#republicans #childabuse #hypocrisy #capitalismisgreed #childlabor

#republicans #childabuse #hypocrisy #capitalismisgreed

https://youtu.be/9ysZVbHU29Y

Our economic "system" was crafted by the obscenely wealthy and power-hungry. They hold all the cards and we don't have a seat at the table. They bought politicians and judges, till they had a supreme court that would make corporations people and money free speech. Then they went to town and destroyed unions, worker's rights, cheap college, effective education, high tax rates on the rich and a democratic party that would stand up to them. Our compensation is no longer tied to productivity and they awarded themselves huge tax breaks so they have nearly all the wealth in the country and we have virtually nothing but debt to them and poverty wages. Bernie has a plan!

Bernie Sanders is right about capitalism https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/24/opinions/bernie-sanders-capitalism-freedom-powers/index.html

#GreedKills
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GreedKillsFreedom
#GreedKillsSociety
#CapitalismIsGreed

"In his new book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” Bernie Sanders chooses the moniker “uber-capitalist” to describe our current economic system — one that feels perfectly designed to enrich a tiny few while making life miserable for nearly everyone else.

...“hyper-capitalism” or “late-stage capitalism,” (is) capitalism untethered to morality or decency. Whatever you call it, it’s not working, except for the super-rich, who Sanders aptly labels oligarchs.
...
Rather than making the case for a Democratic socialist government, Sanders appears to want a reform of American capitalism and to see the country embrace a kind of New Deal liberalism.

Sanders has said...that he sees Scandinavia’s generous social safety nets as a model of the kind of system he supports. In his book, he emphasizes an inspiration closer to home: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — in particular, FDR’s insight that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Any person who is living paycheck to paycheck, working to the point of exhaustion just to survive and stay on top of their debt surely recognizes this statement is true. How “free” is a person really if all they do is work?

How “free” is someone who lives with a debilitating health condition because they can’t afford the medication or health care that could cure them? How “free” is a person who starts adulthood weighted down with a mind-bending amount of debt incurred just to get the education they need to get a job?

Many Americans are essentially indentured servants to an overclass that continues to amass wealth and power, while failing to pass on their largesse to their employees. Between 1978 and 2018, CEO pay skyrocketed by more than 900%, while worker pay grew by just under 12%...

These chronically underpaid employees are also often treated as objects by their employers...Workers complained that “their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom.”
...
Much of what we consider normal here — such as “hustle and grind” culture or working around the clock for employers who would fire us without a second thought — is baffling to our peers in many industrialized countries who prioritize their mental and physical health and don’t suffer from a late-stage capitalist productivity fetish.

Major companies in the United States don’t just mistreat their workers; they lack even a modicum of decency when it comes to their responsibility to consumers and the society in which they live. Today, we are a country where pharmaceutical companies making record profits and paying their executives obscene amounts of money price gouge on drugs that Americans need to survive.
...
Most people can’t even afford a home mortgage while a subsection of society is plunking down cash for their new domicile. The share of buyers purchasing a home for the first time is at a 41-year low
...
But we don’t need this trend to continue to know our society is off the rails. The results are in. This system is not just unjust, it is deadly: The US has earned the unwelcome distinction of having the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rate among wealthy countries.
...
Perhaps most of all, Sanders has powerfully articulated — both in his campaigns and his latest book — the profound lack of decency and utter immorality of the current American economic system."

Lying and delaying action so they can make more money to feed their greed. They couldn't care less about the consequences for future generations!

Fossil Fuel Villain of the Year: Shell CEO Ben van Beurden | The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/169448/fossil-fuel-villain-year-shell-ceo-ben-van-beurden

#GreedKills
#CapitalismIsGreed
#ClimateChange

"The climate crisis is not, unfortunately, the product of a few evil CEOs waking up every day and deciding to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for profit. Its causes are structural, and can be traced back through centuries of colonial plunder and imperial excess. That said, the top executives at the world’s largest fossil fuel companies bear a grossly outsize responsibility for driving up emissions, polluting our politics, and delaying action for decades the world won’t get back. And they tend to be whiny jerks. Case in point: outgoing Shell chief Ben van Beurden.

In early December, the Oversight and Reform Committee investigating fossil fuel company disinformation on climate change released a new 1,200-page trove of documents. The haul was gathered from major fossil fuel companies and a major trade association for the industry, the American Petroleum Institute. The files obtained from oil and gas supermajor Shell show top brass at the multinational company whining about journalists who write unfavorable stories about them and getting worked up over tweets.

The man at the top is equally petty. CEO Ben van Beurden made a point of complaining in an October 2017 email about comments given by longtime Environmental Defense Fund head Fred Krupp at a panel on which the two had just appeared. Krupp, though an environmentalist, has nurtured close ties to corporate America, including fossil fuel companies, under his leadership at EDF. But at a 2017 panel hosted by the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, or OCGI—a coalition of major oil and gas companies aligned around the vague commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions somehow, someway—Krupp apparently dared to cite numbers stating that methane emissions from gas might undercut industry claims about it being a climate savior. A five-year research study conducted by EDF found that oil and gas industry methane emissions were almost 60 percent higher than those found by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Reporting at the time quoted Krupp urging companies to go beyond current commitments and do more to reduce their methane emissions, to “work towards near-zero methane emissions from the gas value chain.”

“If you ask: ‘Is today’s announcement enough?’ Then I would say: ‘No, not by a long shot,’” Krupp said. “There is a lot more that can and should be done.”

Shell execs apparently went ballistic. “Almost all of the CEOs on the panel looked shocked, if not mad, with Fred’s statement,” former Shell VP Angus Gillespie wrote in an email. Van Beurden was so mad about the comments that he canceled a meeting Krupp had requested with him. Krupp, Van Beurden wrote, was “essentially pointing out that if you burden the gas value chain with all the emissions of the oil industry, it would put gas on par with coal.” The comments went “one step too far for me,” he added in an email to other higher-ups at the company. “I felt I should not reward him with a meeting, not in the least as I am not sure anymore we can rely on him to be honest about reflecting the input we give them.” He also wanted his position to be known if Krupp reached out to anyone else on their team. “I am quite OK for Fred to know I was mightily disappointed in his disservice to the good efforts we in principle stand shoulder to shoulder on.”
...
Van Beurden’s comments on this alone make him sound like a spoiled boy prince—after all, Krupp was correct about the methane emissions released all along the gas supply chain. But other revelations from the Oversight Committee’s documents are more damning. Over the last several years, outlets including Bloomberg have reported on major oil companies selling off their most polluting, least attractive drilling assets to smaller and less scrutinized companies. While the emissions from those operations are moved off Shell’s books, the operations aren’t generally shutting down. Instead, the emissions have either continued apace or even grown.

Noting a Bloomberg report that the buyer of BP’s Alaskan assets, Hilcorp Energy Co., planned to maintain operations at full capacity, Shell U.S. and Brazil Media Manager Curtis Smith in 2019 owned up to the fact that sales are a wash for the environment. “True, we transfer CO2 liability when we divest,” he said over email, going on to argue that it’s the same as when oil demand is met by other countries that have “far fewer regulations than we do in a modern, civilized society.”

For teen girls, TikTok is the ‘social media equivalent of razor blades in candy,’ new report claims
https://www.fastcompany.com/90824912/tiktok-teen-girls-self-harm-eating-disorders-study-ccdh

When the focus is on making money by addicting people to the app, of course, it becomes destructive! We have to stop reinforcing the idea that being rich is the greatest good and the definition of true success. This capitalistic free-for-all, will be the death of us! Look at climate change! Look at how social media was used to undermine democracy, inflame social division and even promote genocide. We can't let the "free market" cost us everything!

#GreedKills
#CorporateGreed
#CorporateIrresponsibility
#CapitalismKills
#CapitalismIsGreed

"Vulnerable users are bombarded by images promoting self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate

If they aren’t careful—or potentially even if they are—TikTok’s youngest users could find themselves bombarded with dangerous video content within minutes of joining the platform, a new study claims.

The report, released Wednesday evening by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), aims to decrypt TikTok’s algorithm by using accounts that posed as 13-year-old girls, among the platform’s most at-risk users. Every 39 seconds, TikTok served the harmful content to the “standard” fake accounts created as controls. But the group also created “vulnerable” fake accounts—ones that indicated a desire to lose weight. CCDH says this group was exposed to harmful content every 27 seconds."

Greedy people, and their corporations, kill people and destroy democracy to make a buck and have power! They don't care about anyone but themselves and they will gladly poison us, our environment/climate if they can get wealthy, make more money or have more power. They undermine our democracy so they can control it and get what they want. The havoc, death and misery they have created and continue to, is obscene as is the fact that they still aren't being held accountable for it. We cannot afford to indulge them and be blind to this any longer! Our future, our children's future and the planet's future all depend on us stepping up and cutting them off!!

Part2
How To Kill and Get Away With It https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/9/2140948/-How-To-Kill-and-Get-Away-With-It?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended
#GreedKills
#GreedDestroysDemocracy
#CapitalismIsGreed
#GreedIsAntiSocial
#GreedyHateDemocracy
#GOPPartyOfGreed
#GOPPartyOfTheRich

"...And this only scratches the surface. In just the past year, thousands of Americans have been killed and tens of thousands rendered homeless by climate change-driven weather that men in the fossil fuel industry knew fifty years ago would happen as the result of their selling their products. For money.

Odds are none will ever see the inside of a jail cell, and their companies will never be dissolved

There’s a lot of talk about “two standards of justice in America, one for the rich and another for everybody else.” But there’s a third standard of justice for corporations and their senior executives that commit crimes.

In the 1880s, conservatives on the Supreme Court bizarrely identified corporations as “persons” with human rights defined by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

In a 1978 decision written by Lewis “Memo” Powell, the Court ruled that when corporations purchase the loyalty of politicians, the money used for those purchases was to no longer be called “bribes” but, instead, is “free speech” protected by the First Amendment. The doctrine was radically expanded in 2010 with Citizens United.

Neither corporate immunities apply, however, to the small businesses that make up more than 99% of all corporations and LLCs in America. It’s notoriously easy to “pierce the corporate veil” of a business with revenues not measured in the millions and directly go after what is typically the company’s sole stockholder.

So the “corporate crime” problem is limited to the handful of large corporations and their senior executives who regularly make decisions that destroy Americans’ lives.

And our federal government doesn’t even keep a database of them and their crimes, even though they cost Americans as much as $800 billion a year and hundreds of thousands of lost lives.

Senators Dick Durbin and Richard Blumenthal along with Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon have introduced legislation that would require the Justice Department to build and maintain the same sort of database for criminal corporations as it already does with criminal humans.

That’s right: nobody in our government is keeping track of all this corporate crime. And when these members of Congress proposed it happen, not a single Republican joined their effort.

Our Assistant Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, estimates that as many as 20 percent of all the major corporate crime in this country is committed by corporate “repeat offenders.” But nobody’s sure: it could be twice that percentage, or it could be a smaller percentage and far more widespread than anybody realizes.

Human criminals kill around 23,000 Americans a year, according to the FBI (which only tracks and publishes statistics on crimes committed by human persons).

The coal and tobacco companies alone kill more Americans every year than they employ. (Coal employs 51,795 and kills an estimated 52,105 according to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services; Tobacco employs 124,342 and kills 522,000 according to the same data.)

Republicans spent much of last month’s election screaming from the rafters about crime in America.

Democrats should do the same as we head toward 2024, targeting the real killers and thieves in this nation. Average Americans, who absolutely realize how corrupt this system is, will appreciate it."

Greedy people, and their corporations, kill people and destroy democracy to make a buck and have power! They don't care about anyone but themselves and they will gladly poison us, our environment/climate if they can get wealthy, make more money or have more power. They undermine our democracy so they can control it and get what they want. The havoc, death and misery they have created and continue to, is obscene as is the fact that they still aren't being held accountable for it. We cannot afford to indulge them and be blind to this any longer! Our future, our children's future and the planet's future all depend on us stepping up and cutting them off!!

Part1
How To Kill and Get Away With It https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/9/2140948/-How-To-Kill-and-Get-Away-With-It?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended
#GreedKills
#GreedDestroysDemocracy
#CapitalismIsGreed
#GreedIsAntiSocial
#GreedyHateDemocracy
#GOPPartyOfGreed
#GOPPartyOfTheRich

"If you live in New York State and lie to that government about your income to reduce your taxes, you go to prison. If you’re criminally convicted of 17 counts of such lies — such tax fraud — you could spend a long time in prison.

But The Trump Organization, a New York corporation that was just convicted of 17 criminal counts of tax fraud, not only won’t “go to jail” but also won’t even be dissolved for its crimes.

Instead, it’ll pay a maximum $1.6 million fine that represents less money than just one of Trump’s several-criminally-implicated employees and relatives made off with by the company committing their fraud for the past 15 years.

When the senior executives of California’s private for-profit power utility PG&E made the very intentional decision to move cash into their own pockets through bonuses and dividends instead of making their power lines resilient enough to withstand severe winds, they also made the decision to let people die.

And, sure enough, PG&E pleaded guilty to those 84 killings for the 2018 Camp Fire caused by the failure of those very high-tension lines. The judge forced the CEO, Bill Johnson, to come to court to enter his company’s guilty plea to those deaths and say, “Guilty, your honor” 84 times. But neither he nor any executives at the company spent a single day in jail. Instead, the multi-billion-dollar company paid $3.5 million in fines.

Just two years earlier, PG&E had been convicted of causing the death of 8 other people through poor maintenance on a gas pipeline; they were still “on probation” for those deaths when they chose not to maintain 100-year-old high-tension towers leading to the Camp Fire.

Bizarrely, America has different standards for human criminals than corporate criminals, even though corporations kill around 40 times more Americans every year than do more mundane “normal” crooks.

Alfred Ruf poisoned his wife as part of a scheme to get rich off her life insurance. So did Dr. Gregory “Brent” Dennis, who was looking at a $2 million payout. Joshua Hunsucker poisoned his wife for a mere $250K in life insurance money, $80,000 of which he used to buy a boat. David L. Pettis poisoned his wife for $150,000.

I don’t know the names of the men who poisoned and killed my father and my brother Stan, but I know where they worked and why they did it: just like Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis, they intentionally and knowingly took actions they believed would result in death when they sold asbestos to my dad’s employer and got my brother addicted to tobacco.

The asbestos industry knew as early as the 1890s, and got definite confirmation in the 1940s, that their product caused mesothelioma, the particularly brutal lung cancer that killed my father.

Even today, their executives are trying to avoid responsibility for it: Johnson & Johnson was playing bankruptcy games to avoid paying for cancers caused by their asbestos-laced talcum powder, and not a single executive is even slightly worried about going to jail for all those dead women.

Same deal with the tobacco industry whose top CEOs lied to the faces of members of Congress in 1994 at the same time their industry has been killing over 500,000 Americans a year every year of my lifetime.

Like those four wife-killers, like the Trump Organization, like PG&E, they all did it for the money. But the CEOs and senior executives of America’s deadliest corporations made and get to keep a hell of a lot more money than Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis could ever imagine.

Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis are all in prison. The decision-makers who today are still promoting tobacco, using bankruptcy laws to avoid paying for asbestos deaths, and, like Trump, running companies that engage in tax fraud are living the high life in their mansions, private jets, and yachts..."