Yes it was a fully top-down, banker-spun narrative for how people buying subprime mortgages were "irresponsible" rather than the massively overleveraged financialization of all mortgages, including subprime, by the banks. This is part of a common PR scheme by which to blame "consumers" and the poor for problems created by capitalism and the ruling class. Same as telling people to budget better when they complain about real wages dropping. Or to "sell-improve" if you've been unemployed and are desperate for a job. It's not that the fed created a baseline level of unemployment in the intetests of capital, it's that you didn't divine what skills were most in demand by capital 10 years before they needed them.
Terrarium
joined 2 months ago
Even more dramatically, the banks went to the proles and advertised that even with bad credit and small down payment you could get a mortgage, escaping your landlord and becoming housing secure.
Just gotta invent the Molotov EMP
In the conditions under which the CPC made these strides, the proletariat was much smaller than the peasantry. In a typical ML analysis, the peasantry have a petty bourgeois character, or at least adopt one once liberated from landlordism. This was one of the major contributions of Mao's CPC to ML theory, as even though the Russian Empire had a similar dynamic, it was not as extreme as China's. In the Russian Empire there had been kulakizatiom to bring more petty bourgeois character to the peasantry and undermine the landlords and the proletariat was larger. China's peasantry were often basically serfs.
This is my way of saying that basically every country has enough proletarians (we can quibble about how prole they are) compared to past successful revolutions. What we run up against most often is a deeply propagandized population that has some kind of dependency on financialization and imperialism, where they receive an "artificial" experience of their class, one heightened. Not quite a labor aristocracy, but one that fails to develop even vulgar class consciousness because nothing happens to them that can break through the propaganda. The coworkers that think unions are for lazy people and just accept being fired as a fact of life, as they are sure they will be employed again very soon, their industry being "in demand", propped up by imperialist technological advantage or some insurance grift. The PMC technocrat that, at least for now, believes they can help solve climate change for a decent wage if they just make good enough slide decks (while their paycheck actually comes from capitalist lobbyists). The retail worker that knows conditions are bad but just puts up with it because they are young and believe the line that it's a practice job and they'll naturally get paid enough and work in better conditions as they get older. It's a house of cards that I believe will crumble when imperialism becomes less effective and the expectations of these workers get a reality check. This is what I would usually call proletarianizatiom of the imperial core, it's making proles prevented from developing class consciousness by confidence in future rewards become instead more directly aware of the bum deal, of seeing their exploitation.
The real challenge is how we will contend against modern fashy reactions to what will probably be seriously incompetent first stabs at real mass left organizing.
Anyways sorry for the really long response. I hope it is relevant and makes sense.
IDF can't even pull off the "MIA" grift.
That's why Marx invented concealed carry
Exactly! That's a great spirit to have. Wanting to do something about injustice is the core motivation shared by all good socialist organizers!
If you pair that with a good theoretical and local understanding, you will then get a handle on what to do, if that makes sensr. One neighborhood might be best reached through mutual aid and political education while another might respond most to direct action against a prison while another might respond most to a (principled) socialist electoralist campaign like public housing or immigrant initiatives. All of these can be threatened by liberal cooption but that's just the job, you know?
Please feel free to ask any and all questions you might have! And I'm glad you'll be joining us on the streets and the meeting rooms!
It will mean that sellers might as well warehouse stateside. So either there will be a bunch of new warehousing middlemen nonsense or it will all get folded into Amazon and Walmart with faster shipping times and 20-50% highet prices.
Many Chinese brands already do this. If you buy directly from their website they will ship it to you from a warehouse in Colorado or something and the price is better than Amazon.
I would also not be surprised if they just start using loopholes or trying to hide packages' value.
SW Washington is close to Olympia and Portland, both of which have active socialist organizations. I recommend dipping your toes into an organization to help you get the local lay of the land, as you are likely also beginning a political education journey at the same time and you'll want to have some flexibility in where you end up. Some indicators of a good org are that they will be Marxist, not Trotskyist, will have active local campaigns strategically embedded in communities, will find balance between political education and praxis, and are not weirdly controlling of your life. Many orgs can have bad national takes but good local organizing or dramatic variation between chapters, so it is difficult to reliably recommend just one partu or org. Maybe check out FRSO or PSL. Or even DSA, keeping in mind that the org, overall, is pretty liberal so you will need to be patient with naive chauvinists and protect yourself from adopting their silly ideas.
Dollars to dimes the "best" org for your area will be something homegrown that I don't know about. It's okay if it is the third or fourth org you join rather than the first. It's better to join a worse org and develop and embed than to hold out for the perfect fit. Just don't let any org stymy your development. Don't be surprised when an org doesn't read or reads from a restricted and counter-productive canon. Just don't copy them! Keep reading and do your best to reject only reading summaries and editorialized takes on, e.g., Marx. There is currently a reading group going through Capital here. You can catch up!
Hell yeah that's awesome. Thank you for doing that organizing work! May your recognition happen quickly and management fold during contract negotiations.
Montana is just 3 drunk drivers and a cow in a trenchcoat.
Yeah that's a scam with MLM elements. The "coaches" make money based on how many people they sucker into the program, not their ability to trade. They separated you from the others because they were afraid you'd convince one or more of the others to not give them $17,000 for nothing. The selling part with 1:1s was a hard sell session like they do for timeshares. Presumably they walked you through some numbers about how great of a financial decision it would be to give them $17,000, how you would make that back in a month, and wouldn't it be great to be rich and retire early?
PS given your mention of a gambling problem of some kind I would recommend moving away from day trading. At minimum, take an amount of money substantially larger than what you initially invested and lock it away in a savings account or 10 year bonds or something. And keep your day trading money separate from personal finances. And stay as far away from investments that can be overleveraged, i.e. where you can lose more than you "buy in" for. That way, in the worst case scenario, you cannot lose more money than you had before and you can think of this more as a hobby than a job.
And if doing that seems unreasonable or like you could "lose gains" and you don't want to do it, well, then you are still gambling and you are risking losing all of your money to bankers.