Octavio
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the worker-owned cooperative model to take over for the capitalist model for a long time. It just seems to be a better outcome for everyone. You can’t squeeze the worker to extract wealth for the shareholders if the only shareholders are the workers. No need to squeeze the customers if there’s no hedge fund bros expecting a 20% return on their capital. But how often are workers going to have the money lying around to buy their company?
The workers may not have been interested in buying and as much as we may hate exploitation by capitalist pigs, it’s unrealistic to expect entrepreneurs to just give it all away. I think we’re still a ways off from the appetite for revolution is large enough to just take it from them. And I’m not sure that would be the right thing to do anyway. We do need people with the skill set to organize businesses and envision products and services. We just don’t need to keep treating such people as demigods. That would be enough revolution for me and they could still be the rich people, just not so grotesquely wealthy while people who make it all possible are struggling.
What I’m thinking of is like an investment fund that provides low-cost financing for groups of employees who are looking to buy their boss’s business, or for start-ups that are looking to organize their business as a worker-owned cooperative. Of course by definition this fund would earn less than market rates. Providing low cost financing is just providing low return investment opportunity from the other side. So investing in it would be more of a charitable contribution than an investment. But I don’t think the system is in place to facilitate financing of worker-owned cooperatives at present. I think a better use of our energies would be to figure out how to make such a framework than just screaming at capitalists. Just my take.
Boom, roasted.
There’s already so many places that have been cleared of trees, that also happen to be right near where the power is needed. They’re called rooftops.
Cool, 70% to go.
I ❤️ NY
Well their original charter was to investigate counterfeiting. The presidential protection thing was kind of an add-on. But my impression was that the original function was moved to a different agency and the USSS, originally under the treasury department, moved to Homeland Security. So I don’t know why they would have anything to with this. Unless I remembered that wrong.
Me too but only for a short time.
[jumps]
Great news. Cars are lasting longer these days. Only late stage capitalism could spin that as a bad thing.
Libertarians don’t give a flying fuck about liberty. It is an authoritarian movement that aims to eliminate any force standing in the way of their organizing society into a rigid hierarchy predicated upon wealth. A government that is answerable to the people is a countervailing force against the formation (or re-formation I suppose) of such a system. That was indeed the whole reason such a government was invented in the first place.