a process of domination because that second part lasted a lot longer but it's important to mention all the wars that happen for capitalism to expand because that usually gets glossed over in the capitalist peace Theory many places just didn't want so-called free trade or capitalism and getting them to enter the global economy on terms that Favored wealthier Nations took a lot of brutal Wars of Conquest while liberal thinkers developed the idea of gentle Commerce fostering peace all over the world capitalism which always required expansion actively became a catalyst for war instead of an obstacle to it so many European capitalist Nations became colonial empires not for kicks but because their economies required endless growth to survive but ignore for a second the wars that installed capitalism all around the world and let's talk peace real quick the point of peace is that it's not violence obviously people don't love war but with all the unnecessary suffering and death and that's actually a problem for the capitalist peace Theory because even if you discount the wars that made global capitalism possible the picture you're left with isn't actually less violent at best assuming capitalist peace theory is true and countries stop fighting with one another entirely violence in the age of global capitalism changed but didn't go away instead of violence between states the world was left with a permanent state of structural violence turned inward we live under a tremendously violent system that's just part of capitalism if you don't work you go hungry you end up homeless and cops decked out in literal military gear beat you up for the crime of being poor that's the reality of this economic system and it persists despite the fact that we have enough food for everyone enough housing for all and enough capacity to spread work equitably so that it's not nearly so unbearable this violence is completely unnecessary homelessness and hunger don't need to exist given how much we produce but they do simply because making life better and providing for everyone's needs unconditionally generates way less profit than artificial scarcity and Desperation and that's before you factor engendered and racialized violence violence against immigrants crackdowns on protests and all the overt uses of violence that police the strict hierarchy of this system for Society to get as top heavy as it is today without the bigger group of people overthrowing the smaller one a lot of completely unnecessary violence needs to be doled out and that's been true in every era of capitalism it's obvious but just take how capitalism brutalized the African continent in every Century since its arrival first slavery drained Africa of its labor force then Colonial capitalism setup shop for European companies to extract natural resources that hasn't really stopped and in fact skip a few decades and the World Trade Organization World Bank and imf's structural adjustment programs exacerbated these practices these free trade programs required developing countries to completely restructure their economies in favor of Western companies opening up their vast markets to foreign Capital adopting austerity politics that cut essential public services in health Agriculture and education they trapped developing economies in debt reimbursement schemes that drained them of their remaining wealth and just to remind you nobody elected the leaders of these institutions or take an even more recent example like NAFTA free trade between North American states completely destroyed union labor and Mexican agriculture while increasing both malnutrition and unemployment [Music] the extremely long-winded point I'm making is that even if you believed that free trade reduces the likelihood of war the fact remains that everywhere capitalism has extended its logic people were brought into incredibly violent social structures whether that was under Colonial powers or decentralized markets violence doesn't just go away with free trade it turns inward countries might might fight each other less I'll get to that in a second but violence and the threat of its use structures every part of human existence in this Arrangement capitalist peace is still capitalism and peace is just not a word that applies to the kind of Brute Force this relies on but let's get back to the original claim liberals make global capitalism really reduced the likelihood of War just plain boring war two countries duking it out once countries are in a Free Trade Agreement does it stop that yes or no maybe but probably not in truth a lot of research has been devoted to this question and it's not settled that's partly because free trade isn't a binary switch countries can turn on and off and also because bilateralism and multilateralism have very different effects on a country's incentives add to that confounding variables like nuclear arsenals American global hegemony unequal exchange non-capitalist trade agreements and the offshoring of conflicts in proxy wars and it's really hard to Clearly say this one thing is what reduces the incidence of War but forget all that at best liberalized trade seems like it can only delay War temporarily and here we can turn to World War one and Lenin's theory of imperialism to understand why like we just talked about before World War One all the capitalist imperialist powers in Europe went out colonizing the planet and spread out like white supremacist butter on toast English French German Russian and other Empires slowly took over more and more of the planet in search of new markets resources and cheap if not outright free labor and in the process their economies became more entangled with one another money moved all over the place it was a global trading Bonanza and there were European companies everywhere this was the first era of globalized free trade after mercantilism and for a while it actually kind of worked it provided economic growth and accrued power for these Empires thanks to the seemingly endless exploitation on the horizon the problem is that unlimited growth is necessary for this system to work peacefully eventually you run out of room physically and metaphorically Market saturate like a sponge [Music] in order to grow once the whole world was covered countries couldn't just find new people to subjugate or land to plunder growth now had to be at some other country's expense and that's precisely the situation capitalist powers found themselves in on the eve of World War One a bunch of European Alexanders wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer and triggered partly by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand these countries seized the opportunity to go at each other's throats in the hopes of weakening and taking over someone else's Empire to satisfy their own need to grow and I'm using World War one as an example but this problem didn't just disappear today as the world's largest economies compete over International markets whether that's an oil natural gas semiconductors or something else even with incredibly porous borders for Capital to flow through proxy wars pop up all over the place and tensions keep escalating between otherwise loyal trading partners someone does eventually need to get their hands on that profit foreign peace human rights and democracy are all good values but they're not why Wars get fought to take a very cliche example Saudi Arabia wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar trading partner and military ally with the us if we just couldn't tolerate Injustice anywhere in the world it's always for profit so why would capitalism ever get in the way of that capitalism doesn't lead to peace capitalism and peace are incompatible I mentioned at the beginning of the story
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
How capitalist cause loneliness
loneliness American epidemic epidemic of loneliness hurts you more than smoking cigarettes debilitating levels loneliness if you've watched Bo Burnham's inside you've heard about it before and experts say it's as bad as eating 15 cigarettes a day but what is loneliness really and is it a problem the answer to both of those questions is yes because loneliness is a problem that has existed behind the shadows for too long and I came to realize this when I first began my tenure Surgeon General and I traveled the country and would talk to people who would tell me that they were lonely but they wouldn't use that word they would say things like you know I feel I have to carry all these burdens in my life by myself where I feel if I disappear tomorrow nobody would care or I feel invisible feel anything right and it turns out that millions of people struggle with loneliness when you dig into the data what you find is that about one in two adults in America it was reporting levels of loneliness and these numbers are even greater among kids but what you also find is that loneliness has serious effects on our mental health and our physical health raising our risk for depression anxiety and suicide but also increasing our risk of heart disease stroke dementia and premature death loneliness is a massive problem that's only gotten worse we know this because earlier this year researchers published this paper and these are the graphs they came up with using a national survey tracking people's habits on random days for 17 years researchers found that between 2003 and 2020 people started spending a lot more time alone and a lot less time with friends family and acquaintances like you heard the Surgeon General explained earlier that's a big deal it's not like people are a little lonely so they feel sad for a bit and then happy for a bit and it all kind of evens out we're spending a lot more time alone which is bad for both our mental and our physical health everything from depression to dementia to heart disease gets worse the lonelier we are and the data shows that's an increasingly large number of us and while the pandemic brought this into focus and made things even worse the researchers behind this study stressed that these Trends were already there well before kovid started we've been on this path for a while so who do we blame smarter we talked a lot about the phone we talked about the way technology has changed our lives and it's a little more insular even though we're connected in digital ways and technology is utterly transformed how we interact with one another now so I'm that can be good or bad it can help us or hurt us technology has transformed the way we live and work now where these connections are happening on Zoom online could you stop that smartphones in a lot of the interviews and public addresses you've probably seen about the loneliness epidemic phones social media and technology in general get blamed taking up a lot of air time and don't get me wrong social media definitely has a bad effect on our mental health we've known this for a really long time now and just about every study we've ever done confirms it for example a study that came out just this year found that more social media time equals worse mental health and as a solution it recommends that quote social media users be cautious when interacting with social media features especially likes comments followers media and posts because of their significant effect on mental health yes phone bad phone not only thing bad while social media for sure has a role in this crisis of loneliness something a lot bigger is either completely absent from or barely glossed over in these interviews something that socialists have known contributes to isolation for a long time and that's alienation for centuries now socialist thinkers led by the Dapper young Marx have anticipated that capitalism would produce the kind of acute loneliness we're experiencing today and if you've heard about alienation before watching these news segments can be a little frustrating before we explain what it is alienation is a structural feature of our capitalist Society it's almost Universal and for the most part out of our control that's important because when these reports downplay it or don't acknowledge it which is almost always the case it leads them to conclude that while loneliness affects a lot of people it's ultimately an individual problem with individual Solutions and finally their personal practices look in all of our Lives we can do simple things by taking 15 minutes a day to reach out to and connect to someone we care about to make sure that we are giving people our full attention when we're talking to them in conversation aren't distracted by our phones and at the end of the day as you say this the solutions are on us it's on people it's on individuals and families and groups of friends to do something and these relationships do take work as we're reminded I feel like I'm in touch with them don't get me wrong personal practices to improve our isolation and our mental health are good things and they're not the only thing in the surgeon general's report or the interview I keep pulling clips from both do mention larger scale approaches to this problem like regulation for tech companies government investment and Community organizations and improvements to Public Health infrastructure it's not all bootstraps and getter done but a really large piece of the puzzle is still missing in these reports there's something else that's to blame for a big chunk of the loneliness we feel that can't be addressed by either individual practices or a little extra funding for Community organizations and that's capitalism which especially in its neoliberal variants produces thrives on and actually even demands more individualization and the ever greater atomization of our society let me actually explain alienation you'll see what I mean [Music] on the economic front capitalism is a commodity production system that's the engine that keeps things running stuff for the sole purpose of selling it for more than it costs to make profit motivated production the way this production is organized under capitalism is by class you have the class of people who own the resources needed to produce commodities [Laughter] and those who are hired to use these resources for the production of goods capitalists and workers employers and employees what does this have to do with alienation it turns out a lot in some of his earlier Works Marx identified that the way we organize work and production under our current system alienates us meaning it creates a separation between us and four things nature work others and ourselves nature because through the logic of commodity production it's no longer something we're a part of it's just this dead resource we extract from to make stuff work because most people work for someone else in order to make something that the other person owns you work in a Funko Pop Factory once you're done making that Funko Pop it's not yours to sell you sold your labor power but the product of it belongs to someone else and then there's alienation from others and ourselves in the labor market we are Commodities almost all of us sell eight or more hours of our day to somebody else during that time we kind of stop being people and become just another resource that yields profit for our employers that's already not great being reduced to this one thing for most of our waking hours instead of being the complex interesting human beings with different interests and emotions that we are sucks we're expected to just turn that off and compartmentalize while we're on the clock we're interchangeable in the eyes of capital and it's why so many people relate to the idea of being just a cog in the machine that feeling of alienation is miserable and isolating but it doesn't end there like what about all the other cogs as Commodities in a competitive market we are constantly pitted against one another whether that's for job positions promotions or layoffs there are always fewer jobs than people to fill them and while you can be friends with your co-workers in the back of your mind there's always going to be a little voice that says if the boss ever wants to fire someone you'd rather it'd be them than you social cohesion is harder to come by in the zero-sum competition that decides if you get to eat this month also when in spite of the odds solidarity and compassion do get realized in the workplace and it takes the form of a union capitalists are merciless in their efforts to turn workers against one another teamwork and collaboration are one thing but solidarity terrifies them of course real life is less binary than this we make friends on the job our boss can be a real life nice person but the built-in competitive element of Labor under capitalism puts a strain on these relationships and that's the problem the way our economy is organized runs against our natural drive and physical need to socialize it doesn't make it impossible but it sure as hell doesn't help and I've been talking for a while now but we still haven't gotten the full picture yet not only does capitalism's Reliance on a competitive labor force contribute to us feeling lonely at work its demand for ever greater exploitation makes work a larger part of a lonelier life if we go back to that study I used earlier the one with all the the graphs and the trends uh this one there we go if we go back to this study one of the main conclusions literally the first line at the top of the page in this big highlighted box says quote hours worked per week emerged as a structural constraint to Social connectedness in Normal words you work more you feel lonelier ass and grind [Music] do it what you doing but if you want something different in life you gotta do something different you gotta go all in your boss will always be trying to make you work more and pay you less that's one of the main ways they increase their profits if they do that by increasing your hours without touching your salary you now have less time to socialize if they do it by keeping your wage the same but reducing your hours you now have less money to spend on Leisure someone with a higher income may be able to pay for someone else to do their chores while someone earning less has no choice but to stay home and do it themselves regardless in either scenario what decides how lonely you are is the threat of poverty keeping you at your job and your boss taking advantage of that to either make you work more or pay you less they can't afford to care if that makes your life worse they need to be profitable and if you're lonely because of that that is not their concern and all this is before we even get to the neoliberal part of the equation you can add neoliberal culture and politics to these economic factors inherent to every iteration of capitalism neo-liberal culture values things like self-reliance rugged individualism disdain for the poor and unfortunate and of course neoliberal pundits are constantly hammering on the myth that meritocracy is real even though you can accurately predict a baby's future salary using only the ZIP code they're born in their race and their gender and on top of the rhetoric you can add neoliberal policy things like defunding social institutions like schools which are then forced to cut their arts and after school programs or defunding public health institutions where loneliness and other mental health difficulties could be treated or deregulating work so your boss can work you longer set aside loneliness for a second and think of mental health more broadly how many sources of anxiety stress suicidality depression anger and misery do you think could be avoided if we used all the empty houses at our disposal to guarantee people a home instead of sitting on them until they turn to profit how much of the mental health puzzle could we solve if millions of people didn't need to worry where their next meal would come from because we distributed food freely without bureaucratic means testing gumming up the works how much of a load off someone's mind would it be not needing to worry about getting around when their car breaks down because of a robust system of public transportation when all of society is geared towards maximum exploitation instead of Maximum well-being of course mental health is going to suffer between the material incentives of capitalists that isolate us from nature work each other and ourselves and neoliberal insistence that we are alone in our personal responsibilities combined with their policies that Force us to be it's a miracle we aren't even lonelier the solutions are on us it's on people it's on individuals but I forgot to mention another way this capitalist blindness further contributes to our isolation since the loneliness epidemic became part of the Zeitgeist employers have started using it as another argument in the long fight to bring workers back to the office after kovid a bunch of companies probably including the one where you work have spent the last few years playing around with this idea that work from home is to blame for all the isolation and loneliness people are feeling if you don't know what I'm talking about it's all those like come back to the office the culture here is so great statements every HR department is sending out and I don't fundamentally disagree with their premise their execution is laughable but work from home can be lonely however that doesn't mean going to the office is necessarily better nor is being forced back the solution people want we want our work to be less isolating more meaningful we want more time out of work to socialize most people want some amount of flexibility so they can stay at home part-time and go into the office every once in a while we want to have the power to put our social lives and our needs before profit maximization most people want the ability to have a say in how policies are decided but bosses don't want that they want absolute control this is not an employee choice they don't get to choose their compensation they don't get to choose their promotion they don't get to choose stay home five days a week I want them with other employees at least three or four days we've told people we expect them on May 17th one or two days a week get used to it get your head wrapped around it get your head wrapped around the fact that we may if we can and the legal issues about requiring vaccines but by June by mid-july 50 percent will be back in obviously capitalists think working from home means working less they already have a ton of surveillance Tech on people's computers to police you at home but of course that's obviously not as good as putting you in an open space where everyone's eyes are on your screen guilting you into never taking a break that's why they're always talking about returning to the office they don't care about loneliness they care about their bottom line and power they want to regain the control they lost when you stopped being in their line of sight eight hours a day five days a week none of these guys are doing interviews saying we work our people too hard and research shows that's making them lonely we should really tone it down no they just want to tell you what to do and make sure you do it or you know their real estate Moguls and they're losing money with all these empty office spaces here's the thing when we don't talk about all this about how overwork exploitation and our disgusting politics of rugged individualism profoundly affect loneliness we open the door to capitalists and their rhetoric if we don't talk about work they will and they get it exactly backwards they'll take this loneliness epidemic this massive detrimental problem to our society this thing that's making us miserable and literally killing us and use it as an argument for more time in the office like they're doing us a favor don't fall for it the roots of this problem go far deeper than they will ever acknowledge and before I cut this video off I want to reiterate something if you know or suspect a friend is having a hard time with these feelings of loneliness please reach out to them and if you're experiencing loneliness yourself please reach out to someone in your life or a medical professional or someone on the other end of a warm line to talk about it even with all this structural pressure around us there is help available it works and you can overcome this you are allowed to and deserve to feel happy we need more Connection in our life and that's how I want people to think about this loneliness is not a source of Shame it's like hunger or thirst a signal that our body sends us when we need something for our survival.
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
America's stunted political spectrum
with the 2020 presidential election fast approaching I thought now would be a good time to take a look at the American political spectrum and discuss just how little disagreement there actually is within American politics let's start with a tool we're probably all familiar with the political compass test this simple test has you answer a series of questions then based on your responses gives you a set of two values one for the x-axis and one for the y-axis which it uses to plot your overall political ideology on the chart for those unfamiliar with the compass it's a roughly accurate way to help you understand where your opinions fit in the wide range of political thought the x-axis represents economics with an economy run by a cooperative collective agency on the far left and a market left to the devices of competing corporations and individuals on the far right the y-axis represents social stances with the very top representing a complete obedience to Authority and the very bottom representing a maximization of personal freedom a lot of people get hung up on the left-right portion and conflate one side or the other with authoritarianism this is a mistake any point on the left-right spectrum is capable of authoritarianism for example you'll find leaders like Kim jong-un on the left and a Dolf Hitler on the right there's a vocal subset of figures on the right who love to claim that Hitler was a leftist but we'll get to that later in the video to give you a few examples of notable figures from each quadrant you'll find Mao Stalin Kim and Mugabe in the authoritarian left quadrant Hitler Viktor Orban Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the authoritarian right einar and Milton Friedman Friedrich Hayek and Gary Johnson in the libertarian right and Ghandi Thomas Paine Bernie Sanders and Nelson Mandela in the libertarian left so to reiterate the x-axis is economic stances and the y-axis is social stances as a small disclaimer no simple political test is the most accurate determinant for actual human ideology a two axis chart is simply not nuanced enough to be a hundred percent correct but the political compass is a useful tool for understanding broad trends and it's helpful for this type of analysis now let's look at the compass for the 2020 presidential race interesting right maybe not what you expected there's a whole lot of yelling and name-calling between presidential candidates and their supporters and detractors but when you take their voting records and plot them on a chart like this it becomes apparent that there's really not that much separating most of the candidates and bernie sanders who many people paint as a communist barely squeaked his way onto the left side of the spectrum what's going on here the reason a figure like bernie only just passes the center line is that the political compass isn't just mapping american sensibilities but the entirety of political thought the american political spectrum stops right about here anything beyond Bernie's moderate social democratic platform is absolutely unthinkable in modern-day America so why does our national political conversation stop so close to the center line one of the biggest reasons is the legacy of the Cold War the Red Scare was scary in the days when schools had nuclear attack drills anyone even remotely critical of the prevailing American political model was seen as a communist and sympathetic to the nation's greatest enemy this led to years of crackdowns on left-leaning political groups McCarthy's communists witch hunts and the general circling of the wagons around the quote American Way of life when the Soviet Union fell and the Eastern Bloc countries got both democracy and a free market at the same time the two axes of the political compass got tangled up this bundling led many to falsely equate free-market capitalism with democracy and more left-wing politics with authoritarianism if you need proof of just how ingrained this type of thinking has become in America take a look at these pictures the terminology is always the same blank equals communism apparently keeping baskin-robbins closed so people don't die from a deadly virus as communism who would have guessed when the incredibly popular Ronald Reagan came along and launched his campaign of deregulation tax rate reductions increased military spending and union-busting he put the final nail in the coffin of American left politics since then we've lived in an era of consensus politicians may appear to disagree on many subjects and they probably truly see each other as complete opposites but the truth of the matter is that with very few exceptions the entirety of American politics is contained within a single quadrant of the political compass the entire national political dialogue is framed to begin and end on the right so for the sake of expanding the national dialogue let's talk a little bit about the neglected left side of the spectrum but first we need to put one erroneous claim to rest there are some notable figures on the right who claim that Adolf Hitler was a leftist everyone's favorite felonious filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza and fail son extraordinaire ben shapiro are particularly vocal about it their argument usually boy down to well the Nazis were called the National Socialist Party checkmate okay sure but the Nazis were no more of a Socialist Party than North Korea is democratic by the people or a republic it's the same tactic taken by autocrats throughout history they pick a term their citizens associate with something good usually freedom or democratic or peoples and they adopt it to make themselves look good Hitler himself said our adopted term socialist has nothing to do with Marxian socialism so there you go to be fair bad faith arguments like those from D'Souza are generally dismissed by most thinking people but there are plenty of older folks who get caught in the trap which is sad because they're completely unaware of the fact that they're being taken advantage of but while we're on the topic of socialism I think it would be useful to explain what the ideology really represents after all the term has made quite a comeback in recent years with a larger percentage of young people across America having a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism socialism in America is a blanket term for generally leftist ideology a socialist would advocate for a more egalitarian society where there's not a tiny percentage of people hoarding all the wealth they want to end pointless Wars like the decades-old conflict in the Middle East where young men and women are sent to die and murder other humans for the sake of the rich and powerful they advocate for a more humane society where the sick can get treatment and not go bankrupt in the process where small businesses aren't crushed by multinational corporations and where people are paid fair wages for their work they also advocate for worker control of or at least worker involvement in enterprise that's a key point that most Americans seem to miss when someone shouts that the government issuing a quarantine is communism they're more than a little off base government doing stuff is not communism or even socialism if the US government were to establish a more robust safety net for workers laid off during the pandemic that still wouldn't be socialism nor should such a government be considered leftist if workers don't have a say in how enterprises run you have a left-leaning centrist government at most it's important to have at least a general understanding of what terms mean when we're talking about politics you hear a lot of right versus left freedom versus communism bickering in the u.s. but when you hear something like that remember just how similar mainstream politicians are these days don't buy into the fear-mongering and take the time to educate yourself about the whole spectrum of political not just the stunted American variety while the political compass test isn't perfect it's a good place to start if you'd like to understand more about your opinions and who shares them there's a link to take the test in the description below as well as links to the eight values and nine axis quizzes which attempt to further explore your personal ideology take the results from your quizzes and use them to find books to read on the subject American political understanding is not great but by learning more you can do just a little bit to fix that problem.
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Journal
Why the United States can't handle crisis
For people my age, whose formative years were filled with the effects of u, the odds are that the entirety of your lived experience has been one of crisis if you were born at any point after the 1980s. s activity our earliest memories include 911 and the invasion of iraq under false pretenses then we had the 2008 housing crash the realization that climate change was nearing a point of no return the acceleration of suicidal deregulation and privatization which has left our infrastructure weak and fragile the skyrocketing cost of tuition saddling young people who were told college was the only way to succeed with insurmountable debt and increasingly worthless degrees we've seen the birth and rapid rise of the gig economy relegating huge portions of the population to precarity and poverty and of course we've watched our coveted response become the worst in the world despite having advanced knowledge of the danger and plenty of resources to handle the situation appropriately for millennials and younger generations there's no such thing as the good old days we never experienced them we'll cover that topic more thoroughly in a future video but in this week's episode we're going to examine why the u. This video could easily last longer than an hour because there has been an alarming increase in crisis mismanagement over the past few decades. Instead, we're going to focus on a select few of them before moving on to the major ones. Let's start with an issue that is uniquely American: obesity. At first glance, you might not think that obesity is a crisis, but when you look at the numbers in the U. Things get a little worse as of 2018, 42.4% of all American adults were obese. This number sharply increased between 2000 and 2018, rising by nearly 12, while the prevalence of severe obesity nearly doubled, from 4.7% to 9.2%. Obesity in children is also a major issue, with nearly 1 in 5 of those between the ages of 2 and 19 being obese. Obesity is a serious health condition that comes with a host of negative consequences. 147 billion dollars, and given the rise in obesity rates over the intervening years, we can only assume that cost has increased significantly. Obesity is responsible for nearly one in five deaths in the United States. That's a crisis that isn't discussed nearly enough right now some people will just tell those who are obese to eat better, which is reasonable, but the causes of the crisis go far beyond personal responsibility. In the 1950s, after President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, scientists debated the causes of obesity, which was known to cause heart disease. There were two main schools of thought, one led by British physiologist and nutritionist J. Moving on to our final major crisis, the coronavirus, we're now right around the one-year mark for when Americans really began to realize just how serious the problem was in the past year over 500 000 American deaths from kovid we've had more cases and more deaths than anywhere else on earth this is the worst outbreak of kovid in recorded history. Republicans opposed mass mandates and claimed that the illness was no worse than the flu or that it was a Chinese hoax, and Democrats paid lip service to science but lied about how well they were handling their city's outbreaks, but politicians are not the only ones to fabricate facts when the country is in disarray. However, the politicians are not the only ones to lie. Vietnam, a nation with a 261 billion dollar gross domestic product, completely destroyed the United States, a nation with a 20 trillion dollar gross domestic product. Of course, you won't hear about this because it's not the first time the United States has chosen to keep quiet about losing to the Vietnamese, so yes, by all metrics, the United States' coronavirus response has been among the worst in the world.
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Journal
