This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
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I just want a new season of Reacher where he goes undercover as a gay prostitute.
Capitalism is just feudalism with more math.
Trickle down feudalism yeah.
why a ban?
Lemmy.world, that’s why.
He can post on other instances like Lemmy.today but it doesn’t get the same amount of viewers.
When the largest instance is ban happy (I guess Americans?), it’s going to be controlling the entire Lemmy network.
This sort of thing is not even banned on reddit.
Looked through this sub-Lemmy’s front page.
#Unban_sanitation
Mod log just says “Ban evasion, repeated violations of ToS” across a few dozen coms. I guess mods got sick of them.
I’ve noticed lately a lot of mods are banning people posting a lot. Which is really fucking stupid because they are removing the people creating interaction. Even if they are just copy and pasting from reddit. A) who cares, b) many people here aren’t on reddit, and c) the mods are going to kill their own communities if they keep this up.
There was recently a discussion about this from someone who crossposts stuff from reddit to lemmy and got banned for it. Opinions vary but it’s mostly anti reddit. Can’t find it now though. Myself I’m not sure. Importing trends and “reinforcement learning” or manufacturing cons(t)ent from reddit is problematic. But it’s not like most lemmies aren’t already trained like good little dogs to be neoliberal imperialists. I mostly see the same shite trending on lemmy as on reddit.
It definitely is hilarious that the top post on lemmy currently has double banned tags lol
I dont know about hilarious. The largest lemmy instance banning users for posting content they dont like from reddit? Thats more than just stupid. Its a message what Lemmy is becoming. When Reddit is more free than Lemmy, we have sad days ahead on this social network.
I cannot stop seeing this idea overlaid on every thing that I see or do or hear about. Every action is filtered through the lens of it being extractive and manipulative.
I feel extremely stressed because I see the bars of the cage and no one else around me wants to acknowledge them.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Reject consumerism, make things instead.
We have friends coming over, instead of ordering food from a mega corporation I am going to make pizza and potato wedges.
Where do the ingredients come from? Are you growing your own grain and milling it into your own flower? Do you have your own cows or goats to make your own cheese? Did you build your own oven? Fired with wood you cut down yourself?
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter. It only makes you feel like you’re doing something.
You’d be more effective buying the pizza from a locally owned place.
Don’t let perfect be in the way of better.
I’m not.
I’m asking people to not treat better as the solution; They way they do with rent controls and school loan forgiveness. Buying locally is fine to do, for you in your life, but it has no effect on the larger problem. Too many people pretend it does.
When making something nice I would buy the ingredients from local independents where I can. I can almost see the farm I get cheese and garlic from on a clear day but there is a hill in the way.
Its also risky though, they sell fucking massive slabs of halloumi style cheese. Its a lot of money but also a lot of cheese.
Can’t do it for every ingredient with every recipe, but I am fed up of the just give up attitude I often hear simply because something isn’t 100% perfect in every way and using that as a reason to not even try. So I do what I reasonably can.
Also, ingredients are cheaper than a fast food place. Better quality too.
Like I said, it makes you feel better, that’s fine.
But don’t pretend it’s fighting the fight. Though if you don’t pretend, it may not make you feel better.Other than refusing to consume, what do you suggest doing that will achieve more and is easy for most people to do?
Organizing, protesting, voting and voter registration drives, marketing and coms. Even starting a union owned business, or something similar. Those kinds of things make a difference. Individual purchasing decisions don’t.
Many of those are much more difficult for most people to do, are of questionable benefit or they already do.
Refuse to give them money, it is the only language they understand.
Even starting a union owned business
Hey everyone. You want to change society? Just start a business. Easy peesy! Don’t make small changes in your life, make massive financial overhauls.
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does. You’re cutting out the part with highest markup. Skipping an entire manufacturing process.
You can get the ingredients for a fraction of the cost compared to a finished product.
Maybe. But price wasn’t the argument being made. That’s a non sequitur.
I’m sorry where do you think profit comes from? It’s not grown on profit trees, it’s baked into the price. Higher markup, higher price, higher profit.
Non sequitur my ass
The idea is capitalism. As in, buying from large corporations. Whatever the price or profit, the topic was about who and where you’re buying from, not for how much.
“You want to change society. Yet you participate in it. Curious…”
I buy the majority of my groceries from a local farmers market. Things I can’t get there I buy from Wal Mart. I buy pizza from a local mom and pop shop, where they live above their restaurant. I do everything I can to make buying from mega corps a last choice decision. My partner and I will be starting our garden next year and growing a lot of our own vegetables. We’ll be raising pork pigs so we don’t have to buy factory pork. There’s so many little things you can do as an individual to choke off the billionaires.
But if you want to keep bending over like you seem to be acting, more power to you. Just don’t blame others for society collapsing.
Take back power anyway you can.
Tenant unions, worker unions, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, tool libraries.
Work towards owning your business and your home and your community WITH your coworkers and your neighborhood and your community.
We can overcome the tyrants if we work together. Federal elections are only one small piece of the puzzle and no one will save us but ourselves.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Then do something. Why does someone else need to rattle the cage for you to break free? Why are Americans, who masturbate to the 2nd amendment, so afraid of taking back their country? There’s 350 million of you, trillions of guns, and merely a few hundred of them. Start turning the streets red.
Because those who see what you see are in areas where they would be alone, considered a lone madman. Rest assured, people are gathering and talking.
“All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustimed.”
Yes and the middle class who think they have money keep voting for this.
In my experience the difference in voting is really between the educated class and the uneducated class. Educated people are tend to be left wing. Uneducated people tend to be right wing. I’m pretty sure the data bears that out.
This is well studied in “capital and ideology”. Over the last 40 years in usa, euorpe educated tend to vote left, wealth votes right, which is a switch from how it used to be.
However it seems like at least in usa there isn’t that much difference between left and right when it comes to taxing wealth. Hence the steep rise in inequity since regan
During the Reagan era, lobbyists were allowed back into Washington, and officials on both sides (or non-partisan) were quickly captured.
Paul Krugman has a great comment about it. Paraphrased, politicians tend to listen more to well-dressed, well spoken lobbyists than they do nerdy economists.
He cut taxes for the wealthy by enormous amounts
I assume by he you mean Reagan and not Krugman.
Krugman is a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian.
Yeah,regan
It’s hurt America more then we’ll ever know. Trickle down economics isn’t it when your top 1% is super greedy
In elementary school history, I learned supply-side (trickle down) economics came from Taft, and they failed spectacularly then. I think the only reason it comes back is because it gets resurrected by the owner class, as a justification to break the 3conomy in their favor.
Seriously, the only reason to not have a dictatorship it to make societies more public serving. We really need to start recognizing government capture efforts and capitulation are nothing short ot treason, aiding and giving comfort to enemies of the people and state.
Perhaps the survivors will figure it out.
Most of the world has been damaged by it. The us is putting no taxes on wealth, many other country followed suit
Yep. It’s is the (nearly) end game of pure capitalism.
Which is why you see lately the attack on anything that is given or provided by government.
Because they want more of the pizza. They want it ALL.
And yet they are meat sacks like the rest of humanity. With all the strengths and weaknesses everyone called a human has.
Why are they special? Why are they allowed to hog ALL the wealth?
Because we let them.
Old but still true. “But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you…. they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. IT’S CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO BE ASLEEP TO BELIEVE IT.” George Carlin
I like “this is not a joke”. I really appreciate anybody trying to put into perspective how insanely unequal things are by using real numbers where possible.
The problem is that things are so unequal that it’s just about impossible to illustrate. For example, the “Top 1%” label is perfectly accurate, but doesn’t illustrate both how small and also how large the top 1% is. 1% is still 3.5 million people, which is large. It isn’t just Bezos and Musk. It’s also guys who own car dealerships.
OTOH, it’s also small. There are 4 people in that illustration, and the “top 1%” should really be 1 guy in a room of 100.
It’s also hard to remember that the “lower 50%” isn’t just “the poors”. It’s literally half the people in the country. It’s not 1 guy at a table with 4 people who is only getting crumbs, it’s half the people at that table getting crumbs. I would bet that at least 80% of Americans think they’re richer than the bottom 50%.
That’s also without trying to deal with the issue of “1 billion dollars”, which just isn’t a number that people have much ability to picture. 1 billion feels like it’s similar to “1 million”, but it’s not.
It also doesn’t do anything to show the scale in the top 1%. There is more difference from the top and bottom of that single percentage than there is in the entire pizza and crumbs.
Yeah. The difference between the net worth of Elon Musk and of Gary Tharaldson is basically Elon Musk’s entire net worth. And, Gary Tharaldson is a billionaire and the richest person in North Dakota.
The “merely multi-millionaires” are still a problem. Their wealth corrupts the democratic system. But, it isn’t as dangerous as Musk’s or Bezos’s power.
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I’d sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Which is still, just insane to think about.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there’s people out there, somewhat “commonly”, going “Hmmm yerrs, let’s put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed…”
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It’s nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just…damn.
I don’t wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)
Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what’s good for them.
And besides, nowadays the real oligarchs are 0.1%ers or even 0.01%ers.
1%ers at this point are literally just the higher end of the upper-middle class…
Yeah, in terms of the wealth distribution the 1% are closer to the 99% than to the 0.1%. It’s borderline incomprehensible how wealthy the 0.1% is compared to the rest of us.
I gather this is roughly true wrt income (other estimates place this closer to 750k per household), but not wealth (which i believe is ~14 million to be in the top 1% in the US). Note that this income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains and that a 10% return on a 14 million portfolio is 1.4 million per year in passive income.
Most people in the lower 50% believe that anyone that has any money, especially $1M+ is part of the 1%. The complete lack of understanding of income and wealth escalation in the last couple decades is what keeps many people voting against their own interests. Many $1M-aires believe that with the right government policy and lower taxes, always lower taxes, they would quickly become part of the 1% and be “just like Musk”. They believe that the system that aides and abets billionaires would equally benefit themselves and cannot see that they are part of the riff raff, the same as a homeless person, in the eyes of the billionaire class.
The due date for the Epstein class’s execution is way overdue
How about a different kinda slicing?
Americans let children die in schools to gun violence for decades just so they can uphold the 2nd amendment which by definition doesn’t even guarantee access to guns to common civilians, but hide in the corner when their way of life is being taken away from them day by day because “They have guns too and I’m a pussy”.
The USA is 350 million fucking cowards, and they deserve what is happening.
…says someone who laments gun violence while encouraging gun violence.
If America actually had a civil war this person would write off everyone involved as “toxic and obsessed with violence.” I’ve dealt with folks like this before; they just want to differentiate themselves from Americans so that they can feel safe from what’s happening in America, and like it won’t happen to them. Really not too different from any other kind of victim blaming
It’s easy for people like me to differentiate myself from other Americans, considering that I am not American.
Obvious point being: lawful gun owners do not support gun violence.
Nice job homogenizing 350 million people. Every single one the same and deserving of ridicule. Sure.
Little bit of data for you:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:1989.4,2026.2
That graph makes me sick
And Americans still refuse to do anything about it.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, 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 trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I may be willing to accept other more straightforward methods.
I’m not opposed to compounding remediation, but I want them to experience them as poorer vassals.
I don’t care what they experience, I want them gone. The class violence they commit actively causes the rest of us suffering.
I don’t think 1% share a piece, more like crumbs for anyone else than a piece. While the lesser get image or just vague idea of a crumb.
Yes looks bad, but lets export this system, the “liberal international order” all around the world. It’s a good thing. Lets support the liberation of any other system and welcome them into our blossom on inequality based on wealth.
The irony is that most leftists will agree with OP, but then be happy to support sanctions and attacks on countries like Venezuela. Were happy to support anti Maduro propaganda.
They STILL something think that this US system of liberalism is better than what the enemies of the US empire do. Like Socialism in Libya - Wikipedia under Ghaddafi and nobody gives a shit when NATO bombs it.
So I’ve started to hate these memes not because I don’t think they are not illustrative, but because they somehow do not translate into anything resembling a rational world view on policies or foreign policy based on solidarity. I hate it because like 90% of the people upvoting this are liberals and secretly US imperialists.
They’ve exported unimaginable horror and trauma and then blame the people lashing out against it for being not morally pure.
This system that consumes billions like a biblical winepress for turning labor into capital needs to be stopped. It’s gonna kill us all. I’m on the side of anyone against it.
Libya is not a good example of socialism. unless you like autocracy with massive violations of civil liberties which neuter any benefits of welfare.
Better off Bombedtm
How do group liberalism in with imperialism and indiscriminate bombing? The two are unrelated. Gaining capital at the expense of all else is not “liberal” it is capitalist
So you can understand me as talking about classical liberalism or what you would call neoliberalism. But MOST people on the “left” are fine with many aspects of capitalism, including the moral belief in inequality based on class / wealth. If I make more money, I deserve better healthcare, my kids better food and education. Most “leftists” are closer to classic liberals than socialists (I think).
The other view on this is that “liberal values” or “the liberal international order” means that there ARE no ideological values that are inherently better or worse. It’s all just a question of voting for them or not. A personal choice. Except it’s not.
First people do no or can not accept how much of mass opinion is manufactured (e.g. “manufacturing consent” is in hyperdrive today). If you invest in private media and PR campaigns and fund the right groups you can completely manipulate and interfere in the affairs of other countries. This is the playbook for the color revolutions, what is done today overtly by the NED which used to be done covertly by the CIA. It’s the same thing though.
Second is that because there is no “definite ideology of the state” except “anything goes and greed is good” (e.g. commercial property enshrined in fundamental law) there is no counterweight. This does not have to be spelled out, it is an inevitable outcome of the starting conditions. The power to influence ideology does not rest with the state and it does not rest with the people: It rests with those who have the most power outside of the state.. Those who have the most money and influence. The plutocrats and institutions and corporations. THEY are what have power in a “liberal democracy”. Because there is nothing to oppose these powers because the state is liberal, permissive of all ideology. What remains is powers like Koch brothers, Musks, Murdochs, Think Tanks, bla bla institutes, churches. In a bygone era there used to be unions, but even in social democratic countries they are at least partially captured.
So the idea of “liberal values” as being different from classic or neoliberalism is shaky at best. It’s one of the “big lies” of western democracies. There is only power (Sith axiom). And all political power derives from economic power (homebrew axiom / headcanon)
Or maybe like this: If you could run a computer simulation of a western liberal democratic country based on initial law and wealth and power distribution, you would always get capitalism.
At least this is my latest hypothesis to explain the complete collapse of the pluralistic western civilization.
