> “Think of this as an endless war,”
> "Fear and anger have to be a part of this campaign"
> "exploit the public’s short attention span for scientific debate, and play on people’s emotions"
He just described almost every religion out there. Scary...
> "Fear and anger have to be a part of this campaign"
> "exploit the public’s short attention span for scientific debate, and play on people’s emotions"
He just described almost every religion out there. Scary...
One particularly interesting (IMO) tidbit was Berman's strategy of encouraging doubt and ignorance. Rather than argue facts, try and muddy the waters he suggests:
> “Instead of getting the ‘he said she said’ debate, what you will get with the factual debate, often times, you’re going to get into people get overwhelmed by the science and ‘I don’t know who to believe,” Berman told the attendees at the conference. “But if you got enough on your side you get people into a position of paralysis on the issue.”
> “You get into people’s minds a tie. They don’t know who is right,” he said. “And you get all ties because a tie basically ensures the status quo.” [2]
Thus the utility of paid-for "expert" opinion taking issue with one strand or other of the broad scientific consensus on climate: not to win the public debate but to make reasoned debate ineffective and "ensure the status quo."
This methodology is part of the subject matter of Agnotology - "the study of culturally-conditioned ignorance." [3]
1: https://propagandaprinciples.wordpress.com/propaganda-techni...
2: https://www.desmog.com/2014/10/31/oil-and-gas-industry-s-end...
What are you for? How would you fix this flaw, this one here in this thread that you say is because of capitalism. Why is it because of capitalism and what's your solution to it? Why would your system not have this flaw? Can you give an example of a non-capitalist system that avoided this problem? That would be an interesting and useful comment. Even if I disagreed with you I would gladly upvote it as a useful contribution.
Yes this is a flaw in capitalism, simply because it's a flaw in human nature. What system is going to change that? As Adam Smith said in the Wealth of Nations: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
These people are vile scumbags, they are taking the freedoms and benefits liberal democracy and capitalism provide and abusing them. We should expose them, counter their narrative, lobby our representatives and use the freedoms liberal democracy and capitalism provide us to oppose them.
You can have the top management own 20% of the company, middle management 20%, and the workers 60%, prorate the votes following that, and vote should be anonymous. On highly disputed issues (defining a new direction that needs more than the CEO/CTO opinion), you can have a lottery to form a team representing those percentages. Make the workers invested in the company, in the product, in security.
Having your top management paid to extract as much money as they can for the investor is a recipe for exploitation and poor products.
And they also tend to work for below market wages for years.
Are workers willing to do that?
And why should average wages keep up with average productivity? You’d expect productivity gains to go to those who are more productive, no workers who productivity hasn’t changed.
I just don't see how this disincentivizes the managers and key stakeholders in companies from conspiring like this. Most top managers of companies own a lot less than 20%, I doubt the managers of any of the oil companies own anything like that much, so if anything this would give them even more incentive to try and boost the value of their company. How do you see this preventing such conspiracies?
I’m having a hard time imagining it because usually there’s one person or a few with expert knowledge, awareness of an opportunity, and a vision of what they want to achieve. They make great effort and sacrifice in the early days to take that vision from 0 to 1. They eventually build it up into a larger organization with employees, but it didn’t start that way.
For those folks to only own 20% of their own venture - not even a controlling a share of their own baby - may not be enough incentive.
Every company starts somewhere, so how would this system work in reality?
On the other hand, if a large group of workers have a good idea for a new company and want to start one with shared ownership, they can already do that using an LLC or other corporate structure.
It is nice to have a solution when you identify a problem but you also can't just ignore a problem because you don't have a clear solution. Recognize the problem helps others to suggest solutions to the problem. If you can provide iron clad proof no alternative solution exists, then do that. Passing around the burden of proof merely to prop up a position that clearly also doesn't help the problem helps no one. Let's all carry the burden of proof.
I for one think part of the issue is with indefinite capital accumulation. We adhere fundamentally to property ownership and that your property is yours forever. This results in pockets of wealth that create many of the problems we currently see in capitalism as practiced in the US. Competitive forces designed to keep things in place can be countered when enough wealth is amassed. Law and regulation can be bought and manipulated. Public opinion can also be fairly well manipulated.
Clear out mass inheritance options, set forth ways to cap off mass wealth accumulation and redistribute it to society beyond a point that increases as often as say, minimum wage increases. If wealth wants a higher ceiling, they need to make sure the bottom isn't left behind. Provide progressive tax rates beyond those limits that discourage hoarding wealth and using it counterproductively, if we believe we reward success through wealth.
Just some starter ideas, not a claimed solution for the situation at large. Retroactively applying principles may not even be possible without core restructuring in culture and law. Capitalism is great, it's the best system we've seen so far, but what is going on now isn't great and it's not healthy for society. It doesn't necessarily have to be wiped clear but it needs some restructuring or bandaids attached to resolve some very real fundamental issues we have, otherwise we're going to have a society focused on exploitation acquiring value over the actual value creation we praise capitalism for.
Do powerful leaders and managers in non-capitalist systems not engage in lobbying and not promote the interests of their industry? Do they not engage in unsavoury practices when doing so? How does the system act to prevent that?
On the contrary all the attempts at non-capitalist systems I'm aware of are based on a system of central planning and the allocation of resources on a bureaucratic or political basis. Fundamentally capitalism is based on freedom of ownership (of property and capital), freedom of labour (to work for or hire others) and freedom of association (to form companies). Planned economies by necessity restrict or eliminate some or all of these freedoms, but those restrictions never stop at economic activities. After all almost everything has some economic dimension. In practice this has always seemed to end up with highly coercive, opaque bureaucratic systems in which factional lobbying and influence peddling isn't just a flaw, it becomes the system.
Personally, I think the thing most people are angry about is the wild misalignment between the doctrine of shareholder primacy and the well-being of society overall. Exxon is governed by a board which is elected by its shareholders and has a fiduciary responsibility them. But its stakeholders are a much larger group of people. To be clear, I think that so-called "stakeholder capitalism" is a scam if there is no mechanism to enforce it.
Instead, I think you need an organizational form that incentivizes both efficient operation and the best interests of the people affected by its behavior. This seems to me an as-yet unsolved organizational optimization problem. Unfortunately, at the rate the climate is changing, we don't have the luxury of experimenting to find that form. Short-term, I think the best option for a company with such enormous impact is a government entity with at least tangential accountable to voters. To this end, I would prefer to see Exxon nationalized and forced to wind down their hydrocarbon extraction operations.
But setting that aside for the moment, it does seem that up to now, exposing corruption, counter-lobbying, and courts have been our primary tools for fighting back against the likes of Exxon. How is it going so far? It does not appear to have worked in time to avoid major catastrophe. Is there a limit to their effect? And when we talk about counter-lobbying and using courts, what outcome do we hope to achieve with a company like Exxon? Do we want them to pay for the externalities of climate change?
As for Exxon, they may be scumbags and need reigning in, but basically they are just a business providing a service. We all consume fossil fuels all the time, and we need someone to buy them from. The way to reduce fossil fuel dependency isn't to just kill the oil companies, we'd kill our economies with them. We need to wean ourselves off the poison. We need to stop being their customer, not blame the shop for selling us the goods we went to the shop to buy.
I'm not sure what you mean by absolute private ownership of capital. We don't have that in an absolute sense at all. We confiscate capital through taxation (which I'm fine with by the way), we regulate markets (which is a necessary function of government), the government controls the money supply and directly manipulates financial markets all the time as is needed. The government is a massive employer and huge spender in the economy. I'm a Brit actually, but all of that is true of every liberal democracy. Heck, I even support the NHS, I think it's far better than the US model. However capitalism is fundamentally about individual rights and freedoms, not absolute ones, but valuable ones. I'm a wishy-washy centrist, and proud of it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/shareh...
(They’ve lost three seats to a climate-focused activist investor)
IE : wars on communism, drugs, terror...
And now we have a new "war". The war on covid.
To win it we must sacrifice everything (free speech, free assembly, travel)
It may go on forever (2 weeks to flatten the curve ... 1 year to... variants, delta...)
Are you seeing the pattern here? Does it inspire you to raise your eyebrow?