The Decline of Modern Capitalism's Traditional Advantages

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Updated October 24:

Modern capitalism seems to be losing a lot of the advantages that it had over Soviet style Communism, and the Net and computers seem to be at the root of this decay.

It's as if the capitalists don't care anymore. They don't care if their product works or not, they don't care if they rip you off or not, they won't give you a refund, they sometimes won't even give you the product after you buy it, they have eliminated customer service, and, most insane of all, sometimes they even make it almost impossible to even buy their product.

They said the Net and computers were going to make our lives better, but I don't see how they have. If it has anything to do with the Net, it seems like it sucks. What has the Net done for workers? Nothing. It's allowed people in India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to compete with Americans by outsourcing work. Great!

Some examples:

There's plenty of work out there writing junk copy for websites that only exist to somehow make money (not sure how). You're just writing filler. A lot of it is in porn. I got approached by someone the other day about writing this junk copy, but the pay was $10/hour, so I said forget it. That's junk for writing prose on the Net. I told him to walk.

Turned out I was competing with writers of "English" from Eastern Europe, India and the Philippines. They were mostly working for $5/hour or even less. So even writers now are getting screwed down in a race for the bottom. Who's next?

There's a lot more ways the Net has helped create World O' Crap. Look at how many ways a brick and mortar store is better than e-commerce. The main problem with e-commerce is that it sucks.

E-commerce merchants have a right to bitch about it, but they have created this Shitworld of e-commerce. In their mad insistence that the Net not be regulated, the world of e-commerce is full of more sleazeballs and slimers than you could count for the rest of your life.

It's so easy to rip people off over the Net. I have purchased several things off the Net, including website memberships, that were total ripoffs. Quite a few software programs sold over the Net are absolute crap.

There are more problems. In a good number of cases, you try to buy something off the Net and the e-commerce site fucks it up. It will only let you order 3 packages, not 10. After you order, it gives you a database failure page implying the transaction failed, then sends you a mail congratulating you on the sale.

I bought a spyware killer program that it turned out I did not even need from a ripoff website. They quickly took my $30, but then they tried to bill it to my address as my name - for instance, "Thank you for your purchase, Mr. 35889 West Jones Street." There was no way to go back and change my name from my street address to Robert Lindsay. No way would that happen in a brick and mortar.

Then I could not even download the program. I kept trying over and over for two days, and they kept sending me links that didn't work.

Can you imagine that happening in a brick and mortar? First they take your money, then they tell you to come back in an hour to pick up the product. You come back in an hour and it's not there. They give you a new address to pick it up at. You go there and it's not there. This goes on for two days, you running all over town to pick up your product, but it's never there.

One great thing about brick and mortars is I can always get a refund. And I can always speak to a human being. Try getting a refund off the Net via e-commerce. Almost impossible. The worst thing about e-commerce is that they have managed to get rid of human beings altogether.

A lot of times, online stores do let you order by phone, but when you dial the number, no one is ever there. When you can't deal with humans via phone, it's hard to get anything done. They do often end up emailing you back and forth, but that doesn't work very well.

I bought a software program from a large company that refused to install on my system. I'm so discouraged by this Shit E-Commerce World that I haven't even bothered to call the company up to complain. I just wasted the $30. At a brick and mortar, if something doesn't work or its a rip-off, you just take it back. I've never had a problem yet.

Customer service is just one more thing that has been destroyed by the Internet and computers.

A lot of website memberships are just ripoffs. Quite a few software programs just don't work. One more thing wrecked by computers and the Net - product quality.

Capitalists at least used to be able to say that customer service was pretty good under their system. Customer service was often bad under Soviet style Communism. You went into a restaurant in Russia, and the help was rude. If you complained, you got a shrugging shoulder. There was no way to fire anyone.

Now capitalism, along with all its other disadvantages, increasingly has customer service as shitty or nonexistent as it was under Communism.

One more thing you could always say about capitalism was that product quality was often good. If not, if you had the money, you could buy something worthwhile. There was cheap crap, but for a bit more money, you could get something decent.

Under Soviet style Communism, it is true that there were often crappy products. Now it seems that capitalism is even losing this advantage. Product quality is declining under capitalism to where we cannot anymore say that capitalism at least produces good products.

Another advantage of capitalism is that the products are always available. No lines, no shortages, plenty of stuff on the shelves. Shortages and lines have long been the bane of Soviet-style Communism. But under capitalism now, at least on the Internet, there are quite a few e-commerce sites whose stores are so broken it is almost impossible to buy their product. I never thought that I would see that under capitalism.

As we can see, in addition to all of the negatives that capitalism has in relation to socialism (read any socialist critique of capitalism to learn what those are), modern capitalism is even starting to lose some systemic advantages that it has often had recently.

And computers and the Net are at the core of a lot of this system decay in the quality of the modern capitalist system.

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Illegals, Unions, TINA and National Sovereignty

Excellent commenter Uncle Milton notes presciently about illegal immigration. Comments at the end:

Uncle Milton: Unions didn't gain any real power in this country until the immigration doors were slammed shut in the 1920s. In the modern era (the last three decades) you don't have to look very far to see how cheap Latino labor has suppressed the wages of meat packers, janitors, construction workers, etc.

When critiquing illegal immigration, I find it much more productive (and appealing or at least tolerated) by a wider audience when you bring up what it has done to wages and how employers have profited.

Now with the globalization of computer technology many things can be done overseas: accounting, programming, tech support, architecture. In theory, this is done for lower costs, but I know multiple cases were companies brought labor back to the US.

We hear all the time about how the US isn't producing enough engineers. What you don't hear as much is that the average engineer only stays in the field for about a decade instead of a 30 to 40 year career. Quite a bit of ageism in the field.

Our country's currency is being debased, our technology distributed (and frequently "borrowed" with no recompense in the process) to other nations, and unrestrained immigration (and attendant high birthrates of "migrants" subsidized by US taxpayers) are straining resources.

It's generally profitable to those in top 1/10 of 1% of wealth but not so great for everyone else. The concept of national sovereignty being the source of ones wealth seems to have been tossed out the window. At least Japanese and Chinese people seem to have a better grasp on the concept that a stable cohesive nation is your most important source of wealth.

Uncle makes a fantastic point here! The US labor movement only really got going after we seriously restricted immigration in the mid-1920's. We then massively loosened up immigration in 1965, at least racially speaking. At some point after that, we began to experience mass immigration.

Frosty Wooldridge notes that the 1965 Immigration Act resulted in immigration going from 170,000 - 1.1 million per year. That's a damn good reason to oppose it right there, even if you care nothing about the racial angle.

Mass illegal immigration from Mesoamerica started under Reagan in 1980, picked up tremendous speed after 1990 and has exploded since 2000.

The US union movement began to go into a serious decline around 1973 (Any relation to the 1965 immigration act?), about the same time that US wages started to seriously stagnate and wealth began being distributed upwards. Yes, even the Jimmy Carter "Atari Democrats" were in on this bullshit. We've now had 35 years of this insanity.

Plunging wages have combined with wildly increasing inequality, a flood of illegal immigration, an evisceration of our social democracy and what little Social Contract we ever had to produce 28 years of varying degrees of reactionary politics, with a brief intercession for a Eisenhower Republican Democrat named Clinton (actually, Ike was much more progressive than Bill Clinton).

Does any of this make sense? Of course not.

Why does a population where the bottom 60-80% are getting eviscerated march off and vote for the eviscerators every year? Well. They do it in the 3rd World. They used to do it in Latin America. Can you see where we are headed?

The ageism in IT is disgusting. You get about 10 years and then no one will hire you anymore because you are too expensive. 90% of new IT hires are going to H-1B job thieves anyway, and one of the Senate's paragons of Democratic liberalism, Barbara Mikulski, recently introduced a bill to greatly increase the number of H-1B job thieves to the US in order to destroy even more US jobs and lay off even more US workers.

Does that make sense? Of course not.

It only makes sense in a Democratic Party whose liberal wing has utterly abandoned US workers.

I disagree that the illegal immigration flood is only beneficial to the top .1%. Sure, they love it, but I think the entire top 20% benefits, and further, the entire US business class, from small business all the way to corporations, just loves it to death. Hispanic-Americans generally don't benefit a bit, and I insist that most of them are actually harmed by illegal immigration, but they line up on racial grounds anyway.

One of the worst things about Reagan-Thatcherism's TINA (There Is No Alternative) neoliberalism is that everywhere on Earth it has been tried, it has generally benefited only the top 20% of the population. The bottom 80% gets screwed no matter what. From 1980-1992 in the US, the top 80% gained a lot of money and the entire bottom 80% of the US population lost money!

It's been this way everywhere and as regular as clockwork. That's why Latin America is turning their back on this shit. They've had a couple decades of this poison and they are not buying anymore. These "dumb Latinos" are not as stupid as Gringos think they are! Hell, they are smarter than most White Americans.

Anyway, this nasty 20% bastard class has been created everywhere, and everywhere it has done quite a bit of damage. This class is deeply invested in neoliberalism and makes up the overwhelming majority of the professionals and movers and shakers in society. They seek to keep neoliberalism in place forever by whatever means they can.

Even in the UK, a nasty 20% elite has been created since Thatcher. They have nice new foreign cars and second homes in the country. The result has been the rightwing Labor governments of Blair and Brown. In Latin America, the masses actually voted these professional and business elites out, but it hasn't happened everywhere.

The notion of national sovereignty being the source of a nation's wealth is an interesting one, but I do not know where to start on that subject. Maybe someone else can chime in.

It's clear that in Corporate World, there is no national sovereignty anymore. The corporation is the ultimate traitor - it has no national allegiance whatsoever. How do drive around that nasty speed bump is a pretty difficult question.

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Permission to Quote

We journalists are supposed to operate under something called ethics. They actually have courses on this stuff. It was with great dismay that I heard that a British paper had quoted a Clinton staffer as making some unflattering remarks about someone or other a while back. I forget the details, but it was pretty inflammatory and the woman got fired.

The staffer protested that she had not given permission to publish those remarks. The wicked reporter countered that she had never said not to publish them either.

Actually she had made the remarks, and then afterward said, hey, wait a minute, don't quote me on this, that and whatnot. Quote me on all the rest. But etc etc etc is off the record. The scumbag journalist said, "Too bad, you needed to say off the record before you made the remarks, not afterward."

As a journalist, I get emails from folks in the news. I do phone interviews with folks in the news. If I had my act together a bit more, I'd be doing face to face interviews with newsworthy folks.

It's a principle of journalism that the interviewee has total control over their quotes. You go over the quotes, even show them a copy, and ask if it's ok. Often they will try to rephrase this or that, or ask you to rewrite something, but that's their prerogative. If you don't own your own words or thoughts, what do you own?

An interviewee need not state prior that some quote is off the record. They can say it at any time, even after publication. I've had folks ask me to remove quotes after publication and I have actually done so. This is really a moral matter, and it's important to live morally. It's simply immoral to quote someone when they don't want to be quoted. Real simple.

There may be some exceptions. If someone confesses to a crime or says something really inflammatory or admits that they did something that they really did in life, there's not much harm in a confession. Depends on the newsworthiness of it.

If I heard John McCain say he didn't vote for Bush at a party in 2000 and then he called me up afterward and asked me to retract, I probably would not. It was a party, not an interview and he's quite a public figure. Whether he voted for Bush or not is a factual matter of his life, not some private thoughts of his that belong to his mind alone.

As you can see, things get tricky.

What I thought was horrible about the Clinton staffer incident above was that apparently the entire US media gleefully said that the journoslime had done the right thing. Saying afterward, "Hey, don't quote me on that," is too little too late, crowed the cavorting media goblins.

Man, that's not the journalistic ethics I learned in school.

This shows why the media has popularity lower than the government or corporations. We don't deserve any better. It's amazing that 15% of the population doesn't want to throttle us on sight.

The reasons? The increasingly competitive and corporate-driven nature of the media. The media has become more and more corporate and consolidated lately and family-owned firms have gone public starting in the 1970's with increasing regularity. A family owned newspaper or book publishing business used to be satisfied with 4% margin. It had been 4% for decades and that was plenty to get them good and rich.

As firms went public, they became vehicles of shareholders and more importantly Wall Street investment houses. Wall Street in the past 25 years or so has started demanding higher and higher profits from publishing firms. 4% is for pikers. We want 15%. Not only that, but we demand 15% growth in profits every single year. For how long? For eternity.

This puts a lot of pressure on firms. The result has been a shedding of many to most decent titles at book publishing firms in favor of shlock, murder mysteries, romances, crappy ghosted bios, and other forms of book junk food. Editors have been fired in huge waves. Result? Books are more and more often poorly written and there are many more errors and typos than their used to be.

It's the Wallmartization of books. Books, the last refuge of the intellectual, have been infected by the crapification of our corporatized modern world.

Newspapers are no exception. They're getting crappier and crappier too. In most towns, there's only one paper left, so why compete? A pile of fish wrapper called USA Today is now the model of the daily broadsheet. It's modeled on terminal 15 year old's with the attention span of a shrew on the forest floor.

In such a nasty, money-based world, getting the scoop is what it's all about. There still is some competition left somehow in the biz, and you have to beat the other journoslime rags to the punch. Hence, "journalism ethics" becomes an oxymoron and reporters rank barely above serial killers in popularity.

On a related note, I am a member of a list that deals with Evolutionary Psychology. A particularly unhinged and ultra-reactionary member of the list (a very model for the increasingly fanatical and insane modern conservative movement) recently posted the contents of private emails between him and me to the list.

I wrote those mails to him with the unstated understanding that it was just between him and me. To publish or publicly publicize the contents of private mails is a violation of Netiquette, a violation of privacy and an immoral act. His viciousness exemplifies the viciousness of a conservative movement run amok with rightwing muggers and hitmen, incivility as a motif, and an underlying template of narcissism and sociopathy.

This post by the great blog Orcinus, The Political and the Personal, sums it up well.

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What's Up With Starbucks?

I am honestly not understanding what the problem is with this outfit.

Let me describe the problem.

I lived in a small town in the Sierras of California for 15 years, from 1990-2005. For most of that time, there was a small coffee shop in town that I patronized all the time. It was called The Daily Grind at first, then it turned into Yosemite Coffee and Roasting. I went there for 15 years through a variety of owners. I knew all the owners, some of them very well. I also knew all of the employees, some of them very well.

My friends hung out there and I sat around with them for hours, chatted, drank coffee and laughed, just a bunch of guys. I had lots and lots of friends there, for years on end. I also used to bring books and notebooks there and read and take notes on stuff. Once again, for hours on end. It was the local hangout.

Now, this is a small town of 15,000 where everyone knows everyone (sort of) and no one really worries too much about anyone else as long as you act halfway normal. I also went to many other places in town, many times on multiple occasions. There was never one complaint about me by any employee or customer of any establishment in 15 whole years. Got it?

All of a sudden, in 2005, Starfucks shows up and quickly takes out the existing coffee shops. I don't know how they do it, but Starfucks is able to sell coffee at so low a price that other places can't sell it that low and make a profit. I knew the owner of The Daily Grind at the time, and I told him how low they were selling their coffee, and he shook his head.

Pretty soon, if you wanted a cup of coffee, you had to go to Starfucks. Well, on the first day I walk in, there's immediate problems, and I can tell that the manager really dislikes me instantly. From that point, it's all a downhill run. You don't need to know the rest of the story, but there was a near fistfight and a shouting match in a parking lot, an idiot employee got fired, and top Starfucks management got involved.

So by and by I move to a new city and find a new Starfucks. I go there for a year or so and all a sudden there's a new heap of problems. You don't really need to know about that either, but this post ought to help you out.

Now whatever the Starfucks clowns think of me (not much, I was told in an email - they think I am some sort of weird, insane, dangerous freak), the fact is that I only have problems at these asshole Starfucks stores. No matter what my behavior is like, no one else makes a big stink about it, and no one else ever did. Only Starfucks.

I never have any problems at any other establishments in town, nor did I in the previous town. Nor do I in Fresno. Nor do I in any establishments anywhere on Earth. Nor have I ever had any problems in any establishment on Earth for my whole life, until I ran into this Starfucks crap. I'm 50 years old.

I am trying to figure out what the Hell is the matter with these stores. I think the main problem with Starfucks stores is that almost everyone working there is more or less a kid. Their ages tend to range from 16-22, with an adult here or there tossed in to mind the kiddies.

Further, Starfucks franchises are obviously not owned by anyone locally, as many other franchises are. If they were, I think they would act different. A local owner has a very strong incentive to keep customers around.

So, basically, your local Starfucks is run by a bunch of kids. The people in charge are 18-22 years old, running the whole joint. You hand an 18 year old that kind of power that they've never had in their life and they are just going to go insane with it.

Obviously, no one under 18 should be given much power or authority over anything, and the more I deal with college-aged kids, the more I think that no one 18-22 should be given much authority over anything either. When I was 20, I thought I was as mature as a 50 year old. I don't believe that anymore. There's a real reason why the President of the US has to be 35 years old.

There's a reason that there is no adult supervision in a Starfucks. There's a reason that there are no locally owned franchises. Starfucks is a low-down, cheap-ass corporation nickel-and-diming its employees to death and they're too cheap to sell franchises.

I also think there is a difference between a corporation and locally owned joint. The Daily Grind was a locally owned coffee shop, owned by adults aged 35-60, for 15 years. They were all parents and spouses. No matter what they thought of their customers (including me), they really seemed to want to keep them around, come Hell or high water. It's a small town, we all know each other, and everything is cool. Please come back.

I really do not think that Starfucks cares. Since they pretty much have a monopoly these days, I guess they can treat customers like shit all they want and it really doesn't matter. If you want a cup, you know where you have to go.

This has implications for our society. As locally-owned businesses are bulldozed over more and more in favor of behemoth mega-corporations, some very important values of our society are clearly being lost. I used to hear the anti-corporate types blab about that, but I always wondered what they meant.

Mom and Pop wants to make sure you come back, unless you are really a serious asshole. Starfucks, Microsoft and the rest could care less. They've got you by the balls. Want to run a computer and you use Bill Gates' junk while he laughs in your face. Want a cup and there's nowhere else to go.

I am finally starting to understand what the anti-corporate types are talking about. We really are losing something here, and it's scary. This new corporate world at the strip mall level in America is in some ways a pile of shit. Starfucks is a parable, a story of our times, and it's not a good one.

P.S. A commenter from San Fransisco said that Starfucks is widely despised in the City, where thankfully there are still a lot of alternatives.

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