Remember the “vibe shift”? Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms alike declared that the second coming of Donald Trump meant the old rules of politics and even everyday civility were roadkill.
“I feel liberated,” one top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”
Maybe the vibes shifted again.
Imagine thinking that getting to shit on special needs people is a win. Wtf is wrong with these people!?
As tech bosses get richer and ordinary Americans struggle, Democrats put the case against the US’s grotesque unfairness – and voters responded
As time goes on, I care less about fairness and more about emancipation. I don’t care about making the rich pay their fair share, I just want to be out from under their thumb. I don’t want to be dependent on the rich anymore, for taxes or jobs or anything. I want to be independent from the rich, I want to be free from them. Let them keep their stupid money. Let them sit on their pile of gold like a dragon, as long as I don’t have to have anything to do with them.
The nature of capital is accretion. Gotta do something with excess profit, and the easiest thing is to buy one of your competitors so you can have their profit, too. The rise of mega-corps means the death of small-corps, and means that more and more jobs are at the mercy of the billionaires. The rich aren’t sitting on piles of gold, they’re sitting on piles of…everything - all the stores, all the factories, all the jobs, all the hospitals. There’s no freedom from them while they sit on their piles of everything.
The rich aren’t sitting on piles of gold, they’re sitting on piles of…everything - all the stores, all the factories, all the jobs, all the hospitals. There’s no freedom from them while they sit on their piles of everything.
Taxing them to pay for government social programs doesn’t change any of that. It only reinforces our dependence on them. There’s no tax revenue if there isn’t profit or income first, and they generate their profit and income from the everything they own.
Sometimes I think about getting some like-minded people together and building a self sufficient commune. I’m sure it would be very hard but at least we wouldn’t have to go to a soul crushing job everyday to make ungodly profits for some rich psycho.
I live in an area with a lot of Amish communities. They live simply and they work hard but they’re free. They own their land, they build their own houses, they grow their own food. Idk, that doesn’t sound so bad to me these days.
Taxing them to pay for government social programs doesn’t change any of that. It only reinforces our dependence on them.
You’re thinking of social programs as permanent assistance, and that’s their framing. I mean, there definitely are people with special circumstances who need persistent support, but most of us just need relief from crisis, a hand up from the hole we started in, training to useful skills, doctor when you’re sick… Look at what people do with the ‘free money’ they get from Universal Basic Income experiments.
There’s no tax revenue if there isn’t profit or income first
Also a trap of their framing. It’s absolutely possible to tax wealth itself or unrealized gains. Property-wealth taxes are how you convince farmers it’s time to sell to a housing developer. Billionaire stock-wealth represents revenue that wasn’t paid to the labor that produced it, so it seems fair to take some of it back to benefit those underpaid workers.
The reason your job is soul crushing is you have no alternative. The billionaire has no competition, no motivation to keep his workers happy, because they don’t have anywhere else to go, except maybe another soul-crushing billionaire job. Downsize the corporations so they have competition, and you’ll see better, more rewarding jobs appear.
The reason your job is soul crushing is you have no alternative.
No, I have a few. I could put a bullet in my brain. That’s one.
Downsize the corporations so they have competition, and you’ll see better, more rewarding jobs appear.
Sure, sure. Downsize the corporations. Competition. Wonderful. Until it isn’t. Until consolidation, again. Time to downsize again to promote competition. Repeat cycle until the heat death of the universe. That bullet thing is sounding better and better.
Agree with both of you. they deserve the big metal on a string that slices.
This was the very core of Trumpism, the trick that wowed rightwingers around the world: how he could yoke together minimum-wage workers with the 1%; Latinos and black voters with those happy to dabble in a little light racism; the Epstein-haters with the Epstein class (who can forget Elon Musk’s email to Jeffrey: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”). And he did it by alchemising class antagonism into culture war.
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