Remember the āvibe shiftā? Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms alike declared that the second coming of Donald Trump meant the old rules of politics and even everyday civility were roadkill.
āI feel liberated,ā one top banker told the Financial Times. āWe can say āretardā and āpussyā without the fear of getting cancelledāā¦āitās a new dawn.ā
Maybe the vibes shifted again.
As tech bosses get richer and ordinary Americans struggle, Democrats put the case against the USās grotesque unfairness ā and voters responded
As time goes on, I care less about fairness and more about emancipation. I donāt care about making the rich pay their fair share, I just want to be out from under their thumb. I donāt want to be dependent on the rich anymore, for taxes or jobs or anything. I want to be independent from the rich, I want to be free from them. Let them keep their stupid money. Let them sit on their pile of gold like a dragon, as long as I donāt have to have anything to do with them.
The nature of capital is accretion. Gotta do something with excess profit, and the easiest thing is to buy one of your competitors so you can have their profit, too. The rise of mega-corps means the death of small-corps, and means that more and more jobs are at the mercy of the billionaires. The rich arenāt sitting on piles of gold, theyāre sitting on piles ofā¦everything - all the stores, all the factories, all the jobs, all the hospitals. Thereās no freedom from them while they sit on their piles of everything.
The rich arenāt sitting on piles of gold, theyāre sitting on piles ofā¦everything - all the stores, all the factories, all the jobs, all the hospitals. Thereās no freedom from them while they sit on their piles of everything.
Taxing them to pay for government social programs doesnāt change any of that. It only reinforces our dependence on them. Thereās no tax revenue if there isnāt profit or income first, and they generate their profit and income from the everything they own.
Sometimes I think about getting some like-minded people together and building a self sufficient commune. Iām sure it would be very hard but at least we wouldnāt have to go to a soul crushing job everyday to make ungodly profits for some rich psycho.
I live in an area with a lot of Amish communities. They live simply and they work hard but theyāre free. They own their land, they build their own houses, they grow their own food. Idk, that doesnāt sound so bad to me these days.
Taxing them to pay for government social programs doesnāt change any of that. It only reinforces our dependence on them.
Youāre thinking of social programs as permanent assistance, and thatās their framing. I mean, there definitely are people with special circumstances who need persistent support, but most of us just need relief from crisis, a hand up from the hole we started in, training to useful skills, doctor when youāre sickā¦ Look at what people do with the āfree moneyā they get from Universal Basic Income experiments.
Thereās no tax revenue if there isnāt profit or income first
Also a trap of their framing. Itās absolutely possible to tax wealth itself or unrealized gains. Property-wealth taxes are how you convince farmers itās time to sell to a housing developer. Billionaire stock-wealth represents revenue that wasnāt paid to the labor that produced it, so it seems fair to take some of it back to benefit those underpaid workers.
The reason your job is soul crushing is you have no alternative. The billionaire has no competition, no motivation to keep his workers happy, because they donāt have anywhere else to go, except maybe another soul-crushing billionaire job. Downsize the corporations so they have competition, and youāll see better, more rewarding jobs appear.
The reason your job is soul crushing is you have no alternative.
No, I have a few. I could put a bullet in my brain. Thatās one.
Downsize the corporations so they have competition, and youāll see better, more rewarding jobs appear.
Sure, sure. Downsize the corporations. Competition. Wonderful. Until it isnāt. Until consolidation, again. Time to downsize again to promote competition. Repeat cycle until the heat death of the universe. That bullet thing is sounding better and better.
Agree with both of you. they deserve the big metal on a string that slices.
Imagine thinking that getting to shit on special needs people is a win. Wtf is wrong with these people!?
Trump and his cronies made promises to get the vote of MAGAdiots. They delivered nothing but misery and cruelty. Surprisingly, it only took some of the rubes a decade before they noticed.
This was the very core of Trumpism, the trick that wowed rightwingers around the world: how he could yoke together minimum-wage workers with the 1%; Latinos and black voters with those happy to dabble in a little light racism; the Epstein-haters with the Epstein class (who can forget Elon Muskās email to Jeffrey: āWhat day/night will be the wildest party on your island?ā). And he did it by alchemising class antagonism into culture war.
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