“The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly.” — Governor Woodrow Wilson, 1911, quoted in Other Peoples Money by Louis Brandeis Wilson was no hippie, and Brandeis later became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Among other inhumane depredations, Wilson presided over the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, the latter for merely criticizing U.S. participation in the first world war. Nevertheless, the distance from the popular animus towards the heights of capitalist finance to the more recent tendency to bend the knee to the rich is great. How did it happen? How did we get from widespread hatred of bankers and speculators to whatever you’d like to call the current attitudes? Why do our most celebrated liberal politicians feel bound to assert, “I believe in the Market,” or “I’m a Capitalist.” Nobody is welcoming the hatred of the wealthy.
The overwhelming majority of the world’s business transactions are still processed through COBOL. I learned it on a UNIVAC 1106 mainframe in the summer of 1972. I should have stuck with it.
The problem with public utilities is that they, too, can be captured. This has proven the case for ag coops (captured by management) and arguably the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a regulated utility. Pretty Brandeisian structures are not enough. Eternal vigilance is the price of antimonopoly.
The overwhelming majority of the world’s business transactions are still processed through COBOL. I learned it on a UNIVAC 1106 mainframe in the summer of 1972. I should have stuck with it.
https://www.qs2point.com/post/renaissance-of-cobol-in-2024
Great stuff
The modern credit system
IS
The ultimate command system
of global markets
A greek goddess among mere
Corporate mortals
But shackled by them
Fettered by capital to capital
And capitals relations
People of earth
Sieze power yseterday
and liberate Her majesty
Btw
Some of us stand ready
to work with Her
Performing " miracles "
The problem with public utilities is that they, too, can be captured. This has proven the case for ag coops (captured by management) and arguably the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a regulated utility. Pretty Brandeisian structures are not enough. Eternal vigilance is the price of antimonopoly.