Sinclair group in the US, bought up basically every local news station and began inserting propaganda into scripts as stories. Highly insidious because the older population generally trusted their local news anchors more than the national outlets.
GEO group, one of the largest private prison corporations that also manages ice detention facilities and many mental institutions, not sure I need to say much more.
Ah yes, the Sinclair “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” foreshadowing
The Sinclair monopoly is an invisible part of why Trump is in office. Local news doesn’t really exist anymore.
I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.
Sinclair is literally why I don’t have a local news station anymore, and also part of why after 10 years of working in local television news and being promoted to higher and higher positions I was finally like “fuck this, I’m out” and started working at a fucking Subway.
Similar to GEO, there’s a long list of companies providing phone service to jails and prisons and their entire existence is based off of extorting the living shit out of vulnerable people to be able to contact their families. The massive Securus hack also showed a high likelihood of these types of companies enabling violations of Attorney-Client privilege.
Red Bull, they are nazis and spread fake news about conspiracy theories on their own TV network in Austria. Source
Damn we need open source redbull
There are several RedBull type generic syrups you can buy as a bag-in-box
Is Monster still ok though?
You can dissolve a rat into Monster within a few weeks, do you really want to drink something like that?
Is that different from any other soda? They’re all pretty acidic.
Goodwill specifically hires disabled people under the guise of “giving them work experience”, but it’s really because they can get away with paying them less.
Chick-Fil-A supports conversion therapy.
Similarly, Salvation Army is a whackadoo pseudochristian religious cult masquerading publicly as a thrift store. They’re only about one degree removed from the Mormon church in terms of sequestering, abuse (sexual and otherwise), and manipulation of their members and those in their care. And of course also vehemently espouse the entire conservative fuckhead smorgasboard of homophobic, transphobic, sexist, anti-union views. They claim to do “good works” and superficially may even occasionally accomplish this, but it’s always couched in their hateful religious bullshit which really rather undermines the point.
Yes, Chick-Fil-A is also a famously fundamentalist wingnut organization. Being for conversation therapy is only the start of it.
As is Hobby Lobby – The nation’s only retail chain whose owners were busted for attempting to illegally smuggle stolen religious artifacts from the middle East for display in their personal bible museum!
Just to be clear, Goodwill is notorious for this, but any company can do this. The law allows the disabled to be paid less because they cannot complete the same job as fast. Essentially saying that getting the job done faster means you deserve to live more. It’s insanity that takes advantage of the weakest and most desperate in society under the guise of helping them. Because they cannot get as much work done to their mental or physical disabilities they deserve to be underpaid even though they worked a 40 hour week? It’s a fucking joke and a slap in the face to anyone disabled, but it’s the law. Once again, tons of companies abuse this, Goodwill is just well known for abusing it more than others.
Sometime around the mid 2010s, I worked at one of Goodwill’s busiest locations in the country. So busy we got calls almost every day complaining about the giant fucking traffic snake of donors blocking streets as they all lined up in their suburban safety bubbles to dump their literal garbage into our blue bins.
Absolute shitbox of a store. Run down, dirty, and always a mess. Especially the shoes and toys section. I already hated retail customers but that really sealed the deal. Just a bunch of broke ass motherfucking customers making broke ass workers days even harder. Two of my full-time coworkers were homeless. Those were just the ones I knew about because I worked by their side every day. Despite our poverty wages and grinding hours, I worked with some genuinely good people who cared about each other. It felt like we were all clinging to each other as we drowned in the rising tide that lifts all boats. None of us had so much as a life raft to rest in. Treading water while we gasped between waves of desperation.
Brian, I know you’ll never see this but I hope you’re still alive and got the help you needed. Daniel, you are far too intelligent and capable to waste your life there. I hope you got out.
A few times I had to visit the allegedly original Goodwill store. You might think if there’s one store corporate cares about enough to put a bit of polish on, it would be that one. But no. It looked like the most dystopian shopping experience imaginable. Crumbling architecture, merchandise strewn all over as if the customers were in a fight for their lives, and just like my store, workers who looked ragged, tired, and barely holding it together inside. And there worked at least one young woman with Down Syndrome who I reckon was making about a third of my not-even-close-to-livable wage of $10/hr. I was starting to suspect this Goodwill place isn’t in the business of good will. Then I visited the Training and Education Center which also serves as their corporate HQ in Seattle.
It was modern. Spacious. Clean. Safe. Nobody looked poor or unhappy. Any illusions I might have held about Goodwill were entirely shattered beyond any doubt.
I’ll never shop or donate there again and I’ll take every opportunity to tell anyone who will listen why they should stop patronizing the most for-profit nonprofit I’ve ever worked for.
Fuck you, Goodwill. Fuck you forever.
Where would you recommend donating instead?
Depending on your feelings about the Catholic Church, you might look into donating to the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
Where I grew up there were also some smaller independent thrift stores run by neighborhood religious organizations or other nonprofits on their own steam. You might check for any in your area.
I understand the viewpoint, but the alternative is that disabled people get hired way less or not at all. A real solution would be to reduce our dependence on capitalism or something, but that’s not likely.
God I (as a disabled woman) am SO sick of seeing this take every time this conversation happens, like it’s chill and okay to give us less rights.
I think their main point was that under capitalism, people will only ever be viewed for their economic utility - exploitation of affected groups is inherent to that reduction in a human’s rights and their contributions beyond menial labour.
So the take isnt defending the status quo, it’s saying how the best case scenario in an inherently soulless and uncaring system is to be paid cents on the dollar, and that more intervention to secure better pay, respect, and working rights, by definition, will always move further and further away from “capitalism” in it’s purest, most discriminatory forms.
