technocrit

Auto insurers didn’t pay out on 45% of auto liability and medical claims they resolved last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of thousands of company regulatory filings. That rate might change slightly as more claims are resolved, but it is up from around one in three, or 35%, of such claims a decade ago.

Original: https://www.wsj.com/finance/if-you-get-in-a-car-crash-the-risk-is-growing-your-insurance-wont-pay-1522236c

In Marx workers are free, free in the specific sense that they can sell their labour power to any capitalist they choose. Moreover, workers are separate from the means of production.

Neither of these priors apply in a plantation context. The slave is a slave. That is to say, the slave cannot choose who s/he sells her labour power to. And the slave is not separate from the means of production. On the plantation, the slave IS the commodity! Not only is s/he the commodity, s/he is also the means of production. Had Marx seen this, my guess is that he would have theorised racial differentiation as something constitutive of capital and not an add on. Race would not have been a superstructural element.

Cedric Robinson makes it clear that Marx inherited a racialised European civilisational framework. Accordingly, he was conditioned to see the European proletariat as the historical subject. Black, Brown and other non-white people were seen as pre-political, a backdrop, objects rather than the agents of world history. Racial capitalism is capitalism’s actual form. He argues that Marx misread this. A plantation-centred starting point would have produced Robinson’s conclusion as the premise.

Marx ignored an important feature in historical sequencing because he didn’t see plantation slaves because in his analysis slave labour on the plantation was subordinate to the primary revolutionary agent – the proletariat.

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The factory as the centre of Marx’s model is powerful. An entire theory of exploitation in the European industrial core follows. But what about the rest of the world in which the plantation predominated? What happened to the rest of us? What happened to the global majority? I think the answer is a simple one, the proletariat were the primary revolutionary agents. Everyone else was secondary. Primacy was assumed to be in the western core. That’s what a Eurocentric lens does – it limits, it distorts.

The US launched an airstrike in Somalia on August 7, according to a press release from US Africa Command, as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country.

Communities across the country, like the small village of Haigler, which sits about 6 miles from the Blackshirt feedlot, have become sacrifice zones for the pursuit of efficient meat production. In many places near CAFOs the water has become undrinkable. The stench makes it impossible to be outside. The air is making people sick.

Communities across the country, like the small village of Haigler, which sits about 6 miles from the Blackshirt feedlot, have become sacrifice zones for the pursuit of efficient meat production. In many places near CAFOs the water has become undrinkable. The stench makes it impossible to be outside. The air is making people sick.

Communities across the country, like the small village of Haigler, which sits about 6 miles from the Blackshirt feedlot, have become sacrifice zones for the pursuit of efficient meat production. In many places near CAFOs the water has become undrinkable. The stench makes it impossible to be outside. The air is making people sick.

Global conventions have mainly overlooked the psychological and social impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Here’s how to change that.

"AI" has already had a significant impact on Amazon's carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.

"AI" has already had a significant impact on Amazon's carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger accused the CIA and corporate actors of editing the online encyclopedia to serve state and institutional interests during an interview with the German daily Berliner Zeitung published on 7 August.

"I believe Wikipedia is already compromised," Sanger said.

He added that the platform was identified early as a propaganda instrument, and that its anonymity rule made it easy to use as such.

[...]

"The powerful are very interested in Wikipedia," he said, describing the site's pseudonyms as a mask, saying that the platform treats the positions of institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the World Bank as established fact.

Supplying arms to the Israeli genocidal regime, it follows, quite apart from being morally reprehensible and legally culpable, goes against the Modi government’s own explicitly articulated stand on the Palestinian issue; but that is of little concern to this government. As far as it is concerned, cosying up to Trump, and promoting the interests of cronies like the Adanis who profit hugely from arms sales to Israel, takes precedence over the country’s legal obligations, its moral responsibility, and even its credibility among nations.

"The future is for everyone," Zuckerberg says, describing future that is primarily good for Meta.