If we could harvest energy from the hardcore early capitalist theorists rolling in their graves we'd have infinite energy at that point
> The idea that if things get bad enough "people" are going to do something about it can just occur to someone that hasn't seen enough of the world.
Or I'm French, who knows ;)
Continue selling ports to China, continue selling sport clubs to Qatar, apartments to Emiratis, continue to delocalise industries to third world countries to save on labor, continue to force people into precarity, to force them into shittier and shittier jobs while asking them to work longer hours and retire at 67 for less and less quality of life. I'm telling you, at some point people won't have anything to lose and heads will start rolling
The poor are still too poor to live properly and the rich are too rich to count, that's not how they sold us capitalism is it ? Wasn't it supposed to even out inequalities ? Money trickling down to the poorest ? Why are there still people in ultra advanced countries who can't afford to heat their home ?
> Poverty definition is a relative definition.
Criteria such as:
"can't afford clothes"
"can't go out with friends/family at least once a month due to financial reasons"
"not having access to internet"
"can't pay water/electricity bills"
"can't heat apartment above the minimum temperature determined by the law"
"can't afford one week of vacation out of their own place"
"can't afford meat/fish every other day"
> For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty. [9] And if there are people getting rich by tricking consumers or lobbying the government for anti-competitive regulations or tax loopholes, then let's stop them. Not because it's causing economic inequality, but because it's stealing. [10]
> If all you have is statistics, it seems like that's what you need to fix. But behind a broad statistical measure like economic inequality there are some things that are good and some that are bad, some that are historical trends with immense momentum and others that are random accidents. If we want to fix the world behind the statistics, we have to understand it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good.
If we did that Bezos&co wouldn't have nearly as much money.
A big part of the wealth of these individual is tax evasion or """optimisation""", taxes which are supposed to be used to fix these inequalities... Again, these people don't exist in a vacuum, these massive companies became what they are by squeezing as much as they're legally (and some time not so legally) allowed to squeeze, it's our collective job to set the boundaries. Not doing anything is letting them decide and their end goal is squeezing us and the planet dry
You don't "attack poverty" with good intentions and nice speeches
How about we talk about actually attacking poverty? Coincidentally, the way that Gates, Buffett, Bezos, etc seem to be doing with all their money and time
What ?
They do that once they absolutely milked the world for decades because they're approaching death and start to get worried about their karma. Too little too late, it's like burning a random house and going in to save the cat while the family is burning, you don't get to be applauded for that
If they truly attacked poverty you wouldn't have a single homeless person in the west
But at the time, we understood that the police was really representing the business owners (landowners, industrialists) more than the government and put their crimes not on the individual, but on the hand that lead them. I feel like this understanding is coming back in the US.
People mobbing into stores, grabbing things off the shelves, and just walking out. Sleeping in tents in massive encampments, turning parks and sidewalks into shanty towns. Pissing and shitting on the street in broad daylight.
The richest are driving up rents and housing prices in cities. Gas is increasingly unaffordable, driving up cost of living in rural areas. People who cannot keep up will find other solutions. It might not involve guillotines, but the US has more guns per capita than anywhere else in the world.
edit: what I've described above is not a revolt, per se, but it is revolting.
Trump was the first warning sign IMO, and some are still not taking it seriously, blaming the voters themselves for being so dissatisfied with the status quo that they would take a chance on someone like that.
It is the fault of the voters. Especially after it was obvious Trump was just a grifter who couldn't care less about the common man, and they voted for him again because they were scared of the immigrants and black activists with whom they should have had class solidarity. And it will still be the voters' fault when they vote for him a third time in 2024, based on whatever batshit QAnon lunacy their conservative truth-bubbles drip into their eyeballs.
And Trump wasn't the first warning sign by any means. Arguably Occupy was the first warning sign in recent memory. We don't recognize that because the current narrative is that "the left" supports the status quo of the elites, neoliberalism and capitalism while "the right" are the anti-capitalist, anti-statist underdogs.
There are 300 million people in the US. How come the voters only get to make a binary decision? Simple; because the two parties have designed everything so that the voter only gets to make that decision.
So, I'd say that blaming the voters is a bit short-sighted when it comes to a quasi-aristocracy like the US.
You mean like most other politicians?
> and they voted for him again because they were scared of the immigrants and black activists with whom they should have had class solidarity
This racist trope is propaganda. Also, "class solidarity" is not a thing anymore thanks to the dominant parties who have been squashing it for over 50 years.
> Arguably Occupy was the first warning sign in recent memory.
Occupy didn't accomplish anything, it was a weak protest. Electing Trump definitely accomplished something and proved the discontent runs deep and can affect the cushy established class. Then came the messaging about baskets of deplorables and ultra-maga threats to democracy.
Trump winning was to a large degree just a sign of the times; too many people were unsatisfied with the status quo.
2016 had two outsider candidates (Trump, Sanders) and while the Democrats managed to smother their revolt, the Republicans - because of existing structures, see "Tea party" - didn't.
In his term of office, Trump managed to address few of the problems that got him elected to office - the discontentment is still there, brewing and festering.
Having a 4k TV and a smart fridge doesn't balance the degraded day to day working conditions, pays, longer hours, later retirement
Quality of life peaked somewhere in the 90s in the west, now it's all non essentials, people are giving up on the idea of owning their home and retiring healthy, &c.
After the 1% protests, media started publishing social justice articles to divide & conquer the population. The percentage of woke words like “racist”, “sexist” and “gender” rose rapidly!
Occupy was seriously thinking about killing the rich, but MAGA just has some nebulous ideas that there are pedophile cannibals sneaking around and that social media and the news are heavily biased
Plus there's the fact that Occupy Wall Street was popular among pretty much everyone below a certain wealth level, but now everyone from that demographic is split up into smaller groups who hate each other: MAGA, Bernie Bros, "Hillary/Biden or You're A Nazi", etc