1% (Preview)
Tomomi ItanoTomomi Itano | 1% (Preview)
Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World
nypost.comThey are 1 percenters who are 100 percent despicable.Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World by hiring disabled people to pose as family…
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i just want to say a few words on this …
first of all, this is obviously outrageous, but people should not be pointing their ire at the people with disabilities who are being used as tour guides here (as I’ve seen some commenters do). the real outrage is how shamelessly these rich bourgeois assholes are exploiting people with disabilities in order to accrue for themselves certain privileges.
These rich assholes won’t do jack shit to actually help dismantle the barriers preventing disabled people from being fully integrated into the economic, political, and social structures of our society; but they are absolutely happy to exploit the fact that disabled people are living in the margins by utilizing this so-called “black market Disney World tour service” in order to cut ahead of working class families waiting in lines for rides at the theme park.
I also think, however, that class does enter into it. Whoever owns this particular service — it seems to be a couple of people, at least one of whom is actually disabled — is clearly making a lot of money exploiting an accommodation designed for disabled people at Disney World. This is significant because it is designed to provide accommodation for families with a disabled child or adult.
Disabled families tend to be disproportionately poorer, less educated, and more oppressed, than families without disabilities. The fact that nondisabled rich families are exploiting this accommodation for their own benefit means that they are actually displacing families with actually disabled members. Kind of like how rich assholes park in parking spots set aside for people with disabilities because they may figure out someway to buy the appropriate parking documentation off of someone.
Obviously the culprits are the rich fucks exploiting this. But if anything, it should open up a conversation on the realities of disability in this country, the ways in which disabled people inhabit the margins of social institutions, and the way they are forced into this segregated position by the very kinds of rich bourgeois fucks who design our society — economically, politically, culturally — in such an exclusionary manner.
“Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit.”
—Nick Hanauer, Venture Capitalist who helped get Amazon.com off the ground.
The Lucky Class
guardian.co.ukIf wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.
This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills.
Building A Better America... 1% of A Time
boingboing.net
Oh this is too awesome. The Bank of America in San Francisco got a complementary rework of their logo. This picture is stolen from BoingBoing, they have more at the link. Head over and check it out: part of what makes this culture jam so great is how thorough it is. They even redid the ATMs!
