The illusion has crumbled. I travel for work, and you know what I see. The same crap everywhere. The same restaurants, the same stores, the same hotels, the same everything. And more often than not with not enough staff to keep it open. How many places I have seen with reduced hours. Fast food places with only drive through open at 2pm. My point being that the legs the rich are standing on are crumbling.
Obviously here we know its bullshit. But I’m willing to be that a lot of us have worked in places like that before. There is usually some people that work there not doing so well, poor or depressed or both and more, with reasoning that this is not the best place to work but there kinda looking out for me. People with thoughts that I don’t know where else to go, I have no skills,
Is there anything stopping the writers from finally working on that next great American novel they all have collectively been putting off? If there isn’t something legally barring them, I expect the quality/quantity of books to increase soon.
Did you read the article? The economist interviewed specifically said it isn’t because of price gouging, but because they anticipated future costs will be higher than they actually were.
Normally, Andrew says, profits contribute less than a third to inflation. He found that in 2021, corporate profits could account for about double that, nearly 60% of inflation, meaning it was not costs driving inflation. It was corporate profits. Now, some economists hear this and think this is proof that companies were just using inflation as an excuse to gouge customers. Andrew does not think this. He thinks companies likely raised prices not because their costs went up in 2021 - because they did not, really - but because they were anticipating that their costs would go up a lot in 2022. And by the way, costs did end up going up in 2022, although companies still made record profits.
The part I don’t understand is why it’s important to hit the “replacement level”. Wouldn’t it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?
It really depends which billionaires. Believe it or not, some billionaires aren’t bad people (probably). Billionaires are just people with a ton of money and power at the end of the day, and we should judge them on their actions, not their bank balance, regardless of our suspicions of how they got so rich.
However, if we could stick (for example) the Sacklers, Kochs and Murdochs in a sub and send it to Challenger Deep with just enough oxygen to get there and plenty of ballast, we’d definitely be doing the world a favour. These scumbags have a huge amount of blood on their hands, and while it would be better to see them in jail, we never will, so fantasising about their horrible demise is the most we can really do.
Don’t carry water for people who would let you die to increase their mountain of gold a little. What you’ve described might be true of millionaires, even multi millionaires; but no one gets to a billion dollars without stepping on those below them in the pursuit of more money than one person could ever spend in their lifetime.
Being a billionaire is pathological, if the human race was a biological organism and one part of it started hoarding that many resources, we would call it cancer and cut it out.
Juneteenth is a federal holiday, but private employers don’t have to observe it. Mine sure doesn’t. I have never heard of any employer observing Mother’s or Father’s day with a paid holiday.
That’s a good question. If you don’t mind, I’m going to use the “Speak as moderator” button here (although i don’t really know what that does).
I see a few things necessary to reform the current economic system - let’s call it Awareness, Advocacy and Action:
Awareness means getting people to realise that the corporate propaganda they’re hearing isn’t the whole truth.
Advocacy means going out and telling people to join the cause, form a local union, etc.
Action means taking organized action - writing to politicians, organising dialogues and strikes, etc.
I’m completely open to using this community for any and all of the above. When we have a good critical mass of users, we can all vote on this, and I’ll abide by the consensus.
In the meantime, however, we need to get more people to rally behind the cause. We have ~500 subscribers here from all over the world in a variety of jobs. That’s not nearly enough to do any sort of Action. All we can do in the meantime is Awareness and Advocacy. That means posting memes and screenshots, that means posting news that counters corporate propaganda, that means posting news about organised action taking place elsewhere that we can celebrate or contribute to.
If anyone disagrees, please share your opinions here, I’m totally open to suggestions, criticisms, insults even.
I think “speak as mod” adds a red “mod” logo (kinda looks like a shield) next to your username. That’s it, as far as I can tell - it doesn’t pin the post or highlight it or do anything else.
Work Reform
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