A full time job should never result in being close anywhere close to any assistance programs.
We’ve let our society fail all of us.
We let corporations take over without limit or recourse.
Walmart pays a wage to people whose job it is to help other Walmart employees apply for government assistance. That’s way cheaper to Walmart than paying people more. Then the government assistance comes from the lower 90% who do pay taxes.
Minimum wage hasn’t been raised in decades. It has increased a bit only in a few places.
Over half (guesstimate) of prepared food workers do not have a steady income. They rely on a few customers to tip. And very rarely have any sick time or vacation time or health benefits.
You’ve eaten food that has been handled by someone sick with a fever because they were highly discouraged from staying home sick.
You know what? Fuck this. I’m so godamn sick of seeing people say “we let this happen” as if we can just suddenly not let it happen. This happens because our current society is just a rebranding of feudalism, and to not give the rich their due on responsibility is downright wrong. We did not let shit happen, WE attempted to survive and got fucked, and continued to get fucked. I’ve seen this enough times now that everyone one of you reading this better expect to read it again the next time you or I see anything remotely close to “WE lET ThIS HapPen”
I want to put this edit here because I didn’t expect your comment to get nuked after mine, and because you do raise a lot of good and productive points. I was drunk when I wrote this and it came with a lot of anger that I should have held back. I just think you should reevaluate the first part, other than that, you’re spot on.
It’s less “we let this happen” and more “we were duped into fighting against our comrades over crumbs instead of banding together to ensure our right to more than just crumbs in the first place.” The 1% benefits from every culture war that sows division amongst us. We’re too busy and distracted to organize or build guillotines.
I long for the day we can get over culture wars, at least temporarily, and come to agreement on how we’re all getting fucked over by the rich. I always think about ways to get involved but I come up short. I know a general strike is the game plan, but as an engineer my professional has strayed away from unionizing. Need to get more involved there. Change happens slowly until it doesn’t I suppose.
I’m a power plant operator. Most of my coworkers have chugged the Kool aid in terms of hating unions. We’re well paid but the benefits aren’t good and the schedule is life-wrecking for the average person. Bad unions exist, but I think that they don’t understand the core concept of the power behind collective bargaining. I’ve seen one person get fired in the 3 years I’ve been here, so jobs are generally secure, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to gain from unionizing.
They also very much eat up the culture war slop and aren’t particularly literate. They’re “common sense” forward, which means they don’t understand things like tax brackets or geopolitics, but they’re very upset about them.
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To play devil’s advocate – Liberalism, or the idea that the people who are ruled should have a say in the rules, started coming about ~500 years ago. The elite’s were all always evil and bad to the masses, enslaving us, paying us very little, even clocks and timekeeping were used to trick workers into more hours and when pocket watches became available, they were just banned in early industry.
A lot of people fought and died to establish the idea of Liberalism all the way up to unions and workers rights. So, in a way, ‘we’ did fight for those things and earned them over a long time. It does kind of feel like now the same ‘we’ has forgotten the value of that stuff and the sacrifice it took to get there.
I still don’t really see this as our fault. We live in gilded age II where money is virtue no matter how its acquired. The internet broke the stable propaganda machines and we’re in flux of stabilizing around the new ones and kicking out the smaller bad actors.
You’re right, many people worked hard and tirelessly to prevent this. And we’d be even worse off without the work of those caring people.
Can’t forget to mention that those Walmart employees usually turn around and use those food stamps and government assistance at Walmart due to whatever meager employee discount they get.
So now Walmart not only gets to pay their workers far below a living wage, they also get reimbursed by the government for all those food stamps their own employees spend at their stores. These corporations are the biggest “welfare queens” the world has ever seen.
Reminiscent of owing one’s soul to the company store, eh?
This is how societies have traditionally operated. Far from failing, they are correcting back to the exploitative mean.
With no more free real estate to conquer and no frontier to expand into, we’re boxed in by limited resources and forced to choose between socialism or barbarism.
Since we categorically and unequivocally proved Socialism Doesn’t Work back in the 1980s, that only leaves one option.
They’re not assistance programs for people, they’re basically a wage subsidy for corporations.
…And last year the CEO made $31.4 million dollars
That’s what i was looking for. Fuck these people. Tax the rich and put in beneficial social programs, not just programs for the rich companies to abuse.
One of my favorite things about social media is how everyone is seemingly aghast at the egregious and corrupt results of capitalism, but every single election, you all insist to me that I have to vote for a capitalist as a moral imperative.
And it’s been accelerating since Reagan, but 99% of voters aren’t going to change. Ever.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…"
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again.“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur.
“Listen, bud,” said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
but every single election, you all insist to me that I have to vote for a capitalist as a moral imperative.
Have you ever had the choice to vote anyone other than a capitalist?
Yes.
You can vote Green.
Ralph Nader on Simple Capitalism
“What the corporations have done is destroyed the principles of simple capitalism, that if you own something you have some control over it,” Nader said in a hulking, stentorian voice, belied by his now-stooped shoulders and 80 years. “Managers control the process and define their own mergers and acquisitions and corporate strategy without any shareholder rights, as well as how much they pay themselves.”
Only by putting aside the bitter anger and acrimony that forces us to take sides can we break the corporate stranglehold over government and the economy, Nader said.
You see, America hasn’t tried the correct type of capitalism. They’re stuck on Sparkling Corporatism, which is where all the problems come from.
You have to vote for the lesser fascist
That’s what you’re doing when you vote Green.
… In places where you don’t throw your vote away by doing so
You throw away your vote by voting Democrat and Republican.
How badly do they have to fail before you stop doing so?
Our system isn’t set up that way, so feel free to throw your vote away, but please don’t convince others to do that. Some of us don’t have the luxury of indulging in protest votes.
Some of us don’t have the luxury of indulging in protest votes.
Who is this us you’re referring to?
Are you a billionaire? That’s the only group the Democrats are actually serving. The rest get pretty speeches during campaign time and broken promises after the election.
So how about that investment in IRS to get rich people to pay taxes, student loan forgiveness, etc? Doesn’t count? Why?
I’m not from USA by the way.
But you need ranked choice voting or equivalent for your vote to mean anything at all when there’s a few dominating candidates
My vote doesn’t mean anything in a two-party system.
We’re getting fascists no matter who we elect.
You have a two party system because of your voting system. That’s why I said you should fix that.
No, you’re giving half a vote to whichever of the 2 major-party candidates you hate more.
And you are actively participating in your own oppression, knowingly voting for a candidate when you’ve seen for four straight decades that either ruling party is going to make your life demonstrably harder.
Do you like paying double for your groceries?
Do you like that your rent is skyrocketing?
Meanwhile they make hundreds of billions appear out of thin air for other countries’ wars.
Yep. All bad things.
But the choices we have in a general election are:
- Vote for the candidate you hate least
- Not vote at all and accept whatever the worst candidates are doing to you
- Vote for a fairytale candidate (this and option 2 have identical results)
- Violent uprising
The Trump cult is hard at work on options 1 and 4 while deploying millions of bots and thousands of bad actors to encourage everyone else to go with options 2 and 3.
What exactly are you expecting a Democratic vote to change?
If the Democrats did their job Trump wouldn’t even be on the ballot, so your faith seems misguided to me.
Vote Green instead.
I’m expecting them to not effectively outlaw being anything other than a wealthy CIS white Christian male.
The ship is sinking, and instead of helping us bail water you’re trying to pick out more attractive curtains for your room.
In Germany, certainly
reagan, bush jr., trump. I wish that party could not win and election so that we could have the democrats as the conservative party and start making real progress on shifting left rather than their continual wins moving us right.
Well obviously the flight attendant job is entry level and meant for teens living at home with their parents! It’s not supposed to provide a living wage until you’re more senior.
/s
And by “senior” we mean actually senior. Like, wrinkles, gray hair, liver spots; etc. Of course, if you’re that old, you’re too old to be a flight attendant, so sorry, you’re not hired.
Man, Fortune running articles they would have never 10 years ago, they were like the WSJ in my recollection, what pivoted?
Boomers aren’t the productive people anymore they’re now just leeches - Gen X and lower are the workers now and most of us actually give a shit.
AA’s CEO is a Gen X. You have a lot of Gen X with that Greed is Good crap from the 80’s
You don’t get to the C-suite without being a greedy, sociopath
Once Gen X is gone, there will still be CEOs.
Imagine the communal gasps when these folks realise that an entire generation cannot be generalised in such specific ways. There will always be sociopaths - all the while there is the human condition.
The benefits of incorporating in a Republican state: We can say none of our employees is on government assistance. (That’s because our state doesn’t have government assistance.)
Lol are you a sovereign citizen or something and don’t recognize the feds?
Texas Republican governors have specifically rejected free money from the federal government that is supposed to go to healthcare and unemployment and education.
The current Texas governor has specifically told state employees to avoid federal money grants because there might be “woke” requirements to using the money.
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Ok, bye.
Gotta keep em starving to keep weight down
All the people making below median wages need to get better jobs.
/s. (Was this necessary?)
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Shouldn’t have been.
The solution is to stop bailing out mismanaged companies. Crony capitalism/corporate socialism are scams.
Flight attendant? Well clearly their mistake is not living in a third world city, they constantly travel anyway.
/s
