film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

LWTEquifax.png

'Last Week Tonight' Covers The Capitalist Clusterf*ck That Is The Equifax Scandal

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | October 16, 2017 |

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | October 16, 2017 |


I’m not in the habit of using my own posts as evidence in arguments, but I am going to be damn sure to flag this video in response to that whole “invisible hand of the market” thing.


See, I’ve got a number of issues with capitalism, but without a doubt, my biggest issue is the faith others put in capitalism’s infallibility. Or, more precisely, the belief that current markets and businesses can be treated in exactly the same manner they were fifty years ago. Don’t like a product or company? Just don’t buy from them. They’ll either adjust to meet customer demands, or go out of business. Unless, of course, they’re one of the only airlines flying to the location you need to go to on the day you need to get there. In which case, we’ll all forget about how United beat the shit out of that guy. Or if it’s your cable company or insurance provider in which case you’ll deal with their terrible service because you literally don’t have a choice. Or unless it’s your mutual fund manager who unwittingly invested your retirement in collateralized debt obligations, which include subprime mortgages, and now you’re too fucked and broke to do anything about it. With the final “or” being: Or you can’t opt out because you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.

Now you might be arguing that we could still theoretically opt out of providing those large businesses with our personal information if we wanted to. No one needs to have a Facebook profile. And we don’t need to use large internet search engines. We don’t need credit cards (despite the fact that access to credit is the only substantial form of spending increase most Americans have seen in the past thirty years). Also just be prepared to not need a house, a car, or a job if you’d like to keep your information out of Equifax’s, clearly easily accessible, databases.

Which luckily means you probably won’t have to worry about monetarily supporting any of the other companies who are actively fucking us over.