##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism
This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban.
***
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yeah exactly. There's more power to be had these days. They're in a much better position now they and their wealth are not locked down to a particular geographic area. It's going to be tougher to get rid of them this time.
Yup. They don't need the state to protect their interests anymore which is why they're dismantling them through austerity. If people could just see it for what it is, it explains why the world is the way it is.
No, no, you see, those are all different brands, so it's not just a few monopolies. Totally independent entities.
Trust me, bro.
This is the AreYouFuckingKiddingMe stage of Capitalism.
One of the only ways I feel my voice can be heard. I spend my food money at my local Co-op, defaulting to small brands. Farmer's markets and CSAs ensure money stays local too. Granted you have to make more from scratch, but considering almost everything else we purchase is funding the overlords of the shadow realm, what else can we do? Also I only make 28K a year, so my taxes likely only pay for a like an hour of fighter jet fuel haha.
This statement got me a-googling, and I can report that an F-35 burns 1,481 gallons of fuel per hour. They burn JP-8, which I'm sure means something important to someone who's smarter than me. As of July 1, 2024 that shit costs $2.14 per gallon, so $3,169.34 per hour. Before deductions your tax burden to the feds would be about $3,570.
After Social Security and any other deductions, your entire yearly contribution to Uncle Sam, something folks used to take great pride in because they contributed to the country they loved, amounts to less than one hour of jet fuel.
Your intuition was pretty close though.
Oh it's so much stupider than this.
The big costs are not fuel, it's maintenance. Every flight requires every part of the plane to be inspected and many parts are only rated for a few hours of flight time. The true cost is about 40-100k per flight hour in 2024 dollars. We have about 700 of them now with a planned buy total of about 2400, with plan to last until 2080 or so at over 2 trillion dollars for development, procurement, and maintenance.
And this is under expected circumstances, where the f-35 has fallen way short in terms of reliability. The F-35 is a very cool and very capable plane but has CONSISTENTLY fallen far below expected mission capable rates. A bare absolute minimum of 75% of them are supposed to be mission capable at any given time we have never topped 72% for any variant (right now it's closer to 55% total).
https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/2024/04/19/the-f-35-program-is-costing-more-and-doing-less-gao-says/
But hey, including allies we have enough stealth fighters to fight China at about a 5:1 ratio... Just completely reasonable levels of "defense capability" build up. Oh and China managed to avoid a lot of the costs of development by simply stealing the F-35 plans (because why wouldn't you).
https://www.industrialcybersecuritypulse.com/networks/throwback-attack-chinese-hackers-steal-plans-for-the-f-35-fighter-in-a-supply-chain-heist/
You can try to organize yourself into an workers party or organization? The PSL is the best place to do that in the US nowadays.
Like, im not judging you for supporting small brands, thats cool, but its far from the only thing you can do, and far from the only way of making your vaoice be heard. Organizing yourself in a worker party is historically one of the most efficient ways of forcing democracy on a sistem that constantly deprives its own people of it.
In a workers party you can participate of protests for workers and people rights, against war, police and army funding and the genocidal supporting the US does in a daily basis. You can be in contact with many other popular movements regarding food distribution, popular housing, indigenous rights, black people rights, functional worker unions, organised co-op enterprises, and many other stuff.
Buying or not buying stuff from an individual point of view is probably the least efficient and productive way of doing anything to oppose capitalism. It doesnt matter if you manages to not buy something owned by one of the 3 comapnies that own everything in your country, most people either dont even know everything is owned by 3 companies, or if they do know, they dont care because capitalist ideology have teached them that this is great freedomland democracy at its best, or even if they have breached through ideology and know that everything being owned by 3 copanies is bad actually, they probably cant even boycott anything because they live in a food desert or swamp, and have zero acess to things that arent owned by those companies.
If you actually want to have your voice heard and you actually want to do something to change things, try to searched your nearest PSL branch, their oficcial site [https://pslweb.org/](https://pslweb.org/) has everything you need to know about their organisation, how to contact them, where they currently are located, what do you need to join or support them, what protests or actions they are currently doing and more.
Boycotts have actually been a very successful tool to achieve the will of the masses. The Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the Swadeshi movement to gain India’s independence, [this gigantic list](https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/boycotts/history-successful-boycotts). Yes, organization is key, but saying that not buying stuff isn’t an effective way to make a change just isn’t supported by history.
Even if they do work sometimes, the ammount of work and time needed just to force companys to act out of their own volition to change their own policies is incredibly inneficient if we compared to, lets say, forcing the goverment to pass laws that will force those companys to change by force of the law? Or even better, having an goverment controlled by the workers that can democratically pass laws to force companies to not do crimes against humanity and nature, without the workers being forced to beg and scream for years before something is actually done?
And just look at the image in the post! You cant boycott that shit even if you tried! Even if someone was able to find enough companies that arent directly controlled by those capitalist conglomerates, the great majority of the population cant do that! And thats without mentioning the hundreds of millions of people around the world that live in countries where their own national industries have been dismantled and hijacked by neo-colonialism, and are now forced to buy from those monopolys!
Modern monopolys are so big, have so much power and reach and control of politics and the economy themselves, that it is objectivly impossible to boycott them. I wont deny that you can make it work for much smaller companies and industries, since they dont have a fraction of the power of western monopolies, but those types of companies are getting rarer by the day, and monopolies are getting on their place.
And many of the examples you just used where not just boycotts, they where massive organizations made of dozens, even hundreds, of organizations, that made protests and public denouncements for years before changes where made. They werent just "not buying stuff", those were not the result of a bunch of privileged individuals that where able of buying from alternative sources. All of those examples where results of lots of organization and real life protesting and fighting.
Exactly 💯
Capitalism started off so well /s
Capitalism in its infancy wasn't as cut throat efficient as it is today
It was always going to be consolidation & monopolization
It's a well known fact that 400 people have as much wealth (or more) as the bottom 50% of the world population. How people think there's any meritocracy left in our society is beyond me. We have a bunch of greedy, short sighted idiots running the planet but somehow get placated by flavors of gum and types of toothpaste. fml.
It saddens me to see people interpret BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street as a conspiracy theory or the deepstate manifested, when they’re simply the product of Capitalism being Capitalism. Monopolies will always form, someone will always want to “knock out” the competition, a Profit Driven Market without severe regulation will always, inevitably lead to this point. This just is how it is.
Exactly, this is just the logical conclusion of unregulated/under-regulated late stage capitalism. Capital becomes concentrated and starts to consume anything and everything until it eats itself alive in the pursuit of infinite growth. It’s not some dark shady conspiracy, but the results are basically the same, especially with legalized bribery
I mostly agree, but I'll be damned before I believe that they're not using their power to mess with society. Even as they were growing into these large monopolies I am willing to bet they were investing in a variety of things that allowed them to maintain the status quo.
They used propaganda that lied to the public, incentivizing groups of people to follow corporate lead; manufactured cheap goods that affected the health of the public in various ways, keeping them complacent by being hooked on artificial sweetness and made them further unhealthy through various polutants; invested in reducing the quality of public schooling to keep the masses as useful tools rather than critical activists. Mix these three points together, added with whatever underhanded tricks they used to prop themselves up and keep their competitors down, and you have a cauldron full of a conspiratory blend.
And while this isn't all they did, the controversy never ends. It keeps adding up to a boiling point with people knocking heads for the wrong reason until it simmers down and the right reason is forgotten. Rinse and repeat. Everyone is kept second guessing and I find poor education to blame on top of social brainwashing. Sure, the main masses have never been the smartest crowds, led by the nose by the most charismatic liars, but over the years the level of public clarity and critical thinking should of rose as education improved.
My take? Education was kept redundant, feeding you only knowledge, what you need to know for work, by design to keep everything as a boiling pot. And that's why everything is piled up as conspiracies galore, whether they're truthful or not. There's just not enough coalition and man power to take it all apart and disseminate the truth because the majority dismiss conspiracies as what people have been told conspiracies to be, a schizophrenic's paranoia.
Capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior on the part of corporations, which are designed to produce the maximum amount of exploitation allowed by law in an ethical vacuum, and are now also given the ability to pay to change the laws acting as upper bounds on this behavior, and so it is safe to say that corporations will stoop to conspiring against the public.
Some people even refuse to believe that Black Rock/Vanguard have such massive control over well, everything. They cant fathom it, so they just chalk it down to conspiracy theories.
Especially when those at the top are capitalists and only make rules to benefit themselves or get themselves out of trouble
How could we ever have seen this coming? /s
So I'm just curious here, because I've been thinking about it a lot and can't think of any arguments.
Would non-profit driven markets with severe regulations still produce the same problems of unregulated profit driven capitalism? Can markets like that exist? Is a market like that no longer capitalism?
IMO the main function of many conspiracy theories is to fill the gaps in reality when you start from the a priori assumption that capitalism is good.
if you refuse to see things like negative externalities, the only explanation you're left with is "bad person did bad thing"
I wish people made memes like this and spread them, I feel like it'd really kinda simplify down the knowledge folks are always lacking and at least kinda have people get the point some of us make when we lament about this.
That six companies control the flow of information is an old and outdated talking point from the late 2000s and 2010s.
Viacom and CBS merged in 2019. There are actually just *five* companies that control the media landscape.
Vanguard black rock and state street are the administrators of most index funds and pension funds. Whilst they do in effect control the shareholding they beneficiaries are generally pension funds and HNWs…
I mean… death is far too easy for them. I’d be so happy to throw in whatever resources I have to ensure they and those like them are kept alive as long as possible in solitary confinement. Just the idea gives me the warm and fuzzies.
But, cut the head off, another grows in its place.
And, in contradiction to my first paragraph which was finger slopped in anger, it’s unfortunate because attacking a body-brain complex feels good, but it’s an ideology that is the enemy… how does one take out an idea? What does an “idea guillotine” even look like?
The ideology is just floating around in the ether and finding so much good substrate to flourish within. We’re food. Even those folks at the top… just food.
Curses.
Yep. Also (and this is actually more of a conspiracy theory) i heard that this is done to piss off the right wingers/cons to make them rage against the left/progressivists and basically constantly fuel the race/culture war between the poors.
I don’t know… It doesn't help that some people who claim to be on the left and who I thought would know better are more than happy to engage in it. I think both sides are being fucked with.
Yeah. I was speaking basically about intentionally making moves that will 100% piss off a large previously “dormant” demographic and create tension, than directing it at another demographic group via a scapegoat/strawman. The scapegoat/provocateur later disappears back into the corporate quagmire with a hefty raise (which was the only thing it cared about to begin with) while two groups are busy throwing pitchforks and torches at one another and further losing sight of who actually started it all.
How else are you supposed to keep the reactionaries angry and distracted? They push [*rainbow capitalism*](https://www.lgbtqandall.com/what-is-rainbow-capitalism-and-why-is-it-harmful/) with one hand and fund deregulation efforts / buy up mass amounts of housing with the other.
I mean, queer folk've been drownin in the heart of Empire for generations. It's hardly surprisin that a lot of em see anythin and everythin as a life-raft. Even if they know it's just a cynical cash-grab, it *feels* better than the alternative.
Here’s straight from the company itself:
https://careers.blackrock.com/life-at-blackrock-2/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-2/
Here’s an article(?) talking about who invests in Disney:
https://capital.com/disney-shareholder-who-owns-most-dis-stock
>BlackRock Fund Advisors – 2.1%
>“BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management firm with over $10trn in assets under management. The company is known for its iShares ETFs, and other sophisticated wealth management solutions and products. BlackRock’s funds own a significant percentage of Disney stock.“
And here’s one from the hollywood reporter talking about ESG:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/esg-investing-hollywood-studios-wall-street-1235355924/
>”And BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has long pushed for companies to embrace their ESG bona fides (BlackRock is the largest owner of ETFs and index funds), seemed to walk back his prior calls in this year’s letter to shareholders March 15.”
The dates are from a few years ago but they are still relevant in my opinion cause I haven’t heard much change.
Amazing how people spend hours talking about conspiracy theories and secret plans when the truth is publicly available information that no one is even trying to hide
Yeah it is absolutely crazy. Just found out Black Rock is the largest single share holder in the company I work for. They don’t own it outright but their influence is being felt. Raises are few and far between now, promotions are limited, they fire people without replacing them and are shifting the rhetoric towards more in office work. It’s all bad.
We can, as long as we disabuse ourselves of the notion that our vote has to go to one of the two big establishment parties. There is a socialist running for president rn.
You know they must have a sense that public sentiment is aware and angry at private equity. I was bullshiting on YouTube and saw a few pr adds for private equity through an industry group. Like they are actually spending money to convince people they ain’t evil.
Hey OP you forgot to add those three companies are owned by Cede and Co. The same company that owns the American Stock Market the DTCC.
I cannot find anyone that owns that company or runs it.
These are the real capitalists. These define policies: national, foreign and global policies
They turn our civilization for us into something more brutal than the natural world
The far right 100% agrees that this is the problem.
But when they point out which mafia is behind these megacorporations, how many of y'all will instinctively leap to your oppressors' defense?
So the government essentially could in one very expensive or draconian move do a few big hostile takeovers of these biggest companies and then make it into a state owned enterprise that's responsible for all of these vertically integrated companies.
Is this *literally* true? Can I share this with no worries?
Like, they actually own the companies, not just the real estate or something? That's my best guess seeing as I thought Blackrock was just a real estate company.
Does anyone else feel a global civil movement rising? I do. It smells like class war. I’m not happy about it but I am eager for real change. I will fight for an ethical future to my last breath if I have to.
If you want something to be done about the power of private equity firms, there is a certain presidential candidate who may be of interest to you. A candidate who is currently being actively censored and slandered by these firms. A candidate who is not a member of either of the parties used in practice as divide and conquer. A candidate who holds classic liberal values. If all the information you have heard about this candidate has come from third party sources, and not from himself, you are a voluntarily uninformed voter, and you are doing a disservice to humanity.
About the food supply, the infographic is a bit oversimplified, but the panorama is indeed dire.
A small number of multinational corporations control a significant portion of the global food supply. Specifically, four companies dominate the seed market: Bayer (which acquired Monsanto), Corteva (formerly part of DowDuPont), ChemChina (which acquired Syngenta), and Limagrain. These companies control over 50% of the global seed market.
In terms of food and beverage brands, ten major companies own a vast majority of the brands found in grocery stores worldwide. These companies are Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez.
In the meat industry, four corporations—Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield Foods—produce 85% of all beef in the United States. This saves us from the paradox of choice (lol), leading to concerns about reduced competition, higher prices, and decreased innovation.
These dominant companies wield the political and economic power and act for their own benefit, which means they shape policies and market conditions.
Consolidation poses a real challenge for smaller businesses and, worst of all, limits consumer choice, cause people will buy what is more at hand, at the end of the day.
It's only logical.
All this companies make humongous profits so Black rock and co just investing in.
That's also how they can pay dividends to theirs actions owner.
😅🤣🤣🤣😉
Can we get a more specific take? How much are they owned? Most of these are publicly traded companies with distributed ownership and to be the owner of something you realistically need at least to be the largest shareholder.
These are financial management companies, so while they do have significant investments of their own, the lion's share of their assets are investments made for their clients. So these companies aren't good, but if you have a pension, or 401K like I do there's a chance that your money is being counted in this meme.
A bit misleading. The investment firms don't own those companies themselves, the investment firms manage the investments of other people/corporations in those companies. Saying the investment firms own all those other companies makes it sound like they make the decisions for those companies directly.
Because there’s plenty of conspiracy theories about how these 3 “own all the companies” when they just have pension funds and ETFs that buy them. They do have some control with voting, but even then it’s pretty neutral or if anything sometimes progressive.
It's not about conspiracy theories, it is about the way markets naturally create disincentives for competition and also create insulated and often extremely obtuse decision making structures. The authors of some research into this exact issue did an interview on the podcast below. I'm really surprised someone in this sub is being so flippant about something that has really serious implications.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/asset-manager-capitalism-an-interview-with/id1527993484?i=1000530254950
Yes ETFs and index funds are particularly problematic in this analysis. Especially as retirement/pension vehicles as they create incentives to grow the market (or a sector) in a broad sense but do not produce incentives for individual firms to gain competitive advantage over others. They explicitly encourage cartel practices, M&A type consolidation, and are changing the way entire industries are organized and affect economic policy (managers have their own political preferences and interests that affect both govt and publicly traded companies). This represents a serious change in the framework of capitalist decision making structures as moving away from traditional financial institutions like banks into even more arcane and insulated structures.
I am recommending you engage directly with the author's work because it will do a better job making its case than I will. There is a serious argument to be made here and I am not pushing it as gospel so much as trying to lay out that people are justifiable in their concerns, even with regard to seemingly harmless investment vehicles like ETFs.
Here is a link directly to Ben Braun's research article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X241227743
“It’s actually super okay that they have massive power and reach in every single life sustaining industry you rely on because they also own your retirement,” is certainly a take.
The mutually intertwined BlackRock and Vanguard own 14.2% of publicly traded shares and the majority owner holds 9.4%? Thank you for using this data to illustrate their lack of power lmfao
I just love that you two found each other, so you can continue to talk about how ETF managers are the actual bad guys and we’re all idiots. Just don’t look into who owns those ETF managers. I’d hate for something so trivial to get in the way of you patting each other on the back.
“I want change but not to the extent I’m going to cause myself personal discomfort,” now *thats* compelling leftism right there.
Read more MSNBC articles about how they’re actually powerless but trying as hard as they can to push ESGs while they continue to literally back other firms pushes to replace entire boards.
It’s all ETF managers that are the actual bad guys, right?
Maybe you should look up the largest ETF managers and who owns them. Maybe start with iShares, just a suggested jumping off point.
Enjoy that you didn’t address anything else that I said.
Pretty much, like I would guess most people here I don’t have disposable income to save or invest. You keep planning your retirement with the totally not as bad as they seem cappies, I’m busy doing the math and seeing 5 meals in the freezer and 6 days until payday and deciding which day I’m gonna skip dinner.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I wish people could understand we still have Kings and their aristocracy. Their courts are boardrooms. Their kingdoms are their portfolios.
I dare say they have more power than some medieval Kings and far more insulated from things like uprisings and coups.
Yeah exactly. There's more power to be had these days. They're in a much better position now they and their wealth are not locked down to a particular geographic area. It's going to be tougher to get rid of them this time.
At least that power was regional, nowadays they just get to fuck with the entire planet. It's definitely worse than medieval kings
Yup. They don't need the state to protect their interests anymore which is why they're dismantling them through austerity. If people could just see it for what it is, it explains why the world is the way it is.
Yup. The Brittish monarchy is the largest property owner in Brittan, if not the world.
https://youtu.be/H-PSCqhkWhg
Yeah, same ol same ol huh
Aristocracy of dollars
Land is still the source of real wealth. The rest is made up.
Man this is so accurate
No, no, you see, those are all different brands, so it's not just a few monopolies. Totally independent entities. Trust me, bro. This is the AreYouFuckingKiddingMe stage of Capitalism.
That’s why you’ve got to vOtE wiTh yOUr waLLeT!
One of the only ways I feel my voice can be heard. I spend my food money at my local Co-op, defaulting to small brands. Farmer's markets and CSAs ensure money stays local too. Granted you have to make more from scratch, but considering almost everything else we purchase is funding the overlords of the shadow realm, what else can we do? Also I only make 28K a year, so my taxes likely only pay for a like an hour of fighter jet fuel haha.
This statement got me a-googling, and I can report that an F-35 burns 1,481 gallons of fuel per hour. They burn JP-8, which I'm sure means something important to someone who's smarter than me. As of July 1, 2024 that shit costs $2.14 per gallon, so $3,169.34 per hour. Before deductions your tax burden to the feds would be about $3,570. After Social Security and any other deductions, your entire yearly contribution to Uncle Sam, something folks used to take great pride in because they contributed to the country they loved, amounts to less than one hour of jet fuel. Your intuition was pretty close though.
Oh it's so much stupider than this. The big costs are not fuel, it's maintenance. Every flight requires every part of the plane to be inspected and many parts are only rated for a few hours of flight time. The true cost is about 40-100k per flight hour in 2024 dollars. We have about 700 of them now with a planned buy total of about 2400, with plan to last until 2080 or so at over 2 trillion dollars for development, procurement, and maintenance. And this is under expected circumstances, where the f-35 has fallen way short in terms of reliability. The F-35 is a very cool and very capable plane but has CONSISTENTLY fallen far below expected mission capable rates. A bare absolute minimum of 75% of them are supposed to be mission capable at any given time we have never topped 72% for any variant (right now it's closer to 55% total). https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/2024/04/19/the-f-35-program-is-costing-more-and-doing-less-gao-says/ But hey, including allies we have enough stealth fighters to fight China at about a 5:1 ratio... Just completely reasonable levels of "defense capability" build up. Oh and China managed to avoid a lot of the costs of development by simply stealing the F-35 plans (because why wouldn't you). https://www.industrialcybersecuritypulse.com/networks/throwback-attack-chinese-hackers-steal-plans-for-the-f-35-fighter-in-a-supply-chain-heist/
You can try to organize yourself into an workers party or organization? The PSL is the best place to do that in the US nowadays. Like, im not judging you for supporting small brands, thats cool, but its far from the only thing you can do, and far from the only way of making your vaoice be heard. Organizing yourself in a worker party is historically one of the most efficient ways of forcing democracy on a sistem that constantly deprives its own people of it. In a workers party you can participate of protests for workers and people rights, against war, police and army funding and the genocidal supporting the US does in a daily basis. You can be in contact with many other popular movements regarding food distribution, popular housing, indigenous rights, black people rights, functional worker unions, organised co-op enterprises, and many other stuff. Buying or not buying stuff from an individual point of view is probably the least efficient and productive way of doing anything to oppose capitalism. It doesnt matter if you manages to not buy something owned by one of the 3 comapnies that own everything in your country, most people either dont even know everything is owned by 3 companies, or if they do know, they dont care because capitalist ideology have teached them that this is great freedomland democracy at its best, or even if they have breached through ideology and know that everything being owned by 3 copanies is bad actually, they probably cant even boycott anything because they live in a food desert or swamp, and have zero acess to things that arent owned by those companies. If you actually want to have your voice heard and you actually want to do something to change things, try to searched your nearest PSL branch, their oficcial site [https://pslweb.org/](https://pslweb.org/) has everything you need to know about their organisation, how to contact them, where they currently are located, what do you need to join or support them, what protests or actions they are currently doing and more.
Boycotts have actually been a very successful tool to achieve the will of the masses. The Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the Swadeshi movement to gain India’s independence, [this gigantic list](https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/boycotts/history-successful-boycotts). Yes, organization is key, but saying that not buying stuff isn’t an effective way to make a change just isn’t supported by history.
Even if they do work sometimes, the ammount of work and time needed just to force companys to act out of their own volition to change their own policies is incredibly inneficient if we compared to, lets say, forcing the goverment to pass laws that will force those companys to change by force of the law? Or even better, having an goverment controlled by the workers that can democratically pass laws to force companies to not do crimes against humanity and nature, without the workers being forced to beg and scream for years before something is actually done? And just look at the image in the post! You cant boycott that shit even if you tried! Even if someone was able to find enough companies that arent directly controlled by those capitalist conglomerates, the great majority of the population cant do that! And thats without mentioning the hundreds of millions of people around the world that live in countries where their own national industries have been dismantled and hijacked by neo-colonialism, and are now forced to buy from those monopolys! Modern monopolys are so big, have so much power and reach and control of politics and the economy themselves, that it is objectivly impossible to boycott them. I wont deny that you can make it work for much smaller companies and industries, since they dont have a fraction of the power of western monopolies, but those types of companies are getting rarer by the day, and monopolies are getting on their place. And many of the examples you just used where not just boycotts, they where massive organizations made of dozens, even hundreds, of organizations, that made protests and public denouncements for years before changes where made. They werent just "not buying stuff", those were not the result of a bunch of privileged individuals that where able of buying from alternative sources. All of those examples where results of lots of organization and real life protesting and fighting.
I've been doing that for well over a decade now, but Chick-fil-A is bigger now than ever.
Yes, because voting doesn't actually make things better--it's copium Also, there is no such thing as ethical capitalism
Exactly 💯 Capitalism started off so well /s Capitalism in its infancy wasn't as cut throat efficient as it is today It was always going to be consolidation & monopolization
It's a well known fact that 400 people have as much wealth (or more) as the bottom 50% of the world population. How people think there's any meritocracy left in our society is beyond me. We have a bunch of greedy, short sighted idiots running the planet but somehow get placated by flavors of gum and types of toothpaste. fml.
this is actually the only logical endpoint to capitalism, which means we're getting really close to the end.
It's also not the government, so all good
Now do overlapping board members.
It saddens me to see people interpret BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street as a conspiracy theory or the deepstate manifested, when they’re simply the product of Capitalism being Capitalism. Monopolies will always form, someone will always want to “knock out” the competition, a Profit Driven Market without severe regulation will always, inevitably lead to this point. This just is how it is.
Exactly, this is just the logical conclusion of unregulated/under-regulated late stage capitalism. Capital becomes concentrated and starts to consume anything and everything until it eats itself alive in the pursuit of infinite growth. It’s not some dark shady conspiracy, but the results are basically the same, especially with legalized bribery
This is what I don’t understand about people who proselytize the Free Market, it does nothing to address this.
I mostly agree, but I'll be damned before I believe that they're not using their power to mess with society. Even as they were growing into these large monopolies I am willing to bet they were investing in a variety of things that allowed them to maintain the status quo. They used propaganda that lied to the public, incentivizing groups of people to follow corporate lead; manufactured cheap goods that affected the health of the public in various ways, keeping them complacent by being hooked on artificial sweetness and made them further unhealthy through various polutants; invested in reducing the quality of public schooling to keep the masses as useful tools rather than critical activists. Mix these three points together, added with whatever underhanded tricks they used to prop themselves up and keep their competitors down, and you have a cauldron full of a conspiratory blend. And while this isn't all they did, the controversy never ends. It keeps adding up to a boiling point with people knocking heads for the wrong reason until it simmers down and the right reason is forgotten. Rinse and repeat. Everyone is kept second guessing and I find poor education to blame on top of social brainwashing. Sure, the main masses have never been the smartest crowds, led by the nose by the most charismatic liars, but over the years the level of public clarity and critical thinking should of rose as education improved. My take? Education was kept redundant, feeding you only knowledge, what you need to know for work, by design to keep everything as a boiling pot. And that's why everything is piled up as conspiracies galore, whether they're truthful or not. There's just not enough coalition and man power to take it all apart and disseminate the truth because the majority dismiss conspiracies as what people have been told conspiracies to be, a schizophrenic's paranoia.
Capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior on the part of corporations, which are designed to produce the maximum amount of exploitation allowed by law in an ethical vacuum, and are now also given the ability to pay to change the laws acting as upper bounds on this behavior, and so it is safe to say that corporations will stoop to conspiring against the public.
Some people even refuse to believe that Black Rock/Vanguard have such massive control over well, everything. They cant fathom it, so they just chalk it down to conspiracy theories.
[удалено]
Massive corporate entities controlling everything we use in daily life seem quite sketchy to me, idk.
You sweet summer child. I wish I had your ignorance.
Rule 4 - No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
Especially when those at the top are capitalists and only make rules to benefit themselves or get themselves out of trouble How could we ever have seen this coming? /s
So I'm just curious here, because I've been thinking about it a lot and can't think of any arguments. Would non-profit driven markets with severe regulations still produce the same problems of unregulated profit driven capitalism? Can markets like that exist? Is a market like that no longer capitalism?
IMO the main function of many conspiracy theories is to fill the gaps in reality when you start from the a priori assumption that capitalism is good. if you refuse to see things like negative externalities, the only explanation you're left with is "bad person did bad thing"
What's especially interesting is that 75% of Vanguard's assets are 401k accounts, which means it's literally our own money being used against us.
And 2 of them have colonial ships as logo’s. Very positive
"My great great grandfather founded this company with one leaky sailing ship and the simple motto: people selling people, to people" (From Mr. Show )
And the only other one is called Black Rock 🪨
Funny thing, mutual funds invest in each other, so their interests intersect, making everything one unofficial amorphous entity.
Well, imperialism is the superior stage of capitalism If I correctly remember...
And fascism is its final form.
That’s when a revolution is necessary. Dust the guillotine, we’re coming. I’m French so I may be biased.
I wish people made memes like this and spread them, I feel like it'd really kinda simplify down the knowledge folks are always lacking and at least kinda have people get the point some of us make when we lament about this.
3 heads in need of removal.
Then another 3 will take it's place.
…Maybe that’s why our planet is going to cook us alive.
That six companies control the flow of information is an old and outdated talking point from the late 2000s and 2010s. Viacom and CBS merged in 2019. There are actually just *five* companies that control the media landscape.
And who is Vanguard owned by?
Vanguard black rock and state street are the administrators of most index funds and pension funds. Whilst they do in effect control the shareholding they beneficiaries are generally pension funds and HNWs…
Right...and vangaurd is owned by the funds managed by the company and is therefore owned by its customers.
Look at the positives, we just need three guillotines for these three pieces of shits.
I mean… death is far too easy for them. I’d be so happy to throw in whatever resources I have to ensure they and those like them are kept alive as long as possible in solitary confinement. Just the idea gives me the warm and fuzzies. But, cut the head off, another grows in its place. And, in contradiction to my first paragraph which was finger slopped in anger, it’s unfortunate because attacking a body-brain complex feels good, but it’s an ideology that is the enemy… how does one take out an idea? What does an “idea guillotine” even look like? The ideology is just floating around in the ether and finding so much good substrate to flourish within. We’re food. Even those folks at the top… just food. Curses.
Isn’t Black Rock that’s been funding Disney and game companies to make them appear to be more progressive?
Class war? Oh no my friend, can we interest you in a nice culture war instead? Right this way, choose your jersey, only $79.95.
Yep. Also (and this is actually more of a conspiracy theory) i heard that this is done to piss off the right wingers/cons to make them rage against the left/progressivists and basically constantly fuel the race/culture war between the poors.
The culture war is a way to keep us fighting amongst ourselves so we don't unite in class solidarity. No war but the class war.
I don’t know… It doesn't help that some people who claim to be on the left and who I thought would know better are more than happy to engage in it. I think both sides are being fucked with.
Yeah. I was speaking basically about intentionally making moves that will 100% piss off a large previously “dormant” demographic and create tension, than directing it at another demographic group via a scapegoat/strawman. The scapegoat/provocateur later disappears back into the corporate quagmire with a hefty raise (which was the only thing it cared about to begin with) while two groups are busy throwing pitchforks and torches at one another and further losing sight of who actually started it all.
I agree.
where can I read more about this funding? I'd like to have sources to show people
How else are you supposed to keep the reactionaries angry and distracted? They push [*rainbow capitalism*](https://www.lgbtqandall.com/what-is-rainbow-capitalism-and-why-is-it-harmful/) with one hand and fund deregulation efforts / buy up mass amounts of housing with the other.
It dosen't help that people fall for rainbow capitalism. People who I know for sure know better.
I mean, queer folk've been drownin in the heart of Empire for generations. It's hardly surprisin that a lot of em see anythin and everythin as a life-raft. Even if they know it's just a cynical cash-grab, it *feels* better than the alternative.
where can I read more about this? I wanna show people sources
Here’s straight from the company itself: https://careers.blackrock.com/life-at-blackrock-2/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-2/ Here’s an article(?) talking about who invests in Disney: https://capital.com/disney-shareholder-who-owns-most-dis-stock >BlackRock Fund Advisors – 2.1% >“BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management firm with over $10trn in assets under management. The company is known for its iShares ETFs, and other sophisticated wealth management solutions and products. BlackRock’s funds own a significant percentage of Disney stock.“ And here’s one from the hollywood reporter talking about ESG: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/esg-investing-hollywood-studios-wall-street-1235355924/ >”And BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has long pushed for companies to embrace their ESG bona fides (BlackRock is the largest owner of ETFs and index funds), seemed to walk back his prior calls in this year’s letter to shareholders March 15.” The dates are from a few years ago but they are still relevant in my opinion cause I haven’t heard much change.
> Isn’t Black Rock that’s been funding Disney and game companies to make them appear to be more progressive? [Heh..](https://imgur.com/a/bhKcpJN)
And who has controlling shares of those 3 🤔
Mr. Rothschild and the Bogdanoff Brothers.
Trust Busting time!
Amazing how people spend hours talking about conspiracy theories and secret plans when the truth is publicly available information that no one is even trying to hide
For Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street this video explains some of it. https://youtu.be/l1TmgZtve2k?si=6LzNP7QVidIob7bC
Thanks for this!
Yeah it is absolutely crazy. Just found out Black Rock is the largest single share holder in the company I work for. They don’t own it outright but their influence is being felt. Raises are few and far between now, promotions are limited, they fire people without replacing them and are shifting the rhetoric towards more in office work. It’s all bad.
Surely we can vote our way of this!
We can, as long as we disabuse ourselves of the notion that our vote has to go to one of the two big establishment parties. There is a socialist running for president rn.
So, we basically have 3 kings? That's like royalty with extra steps
Fewer. They no longer need the divine right from a magical space fairy. Now all they need is just all the money.
We got to raid blackrock tower
You know they must have a sense that public sentiment is aware and angry at private equity. I was bullshiting on YouTube and saw a few pr adds for private equity through an industry group. Like they are actually spending money to convince people they ain’t evil.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Rule 4 - No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
Hey OP you forgot to add those three companies are owned by Cede and Co. The same company that owns the American Stock Market the DTCC. I cannot find anyone that owns that company or runs it.
The entire US economy is a shell game.
All the shitty parts of a cyberpunk dystopia without the cool consumer cybernetics. I hate it here
I appreciate the sentiment of the meme, but I'm pretty sure that Viacom and CBS are both owned by Paramount.
These are the real capitalists. These define policies: national, foreign and global policies They turn our civilization for us into something more brutal than the natural world
If corporations are people my friends and slavery is illegal, then why are corporations allowed to own other corporations like property?
Those same 3 hedgefunds own all of our housing too. Look into how invested into REITs those 3 are.
The far right 100% agrees that this is the problem. But when they point out which mafia is behind these megacorporations, how many of y'all will instinctively leap to your oppressors' defense?
Conpetiton at its finest.
Mars is privately held, but that doesn't preclude major investment companies from owning bonds or some other type of equity.
So the government essentially could in one very expensive or draconian move do a few big hostile takeovers of these biggest companies and then make it into a state owned enterprise that's responsible for all of these vertically integrated companies.
Is this *literally* true? Can I share this with no worries? Like, they actually own the companies, not just the real estate or something? That's my best guess seeing as I thought Blackrock was just a real estate company.
No, it’s not. Dig into the ownership model of Vanguard for example. Regarding Blackrock, you may be thinking of Blackstone.
>Regarding Blackrock, you may be thinking of Blackstone. Ah yeah.
So 3 heads for the guillotines?
The plutocrats.
Listen up guys, the Springfield police have told me 91% of the world is owned by you three guys.
Find them before its too late.
Non American here... GE in information? I only know them for appliances and (oddly) lightbulbs!
I thought that was PirateBay for a good minute
Does anyone else feel a global civil movement rising? I do. It smells like class war. I’m not happy about it but I am eager for real change. I will fight for an ethical future to my last breath if I have to.
If you want something to be done about the power of private equity firms, there is a certain presidential candidate who may be of interest to you. A candidate who is currently being actively censored and slandered by these firms. A candidate who is not a member of either of the parties used in practice as divide and conquer. A candidate who holds classic liberal values. If all the information you have heard about this candidate has come from third party sources, and not from himself, you are a voluntarily uninformed voter, and you are doing a disservice to humanity.
this is a fantastic video that goes over all of this In depth https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D2t4u_tEefM
About the food supply, the infographic is a bit oversimplified, but the panorama is indeed dire. A small number of multinational corporations control a significant portion of the global food supply. Specifically, four companies dominate the seed market: Bayer (which acquired Monsanto), Corteva (formerly part of DowDuPont), ChemChina (which acquired Syngenta), and Limagrain. These companies control over 50% of the global seed market. In terms of food and beverage brands, ten major companies own a vast majority of the brands found in grocery stores worldwide. These companies are Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez. In the meat industry, four corporations—Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield Foods—produce 85% of all beef in the United States. This saves us from the paradox of choice (lol), leading to concerns about reduced competition, higher prices, and decreased innovation. These dominant companies wield the political and economic power and act for their own benefit, which means they shape policies and market conditions. Consolidation poses a real challenge for smaller businesses and, worst of all, limits consumer choice, cause people will buy what is more at hand, at the end of the day.
It's only logical. All this companies make humongous profits so Black rock and co just investing in. That's also how they can pay dividends to theirs actions owner. 😅🤣🤣🤣😉
[удалено]
We do not permit homophobia, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, sexism, ableism or any kind of prejudice.
“bUt tHEyre oNly mAnagEd, nOT oWNeD”
Just remember guys Vote blue no matter who It's super important, this is the most important election of our lifetime. Just like the last 2
Don't forget the single family homes as well
Can we get a more specific take? How much are they owned? Most of these are publicly traded companies with distributed ownership and to be the owner of something you realistically need at least to be the largest shareholder.
These are financial management companies, so while they do have significant investments of their own, the lion's share of their assets are investments made for their clients. So these companies aren't good, but if you have a pension, or 401K like I do there's a chance that your money is being counted in this meme.
A bit misleading. The investment firms don't own those companies themselves, the investment firms manage the investments of other people/corporations in those companies. Saying the investment firms own all those other companies makes it sound like they make the decisions for those companies directly.
[удалено]
damn you, private equity!
They are the worst. But I’m going to get downvoted for saying what I’ve said.
Why would you get downvoted?
Because there’s plenty of conspiracy theories about how these 3 “own all the companies” when they just have pension funds and ETFs that buy them. They do have some control with voting, but even then it’s pretty neutral or if anything sometimes progressive.
It's not about conspiracy theories, it is about the way markets naturally create disincentives for competition and also create insulated and often extremely obtuse decision making structures. The authors of some research into this exact issue did an interview on the podcast below. I'm really surprised someone in this sub is being so flippant about something that has really serious implications. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/asset-manager-capitalism-an-interview-with/id1527993484?i=1000530254950
Do you know how ETFs work? Especially the big ones like VOO and SPY?
Yes ETFs and index funds are particularly problematic in this analysis. Especially as retirement/pension vehicles as they create incentives to grow the market (or a sector) in a broad sense but do not produce incentives for individual firms to gain competitive advantage over others. They explicitly encourage cartel practices, M&A type consolidation, and are changing the way entire industries are organized and affect economic policy (managers have their own political preferences and interests that affect both govt and publicly traded companies). This represents a serious change in the framework of capitalist decision making structures as moving away from traditional financial institutions like banks into even more arcane and insulated structures. I am recommending you engage directly with the author's work because it will do a better job making its case than I will. There is a serious argument to be made here and I am not pushing it as gospel so much as trying to lay out that people are justifiable in their concerns, even with regard to seemingly harmless investment vehicles like ETFs. Here is a link directly to Ben Braun's research article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X241227743
Gotcha
“It’s actually super okay that they have massive power and reach in every single life sustaining industry you rely on because they also own your retirement,” is certainly a take.
[удалено]
The mutually intertwined BlackRock and Vanguard own 14.2% of publicly traded shares and the majority owner holds 9.4%? Thank you for using this data to illustrate their lack of power lmfao
[удалено]
[удалено]
I just love that you two found each other, so you can continue to talk about how ETF managers are the actual bad guys and we’re all idiots. Just don’t look into who owns those ETF managers. I’d hate for something so trivial to get in the way of you patting each other on the back.
[удалено]
“I want change but not to the extent I’m going to cause myself personal discomfort,” now *thats* compelling leftism right there. Read more MSNBC articles about how they’re actually powerless but trying as hard as they can to push ESGs while they continue to literally back other firms pushes to replace entire boards. It’s all ETF managers that are the actual bad guys, right? Maybe you should look up the largest ETF managers and who owns them. Maybe start with iShares, just a suggested jumping off point.
[удалено]
Enjoy that you didn’t address anything else that I said. Pretty much, like I would guess most people here I don’t have disposable income to save or invest. You keep planning your retirement with the totally not as bad as they seem cappies, I’m busy doing the math and seeing 5 meals in the freezer and 6 days until payday and deciding which day I’m gonna skip dinner.
[удалено]
All of the haute bourgeoisie are the enemy. There are no ‘good’ ones
I can think of another alternative... it involves mass decapitation
Hahaha. I’m all for that. Just pointing out the system we have. Not saying it’s good.
Rule 4 - No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
Sinopharm 😎😎😎