What a flawed argument. Mentally ill / drug addicts will always exist, so there will always be people like that. That’s the fallback for people who want to dismiss poverty. This is divisive in a dumb way.
“There are no good billionaires” not because of a picture of a homeless guy, but because how the position itself inherently requires screwing society and not giving back in return to hoard an unnatural amount of wealth. And the one that do try to give back would likely get demonized by the rest, as in troll factories in poor countries being financed to spread toxicity, so they can do their best at trying to avoid letting it become a trend.
The moment people decided to shit on the parties that submit to oversight and investigations, even those that are basically manufactured from nothingburgers, over the parties that deflect and lie to a degree that’s not even comparable while they get fed off intel from Palantir on how to keep manufacturing BS that best attacks their political opponents, is the moment democracy was lost.
In Germany we have a strong social welfare program open for everyone and yet there are still people living on the streets. We have state-sponsored street workers going around and trying to help. There is only so much you can do. Some people will refuse any help offered to them.
The only way to get them off the streets is to put them in jail, which wouldn’t be OK either.
No, but they can and will bribe their way to ensure that there are more and more of those in the first image so they can have more and more of what makes the second image.
In the United States, President Eisenhower was a Republican and he used social programs to build the US interstate highway system and the infrastructure necessary for the predecessor to our modern airport infrastructure and space program.
The highest top marginal tax rate during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency (1953-1961) was 91%, which applied to the highest income bracket. (Note: In 1952 and 1953, the top rate was 92%, dropping to 91% for 1954–1963.)
Totally on board with the message, but, isn’t this, like, a direct violation of rule 2? Or are we going with the Gamer™ definition of “politics” where any stance that the community agrees with is inherently non-political?
Billionaires are people, not politicians. There are no political parties mentioned or any laws or anything really related to politics at all.
The meme is about scumbag people.
I assume that rule 2 is more of a “don’t post memes that contain politicians”, since nearly everything that we say or do is political in some sense.
ITT: Americans brainwashed into thinking poverty is a moral failing.
Poverty is a moral failing, just not of those impovershed.
Scroll down to see which lemmy users simp for the billionaire class. It won’t surprise you.
Every steam fanboy on Lemmy who treats Gabe like hes THEIR billionaire and Steam is THEIR billionaire corporation
Yes, humans have to disappear. Agreeable.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I agree. My real abhorrence, however, is for the countless bootlickers who themselves live in near poverty yet loudly support their overlords in a sycophantic and unquestioning fashion. These class traitors, masquerading as real Americans are as culpable as the mentally deranged hoarders they prop up.
I don’t feel like there’s a way to get through to these sheep-like collaborators, so it’s difficult to imagine anything will change in the near future.
they have been isolated by our mass media environment being hyper individualized, and gaslit into believing that their overlords and our overlords are a different set, and that we worship ours and the only counter is to empower theirs to combat ours. it will possibly take years of deprogramming to get them out of this. the best thing you can do is produce and disseminate propaganda that normalizes a true narrative: that left and right, male and female, islam and christianity and judaism, Black and white, rural and urban, gay and straight, are all distractions from up and down. how we fight our oppressors is through solidarity of the underclass. blaming people instead of helping people different from ourselves is how we lose.
you won’t be able to reach all of them, but you will reach some of them. they really don’t know they’ve been tricked
“Temporality embarrassed [mb]illionaires” in their minds.
i was excited until you said taxation :p
They should be, but they wont because their wealth and our system allows them to make the taxation laws. There is only one realistic way out of this one.
Financial obesity makes it seem like it’s the same as being fat, which doesn’t make sense because being fat is not a specific problem in the same way that being rich is.
I’m sure you just mean it like “fat cat” but it’s a bizarre way to phrase it since it isn’t a good analogy.
I think it’s just meant as a way to reverse the usual assumption that it’s a desirable state, it puts it in terms that imply you have too much and it’s not good for you.
That’s why I’m objecting. Being fat isn’t a problem; it’s everything that can go along with it, like diabetes and so on. But being rich IS a problem. It’s kind of like saying “financial whiteness”.
Since it seems your use of obesity is causing some concern, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say “financial gluttony” as a more accurate phrasing?
A distinction without a difference. One is the process, the other its outcome.
Obesity is a problematic state for an entity to be in, and attempts to reframe it as normal only manifest as harm.
Where I see potential validity in criticism is the flawed definitions used for medical classification, but that’s an issue for the medical profession to reckon with and address.
With the silly reactions to my suggestion even though I have no issue with your wording, I feel stupid trying to hold a discourse here, but regardless…
The distinction is gluttony is an active action, a decision, to consume more than needed, and a sin in religious contexts.
Obesity is a state of being, correct, but can be out of a person’s control medically, I believe (I’m no doctor).
I’m sure the rhetoric brigade will attack this as well, though. So much for quality interactions of the fediverse.
It can be out of a person’s control… and it’s still bad for them. Nobody here is saying that fat people are bad people, people are saying that fat is bad for people.
For fuck sake, can you keep your fatphobia out of things for five minutes?!
Calm down, fatty
Billionaires simply cannot exist without their money coming from the exploitation of the “lower classes”
No capitalist can. It’s definitional to the system.
Over many generations
But they won’t drive you to become homeless because it stop you from paying them. They may keep you not rich but never is their intention to keep you so poor that they can’t get a penny from you.
Think of it as a remainder from a math problem. To keep a subservient middle class stretched across the lowest income brackets, you’re going to have a certain percentage of people who simply can’t afford to exist. They know that, it’s inherent to the system. It’s like that story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” That’s why there’s never any serious interest in fixing the problem - it’s just going to keep happening because the system generates it, so housing everyone homeless right now wouldn’t solve homelessness in 10 or 20 years time, it’d start all over again. Systemic.
Agree with your point. But putting them in the homeless condition won’t serve the elite either. You don’t kill your milking cow. You need to keep them dependent yet capable to provide for you.
Even if paradoxically well paid workers would be better as they’d have more money to spend on things, billionares only focus on what immediately creates profits and that means paying their workers as low a wage as possible. When homelessness exists it means you HAVE to work to survive. You either take the job that pays you far less than the work is worth or you’re left on the streets.
No, they will. The underclass is the implied threat of violence against you for not surrendering your productivity and your own meagre scraps of surplus value to them as their slaves.
It serves their purpose to make you homeless to ensure others continue to grind themselves to death.
How slavery perpetuate? Turn some of the slaves into masters after getting them to point out which slaves are talking about killing the masters.
No one hates like family.
I’ve never liked how the pyramid is arranged, as if the ones on top are living the ‘right’ way, or are ‘better’ somehow.
It should be the other way around, with 8 billion people hanging to a ledge, trying to improve the state of the world, while roughly 6.5k are throwing a tantrum, desperately clinging to the ankles of the masses, threatening to drag everything into the void if they can’t get their way.
as if the ones on top are living the ‘right’ way, or are ‘better’ somehow.
Media literacy at an all time low. How on earth do you come to the conclusion that the people sitting on platforms literally weighing down on the lower classes are supposed to be better?
It’s not “higher = better” but the level above suppresses / deceives the level below. And the higher up you go, the fewer people inhabit a level.
Okay, well, you draw it to a sufficient enough standard and then we’ll use that one instead.
I mean you just made another metaphor but it’s more weird and doesn’t work
Think about it. Many of them have enough money to end world hunger, build affordable housing, give healthcare to a poor country, etc. But they choose not to. All evil is an active choice.
They mostly just choose to go to Epstein island it seems
It’s a task for government, not for an individual.
It’s a task for anyone that has the capability.
Then they need to give all their money to the government
it’s a task for all individuals.
if I had a few billion I could either live in extravagant wealth, or end homelessness AND live in extravagant wealth.
it’s a choice every single billionaire makes.
The rich take many steps to reduce their taxes to nothing on all levels, including lobbying, loopholes, offshore banking, shell corporations, money laundering, fraud, etc. It’s absolutely their individual fault for not contributing proportionately.
The best way a billionaire could spend their money is to lobby politicians to tax the rich.
Ah yes, the liberal solution that never works and is always temporary and doesn’t account for literally any systems of power.
Can you expand on this? I don’t understand your argument
I don’t like the long term effects of condoning corruption. That just makes politicians rent seek even more - and might incite jealousy in any politicians who missed out on that bribe. They’ll be back next election getting bribed by a bigger billionaire. I’d think better to try to reduce corruption.
That’s ignoring the fact that billionaires are already lobbying governments to pay less in taxes. If nothing else, a billionaire lobbying to pay more in taxes would highlight the hypocrisy of the current system and expose the existing corruption.
In the current system you have to use money to lobby if you want your agenda enacted. One could argue that the only ethical thing you could pay to lobby would be enacting laws that make lobbying illegal.
