I’ve covered this a bunch but global companies have access to a quasi-legal system where secret tribunals decide whether governments owe corporations money for costing them profits by doing things like passing environmental and labor regulations 🙃 it’s a giant looming threat for climate policy! 👇🏼
Exxon and Shell field an ISDS claim against the Dutch government last week. These suits basically let oil companies sue countries that make climate-friendly policy changes for the revenue they lose as a result. They are a true obscenity in a rapidly warming world, and they aren't going away.
Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.
Every academic who has had a university president come in and say he's (and it's always a he) "gonna run the university like a business" knows it's a giant flashing red light. The government does stuff that doesn't turn a profit! That's why we need a government and not just the market!
Trump: please let me stop, let all this stop New York Times: no motherfucker get your thick ass back out there we both need this
Tetris taught us if we fit in? We will disappear.
If you care about electoralism, maybe take the time you’d spend arguing with people to your left and use it to make sure disabled, carless, and otherwise limited-mobility people in your community have access to a voting booth or mail-in ballot.
We are now in the *third* consecutive election in which a near-majority of Americans backs a Donald Trump espousing racist and fascist viewpoints and people broadly blame his Democratic opponent for it.
The Gish gallop is now the default rhetorical style for everything in tech, finance, and culture
All so a handful of people become wealthy. It's disgusting the amount of money spent on this while things like affordable housing, UBI ,or free transit are cast aside as "too expensive" or "not worth the value to shareholders."
Given how mindbogglingly vast wage theft is versus literally all forms of robbery and burglary combined, the entire system would crash to a fucking halt the instant people simply refused to work for free.