There's lots of US historical antecedents of Trumpism - fascist movements like Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers.
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Inquisitor Palletack
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Brian Anderson (He/Him)
in reply to Inquisitor Palletack • • •1. Kudos to the Wikipedia editor(s) that updated his entry so quickly.
2. It’s ironic that someone whose whole schtick was being a fringe outsider who dreamed of being in that circle will be remembered this way. The dog caught the car.
RRB
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
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We call Trump a "reality TV star" and it's true, as far as it goes. Trump did play a billionaire on TV long before he grifted actual billions, using his status as the poor man's idea of a rich man to secure liar loans and rip off creditors, contractors, business partners, workers, and governments - local, state and federal.
He rose to power on this, boasting on stage that cheating "makes me smart":
pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its…
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Pluralistic: “That Makes Me Smart” (04 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Like so many crooked officials, Trump's brand is "He steals, but he works" (except of course that he doesn't - at any given moment, odds are that he's either taking a nap, watching Fox News, or playing golf):
reddit.com/r/AskBalkans/commen…
Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt.
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Cory Doctorow
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Someone like Trump *has* to convince people that they can't rely on institutions or their neighbors. His path to power lies through convincing people that the system is rigged and that he - as a man who is an expert at cheating - knows how to rig it in *your* favor:
factcheck.org/2016/07/trumps-r…
But merely claiming "the system is rigged" doesn't actually win the day. If you want to convince people that the system is rigged, it really helps if the system is *actually* rigged.
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Trump's 'Rigged' Claim - FactCheck.org
Robert Farley (FactCheck.org)Cory Doctorow
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Want to convince people elections are corrupt? Legalize unlimited dark money spending and fill our poll with defective, unauditable voting machines made by Beltway Bandits selling into no-bid contracts:
web.archive.org/web/2021020311…
Want to convince people there's a shadowy cabal of rich pedophiles hiding children in a pizza parlor basement? It helps if there's an actual cabal of rich pedophiles hanging out on a private island, abusing more than a thousand children (and counting).
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Voting machines didn’t steal the election. But most are still terrible technology.
Cory Doctorow (The Washington Post)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Want to convince people that the financial system is a rigged casino so you might as well just gamble on cryptocurrency and betting markets? It helps if the actual financial system is run by banks who receive billions in public money and then steal millions of Americans' homes after Obama takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runways" for the banks using Americans' houses:
keystoneky.com/article/all-we-…
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“All we can do is put foam on the runway” – Tim Geithner, speaking before the collapse of Lehman – Keystone Financial Group
keystoneky.comCory Doctorow
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Which is all to say, if you want to understand the origins of the surge of suckers for fascists who are desperate for a strong man to cheat on their behalf in a rigged system, it helps to look beyond racism and xenophobia, to the ways in which the system is, indeed, rigged. Racism and misogyny alone aren't enough to bring about fascism. To groom a nation of fascist patsies, you first need a crooked system:
pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all…
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Pluralistic: Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (22 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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This is why it's worth understanding finance. The finance sector hides its sins behind the Shield of Boringness (h/t Claire Evans). The layers of overlapping jargon and performative complexity make it hard for everyday people to criticize the finance sector. Finance ghouls exploit this, leveraging confusing ambiguities in the system to insist that their critics don't know what they're talking about and that everything is fine, actually.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is an incredibly destabilizing dynamic. Living in a system where you're being fleeced every day but where people who seem smarter than you have reasonable-seeming explanations about why it's all legit and above-board is a recipe for abandoning all faith in the system, in experts, and in lawful processes, and throw your lot in with a strongman who promises to cheat on your behalf.
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Cory Doctorow
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Take stock buybacks, a form of stock swindle that was illegal until 1982. In a stock buyback, a company buys its own shares on the open market. When the number of shares goes down, the price per share goes up. This is just a form of "wash-trading," like when NFT and shitcoin scammers buy their own products in order to make it look like they're valuable and desirable:
pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/com…
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Pluralistic: Stock buybacks are stock swindles (06 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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Advocates for markets as a system of allocation (as opposed to allocating via a democratically accountable state, say) insist that markets are efficient because prices "encode information" about the desirability, viability, and other qualities of goods and services.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but *scientific*, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us.
In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company.
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Cory Doctorow
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When a company buys its own stock back, though, its price goes *up* while its value goes *down*.
I mean that literally: say a company that's sitting on a billion dollars cash is valued at $10 billion. From this, we can infer that the company's capital stock (factories, inventory, etc), IP (patents, processes, copyrights, etc) and human capital (payrolled employees, contractors) are worth $9 billion.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars.
Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback.
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Cory Doctorow
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What's more, the drop in corporate valuation is *more* than the billion the company just blew on its buyback. A company with no cash reserves is brittle and prone to failures. Without a cash cushion, any rent shock, change in market conditions, or other adverse incident will leave the company scrambling to borrow money (at punitive rates, thanks to its desperation) to weather the storm.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If share prices are actually "encoding information" about a company's worth, a billion dollar buyback should lop *more* than a billion dollars off the company's share price. Instead, it sends the share price *up*.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name - just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is categorically untrue. Dividends *do* take money from a company coffers and distribute it to its shareholders, sure - but a dividend is a bet on the company's future *success*. That's why a company's shares rise after declaring a dividend. Investors observe a company that's so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations.
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Cory Doctorow
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But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That dividend would *not* send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Contrast that with buybacks: to do a buyback, the company need merely spend its free cash flow, or money it borrows, or money derived from the sale of key capital, or money saved through mass layoffs, to buy its own stock. Then the share price goes up.
In other words: when a company's stock price rises on news of a dividend, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's management and its future growth.
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Cory Doctorow
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When a company's stock price rises on news of a buyback, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's future looting to the point of collapse.
I used to think that this was the whole stock buyback story, but as is ever the case with finance, buybacks are fractally corrupt.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This week, I've been reading Boston College law prof Ray D Madoff's book *The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy*, and I've learned even more scummy truths about buybacks:
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/b…
For tax purposes, dividends are "ordinary income," meaning that they are taxed at up to 37%.
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The Second Estate
University of Chicago PressCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Meanwhile, if you sell your shares after a stock buyback juices the price, the profits are treated as "capital gains," whose tax rate caps out at about half that (20%). This means that shareholders pay *half the tax* on money that comes from strip-mining a company than they would get from money derived from managing a company for sustainable growth.
It's worse than that, though, because capital gains can be offset by capital *losses*.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you invested in a stock that tanked, you can hold that stock in your portfolio until you are ready to sell a profitable stock, and deduct your losses from the gains you've made.
But you don't even have to sell the stock to realize *tax-free* income from it: the ultra-rich live according to a financial arrangement called "buy, borrow, die" that lets them avoid *all* taxes.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Here's how that works: if you're sitting on a bunch of stock, you can stake it as collateral for a loan that is tax-free. Better than that, if you're smart, some or all of the interest on that loan is *tax-deductible*. If you're rich enough, you don't have to make regular payments on the loan, either - you just wait as the stock continues to grow while your loan is maturing, and when it's due, you borrow *even more* money against the new valuation and pay off the old loan.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's "buy" and "borrow." Here's "die." When you die, you transfer your assets to your kids, who benefit from something called the "step-up in basis," which lets them avoid *all* capital gains on the appreciated value of your assets.
Now, maybe you're thinking that you can benefit from this arrangement. I've got bad news for you: you won't qualify for one of those cool loans that you don't need to pay regularly!
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What's more, if you own any stock you almost certainly own it through a retirement plan like a 401(k), and when you cash out that 401(k), *that* is treated as "ordinary income" at nearly twice the rate that our plutocrat overlords pay.
Buybacks, then, are part of a system whereby rich people get *much* richer every time a company that makes something good and employs ordinary people guts itself and sets itself on the path to bankruptcy.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Meanwhile, working people don't benefit from this system, even if they own stock. They just get to live in a world where businesses are looted and shuttered and public services are slashed thanks to balanced budget rules that mean that governments can't spend when rich people don't pay taxes.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is *why* buybacks have apologists. Buybacks - a stock swindle, illegal in living memory - make rich people richer. They spend some of the loot to fund an army of reply-ghouls to push the message that buybacks are dividends by another name.
It's part of the ripoff economy that's seen crypto-billionaires lobby, bribe and terrorize lawmakers into merging speculative assets with the real economy, endangering the economic future of everyday people:
levernews.com/what-tech-wants-…
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How Zohran Mamdani Beat Citizens United
The LeverCory Doctorow
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It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen AI bros put the global market in peril with crooked accounting and empty promises:
wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifi…
The ripoff economy is baked into the American experience. It is the foundation of Trumpism. It is the financial basis for things like "Project 2025" - literally!
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The Enshittifinancial Crisis
Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway's founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook:
pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/fre…
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Pluralistic: Bridget Read’s ‘Little Bosses Everywhere’ (05 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net2qx
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Richard DeVos was complicit in denial and inaction during the AIDS epidemic, blaming the victims.
Ultimately, destroying public education, pyramid schemes and stock swindles don't really hold a candle to committing genocide with bad policy.
griid.org/2021/11/30/world-aid…
World AIDS Day: Remembering what Reagan AIDS Commission member Richard DeVos had to say about AIDS and the Gay Community
Grand Rapids Institute for Information DemocracyMichael McCormick
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You don't even have to wait to sell your stock!
"Tax-Loss Harvesting" allows you to save up that loss for sometime in the future. Then you turn around and buy the stock you just sold. It's basically a free tax deduction!
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