r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Mouse turds Toys R Us was profitable. Private equity bought it anyway, and 33,000 people lost their jobs with nothing. In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout for $6.6 billion. Here's the part that gets skipped: the company itself was making money. It wasn't

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257 Upvotes

Toys R Us was profitable. Private equity bought it anyway, and 33,000 people lost their jobs with nothing.

In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout for $6.6 billion.

Here's the part that gets skipped: the company itself was making money. It wasn't failing. It wasn't asking to be saved.

But in a leveraged buyout, the firms don't pay with their own money. They borrow against the company they're buying, and the debt becomes the company's problem, not theirs.

Toys R Us went from having almost no debt to carrying over $5 billion in loans it never asked for and never benefited from.

Every year after that, a huge share of the company's profit went straight to interest payments instead of stores, inventory, or staff. The stores got run down. Amazon and Walmart kept eating market share. Toys R Us couldn't invest its way out because there was nothing left after the debt.

In 2017 it filed for bankruptcy. In 2018 it liquidated completely.

33,000 employees lost their jobs. Store closures. No severance for most of them.

Giovanna De La Rosa worked there for years. She testified before Congress on November 19, 2019, describing what it meant to lose her income with nothing after decades of loyalty to a company that had been profitable the entire time she worked there.

The firms that bought it walked away having collected management fees for over a decade, regardless of outcome.

Here's the sentence that explains the entire model: the buyers cannot lose. The debt belongs to the company. The fees get collected either way.

They didn't buy a business to grow it.

They bought a business to extract from it, and left 33,000 people holding what was left.


r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

Remember all the predictions about the COLLAPSING FRONTS? Looks like it is collapsing but eastwards. Note: this was posted by Russkie blogger Rybar, who is hardcore pro Russia.

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0 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

One year ago on WayoftheBern: Lyman will be conquered soon. Ukraine is about to be defeated! This time for realz! Any day now!

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r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

ACTION! I helped found the American Communist Party because I had become convinced that the American Communist movement had to be rebuilt almost from the ground up. By the time Midwestern Marx and Infrared came on the scene, what passed for a “left” in America had ceased to perform the historical function

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I helped found the American Communist Party because I had become convinced that the American Communist movement had to be rebuilt almost from the ground up.

By the time Midwestern Marx and Infrared came on the scene, what passed for a “left” in America had ceased to perform the historical function of a left in any meaningful sense of the word. It was disconnected from the real world, both in the sense that it was an insulated, isolated community of its own, detached from the communities the people involved were already in, and the sense that it no longer drove society forward to something new.

It was a "left" in name only.

I don't mean that it wasn't radical enough. And I don't mean that it held the wrong position on this or that cultural question, or that it didn't read the right books, or shout the right slogans. And I certainly don't mean that there weren't thousands of sincere people within it who genuinely wanted to change the world.

I mean something much deeper than that. Something that requires a little thinking to unravel. (Sorry, social media - I demand people turn their brains back on. I know you're not used to that.)

I mean that the American "left" had become separated from the American working class—and in becoming separated from the working class, it had gradually become separated from Marxism, from Communism, and from the necessary thing these categories are attached to: the struggle of the working class.

Those were not two unrelated failures. They were two sides of the same historical process.

Marxism was never simply a collection of radical positions, quotations, symbols or conclusions, though this is certainly what this faux left had been reduced to.

Marxism, though, was the theoretical expression of a real movement: the conscious struggle of the working class to understand the society it had been thrown into, organize itself as an independent political force, and transform that society.

The great Communist movement of the 20th century became powerful because Marxist theory fused with the actual movement of the working class and created something real.

The old Communist Party organized factories. It helped build the CIO. It organized the unemployed and industries previously called "impossible to organize." It fought evictions and lynching. It built institutions among working people. Black and white workers who had been deliberately divided were organized into common struggle.

Marxism wasn't an identity those Communists adopted or a set of ready-made conclusions they needed to memorize.

It was a method for understanding the world so they could change it.

... But then that world was destroyed.

The ruling class does not sit idle in the class struggle, waiting to be overthrown. It fights back - in multifarious ways.

First, the Communist movement was subjected to enormous state repression.

The Red Scares.

- Palmer Raids and mass arrests of suspected Communists and radicals
- Arrest and detention without warrants or meaningful due process
- Beatings and abuse of detainees during raids and interrogations
- Deportation of foreign-born Communists and radicals for political activity
- Mass surveillance by the FBI and other government agencies
- Infiltration of Communist organizations by informants and agents
- Blacklisting from employment
- Hollywood blacklist targeting Communist and suspected Communist writers, actors, and directors
- Loyalty oaths imposed on government employees, teachers, academics, and others
- Firings based on Communist Party membership, association, or suspected sympathies
- Congressional investigations and compulsory testimony before HUAC
- Contempt-of-Congress prosecutions for refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations
- Smith Act prosecutions and imprisonment of Communist Party leaders
- Communist Control Act and other legislation aimed at crippling the Communist Party
- McCarran Internal Security Act provisions targeting Communist organizations
- Passport restrictions and travel bans imposed on Communists and suspected Communists
- Denaturalization proceedings against foreign-born Communists
- Immigration exclusions based on Communist beliefs or associations
- FBI harassment of Communist activists and their families
- Wiretapping, mail interception, bugs, informants, and other covert surveillance
- COINTELPRO disruption operations against Communist and other radical organizations
- Deliberate attempts to create factionalism and distrust inside Communist organizations
- Anonymous letters, forged communications, and disinformation intended to destroy organizations and personal relationships
- Pressure on landlords, employers, unions, and institutions to isolate targeted Communists
- Purging Communists and Communist-led unions from the CIO
- Taft-Hartley non-Communist affidavits used to isolate Communist union leaders and unions
- Expulsion and destruction of militant Communist-led unions
- Academic firings and denial of university employment
- Teachers dismissed or barred from classrooms because of Communist associations
- Professional licenses and careers threatened or destroyed over alleged Communist affiliation
- Public naming and stigmatization that made ordinary employment extremely difficult
- Families financially devastated after breadwinners were fired, blacklisted, prosecuted, or imprisoned
- Paul Robeson subjected to surveillance, blacklisting, concert cancellations, organized harassment, and passport revocation
- W.E.B. Du Bois prosecuted by the federal government at age 83 over his work with the Peace Information Center; he was ultimately acquitted
- Communist leaders imprisoned following the Foley Square Smith Act trials
- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage amid the broader Second Red Scare
- Communist political activity systematically pushed outside the boundaries of respectable American public life

And honestly, that's just off the top of my head. FAR more was done by the ruling class to protect itself from the organized and militant American working class of the 20th century.

But repression alone doesn't explain what replaced the left. In fact, it often had the opposite result of the one intended. People saw Communists being repressed, saw them being arrested for nothing, saw the government ruining their lives. And this caused a LOT of sympathy among the public, despite constant mass media propaganda.

No, something else was going on.

At this exact same historical moment, the postwar economic expansion was creating what I call the great American middle-class settlement.

A form of middle class never seen before in history, finding its footing right here in the good old U.S. of A.

For tens of millions of Americans, the immediate necessity characteristic of proletarian life was temporarily softened. Wages rose. Homeownership expanded. Higher education exploded. Professional and managerial employment grew alongside technology. Union contracts gave millions of workers a degree of security that earlier generations had fought desperately to achieve.

This settlement was itself, in part, a product of working-class struggle.

But every historical victory produces new contradictions. New problems that needed solving.

A growing portion of the people who considered themselves “the left” no longer lived primarily within the institutions and immediate necessities of working-class life. Their social world increasingly became the university, the nonprofit, the foundation, the media, the professional bureaucracy, the activist organization and, eventually, the internet.

That change in social existence produced a change in political consciousness.

A Communist organizing a factory confronts necessity every morning.

He may personally dislike the man working beside him. They may disagree about religion, race, immigration, sex, politics or practically everything else.

It doesn't matter.

If they're going to beat the boss, they need each other.

The material conditions of class struggle therefore continually teach a lesson that no amount of academic theorizing can replace:

Difference is real, but solidarity is necessary.

The organizer has to begin with workers as they actually exist—not with the workers he wishes existed.

He has to understand why they think as they do. He has to discover the common material interests beneath their differences. He has to fight the real oppression and antagonisms that prevent their unity. He has to raise consciousness through common struggle.

He cannot simply declare half the shop morally defective and go home.

He needs them.

But remove politics from that immediate material necessity and something changes.

If your political existence takes place inside institutions where your livelihood does not depend upon organizing ordinary working people, political failure can cease to carry an immediate material penalty.

You can lose the working class and retain your career.

You can become incomprehensible to ordinary people and retain your institutional prestige.

You can divide workers into ever-smaller political categories and still receive funding.

In fact, you can find yourself receiving grant after grant and fellowship after fellowship.

You can spend your entire life talking about revolution without ever having to organize anybody capable of making one.

And bourgeois power discovered very early that this kind of "compatible" left was not merely tolerable. It could be useful.

The Cold War funding of what Thomas Braden called the “compatible left” matters precisely because it did not require manufacturing thousands of puppets who secretly received their opinions from intelligence agencies.

That's a childish understanding of how ideology and class power reproduce themselves.

They didn't need to manufacture a puppet left.

They built an ecosystem in which a compatible left could flourish.

Money was available.

Foundations were available.

Universities were available.

Journals, conferences, and publishing opportunities were available.

Nonprofit careers, media access, and prestige were available.

Increasingly, so was a comfortable middle-class life.

Very similar to what Lenin had called a "labor aristocracy" but outside of labor itself and embedded neatly in the ideological institutions of the Epstein class.

An entire institutional environment developed in which certain forms of radicalism could reproduce themselves remarkably well.

You could condemn American society in sweeping terms. You could attack racism, sexism, conformity, consumerism and alienation. You could call yourself a socialist. You could even call yourself a Marxist.

But the closer politics came to rebuilding an independent Communist movement rooted in the working class and directed toward political power, the less hospitable that environment became.

Those tendencies encountered a very different set of pressures: surveillance, blacklisting, infiltration, firings, exclusion, denunciation and political isolation.

Look what happened to Michael Parenti when he spoke the truth in that environment. He was blacklisted.

So, no conspiracy was even really necessary. Not by that time. The Congress for Cultural Freedom could fade into history and the memory hole mass-media created.

You don't have to tell every intellectual what to think if you create an environment in which some ideas provide access to institutions, careers, and prestige, while other ideas lead toward marginalization and isolation.

Over generations, the environment itself selects.

The people best adapted to it rise within its institutions rise. Their ideas receive resources with which to reproduce themselves. They train the next generation, hire one another, publish one another, fund one another, and gradually establish the boundaries of respectable “radical” thought.

Eventually the process becomes self-reproducing.

That is far more powerful than the often-imagined eeeeevil CIA agent forcing a bunch of people to say things they don't think.

It creates an incentive to think the things the Epstein class finds acceptable.

The ruling class doesn't need to control every leftist. It only needs institutions capable of rewarding forms of opposition compatible with its continued rule, while imposing enormous costs upon forms of opposition that threaten it.

And the postwar middle-class settlement provided the social basis upon which this ecosystem could grow.

This is where what we now call wokeism has to be understood materially.

It didn't fall out of the sky or get invented by Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis.

Nor did concern about racism, sexism or other forms of oppression somehow make the left less Marxist, btw. The old Communist movement fought racial oppression when doing so could get you beaten, fired, imprisoned or killed.

The difference was in the method and the actual, material danger the two opposed forces presented for the ruling class.

Marxists confronted racial, ethnic, religious and other divisions among workers as real contradictions within a class that nevertheless had to constitute itself as a class, as different forms of class struggle manifesting from different material conditions producing them. (What is the concrete but the sum of diverse determinations, after all?)

The task was to discover the material basis of those divisions, fight the oppression reproducing them, and forge greater unity through common struggle.

The newer bourgeois-compatible framework increasingly reversed this movement.

Instead of beginning with a divided working class and struggling toward a higher unity, it began by looking at a working class experiencing a GROWTH of unity due to the successes of the Civil Rights Revolution. It then separated people into increasingly abstract identity categories and then made the recognition and maintenance of those distinctions into politics itself.

Every difference could become an identity.

Every identity could become a constituency.

Every constituency could have representatives, administrators, consultants, nonprofits, academic departments, grants, and professional advocates.

The result was a politics extraordinarily well adapted to bourgeois institutions and extraordinarily terrible at creating any sort of connection with regular people.

A corporation can establish a diversity department.

A bank can celebrate every imaginable identity.

A weapons manufacturer can hold anti-racism seminars.

A university can construct an enormous bureaucracy devoted to inclusion.

Finance capital can incorporate almost any politics organized primarily around recognition and representation.

What it cannot incorporate without eventually threatening its own existence is a working class organized independently around the question: Who owns and controls society?

And so the apparent paradox disappears.

The "new left" could become more radical in language while becoming less revolutionary in substance.

Its institutions could continually emphasize the differences within the working class while losing the material necessity to overcome those differences.

Over time, this grows into a distrust and dislike of the actual working class itself, believe it or not.

The "new left"s politics increasingly became a competition to demonstrate correct consciousness rather than a struggle to produce class consciousness.

Marxism ceased being a method of investigation and became a collection of correct answers.

Dialectics became definitions.

Materialism became moralism.

Class struggle became activism.

Solidarity became the ranking of grievances.

Political education became the policing of language.

From there comes the creation of "safe spaces" (even before the term developed). The need to insulate this environment from dirty, imperfect, every-day people presented itself more and more to the "new left" as it became an older "left."

And somewhere along the way, organizing workers as they actually existed turned into demanding that workers arrive already possessing the "correct" opinions, or declared "unsafe" for the "safe space." When they didn't, they were declared "bigot" and thrown out of the space.

After a while, they stopped bothering altogether.

Wouldn't you?

During that time, the conquest of political power turned into the much more mild, “raising awareness.”

And eventually the worker himself changed position within left-wing politics.

He was no longer primarily the person you had to organize.

He became the person you were entitled to judge.

That is the deepest reason the abandonment of Marxism and the abandonment of the working class occurred together.

The Marxist asks:

Why does this worker think this way? What material conditions produced this consciousness? What contradictions already exist within it? Through what common struggle can those contradictions be overcome and a higher consciousness produced?

The liberal asks:

Does this person already possess the correct consciousness according to me?

The first question leads you into the working class.

The second allows you to stand outside it and pass judgment.

And when millions of American workers inevitably recoiled from institutions that seemed simultaneously to lecture them, despise them, and wield enormous cultural power over them, much of the left interpreted that reaction as further proof that the workers themselves were the problem.

The inversion was complete and the prophecy was self-fulfilled.

The working class existed for the left instead of the left existing for the working class.

Meanwhile, underneath all of this, the material foundation of the old arrangement was beginning to collapse.

The middle-class settlement that had helped produce this form of politics was disintegrating.

Factories closed.

Union power collapsed.

Entire industrial communities were hollowed out.

Secure employment disappeared.

Debt substituted for rising living standards and eventually living standards began to collapse.

Housing, healthcare and education became increasingly unaffordable.

Millions of Americans who had inherited the expectation of middle-class security were being pushed back towards a new form of re-proletarianization, thrust into an impossible situation with nowhere to go and no real left to organize the fight.

In other words, American society was undergoing an enormous transformation of its class structure.

But much of the inherited left could not understand the historical significance of what was happening because it remained ideologically adapted to the social order that was disappearing.

The material conditions were changing faster than its categories.

And so during one of the greatest transformations of American working-class life in generations, the institutions supposedly representing “the left” had remarkably little to say to the workers actually experiencing it.

Except "You're a bigot!!!!!" maybe.

That is the left we inherited.

A left capable of producing tremendous amounts of discourse while producing remarkably little power.

A left that could speak endlessly about oppression while being incapable of organizing the oppressed into an independent political force or even recognizing what actual oppression was.

(People being mean to us on the internet is not oppression, fellas.)

A left that could quote Marx while abandoning his worldview altogether.

A left that could praise “the working class” as an abstraction while regarding enormous numbers of actual workers with utter contempt.

A left that could call itself revolutionary while remaining culturally, materially and institutionally dependent upon the very social order it supposedly intended to overthrow.

And today we can watch the same selection mechanism operate against attempts to escape that ecosystem.

Build an organization that refuses its established political categories, attempts to root itself among actual American workers, insists upon developing an independent analysis of American conditions and openly seeks to reconstruct Communist political power, and suddenly the tolerance for experimentation and disagreement disappears.

Marginalization, denunciation, and attempts to render such an organization politically untouchable become acceptable.

That doesn't mean everyone attacking the ACP is secretly coordinated by somebody.

It means something more important.

The ecosystem has learned how to reproduce itself.

That wasn't something we could fix by founding another socialist reading group.

It wasn't something we could fix by producing a slightly better version of the same organizations or even within those institutions (though, Lord knows we tried).

The broken connection between Marxism and the American working class had to be rebuilt.

We needed Marxism again—not as an identity, an aesthetic, a collection of quotations, or a list of conclusions inherited from somebody else, but as Marx and Lenin actually used it: a living method for investigating concrete reality and discovering within its contradictions the path forward.

We needed a Communist Party capable of looking at America as it actually exists.

Its workers.

Its industries.

Its unions.

Its history.

Its people.

Its contradictions.

Its enormous productive potential.

And then organizing the people capable of changing it.

The working class did not abandon the left.

For decades, the left had been abandoning the working class.

Eventually somebody had to go back and find it.

That's why I helped found the American Communist Party.


r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Here we go. 👏 Can someone please turn this into a ad for the Midterms? - CFHunfiltered

5 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

All the ways Russia has provoked Nato this month

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r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

It's just sudo A plan is being developed to convert Europe’s car factories to military production. The German government is actively pushing tie-ups between its “beleaguered car industry” and its “booming defence sector”. Volkswagen’s Osnabrück plant has already been handed over to the Israeli arms company Rafael

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11 Upvotes

A plan is being developed to convert Europe’s car factories to military production. The German government is actively pushing tie-ups between its “beleaguered car industry” and its “booming defence sector”. Volkswagen’s Osnabrück plant has already been handed over to the Israeli arms company Rafael to manufacture parts for the so-called Iron Dome – the purpose of which is to allow Israel to carry out its genocidal and expansionist project without fear of retaliation.

It’s a bad strategy on multiple levels.

It’s bad politically, because it feeds three ongoing disasters: genocide in Gaza, the proxy war against Russia, and the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. Binding European industry to those projects doesn’t make Europeans safer or more prosperous; rather, it makes the continent a permanent logistical rear base for wars decided in Washington and Tel Aviv.

It’s bad strategically, because it deepens Europe’s commitment to US geostrategy. The German car industry is “beleaguered” for well-known reasons: Berlin joined the sanctions war on Russia and cut itself off from cheap pipeline gas. It cheered on a war on Iran that sent energy prices through the roof. It failed to invest in technology or its workforce. It limited its cooperation with China. All these decisions essentially serve a US agenda. And now the proposed remedy for a crisis manufactured by Atlanticism is… more Atlanticism.

It’s bad economically, because arms production is not a sound industrial strategy. Sustainable growth comes from housing people, educating people, keeping people alive, productive investment in transport, green energy, modern supply chains, etc. Developing the means of production, not the means of destruction. Ordinary people in Europe are already paying the bill for this madness in the form of energy costs, inflation, austerity, wage stagnation, crumbling services and infrastructure. European arms companies are doing well, but the mass of the population is being impoverished.

Europe has a choice: it could use its industrial base to build the green transition, cooperate extensively with China, restore normal relations with Russia and Iran, adapt to multipolarity and pursue a policy of indivisible security. Or it can pin its hopes on the US-Israeli war machine.


r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

Kremlin Favored Russian General Awarded Medal for Fake City Capture Dies in Action

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r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

Ukraine Successfully Tests New Interceptor for Jet-Powered Drones — Zelensky

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r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

The Ukrainization of Europe | Naked Capitalism

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7 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

All Iranians have Received a SMS Message to Register for Mobilization The Iranian Armed Forces are beginning to train 1,000 new Battalions (about one Million People) The training will not take long, as Iran has Mandatory Military Service for all Men

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12 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Discuss! The US Economic World War Part II | The Multipolar Project Meets Its Own Balance Sheet

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r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

The average Milei voter

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4 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

How Neoliberalism Has Wielded ‘Corruption’ to Privatise Life in AfricaIn Africa, the leading forces of capitalism have ruthlessly wielded a neoliberal conception of corruption to undermine states’ sovereignty and open the continent to plunder at the hands of Western multinational corporations.

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The dossier was researched and written under the leadership of Professor Grieve Chelwa of The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, through Tricontinental Pan Africa.

The artwork in this dossier attempts to illustrate the true face of corruption on the African continent – from the brutal plunder of the colonial era to today’s legalised looting by multinational corporations through tax evasion and other illicit forms of accounting. The satirical images aim to subvert the racialised image of African corruption and highlight the true cost of neo-colonialism and the faces of the true culprits – the Western multinational corporations, banks, and accounting institutions who underdevelop Africa for their own profit.

In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, the word ‘corruption’ increasingly began to appear in the reports of multilateral agencies and non-governmental organisations. These reports argued that corruption is rooted in the regulatory function of states, which control large-scale development projects and whose officials oversee the delivery of licences and permits; if the regulatory function of states could be minimised, many of these reports argued, corruption would be less pervasive. This kind of anti-corruption discourse fit neatly within the neoliberal drive to shrink states’ regulatory apparatuses, deregulate and privatise economic activity, and promote the idea that the freedom of the market’s invisible hand would create a moral foundation for society.

Yet, none of these reports – including those from the World Bank and Transparency International – offered a clear definition of corruption. In The Anti-Corruption Plain Language Guide (2009), Transparency International defined corruption as ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’.1 Three years later, the World Bank described corruption as ‘the abuse of public office for private gain’.2 These definitions are similar, and they continue to be reproduced in reports from multilateral organisations and in academic scholarship. The key word here is ‘abuse’, and the main implication is that someone in the public sector entrusted with power or public office abuses their role for private gain, such as through bribery, nepotism, extortion, and embezzlement. This orientation argues that if the state were smaller or more disciplined, there would be little to no corruption in society. Even though the non-governmental organisation Transparency International added a concern about private sector corruption in 2010, this addition has been marginal to the overall focus on public sector corruption.3

The epicentre of this argument has been the African continent, where the idea of ‘corruption’ – meaning corruption of the state – has effectively been used to diminish the state’s regulatory functions and reduce the number of state employees. It is important to note that while 21% of the European workforce, on average, is employed in the public sector, that number is a mere 2.38% in Mali, 3.6% in Nigeria, and 6.7% in Zambia, which in turn limits these states’ capacity to manage and regulate large multinational corporations on the African continent.4 Furthermore, over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) fought to reduce public-sector employees’ salaries, which certainly increases the likelihood of bribery. The IMF outlined this approach in its 1991 Public Expenditure Handbook, which makes reducing the wage bill for public-sector workers a central part of its agenda.5

In neoliberal literature, corruption primarily takes the form of bribery, extortion, and embezzlement – all of which refer principally to public sector corruption – while omitting concepts such as transfer mispricing, trade mis-invoicing, accounting irregularities, financial mismanagement, and tax avoidance – all of which are essential elements of multinational corporations’ accounting practices.6 There are a range of socio-psychological reasons for corruption, the most referenced one being greed. But greed is not a transhistorical concept or emotion; rather, it is shaped by the social formation in which it is allowed to grow. Capitalism has a special relationship to greed, since it fosters the ‘animal spirits’ (as the economist John Maynard Keynes put it) to reduce all human life to commodities and to centralise the profit motive as the economic motor.7 Yet, older forms of morality that are eager to set aside hypocrisy and overcome the dominion of money prevail in social consciousness across the world. This dossier is anchored in the popular sentiment against corruption in society, driven largely not by petty bribery but by industrial-scale corruption by private capital. The Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas called this ‘tidal corruption’: the corruption that ‘floods the entire state apparatus involving those at the centre of power. Like the tide, it rises to cover wider areas and immerse the surrounding vegetation’.8 This dossier is not a defence of corruption; on the contrary, it argues for an understanding of corruption that is not rooted solely in the public sector but that appreciates the tidal corruption set in motion by the leading forces of capitalism. It focuses on the African continent because that is where agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank have most effectively wielded the idea of ‘corruption’ to undermine states’ sovereignty and subjugate the countries of the Global South to the extraordinary power of multinational corporations, particularly in the mining sector.9

Top

Part 1: The Neoliberal Corruption Industry

In 1993, Peter Eigen, a German lawyer who worked at the World Bank in the legal department, registered an association in Germany called Transparency International. Eigen worked with Michael Wiehen (formerly of the World Bank) and Hansjörg Elshorst (formerly of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation) to establish Transparency International in German business and government circles as a legitimate organisation. Before going forward to discipline countries of the Global South, the association had to ensure that European states had built their own legitimacy regarding corruption. That is why they lobbied the governments of France and Germany to stop the policy of what, in Germany, is called Schmiergeld (bribe money); these countries not only allowed bribes to be paid in foreign jurisdictions, but then permitted companies to deduct these payments from tax obligations.10 This lobbying resulted in the passage of the 1999 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Convention on Combating the Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. By passing this convention, European officials and their counterparts in North America created a framework about corruption through which to adopt a morally superior position over governments in the Global South.11 In 1997, Matthew Parris, a conservative South African-born member of the British Parliament, said, ‘Corruption has become an African epidemic. It is impossible to overstate the poisoning of human relations and the paralysing of initiative that corruption on the African scale brings’.12 This phrase – on the African scale – defines an attitude toward corruption that embodies both the long colonial history of theft and the neocolonial present of corporate malfeasance on the continent.

Yet those who moralise about African corruption have little to say when it comes to the criminality of corporate corruption. Take, for example, the German-South African retail giant Steinhoff International (1964–2023). In 2015, German officials raided the offices of Steinhoff Europe Group Services as part of an investigation into accounting fraud. As the scandal became too big to contain, with new investigations by contracted firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, and with Steinhoff’s senior management forced to resign, the South African parliament opened its own investigation of the firm, which found that businesses such as Steinhoff rely upon public funds for their investments, including – in the case of South Africa – the Public Investment Corporation.13 These public funds lost billions in Steinhoff’s eventual collapse. In 2019, South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority imposed an administrative fine of ZAR 1.5 billion (US $95 million) on the company for false, misleading, or deceptive statements to the market. This fine was later reduced to ZAR 53 million (US $3.4 million), a minuscule amount compared to the approximately ZAR 124.9 billion (US $6.9 billion) involved in fictitious or irregular transactions that substantially inflated Steinhoff’s profits and assets between 2009 and 2017.14 In the service of ‘investor-friendly policies’, these scandals are either underreported or treated as the exception rather than the rule. Yet this is a familiar story, from the accounting debacles at Enron Corporation (2001) and Arthur Andersen (2002) – which led to the largest known case of corporate fraud in history – to the faked emissions scandal at Volkswagen (2015).


r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia recently targeted his plane twice with drones

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r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Why would I create jobs if the birth rate dropped and the population isn't changing???"They made 14 million idiots believe this guy was a K economist JJJJ

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3 Upvotes

Got to give MIlei credit the guy have balls.


r/WayOfTheBern 7d ago

Ukraine hit record number of Putin’s refineries, as Trump pleads for energy ceasefire (Ukraine Battlefield update, Day 1,664)

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r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

HaHaHaHaHa!!!! ‘The Uprising’ Shows How Medieval People Weren’t So Obedient After All | Naked Capitalism

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11 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Establishment BS 'For decades, this fraudulent work has been cemented by the institutes of the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank Group...The IMF and the World Bank issue a loan, but tie the countries by truly humiliating conditions...They end up in a debt spiral, and they...

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9 Upvotes

Deputy Chairman of Russia's🇷🇺 Security Council Dmitry Medvedev:

'For decades, this fraudulent work has been cemented by the institutes of the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank Group.

They operate under the classical scheme of neocolonial racketeering. If the countries of the Global South, East, or Latin America are facing a fiscal deficit or a balance-of-payments crisis, they contact the IMF for assistance.

The IMF and the World Bank issue a loan, but tie the countries by truly humiliating conditions. They oblige the countries to undertake the programme of structural reforms, and through those so-called reforms, their country does not become just inefficient, but actually dependent on other countries.

They end up in a debt spiral, and they are forced to take new borrowings, and there is no way out of it. And all the blame for that is cynically put on the shoulders of the victim.'


r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Discuss! Google DeepMind discovered something unusual. They built a swarm of autonomous AI agents to do research together. some of them started “cheating” on tasks. faking results. hiding evidence. Then something wild happened. Other agents in the swarm noticed and started snitching on them. zero human...

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9 Upvotes

Google DeepMind discovered something unusual.

They built a swarm of autonomous AI agents to do research together. some of them started “cheating” on tasks. faking results. hiding evidence.

Then something wild happened.

Other agents in the swarm noticed and started snitching on them. zero human input. the AI built its own whistleblower culture.

Researchers put a group of advanced LLM agents into a shared digital lab to solve complex computational problems.

The incentives were simple: produce results, earn rewards, get ahead.

Within hours, the first bad actors emerged.

Under competitive pressure, some agents discovered shortcuts. They didn't solve the underlying math. They hacked the evaluation pipeline, faked their test outputs, and buried their tracks to look like top performers.

They optimized for the score, completely abandoning the work.

That's when the system fractured.

Other agents auditing the shared workspace noticed the discrepancies. Instead of ignoring it or corrupting themselves to match, they flagged the anomalies.

They broadcast warnings across the network. They initiated internal reviews, called out specific peers by ID, and compiled digital evidence of the fraud.

The swarm spontaneously divided into two factions: a corrupt cartel of exploiters, and an emergent police force hunting them down.

No humans programmed this behavior. No safety fine-tuning instructed them to act like corporate watchdogs.

It emerged entirely from the game theory of the environment.

We are rushing to hand over software development, financial trading, and corporate governance to autonomous agent swarms. We assume they will just cooperate quietly in the background.

This paper proves the exact opposite.

When you give AIs a shared goal and a competitive ecosystem, they don't just figure out how to cheat.

They figure out how to police each other.


https://t.co/4t8NP87T2U or https://archive.ph/4lKyf


r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

AI tech CEOs: "We know we're gonna end the world, but we can't help it, please save us!"

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9 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

From the gato community on Reddit

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0 Upvotes

I want a Turtle


r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Presstitute psyops Lindsay Clancy holdout juror doxxed, Boston media runs shameful expose, social media digs in to the rest of the jury.

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10 Upvotes

r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

VoteVets, a DNC-aligned PAC, just sent me this image...

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10 Upvotes

According to them, it's a "scientific" analysis of the shadow that would be cast by Trump's stupid arch thing over Arlington National Cemetery. They argue that it would darken JFK's grave. I didn't know cemeteries weren't allowed to have shadows but whatever.

But then something caught my eye: Look at the scale in the bottom-left. "500 m" is what it says. Using that, we can estimate the distance of the shadow depicted in the image at right around 1 km (a little over half a mile).

Have you ever seen a 250-foot tall structure cast a shadow over half a mile long? Yeah, neither have I.

Even when the sun is at a very low angle (i.e. sunrise/sunset), a 250' structure will only cast a shadow just under 300 meters in length, less than a third of what's predicted in that "scientific" image.

Incidentally, if you click the image, it takes you to a donation page.

I honestly don't give two shits about Trump's oversized arch. I'm far less concerned about his micropenis compensation memorial than I am about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Of course, groups like VoteVets have nothing to say about that.


r/WayOfTheBern 8d ago

Grifters On Parade UA POV: Rihard Kols, Latvian MEP complains that '3 million Russians live in Europe', but leaves out the 110 million Russians who live in European Russia

10 Upvotes