• AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    56·
    2 months ago

    First of all, financial times, please find people who can get to the point in the first 16 paragraphs. Relevant bit:

    After Bezos, Amazon’s largest stockholders are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. These asset managers are also the largest stockholders in Tesla, after Musk. They are also the largest stockholders in Prologis. And they are likely to be among the largest stockholders in most other companies you might think of. (The equity of AerCap is provided by a slightly different group of asset managers.)

    BlackRock and its competitors are not beneficial owners, of course; they run index funds that invest in everything and also offer active management through pooled funds and on behalf of large institutional investors, such as endowments and pension funds. Some of these institutions are large direct investors in equities; organisations such as Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the more than trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund of Norway, and Calpers, which funds the pensions of California’s public employees.

    One of modern capitalism’s greatest achievements has been convincing workers they really own a stake in their own shackles. If you want to survive in your old age, you need a pension fund, which invests in equity. If you want what scraps you saved not to lose their value, you give your money to someone else to put in an index fund.

    “At that point what difference is there between you and Musk or Bezos?” asks some illiterate moron. Well, it’s simple really, even an imbecile writing for FT can get it. As far as a normal person who doesn’t drink children’s blood is concerned, investing in private equity provides lower returns that just playing the stock market after the extract all the hidden fees they want. In some usian states, it’s apparently illegal to disclose the details of an equity’s financials. Furthermore, people who happen to be giving their money to the parasites running this charade through pension funds and whatnot have less say in their running than the homeless guy sitting outside their offices.

    The notion ”I own a small part of the firm that owns a small part of the firm that owns this plant and rents it to the airline therefore I’m a capitalist" is so removed from reality that even liberals shouldn’t be falling for this shit. From the same article:

    400
    The number of times greater that Jeff Bezos’ $200bn wealth is than Andrew Carnegie’s. Over the same period, US national income has risen only by a factor of 50

    That’s a whole lot of rubbish to say “the rich have gotten richer”

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      2 months ago

      lackRock and its competitors are not beneficial owners, of course; they run index funds that invest in everything and also offer active management through pooled funds and on behalf of large institutional investors, such as endowments and pension funds. Some of these institutions are large direct investors in equities; organisations such as Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the more than trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund of Norway, and Calpers, which funds the pensions of California’s public employees.

      They have meetings that probably aren’t dissimilar to that one scene in Spectre https://youtu.be/o8wvQkZkxyQ

    • pastalicious [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      2 months ago

      401k’s and such do function to mentally invest you in capitalism. My 45+ year old coworkers are obsessed with the stock market as their retirement accounts swing wildly by 80k from time to time and get mad at whatever they perceive as the cause. Occasionally it’s Musk or Bezos but equally as often it’s unions or any tiny bit of government spending that might actually do a sliver of good. It’s sad to watch.

  • cricbuzz [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    53·
    2 months ago

    say it with me everyone,

    “your status as a ‘capitalist’ relates directly to your access to the means of production. If you are a worker, even white collar, you are not a capitalist”

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    41·
    2 months ago

    That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

    Even if you have a we are all freelancers now mindset, can you honestly say that I own the means to production for what I do on my computer when a third party owns a lot of the data physically on the device and I need to pay a whole bunch of rentiers for the stuff I need for my job?

  • sweatersocialist [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    35·
    2 months ago

    “capitalism is when you have a iphone” i don’t know where this liberal bullshit came from but whoever wrote that article needs to shut the fuck up. they literally do not know what capitalism is, or what it means to be a capitalist. these people’s relation to any sort of productive means is obviously that of a worker. they are not capitalists lmfao. “being exploited for your labor but instead of directly having a boss an app is telling you what to do, makes you a capitalist”. ok that sentiment makes whoever holds it a genius who knows a lot about what they’re talking about then i guess.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    Called it. I’ve been around some pork circles and this is what they’re coalescing around as their next pitch.

    EVERYONE should be their own individual small business owner, being a businessman is the new clergy so no one will have anything to complain about when everyone’s a pork. In a sense, they do want communism but only on their own terms. If the capitalist class is the only class, then it’s a classless society.