It would really fucking help if we stop giving billionaires a god damn microphone. All these news sites and even social media shares. Stop it.
Oh, climate change issue?
Let’s see what “self-made” billionaire CEO of Oilerson Oils, Oily Oilerson, grandchild of another billionaire, has to say.
“With these unprecedented times, we must bond together and move forward, else we move backwards.”
They keep buying the microphones.
The wise words from those smelly old men…
And after microphones, they’ve moved on to buying education. Really recommend that you watch this video.
This is exactly the kind of thing a billionaire would say.
Wait, but what did elon musk say about it? /s
Wait, but what did the kardashians say? /s
Etc etc
Dealing with the billionaire problem should be everyone’s top priority
There’s no solving climate change until we’ve solved billionaires.
Ah, yes, lets put the climate crisis on hold
It’s an ugly reality, but there is nothing you or I can do about climate change, except living greener (which has so little effect it rounds off to zero), and demanding government action. The billionaires own every government, and the answer is no — they’d rather destroy everything than lose 3% of their wealth.
There’s no solving climate change until we’ve solved billionaires.
Nah, buying a Tesla, a Porsche Taycan or a Volvo XC90 hybrid will solve the climate crisis. Trust me. Some guy on another thread told me.
There’s no “solving” climate change.
I think reining them in is enough. We can habe billionaires in a green economy.
I totally agree that billionaires should not exist, but I think climate change is more important and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
The average billionaire emits 1 million times more CO2 than the average 90%er. There are about 3000 of them
Yeah and it’s easier to transition to clean energy, mitigating their output, than it is to remove them.
Consider how much easier it would be without them though
Yeah but consider how difficult it is to remove them.
Difficult in what way?
You can’t reign them in when the reigns are for purchase You can’t prevent them from purchasing the reigns because when the price tag is big enough, everything is for sale You can’t stop them from purchasing reigns altogether because they’ll go to a different market who can, then force the market to be open to them They will do everything in their power to KEEP their power, and to prevent them from EVER LOSING their power There IS ONLY ONE WAY to stop billionaires from having power and it is to stop them from being billionaires in any way available
It’s “rein them in”
Reins are for horses, reigns are for kings
And rains are for the plains of Spain!
The planes in Spain fall in the rain
No, the rains in Spain fall mainly in the plains.
Even the billionaires, really. Less income inequality, more income security.
The French Solution. Worked before.
I’m not sure if anyone really believes that the rich hoard immigrants.
[Saudi Arabia has joined the chat]
And honestly, a non-zero amount of Western elites as well. It’s just smaller scale.
Every company that has a small town under it’s thumb.
It’s so hard to know where to even start. Say one thing and it’s like you have to go right back to the basics of how money, capitalism and society work. Nuanced conversation is Impossible.
Me, pulling down a chart when anyone asks me a question about modern society: “Okay, to understand this, we have to go back to early market economics of Mesopotamian city-states…”
History repeats itself… Except now we have climate change and nukes.
I have nothing to add (sorry!) but reading “…back to early market economics of Mesopotamian city-states…” had me rolling, thank you.
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First, immigration drives up housing prices because everyone needs it, and it can’t be built overnight
Contrary to what they say on Faux News, caravanfuls of immigrants aren’t let in overnight either. As for undocumented immigrants, the vast majority are Canadians and Europeans overstaying their visas and refugees who aren’t rich enough to complete the legal process, neither of which will suddenly buy a shitload real estate.
Second, it drives down wages by flooding the labor market with a high supply of people desperate to take whatever is offered to them
Classic victim blaming and othering. Native born and naturalised citizens lose orders of magnitude more potential wages to wage theft than to exploited immigrants “flooding” anything. Another fallacious talking point, I’m afraid.
Rent goes up, and wages go down. That’s the fault of the 1%, not immigrants looking to make a better life for themselves.
Oh good, you DIDN’T mean to victim blame, you just did it accidentally. Let’s see if you can stay away from the right wing talking points for the rest of your comment, then!
The cherry on top is that were conditioned to respond to anyone who acknowledges this as a racist. If you want to avoid the label, you need to support tla policy that will push high rents higher, and depress low wages even farther.
Guess it was too much to hope for…
You don’t come off as racist, you just come off as someone who, in spite of meaning well and knowing who’s actually to blame, has fallen for some of the lies the billionaires and their pr machines use to make the discrimination more palatable to non-racist people.
The people at the top have a few economic levers they can push around to manipulate society reliably.
Including the dissemination of gaslighting and other insidious lies to fool even their enemies to help their cause, as you’ve just demonstrated yourself.
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Everything you wrote implies I blamed immigrants, which is entirely a lie.
Wasn’t my intention. What I meant to say is that, in spite of not blaming the immigrants themselves, you’re blaming things on immigration that simply are not caused by immigration.
they can increase immigration to weaken the working class
That’s the crux of it: they can’t. Immigration is a net benefit to the economy as a whole, ESPECIALLY the working class.
This has been done
No. They made it up. Immigration doesn’t hurt you.
Advocating for labor and tenants is not right-wing. Advocating for higher wages is not right-wing. Blaming capital, rather than migrants is not right-wing.
True, but you’re still missing my point: even when not blaming the immigrants themselves, you’re helping the right wing when you repeat their bogus talking points. No matter how different your intentions and attitude towards immigrants are.
Right-wing politics tried to shame people who resist anti-labor, anti-tenant, anti-worker policies.
And also made up causal relationships, having so much success doing so that even seemingly good people like yourself repeat their lies.
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If we had (…) immigration would not be harmful.
I’m getting tired of repeating the simple fact that it already isn’t. Stop repeating the propaganda of those we’re fighting against, please.
Without certain socialist policies in place first, high immigration weakens the leverage workers have.
First of all: no. That’s simply not true. Second of all, the US has low immigration per capita compared to most countries.
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No, what I’m doing is disabusing you of false notions, that you haven’t provided any proof of yourself.
Study showing that immigration depressing wages is close to zero at first and actually INCREASES productivity and wages in the long run.
As for property prices, compare this to the fact that net immigration is declining. .
I believe in fact-based arguments, not blindly repeating commonly believed lies and complaining about being shamed when others point it out.
can’t be built overnight
Jimmy Carter does it all the time.
He only does it overnight with the help of chuck norris
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I was having a talk with my 73 year old dad the other night and he still swears up and down that it’s the illegal immigrants crossing the border that are stealing all of our money. I asked him where he got this info from, he said he reads things on the internet. I had my laptop out and said “show me” and then of course he said “I don’t know how to search for it!”. I then told him that he was full of shit, he said the same things about the points that I was bringing up. I told him the difference between my points and his is that 95% of my points I can find a source for, his is always a form of “do your research!”.
He said he never believes online surveys because he’s never been asked to participate in one, so he thinks it’s always a small perfectly chosen group of people in order to sway the results. I read him Pew Research’s surveying methodology and they said that they have all the datasets available. I mentioned that the GOP is almost entirely white people, and he said “How come there were ‘Black People for Trump’ in the last election?”. He wanted to know the results of a particular survey that had to do with politics, but of course wouldn’t look them up himself so I registered for an account, downloaded the datasets and showed it to him. From 2018 until now the GOP has been almost entirely white people, from 88%-92%, it even said that a quarter of them were “males over the age of 65 who identified as Protestant”.
I asked my mom if she had seen that one Presidential debate where Trump was asked by Chris Wallace to say denounce white supremacy and the man literally contorted his brain into a pretzel to fudge out “stand by and stand back.” It was a 100% crystal clear call to “those type of supporters.” When I told my mom this, her rebuttable was “I didn’t watch it” so for her if she didn’t watch it, then it didn’t happen and even if it did happen, she doesn’t have to believe it. It floors me that white supremacist are emboldened these days, but the ignorance, complacency, and lack of empathy and critical thinking from the Right will probably doom us all in a long enough time line.
I never thought that the rich hoarding immigrants was the problem.
It’s the rich hoarding cash that’s the problem. They should be hoarding immigrants instead, right?
The More You Know 🌈
Its not hoarded wealth, its spent on things that make them more money. More “ownership” of others work.
There’s actually a stunning amount of simple hoarding of cash. It’s a major contributor to economic stagnation:
https://psmag.com/economics/one-percent-stop-hoarding-much-cash-84996
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/companies-hoarding-cash
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/the-velocity-of-money-with-ann-pettifor/
[me having a flashback to 2015 when I argued that low velocity of money was going to be a major killer of Western economies if nothing changed]
GOD I HATE BEING RIGHT
I’ve made an argument previously that the real estate market needs to be tanked, with no corporate ownership and a limit of 1 property per person and essentially an abolition of rent through a forced auction pool and no deposit finance. But that is not the point…
A big part of my argument is that we need to move investment from “asset” ownership to corporate ownership - ie make the only viable investments in business and startups, thereby providing jobs and forcing risk on to the wealthy. This gets money moving and pushes up productivity, advancing the human race
It’s money management. Some percentage of wealth in different risk/growth classes and some kept liquid to profit on
tragedyopportunity.
Super simple analogy I like to use:
You’re a kid and you go to a badly run daycare with nine other kids. Your parents pay for your stay and the person running it gets a daily shipment of food from that money, let’s say, eleven sandwiches [a convenient but not perfect stand-in for workers generating the resources and value for the bourgeoisie]. He should keep one for himself and give ten to the kids, so everyone gets one sandwich, but instead he keeps six and gives all of you five, so you only get half each which is barely just enough. Now, five more kids join, their parents are also paying the daycare owner, and he now gets sixteen sandwiches per day. But he keeps the difference for himself and still gives you all five. Now you each only get a third of a sandwich, barely even a mouthful and you’re hungry all the time. Do you blame the new kids for also being hungry and eating the food, or do you blame the daycare worker for hoarding all the food in the first place?
Technically they don’t hoard the cash, they loan it out to other rich people with the expectation of a return on their investment. Or theyhoarfd property.
Its not even the loaning out of the cash that is the problem. The real problem is that they spend the cash on ways to prevent other people from having the opportunity they had. This goes for political routes, such as donations to influence tax breaks, goverment backed monopoly, etc. Its also spent buying competitors or losing money to crush conpetition.
Poor people have shitty lobbyists -John Oliver
Income inequality can just be set through fiscal policy. It doesn’t matter how much “cash” the rich want to hoard if they can’t do it (as much) because it was already taxed.
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The rich stole our shares and our migrant friends’ shares in order to enslave us all. Taking back what was stolen is surely a better option than fighting people who have been similarly victimized.
Which is possible because the worker world is a race to the bottom between natives and immigrants, who in most cases are willing to accept lower salaries and worse conditions to land a job. Both are true.
We need to shift away from traditional coporate ownership and move towards worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and/or syndicates. Labor ownership invariably leads to the accumulation of wealth as you make money off a larger and larger percentage of workers.
Convincing people that transwomen are women and transmen are men is right up there too.
