Neocolonialism maybe?
That you can lease prison labor.
Hong Kong’s subway system offers fare discounts if you use the entrances/exits that require you to walk through a mall, as part of their monetisation of spaces required to access public services
Maybe this
Amerika
Is the answer not chattel slavery?
A peanut with a top hat and a monocle selling you other peanuts, to eat.
Capitalists will say that it’s fine for an economy to have a few capitalists own all capital and all physical and intellectual property while common people are only allowed to rent it from the capitalists at whatever rate the capitalist pleases. However, capitalists will also say that the evil of socialism is that you won’t be allowed to own property. That’s the most capitalist thing I’m aware of.
Capitalists also say “You’ll own nothing and be happy”, the part they leave out is that it’s because you will rent every from them. In filthy socialism, the state holds everything in trust for the people and nobody makes any profits from ownership (the true power of capital).
This is golden.
I see a private ambulance service driving around my town occasionally and it always makes my skin crawl
all the mercenary healthcare strikes me as creepy capitalism.
“In the interest of user safety and security…”
Always before some dumb new draconian shit
Motorcycle airbag vests that will not work if you aren’t up-to-date on the subscription payments when you have a crash…
suppressing wages and social housing so that starvation and homelessness make labour cheaper
Today I heard Meta has laid off workers because they brought their own food for lunch instead of buying it from the company cafeteria.
Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee’s part.
Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.
You see, I at least buy food from my lunch stipend, although it’s usually my grocery trip and not necessarily my lunch of the day. And I only get about 7€ lunch stipend per day, not >40€.
A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org
We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.
An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.
Here in Sweden we currently have the problem that hospitals are understaffed and keeping wages of nurses so low that a lot of nurses quit and leave the others with an even crazier workload so the hospitals buy nurses semi permanently from temp agencies that cost multiple times more and the rental nurses have better pay and agreements of overtime and such. We had a well functioning health care but then the privatisation of everything and selling out communally owned services to private profit making schemes since the 90s. Because our government has been dominated by right wing market liberals and “sossehöger” - social democrats that jump on right wing populism to stay in power when they can rather than being consistent in left wing ideals.
Fucking end the market liberal experiment already. “The market solves all problems” - yeah, of it’s own interest which is how to squeeze out more profits regardless the how and how low it stoops.
EVERY instance of ‘public-private’ healthcare goes that route, touted as the wave of the future and a seamless melding of public interest and delicious capitalist pork, and then every single one of them gets drunk on the cash and goes toxic like this.
It’s happening to Canada too. And France. And London.
Damn, I didn’t know America was contagious…
It’s been the strategy of the right wing here since forever - get in power sell out as much they can (and for some unfathomable reason for discount prices), fuck things up in general, leave it to a left wing government to salvage what can be saved while blaming them for public service being garbage so they can motivate selling out more when they have power again. It’s a mix of blind idealists and profiteering scum that are in liaison with the right wing nationalist party with former nazi connections and obviously the Christian democrat leader that models the party according to the republicans is the most buddy-buddy with the fringe right.
And the populist right wing of course romanticises about the good days when everyone had housing and was safe and provided and so on - that was built solely by the left and the right wing fought them every step of the way and that they have since then torn down. Blatant lies and disinformation all the way.
But it is what people vote for. We get the societal break down we deserve.
Whoa, I thought that just Australia was following American economics. The descent into privatisation on everything. I guess there are greedy and ignorant people everywhere. For some reason knowing Sweden is also going down the neoliberal toilet it makes me feel better and I dont know why. I guess its a feeling of inevitability.
Reminds me of John Stewart stating that to combat vested interest takes energy and effort every single day.
There are so many groups taking advantage of our overworked lives combined with the over abundance of useless information that distracts us from the real issues that impacts us. Its very difficult to know how and where to direct our energy. Of course thats my view as a social/environmental person. However, if you love the conservative/neoliberal view of the world. Then congratulations, things must seem pretty great right now.
Thats fucking sad