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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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The billionaires aren't the problem?
I do get your point. It's bad to take joy in the pain of other people. That it is bad as a society that we celebrate the deaths of our fellows. I don't really want vigilante justice to become our norm--that's how gangs and cartels come to prominence. I'd much rather have institutions that do their damn jobs so the common person doesn't believe justice can only be found at the end of a gun. The billionaires keep voting/promoting to break those institutions though!
I love Bernie. The point he and I are making is that government is failing the people.
I love Bernie too! We have that in common.
But you're take is only part of the point he's making though. The government is failing people in large part because such a small segment of the population has enormous sway over who gets to be in government.
I had a much longer response that got deleted when the app force closed on me 😮💨
I really did want to weigh in from your original post, though, how you argue that billionaires make jobs, make products, make the world better. Like, sure, some do, but the ones at the top? Big corporations? No, they don't. Literally, Walmart workers have relied on government assistance programs due to poor pay for decades. Companies like Toys R Us get bought up by billionaires and liquidated for more money as employees lose their jobs. Or billionaires buy things that shouldn't be profit driven--where is that return on investment going to come from? These are billionaires choices, not Congress or City Council or whatever, that directly shape society negatively. Sure, governments allow it--especially governments that billionaires have bought.
I used to be against limits to billionaires (I still kind of am, I'd prefer minimum/maximum earning ratios), but actually watching them work and change in the world, I have seen that they have too much power with too few checks. I mean, hell, from a global warming perspective, it's hard to find what I, as a little person, do matters at all. I could die tomorrow and produce no more carbon emissions (beyond my body's offgassing), and it wouldn't change anything. Meanwhile, some small percentage of people, just like in Bernie's tweet, contribute much more each day than I will in my whole life. Fuck, man.
Well, I saw it more as the government is failing by allowing them all this unreasonable influence in the first place.
I'm familiar with these arguments. My general issue is that people get really invested in supporting arguments that seem reasonable on the surface without really having much knowledge of the full situation. Headlines are visceral. The nitty gritty of the story is often much more nuanced. Of course there are worse case examples and they make the headlines. Then something else seems similar and people assume they're all the same kind of story.
I just don't blame the billionaires. I don't blame the corporations. I blame the governments and indirectly the voters. Neither the corporations nor congress are going to go out of their way to reduce harm.
America has been brainwashed since the Reagan administration that capitalism is king. I'm cautiously optimistic that this is coming to an end but I don't see anything prepped to take its place. Americans are consuming more than ever before. We'll see what happens in the next administration when no one can afford anything.
The people have to be broken free of the brainwashing before they start speaking out and getting congress to change regulations. I don't think killing a CEO is going to do any good.
I understand that corporations do what they do to further their prime directive (profit maximizing, as I figure), but blaming the government for not sufficiently innoculating itself against them is kinda wild to me. Yes, Citizens United is an abomination, but even if it weren't the current meta, corporations would still do their utmost to influence the levers of power to their own ends.