Most Americans at this point are a product of capitalist indoctrination via privately owned for profit media propaganda, and public schools defunded and in utter ruin by capitalist captured government to cut their taxes, despite still profiting directly from a pre-literate workforce to draw from that they just don't want to pay for.
And now, through the long laid, long paid for installation of capitalist interest to the SCOTUS through their Federalist Society judicial extremist group, they now effectively own our... I'm sorry, their judicial branch of the government we have to suffer without recourse or appeal.
...They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it...
-George Carlin, decades ago.
This is also why study of the humanities is under attack in academia, btw. Believe it or not, maximizing growth/metastasis/GDP isn't healthy as society's sole practiced value and pursuit. Gotta hurry, a few thousand greedy sociopaths aren't getting richer fast enough, herp derp.
The owners have been painfully clear they believe they can sustain an economy only they can afford to participate in, but still somehow powered by and on the backs of everyone else that can't afford to live within it, let alone be active consumers/participants.
Honestly at this point the 95% should just tell the 5% to keep sucking eachother off buying eachother's space tourist rocket yachts (Edit: sorry, AI powered space tourist rocket yachts) only they can afford while we go off and make cooperative, interconnected socialist communities. Maybe start compeeeeeting on what cooperative, humble members of a shared society we can be.
The owners figured that out after Jim Crow fell. Overt slavery leads to resistance, and gets harder to maintain at scale.
Since then, they stumbled upon a solution born of modern technology.
Just propagandize your labor pool using the media you own and the education system you inform through your captured government into enslaving themselves and believing it was their idea, and just as importantly, propagandize them into hating and blaming the minority of peasants who didn't fall for that propaganda as the reason for all their owner caused misery.
"If you work really hard and do everything we tell you, you will prosper!.. At some undisclosed point in the future. Just keep working our machines, it'll happen, you'll see! You stupid fucking sucker peasants🖕🤑💰"
But they worked so haaaaaard exploiting the labor of thousands of other humans to enrich themselves specifically!
It would be so unfair to punish the success the global owner class created all by themselves that had nothing to do with access to their society's commons like functioning utilities and roads, legal mechanisms for business disputes, and publically educated, pre-literate labor pools to draw and directly profit from but should never have to fund commensurate with the immoral levels of wealth it most certainly didn't facilitate them acquiring!
Wouldn't a just, compassionate society do the only fair thing and just let the worst off human beings and citizens of our respective societies die in the streets horribly of exposure and law enforcement brutality for the crime of not producing value well enough for our beloved job creators?
I hear you, and it's tragic that the fight doesn't end with taxation but with its application and every politician wants to give it to their affluent bribers in some form.
That said, capital at the level of the owners is an expression of power, power to keep the world rigged, buy governments/regulators, protect monopolies, etc.
If that money was somehow (im not holding by breath) taxed/confiscated from the world's immoral owner class, transferred into paper currency and incinerated, it would still be a good day because the power dynamic between them the 10s of thousands of sociopath owner families, and us the billions, would still be measurably improved.
Most Americans have no idea how anti-worker the US supreme court has become ( www.theguardian.com )
CEO pay is rising faster than it has in a decade — and 3 times as fast as worker wages ( qz.com )
A Tax of 5% on The World’s Multi-Millionaires and Billionaires Could Raise $1.7 trillion, Enough to Lift 2 Billion People out of Poverty ( medium.com )
Ikea’s CEO has solved the Swedish retailer’s global ‘unhappy worker’ crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare ( fortune.com )
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/15395224...
It's just not fair! ( lemmy.world )