Bank of America is facing allegations that hundreds of hourly workers performed up to 30 minutes of unpaid computer setup work daily for years.
A former Business Analyst filed a class action lawsuit in federal court on October 23, claiming the banking giant systematically shortchanged remote employees who had to boot up complex computer systems before their paid shifts began.
https://progressive.international/wire/2025-11-06-pi-briefing-no-40-kerala-ends-extreme-poverty/en
The Extreme Poverty Eradication Project (EPEP) represents a historic victory for the people of Kerala. The southwestern Indian state has long been among the country’s poorest. In the 1970s and 1980s, incomes in Kerala were roughly two-thirds of the national average. In the 2000s, incomes in the state surged ahead of the rest of India and, by 2022, they were over fifty percent higher. In mere decades, Kerala had become one of India’s wealthiest states.
Wars are costly. Very intensive and extensive in the use of resources and the destruction of resources; let alone the loss of quantity and quality of life.
In all wars, all parties incur costs; significant costs. Sometimes, a party to a war can avoid most of those costs through having someone else pay. Of course, the United States paid to some extent for the wars against Iraq in terms of American lives lost and degraded; little cost was borne by those Americans who propagated those wars, though.
The material costs of the wars in the 2000s were paid – indirectly – by Chinese households not consuming large swathes of the goods they produced; Chinese workers and capitalists were, on an increasingly massive scale, exporting the fruits of their labour and their capital to the United States. More sending than spending. Much more. (A Marxian analysis would attribute the seemingly costless affording of the US-Iraq war to the extraction of ‘surplus value’ from the Chinese working class by the American capitalist class.)
Yet these Chinese costpayers didn’t much mind, because – while their abilities to enjoy the increasing fruits of their labours were highly constrained by China’s export policy – they were happily stacking up claims on future production; deferred enjoyment, rather than the pure exploitation which occurred in the early years of Chinese Communism.
China bore the West’s costs in other ways too; in those years Chinese people suffered huge environmental costs, at a time when natural environments were improving in the deindustrialising West.
There was a wider set of ongoing costs, however, arising from the ensuing highly unbalanced global capitalism. United States’ industrial survival is now largely dependent on its specialisation in military hardware and software; meaning that the United States’ economic deformation has made that country into a predatory warrior state. Violences, especially upon non-Americans, are today directly committed by the American state; and through both exported and gifted military goods and services, and through violations committed directly by America’s proxies (and, as in Sudan, by its proxies’ proxies).
Protests in the Netherlands as dozens of protesters stormed the headquarters of Dutch defense firm GKN Fokker in Papendrecht, accusing the company of supplying F-35 fighter jet components to Israel amid the Gaza war. Protesters called GKN Fokker “complicit in genocide”, demanding an immediate halt to all weapons exports and collaboration with Israel’s defense industry. Riot police were deployed to remove demonstrators who had occupied offices and rooftops of the facility.
In a new interview the Financial Times, Huang said that “China is going to win the AI race.”
He added that China will defeat the US due to lower energy costs and looser regulations, while the West is paralyzed by “cynicism” — an astonishing admission about the technological capabilities of a country which multiple presidential administrations have taken pains to hinder.
Full article: https://futurism.com/future-society/nvidia-ceo-china-trump-win
The former House speaker, who announced Thursday that she will retire from Congress in 2027, had a $2,675,036 minimum net worth in the year she began serving and a $63,996,050 minimum net worth in 2024, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of assets and liabilities listed in her congressional financial disclosures. An analysis by Quiver Quantitative estimates her current net worth more precisely at $278,760,000 million.
[…]
The 85-year-old congresswoman’s portfolio nearly doubled the S&P 500’s growth in 2024, the DCNF previously reported. Her wealth prompted calls for reforming the rules on lawmakers trading stocks, as well as suspicion that she engaged in illegal insider trading based on advance knowledge about industry trends. Her office denied such claims, saying she does not personally own stocks or have prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in transactions. Her husband, Paul, manages her trades.
Full article: https://www.aol.com/articles/nancy-pelosi-got-filthy-rich-160259206.html?
I did multiple interviews a week for years, with people all around the world, with three translators, via email and Zoom and in person. I interviewed every type of person that’s mentioned: auditors, NGO people that directly interact with and record the deaths of child laborers, farmers, retail associates, cosmetic chemists, lawyers, CEOs. I didn’t talk to the assassin [one vignette features the point of view of an assassin who kills a lawyer representing peasant farmers in Honduras] – unfortunately, they were not easily accessible.
Ultimately, we are all participants and complicit in how beauty is produced throughout the world. I wanted the reader to be immediately implicated in the story, like you are the final girl in this horror movie.
Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/nov/07/beauty-industry-arabelle-sicardi-book
Basically, we might completely destroy our economy, our culture, our sense of privacy and individuality, our sense of pride in contributing to our communities—but we’ll be damned if we let anyone else do it to us.
Full article: https://gizmodo.com/palantir-ceo-says-a-surveillance-state-is-preferable-to-china-winning-the-ai-race-2000683144
Paranormal Psycho-Economic Activity Monitor
Dismantling the Propaganda Matrix
What is this historic chaos really about? If you’ve just arrived and are observing what’s happening in the United States, you might think that our most pressing issue is that the richest among us simply aren’t rich enough – as the Trump administration and the OBBB cuts public services and benefits that will make life more precarious for millions in the name of tax breaks for the rich.
While they play out their destructive tendencies predicated on non-existent problems like DEI or in service to imagined government waste, the real goal is to have a YOYO – you’re on your own – economic system for the masses in order to transfer more income to those without need.
One of the most striking statistics on inequality is the historical trend in the share of national income received by the Top 1 Percent. Figure 1 shows that at the end of the “Roaring Twenties,” just before the Great Depression, the Top 1 Percent held about 20 percent of all income (excluding capital gains) – about where it was in 2022 (most recent data available).
Read on… https://cepr.net/publications/the-rich-are-not-rich-enough-in-america/