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founding
May 24, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Poverty abounds amidst the greed of the corporists and bangsters.....remember this McTrump and his ilk are wrangling to revive the tax breaks for the ruling class while the rest of us struggle making ends meet!

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I'm teaching a class in the fall about how the media covers poverty, with a few lessons about how the media covers wealth, as well. I've been looking back through various stories from reputable news sources and there aren't a lot of probing questions about venture capitalism. It's more reporting with a sense of wonder that these people are so very rich, how did they DO that. There's no questions about WHY or who suffered because they did that.

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founding
May 24, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Some of their wealth resulted in government deregulation of institutions such as banking. This allowed VULTURE capitalists to swoop in and buyout smaller banks (my first real job was with United Bank in Hartford located at 101 Pearl Street). My employer held out until deregulation passed which allowed United to be bought out by Fleet, they eventually were bought out by Bank of America. Jobs were lost, community relations were impacted and we saw many banks fail (remember CBT a one time giant of the Connecticut banking business). This is just one small example of the VULTURE capitalists greed changing the entire industry with the help of sticky fingered politicos and lobbyists!

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Yep. And if you have enough money, you can always buy a politician or two to make sure your fortress is safe.

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May 24, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

Oh, man, yeah, the plutolatry. Which is of course a specialized version of the worship of power. :(

FWIW, I think it's worth noting that the Selective of Incredibly Smart Squillionaires is very ex post-- not unlike the way J.B. Rhine found people with psychic powers in the people who happened to have scored highest on his tests through successive rounds (as *some one* will of course do). Backward-looking hagiographies-of-the-rich see intense brilliance in every step, while those whose lost gambles flop them out of wealth don't get saluted as Financial Geniuses, and may get called stupid.

(If you're rich enough you can of course easily survive making many bad bets while remaining ungodly rich, since any given bet is small relative to your stacks.)

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author

All true. The mattress is immensely padded if you have enough scratch.

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May 24, 2023Liked by Susan Campbell

I thought "venture capitalism" was when rich people buy thriving companies, stop investing in R&D and siphon off the profits and drive them into the ground, and then sell off the remaining fragments. That's what happened to a lot of the U.S.'s tech companies.

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That's a pretty good description, actually. Drain the companies for all their worth. I don't see a great deal of difference between this and vulture capitalism.

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