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Watch the oligarchs move into their new roles. Jeff Bezos started out selling books. Now he's a multi-billionaire. He bought one of the best newspapers in the US: the Washington Post. But Trump publicly threatened his business, and Bezos is willing to suck up to Trump to stay out of trouble. So now he has decreed that the opinion section of the Post can only publish opinions in support of "free markets" and "personal liberties"... not against Trump.
But he's not really in favor of free markets: Amazon is a monopoly and exploits that power to the hilt.
And he's not really in favor of personal liberties: for example, Amazon forced their drivers to urinate in bottles and defecate in bags:
Bezos' notion of personal liberty is "freedom for me to be an oligarch... accountable only to the authoritarian boss." He acted liberal only when it didn't hurt his bottom line.
We cancelled our Washington Post subscription today.
@johncarlosbaez Somebody should remind Jeff Bozo that Putin ended up confiscating all of his own oligarch's wealth.
@hal_9000_DT - actually a bunch of oligarchs in Russia are doing just fine.... umm, as long as they do whatever Putin tells them to do.
@johncarlosbaez "100% commitment" to toe the line in journalism is the mark of the undead
WaPo is a zombie, don't let it eat anyone's brains
1--Cancel WaPO, 2--do not shop at Whole food groceries, 3--"try" not to shop on Amazon
Giving them our money is their source of power: deny!
@johncarlosbaez It was about time to do so.
@johncarlosbaez All the liberty you can afford, ratioed relative to a billionaire.
Turns out the road to serfdom actually went via conservative libertarianism.
@johncarlosbaez At least he seems to be stating clearly what opinions will be allowed/forbidden. I guess that's better than pretending to be unbiased. :-)
I mean, I read "first things" which is very right leaning... but that's exactly what they claim to be.
But yeah, if you don't want to hear these viewpoints without any counter points then it's time to unsubscribe. (I don't read the Washington Post in the first place. )
@poleguy - the Washington Post has been a great source of news about the US government: lots of details it's hard to find elsewhere.
@johncarlosbaez I bet he may even believe his free markets and liberties stance as anti-Trump depending on how Trump proceeds.
@johncarlosbaez Buy the newspaper to soon kill it. Haven't we seen this kind of thing before?
@johncarlosbaez Bezos probably once believed in free markets and may think of himself still that way even though he's now the near -monopolist.
Thing is, the patron he's looking to appease NEVER acted like he wanted to operate in a free market and invokes freedom less than any other politician.
@johncarlosbaez My wife canceled our subscription too (I would only read it occasionally).
@Ianagol - for us it's been a major source of "inside the Beltway" news about the federal government, and my wife also loves to read Carolyn Hax's advice column. There's a lot good about it, but it just became a propaganda outlet.
@johncarlosbaez In the longer term, we need to be thinking of how we can make democracy more stable.
I suspect that democracy can never be stable in the presence of very wealthy people. We should treat billionaires as a threat to the good working of democracy in the same way that monopolies are treated as a threat to the good working of markets. Billionaires should be restricted and regulated by the government. It might even be necessary to supress them altogether (Henry VIII did this with the monasteries in England when he felt the Roman Catholic Church was too powerful). One way to supress them would be to have progressive taxes which rise to 100% at a certain proportion of GDP. When a person's wealth nears that limit they can either continue accumulating money for the government or else they can go off and do something else. No need for revolutions. No need for anyone to be killed. Just one person mildly inconvenienced so everyone else can just get on with their lives.
Capitalism in the small and medium-scale but communism in the large.
This might be impracticable, it would almost certainly need a lot more thought to be made to work. But we need ideas to challenge the gobshittery with. We cannot challenge it by saying everything was OK as it was before.
@tristrambrelstaff @johncarlosbaez The 90+% marginal income tax of the XX century surely did a lot already. At the very least that, considering capital gains as income – too many loopholes.
@tristrambrelstaff - "No need for revolutions. No need for anyone to be killed. Just one person mildly inconvenienced so everyone else can just get on with their lives."
I agree with you except that it's too late for this in the US: the billionaires have won. The highest marginal federal income tax has been dropping and we can expect that to continue.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates
@tristrambrelstaff @albertcardona @johncarlosbaez You would have said the same about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, at this point.