@rpm

Wondering if the attitudes of the Epstein Class contaminate the mainstream.

"Distributed income" is the new euphemism for employment precarity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/henriktotterman/2026/03/22/from-lifetime-employment-to-distributed-income/

Rich folk want to only pay for labor when they need it.

The training, the logistics, the wait times, the preparation & planning -- they don't want to pay for any of it.

They ignore what happens in crisis when there's not enough talent ready to go & available in a crunch, crisis, or peak period.

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They ignore proven practices for resilience like redundancy.

They just see it as paying people to loaf around, not as paying fire fiighters between 911 calls.

Paying a medical specialist for their 10 years of preparatory training is viewed as a waste.

Their attitudes towards labor have pernicious impacts on business.

Web sites that aren't maintained is just one example.

Cory Doctorow describes the huge waste of Uber drivers constantly driving around the downtown core waiting & unpaid

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The wealthiest hold attitudes towards labor & workers that have global impact.

Example: Trump's megadonors are dynasties with long legacies of anti-labor practices.
https://zeteo.com/p/billionaire-oligarchs-project-2025-trump

Bradley, Koch, Coors, Scaife Mellon, Seid, Uihlein

https://www.desmog.com/2024/08/14/project-2025-billionaire-donor-heritage-foundation-donald-trump-jd-vance-charles-koch-peter-coors/

https://www.levernews.com/dark-money-just-got-darker-wall-street-helped-fund-project-2025/

https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/25/project-2025-trump-mapped-how-6-billionaire-family-fortunes-fund-climate-denial/

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-project-2025-the-policy-substance-behind-trumps-showmanship-reveals-a-radical-plan-to-reshape-the-world-227161

The most corrupt arose from Andrew Mellon & set the stage for WW2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon

The same elite tax evasion & "blame the poor" philosophy.

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Andrew Mellon, Tim Mellon's grandfather, advocated for the same self-dealing corruption of today's MAGA faithful.

"critics of the Harding administration saw the Mellon appointment as a sign that Harding would "reseat the power of special privileged interests, the powers of avarice and greed, the powers that seek self-aggrandizement at the expense of the general public."

"Mellon believed that economic recessions, such as those that had occurred in 1873 and 1907, were a necessary part of...

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... the business cycle because they purged the economy.

In his memoirs, Hoover wrote that Mellon advised him to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. ... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

Social darwinism "Purging the economy" attitudes towards the labor force laid the groundwork for disastrous policy like...

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... Smoot-Hawley, directly attributable to the onslaught of empire building in Italy, Japan, & Germany and then WW2.

"Half-court tennis" policies with global impact as historian S.C.M. Paine describes it.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sarah-paine-japan

In the 1920's a small number of self-serving corrupt oligarchs set in motion policies that would domino & trigger WW2 and caused 90 million deaths.

All because of elite attitudes towards the 99% as 'undeserving' of good jobs & stable employment.

@Npars01 'recessions are good because they purge the economy' -- this puts "drain the swamp" in a whole new light: to them, we are the swamp. The government programs they destroy, which keep the world stable and prosperous, are the swamp.

The corruption we think of as "the swamp" is, to them, the goal of the entire system: personal wealth (victory) for the "winners" who played the game right, which means making the right "friends".

Making the world more chaotic just makes the game more interesting, to them.