It's not often you see an image and immediately think "yep, that'll be in some history book in short order". Just utterly divorced and a sign of a _very_ healthy society...
If you can't see it: An image with "Dow's Best Week Since 1938" on a graphic while breaking news declares "More than 16 M Americans have lost jobs in 3 weeks"
For those that want a higher quality screenshot, I just took one: https://i.imgur.com/FzkO6W5.png
It's Jim Cramer's Mad Money on April 9th 2:00 in. (I do not recommend watching Cramer.)
Instead neo-liberalism serves us this distopian neo-feudal regime that requires all to 'work more/work longer' just to slow our decline into near poverty while a select few 'rulers' horde all the fruits of progress.
I've been struggling with working life, especially in the midst of wfh during this pandemic and the common question I keep arriving at is: "what's the point in all this?" I don't claim to have it hard (I am so fortunate to have a steady job that allows me to work from home) but there's just a level of mental exhaustion and constant low level burnout that everyone is experiencing (especially amongst my cohorts/generation/friend group since that's my sample size) and it's just like... okay we have another what 40+ years of this? all for what?
and that doesn't even apply to the people working those app jobs and doing physical labor, who no doubt have it worse than anyone else I know.
This, x1000. It's maddening. I work in a an understaffed military HQ that tries to do too many things, while suffering through 30-50% personnel turnover every summer. We plan exercises talking about "readiness" but it's like groundhog day...EVERY.DAMN.TIME. Nothing really changes, the organization is no better prepared to fight today than it was 3 years ago, and all it's doing is burning out the mid-career professionals we'll need to carry the force when the war eventually kicks off for real.
Across industries, across geographies...we are living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia.
Second, a great day means nothing if you look at how volatile the market has been lately. We are seeing large swings up and down on a regular basis.
Third, there is no indication that tens of millions unemployed (which we are still figuring out how much of that is actually temporary vs. permanent) would necessarily immediately affect the large cap stocks in the Dow. These are companies like 3M, Apple, Caterpillar, etc...
Lastly, just because the Dow is up significantly on a single day does not mean all the stocks in the Dow are doing great. We've been seeing handfuls of stocks carry indices upwards even though they also contain poor performers.
There are good sides and bad sides to this. Currently US politics is in a deadlock between fractured local interests (NIMBY/gentrification, preservation, but also we need low-income housing too; let's build a wall, but also allow cheap farm labor) and federal concerns (tariffs, fuck Obamacare, and everyone in general, but also let's help the economy, etc).
This kind of polarized chaos only helps those who are entrenched and are already playing dirty.
If not, who are these incumbent power brokers? And how does it benefit them to ban drugs, not build new housing, limit immigration, etc?
Sure, money is always involved, "political capital" is real, but accumulating more of it doesn't increase the capacity of global political system (as economic capital grows the economic capacity), it just consolidates and polarizes it. So fucks it up basically. And in that regard it's more like a market failure of politics. Too little political competition, too much outside influences and forcing factors. (Eg too much ideology. Or a kind of cross-financing props up one side - basically somewhere in the decision making hierarchy that small sector was conceded, sacrificed, so Intuit continues to make big profits, but something else happened instead, let's say some state got some subsidy.)
All in all, first-past-the-post voting entrenches the big power brokers. (Who might not be the elected officials, but quite usually of course are.) Then the emergent two-party system leads to polarization of other issues. Local issues also became party issues. This brings some uniformity and consistency, but obviously does cause a lot of inefficiencies too.
So, how does it benefit them to do X? Probably it makes them good party members. And that consistency makes the party viable long term. Thus even local changes can only happen if the whole country zeitgeist changes.
"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?"
-Alexander Hamilton, Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299. (June 19, 1787)
I'd argue a true democratic republic isn't possible alongside capitalism. The rich will always have disproportionate power over elected officials. Whether it's through direct payments, or the ability to influence voters by manufacturing consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent).
On the contrary, I'd argue they are mostly good at their jobs.
Their job isn't to help the average American. Their job is to serve Capital. They get paid by the rich, not by average Americans.
They are doing a good job at that. Look at the stock market, it goes up while Main Street is in turmoil.