Wealth inequality will destroy America.
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%.
199 replies
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're right, guess I'm just gonna give everyone hand jobs or are you going to tell me I need to build my own sex robot from scratch?
Giving someone a hand job, is doing it from scratch.
What's the sex bot for?
No, because I was planning on using a water based lubricant
There are lots of recipes for home made lube online.
For hand jobs, simple olive oil will work fine. Don't know if it's water based, but it cleans up easy enough.
But still, what the bot for?
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Haha yeah sorry I was struggling to convey that properly. US American here.
Like, after the paycheck comes in, and we pay all the bills, yeah having some 1000's just left over to decide what to do with would be quite cushy.
We're a couple that both work decently paying part times. Living with family makes that possible, but unavoidable debts (and climbing insurance rates) the last few years balanced it out.
So I mean, we live comfortably and we're materially content. But also times are really scary where another 2008 could hit us real bad.
So it's still weird imagining people just having lots of padding floating around. Lol
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.
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.
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.
Nothing they said advocated gun violence.
They might have meant a peaceful shutdown.
They said the population is cowed, to put it more nicely. They’re correct.
I’ll paraphrase what I see: “Americans have guns but are too afraid to use them.” That certainly reads to me like inciting violence.
Your rephrase is incorrect
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.
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
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
I assume by he you mean Reagan and not Krugman.
Krugman is a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian.
Yeah,regan
Capitalism is just feudalism with more math.
Trickle down feudalism yeah.
Maybe what MAGA could realize is that america was great when income inequality was more in-check.
Bringing angry MAGA folks to this conclusion would be a huge win for pretty much everyone.
We need blue collar union solidarity to come back, and bring with it safe reasonable high quality work on worthwhile things for our neighbors, compensated fairly.
Getting MAGAts to even THINK is a huge endeavor.
Defunded education, 24-hour Fox "news" coverage, and literal armies of sock puppet accounts are what you're up against.
The billionaires have taken over social media so they can fabricate their own reality using millions of fake voices and thousands of hours of emotional response conditioning.
What's your plan to fight against that?
I'm going to use a sharpie to write some words on a piece of poster board and then get lost in a crowd. Maybe something like, "Make America Fair Again. Tax the Ultra-Wealthy."
No Kings: October 17th
In the words of Ian MacKaye, "at least I'm fucking trying"
Yeah. This is exactly why education is constantly attacked. Gotta keep the serfs dumb and docile.
remember - there is no such thing as stratification within the working class. there is no “upper middle class” - it’s all just propaganda to get us distracted by a better house, greener lawn, culdesac, suit wearing folks…
There is an "upper middle class."
If you point to the average doctor or lawyer, and tell poor people "those guys are working class, same as you," half of them are going to tell you to get bent. Cause when they see them with their mcmansions that somebody else cleans, and their giant lawns that somebody else mows, and driving their mercedes and corvettes, the average poor person is not going to believe you when you tell them they're the same class.
Maybe if everyone was educated and enlightened you could pull that off, but expecting all or even most people to be like that is idealistic and naïve at best. Perhaps even callous and out-of-touch.
The grain of truth is that we are indeed all "working class," and that class conflict
isshould be about working class versus owner class; and that the owner class actively pits upper-middle class against middle- and lower-class, and middle-class against lower class.But telling everyone "there's no such thing as/no distinction between upper-middle, middle, and lower classes" is not the remedy. You need to remind them that even though there is stratification within the working class, we're all on the same team and need to work together.
Telling them otherwise comes off as gaslighting and is not going to convince the majority of working class people, because it directly contradicts the evidence of their eyes and ears.
And besides, upper-middle class people will hear that and think "so you want to reduce me to poverty just to level the playing field!", middle-class people will think "so you want to eliminate the middle class and make us all poor?," and lower-class people will think "so you're erasing my struggles and pretending I have it just as easy as the middle- and upper-middle classes?"
Denying the reality isn't helpful. That's like using "colorblindness" as an argument against racism. We need to acknowledge our differences in order to accept them. Pretending there's no difference will never work, and only advantages the owner-class attempting to maintain the status quo.
could not agree with you more.
I am one of those people that has had circumstances improve. I grew up in a trailer that honestly should have been condemned rather than allowed to have someone live in it. I've gotten used to sleep for dinner when I was younger having my only good food be the fact that one of my friends mom's was our lunch lady and she took pity on me pretty regularly.
over the last 15 or 20 years I've somehow worked my way into a good paying job and when I read your first paragraph it was a little bit of a wake up for me since a lot of those things apply now.
I would say the main difference that I have between now and then is that I have more control over my life personally, if I were to lose my job I could probably find another one and even if I couldn't I could sell my house and be okay for a while. homelessness is not right around the corner like it was when I was a kid and we got evicted three or four times.
The real difference between classes though is not that I can afford my electricity bill every month or make sure that my kids have probably too many toys, as far as I'm concerned the primary difference is whether you have control of how other people live their lives.
The owner class has propaganda machines, owns government officials, can collaborate with each other to ensure that wages are suppressed and to ensure that the right people make the right business calls and make a bunch of money at the rest of our expense.
it's insane to me that the life that I have used to be common in America and I feel so lucky and grateful that I have it at all today. all I have is a house a job two cars and two kids and a cat I guess.
that should not be too much to ask for for the regular person. everyone should get to have that kind of stability in their life.
I vote and believe the way I do not because I think it will drastically change my own life but because I think that others deserve what I have, it should not be extraordinary for people to be able to survive on one job and build a family if that's what they want to do.
I don’t disagree, I just think that this response is a function of a lack of class consciousness and is really an exercise for you, to teach your audience, that “sells labor and limited lifespan” means working class. (eliding the details here…)
In short: it’s audience specific. My reply here was meant for the audience here. I might not say it the same way to my neighbor, or a friend, etc.
i guess i don’t disagree that in the interest of time and energy we do consider there to be multiple middle classes, etc, but i consider it harmful to our unification as one working class.
Except for cops. Remember: they’re not working class, just trash class.
That changes nothing about what I said.
You should take your own advice...
Conservatives insist this is the only way. As long as conservatives exist, the normal people will never be permitted to regulate capitalism or charge billionaires with crimes.
We must delete the foot-soldiers to defeat the billionaire class.
TRUTH NUKE
Missed opportunity to have the lower %50 portrayed as extremely obese. That is how we are taught I feel, that the poor are actually lazy moochers taking instead of contributing.
Which isn't true to be clear
There is in fact a problem with the lower income families having food deserts, having not enough money for fresh produce, and having to rely on mostly hyper processed foods which fuck with your insulin levels, have tons of sugar, fats and salts to make them tasty, and that leads to irregular fat storage even when you’re taking a normal or sub normal level of calories. It’s one of the reasons the “fat American” body type is showing up in other nations, particularly in Europe, where they’re also becoming more reliant on ultra processed foods. Being poor is more expensive in many ways, and one is that you can’t afford a good diet and it makes you sicker faster while you lack the healthcare to manage it or find education on the matter via a primary care provider.
There has to be more to it than that. I was watching something about an area near me being one of the fattest in the country. Its moderately deprived which I am sure is a contributing factor, but then less than 100 miles away another town which is far more deprived is around 10% lower for obesity.
They interviewed people too, asking them where they get food from. So many said the same answer, a shop which is entirely stocked with processed crap. Yes, if you go shopping there you are coming home with crap. But next door there were 2 other shops which sell fresh vegetables and for less than the ultra processed crap. It takes less than 10 seconds to walk between the doors of each shop.
Its not a food desert, fresh food is available here and cheaper than processed food. I spend less on food for the week than many people do on a single takeaway, of which they have several a week.
The other component is time. When someone works multiple jobs, the thought of going home and spending an hour cooking and half an hour cleaning up just to eat in ten minutes is very unappealing when there's so much else to be done. Simply having the food available for cheap doesn't do any good when you don't have time to cook it and don't want salad.
I was going to mention that although it was getting long already. This is in the UK with one of the best minimum wages on the planet. If you work so much that you lack time, you will have quite a lot of money. Maybe not rich, but plenty to be comfortable.
Especially for a fairly deprived and lower than average cost of housing area.
When you're working two jobs to survive, you do not have time to cook from scratch.
When education fails to educate, you do not have knowledge how to cook, nor understanding of the reason why one might want to.
UK minimum wage is pretty good, if you are working 2 jobs you should have quite a lot of money.
Microbiome differences will absolutely account for that. I’d be testing for soil and water issue differences and checking if one has more time spent in third spaces that help foster more healthy and diverse microbiomes. Just having more park time would do it, but absolutely having more gardening in one vs the other would do that, even with the exact same diet
Well I know the water here has as much agricultural fertiliser in it as they are legally allowed to leave in.
The due date for the Epstein class’s execution is way overdue
it HAS destroyED America
Aside from the imagery of the share of the pizza, I appreciate the detail of the lower 50% not even having "a seat at the table" :/
Yes although it could be a whole family out in the cold for greater realism.
why a ban?
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 mean every day you see massive influence campaigns playing out on reddit. Bots are real and completely distort reality and train people to be stupid. Right now everyone is laughing about a search engines web crawler "bots" being taken down, everyone piles on and completely, absolutely completely ignores the reality that the bots on the other side / fronts of the culture wars do more damage. It's disinfo and scapegoating in one.
So how CAN you have a social media without heavy moderation? Wealth means power. The power to have think tanks design influence campaigns and have PR corporations implement them. Like overwhelming power.
But we don't talk about it. Lemmy users are just as stupid, already trained like good dogs to fall in line and no better than reddit. Lemmy as a replacement to reddit has indeed already failed. But theoretically you want moderation, want to regulate that social media has to employ "more than enough" moderators to prevent bots and campaigns influencing our social media. Because that is how we lost our pluralistic western democracies.
So not that it matters now and maybe I misunderstood you. But "free" is just another word for "controlled by those with the most wealth".
Exactly, they’re cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. No one ever learns.
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
Why are they banned?
It's exponential by design. It doesn't have to be, but slowly the rich have made it this way as they tried to gain more and more, and lobby for more and more.
Very funny to see this at the top of my feed when the poster is banned.
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
This is quite literally the stuff that results in revolutions. People can tolerate inequality only up to a certain level. Even some ultra rich can see the situation can't remain stable.
Which is why they put so much effort into manipulating all of us
It just takes one person to start a revolution. Too bad the lot of you are waiting for someone else to start it.
This applies to you as well. Also what revolution was done by a single person?
I don't live in a country under dictatorial fascism. So I don't need to start a revolution.
Rosa Parks refusing to leave her seat on the bus was the catalyst for the Civil Rights movement just to name one. Greta Thunberg as an individual is the face of climate change and social economic change.
Greta didn't start shit and saying Rosa Parks 'started' the civil rights movement is historically illiteracy.
Then kindly shut the fuck up about what people you don't even live with should do.
Cool. Enjoy ICE or something I guess. Hope you don't sprain your ankle or you might end up homeless.
Thanks for your concern, I'll give it all the consideration it is due.
Who's "you"? I'm not American, things are nowhere near as bad where I live
You said "All of us". I'm not manipulated by "them". I assumed since you added yourself into it that you were American.
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 Bombed^tm^
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.
More accurately, the lower 50% is forced to fight over some cheese stuck to the lid and the grease- soaked bottom of the cardboard box.
I'm sorry but this is a wildly inaccurate way to portray the data. This image is portraying not the cut that every group gets, but the wealth that the average individual in that group gets. These individual averages per group are then added up to 100% and then everybody gets a slice out of that 100%.
To show you how this is inaccurate say we did this with 10 people. We have 2 groups. Group 1 has 9 people who average 1 dollar and then group 2 has 1 person who owns 2 dollars. In that example group 2 has 2 dollars combined and group 1 has 9 dollars combined. This would mean the groups own 18% and 82% of the wealth respectively. But according to how this comic portrays it, as per Capita, the pizza slice of group 2 would be ⅔ of the pizza and group 1 gets ⅓ of the pizza, which is not accurate at all to how the wealth is actually distributed.
Using this per capita metric is highly misleading if we are to use it in that way. The top 1% in the USA in actuality holds 32,5% of the wealth in the USA which would create a totally different pizza than the one in the comic.
I think that's the whole point. It's not trying to paint an overview of the economy, but rather to show what portion a typical member of each class gets to live off of.
Images like you describe that show the breakdown for each entire class? Those are not hard to find.
I just don't think it's an honest way to show the data. You could use the exact same method but put the richest individual as one group and the entire rest of humanity as another group and show that the top 1 person gets the entire pizza except for one microscopic crumb but of course that would be extremely misleading. I'm fine with per Capita wealth per wealth group as a metric but it doesn't lend itself to be used in circular graphs. A bar graph would be less misleading. But of course that wouldn't be good in a comic. I'm also against extreme wealth inequality but we are not going to solve it by misrepresenting the data. The non misrepresented data is already telling enough.
There's 4 people in the image. If the 4 of them split a pizza based on their wealth, this is what each would get. How is that misleading?
1: I think the average reader of this comic won't understand it correctly without thinking deeply about how "per capita" affects the size of the pizza slices compared to a non per capita version.
2: Looking at this graph one would think that the entire problem with wealth inequality lies with the top 1%. However the next top 9% own more wealth combined than the top 1% do. This comic represents the "merely wealthy" as a victim but I would argue the opposite. To even enter the top 10% category you need over 2.5 million dollars. Top 5% is almost 5 million dollars. They get an unfairly large slice of the pie too.
The top x% owning y% of combined wealth is a standard measure of wealth inequality. This is literally what the Lorenz curve describes and the basis for the well-known Gini coefficient.
That being said, the proportions in the comic aren't really in line with the figures I know. Wealth inequality is increasing in the US, but the wealth share of the top 1% currently is more like 33% (still bad but far away from the pizza example).
This cartoon does not use "top x% owning y% of combined wealth". It uses a per capita version which is very different from what you're talking about. And that's my entire point.
Gotcha, I was wondering what the "per capita" meant and saw it explained in a different comment. In that case, I agree that this is misleading.
Yo know who I expect to have the most scrutinized data? Cartoons.
Dr. W. E. Coyote PhD, now that was a scientist with some goddamn tegrity!
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2011.2,2026.2
The point of the bottom 50% enjoying 2 pepperonis is the accurate part
The cartoon would then have to show the relative sizes of the groups as well (about 6 to 1), so 1 person gets 2/3 while 6 people get to share 1/3. Or, each person in the 1% gets 2/3 of the pizza, and each person in the 50% gets 1/18 of the pizza. Or, the 1% get 12 times more. The real figures are a lot worse, with the bottom 50% holding about 1/50 of the total household wealth, while the 1% hold 1/3 and the rest being distributed among the other 49%. The reality therefore is that those 6 people have to split 1/50th of a pizza, for 1/300th of a pizza each. What would 1/300th of a pizza look like? Crumbs I reckon.
Anyway, it's a cartoon.
You make a compelling argument. One word for you though, per capita.
That's two words.
Fair enough.
ALSO two words, although I know you never claimed otherwise. ;-)
And people over 55 own 73% (most of the top 1% that isn't tech billionaires, are also old people after all). Start taxing corporations more and they won't be able to retire the way they have, so they're naturally against that. Good luck figuring it out without magically increasing birth rates to have more workers per retiree, or having your old people live in squalor so young people can have better lives (potentially driving up birth rates if they feel they can afford children)
People who own capital on an international scale vs. People who own a small amount vs. People who own none.
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.
MAGA think they’re “merely wealthy” because they got a new (to them) pickup three years ago. So this will fall on dumb ears.
As infuriating and dangerous as MAGA is, just remember who the true enemy is. There is no war but class war.
Oh trust me. I know
Reminded me of this little sketch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL_I6_0FcTg
However, it ain't just MAGA unfortunately, there are many liberal people also confuse debt and wealth too. Taking vacations, buying tech, and then complaining about living paycheck to paycheck.
In fairness, you did say "MAGA" after all. ;-)
I have one of these stupid fucks trying to weasel his way into buying a truck from the recent widow I'm fixing/selling it for. This fucker thinks he can swing in and buy it for an IOU. My only other interaction with him is brandishing a gun because his ex wouldn't fuck him.
It really do be like that.
This doesn't show the severity of it.
A better pie chart would show:
~ The top 0.001%
~ Everyone else in the top 0.01%
~ Everyone else in the top 0.1%
You're likely already guessing how the pie looks with those groups figured in.
Note that absolutely everything above $30 million is pure capital. Its only purpose is to make more money.
Note that people this rich can do a lot of incompetent and heinous stuff and still fail upwards.
Note that a considerable number of the ultra-wealthy think of working class humans as NPCs and would rather replace us all with machines that cost twice as much to maintain.
Not shown on this chart: the rest of the world exploited by American imperialism
Hyper Rich muthafuckas down voting. Happy for ya.
I take issue with the lower class being illustrated as overweight
He looks normal sized
Correct: Americans are normally obese.
But US lower class is overweight. Artist was too kind, should add another 40 lb
The people with crumbs STILL doing nothing despite having nothing to lose will allow America to be destroyed.
will allowhave allowedYou’ve spent half a century watching these people and knowing exactly what they will do. Sure, I guess if it makes you feel better, you can “blame them” the same way I’d blame a bunch of 12-year-olds playing with fireworks in a warehouse full of gasoline. But at a certain point, the people who knew exactly what was going to happen and kept allowing them to obtain matches are the ones who need to be held responsible and deserve whatever they get if not.
Hey look, I found one of those people!
They aren't doing nothing. They are actively supporting these policies, going to Trump rallies, and blaming immigrants and trans children.
Trump is funded by the ultra rich. He is supported by the uneducated poor.
.1%
Wealth concentration today is 3x worse than at the height of the gilded age.
My thoughts and prayers go out to lower 50%.
Banned
Ive read the Seattle Times for decades.Horsey has gotten better. He's had some really bad takes in the past.
Are the merely wealthy the other top 9%?
Ah, yes, this is only an issue in the US... And also, nothing other than the US matters or exists.
You just have to realize the monopolies and how widespread they are. If you break the nation apart and make it several smaller countries then some will become like the old US and other countries will thrive. At the very least, we could go somewhere and have our own laws and way of life.
Moving to another country is always expensive
Yes, but, my neighbors just bought a bigger car than me, so I had to buy a new one as well - on a loan. If I skip my sons birthday and instead make overtime, maybe my boss will notice and give me a raise (so I don’t have to subtract the loan interest from my sons college fund). Anyways if immigrants actually payed their taxes this would all not be problem… What was I doing again? Ah I was on my way to vote split ticket again; devided government keeps both sides in check.
Edit: I guess satire is not my strength.
Refusing to consume is one of the greatest acts of resistance that pretty much everyone is actually able to do, and would even benefit from doing.
I just want a new season of Reacher where he goes undercover as a gay prostitute.
We need a The Expanse crossover with that Wesley guy. Watch me not have remembered his name right - the one who can walk in heels 😂
It's like the excess sugar and bad fats most Americans eat everyday and think their chronic issues are normal, but it's all the shit foods, and they don't care, numb on junk food and their viral slop algorithm is all they do under the oppressive inequality they keep voting for.
upper middle class is a black woman?
Sometimes.
so much so that they represent the majority of the upper middle class?
What an odd thing to take issue with in this comic. You're the only one here that seems to think the skin color of the characters in the comic are even relevant.
I'd say the top 1% being represented as white is kinda important. The rest doesn't.
So you don't hve a problem with the rich WHITE lady, just the moderately rich BLACK lady.
I think it's clear what you have a problem with.
Odd that you latch onto that but not how the lower 50% is depicted. And nowhere does it say each person is a racial representation of that class.
You're real fucking dumb.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Maybe the top 1% is a black woman too.