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It's staggering that as the richest and most powerful nation ever to exist, we've put ourselves in a position where we can't safely transport chemicals, we won'

It's staggering that as the richest and most powerful nation ever to exist, we've put ourselves in a position where we can't safely transport chemicals, we won't provide comprehensive information about contamination to those affected, we either can't or aren't able to put any kind of comprehensive cleanup plan in place, and we can't find trustworthy parties to enact that cleanup. This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so." The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.

libraryatnight 4y ago
I had a bit of a melt down yesterday while a company all hands meeting was taking place. This guy spoke for 15 minutes and said not one thing that wasn't just a business buzz word, there wasn't a bit of substance, and I realized and cried out to my wife "This fuckhead has no idea what's going on or what this company even does the only thing he knows is how to be an MBA" As soon as something swaps hands from the person or people who built it because they understood the problem it solved to people who only see it as an engine for profit it begins to die, and we've set up systems to make the death long and agonizing while the MBAs bleed it dry.
- paiute 4y ago
  I felt the same as you when I was younger, but next time watch the faces of all the non-engineers in the room. It will start to make sense.
  - felipemnoa 4y ago
    For the rest of us that will probably not have a chance to be in the same situation, could you please explain?
    - 88913527 4y ago
      I think he's saying they're eating it up. I haven't bothered paying attention to business-type's face's in all hands when a business person presents, but I imagine they glow up at corpspeak. Those with more technical specialties are more likely to have a neutral reaction, or more realistically a pokerface.
    - paiute 4y ago
      Persuasion basically. They can take any situation and make most of the room feel good and confident in the business. Good politicians do this too. It doesn't work on everyone, but it works well enough.
      - felipemnoa 4y ago
        Got it. Never would have guessed.
- wiml 4y ago
  That is the core tenet of the MBA — that managing one kind of enterprise is just the same as managing any other; there is no need for domain knowledge, and it's probably actually counterproductive.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- fiat_fandango 4y ago
  This is why I quit being a TPM - at one point I just started making up bogus words and every PM (non-technical) with an MBA immediately jumped at the opportunity to use a cool new word. The day that did it for me, aside from the company failing to realize any pivot towards actual revenue was "well, at this point our best case outcome is to be revenue-neutral but ideally by Q4 with the current POC we'll be revenue-positive and able to reneg on prior action items". Just say, what we're doing right now isn't working and we're not making money...
recycledfood 4y ago
The twelve occurrences of "we" in your comment imply agency and consent where little to none existed. "We", which is to say a majority of residents and citizens of the US, constituting the working class, had these things imposed on us by others who have systematically and successfully manufactured the appearance of consent over a period of decades, the ongoing results being consistently undermining the working class and incepting a kind of learned helplessness that justice can never be found. The "cult of the MBA" is apt, although a more appropriate appellation might be the "cult of Mammon".
- roughly 4y ago
  As Warren Buffet put it, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." I agree with all of what you've said, although I think folks have been more willing contributors to the process than you suggest.
  - ineptech 4y ago
    This makes it sound like the wealthy colluded against the masses, which I don't think is accurate. It's a coordination trap: each individual is doing what's in their individual best interest, but the result is collectively bad for everyone. The solution is to change the incentives, e.g. laws that make it more profitable to clean up pollution than to pollute, but it seems unattainable because a feedback loop has concentrated power in the hands of the people who are most insulated from the problems, which is sort of the opposite of the intended outcome of democracy.
    - Guthur 4y ago
      They colluded to enrich themselves without end. Seeking monopoly rents and pushing infrastructure, social and environmental costs on to others to increase the margin. We allow the rewarding of truly psychotic behaviours, there is a reason why most executives seem to exhibit these traits.
      - 4y ago
jostylr 4y ago
This is not free market, but a captured regulated market. Companies bet that the government will cover over their mistakes. In an actual free market where the company and the people making the decisions would be held accountable for the damages done to 3rd parties, this would not happen. The need to insure would motivate people to find cost effective ways to make it safe. Consequential failure is a big motivator. I work for a place that is regulated by the city and insurance. I find the city to be unhelpful, unresponsive, and largely useless in helping us. They just want the fees paid. The insurance companies, however, will send out inspectors that work with us to right anything that might be unsafe, explain their concerns, and generally are looking to have a good profitable relationship with us. There was one company that did not do good inspections. We stopped working with them and now work with a different company. I have no such option for working with the government as we are quite locally based. Also, the city owned sewage treatment facilities are major polluters. Government control often leads to pollution (see various authoritarian governments, our military, various municipalities,...) As for the sense of mutual obligation, it has withered, but my bet is that it is the theoretical outsourcing of it to government which has undermined it. Without that failing crutch, we would have to work together and look out for each other, bringing to the table immense social pressure for those outside social norms. That has its own downside, but it is much more flexible and resistant to corruption than the monopolistic government power structure. One danger is, of course, rich outsiders who can take over large tracts of land with money. But in our current system, they buy up politicians who use eminent domain to take the choice away from the owners and the people at large. In a private ownership system, they would have to convince everyone to sell which is way harder to do.
- CodexArcana 4y ago
  This is an incredibly utopian view of the free market that has never existed in any implementation of the laissez faire free market philosophy. Competition yields winners, and those winners buy out the losers, leading to monopolization and wealth consolidation. You've identified the problem, the railroads are a captured market, but it's because most regulatory bodies are operated by former agents of those industries or those taking large amounts of money from those industries. These industries DO get bailed out, because they have captured the regulatory mechanism. Their wealth consolidation allows them that power, especially in the post Citizens United world we live in. The things you view as failings of the government are corporate successes in the never ending squeeze of year after year growth. The power structures inside these corporations are squarely authoritarian in their design. You have no real agency within your workplace. The most freedom I've ever experienced in my work history has been working for government agencies, specifically public education, doing IT work. This idea that, in the absence of government intervention, we (citizens) would have the agency to do the right thing in these moments completely ignores the massive amount of leverage the corporation has over its workers. Since these corporations are top down, hierarchical, and authoritarian in their organization, the only will the workers have is that of those at the top. In this case, the executives and shareholders who historically have shown to not be interested in taking a loss for the sake of safety. You mention that, under the utopian vision of the free market, we would go to another vendor. So who would we decide to transport with? The rail systems are regionalized and to get from one part of the country to the other you have to make trilateral or quadrilateral deals with these companies. In other words you are forced to use all of them on some leg of the journey. This regionalization means that there is an oligopoly on the rail system. How are you going to create a "competing" rail system in any of these regions when these companies own all the rails?
sidewndr46 4y ago
Replace "can't safely transport chemicals" with "don't bother to safely transport chemicals" and then you have an accurate statement.
- roughly 4y ago
  At some point the capacity atrophies from disuse. Right now, if the EPA wanted to find an incinerator that didn't have a clear history of poor-quality operations, could they? If the owner of those chemicals wanted to ship their chemicals in the safest manner possible, could they? How could they verify that the chemicals would be treated with care and concern?
hibernator149 4y ago
Reminds me of the railroad tunnel accident in Atlas Srugged by Ayn Rand. That happened for exactly the same reason. Only that the greedy railroad boss Dagny Taggart took the accident seriously and tried to fix it. We live in a world where having people like Taggart, Rearden, or Galt at the top would be an improvement. Just think about that... (How is it that Ayn Rand is always so right? </sarcasm>)
DanHulton 4y ago
I would say this actually IS a politics problem, just not the simple "right vs left" issue that everyone assumes "politics" means these days. "What to do about late-stage capitalism?" is actually an explicitly political question.
- scruple 4y ago
  Well, the problem there is, IMO, no one with any power in politics on the left or the right has any sort of vision for what comes next.
  - myko 4y ago
    Power is collective, no one can unilaterally fix issues like this but many have campaigned and attempted to enact positive environmental policy (and that unfortunately _does_ tend to be right vs left)
  - morpheos137 4y ago
    Mainly because too many intelligent people go into private business because it is so lucrative. Ultimately we need to decide how we want to run our country. Do we want to be run by mega corporations manufacturing consent through the media with vapid bimbo politicians providing a rubber stamp or do we want to take back the power for the masses of private citizens and elect effective politicians who will answer to voters who want not to be dependent on the will of megacorps for their every need.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > "What to do about late-stage capitalism?" is actually an explicitly political question. Its also an explicitly political (in the “ideologically partisan” not merely “concerning government”) framing of the question, that makes ideologically-based assumptions about reality, the current situation, and the answer to the question. (If the answer was something within the scope of “capitalism”, the thing being addressed would not be “late-stage capitalism”.) Heck, even the presumption that the thing described is something that calls for something to be done about it is ideological.
akudha 4y ago
I am currently listening to this podcast called City of the rails. Couple of episodes talk about the power of these rail companies. How they treat their employees, how they have insane power over politicians etc. Did you know these companies have their own police force, with practically zero accountability? They do whatever they please. It is depressing, to put it mildly
- windthrown 4y ago
  They even have their own retirement program separate from Social Security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Retirement_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Retirement_Board
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    Well it seems like they are better off than on social security >At the end of fiscal year 2018, the average annuity paid to career rail employees was $3,525 per month, the average annuity paid for all retired rail employees was $2,815 per month, and the average retirement benefit under Social Security was $1,415 per month
  - gruez 4y ago
    From your link: >Railroad workers formed an association to agitate for government action. The Department of Labor proposed its own plan in response, eventually compromising with the workers to produce the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934. That's supposed to show the power of rail companies?
    - windthrown 4y ago
      Perhaps not very advantageous power for the retirement benefits but I think it still shows the immense influence of the industry. I'm not aware of other private companies which are exempt from paying into Social Security and have an entire federal agency dedicated to managing their separate system.
gptgpp 4y ago
Counterpoint: America is so rich and powerful precisely BECAUSE it maximizes efficiency and capital. Gutting all of those jobs and making it so that they only have 30 seconds to inspect each car (which is pretty much impossible to do due diligence) makes it so that they can rake in a ton of cash. Sure, accidents will go up. Small little towns will find themselves doused in carcinogens or burned to the ground (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...). Politicians will use it for photo ops. Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs. I don't think it's "gutting" America. On the contrary, I think it's the heart of America, and what makes it so powerful and hegemonic. You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs. I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs. "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
  - orwin 4y ago
    That's why the left should push for legalizing long range rifles and AP rounds instead of fighting against semi-automatics. I mean, Abe was the only corrupt politician/business leader who suffered the true "cost of doing business", hopefully he start a trend.
  - gptgpp 4y ago
    Yes, in a more practical sense, to quote Liu Cixin, "If I destroy you, what business of it of yours?" https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216658-if-i-destroy-you-what-business-is-it-of-yours https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216658-if-i-destroy-you-wh... In a similar sense, can you reasonably object to being eaten by a man-eating tiger? We create corporations who's utmost responsibility is feduciary in nature, we make capital the lifeblood of our society, and then act shocked and horrified when capital trumps human life, and corporate interests hold similar priorities? Seriously. How did anyone think gutting the workforce and the ability to do safety inspections in a reasonable manner would turn out in any other way? How did the regulatory agencies think this was acceptable? The quote by Cixin is the only explanation. That disaster I cited in Quebec was many years ago, yet a scathing report was released that effectively nothing has been done to meaningfully/substantially regulate the railways. An entire town was wiped from the map. What business is it of theirs if they are ground to dust by industry? Ultimately we are all meat for the machine :)
crazygringo 4y ago
I sympathize with you completely, but I just want to point out that there's no simple solution. At the end of the day, nothing is perfectly safe and everything is a tradeoff. In a capitalist society, corporations are always going to try to maximize profit because that's how the incentives are structured, and it's always going to be the job of government to set safety regulations. Safety regulations that aren't so onerous that they simply shut down the economy (e.g. you can't ever transport chemicals ever) but also aren't so lax that people are getting killed in accidents all the time (do whatever you want, railroads!). The job of developing safety regulations to achieve the right balance is not only incredibly difficult by itself, but it becomes even more difficult in a messy democratic process. Because if it were done entirely technocratically, you could assign a monetary value to each human life and try to model the safety tradeoffs and come up with "objective" standards that would nevertheless only be so-so because a lot of the estimation is necessarily guesstimation, and figuring out what to do about black swan disasters is almost an unsolvable problem. But we also live in a democracy where many voters are horrified by the idea of putting a dollar value on someone's life for that kind of economic/safety modeling, and some of them just want more jobs because their community is disintegrating economically so damn the regulations, and some of them just want to protect the environment so damn the unemployed. (And then add another 20 different viewpoints and perspectives, because those aren't the only ones.) So we kind of muddle along somewhere in the middle because that's what democracy does.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Is the US richer and more prosperous than the Vatican? I’m intrigued now how to figure these rankings out, no joke.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  One (imperfect) metric is GDP per capita. US is around $70k. Vatican City around $21k, pretty much all of which is tourism and not even “production” per se.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    thanks
samirillian 4y ago
Yeah we're so fucked. We live on our phones and have either checked out or turn it into us-them mentality. Neither political administration did what they should have. We can't fix it, so we finger-point or throw up our hands in despair. And most people who haven't given up are simply too dense to understand how they're getting played by their little echo chamber, or what a strategy to fix it would even look like. Let's just wait till the boomers die, and then demographics shift, then corporate capture will fix itself, right??
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
Your comment is just vague talking points. I see literally no one justifying poisoning the environment and the town by saying this is an acceptable cost of the free market. Blaming MBAs for this instead of the JDs that are writing and enforcing the laws is also silly. Finally, almost everyone from the federal down to the local is running unsustainable deficits, so there is clearly a lack of forethought in spending. I would argue we have the opposite problem you are suggesting. Everyone's happy to spend money thoughtlessly because it's someone else's money.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  If everyone is running a deficit why have there been record profits
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  Found the MBA.
CWuestefeld 4y ago
> we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so." If a private entity can unilaterally impose itself upon another, that's the opposite of a free market, or at least of a free market that has any respect for property rights. Instead, what you're seeing is a corporatist system, in which the regulatory machinery has been co-opted by private interests - which is exactly what we'd expect to happen in a democracy. See "regulatory capture". If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. The fact that the residents aren't able to do so doesn't reveal a problem with markets. It shows that the government isn't protecting the people's property rights, either due to failures in the legal system, or through a regulatory scheme that's been perverted to protect the corporations rather than the rest of us. In short, point the finger at your leaders.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  > If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. “You’re free to poison me, but you’ll have to pay for it” doesn’t sound like a particularly well functioning system either. I think I would rather try to work out a political and regulatory system that resists capture.
  - glaslong 4y ago
    Seems like they should just poison you harder to reduce the time you have left for long legal disputes.
jhobag 4y ago
wait until public pension funds realize they are financing the decay of rail conditions thru private equity investments
tj-teej 4y ago
Why do you think it's the "Cult of the MBA" (aggressive business leaders have always existed) and not the fact that there will be no meaningful pushback from the US Government, regardless of which political party is in power. It's nice to think that business leaders had a civic duty in the past and that "they changed" but to be frank, I think you can blame a shift towards "neoliberalism" by both parties and the lack of regulation and "teeth" that came from it.

libraryatnight 4y ago

I had a bit of a melt down yesterday while a company all hands meeting was taking place. This guy spoke for 15 minutes and said not one thing that wasn't just a business buzz word, there wasn't a bit of substance, and I realized and cried out to my wife "This fuckhead has no idea what's going on or what this company even does the only thing he knows is how to be an MBA" As soon as something swaps hands from the person or people who built it because they understood the problem it solved to people who only see it as an engine for profit it begins to die, and we've set up systems to make the death long and agonizing while the MBAs bleed it dry.

paiute 4y ago
I felt the same as you when I was younger, but next time watch the faces of all the non-engineers in the room. It will start to make sense.
- felipemnoa 4y ago
  For the rest of us that will probably not have a chance to be in the same situation, could you please explain?
  - 88913527 4y ago
    I think he's saying they're eating it up. I haven't bothered paying attention to business-type's face's in all hands when a business person presents, but I imagine they glow up at corpspeak. Those with more technical specialties are more likely to have a neutral reaction, or more realistically a pokerface.
  - paiute 4y ago
    Persuasion basically. They can take any situation and make most of the room feel good and confident in the business. Good politicians do this too. It doesn't work on everyone, but it works well enough.
    - felipemnoa 4y ago
      Got it. Never would have guessed.
wiml 4y ago
That is the core tenet of the MBA — that managing one kind of enterprise is just the same as managing any other; there is no need for domain knowledge, and it's probably actually counterproductive.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fiat_fandango 4y ago
This is why I quit being a TPM - at one point I just started making up bogus words and every PM (non-technical) with an MBA immediately jumped at the opportunity to use a cool new word. The day that did it for me, aside from the company failing to realize any pivot towards actual revenue was "well, at this point our best case outcome is to be revenue-neutral but ideally by Q4 with the current POC we'll be revenue-positive and able to reneg on prior action items". Just say, what we're doing right now isn't working and we're not making money...

recycledfood 4y ago

The twelve occurrences of "we" in your comment imply agency and consent where little to none existed. "We", which is to say a majority of residents and citizens of the US, constituting the working class, had these things imposed on us by others who have systematically and successfully manufactured the appearance of consent over a period of decades, the ongoing results being consistently undermining the working class and incepting a kind of learned helplessness that justice can never be found. The "cult of the MBA" is apt, although a more appropriate appellation might be the "cult of Mammon".

roughly 4y ago
As Warren Buffet put it, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." I agree with all of what you've said, although I think folks have been more willing contributors to the process than you suggest.
- ineptech 4y ago
  This makes it sound like the wealthy colluded against the masses, which I don't think is accurate. It's a coordination trap: each individual is doing what's in their individual best interest, but the result is collectively bad for everyone. The solution is to change the incentives, e.g. laws that make it more profitable to clean up pollution than to pollute, but it seems unattainable because a feedback loop has concentrated power in the hands of the people who are most insulated from the problems, which is sort of the opposite of the intended outcome of democracy.
  - Guthur 4y ago
    They colluded to enrich themselves without end. Seeking monopoly rents and pushing infrastructure, social and environmental costs on to others to increase the margin. We allow the rewarding of truly psychotic behaviours, there is a reason why most executives seem to exhibit these traits.
    - 4y ago

jostylr 4y ago

This is not free market, but a captured regulated market. Companies bet that the government will cover over their mistakes. In an actual free market where the company and the people making the decisions would be held accountable for the damages done to 3rd parties, this would not happen. The need to insure would motivate people to find cost effective ways to make it safe. Consequential failure is a big motivator. I work for a place that is regulated by the city and insurance. I find the city to be unhelpful, unresponsive, and largely useless in helping us. They just want the fees paid. The insurance companies, however, will send out inspectors that work with us to right anything that might be unsafe, explain their concerns, and generally are looking to have a good profitable relationship with us. There was one company that did not do good inspections. We stopped working with them and now work with a different company. I have no such option for working with the government as we are quite locally based. Also, the city owned sewage treatment facilities are major polluters. Government control often leads to pollution (see various authoritarian governments, our military, various municipalities,...) As for the sense of mutual obligation, it has withered, but my bet is that it is the theoretical outsourcing of it to government which has undermined it. Without that failing crutch, we would have to work together and look out for each other, bringing to the table immense social pressure for those outside social norms. That has its own downside, but it is much more flexible and resistant to corruption than the monopolistic government power structure. One danger is, of course, rich outsiders who can take over large tracts of land with money. But in our current system, they buy up politicians who use eminent domain to take the choice away from the owners and the people at large. In a private ownership system, they would have to convince everyone to sell which is way harder to do.

CodexArcana 4y ago
This is an incredibly utopian view of the free market that has never existed in any implementation of the laissez faire free market philosophy. Competition yields winners, and those winners buy out the losers, leading to monopolization and wealth consolidation. You've identified the problem, the railroads are a captured market, but it's because most regulatory bodies are operated by former agents of those industries or those taking large amounts of money from those industries. These industries DO get bailed out, because they have captured the regulatory mechanism. Their wealth consolidation allows them that power, especially in the post Citizens United world we live in. The things you view as failings of the government are corporate successes in the never ending squeeze of year after year growth. The power structures inside these corporations are squarely authoritarian in their design. You have no real agency within your workplace. The most freedom I've ever experienced in my work history has been working for government agencies, specifically public education, doing IT work. This idea that, in the absence of government intervention, we (citizens) would have the agency to do the right thing in these moments completely ignores the massive amount of leverage the corporation has over its workers. Since these corporations are top down, hierarchical, and authoritarian in their organization, the only will the workers have is that of those at the top. In this case, the executives and shareholders who historically have shown to not be interested in taking a loss for the sake of safety. You mention that, under the utopian vision of the free market, we would go to another vendor. So who would we decide to transport with? The rail systems are regionalized and to get from one part of the country to the other you have to make trilateral or quadrilateral deals with these companies. In other words you are forced to use all of them on some leg of the journey. This regionalization means that there is an oligopoly on the rail system. How are you going to create a "competing" rail system in any of these regions when these companies own all the rails?

sidewndr46 4y ago

Replace "can't safely transport chemicals" with "don't bother to safely transport chemicals" and then you have an accurate statement.

roughly 4y ago
At some point the capacity atrophies from disuse. Right now, if the EPA wanted to find an incinerator that didn't have a clear history of poor-quality operations, could they? If the owner of those chemicals wanted to ship their chemicals in the safest manner possible, could they? How could they verify that the chemicals would be treated with care and concern?

hibernator149 4y ago

Reminds me of the railroad tunnel accident in Atlas Srugged by Ayn Rand. That happened for exactly the same reason. Only that the greedy railroad boss Dagny Taggart took the accident seriously and tried to fix it. We live in a world where having people like Taggart, Rearden, or Galt at the top would be an improvement. Just think about that... (How is it that Ayn Rand is always so right? </sarcasm>)

DanHulton 4y ago

I would say this actually IS a politics problem, just not the simple "right vs left" issue that everyone assumes "politics" means these days. "What to do about late-stage capitalism?" is actually an explicitly political question.

scruple 4y ago
Well, the problem there is, IMO, no one with any power in politics on the left or the right has any sort of vision for what comes next.
- myko 4y ago
  Power is collective, no one can unilaterally fix issues like this but many have campaigned and attempted to enact positive environmental policy (and that unfortunately _does_ tend to be right vs left)
- morpheos137 4y ago
  Mainly because too many intelligent people go into private business because it is so lucrative. Ultimately we need to decide how we want to run our country. Do we want to be run by mega corporations manufacturing consent through the media with vapid bimbo politicians providing a rubber stamp or do we want to take back the power for the masses of private citizens and elect effective politicians who will answer to voters who want not to be dependent on the will of megacorps for their every need.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> "What to do about late-stage capitalism?" is actually an explicitly political question. Its also an explicitly political (in the “ideologically partisan” not merely “concerning government”) framing of the question, that makes ideologically-based assumptions about reality, the current situation, and the answer to the question. (If the answer was something within the scope of “capitalism”, the thing being addressed would not be “late-stage capitalism”.) Heck, even the presumption that the thing described is something that calls for something to be done about it is ideological.

akudha 4y ago

I am currently listening to this podcast called City of the rails. Couple of episodes talk about the power of these rail companies. How they treat their employees, how they have insane power over politicians etc. Did you know these companies have their own police force, with practically zero accountability? They do whatever they please. It is depressing, to put it mildly

windthrown 4y ago
They even have their own retirement program separate from Social Security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Retirement_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Retirement_Board
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  Well it seems like they are better off than on social security >At the end of fiscal year 2018, the average annuity paid to career rail employees was $3,525 per month, the average annuity paid for all retired rail employees was $2,815 per month, and the average retirement benefit under Social Security was $1,415 per month
- gruez 4y ago
  From your link: >Railroad workers formed an association to agitate for government action. The Department of Labor proposed its own plan in response, eventually compromising with the workers to produce the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934. That's supposed to show the power of rail companies?
  - windthrown 4y ago
    Perhaps not very advantageous power for the retirement benefits but I think it still shows the immense influence of the industry. I'm not aware of other private companies which are exempt from paying into Social Security and have an entire federal agency dedicated to managing their separate system.

gptgpp 4y ago

Counterpoint: America is so rich and powerful precisely BECAUSE it maximizes efficiency and capital. Gutting all of those jobs and making it so that they only have 30 seconds to inspect each car (which is pretty much impossible to do due diligence) makes it so that they can rake in a ton of cash. Sure, accidents will go up. Small little towns will find themselves doused in carcinogens or burned to the ground (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...). Politicians will use it for photo ops. Yet a small group of key individuals will amass a ton of capital and, therefore, power. They can then use that to create more businesses and ventures that will be just as ruthless and driven to succeed at all costs. I don't think it's "gutting" America. On the contrary, I think it's the heart of America, and what makes it so powerful and hegemonic. You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs. I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.

lamontcg 4y ago
> You don't make a scientific and cultural powerhouse omelette without breaking a few eggs. "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
- orwin 4y ago
  That's why the left should push for legalizing long range rifles and AP rounds instead of fighting against semi-automatics. I mean, Abe was the only corrupt politician/business leader who suffered the true "cost of doing business", hopefully he start a trend.
- gptgpp 4y ago
  Yes, in a more practical sense, to quote Liu Cixin, "If I destroy you, what business of it of yours?" https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216658-if-i-destroy-you-what-business-is-it-of-yours https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216658-if-i-destroy-you-wh... In a similar sense, can you reasonably object to being eaten by a man-eating tiger? We create corporations who's utmost responsibility is feduciary in nature, we make capital the lifeblood of our society, and then act shocked and horrified when capital trumps human life, and corporate interests hold similar priorities? Seriously. How did anyone think gutting the workforce and the ability to do safety inspections in a reasonable manner would turn out in any other way? How did the regulatory agencies think this was acceptable? The quote by Cixin is the only explanation. That disaster I cited in Quebec was many years ago, yet a scathing report was released that effectively nothing has been done to meaningfully/substantially regulate the railways. An entire town was wiped from the map. What business is it of theirs if they are ground to dust by industry? Ultimately we are all meat for the machine :)

crazygringo 4y ago

I sympathize with you completely, but I just want to point out that there's no simple solution. At the end of the day, nothing is perfectly safe and everything is a tradeoff. In a capitalist society, corporations are always going to try to maximize profit because that's how the incentives are structured, and it's always going to be the job of government to set safety regulations. Safety regulations that aren't so onerous that they simply shut down the economy (e.g. you can't ever transport chemicals ever) but also aren't so lax that people are getting killed in accidents all the time (do whatever you want, railroads!). The job of developing safety regulations to achieve the right balance is not only incredibly difficult by itself, but it becomes even more difficult in a messy democratic process. Because if it were done entirely technocratically, you could assign a monetary value to each human life and try to model the safety tradeoffs and come up with "objective" standards that would nevertheless only be so-so because a lot of the estimation is necessarily guesstimation, and figuring out what to do about black swan disasters is almost an unsolvable problem. But we also live in a democracy where many voters are horrified by the idea of putting a dollar value on someone's life for that kind of economic/safety modeling, and some of them just want more jobs because their community is disintegrating economically so damn the regulations, and some of them just want to protect the environment so damn the unemployed. (And then add another 20 different viewpoints and perspectives, because those aren't the only ones.) So we kind of muddle along somewhere in the middle because that's what democracy does.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

Is the US richer and more prosperous than the Vatican? I’m intrigued now how to figure these rankings out, no joke.

ethanbond 4y ago
One (imperfect) metric is GDP per capita. US is around $70k. Vatican City around $21k, pretty much all of which is tourism and not even “production” per se.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  thanks

samirillian 4y ago

Yeah we're so fucked. We live on our phones and have either checked out or turn it into us-them mentality. Neither political administration did what they should have. We can't fix it, so we finger-point or throw up our hands in despair. And most people who haven't given up are simply too dense to understand how they're getting played by their little echo chamber, or what a strategy to fix it would even look like. Let's just wait till the boomers die, and then demographics shift, then corporate capture will fix itself, right??

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

Your comment is just vague talking points. I see literally no one justifying poisoning the environment and the town by saying this is an acceptable cost of the free market. Blaming MBAs for this instead of the JDs that are writing and enforcing the laws is also silly. Finally, almost everyone from the federal down to the local is running unsustainable deficits, so there is clearly a lack of forethought in spending. I would argue we have the opposite problem you are suggesting. Everyone's happy to spend money thoughtlessly because it's someone else's money.

kevviiinn 4y ago
If everyone is running a deficit why have there been record profits
Pulcinella 4y ago
Found the MBA.

CWuestefeld 4y ago

> we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so." If a private entity can unilaterally impose itself upon another, that's the opposite of a free market, or at least of a free market that has any respect for property rights. Instead, what you're seeing is a corporatist system, in which the regulatory machinery has been co-opted by private interests - which is exactly what we'd expect to happen in a democracy. See "regulatory capture". If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. The fact that the residents aren't able to do so doesn't reveal a problem with markets. It shows that the government isn't protecting the people's property rights, either due to failures in the legal system, or through a regulatory scheme that's been perverted to protect the corporations rather than the rest of us. In short, point the finger at your leaders.

bandyaboot 4y ago
> If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. “You’re free to poison me, but you’ll have to pay for it” doesn’t sound like a particularly well functioning system either. I think I would rather try to work out a political and regulatory system that resists capture.
- glaslong 4y ago
  Seems like they should just poison you harder to reduce the time you have left for long legal disputes.

jhobag 4y ago

wait until public pension funds realize they are financing the decay of rail conditions thru private equity investments

tj-teej 4y ago

Why do you think it's the "Cult of the MBA" (aggressive business leaders have always existed) and not the fact that there will be no meaningful pushback from the US Government, regardless of which political party is in power. It's nice to think that business leaders had a civic duty in the past and that "they changed" but to be frank, I think you can blame a shift towards "neoliberalism" by both parties and the lack of regulation and "teeth" that came from it.