(Part 4) Top products from r/LateStageCapitalism

If you're interested in creepiness factor, here is one of their books they had us read (if you press "look inside", you'll find this):

>Every business is a corporate family. It doesn’t matter if your company has ten employees or ten thousand; the relational bonds within the organization are very similar to those in the basic family unit. Executive leaders who guide the company are like parents: setting expectations, developing skill sets and habits, checking progress, and rewarding good effort. And all employees experience varying degrees of sibling rivalry as they look to the “parents” for instruction and guidance, strive to meet expectations, vie for attention, and even test limits.

[...]

>When you enter any business, you should find a group of people working together with a shared purpose to fulfill a set of objectives. Whether the business is a bakery, a bank, or an international investment firm, all members operate within their unique culture, depending on each other to uphold responsibilities and looking to the “head” for direction. By definition, a family is a group that has commonality, typically comprised of parents and their children. In a sense, every business is like a family—we call this your “Corporate Family.”

https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Family-Matters-Steve-Wilke/dp/061535775X

edit: corrected nouns used to describe the training. Also, please note that I did not work for the people that wrote this book. They were brought in to the company I worked at for leadership training.

The best we can do is strive for equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome is not achievable. Also, the economy is not a zero-sum game. Just because someone has more, does not mean others necessarily must have less. Capitalism is the fairest system we have. Prices are the most efficient way there is to distribute scarce resources (which have alternative uses) to enormous numbers of individuals, each with individual wants, needs, and values. Capitalism is not perfect, thus the vast majority of people prefer to have a government over anarchy. But, the more government interferes, the less efficient it becomes, thus regulate as a last resort. This is all in the first chapter of basic economics.

If bread is what you want to learn, I highly suggest buying

Crust and Crumb by Peter Reinhart

Or

Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman

And if you like rye breads I highly highly recommend

The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg

Honestly I can't recommend The Rye Baker enough, it quickly became my favorite bread book.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman goes into great detail about the Bechtel Corporation. Very well written story about a guy who was unwarily caught up in instituting U.S. interests abroad.

I think you'd really like this book, your comment is basically the defining opinion of some of my favorite characters in it.

This is very clearly just one of the many symptoms of our nation crushing wealth disparity.

Of which there are many...

I recall this book being a good read 10 or so years ago: https://www.amazon.ca/Rebel-Sell-Culture-Cant-Jammed/dp/0006394914

I think it's actually written from a fairly pro-status quo standpoint but it makes some really solid criticisms of the commodification and commercialization of reactionary movements. It was probably more relevant when things like Adbusters magazine were still around.

https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499

You can probably find the pdf somewhere for free

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

You might also be interested in this site:

http://www.paecon.net/

And this book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pluralist-Economics-Education-Routledge-Heterodox/dp/0415777623

(I have a pdf if you want it, the book is quite expensive)

Martin Ford discusses this in his: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521743069&sr=8-1&keywords=the+rise+of+the+robots+martin+ford

Good read if you have time.

Highly, highly recommend this book. The line between advertising and propaganda is a very thing line.

Book recommendation for every serious comrade (especially American):

https://www.amazon.com/Mismeasure-Man-Revised-Expanded/dp/0393314251

The last time I saw this image someone commented and recommended the book King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Someone gave it to me as a gift recently and it's on my stack, but I haven't gotten to it quite yet. I think I'll move it to the top. Before I saw this image last time I had no idea these things had happened.

>This is complete and utter deception on an order that might not really have a precedent in history.

I have a feeling I'm going to be posting this link a lot to the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. So far, all the techniques described in the book for getting the downtrodden to hate people who have no power to impact their lives and instead love powerful people who make their lives miserable sound exactly like what the Republicans are doing. It's as though the Republicans are using this book as a manual.

Kevin Kruse's book One Nation Under God shows how corporations used Christian churches and movements to fight against the New Deal, which ended up morphing into the Christian nationalist movement that has taken over the Republican party today. It's a scary mix of theocracy, fascism, and unrestrained capitalism.

Also, there's the new Christian movement called the Prosperity Gospel, where they essentially say that the more you donate to the megapastors, the richer God will make you in the long run (backed up with scriptural citations, of course!). So the idea is that people who aren't rich aren't blessed; if you're poor, it's your fault! It's a shocking yet ingenious way to merge Capitalism and Christianity.

I'm an ex-Christian, and absolutely hated the Prosperity Gospel, because I was convinced that the love of money was the root of all evil. Funny how I never made the connection that capitalism is basically the root of a great deal of problems on our planet today.

Yeah, I don't know how to do it, but I don't think it's impossible.

One of the most bizarre discussions I had semi-recently was at a family gathering the same weekend as the Milwaukee riots where a very conservative relative recommended this book about inner city poverty as background for how bad it was there (despite the author being "a bit of a wacko socialist"), but then supporting the sheriff ordering a National Guard crackdown to preserve law and order (and he thinks Obama undermined the moral fabric of society by releasing some drug offenders).

Well you shouldn't call it America. It's the US. America is also Canada and every country in south america technically. Speaking about south america, the US has fucked over every government and economy down there in the name of stopping communism and ending the drug trade. It's worth a google.

Here's a book for 10 bucks that details alot of the smaller and lesser known conflicts we have been involved in. Both successful and failed incursions. https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Splendid-Little-Wars-Engagements/dp/0670032328

Look into how al Qaeda was formed and ISIS. You can thank the CIA for them. We have this tendency to supply munitions to our potential radical enemies if we think they can help prevent the spread of communism or fight against Russia.

Let's look inward....the "drug war" is a complete failure and was started as a war on colored people and their american subculture. Look at the disproportionate rate at with POC are incarcerated compared to white people even though FBI statistics state white people are more likely to commit a crime(and get away with it too). A good book for this is 'Just mercy' by Byran Stevenson.

Japanese internment camps and our treatment of Japanese Americans during world war 2.

The trail of tears, wounded knee, desecration of the black hills, and how we have treated native americans...stripping their land from them and sticking them on reservations.

The list goes on and on.

> On the supply side, fuck the people that make those things, especially for a profit.

The people growing the poppy that's turned into heroin are impoverished farmers who basically have no other options for crop growth if they want to make a living. Even Myanmar's government acknowledges this.

They are also sometimes forced to grow these drugs by armed resistance groups who use the money to fund their operations. Why are there armed resistance groups in Myanmar? Leftovers of imperialism of course, the entire area is still destabilized from arbitrarily assigning a single-ethnic group complete control over a region that had always been populated by hundreds of groups that, while they didn't necessarily exist in a peaceful balance with each other, didn't live in constant oppression because some one community had the luck to meet the British on the shore first! Yes that's simplifying things quite a bit, but in essence the groups that rule post-colonial countries are the ones that worked with the colonial governments in exchange for power.

We can also look at how the CIA was complicit in drug trafficking around the world and in America in order to understand the modern layout of the black-market and how things like Mexico's cartels came to exist as "lesser evils" for fighting communism.

Finally lets not forget that what we consider illegal drugs aren't the most trafficked things in the black market - Prescription drugs are, as well as things like televisions, cigarettes and that most dire of evils: food.

In short: Shit's fucked, yo, and lots of people have no choice but to participate in this fucked up system just to make a living, and this is the essence of FinalageCapitalism isn't it?

Of course all information is colored by propaganda. But the data is still data and got can interpret it how you want. For example, I disagree with the theme and conclusions of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/North-Korea-Markets-Military-Rule/dp/0521723442

But it still contains an excellent overview of the data that is available and the empirical problems with it. I would recommend this article as well:

http://apjjf.org/2014/12/18/Henri-Feron/4113/article.html

Which goes over the basics of why we actually know quite a lot about the specific thing we are discussing (the character of North Korean production). We can toss out the bank of korea data and the cia data but that's something that can be tested empirically, not just a political question.

Sorry to get so testy but sociology is just like physics. No one feels the need to give their opinion on pions if they have not studied it in depth and yet people think they can give grand proclamations about history, economics, and politics of North Korea because the US media ran a story about Kim Jong-un's eating habits. I will argue about the extent of marketization, the flawed understanding of modes of production that bourgeois scholars approach the issue with, and the definition of socialism and how we can test it. But arguing about the north Korean economy as having slave labor (meaning here that slavery exists at a systematic level) is pure racist propaganda with no basis in fact.

Seeking asylum isn’t against the law in the US.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/psmag.com/.amp/news/what-asylum-means-for-the-u-s-and-the-central-american-migrants-who-want-it

Second the rhetoric the republicans spout is that they’re breaking the law entering illegally, thus changing the narrative from refugees to criminals, and all criminals are dangerous that are gonna get your kids in middle America.

Third if it’s not about race and it’s about coming into this country legally then why station so many border agents or military troops. More often than not, at almost a 99 percent rate of responding the immigrants detained report back to their immigration officer after
processing. FYI most immigrants to this country enter the legal way, through visas, they just stay past their allotted date.

https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/do-mexican-immigrants-cause-crime

Lastly, these people are fleeing violence and gang extortion from their own countries, which in some cases had direct US involvement.

https://www.amazon.com/Banana-Wars-Military-Intervention-Spanish-American/dp/0025882104

Here’s a book to read up on it.

This is a stunt to rile up the xenophobic and scared to the voting booths. They’re being labeled as criminals or thugs to dehumanize, did you hear trumps last speech saying that young men are in the caravan WTF do you think that means, he might as have said they’re coming to rape your women. Live in your fantasy of protecting the fallacy of entering this country legally, whatever helps you justify your view point.