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Why Barney Frank Went to Work for Signature Bank

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-barney-frank-went-to-work-for-signature-bank

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  On 3/16/2023 at 9:24 AM, usagi said:

 

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just noticed ur name means rabbit in japanese

cute

兎

  On 3/16/2023 at 9:24 AM, usagi said:

 

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watched this video earlier and immediately called my job to tell them i was feeling sick today

Kill all the white man!

-Albert Einstein

I’m not an expert on politics but based on my recent personal experience of the company I always enjoyed working for which was recently privatised and now has become a hell hole to turn up to I would say I’m totally convinced capitalism is evil. Before we always made profit yet now work volumes have trebled we are now losing millions. How is that possible? It’s a total disgrace and I wouldn’t shed a drop of emotion if the CEO and all his parasitic mates all died in a plane crash. It’s the Royal Mail by the way. Let’s hope the government step in and sort the absolute disaster out. 

Twice the CEO cunt has been called to a parliamentary committee to explain himself. The second time they made him swear on the bible under oath that he was telling the truth because they (and he) know damn well he’s blatantly lying through his teeth. Absolute cunt of a man.

Prepare the guillotine. And make sure the blade is as blunt as it possibly can be…

500 year old company destroyed by greedy pig men. I’ll turn you into chops ya filthy cunts  

we may get to see WATMM cited in a UK court case some day, wild times

  On 3/30/2023 at 8:18 PM, beerwolf said:

500 year old company destroyed by greedy pig men. I’ll turn you into chops ya filthy cunts  

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is there any company that old that doesn't have a past full of crimes or sad dark history of owning slaves and benefiting from colonialism or something like that? hard to imagine a 500 year old company existing w/o blood on its hands... not saying they're getting what they deserve just an observation/useless thought.  greedy pig men is sort of what capitalism is right?

  On 3/30/2023 at 8:18 PM, beerwolf said:

500 year old company destroyed by greedy pig men. I’ll turn you into chops ya filthy cunts  

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give'm hell beerwolf

  On 3/31/2023 at 6:20 PM, ignatius said:

 hard to imagine a 500 year old company existing w/o blood on its hands... 

Well the man who founded it? He cut off two of his six wives heads!

Ahh the good old days  

I'm starting to think that capitalism is great for getting things going, but once a publicly-traded company grows to a certain size, capitalism will always dictate that they continue growing. For bigger companies, this almost always comes at the expense of the employees.  Cutting benefits, "doing more with less", mergers, just-in-time supply chains, etc.

When I started working for my employer (Johnson & Johnson) 11 years ago, my division (Consumer Products: slow-growing, steady) was seen as a ballast of sorts.  When the pharma and med. device divisions were more volatile, we provided a ballast for the company.  We still had a pension plan (lol) and great benefits.  The most recent CEO took over and within a year, froze the pension plan, reduced health care benefits for retirees, and spun off my division to become a separate company (because they shopped us around and we were too big for someone to buy).  Rumor is that he's going to do the same to med. device, just leaving J&J to be a pharma company, where the stock price can go up much faster (nevermind that J&J actually started as the Consumer business, gauze, Band-Aid, etc.).  It's disgusting.  Although I'm lol-ing hard that J&J has to keep the (multi-billion dollar) talc litigation liability, even though they shed us, and that their Texas two-step bankruptcy maneuver has just been shot down in appellate court.

  On 4/1/2023 at 10:04 PM, randomsummer said:

I'm starting to think that capitalism is great for getting things going, but once a publicly-traded company grows to a certain size, capitalism will always dictate that they continue growing.

i’ve though of this route before…a hybrid system where you’ve got capitalism to find the best viable methods and innovations for new needs/tech/etc. but as winners grow, gov regulations slowly constrain them and (in some cases) make them essentially utilities/public services (essentially this has happened for electrical companies, telephone service somewhat, etc.) eventually. 

  On 4/1/2023 at 10:04 PM, randomsummer said:

I'm starting to think that capitalism is great for getting things going

well if you look at how the framework of capitalism itself "got things going" it involves

-mass genocide

-land enclosure

-theft of personal property

-privatization of public resources

nothing about that is great

and once it "gets going", how does it expand and make money?  literal theft of the surplus labor value of the workers, each of whom is coerced into working there by the threat of homelessness or poverty

I'm still not convinced that capitalism is evil...

...   Capitalists and Other Psychopaths , By William Deresiewicz 

  On 4/18/2023 at 3:32 AM, zlemflolia said:

well if you look at how the framework of capitalism itself "got things going" it involves

-mass genocide

-land enclosure

-theft of personal property

-privatization of public resources

nothing about that is great

and once it "gets going", how does it expand and make money?  literal theft of the surplus labor value of the workers, each of whom is coerced into working there by the threat of homelessness or poverty

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Thanks for taking me out of context.  I was talking about getting a new business off the ground / creating new jobs.  You probably knew that but couldn't pass up an opportunity to troll.  I have a feeling that you might be confusing capitalism with imperialism with the whole mass genocide, theft of personal property... stuff wrt what I said.

IMO, the incentives for job and wealth creation for everyone are the most effective in capitalism with respect to creating new and innovative companies.  From my experience, smaller, new companies are much more pro-worker.  Problems begin to arise when that company grows to a point where it cannot sustain enough growth through innovation and market expansion, and then it has to rely on squeezing the workers and doing more shady things like "cheating" on or evading corporate taxes, or going to foreign countries and taking their land / labor.  That's when I believe capitalism fails the working class, and I don't have a solution of what to do after that.  Now, aside from changing the mindset of an entire population, I don't see how one could create the same incentives for new companies to be created and accelerate faster in any other system that's out there right now, but I'll admit I am not nearly as knowledgeable on this subject as some of you and I'm more than willing to be educated.  I'll also admit that what I said above assumes that the model for an economy should be infinite growth, which I think is something that will have to change in the not-too-distant future.

On a personal note, I'm much more socialistic in my beliefs than you probably think.  I work for a giant company and despise it almost every hour of every working day.  I have had a front row seat in witnessing my employer do so many truly shitty, immoral things.  However, I'm a realist and not about to go live on a commune, so I decided to take my employer for as much money as possible from the inside, and have encouraged many colleagues to do the same.  I employ the golden rule, I treat my employer as well / poorly as it treats me.  I'm lucky in that I'm somewhat of a specialist which puts me in a position to take my employer for $$$ while pretty much doing as much or as little work as I choose (although my work ethic and morals won't allow me to totally fleece my employer).

  On 4/18/2023 at 12:55 PM, randomsummer said:

Thanks for taking me out of context. [...]

I am known to ramble and take things out of context, but I'm not a troll

And no I don't mean imperialism, I mean plain typical capitalism.  it was achieved through extremely bloody revolutions and violent theft of resources.  and imperialism is anyway a necessary result of capitalist expansion, not something that can even be isolated from it to treat a capitalism as pure until imperialism develops, no rather they are dynamic systems causing one another, resulting in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/]

maybe youre right that megacorps are more immoral, and maybe small companies that know employees personal are less bad, but a common experience of workers in small mom and pop owned shops is that they are expected to love and care about the company as much as the owners, despite being nothing more than underpaid wage laborers, and are exploited sometimes even more heavily than in megacorps.

living in communes in capitalist societies is individualistic lifestyle adventurism and not a pathway to achieving communism unless they are a part of a revolutionary anti-capitalist program supporting a socialist movement, not some nudist hippies (who I have nothing against but they are not communist necessarily)

think of it this way, capitalism has a concept of private property as its central principle.  but how do you start that?  was everyone given some private property and then the capitalism button is pressed and people start competing?  no, the richest and most powerful took by force what they wanted, to create their initial capitals.  it even continues to this day as financial manipulation bankrups millions, murders others, ruins their government systems, entire public forests are sold for pennies on the dollar to private interests and cut down to create cop cities, etc. 

the rosy image of competition is propaganda spread by capitalists and their governments

  On 4/18/2023 at 9:48 PM, Summon Dot E X E said:

You're right about capitalism. Of course it's been horribly exploitative. That's how Marx's writing was able to convince the intelligentsia in all the places where communism has gone into effect, and how they were able to browbeat the populations in submission. When you're in hell, as millions in the chains of the naked, brutal power of capital have been, an intellectually appealing alternative is alluring. I myself was under that idealistic spell from age 15 until about 28.

However, humanity has certain limits and weaknesses, and history keeps repeating itself. We are prone to so many fallacies, emotional decision making, etc.

What you don't realize yet, or have made excuses for, is the fact that communism is every bit as brutal. It always has been, and it always will be. Just like capitalism, it's a small hegemony which rules vast amounts of resources and people. It also controls thought, which is something we are seeing now in "capitalism". I put it in quotes now because we have long since left the free market and have something more like totalitarian hegemony in virtually every country, in which information is the most powerful weapon.

I spoke to Noam Chomsky about this a decade ago. Regarding what we should do, he said:

Communism has been an attempt to either design an ideal society (that always fails horribly for the same reasons), or it is an attempt to enslave people.

At any rate, the present-day Maoists with their Little Red Books are having fun with their ritual humiliation on the internet these days, and we're getting close to the story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov, whether it was fabricated or not, with children being turned against their parents through the information they receive.

There's really no precedent for what's happening now with the hyper-connectedness of the internet, the addictive, soul-destroying power of social media, and the god-like potential of AI which will certainly be wielded by those unworthy of that type of power.

Beware false dichotomies, false tribes, false information, manipulated emotions, and manufactured consent.

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well chomsky is not a communist so of course he would say that

do you prefer china went down the capitalist road and probably never even remotely reached its current level of advancement, and was just another colony still?