USpolitics

In the wake of recent events a widespread disgust with the behavior of corporations has been in the spotlight. Why do companies act? Mostly 'for the shareholders.' This is why Twitter is no more, why openAI is an empty husk, and possibly why our planet is headed towards a climate disaster.

Note this Ferengi-esque drive to profit is entrenched in our model of a corporation: It's entire purpose is profit. When we think of a corporation acting in the interest of it's shareholders we only think of actions that result in profit in dividends or stock prices.

Why is this the only way corporations act in the interest of shareholders? Because shareholders, owners, only take financial risk when owning a corporation. Owners are inherently protected from the consequences of corporate actions.

Corporations commit crime. It happens, and it is difficult to pin down who is ultimately responsible for these crimes. Sometimes it is an employee who truly is responsible, but sometimes the company itself created the conditions requiring employees to break the law and sometimes the company decides the penalty is worth the profit.

Imagine how the balance of competing interests would change if instead of treating owners as disinterested observers, responsibility for all corporate actions was evenly divided by ownership stake. Fines, asset seizure, court orders, prison sentences, felon status all trickling up to those ultimately responsible: owners. The best interest of shareholders would no longer be limited to maximizing profit, but also minimizing prosecution risk.

This would not stop bad actors entirely, but would remove one of the evolutionary pressures that selects for their success.

Since Kamala Harris’s catastrophic electoral defeat last month—the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate has gotten the most votes in a U.S. election—a lot of criticism has been focused on the campaign’s message. That criticism is warranted, and long before Election Day, this publication had been among those warning that Harris was failing to effectively counter Trump’s populist appeal. But a campaign is not just a candidate and a message. It is also an organization, one with a budget and staff that makes decisions about actions that can be taken to transmit the message and convince people to turn out for the candidate. And any election postmortem needs to analyze Harris’s operation in addition to her words.

The New York Times, for instance, has reported that even as the Harris campaign splurged on celebrity-filled events (including paying Oprah’s production company $1 million), in Philadelphia, many of the field offices “were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said,” with city campaign staffers “being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently.” That is when they even had field offices, and in many predominantly Black neighborhoods “campaign staff members were operating out of public parks, grocery-store parking lots and church basements.” A volunteer told the Times: “There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts… There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”

Even when there were T-shirts, they could be slapdash (one box of them said “Harriz-Walz”). A “get-out-the-vote bus tour for [Pennsylvania’s] Black mayors” had its funding pulled without explanation. The head of a pro-Harris group “recounted frantic campaign staff members in Philadelphia, Detroit and North Carolina calling him in the final weeks of the race to say they did not have enough money to provide food or water to volunteers.” In Georgia, a county party chair “said the Harris campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation had been nonexistent, even as he had pleaded for resources.” Black staff members reportedly felt that the Black vote was being taken for granted, and when they aired their complaints in a post-election call, Harris’s deputy campaign manager “told staff members that talking to the press would ruin their career prospects.” There appears to have been racism in the allocation of resources, with the campaign deliberately choosing to more heavily fund operations in white suburbs and neglecting Black urban centers. (Perhaps on the theory that the Democrats had already successfully appeased Black voters by selecting a Black woman.) Organizers “said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods” and instead were turned “into glorified telemarketers.” As a result, Harris staffers resorted to going rogue and setting up their own unauthorized operations in a desperate attempt to get out the Black vote.

Some of this seems to have been simply bad decision-making. Harris made the same error that Hillary Clinton did in 2016, deploying resources in states like Texas that she was clearly not going to win that could have instead been used in states she desperately needed to win. “We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former DNC consultant told Puck. They even bought an expensive TV ad in Florida, a state Harris knew she wouldn’t win, just to “troll” Donald Trump. Other aspects make the Harris campaign look like little more than a multi-level marketing scheme. For instance, they spent “$111 million in online ads seeking donations,” in other words ads asking for money to pay for more ads asking for money! I was struck over this campaign season by how many texts I got just pleading with me urgently to SEND MORE MONEY. I never did, even though I did not want Trump to win the election, because I had zero confidence that the money would actually end up being spent on anything useful. Turns out, this lack of confidence was fully justified, because your donation might well have gone to a drone show production company, or Oprah’s staff, or to pointlessly build a set for a podcast (which reportedly cost $100,000 yet had “cardboard walls,” raising the question of who got the money), or just toward sending you even more texts. What it did not go toward, apparently, was adequately funding field offices in Black neighborhoods.

...All they know how to do is demand money and spend it on nonsense, like a big light-up sphere or a concert with celebrities. It is not quite a scam on the level of Bernie Madoff or the crypto industry, but it is certainly a kind of fraud, because it relies on convincing good people to part with their money, thinking they are paying for one kind of thing when they may in fact be paying for something they wouldn’t want to fund if they understood where the money goes. It’s deceptive and wrong, and I suspect we haven’t heard the last of the damning reports about how spectacularly this campaign failed.

P.S.: Sabby Sabbs discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y’all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23142216

Stuart Thompson has monitored right-wing media since 2020. He watched 47 hours of video on Rumble for this article.

As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: “We are the media now.”

The idea seemed to capture a growing sense that traditional journalists have lost their position at the center of the media ecosystem. Polls show that trust in mainstream news media has plummeted, and that nearly half of all young people get their news from “influencers” rather than journalists.

If Rumble was the media now, I wondered what it would be like to consume an all-Rumble diet. So on Nov. 18, about two weeks after the election, I deleted my news apps, unsubscribed from all my podcasts and filtered all my newsletters to the trash. And for the next week, from early morning till late at night, I got all my news from Rumble.

...they fixated on a cast of perceived enemies to blame for America’s troubles — from Democratic politicians to TikTok personalities to Republican adversaries.

Just a few hours into the experiment, it was clear that I was falling into an alternate reality fueled almost entirely by outrage...

I received a statement from Tim Murtaugh, a representative for Rumble who was also Mr. Trump’s communications director for his 2020 campaign. He said: “The New York Times and its fellow legacy media outlets have lost their monopoly on deciding what information people can have, so of course they’re rushing to attack Rumble, a key alternative in the news marketplace.”

‘You’re going to become part of the show.’

After watching Rumble nonstop for days, I realized this very article was likely to fuel its own cycle of outrage on the platform. But I was surprised when that happened before it was even published.

I wrote to everyone mentioned in the article to ask for their perspective about Rumble and its popular shows, but few replied. Instead, people like Russell Brand, the former actor turned political commentator, took one of my emails and made an entire segment out of it. Mr. Bongino called me “public enemy No. 1” and claimed my story would focus on Rumble’s fringiest voices in a bid to get the site banned.

“Don’t ever email us,” he warned. “Don’t. Because you’re going to become part of the show.”

Mr. Pentland, the co-host of “The Roseanne Barr Podcast,” posted the email I sent him to his X account. Rumble’s chief executive reposted it, then Elon Musk reposted that to his more than 200 million followers.

P.S.: Glenn Greenwald discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y'all.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide…

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday said he will nominate retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg to serve as assistant to the president and special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

When U.S. President-elect Donald Trump nominated former Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump described him as a “True fighter for America First policies.”

The head of the CO2 Coalition tells DeSmog that Wright agrees carbon dioxide is “not the demon molecule, it’s the miracle molecule.”

On Earth Day in 2022, President Joe Biden stood among cherry blossoms and towering Douglas firs in a Seattle park to declare the importance of big, old trees. “There used to be a hell of a lot more forests like this,” he said, calling them “our planet’s lungs” and extolling their power to fight climate change.

Four states that Republican Donald Trump carried in this month’s presidential election also elected Democratic senators. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s twice as many “mismatches” between states’ presidential and U.S. Senate results as in all Senate elections held in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined.

Billionaires, rapists, war hawks, and crackpots are about to hold the keys to power.

The Florida GOP weaponized racism and antisemitism to reshape academic institutions, recent trends suggest “liberal universities” could cave to pressure

Movement among two groups of women voters help explain Trump's new coalition and how inflation, education and gun violence will shape the political fights ahead.

Across the U.S., Latino immigrants who’ve been in the country a long time felt that asylum-seekers got preferential treatment. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” said one woman from Mexico who has lived in Wisconsin for decades.

The outgoing administration worked to secure abortion access, but it can do little to maintain those protections beyond January 20.

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The incoming administration’s hostile trade plans threaten to slow the shift to cleaner industries, boost inflation, and stall the economy.

At 78 years, 4 months and 22 days of age, Donald Trump is the oldest major-party presidential nominee in history, after President Joe Biden withdrew from contention prior to becoming the nominee of his own party in the 2024 United States presidential election. If elected, by the end of his term he would become the oldest person ever to hold the office, sparking renewed discussion of his fitness to assume the presidency. Since the early days of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, his physical and mental health have been a subject of public debate. Trump was 70 years old when he first took office, surpassing Ronald Reagan as the oldest person to assume the presidency to that date. During Trump's presidency, comments on his age, weight, lifestyle, and history of heart disease raised questions about his physical health. In addition, numerous public figures, media sources, and mental health professionals have speculated that Trump may have mental health impairments, ranging from narcissistic personality disorder to some form of dementia, which runs in his family.