liberalsarecool:

Let’s keep this straight. #immigration

post-teenager:

micdotcom:

What would you do if the price of your everyday prescription rose 5,500%? That’s exactly what happened to Daraprim (pyrimethamine), a drug originally developed over 60 years ago, that helps immunocompromised HIV and cancer patients. After Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager, acquired the drug for his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, he raised the price by 55 times overnight. Shockingly, this type of gouging is fairly common.

Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC 

1177 Avenue of the Americas, 39th Floor
New York, NY 10036

Tel: 1.646.356.5577

Turing Pharmaceuticals AG
Haldenstrasse 5
6340 Baar CHE

Tel: 041 41 760 24 24

Source: http://www.turingpharma.com/contact-us

thespectacularspider-girl:

puregag:

Water Is Not A Human Right

Yes, Nestle, the company that uses child slaves to make their chocolate.  Color me surprised.

Capitalism is organized crime and we are all its victims.

america-wakiewakie:

The New Hip Fascist State | Bobby London Wordpress

[…] As the state continues to build it’s arsenal against the resistance and create more authoritarian agencies to stalk us. I wonder how long it is going to take for us to move away from a position of defense towards a more proactive stance against an increasingly more powerful fascistic state.

I find my self debating with people often on whether or not what we’re living under is even really Fascism, “we still have a free press” they say, “you’re not locked up in jail or murdered for your political ideas” they say, “how can this be fascism?” they ask. Now insert some WWI or WWII historical fact here and if one cannot prove that America is doing that exact thing, in this exact way, then we are not of course living under a fascist regime. Despite however the fact that in this country we are more surveilled than the populace in Nazi Germany, that America, after the war, recruited and adopted many of the Nazi’s all-star players, many of them top scientists and researchers.

And sure, I haven’t been imprisoned for the things I write or say – yet, but the state is carefully collecting and storing everything from phone calls to emails for later use. We’ve already seen cases of people being arrested for their Facebook or Twitter statuses – free speech ain’t so free after all. Let’s be clear though, the media is owned by a rich minority that is used as a complete propaganda tool for the state. The function of the state at this point is to serve corporate white supremacist interests both here and abroad. To do this they need Fascism and the force of the police state.

This however does not constitute as Fascism according to them. I guess we’ll have to wait for a more obvious form of ethnic cleansing, (enter statistic that is consistently increasing here) of black people being killed every day by police officers, but I guess this isn’t systematic enough.

Does it matter what we call it anyways? In this time of highly propagated media you could probably market Fascism as something fashionable and chic. The public would eat it up. Have it run a candidate that’s a TV show host they love to hate just to draw them in, or wrap it up in Feminism, ‘cause it’s time to smash some glass ceilings (for some of us), or better yet throw some Socialism on it for others ‘cause you know you can’t be a socialist and a fascist.

At this point is Fascism more dangerous than White Supremacy? Can you really have institutional White Supremacy without Fascism? and if so, then doesn’t that mean that America has always been a fascist state? Sure Mussolini may have coined the phrase but America has been utilizing the very same tactics before the idea was even given its fancy name, so give credit where credit is due.

America has always been fascist depending on what America you are talking to. If you’re a black and in America from the time of slavery this country has been fascist to you. From genocide, to a vast prison industry, the introduction of crack cocaine by the CIA , AIDS, segregation, and let’s not forget slavery. The Edward Snowden era anti-surveillance advocates only come at a time where now the tentacles of Fascism are effecting white America.

I’m sure depending on who you’re talking to and what part of the world they are living in Fascism will look and sound different too. Fascism for someone who survived the Holocaust may have looked much different than for someone who survived the reign of Pinochet. I think the major difference between now and the 1930’s are that governments are no longer openly fascist in name. Which is a great PR trick, but it does not change the fact that they behave as fascists. Take for instance Occupied Palestine also known as Israel by other fellow fascists. Israel resembles and inflicts a lot of the same persecution and terrible techniques used by Nazi Germany on the Palestinian people. They are also currently one of the major weapons and surveillance capitals of the world. They have imposed heavily militarized checkpoints and test chemical weapons on the Palestinian people, used forced sterilization on Ethiopian Jews, and what is Gaza other than a large scale concentration camp at this point?

So back to a question I asked earlier, does it matter whether or not we call it Fascism? The answer is yes. From the time we attend grade school we are taught that Fascism is wrong, that Democracy is key, and that WWII was a victory of good against evil and freedom against fascistic enslavement. The Nazis were good, but the Americans were even better when it came down to propaganda. Propaganda was repurposed and rebranded as Public Relations (PR), and Americans along with the existing international community, including the wealthy elite, knew they needed rebranding as much as they needed Fascism. So instead of calling it Fascism, they would call it Neo-Liberalism, or Democracy (their interpretation of it anyway), or however they decide to spin it, in the end Fascism is Fascism.

(Read Full Text)

sixpenceee:

A father stares at the hands of his 5 year old daughter, which were severed as punishment for harvesting too little rubber. 

This is from when King Leopold ll took control of The Congo during the late 1800’s and claimed that he was guiding them towards independence. Instead he implemented extremely harsh policies. 

dagwolf:

dagwolf:

When you hear your friends say, “people are inherently selfish,” remind them that statement is ideological and is not representative of any characteristic of people. Tell them ‘People are inherently selfish’ is a generalization that educates us how to talk about humanity so we will excuse all of the abhorrent aspects of capitalist culture. 

Not many have time to read the history and philosophy relating to this issue, but it doesn’t matter because the statement isn’t philosophical; it’s political. ‘People are inherently selfish’ results after applying one of several principles about how people should behave in the market as consumers, employers, employees, and owners. The principle, in this case, is People should behave in their own self interest. Clearly, an answer to what we should do is not an answer about how people want to behave. Don’t confuse capitalist ethics for an objective statement describing human being. 

Moreover, to insist that people are inherently selfish is to promote a problematic representation of community. Community becomes a necessary hindrance to the self-interested pursuits of individuals and cooperation is relegated to transactions between consumers and producers, employees and employers. Communities become spaces occupied by individuals who voluntarily submit to a social order for themselves and, according to the US version of this order, can decide to leave at any time as well as can assume a privilege to benefit from the products of social living without having to work to produce the benefits. (See, Right to Work) Two problems emerge.

1. We know we have good reasons to be selfish at times and the generalization about self-interest conveniently ignores those reasons. People are inherently selfish is another way to say all people are already selfish. We are composed as always already selfish. This causes problems. When poor people struggle together to take control of local resources, for example, they are easily blamed for breaking the rules rather than acting in their own self interests. Henry Ford is spoken about as the first person to institute the 8-hour work day to great success. What an innovation, right? Except, workers struggled in commune for the 8-hour work day for a long time. It was not an innovation the result of individual genius; it was the result of community struggle. This theory of self-interest only works if and when we treat people primarily as individuals. Anti-socialism in capitalism is a tool to keep working and poor people apart, as individuals at work or home, and out of the streets, where they might choose to cooperate to achieve greater benefit for all. Capitalist culture is good at breaking up communities. The selfish discourse destroys communal struggle because such struggle is never legitimate.
   
2. People are inherently selfish insists we ignore social hierarchy that rewards unearned ambition. To be successfully selfish is to reach an upper class social status, to be able to afford expensive durable goods, to become a boss and owner. Inheritance and other forms of unearned ambition are viewed as rights. To benefit from fortunate circumstances and privilege are the fruits of proper self-centered behavior. To join in class struggle, then, or to insist we examine and make reparations for white supremacy, or to seek to destabilize patriarchal institutions, or to work against oligarchy, monarchy, and plutocracy is to transgress against not only the free market but a social contract that has been organized to permit individuals access to nature’s destiny for “human being”. To struggle against this social order is to be an unsuccessful individual, to be a bad subject. Check out Kant addressing nature’s plan for mankind. See what Hayek and von Mises did with this idea. (It’s important to insist we use “human” and “man” here because this is a patriarchal representation of selfishness in capitalist culture and society. The idea was developed by white men for white men. Don’t forget that.)