I mean, I'd heard that this is how the labour market is supposed to work in theory, but I didn't realise that some CEOs were actually doing it. Corporate America does NOT want you to think about this.
I recently started at a private company that does profit sharing through ESOP. This year to all invested employees, so those more than ~1yr, they contributed around 30% of their annual salary in stock to their retirement. The private stock price rose about 32% from last year as well. On average the stock goes up 20%+ and the contributions have been around 18%. The founder and IG CEO found that companies that have an ESOP grow faster than others, and are happier. It takes 6 years for full investment, but after that, when you leave, they pay out your shares at that stock price, over a few payments I believe.
I wasn't a believer when I started at an ESOP. But looking at my retirement funds after working for 8 years at the company. Then comparing it to friends who were given shares of large public companies and making maybe like 10k over 4 years. Absolutely worth it.
If I were eligible this year, it would have been >20k just given to me for retirement. They also contribute to 401k. It's nothing crazy but it's something on top of ESOP. I don't want to need to work until I'm to old to enjoy retirement, but my wife and I like to travel now. This helps do both.
And this is like tip of the iceberg bare minimum type shit, it's not even suggesting workers own the means of production or anything that radical, all it is is paying employees a more appropriate share of the profits (the company is still making an obscene amount of that profit, and the employees are still under paid for their labour, it's how the pyramid scheme we call capitalism works, but this is proof that even while continuing to roll in billions, other employers don't have to be keeping their employees on poverty wages, they choose to).
Why would workers own the means of production if they didn’t set up the business in the first place? It’s just a hired labour. If you hire someone to do something this doesn’t mean they should suddenly have a part of that thing.
Just go and do it or join the existing one. There’s like plenty of them here. And if there isn’t at your location it’s still better to act than complain.
Just for context, if you made 100k a year, an extremely enviable salary, and saved every penny somehow, you’d be a billionaire in exactly TEN THOUSAND YEARS.
No one can earn a billion dollars through honest labor and the sweat of their brow. It must be exploited out of others. It must be stolen. You cannot possess a billion dollars and be a decent human being. For any good you do, you can’t approach the harm you’ve already inflicted upon others in the name of insatiable greed.
Oh I’m sorry, they’ve used their wealth to warp the culture and language to their benefit, so greed doesn’t exist anymore. I meant “rational self-interest.” also we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Buddy it ain’t stealing if we keep using the product and indirectly (directly) supporting the billionaires exploiting others.
EDIT: this comment was only directed at people who will see this kind of thing and not care. To those who don’t believe you have a choice in dropping Facebook because of life events. I get it. Most people do business through Facebook even.
The problem is that Facebook has a hold on the market. I do understand this but the truth of the matter is if we could get people to stop supporting Facebook then they wouldn’t make the money users keep fueling them with. It isn’t your fault Facebook is a power house of social media. I don’t blame consumers but was stating Facebook will continue to hold this market until consumers care.
I also do personally believe you can let go of Facebook or mitigate its use and I know this is possible because I do this myself. Yes, the guy who made the comment about supporting Facebook is using Facebook but only when necessary.
If you would like some tips and person tricks on how to mitigate your use then message me. I have just custom tailored my experience to use Facebook less and only for essential need, what little it provides.
My problem with using the word, “stolen.” Is that stealing is usually being done without our notice. It isn’t stealing if you have been caught multiple times and no one cares. At that point it’s just using.
I think you underestimate the propaganda influence they have. I don’t consider it voluntary by most, any more than I blame a North Korean citizen for hating the west as they’ve been indoctrinated to do, it’s the fault of the power above them.
The power above us isn’t our purchased government, it’s capital. And it propagandizes us to defend this system from Kindergarten to colleges of economics to the for profit news they own. And if that doesn’t work, they control the means of state violence through the government and both major parties they fully own and control to defend their profits and interests against the peasants. We aren’t approaching Orwellian society, we’ve surpassed it. Legions of peasants advocate directly against their own interests because thats what all of us are taught to do, you have to buck that pressure to even truly open your eyes and know whats going on.
Problem is that it’s not against the interest of the peasants.
Everybody knows how poor life can be in the rest of the world. Once you go human decency you want to share with everybody. You may even care about animals.
any more than I blame a North Korean citizen for hating the west as they’ve been indoctrinated to do
I assure you that North Koreans don’t need to be indoctrinated in order to hate the west. The genocide committed upon them by America was enough to do the job. But don’t take my word for it, read what USAF General Curtis LeMay, who was also head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, had to say on the matter.
We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?
I was off Facebook for years, and was never a heavy user, but I had to get back on because the school my daughter goes to sends out so many notifications that way.
Facebook is very ingrained in how business and groups interact these days, what’s an individual to do? Disconnect from the world and miss important school notifications, among other things?
Plus the “stealing” isn’t just from people using the platform, it’s also in wages and benefits for employees. Why aren’t they getting a bigger share of those profits they worked to produce?
I work 7 days a week and my wife works full time to get that $100k/year and it took us years to get where we are in our careers. $1million in assets is still so far away. It’s such an incredible amount of money and Zuckerberg and friends have thousands of times that much money. It’s just so crazy to think about.
And here’s the problem I have with that: not all labor is exploitative. No matter what economy we have, there would still be laborers printing the book, binding it, cutting down the trees and making the paper, etc.
Even if they’re not making an even split of company profits, some worker somewhere is happy with what they’re getting.
And regardless of economy, some worker will be unhappy working, somewhere, feel they’re not getting their fair share, etc.
That doesn’t change simply because we switch from capitalism to some other system.
The only fair way for that book to be made from the implications given is if all of the labor is automated, but at the end of the day a human being would have to do some work somewhere no matter how many levels of automation redundancy you have, so how is he not implying being expected to do anything is the problem, and using the blatant shitty behavior of the rich as a smokescreen for that?
We could live in a Jetsonian paradise where all he’d have to do is push a few buttons once a day and he’d still complain.
I have done things that are hard work for less compensation than it deserves and been happy to give it freely (ie charity, volunteering), but that doesn’t mean we can’t examine the power structure, even if the plurality of people are happy inside it.
But it’s not the author exploiting publishing companies. It’s the execs of those companies exploiting their own workers. The publishing companies make excellent money (and same for paper creators, etc). Just it disproportionately goes to execs and possibly shareholders, not workers.
of course you can slice it any way you like. I’m not saying no one should be an author, but I am saying billionaires aren’t made without exploitation somewhere
You forget the impact of compound interest. If you invested 1 dollar at 1% interest, you would have a billion dollars in just over 2000 years. So these comparisons based on income are not useful.
yeeah, an insane cspan caller was trying to tell the world that him losing by 17 votes was a signal for the faithful to start the revolution. Nuckinfuts people. Hopefully he doesn’t lose by 76 votes next. 😑
They fail to realize their revolution is just a schism within the GOP. They want it so badly, they're falling apart. Make it official. Split the party.
If there truly was a proper party split, that’d give progressive, and non-regressive democrats room to start ousting the geriatrics and conservatives from the party, moving the whole country’s political representation leftward while GOPα. and GOPß compete with each other to be the new #2 party.
The split may be larger than the vote appears to suggest. Those worried about re-election will avoid publicly opposing an ally of Trump and the base, especially if they know that colleagues in safer districts will prevent him gaining a majority anyway.
Exactly. And, this needs to happen if they can't even caucus together to do something as simple as select a speaker. Their internal division is paralyzing Congress because they are two parties acting like one, but not really.
That’s going to happen regardless. Basically once enough of these people die off, control will be released and at least some things can move forward. I fully expect to see a very hard push to the left.
That’s precisely why the gop shot their shot and why they’re so hellbent on proving thst government doesn’t work by burning it down from the inside to prove their point.
Conservatives will abandon democracy before they abandon conservatism.
Basically conservatives get elected and break government. They then turn around and tell their constituents that the government is broken and wasteful. Do this for enough generations and suddenly taxes are thievery and why does anyone care for infrastructure?
If somebody could politely explain to me, why is the economy doing well but my paycheck provides less and less each month? I feel like these numbers are divorced from my everyday experiences. Does the inflation of goods not factor in?
The economy booming means that shareholders make big returns. It doesn’t have any connection to workers. Worker benefits are rarely connected to how well economies or companies are doing. It doesn’t really relate to inflation. It’s just a measure of how well businesses are doing. They are doing well thanks to taking more out of your monthly.
This is exactly along the lines of what I thought. It’s just so strange to me to have people cheer a good economy when it can mean so little for your average peon.
Jobs that dont pay enough to afford a house, rent, healthcare or basic living standards. Also its probably a lot of people who got hired for a second or third job
Bingo. The company I work for just announced their 2023 results: successful but not as wildly successful as they’d hoped. Accordingly, stockholders get larger dividends than ever before while employees get layoffs, rolling furloughs, and pay cuts.
This so called “economy” loosely translates to like, 12 or 15 companies siphoning away the financial benefits produced by the working class, hence the discrepancy between it doing well and the low wages people have to survive with.
Usually in reports like this there are mentions of job growth (ie new recorded hiring) unemployment going down and average income levels rising.
Ok so yes, jobs are created, wonderful.
But lots of things arent recorded as job losses.
Generally speaking, if you dont file for unemployment, or dont qualify, but still lost a job, you dont show up without doing far, far more exhaustive research than these headline numbers illustrate.
And any prole has either had this happen to themselves or someone they know by this point, at least amongst people I know.
Or, if you are out of the workforce due to an injury, illness and/or esrly retirement, that usually doesnt show up as a job loss, but does show up as ‘not in the workforce’.
And, if youre not in the workforce, you are not considered unemployed, as you are not in the pool if possibly employable workers.
So, wonderful, that not in work force number is still high compared to historical norms, as a proportion of the whole population. Its going up.
Income. This one is easy.
Thats usually always a headline of average income.
Cool. Averages dont mean dick in an economy where the vast number of people earn little, and only a few earn a lot. So what did we learn in basic statstics hopefully?
5 5 5 5 5 has an average of 5
1 1 1 2 20 /also/ has an average of 5.
Further compounding things, Americans are now drowning in personal debt, so much so that even quite a lot of people who /appear/ to be well off actually have as much net worth as many who appear not well off.
The maths and data on that is /way/ more complicated, but the rough breakdown is:
1/4 of Americans have significantly negative net worth, ie -5000 or worse.
1/4 of Americans have roughly 0 net worth.
1/4 of Americans have roughly positive net worth, ie up to 10k.
Then the higher you go from there its an exponential scale of less and less people having more and more money.
Ending up with something like the richest 1% of Americans have more net worth / wealth than the bottom 60%.
The confusing part is that for incomes below basically about a quarter mil a year, there is again actually significsntly wide variance in the relationship of yearly income to net worth.
Many people of modest means are actually in financially better positions than many people who would basically be their boss, or bosses boss…
But can you imagine that the richer ones either hide this and lie about it, or act like its fine and not a problem for them, but it /is/ a problem for those of lower income, and /they/ are irresponsible and need personal austerity finances, while they (the higher incomed folks) dont?
So anyway, there ya go, theres /some/ explanation of whats going on from someone with a bachelors in econ, specialty in econometrics and environmental econ, and another bachelors in poli sci.
For me to actually lay all this out with proper cited studies and data sets would basically be a phd thesis, im tired, go away.
Basically the title of this thesis would be ‘How the American Economy Enforced And Solidified An Economic Caste System Structure Following the 08 Financial Crisis’ and would focus heavily on how income mobility has been extremely reduced for large segments of society in the past 15 years.
Hilariously I cant afford to pay for a PHD, so whats the fucking point rofl.
EDIT;
2 other major factors: Rent and Healthcare.
Both of those are absolute shit shows right now, and vaaaaastly take more proportional income from a poorer person than a richer one.
Remember when most people owned homes by their 30s?
Haha, yeah, good one, me neither.
EDIT 2: Alternative spicy title for the PHD Thesis would be:
“An aggregate, ends justify the means, moral argument for the justness and validity of,
at best,
letting all the baby boomers die scared and alone in old folks homes with poorly trained and paid staff who will abuse them until they die painful, terrifying, lonely deaths,
or, at worst,
why we should actually just start killing /enough/ of them that it scares the rest of them into selling their barely-not-foreclosed-on second homes they are renting out based not on actual market rates but on the prices dictated by their mortgage payments… why we should kill enough of them that they sell these properties for about 1/4 of what they think they are worth.”
Marx explained this very phenomenon in Das Kapital. Creating jobs is a meaningless metric when employers aren’t required to pay people a living wage. Minimum wage in US is nowhere close to being livable at this point, and what happens is that people are simply having to get multiple full time jobs to pay their bills. In fact, 37% of the population is now working two full time jobs now.
Low unemployment and rising wages means it’s a good time to find a new job that pays more. The absolute best time to get more money is to get a new job. Staying in the same job for a long time almost always means your wages will stagnate, most companies don’t reward loyalty, they abuse it
For the average Joe, economy doing well means the job market is healthy, robust in the aggregate. All this does is give you the leverage to renegotiate salary/benefits or change jobs.
Regardless how much money your boss makes, even if he makes tenfold from last year, he's not going to voluntarily increase your pay beyond annual adjustments.
At the end, you need to take the initiative to change your income.
[This job market keeps rewriting the history books.
The latest superlative: The unemployment rate has now stayed safely below 4% for two full years. The last time the unemployment rate was this low for this long, Richard Nixon was in the White House.]
Because the advent of computers allows for all kinds of creative new ways to massage numbers to “prove” something to people, even when it flies in the face of what is obviously happening in the real world.
That’s exactly why. All that money you aren’t making is what’s fueling the economy for investors and stockholders. Can’t do millions of dollars of stock buybacks with your own money.
It is funny that by trying to punish the union members, they proved that unions work. The other employees would never have gotten pay raised and perks without the union.
Is there a single impressive philanthropic feat that has been achieved by any of these billionaires?
If I had access to hundreds of billions and I wasn’t able to solve a single meaningful welfare issue for even a single country in the world in my own lifetime, I would consider that abject failure.
Bill Gates has done significant good fighting disease. Still something that should’ve been decided by society, not a single person, but credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately anti vaxxers have destroyed a lot of that legacy anyway.
Bill Gates has done significant good fighting disease.
No, he got in the way of progress for the sake of his own profit. The scientists that made the covid vaccine wanted it to be open source so any country could make their own, but he forced the company to patent it instead.
He’s also been funding anti-scientific propaganda to convince people that his anti-solutions will solve the climate crisis. His foundation also regularly invests in ventures that pollute the Global South.
He’s not perfect, and your examples show why these sorts of decisions on spending and priority shouldn’t be in the hands of a single person who isn’t even an expert in diseases.
It’s still worth acknowledging that he did plenty to help with polio and malaria, even if it could’ve been done better by another method.
The real obstacle wasn’t patents, it was manufacturing capability. India early on didn’t even let US vaccines in when offered them because they insisted they had to go through their own regulatory and testing process first.
Most people say Bill Gates but it reminds me of the classic joke:
The woman you know as your grandmother is not my mother. That’s an elderly woman now trying to get into heaven
Bill Gates acted identically to Zuckerberg and Musk and every other hated billionare back in the 90s. There was a time Micro$oft was always written with the dollar sign. There was a time a young smug grinning Gates was posted everywhere as the poster child for rich assholes. The Microsoft board of directors did the smart move and removed Gates from management and then he quietly retired. He’s had an Ebenezer Scrooge moment and has spent the last decade trying to buy his way into people’s good graces.
It’s great that Gates is helping people, but I don’t think we should all have to suffer under a power hungry cut throat CEO and hope one day they have a change of heart.
He forced the covid vaccine to go private with Moderna. Micro$oft was cute and all but these pharmaceutical companies have killed and are killing hundreds of thousands simply by charging so much for the cure.
Capitalists actually keep the developing world from fully developing. On purpose. And NGO Aid has been proven to stagnage rather than assist countries that are constantly receiving it, such as Haiti. Yeah I would consider that failure, too. But they certainly wouldn’t. And perhaps, with that many eyes in you, it might actually be harder to get things done that go against the interests of other rich and powerful people.
What are you solving with money alone? We need intent before money. Globally we lack intent, even if some rich guy spends some money, we need to locate human resources. That doesn’t mean I can disregard philanthropy. That alone doesn’t solve things
Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Vanderbilt University and Duke University. John D. Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago
Denny Sanford, of Sanford Health, has donated about $1.5 billion to healthcare.
“Fulton County prosecutors are recommending a sentence of six years probation. Powell will also be required to testify at future trials, write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, pay nearly $9,000 in restitution and fines and turn over documents.”
That’s it?! Must be nice to try and undermine a presidential election, to only potentially face probation + $9000.
I wonder if the lenient sentence relies on the fact that a) she is genuinely mentally unwell and b) without the people she is about to testify against she can’t organise anything.
In order to prove RICO, you need to prove in court that crimes were committed and that they were part of an organized effort.
Having lower level actors plead guilty establishes that there were actual crimes that were committed. You can’t argue that something is not a crime after there’s a conviction.
Now add in the promise to point fingers in future trials, and you can connect the bosses to these proven crimes to establish the organized efforts.
1%?! Whhhoaaa there, we don’t want to cause any economical damage that might cause job loss, do we? Do you want to be the one to break it to the deputy minister of job security? Let’s go for a more reasonable 0.001%
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