• willis936@lemmy.world
    94·
    10 months ago

    When you’re told the economy is doing great this is what they mean. It’s a bad message to send in an election year.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
        19·
        10 months ago

        Bidenomics is based in Reaganomics. Only it doesn’t hand social program budgets so quickly to the religious ministries to spend on megachurches. The public hoped for a Social Democrat, but the establishment party chose another neoliberal. (In 2016 the Dems lost to an open fascist — with a majority, but losing the EC — because a conservative neoliberal woman President was too spicy.)

        Even in the 1800s railrod barons owned all the candidates in the primaries. So we can’t redistribute wealth by vote.

        It does show capitalism gives us its true colors during the Great Depression. Our ownership class will gladly see us starve and freeze than give up their vast holdings. They’ll hire armies and lawyers alike to keep wealth they cannot actually utilize (except to gain more wealth) even if it drives the human species to extinction.

        And the longer it takes for the public to fight back, the higher the global catastrophic risk.

        This, however, isn’t to say we can choose revolution at any time. Violence remains unthinkable until the hour it is inevitable; until the hour we find our Mahsa Amini, we can only stir and wait.

    • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      10 months ago

      Americans have been conditioned for nearly a century now to be far too comfortable to do anything. The fascists have learned their lesson, and this time they are much better at keeping people from caring until it’s too late.

  • Colonel Panic@lemm.eeEnglish
    39·
    10 months ago

    As anyone who has played the board game Monopoly can tell you, this is the point in the game where the game is effectively “over”, the winner has been decided. That one player owns most of the board and the rest are hanging on with mortgages and selling off their houses and properties to hang on for one more turn and hoping to land on a space that doesn’t bankrupt them. But we all know they eventually will.

    So, when do we say GG, pack up the board and try something else?

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
        10·
        10 months ago

        “Rigged” is human nature. There’s always people wanting to climb to the top of the heap and hoard anything of value and amass power. At no point in human civilization has this not been true. Kings, religions, merchants, even the criminal class. They all have people trying to place themselves in control to reap the money and rewards of others’ work.

        You have to “un” rig the system with controls to prevent obscene collection of wealth and power; and even then it’s a continuous, non-stop battle to prevent the rich and powerful, and their sycophants and supporters, from constantly trying to find workarounds and/or undermine the system keeping them from their economic gluttony.

        • Patches@sh.itjust.works
          9·
          10 months ago

          If a Monkey tried to collect two hundred and thirty billion bananas - he would’ve been ripped in half by the other monkeys with his head on a banana pike as a warning. This is not ‘business as usual’…

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
            6·
            10 months ago

            And we’re not monkeys. What an awful analogy considering monkeys have no concept of hoarding wealth, much less any other facets of human society that drives wealth acquisition at the expense of others.

        • rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          10 months ago

          Yeah. We should probably destroy the hierarchy at some point. Make it so you literally can’t hoard wealth and force others to work for you.

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
    34·
    10 months ago

    Makes me wonder what the numbers would be if we did tax brackets for capital property.

    Like with incomes there’s might be a standard deviation curve but people are considered at least diet rich in this country if they can afford to own a second home for whatever purpose.

    Going up to three properties I’m pretty sure makes viewing it based on percentile pointless.

    • Alto@kbin.social
      35·
      10 months ago

      Not directly related to income tax, but I’m a big believer in having property taxed on an exponential scale. Start off quite low for your first property, a vacation home is still reasonable, but by the time you’re much past that it becomes completely unreasonable to keep buying properties. Add a hefty multiplier for empty units on top of that, and you’d go a long way to fixing the issue with property hoarding.

      E: sp

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
      16·
      10 months ago

      What’s crazy is I pay around 45% income tax. And these people have their billions. How about anyone making less than 500k a year doesn’t get taxed, and those fuckers pay.

      • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
        5·
        10 months ago

        The billionaires could have their tax attorneys make them look like they have no net income. It’s a complicated game. If you tax their wealth, they’ll just shift the ownership to a trust or corporation that they technically don’t control. And that’s assuming you could even find most of their wealth!

        Really I think the answer is we need to try them for crimes against humanity and forbid them from owning any assets.

      • andros_rex@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        Rich people don’t keep their money in cash. It’s in assets - land, houses, businesses… They pay someone to figure out what they can write off. They also will know to the dime what the maximum amount they can donate and write off, distribute the wealth among family, and have access to all kinds of exotic financial instruments.

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
    30·
    10 months ago

    That’s a hell of a lot of money to steal in just a few years. In under a decade, they’ll all be trillionaires, and we’ll all be trillions of dollars poorer.

  • UFO@programming.dev
    26·
    10 months ago

    Can’t wait to read some idiot’s argument on why Trump is the right guy to fix this lol

  • wabafee@lemmy.world
    22·
    10 months ago

    Man that’s bad why aren’t people doing something about this. Me then proceed to continue doomscrolling.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    21·
    10 months ago

    The problem (according to Das Kapital ) is that the owning class will fight back. Not all of them. Some realize that long-term capitalism requires keeping the working class happy (more or less) but well more than not. And as we learned with feudalism in the middle ages, it takes only one bad king to bring the ruin the works of ten of his predecessors. (It’s a running theme in A Song of Ice and Fire )

    So these recommendations are on the assumption that our governments are not already captured. The point of government is to serve the public good and the US has been trying to go back to that for over a century (since the Great depression, which escalated the desire to try something else, all the while the Soviet Union was doing just that.)

    Our plutocrats have more resources by which to keep hold of our current governments, even as industry pollutes the air and drives us toward extinction.

    • Eximius@lemmy.world
      8·
      10 months ago

      Please don’t perceive the Soviet Union as serving the public good. It was a well played (albeit it was 1950s 1960s, easy to write your own narrative) fascism that only benefitted Stalin and Moscow, while keeping the usual fireworks expense needed to sate the masses (just as in capitalist America) at a minimum. They murdered good people left and right, because they weren’t obedient. They murdered good and bad people because they had money they wanted.

      They were no different from Nazis, in that Moscow wanted to russify the world. They did it in a more “tolerant” way, you could say. Doing their genocides slowly. Immigrating ethnic russians over decades. But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.

      Some “visionaries” were allowed to build some architectural projects or other, for the people, as long as they adhered to the party’s rule, kept the fake narrative going. This was an easy way for a person without honor to have his name written in stone. Repeat for all subcultures.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
        5·
        10 months ago

        Firstly Marx and Das Kapital are not the Soviet Union. The USSR was an attempt to make communism work, much the way that the United States was is was (is no longer) an attempt to make democracy work.

        US constitutional framers made a lot of mistakes and concessions: failing to end slavery and the chattel status of women, using first-past-the-post elections and embracing a two party system, using the electoral college as an intentional sabotage of popular democracy by which the ownership class could undermine a popular vote creating early precedence the US is only a democracy as far as oligarchs can control it.

        So when railroad barons in the 19th century were able to assure they got to choose who got to run in the primaries, even then, the people got to vote for elite-picked officials, and public-serving governance was already sabotaged.

        At the time of the Great Depression (1929-1939), communism was looking pretty good to the people because we were living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste and shoe leather and Hoover and the industrialists thought this was fine. (🐶🔥) So if you notice a lot of things going on today seem familiar and rhyme with history, yeah, you’re totally right. This isn’t our first rodeo.

        In fact, our industrialists balked when FDR pushed the New Deal, which was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance. Some of our oligarchs were already looking to overturn democracy for fascism. Even then, a PragerU-style an anti-communism campaign (delayed a bit by WWII) was created and pushed onto kids. The stuff on YouTube isn’t new. It’s the same stuff put on reels and shown to me when I was in school in the late 70s / early 80s, just updated and available faster.

        Let’s also remember the Red Scare started with Wilson, who sought to isolate and sabotage communism in the Soviet Union weeks after the October Revolution much the way the monarchist coalition of Europe turned on France after its revolution in 1789. So communism never really had a chance but to establish ad hoc hierarchies which leads to corruption.

        I’m not a political scientist. I can’t say how well the Marxist model can work, but that it hasn’t really ever had a chance what with industrialists hating on it the way monarchists hated on democracy. But then, here in the States, democracy never had a chance because it was sabotaged from the beginning. But we do know from both stories that plutocrats and aristocrats will always try to reinstall itself and sabotage efforts to partition and dissipate political power, as it has done continuously for the last few centuries. And whenever they seize power, public serving governance is the first casualty of corruption

        (I talk about some of the easy fixes our framers could have made in the US to make democracy here more robust. Brains smarter than mine have come up with robust election reform packages that have been made and updated for decades now, with a snowflake’s chance in Hell of actually getting pushed through state and federal legislatures. Short of change by force, the US is already fucked.)

        Yes, awful things happened in the USSR. But we actually talk about those while we’re still refusing the discuss the awful things still happening in the USA. We don’t like to talk about the people we don’t like to regard as people, and what we continue to do with them. And I think it’s just as tankie to disregard the wrongdoing done by the US as it is by the USSR, by post-Soviet Russia or by China. Or by anyone, really. We’re all the baddies.

        And that said I’m not going to throw out Marx because of Russia any more than I’m going to throw out Hume because of America.

        • Eximius@lemmy.world
          1·
          10 months ago

          I highly doubt USSR 1930s onwards was ever an attempt to make socialism work. Especially after Lenin’s death.

          The remark about USSR being only an attempt at communism is verbose, and questionably required. I never attacked socialism’s ideas.

          Just by numbers, a lot more innocents’ murdering happened in Soviet Union. Double digit millions if not more over its existence. There is just no whataboutism that can save that piece of fascist wreck of a state.

          I merely wanted the idea by @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone that the Soviet Union “Had good ideas” to die in a fire.

          Otherwise, good points.

          • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
            3·
            10 months ago

            In my top-of-thread comment, I didn’t mention the USSR at all other than to say it was trying something other than capitalism, and that trying something else was inspiring Americans in the early 20th century. Now I suspect you’re not engaged in this dialogue in good faith.

        • kaffiene@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Good post. One thing I will say about Marx is that his analysis of Capital is really insightful. Especially if you consider it alongside what Smith says in The Wealth of Nations regarding the problems of rent seeking behaviour. Between those two works is a solid analysis of much of what ails modern Capitalism. The biggest problem with Marx isn’t his analysis of the problem, it’s his proposed solution . I’m sympathetic to socialist ideas, but while the idea that a small group of people can seize power is plausable, the idea that they will then voluntarily disseminate it to the populace, is fanciful. Human nature doesn’t work that way.

          • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
            1·
            10 months ago

            Yeah, so far we don’t have any good solutions for the propensity of power to consolidate. Similarly Madison presumed people in office would be rational and naturally inclined towards serving the common good, but also that the voters would know their own personal best interests and vote accordingly. History would quickly demonstrate otherwise.

            As I said, I’m not a political scientist, and right now, if we could revise our elections there’s a handful of basic changes we could make to improve things and give the public more power. But we’re going to need sociological tricks we don’t yet have to erect a society that doesn’t succumb to corruption over centuries (if not decades). We naked apes aren’t really meant for huge societies, and knew we were treading on dangerous ground when we first started seeing the fruits of agriculture.

            That said, CIA experts and Christian Sociologists (desperate to see their faith not get shredded in the next few eras) warn that if power is not disseminated back to the public, we are likely headed towards civil war within the next five to ten years. These will be interesting times, and if history serves it might be decades before we see a stable normal again.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
        1·
        10 months ago

        But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.

        Hey now. That’s not quite accurate. A great deal of thought went into it when the leadership realized that the Greens (peasant militias primarily organized for mutual defense against pillaging aka “requisitions” by the Red and White armies), the presence of anarchist societies allowing voluntary association (like the Makhnovists in Ukraine, and ethnic groups with strong identities or cultural individuality would interfere with the Central Commitee’s absolute power over the populace.

    • tacosplease@lemmy.world
      11·
      10 months ago

      Doesn’t morbid mean - dangerous for life? As in those parasites are looking more succulent each day. LOL

  • Yewb@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 months ago

    These are all paper gains if they would never be able to realize that money in reality.