The surging anti-monopoly movement has been greeted with skepticism from the left, some of whom suspect the whole thing is merely fetishizing competition for its own sake, irrespective of whether competing businesses produce value for their workers, communities and customers.
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There's certainly an element of the economic world that sees competition and market forces as a cure-all, jumping through farcical hoops to push pro-competitive policies to the exclusion of safety, quality and labor regulation.
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But sometimes, competition really DOES solve problems - and even more often, a LACK of competition CREATES problems.
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Inside: The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance; How Peter Thiel gamed the Roth IRA for tax-free billions; New York City's 100 worst landlords; and more!
Treating shelter - a human right and necessity that sits just above food on the hierarchy of needs - as a commodity inevitably pits the creation and maintenance of wealth against the survival of the people for whom a home is a place to live, not an asset.
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(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)
American prosperity has historically come from two sources - intergenerational wealth accumulation through family homes; and gains made by organized labor that increased wages and improved working conditions.
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The @propublica#SecretIRSFiles is a large tranche of IRS leaks detailing the tax-structures of the super-wealthy, documenting the ways in which Leona Helmsley was perfectly correct to assert that "taxes are for the little people."
(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)
The latest reporting examines the way that Peter Thiel and other billionaires are able to abuse the Roth IRA (a savings vehicle that is only supposed to be used by middle-class people to save modest sums for retirement) to evade taxes on billions..
From traffic-cams to mobile device tracking to social media spying and beyond, the urban landscape has quietly become a locus of ubiquitous surveillance, without any meaningful debate, let alone democratic oversight or consent.
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(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)
"The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance, and How to Fix It" is a superb, long-ass infographic from @EFF's @mguariglia, depicting a cross-section of urban surveillance, from the satellites in low-Earth orbit to the deep-sea cable taps.