No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism

The anti-Communist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was alarmed to find in a recent survey that 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, compared with 42 percent who want to live under capitalism.

..  But given the increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy, it’s not surprising that for many young people, capitalism looks like the god that failed.

..  the rich people who would benefit from the measures passed by the House and the Senate tend to be older (and whiter) than the population at large.

Younger people would foot the bill, either through higher taxes, diminished public services or both. They stand to inherit an even more stratified society than the one they were born into.

.. there’s also an ideology at work, one that sees the rich as more productive and deserving than others.
.. consider what Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told The Des Moines Register about the need to repeal the estate tax, which falls only on heirs of multimillionaires and billionaires. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies,” he said.
.. Senator Orrin Hatch ..  He went on to rant against the poor: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves — won’t lift a finger — and expect the federal government to do everything.” It was unclear whether he was talking about the nearly nine million children covered through CHIP or their parents.
.. You don’t have to want to abolish capitalism to understand why the prospect is tempting to a generation that’s being robbed.

I Believe Juanita

Brian Beutler warns that in future elections, right-wing propaganda will exploit the progressive commitment to always taking sexual abuse charges seriously. It’s easy to imagine an outlet like Breitbart leveraging the “believe women” rallying cry to force mainstream media coverage of dubious accusations.

..  Clinton years, in which epistemological warfare emerged as a key part of the Republican political arsenal, show us why we should be wary of allegations that bubble up from the right-wing press.
.. At the time, the reactionary billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife was bankrolling the Arkansas Project, which David Brock, the former right-wing journalist who played a major role in it, described as a “multimillion-dollar dirty tricks operation against the Clintons.”
.. Of the Clinton accusers, the one who haunts me is Broaddrick. The story she tells about Clinton recalls those we’ve heard about Weinstein. She claimed they had plans to meet in a hotel coffee shop, but at the last minute he asked to come up to her hotel room instead, where he raped her. Five witnesses said she confided in them about the assault right after it happened. It’s true that she denied the rape in an affidavit to Paula Jones’s lawyers, before changing her story when talking to federal investigators. But her explanation, that she didn’t want to go public but couldn’t lie to the F.B.I., makes sense. Put simply, I believe her.
.. one of the sick ironies of the 2016 campaign was that it was Hillary who had to pay the political price for Bill’s misdeeds, as they were trotted out to deflect attention from Trump’s well-documented transgressions.
.. Discerning what might be true in a blizzard of lies isn’t easy, and the people who spread those lies don’t get to claim the moral high ground. We should err on the side of believing women, but sometimes, that belief will be used against us.

Put Women in Charge

Cumulatively, incidents like this erode women’s self-confidence and make it hard for them to find mentors as their male peers do.

.. For most of my 20s and 30s, I never had to worry that getting ahead in my career meant staying in the good graces of a straight man.

.. Research “shows that when workplace power disparities are gendered (e.g., most of the support staff are women and most of the executives are men), more harassment may occur,”

.. The president is a misogynist thug who has boasted of some of the same crimes Weinstein is being pilloried for. His daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, mouths platitudes about female empowerment while supporting the rollback of a federal rule on equal pay. Her attempt to portray herself as a champion of “Women Who Work,” the title of her most recent book, seems tailor-made to support left-wing critiques of what’s sometimes called “corporate feminism,” a feminism that fetishizes the success of elite women.

.. the type of “You go, girl” feminism obsessed with professional cheerleading and pop culture affirmation has come to feel as dated as shoulder pads. Feminism’s energy has shifted left, toward women who want to dismantle the ruling class, not diversify it.

..  as long as we have a hierarchal society, the gender of those at the top matters. In any field where women consistently have to please men to realize their ambitions — or simply to survive — there will be exploitation.