***Official Political Discussion Thread***

I am laughing at gas prices going up because no one wants to haul it. :lol:

I hope these drivers get what they deserve.

soon nobody will work. Dudes and girls will just live off crypto and only fans. :pimp:
 
I know it’s fun to hate on “capital”, but from my experience, a good 60 to 70 percent of the people who work on Wall Street tend to be sincerely focused on minimizing bias against women, PoC’s, and people identifying as non-cishet. These days neurodiversity gets attention as well.

I think it’s pretty clear from the evolving concept of “whiteness” that you can marginalize prejudice against various groups while still promoting the economic status quo. In the 80’s and 90’s, trading floors had very good representation from Italian and Jewish people from New Jersey and Long Island that wouldn’t have gotten their feet in the door of a white shoe firm a half-century before. And you can say the same thing now with women and Asians. Obviously, there’s still work to be done with women, African Americans, and US-born Latin Americans -especially in senior management roles, but I do think that Wall Street is doing a better job than, say, Silicon Valley or academia at both recruiting and discouraging workplace hostility. So if your goal is to provide a bit of financial security for yourself and your family and not to capture the means of production, Wall Street tends to be a pretty good place to do that.

You can dismiss the efforts as cynical ploys by the ”cabal of international bankers” to disrupt organized labor or even as insincere manners affected by the elite. But I think a far simpler explanation is that people who are educated in the supposed hotbeds of liberal elitism do tend to be exposed to (non-ecomnomic) diversity and generally shed themselves of ignorance rooted in stereotypes. Also, good help is hard to find and managers look out very closely for unhappy, high-performing people. Bias is a somewhat expensive indulgence.
 
I know it’s fun to hate on “capital”, but from my experience, a good 60 to 70 percent of the people who work on Wall Street tend to be sincerely focused on minimizing bias against women, PoC’s, and people identifying as non-cishet. These days neurodiversity gets attention as well.

I think it’s pretty clear from the evolving concept of “whiteness” that you can marginalize prejudice against various groups while still promoting the economic status quo. In the 80’s and 90’s, trading floors had very good representation from Italian and Jewish people from New Jersey and Long Island that wouldn’t have gotten their feet in the door of a white shoe firm a half-century before. And you can say the same thing now with women and Asians. Obviously, there’s still work to be done with women, African Americans, and US-born Latin Americans -especially in senior management roles, but I do think that Wall Street is doing a better job than, say, Silicon Valley or academia at both recruiting and discouraging workplace hostility. So if your goal is to provide a bit of financial security for yourself and your family and not to capture the means of production, Wall Street tends to be a pretty good place to do that.

You can dismiss the efforts as cynical ploys by the ”cabal of international bankers” to disrupt organized labor or even as insincere manners affected by the elite. But I think a far simpler explanation is that people who are educated in the supposed hotbeds of liberal elitism do tend to be exposed to (non-ecomnomic) diversity and generally shed themselves of ignorance rooted in stereotypes. Also, good help is hard to find and managers look out very closely for unhappy, high-performing people. Bias is a somewhat expensive indulgence.

First let me clarify, I don’t really begrudge people trying to secure a decent life for themselves through employment with an employer that does bad things. The exception is if you run for office because ostensibly, you’re representing a State or district that in most cases is made up mostly of people who are not prosecutors,, finance guys and corporate lawyers and yet our politicians are disproportionately drawn from those groups. But other than that, if you’re just trying to make a decent living, you don’t deserve scorn. Systems deserve scorn.

While some managers of capital are more open to diversity, it cannot change the fact that we are on a glide path to living in a country where 80% of Americans will be poor or right on the verge of poverty and won’t ever own a home or be out of debt or able to retire or even take a sick day or have a predictable schedule. And while the cohort, who do get to enjoy economic security and some autonomy at work, is becoming a bit more diverse, it really doesn’t matter that much compared to the suffering of the much bigger and much more diverse bottom 80%. IMO, you can measure social prospect by the conditions of the people at the bottom than the people near the top. Until all the big grocery chains and retailers let their associates sit down while working a cash register, I’m not especially impressed that Goldman gives its white collar workers paid mental health days.

Now since you are obliquely accusing me of anti Semitic tropes, I have to address it. As you probably know, capital is borderless, it dictates working people’s lives, it tells ostensibly sovereign nations what do to, and steals the fruits of people’s labor. It is no coincidence that the rich Catholics and rich Protestants, who screwed over poor Catholics and Protestants, assigned all of the bad traits of capitalism onto an ethnic and religious minority. When I say capital I mean capital.

Ultimately though, I agreed that there are a lot of people among the PMC and bourgeoisie, who care about social justice, and some of them are trying to do what they can in their company and in their departments to make their workplace more inclusive and that’s better than trying to maintain an all white boys’ club but it’s a drop in the ocean of injustice. And not only that, history has shown that as soon as either material conditions worsen and there’s less to go around or when faced which serious challenges from the working class, the liberal bourgeois and professional class turn reactionary in a hurry. I don’t say this in a finger pointing manner, I say this in a looking in the mirror manner since I’m not from the working class and don’t know how I’ll react when climate crisis intensifies or even of/when workers rightfully become a revolutionary force.

I suppose this is a round about way of saying that I’m not super impressed by people with money and/or power being nice, its the absolute least we can do. It’s the system that needs to be focused on and the key to having a genuinely equitable system is one where capital is out if the picture or at least is radically constrained.
 
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aepps20 aepps20 come get your people. They're losing the plot.
 
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aepps20 aepps20 come get your people. They're losing the plot.

sometimes, in my most optimistic moments, I look at the post-Trump Republicans flailing around flaccid af, NYPD replacing robot dogs with social workers, and mass labor shifts out of minimum wage "hero jobs" and get ideas that the tide might be turning after all this.

then 8 people get shot up somewhere, Jeff Bezos buys a city, or COVID gets another life bar and it's right back to a future of grey skies.

this is a fateful period in human history.
 
Someone define the new buzz word “critical race theory” for me. I see it getting tossed around Fox News all morning.
 
Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie introduced a bill that would create a publicly funded trust fund — known as a baby bond — for children whose families make less than $132,000 a year. Upon birth, every eligible child in D.C. would receive a $1,000 payment from the government into their fund, followed by annual, income-based supplemental payments that could reach $2,000 for the lowest-income children. Once they turn 18, each child would be able to withdraw the money for specific uses like education, business ownership or investment, or to purchase a home.


 
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