Our subscriptions mostly pay for the salesmen and the ads. They sell ads first, IT second. So I'm not gonna cry for RedHat. The image of the poor developers working in a cave, struggling to make money is only in our mind. They had a perfectly functional model but decided to sabotage some of it to try to squeeze even more money....
Back in the 1950s, a new, democratically elected Iranian government nationalized foreign oil interests. The UK and the US then backed a coup, deposing the progressive government with one more hospitable to foreign corporations:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Powerful and Continuing #Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of #patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. #Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the Recognition of #HumanRights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, and long incarcerations of prisoners.
Supremacy of the #Military
Even when there are widespread #domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
Rampant #Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional #gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to #abortion is high, as is #homophobia and anti-#gay legislation.
Controlled #MassMedia
Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation or by sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Government #censorship and #secrecy especially in war time, are very common.
Obsession with #NationalSecurity
Fear of hostile foreign powers is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
#Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
Protection of #Corporate Power
The #industrial and business #aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Suppression of #Labor Power
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor #unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
Disdain for #Intellectuals and the #Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to #HigherEducation and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other #academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
Obsession with #Crime and #Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the #police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego #CivilLiberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
Rampant #Cronyism and #Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
#Fraudulent#Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by #SmearCampaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control #voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
This post is a summary of Fascism, Anyone? by Lawrence W. Britt published in 2003 by Free Inquiry magazine."
Well, well, well... if you were wondering where the state-support for the #railways was going (as it certainly hasn't been driving down fairs), it would seem that the train-leasing sector is have a very good time.
Kevin Farnsworth has a term for this: 'corporate welfare' - the funnelling of taxpayers money into #corporate pockets with little regard for the impact on #voters interests....
Where there's a subsidy, there's a firm capturing it for their shareholders.
So #Mastodon has now passed 13m users....not all active, of course;
Nonetheless since there were under 3m accounts at the end of 2021, I think we can say, given the lack of a #corporate marketing campaign, and a constant drip of articles making spurious claims about how difficult it is to join the #fediverse, we have done pretty well in carving a new bit of the #socialmedia environment which functions with rules that serve us not the owners & advertisers of the platform.
VICE Ran Out of Money (For Everyone Except Its Executives) By Katie Way
"For instance, the company's Chief Operating Officer Cory Haik, who came to VICE by way of Mic, took home $726,068 between May 2022 and May 15, 2023, the date of VICE's bankruptcy filing. Folded into that sum was a $45,000 bonus on April 28, a little more than two weeks before VICE declared bankruptcy."
This year will be a big test for multilateralism & global #taxation.
Today, an agreement (three years ago) by 140 countries comes into force mandating a minimum effective tax rate of 15% on #corporate profits.
Q. is will the absence of 60 states from this agreement render it relatively ineffective, or are we at last seeing a move to ensure corporations contribute properly to the social #infrastructure of the countries in which they operate?
[Also see yesterday's post of Sol Piciottos' blog]
Opinion: Why the birthplace of the Western #Apache religion shouldn’t be destroyed by a #CopperMine
by Luke Goodrich
February 6, 2024·
"A federal court is poised to decide whether a #NativeAmerican#sacred site will be destroyed by a massive #copper#mine. Mining proponents claim that destroying the #SacredSite is necessary for the development of #GreenEnergy. That claim is both factually wrong and morally repugnant. And recent polling shows that the vast majority of Americans agree with what the constitution requires: #Native sacred sites deserve the same protection as all other houses of worship.
"Since before European contact, #WesternApache and other Native tribes have lived and honored their #Creator at #OakFlat, or 'Chi’chil Bildagoteel.' The site is the birthplace of Western Apache religion and the site of ancient religious ceremonies that cannot take place anywhere else. Because of its religious and cultural significance, Oak Flat is on the National Register of Historic Places and has been protected from mining and other destructive practices for decades.
"That changed in 2014, when several members of Congress, supported by #corporate#mining#lobbyists, slipped an amendment into a must-pass defense bill authorizing the transfer of Oak Flat to a foreign-owned mining giant. That company, #ResolutionCopper, announced plans to obliterate the sacred ground by swallowing it in a mining crater nearly two miles wide and 1,100-feet deep, ending Apache religious practices forever. That was no surprise given the company’s sordid history dealing with #IndigenousPeoples. The majority owner of Resolution Copper is #RioTinto (the world’s second largest mining company), which sparked international outrage in 2020 when it destroyed a 46,000-year-old rock shelter with some of the most significant #Aboriginal artifacts in all of #Australia.
"The Apache and their allies, represented by my firm, the #BecketFundForReligiousLiberty, have been fighting in court to ensure that such an atrocity won’t repeat itself at Oak Flat. After initial court rulings against the Apache, a full panel of 11 judges at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reheard their appeal last spring. A decision on whether the government can execute the land transfer is expected any day.
"Resolution Copper and its backers want the public to believe that building the mine is essential for developing #renewable energy. Extracting the copper beneath Oak Flat, they say, will help to build batteries necessary for powering #ElectricVehicles and thus fight #ClimateChange. In other words, we have to destroy Oak Flat in order to save the planet.
"These claims, however, are false — and they are specifically designed to obscure the physical and cultural destruction the project would wreak on the land.
"The mine will destroy the #environment, not save it. It is undisputed that the mine will swallow the ecologically diverse landscape of Oak Flat in a massive crater, decimating the local #ecosystem. It will also leave behind approximately 1.37 billion tons of '#tailings,' or #MiningWaste, which, according to the government’s own environmental assessment, will pollute the #groundwater and scar the landscape permanently. And the mine will consume vast quantities of water at the time it is most needed by drought-stricken towns and #farmers.
"Supporters of the mine are also at odds with the majority of Americans. According to this year’s Religious Freedom Index, an annual survey conducted by Becket, 74% of Americans believe that Native sacred sites on federal land should be protected from mining projects, even when the projects are purportedly pro-jobs and pro-environment.
"That conclusion is both sensible and humane. America can transition to renewable energy without blasting the cradle of Western Apache religion into oblivion. And it should. For too long, our nation has made excuses for taking advantage of #IndigenousPeople and their land. Indeed, our nation drove the Western Apache off Oak Flat and surrounding lands in the 1800s precisely to make way for #MiningInterests. It shouldn’t repeat that #injustice again.
"It is past time to protect Indigenous sacred sites from further destruction. Basic fairness and our constitutional commitment to religious freedom require no less. And, happily, most Americans agree."
A key to the reforming the global economy is a reset of #corporate#tax regulation.
For years this was the remit of the #OECD but frustrated by the slowness of reform, developing countries tried to move the project to the #UnitedNations.
This resulted in a UN report last year & a series of voluntary standards as the first steps of reform.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, its now emerged that the UK & EU have been 'rubbishing' the report & working against these reforms.
Affiche pour la #BnF site de Richelieu vue dans le métro. Le texte me laisse perplexe mais je la trouve belle! #corporate Et sinon, allez-y: la rénovation est très réussie, on peut aller bouquiner (gratuitement) dans la salle Ovale et visiter le musée qui expose des pièces choisies dans les collections. #bibliotheque#bibliothequeNationaleDeFrance
A judge on Tues ruled that #ElonMusk's $56 billion #Tesla pay package could be tossed, calling the compensation "an unfathomable sum" that was not fair to #shareholders, acc/to a court filing.
The ruling swept away the largest pay package in #corporate America. The judge found it was
negotiated by directors who seemed #beholden to their headline-making CEO & the promise of allowing him to share in the company's enormous growth.
Today in London, in a long running case where a an #Energy firm was trying to extract $11bn of damages from #Nigeria for a failure to build a pipeline promised in a contract, has resulted in the case being judged to be based on a fraudulent contract and as such now looks like at an attempt at international extortion (via the UK's arbitration sector).
Once again London is being tainted by the manner in which it tramples over others' in the #corporate interest!
"President #Biden blasted corporate “price gouging” more forcefully this week than ever before...
assailing firms for not lowering prices even as supply chains have healed. “Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even [as] supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging,” he said in a speech" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/01/biden-price-gouging-inflation/
Rather than kowtow to #corporate demands about content, #JonStewart has chosen to end his show on #Apple+. #Media#censorship of even basic liberal content is pervasive. Folks with actual leftist views have almost no chance of being heard.
I don't like the term #neoliberalism (its imprecise use renders it a weak criticism), but the UK's malaise is clearly linked to the domination of a mindset dominated by the construction of #markets as a general social panacea, the instrumentalisation of public life, the privileging of #corporate interests & the domination of a thin understanding of the good life....
if this is neoliberalism, then that is the the problem.
Whatever; the UK needs a major rethink about its socio-economic model(s)
"The #UK is pulling out of a treaty that lets fossil fuel firms sue governments over their #climate policies.
The [#EnergyCharterTreaty] allows fossil fuel investors to sue states for lost profit expectations in an opaque corporate arbitration system set up to protect fossil fuel investors in the former Soviet economies in the 1990s."
Here is a primer on the "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) and the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). It's not the only primer out there but when Doctorow writes it, it makes you laugh even as you're horrified, and you remember it.
The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population >>
"The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, #biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, #civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough #babies.
“The entire global #financial system, the value of your money, and every #asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth...." >>
>> "...#corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These #systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, #hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their #office jobs, often at the expense of starting a #family. But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having #children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. >
Reminder that RedHat makes A LOT of money already. The results of the 2019 fiscal year show that RedHat spends twice as much money on ads and sales people than on developers. (www.businesswire.com)
Our subscriptions mostly pay for the salesmen and the ads. They sell ads first, IT second. So I'm not gonna cry for RedHat. The image of the poor developers working in a cave, struggling to make money is only in our mind. They had a perfectly functional model but decided to sabotage some of it to try to squeeze even more money....