Covid-19 was just the beginning, a class-war is looming on the horizon.
The youth can’t keep being convinced the poorest people in our communities, and the poorest countries around the globe, are our enemies.
Our enemy isn’t below us. He’s not what’s putting your family and livelihoods at risk.
It’s the ultra rich.
Telling us to work in a pandemic.
Molesting our children.
Buying our governments and media outlets.
Giving authority to racist murderers.
Toppling our crooked economies and leaving 20% of people without an income.
Destroying the biosphere of our entire planet for millennia to come.
It was always the rich.
I'm just sad that years of programming actually managed to make people believe it was anyone else.
You know racism? I'm not even fucking kidding you, it was invented by the rich. Maybe not exclusively because it was always there in the back of people's minds, but the rich knew it was the perfect tool for turning light skinned people against darker skinned people. You know, as a distraction. Do you think it's a coincidence that wealthy American plantation owners had a lot to benefit from treating black people like all they would ever be is slaves?
It's by design. Years of racism built up to convince people that ownership of black men and women is "normal". Because the slave trade was extremely valuable. The rich still use racism and division to get what they want from the average American. And they will keep fucking doing it until they are satisfied, which is never.
Have you noticed that the people who are most trying to push against the narrative of "Black Lives Matter" and humanity being equal regardless of skin, they're usually pretty right wing? Capitalism and race division almost go hand in hand. President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The rich control pretty much every aspect of the average person's lives, if they so wish.
There's a reason you almost never hear about rich criminals actually going to jail and serving length prison sentences. That's because as much as we just love to believe that "justice is blind" and "everyone is equal before the law", it's a load of bullshit. White collar crime is rampant and difficult to punish. I was actually shocked when they managed to get enough of a case against people to punish them for college scandals. I thought, like most rich people, they would walk.
So yeah. Open your eyes and ears. I hate the term "woke" because it's overused. I much prefer the term "eyes opened" because it really is like seeing the world for what it really is for the first time. Research any part of what I said and try to disprove me, I will be gladly listen to what you have to say. There are years of research on this subject.
Visualization of $50K, $1M and $1B. The median income in the US is $32,000. You can't build a lot of wealth with this... If each step on a staircase represents $100,000 of net worth then HALF of the people in the US are on the base or the very 1st step. Almost 200 million people who can't even get one step up in this system. The households on the 80th percentile are on the 5th step. That's about five seconds of walking to get up there. A billionaire is ten thousand steps up the staircase. That's enough to walk up five Empire State buildings. From these heights, they couldn't tell the difference between a millionaire and a homeless even if they wanted to. And Jeff Bezos? That's more than halfway to the space station. That's more than 24 consecutive Mt. Everest's stacked on top of each other.
If you had a job that paid you $2,000 an HOUR, and you worked full time (40 hours a week) with no vacations, and you somehow managed to save all of that money and not spend a single cent of it, you would still have to work more than 25,000 years until you had as much money as Jeff Bezos. Of course, we are talking about all his assets but don’t forget that Jeff is selling his shares from time to time. Sold $1B of stock in 2017 and Cashed out $1.8B in 2019. He reinvested the money but nevertheless, he is able to cash it out if he wanted to store it.
Notable mentions:
- Elon Musk can blow a MILLION dollars EVERY DAY for 65 years. Was born rich. “We had so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”, “a teenager Elon walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket”. Musk family owns an emerald mine in Zambia
- The Koch brothers can blow a MILLION dollars EVERY DAY for 242 years. How the Koch brothers are uber rich
- Bill Gates can blow a MILLION dollars EVERY DAY for 247 years. Was born rich, his mom worked with IBM CEO, his father was a lawyer, his grandfather was a Banker and his great grandfather was the president of the national city bank in Seattle
- Jeff Bezos can blow a MILLION dollars EVERY DAY for 306 years. Was born rich. Grandfather owned a Texas ranch, his parents invested hundred thousand dollars into Amazon. Btw Jeff donated 98M USD in November 2019 - If you earn 50k a year it is like donating 45 USD
- The Walton heirs can blow a MILLION dollars EVERY DAY for 370 years. Born billionaires
Share of wealth held by the Forbes 400 more than doubled in the last 10 years
- Distribution of U.S. income as of Jan 2017. Now it’s worse
-
Productivity is increasing but wages are stagnant, all the profit is going to the wealthy. The division started in 1982 when companies were allowed again to do buybacks of their stocks.
- Distribution of average U.S. income growth during expansions
- Income inequality in the U.S. compared to western Europe
- Income gini index in the world. As you can see. US, UK, Spain, Japan, Greece, Australia, Italy are in the top 10.
- Inequality is still an issue in Europe but not in every country, here's the distribution of German wealth. And here you have for the UK. The wealthiest 10% of households owned 44% of total aggregate household wealth. The richest 1% have accumulated as much wealth as the poorest 55% of the population. The poorest 50% of the population only have 9% of total wealth.
- U.S. economic mobility compared to other developed countries
- Taxes for the richest Americans have plummeted over the last 50 years. However the Effective tax rate stayed the same
- Amazing info-graphic about U.S. economics over time
- In addition to all of that, there's another layer of inequality as well. The one between the 1st World countries and 3rd world countries
- 12 EU countries reject move to expose companies' tax avoidance
Videos:
- Wealth inequality in America
-
. The pay gap between American CEO and workers moved from 15:1 in 1965 to 220:1 in 2018.
- The minimum wage in the US isn’t working
- Why pay and benefits as % of GDI are declining
- What is neoliberalism
- Banned TED Talk: Rich people don't create jobs
- Debt buyers
- How poor people survive in the USA
Articles:
- Study shows that you're more likely to be successful if you're born dumb and rich than poor and smart
- Richest 1% of Americans Close to Surpassing Wealth of Middle Class
- "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"
- Millenials are the poorest generation
- An hereditary meritocracy
- Panama papers - Don't let it die
- Formations House works to hide money for the superrich
‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'—Management Is. How can you retrain a 50 yo trucker? How can you tweet #learntocode to a 55 years old maid? No more sick leaves, no more PTO, no more maternity leaves.The managers who see a cost benefit to replacing a human role with an algorithmic one and choose to make the switch are killing jobs. The CEOs who see an opportunity to reap greater profits in machines —they’re the ones coming for your job.
There's an Automation Crisis Underway Right Now, It's Just Mostly Invisible and 'Goliath Is Winning': The Biggest U.S. Banks Are Set to Automate Away 200,000 Jobs
800 million jobs will be taken by automation by 2030 and
the elites have made the conscious decision to destroy the climate in order to maintain their power.
While suicide was the 10th most common cause of death among Americans of all ages in 2017, it was the second leading cause of death among young Americans age 15 to 24 Rising tide of suicide for young people under 24
Fight, before it's too late
I like it. Tell us more.
I suppose you've established the binary opposition between ultra-rich and the rest, which is nothing new, nothing more than a standard woke narrative--you literally linked YouTube videos, the most lowbrow form of information (their purpose is, after all, to get views, not to divulge into tough thinking), that share your exact argument. But where is the evidence for your claim that a class war is "looming on the horizon"? What is even the point of this post? This forum is devolving into Reddit far quicker than I expected.
It’s all tiresome and muddy headed. Reddit tier minds.
"reddit tier minds" and yet you only made it into a T30, low tier minds over here.
We're in a class war and it's corporations versus citizens.
Warren Buffet is not only one of the wealthiest men in the world, he's also his class' biggest traitor who routinely dishes the dirt. His opinion on the class war
was pretty blunt: "There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won"
If you want a blow by blow of how this war has been and is being waged, read the book Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrick Smith. There's a nice summary of the book here.
The results of the class war are terrible for most of us (the 99%):
relentless downward pressure on American wages and job security
shifting costs to the worker and away from the corporation (retirement + health care)
making average american more easily exploitable by business
increase of productivity of the worker going mostly to the corporation
lowering of taxes on the top earners resulting in a massive accumulation of wealth at the top and a massive increase of the country's deficits crowding out citizen's priorities.
Viewing our votes as for/against a corporate agenda is essential to figuring out how we get our country back. Most americans don't realize we need to be as much on a war footing against our own corporations as we are against terrorists. It would be analogous to the circumstances we were in before 9/11. Just as terrorist could make/execute plans with impunity, corporations enrich themselves at will at the expense of the country and its citizens and we mount only distracted, token opposition to them doing so.
Non-participation is a vote for the corporate agenda for America
To those Americans, who don't plan to vote in a few weeks, please, please participate in your civics. Your country needs your engaged, self-interested participation. Right now the status quo don't need to take into consideration. To the extent that you don't oppose them and their corporate agenda, they can gain an even greater foothold in our democracy.
Case in point, the last midterm election (2010): The folk who were animated and showed up to the polls were folks mobilized by all that newly available corporate agenda money via the January Citizen's United ruling. The lack of engagement and voting by democrats who apparently didn't think their majorities in the congress were worth protecting is the reason we now have the ridiculous obstruction we've been living under these last four years.
Here's a secret: Cold hard evidence that civic engagement helps the average guy get to a better quality of life. I would maintain that self-interested voting is a lynchpin in that equation as well. Even if you're engaged, you need to be engaged in voting for what you want and need for those things to be given priority.
A vote for the GOP is a vote for the corporate agenda for America
Both parties are clearly in bed with corporate america, so how can I say this?
One party refuses to raise taxes to pay down our 17 trillion in debt and blocks every attempt to do so (This is the key difference of the class war that has been/is being waged and illustrates the clearest difference between the democrats and republican parties: where one party supports business and the other prioritizes business wealth at the expense of middle class priorities.
It's also the biggest driver of our deficit since Bush/Cheney cut them with no offsets. It was criminally negligent to choose to run our country into debt via 500 billion dollar in annual deficits and immoral to do so while we were fighting two wars.
This is that shameful GOP starve the beast policy that every American should vote against the GOP for waging. It is front and center in the class war against the average American and the GOP own it. )
One party supports unions, raising the minimum wage, and wage equality for women the other doesn't
One party supports the right for women to family plan and the other doesn't
One party wants immigration reform and the other doesn't
One party attempted to keep America from the joining the ranks of every other 1st world nation in having universal healthcare coverage for it's citizens, the other one enacted and defended that. Generally speaking, democrats own the safety net. They have defended it and strengthened it for 100 years. That having a safety net in America makes you hated by conservatives when it is literally the source of happiness and quality of life for people all over the free world is a mystery to me.
Each of these GOP positions hurts citizens but helps corporations. My reasoning is that putting dems in right now (how things were in 08) gets us back to sanity. It also sends the message that obstruction should be a losing not a winning strategy to the GOP. Their obstruction has cost this country 1 to 3 million jobs in our tepid recovery and it needs to be punished.
Am I blindly partisan? Is this yet another "democratic circlejerk"?
I've done a lot of reading about these things. My decisions are formed from what I have read, not blind or indocrinated or ideological or faith driven.
I'm of an opinion that facts trump any and every kind of ideological position and that doing what works is what we should ALL be aiming for.
Looking around the world at what is working in free democratic societies and adopting those standards; implementing them and then using feedback loops to fix what's not working and improving what is; that is my ideology if it can be construed as one.
What we need from every American of every political persuasion
To get mad that the corporate media is manipulating the electorate by downplaying every piece of good news and overstating every piece of bad news to discourage your vote, to scare you into making fear motivated decisions and to make you doubtful of the future.
It's a future we can win if we do what corporations and the 1% never forget to do which is to *vote in our own interests.
Vote for your education, healthcare, a safety net to be strong should you need it, the safety of your food, water and environment, protection from unscrupulous businesses, quality shared infrastructure, better wages and opportunities.
The corporations never forget to look out for themselves and they've goaded a large portion of the electorate into taking their positions on these things
reduce/privatize education, oppose healthcare, shred safety net, reduce corporate oversight, infrastructure spending yes but no taxes to pay for it, lower wages by outsourcing, hiring the undocumented, opposing unions, wage equality, etc...
In each case they cut cost on individual concerns and pocket the savings.
We've become this pro-business/no citizen agenda society even to the detriment of the quality of life for our own families.
It's painfully obvious that you use alts to upvote all your posts and comments... lol. Saw this comment posted, refreshed the page a few minutes later and instantly there were 2 SBs, just like the rest of your posts and comments, which all suspiciously gain 2-3 SBs right after being posted.
"The last midterm election (2010)"
"Putting Dems in right now like things were in 08"
Please update your shit for the current year, thanks
Reddit post
Disagree that the rich use racism to divide the poor. Maybe it was true 50 years ago but now the standard procedure for a company like Goldman Sachs nowadays is BLM and rainbow flags to avoid any controversy. Even if you turn on Tucker Carlson there's nobody who runs ads on his show
BLM and LGBT drive poor repub whites crazy , divide and conquer still , the target audience is just different
Yeah, but the main goal is to throw red meat to their millennial urban workforces, not to stir shit up with R voters
Cool story bro
too long didnt read. im sorry that happened, or happy for you or whatever
damnnnn think i'm gonna apply for an internal transfer to dcm if it's that chill
i'm on the brink of being fired and I love it, I thrive here
I didn’t read, but seems woke…for that I say YAAAAASSSS
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