A number of conservative websites and Twitter users I like are mad that the former CEO of Twitter said this:
Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.
— dick costolo (@dickc) October 1, 2020
The replies are all…
“Millionaire capital hypocrite wants to shoot other capitalists.”
Sorry, but no.
I am a capitalist, but I have come to hate the Capitalism Uber Alles that some on the Right have embraced.
“Me-first” capitalists are the CEOs who lay off an entirely factory, outsource production, kill a small town, and drive thousands into bankruptcy to pocket a fat bonus.
And yes, when the last American factory worker is laid off so the next holding company manager can make another billion, I suspect a lot of people will be stood against the wall.
Capitalists who create and innovate, that make money providing good and services that people want are good.
It’s the capitalists who lay off, leverage buyout, and outsource their way to wealth, leaving a wake of misery and destitution behind them that I have a problem with.
If conservatives can’t understand that difference and understand why the latter is bad, then we deserve the socialist revolution.
Let me put it to you like this.
The town of Ilion, New York is dead and a 204 year old American company is no more, all because the half dozen guys who owned Cerberus Capital pocketed $600 million in Remington’s money.
I guess you’re okay with that because capitalism uber alles.
Remington isn’t even a good example of what you’re referring to because the factory and employees stayed in Ilion, NY and were never outsourced. Remington went bankrupt because of many factors, some of which had to do with the hostile business climate they worked under by remaining in the state of New York. This hostile business climate included allowing nuisance lawsuits against Remington to go forward in defiance of the Protection Of Lawful Commerce In Arms Act (PLCAA).
The management of Cerberus borrowed $600 million in Remington’s name. Did a debt transfer. Kept the borrowed money for themselves and put the debt on Remington’s books. Then let Remington go bankrupt and be taken by the banks while they walked away with the money.
They used legal means to pocket $600 million and let the Ilion employees take the fall by losing their jobs.
Seems pretty fucking evil and unethical to me.
Why I disagree with you.
1) Historically, revolutionary firing squads are like guillotines: they need to be fed and they don’t care if it is a Me-First capitalist or Mother Theresa: Bullets will found a fleshy resting point.
2) Yes, there are Me-First capitalists that will fuck up good companies, but the alternative that the Costolo guy spouses will fuck up EVERY company. If you have any doubts, ask PDVSA how they are doing under the revolution and why the Venezuelan government is importing gasoline from Iran so the people can run their vehicles.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was immensely better than Vladimir Illich Lenin as history has proven.
I’m not disagreeing with you.
I’m saying if we defend and protect the abuses of capitalists, we feed the socialist beast who will kill us all.
The capitalists need to police their own to curb the socialist talking points.
The reason the English monarchy didn’t end up like the French monarchy is they voluntarily gave up power to the parliament before heads came off.
I want to avoid a socialist takeover. That’s means we reign in the holding company bosses before we all get put to the wall for having two $20s to rub together.
Agree with you there j.kb. If we as free market capitalists allow, and ignore the abuses, we are doing two things. First, we are condoning a behavior that is ultimately damaging to the market, and secondly, we are providing the socialists justification for pushing their vision of the marketplace.
Some companies need to be bought out, fleeced and shut down, but that should be the exception, not the rule. And, it should be done to benefit the overall economy, not to line the pockets of a select few.
However, there are a lot of other possible solutions instead of just life in front of the firing squad.
I suspect Remington’s closing was a planned hit, the buyers were adamantly anti-gun and proud of it . Some of them also stated they believes people should use their position to push what they believe( activist economics). Every thing that made Remington money was slowly fazed out before that money transfer was used as a deathblow. There should be a class action lawsuits by the investors against those shmucks.
I thought the anti-gun nuts were the ones who nearly destroyed Smith & Wesson, though it has since recovered.
Meanwhile, re Sam’s comment on the British civil war — there’s a somewhat older case interesting to look at. That is the Dutch war for independence, a.k.a., the “80 year war” (of which the last 30 are known more broadly as the “30 year war”). Not long after it started (curiously enough) the Dutch adopted a declaration of independence. Its wording is not all that elegant, not even close to the marvelous prose of Thomas Jefferson, but many of the sentiments are in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Abjuration
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/before-1600/plakkaat-van-verlatinghe-1581-july-26.php has the full text (in translation and the original)
It wasn’t exactly “voluntary”. The English had their own civil war, and the Parliamentarians forced the monarchy to retreat and grant a bill of rights, the first such document in the European world, or perhaps globally (certainly nothing like it existed in the EASTERN world). This unprecedented document granted that ALL Englishmen had rights, and that NO one could be killed or robbed without due process, and that the law applied to everyone. It makes me laugh to see people who seem to think that the US invented citizen’s rights and democratic government, when these were actually taken directly from the unique English mode of thinking, i.e. rule of law, equal rights, the concept of liberty, protection of property (which was a big one). We just expanded and increased the already existing English concept and made it more extreme, really. Before (and after) the Revolution, Englishmen prided themselves on the liberty under law that each citizen was granted, the rights encoded in Magna Carta. It certainly wasn’t an egalitarian society, but they were proud of their status as Free Men, who couldn’t be forced to work without pay or murdered offhand by anyone with a noble title. These rights were obtained by force, but well before the point where the peasantry erupted and murdered all the nobles. In fact, during the war the Royalists had most of their support from the poor people and the countryside, while it was the middle class who supported the Barons who insisted on Parliament and rule of law. The citizen’s rights were granted because the Barons needed the help if the middle class – the merchants and bankers, etc – to defeat the Royalists. In exchange they insisted on having their rights protected, so their businesses could prosper without nobles seizing whatever they wanted. The difference between the English and America was mostly that we made our rights somewhat more extreme, and we insisted they were NATURAL rights, whereas the English were happy with the legal basis that the rights were granted by the benevolent monarch. So America didn’t invent any of these concepts, and England, as bad as it may seem in retrospect, was a haven of liberty and citizens rights while the rest of Europe was still using their peasants for target practice and insisting on the droits de signeurs, and other nasty practices.
But I’ve gone off on a tangent, sorry. Just thought it might be of interest.
Most importantly, the Magna Carta banned fish weirs.
Went to see the copy at Salisbury Cathedral last year, and that was the part that stuck with me from the translation, for some reason.
Also saw the grave of Robert Marshall, the knight who shepherded the Magna Carta to adoption. The Temple Church — originally a Templar church which is why he was buried there, owned by the London Bar since the Templars got the axe — has a display about the number of Temple Bar members that signed the Declaration and the Constitution. So there’s a direct connection from the Magna Carta to the US founding.
The problem with going after the bosses is you only attack the symptom. We need to eradicate the root cause by destroying the “management consultants” who place stock prices and bonuses above all. Forget execution, let’s do like McKinsey and outsource. Take every current and former McKinsey, Bain etc. employee, ship them to a Chinese re-education camp in exchange for Uighur and free our economy of these teredo worms. Extra bonus, Mitt Romney and Pete Buttigeig will be on the first shipment
It’s called “enlightened” self-interest for a reason. If everyone does as well for themselves as they can without screwing over others, society as a whole prospers more.
The problem I see with the original tweet is that “me-first capitalist” may well be a synonym of “capitalist who votes Republican”.
Actually, the “me-first” capitalist usually head out before the tanks roll in, along with a lot of the nation’s available capital.
Instead, it’s always the revolutionaries get the bullet, especially the ones who didn’t pick up on which Maximum Leader was going to end up as the maximum leader early on.
J.Kb while I agree that I think that kind of capitalist behavior is a problem it isn’t what Mr. Dick is referring too. This man is a economic activist, he believes in CEO’s using company money and their position to push their political agenda be it through banks or deliberately closing down businesses they don’t like. He probably loves the asshats that killed Remington and other companies that refuse money transactions to conservatives or gun purchases. We really need to shut both types of assholes down.
“The trouble with socialism is socialism; the trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” -Willi Schlamm
Are the assets being sold off to other companies? Is it up to auction in bankruptcy court?
Context is important. While what you are saying has some truth to it, Dick wasn’t responding to a thread talking about that. He was responding to a thread in which people were saying they wanted to work without having politics infect their workplace.
It’s clear that your definition of “me first capitalism” is not the same as his. He’s saying that those who don’t get on the social justice bandwagon at work (and by implication, in every aspect of their lives) should and will be shot, and that he will celebrate when they are. I suspect he would have said the same thing if the conversation had been about keeping politics out of our family gatherings and holidays.
There is plenty to be angry about in what you are describing, which, rather than venture capitalism, should be termed “vulture capitalism.” It is absolutely disgusting and perhaps it could be made illegal, if properly defined. Maybe a law like “loans to businesses are not be fungible to other businesses owned by the main company” would be able to prevent this kind of activity.
I do independent contracting for a number of different companies. Depending on the contract and terms of service, I may or may not be on company chat systems. Mostly Slack.
One company had so many in your face leftist commentators that the #general that I just couldn’t work with them. I had to go to the HR department to get those people to stop pushing their politics on the company via common Slack channels.
The real problem was that it was never a discussion. Putting forth facts with references, just got you yelled at. One leftist put out the trope that “90% of climate scientist agree, who are you to say they are wrong?” I pointed out that he had his trope wrong and he had a fit. When I pointed out that the people he was telling “your opinion doesn’t count” were trained engineers and scientists and in some cases engineer-scientists and knew how to do independent research he had a fit.
But he was rude about any other opinion and shut down all discussion except for those that wanted to echo his point of view.
That was a trip to the HR department to get him told “Keep your politics to yourself in the work place.”
Those that leaned right kept their politics to themselves. Those that leaned left never had any problem expressing their TDS or any other darn thing they wanted to say. All the while assuming that everybody in the office just agreed with them.
Keep your politics out of the workspace.
(On the other side of it, in other companies, where there is a mix, I’ll sometimes hear “Can I talk about X here?” and they will get politely redirected to #politics to keep the politics out of the #general and other required channels. But it is only the right leaning folks that seem to do that. People suffering from TDS don’t ever seem to check first)
Ah you’re more of a Hank Reardon than a Gordon Gecko huh?
Whats not to like about that?
I don’t subscribe to Twitter and I rarely try to wade through it, so I didn’t see the background leading up to that violent tweet. But just now I saw an article that describes the discussion that prompted it. https://www.westernjournal.com/ex-twitter-ceo-goes-giddy-thought-lining-capitalists-wall-shooting/
Basically, it started with another CEO (Armstrong) saying that his company doesn’t do political or social activism because they need focus on the business. And there were some reactions to that basically agreeing. This is when Costolo piped up saying that such a position is bad and people who believe businesses should do business need to be shot.
In other words, it doesn’t look like what J.Kb is arguing for, the denunciation of vulture investors. Instead, it’s an attack on managers who want their companies to succeed (meaning their employees will prosper).