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Not just America, the entire world works like this. It’s sadly our obligation to make people aware and understand how to fight against it, every small step we take will slowly build towards a more just place especially when we have big communities.
Yeah but in dum dum yankkkee land we have no healthcare or public transit. We got giant Hooverville everywhere.
Of course they don’t. Our country was founded by religious extremists. Puritans, Quakers, Calvinists, Mormons. One of the quotes of Jesus is “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
It also says in the OT that God appoints our leaders, and rebellion against our leaders is rebellion against God.
The vast majority of Christians in the USA are fundamentally opposed to anything that would financially better the lower and middle class. That’s socialism, and it’s evil. But the rich becoming this rich? That’s holy. If they become even more rich, that just means they are even more holy.
This is a worldwide problem, not just a US one.
The world needs to collectively make these people’s vast accumulation of wealth and thus power illegal. Old and new money regardless of where it came from.
Japan has very little wealth inequality.
Sadly that’s not as true as it used to be, they’re starting to get an increase in homelessness.
I think they were just slower to get fucked
True, but most of the world has it.
Not entirely true, socialist countries do exist and are undermining this system. Global capitalist countries are all seeing similar consolidation, though this is more stark in imperialist countries dominated by finance capital than in the global south, which is largely transitioning from underdevelopment and neocolonial trappings to development and sovereignty.
I see everything as a spectrum in this ol class war.
Seriously, what should I do as an individual to singlehandedly change this?
Not in a fedposting get-you-to-incriminate-yourself way, I’m genuinely asking what you expect me to do, one person out of nearly 400 million
I’m fucking trying, I’m doing everything I can in my rented apartment and my shitbox from the '90s
Who the fuck is the target audience for this on Lemmy, Europeans glazing each other because they did their imperialism before the internet existed?
You can not single handeely change this. They only way is to work together. If you havent already, find a group (ideally in person), and meet regularly. Find a project you can all work on together. Everyone needs to chip away at the hydra.
I killed seven obscenely wealthy people last week and ate their flesh to redistribute their wealth. Pretty sure that’s how it works. Even if it isn’t, it can’t hurt for us to all give it our best shot.
Okay you can’t just say that online and not share recipes
Nothing to share, sadly. Obscenely wealthy humans are so rotten inside nothing can make them taste good. With the possible exception of MacKenzie Scott. I can’t be sure, but I’d be willing to test. For science.
… like, without the murder. On that one. Just sex stuff. No combining sex stuff with murder and nightmares, or we will become like them.
I don’t think McVeigh was a terrorist. I think he was a patriot.
I’m not condoning violence. But I want to point out that Millennials first rebelled against the fed during Occupy Wall Street, and it accomplished nothing because it was peaceful. 15 years later, no amount of peaceful attempts to change things for the better has worked.
Every time there is an attempt to form organized resistance, alphabet agencies infiltrate the movement and their favorite thing to do is have one of their undercover agents begin violent protest and that lets their goons swoop in to conduct mass arrests of all the people affiliated with the movement that weren’t acting out violently. Just being associated with the violent guy (who is an undercover cop) is enough to get them arrested. I think that’s exactly what they did on January 8th because a number of violent protestors walked away without charges, but a lot of people who were there and just walked into the capitol building got slapped with multiple charges and are still struggling with legal battles years later.
The intelligence agencies have cracked rule by mass psychology and the above is just one tool they use to maintain control. The American mindset that “socialism is evil and capitalism is good” is another tool they use to stifle rebellion. They no doubt have agents reading this right now and are probably adding my user account to a list.
So where do we go? JFK said if you make peaceful revolution impossible you make violent revolution inevitable. But at this point I think the CIA, NSA, and FBI have basically proven him wrong. I don’t see how a revolution of any kind is able to get up and running in modern day USA.
If you’re interested in learning more about how they control dissent, give this documentary a watch. It’s long but is really good. https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s
Join a revolutionary socialist organization like PSL that’s active near you.
This week, each one of you has a homework assignment. You’re gonna go out, you’re gonna talk to a coworker about pay. You’re gonna tell a coworker how much you get paid even if that’s cringe.
Unfortunately, even thinking the word “solidarity” is grounds for termination here
And yet, people still think the top tier earners deserve to live in houses with unbroken windows and unburnt lawns…
It’s easy to call us cowards, in reality we live in a surveillance state that makes trillions of dollars by killing and torturing it’s own citizens. In a place like this lacking morals becomes a question of survival. Definitely not excusing it, but it’s the truth.
that, and none of the people who so flippantly dismiss us all as cowards have ever seriously considered the realities of spending considerable time in the American penal system, our favorite way of breaking people who color outside the lines. They’re usually people from countries where prison is a place of rehabilitation and not punishment.
Everyone wants to see another Luigi, nobody wants to go through the kind of grief he is going or will go through.
No, just last week 250 comrades were arrested from a sister group of ours in Turkey.
Turkish prisons are not very pleasant. But when you have something to strive for, you do what is right and not what is easy.
Türkiye, exemplar of justice, egalitarianism, and good government. Great example.
That was the point, that activists still organized despite the harsh prison sentences. Fear of imprisonment in the US Empire isn’t a valid excuse for the under-organization of the working classes.
Fair enough
It’s not a valid excuse, but it’s a reason. Like saying that you drove the car into a tree because you were drunk- it doesn’t excuse it (in fact, in both cases it makes it a little worse, imo), but it is the reason.
Plenty of other people get drunk without driving or even drive drunk without crashing, but you’d be giving a technically true and very misleading answer if you just described the physics of the accident (driving too fast into a curve or swerving to avoid an obstacle, for example).
I don’t think it’s a reason that gets to the heart of the issue, though, as comparing similar situations gets us different results. There is more going on that is holding the Statesian organizers back.
Oh, absolutely. I think it’s a combination of
tldr; one) slavery, Native American genocide, structural racism, the civil war, and McCarthyism; two) manifest destiny; and three) Reagan
the country literally being founded on and steeped in multiple deeply societally divisive, violent, and genocidal institutions, the cultural worship of rugged individualism, and the simultaneous erosion of public education and removal of the fairness doctrine, which, in combination with the heavy usage of and government investment into propaganda since the 1930s (along with other factors, like the fact that we’re a huge country with only three land borders with two countries, neither of which historically had a radically different culture immediately upon crossing the border [the four countries that border Mexico used to be part of it, and before cultural homogenization, the American border towns weren’t so far off from their Mexican equivalents], so, given the high cost of international compared to domestic travel, most people (that’s just a population index for comparison with the next link, if you want) don’t really go anywhere too much different from where they are from, even fewer before air travel became commonplace, so for boomers and older)]) lead to a very malleable society
, but that’s just one of many perspectives on why Americans are so docile in the face of such circumstances.
Most people don’t protest exemplars of justice, egalitarianism, and good government. And if 250 people were arrested while doing so, they’ve got a different understanding of either the word “protest” or the word “exemplar” from mine.
Given that, I’m not sure what answer they could have given which wouldn’t have prompted the same reaction.
I guess it was easier in Nazi Germany to keep your head down and go with the flow, too.
Don’t worry, people don’t forget!
Well, they’ve also been brainwashed into extreme individualism, “if you fail at life it’s your fault” kind of thinking. The fact that losing your job means homelessness, no healthcare, and with extremely powerful corporations handling pretty much everything you do or own makes it incredibly hard to organise.
Revolutionaries have succeeded in worse conditions, like Russia, China, Cuba, etc. The reality is that a good portion of the US Empire’s working classes are bribed by the spoils of imperialism, and that there is a huge settler population that benefit from settler-colonialism. Organizing in the US needs to primarily be from a decolonial and anti-imperialist standpoint, which is largely why the Black Panther Party was so successful in garnering support, along with the mutual aid and community defense they performed.
A lot of the Black Panther Party was inspired by global south movements, including juche socialism from the DPRK, and Mao’s policy in China. They focused on independence, sovereignty, and self-reliance, which is why their community defense and free lunch programs were so critical to their strategy. They believed that they needed to correctly show the working classes how to properly be a disciplined, working class party, bringing them up to their level theoretically and practically.
The problem is not that you are cowards, the problem is that you are stupid cowards.
You don’t organize, you don’t know how to either. And yeah going to prison sucks but that is true for the whole world.
There’s just very little solidarity. I’m from the US, and I didn’t realize it was missing until I moved to a country where it’s normal. Nobody trusts others to have their back, so why would they risk anything?
That said, it looks like it’s slowly developing. Ten years ago, I would not have expected Minnesotans to en masse refuse to help ice agents caught in the snow, for example. That may be because of my own ignorance, but in my home state of Connecticut there is a group of insurance professionals (not your local brokers, more like actuaries and people who work at the insurance company headquarters-not a group inherently predisposed to solidarity with immigrants) who coordinate shopping for local immigrants.
This was the purpose of the oligarchy sponsored NoKings bullshit, to give the illusion of organization and resistance in a nonthreatening format.
Revolution is neither easy nor impossible, it’s difficult. The fact that obstacles stand in our way does not mean they are insurmountable, and as the empire decays it becomes more and more a “paper tiger,” rotted from the inside out by finance capital. Imperial security is being enshittified, so to speak, along with the rest of society. That’s why the war on Iran was lost.
You’re right, it is easy. Seems to me there are exactly 3 people in America who aren’t too cowardly to take a shot at the pedophile king.
In America it is somehow, inexplicably, easier to organize and coopt conservatives into betraying their cause than it is to get more than even 2 or 3 self proclaimed leftists to agree to do anything at all substantial.
edit: This has been my experience, at least. The American “left” mindset is so very performative and seems to think that doing anything other than voting the problem away is too scary or too much or too something. I cannot imagine we will see actual organization until something so bad happens that not being organized seems more dangerous than being organized, and i’m pretty sure it’ll be way too late to get started safely and cleanly by then.
It’s my experience, too. Even worse they freeze you out for speaking like this. They just want to march and getting killed or tossed in jail for it isn’t enough to convince them.
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It looks the same to me? What is the source of that graph?
I had it set to shares% instead of levels$ … My bad. Yeet the rich
That’s a different graph. You changed it to shares and (more importantly) assets instead of overall wealth
Whoops you right
Phew! Had me worried for a second
Wow, good vetting. @K1nsey6@lemmy.world, please respond and address this discrepancy.
Check the data selection. It’s assets, not wealth
Yea OP is good . I had the wrong graph setting. It was I who is the fake news
Also, it’s interesting that the situation in the OP’s graph looked to be getting better over time, in that around 2015 the ratio was more like 10-12x (apparently down to 6x).
Americans? It’s fucking planet Earth (share your country and I’ll demonstrate)
Man covid was devastating
Capital consolidates in crisis. Each crisis, which is fairly regular in capitalism, results in the bigger capitalists buying or squeezing out the smaller capitalists that cannot weather the crisis, resulting in greater centralization and consolidation of capital, and greater absolute disparity.
Kind of weird that it somehow made the rich richer…
Never let a good crisis go to waste they say
Man, seeing this graph that was a literal inflection point where their wealth exploded compared to a literal decade before.
If you zoom out, these jumps and explosions happen following nearly every crisis. It’s intrinsic to capitalism.
It’s not about spine, it’s about the system. There is currently no mechanism to change this, even if we wanted to, which we generally do. We have to change the system first, so that a change in how we handle Sociopathic Oligarchs is possible.
And frankly, we’re working hard on that. We’ve got a Midterm Election coming up that Dems have been working very hard to exploit as much as possible (for a change), and more than that, the people who are running and winning primaries are the kind that are going to insist on substantial changes when they get in office, starting with leadership. If the Dems take the Senate, Schmuck is out as leader, and then out of his office in 2028.
When we change the profile of the party, take control of Congress, then change the leadership, we are on the path to make bigger changes that can have a real impact.
One of the main issues is that too many think their shade of sociopathic oligarchs is going to save them
yup
You’re speaking purely political voting when you say there is no mechanism to change this. That is intentional. As is the hope it will change sometime soon politically. Hope like winning the lotto is important. It keeps the peasants from rising up.
People have been in simular or worse situations all throughout history with no mechanisms to change it and they changed it. They are very few and we are many. They don’t stand a chance. I’ve been waiting my whole life with the same hope of political change just around the corner that never comes. In my 40 years here it has only gotten worse.
Every one of these people have cooks and gardeners and house staff. This change isn’t difficult but it does take a spine to do it and to care more about the common good than your life and freedom.
I’ve always said this, the Americans who ended the gilded age and elected the Roosevelts will be rolling in their graves after seeing how spineless their descendants have been.
The only nation to never revolt says it’s impossible to revolt.
Ah yes, the old raped, dead husk of the stock market still working for the rich.
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Always hard to interpret these bottom procentile numbers because a certain procentile has 0 wealth or negative wealth. A quick search says 25% of Americans have 0 or negative wealth. I myself have negative wealth because I recently graduated and I have student loans. A homeless guy with 0 debt and 1 dollar in his pocket therefore can be said to be wealthier than 25% of Americans, and myself. However my quality of life is very good with an above average wage. And I can be expected to start going into positive net wealth later in life as I start paying off those student loans.
I would love to see numbers in lifetime wealth generation or something similar that would take into account that a lot of people are understably at 0 or negative wealth at early points of their life. Otherwise I have a hard time interpreting these bottom procentile numbers. Makes for great headlines though!
You make the assumption that negative wealth is okay when you’re young.
I don’t agree with that.
Some say that time is wasted on the young. They have so much of it that they don’t know what to do with it. I say that wealth is wasted on old people, for the same reason.
A society should invest in young people. They spend the money back into the system and shape the future they have to live in by how they spend it. Old people do none of that. They just tuck it away, and clutch their pearls.
I’m grateful to live in a society that has welfare to pay young people to study, so they don’t start their lives in debt. I hardly used it myself, but I’m still happy to pay my taxes knowing that our society has raised the bar so that nobody is forced into negative wealth just to get their life started. Poverty is low, homelessness is low, education is high. This is the society that I want to live in and pay for.
Some would call it socialism. It’s not really, and it isn’t perfect, but whatever it is, it’s surely better than a casino where the house always wins, also known as the American Dream.
