We let corporations take over without limit or recourse.
Walmart pays a wage to people whose job it is to help other Walmart employees apply for government assistance. That’s way cheaper to Walmart than paying people more. Then the government assistance comes from the lower 90% who do pay taxes.
Minimum wage hasn’t been raised in decades. It has increased a bit only in a few places.
Over half (guesstimate) of prepared food workers do not have a steady income. They rely on a few customers to tip. And very rarely have any sick time or vacation time or health benefits.
You’ve eaten food that has been handled by someone sick with a fever because they were highly discouraged from staying home sick.
You know what? Fuck this. I’m so godamn sick of seeing people say “we let this happen” as if we can just suddenly not let it happen. This happens because our current society is just a rebranding of feudalism, and to not give the rich their due on responsibility is downright wrong. We did not let shit happen, WE attempted to survive and got fucked, and continued to get fucked. I’ve seen this enough times now that everyone one of you reading this better expect to read it again the next time you or I see anything remotely close to “WE lET ThIS HapPen”
I want to put this edit here because I didn’t expect your comment to get nuked after mine, and because you do raise a lot of good and productive points. I was drunk when I wrote this and it came with a lot of anger that I should have held back. I just think you should reevaluate the first part, other than that, you’re spot on.
It’s less “we let this happen” and more “we were duped into fighting against our comrades over crumbs instead of banding together to ensure our right to more than just crumbs in the first place.” The 1% benefits from every culture war that sows division amongst us. We’re too busy and distracted to organize or build guillotines.
I long for the day we can get over culture wars, at least temporarily, and come to agreement on how we’re all getting fucked over by the rich. I always think about ways to get involved but I come up short. I know a general strike is the game plan, but as an engineer my professional has strayed away from unionizing. Need to get more involved there. Change happens slowly until it doesn’t I suppose.
I’m a power plant operator. Most of my coworkers have chugged the Kool aid in terms of hating unions. We’re well paid but the benefits aren’t good and the schedule is life-wrecking for the average person. Bad unions exist, but I think that they don’t understand the core concept of the power behind collective bargaining. I’ve seen one person get fired in the 3 years I’ve been here, so jobs are generally secure, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to gain from unionizing.
They also very much eat up the culture war slop and aren’t particularly literate. They’re “common sense” forward, which means they don’t understand things like tax brackets or geopolitics, but they’re very upset about them.
To play devil’s advocate – Liberalism, or the idea that the people who are ruled should have a say in the rules, started coming about ~500 years ago. The elite’s were all always evil and bad to the masses, enslaving us, paying us very little, even clocks and timekeeping were used to trick workers into more hours and when pocket watches became available, they were just banned in early industry.
A lot of people fought and died to establish the idea of Liberalism all the way up to unions and workers rights. So, in a way, ‘we’ did fight for those things and earned them over a long time. It does kind of feel like now the same ‘we’ has forgotten the value of that stuff and the sacrifice it took to get there.
I still don’t really see this as our fault. We live in gilded age II where money is virtue no matter how its acquired. The internet broke the stable propaganda machines and we’re in flux of stabilizing around the new ones and kicking out the smaller bad actors.
Can’t forget to mention that those Walmart employees usually turn around and use those food stamps and government assistance at Walmart due to whatever meager employee discount they get.
So now Walmart not only gets to pay their workers far below a living wage, they also get reimbursed by the government for all those food stamps their own employees spend at their stores. These corporations are the biggest “welfare queens” the world has ever seen.
Reminiscent of owing one’s soul to the company store, eh?
We let corporations take over without limit or recourse.
Walmart pays a wage to people whose job it is to help other Walmart employees apply for government assistance. That’s way cheaper to Walmart than paying people more. Then the government assistance comes from the lower 90% who do pay taxes.
Minimum wage hasn’t been raised in decades. It has increased a bit only in a few places.
Over half (guesstimate) of prepared food workers do not have a steady income. They rely on a few customers to tip. And very rarely have any sick time or vacation time or health benefits.
You’ve eaten food that has been handled by someone sick with a fever because they were highly discouraged from staying home sick.
You know what? Fuck this. I’m so godamn sick of seeing people say “we let this happen” as if we can just suddenly not let it happen. This happens because our current society is just a rebranding of feudalism, and to not give the rich their due on responsibility is downright wrong. We did not let shit happen, WE attempted to survive and got fucked, and continued to get fucked. I’ve seen this enough times now that everyone one of you reading this better expect to read it again the next time you or I see anything remotely close to “WE lET ThIS HapPen”
I want to put this edit here because I didn’t expect your comment to get nuked after mine, and because you do raise a lot of good and productive points. I was drunk when I wrote this and it came with a lot of anger that I should have held back. I just think you should reevaluate the first part, other than that, you’re spot on.
It’s less “we let this happen” and more “we were duped into fighting against our comrades over crumbs instead of banding together to ensure our right to more than just crumbs in the first place.” The 1% benefits from every culture war that sows division amongst us. We’re too busy and distracted to organize or build guillotines.
I long for the day we can get over culture wars, at least temporarily, and come to agreement on how we’re all getting fucked over by the rich. I always think about ways to get involved but I come up short. I know a general strike is the game plan, but as an engineer my professional has strayed away from unionizing. Need to get more involved there. Change happens slowly until it doesn’t I suppose.
I’m a power plant operator. Most of my coworkers have chugged the Kool aid in terms of hating unions. We’re well paid but the benefits aren’t good and the schedule is life-wrecking for the average person. Bad unions exist, but I think that they don’t understand the core concept of the power behind collective bargaining. I’ve seen one person get fired in the 3 years I’ve been here, so jobs are generally secure, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to gain from unionizing.
They also very much eat up the culture war slop and aren’t particularly literate. They’re “common sense” forward, which means they don’t understand things like tax brackets or geopolitics, but they’re very upset about them.
To play devil’s advocate – Liberalism, or the idea that the people who are ruled should have a say in the rules, started coming about ~500 years ago. The elite’s were all always evil and bad to the masses, enslaving us, paying us very little, even clocks and timekeeping were used to trick workers into more hours and when pocket watches became available, they were just banned in early industry.
A lot of people fought and died to establish the idea of Liberalism all the way up to unions and workers rights. So, in a way, ‘we’ did fight for those things and earned them over a long time. It does kind of feel like now the same ‘we’ has forgotten the value of that stuff and the sacrifice it took to get there.
I still don’t really see this as our fault. We live in gilded age II where money is virtue no matter how its acquired. The internet broke the stable propaganda machines and we’re in flux of stabilizing around the new ones and kicking out the smaller bad actors.
Removed by mod
You’re right, many people worked hard and tirelessly to prevent this. And we’d be even worse off without the work of those caring people.
Can’t forget to mention that those Walmart employees usually turn around and use those food stamps and government assistance at Walmart due to whatever meager employee discount they get.
So now Walmart not only gets to pay their workers far below a living wage, they also get reimbursed by the government for all those food stamps their own employees spend at their stores. These corporations are the biggest “welfare queens” the world has ever seen.
Reminiscent of owing one’s soul to the company store, eh?