Leopards Ate My Face
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The funny part is that the same people bank rolling the presidency are the same people bankrolling the legacy media AND the social media influencers.
There is one group to blame for all this and it's not hard to find them .... anyone that controls billions of dollars of wealth, controls the country.
With every month that passes, a conviction grows in me: "Billionaires shouldn't exist."
Without a doubt, I say there should be a cap on personal wealth, say 1 billion, because I can't really see why one person would ever need more than that to live comfortably. Then every dollar made over that goes straight to the federal government.
Essentially a new income tax bracket for only the wealthiest of individuals that is permanently set at 100%
I don’t know about a hard cap. Shelves and caps tend to inspire “creative accounting” just shy of fraud, and we can curtail runaway capital accumulation by just making the curve more aggressive.
A simpler solution is public equity. This is an idea I’ve been selling for a while so I have a spiel. Tap below if curious.
Public Equity
Public corporations should not be taxed based on declared revenue. Instead, a portion of shares should be owned by the public such that taxes are paid by dividends.
Also, any direct funding or “stimulus” from the federal government should purchase additional shares. The government’s failure to demand equity on behalf of its people when increasing their shared national debt to fund large corporations would be considered gross fiduciary negligence in any other funding scenario. For example, full bailouts should result in a controlling stake, i.e. nationalization.
It eliminates poverty, easily solves a truckload of difficulties we have taxing these corporations and their shareholders, promotes overall economic health, and is above all more fair to everyone, including the wealthiest.
Specifically:
- If shareholders are paid, taxes are paid. It would no longer be possible for a company like Amazon to have $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to its shareholders.
- It skips the “trickle down” step. Share appreciation is reflected directly and automatically in public equity growth, so if the paper wealth of the richest citizen increases, so does the paper wealth of the poorest.
- It prevents runaway capitalism, the situation we find ourselves in, where a government is too anemic to reign in corporate greed and the public servants within it too starved to resist corruption.
- It offers more direct control of inflation, since the Fed can simply not reinvest a portion of dividends paid on shares.
- It makes Universal Basic Income (UBI) trivially easy to implement, since what we are describing is essentially a universal pension fund that everyone has fractional shares in.
Most importantly WRT principle, it more accurately reflects the value afforded to every public company by the actual public; i.e., the society in which it operates.
Edit: forgot to mention UBI
Well, where are they, exactly?
Hiding from guillotines.
I think it's time to make an American version of the guillotine where we replace the sharp blade with a giant rock, and keep everything else the same.
It seems appropriate
Given the seeming plummet of intelligence in the US we should name it the Ungabunga. The fact that cavemen didn't live in caves and weren't dumb is the other half of the reason.
The American version is calling up Israel for a bombing run.
Contributing millions to dark pacs, which bankroll media outlets either directly or through ad money.
Although now I’m sure they’re also buying shitcoins in closed door meetings at maralago as well.
There is one group to blame for all this and it’s not hard to find them
I'm told it is anyone who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.
I mean we’ve been on the path to fascism since Bush vs Gore, so maybe we can collectively shit on Nader for being an egotistical asshat.
One of them being Russia is bankrolling most of it
I'm genuinely curious to know whether the majority of Lemmyites believe Tim Pool gets more money from Vladimir Putin's bagman than Google's YouTube advertisements and SuperChat kickbacks.
So many Americans do not seem to want to believe their own network of oligarchs have deep pockets and a wide net of social media influencers. As though organizations like DailyWire and One America News Network and the Murdoch suite of publications simply don't exist. The Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, The Thiel Foundation, The Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute... its like they don't even exist.
It’s been quite exhausting seeing this shit show unfold.
Trump and his team has made the movie Idiocrazy (2006) completely obsolete 😅
But the characters in Idiocracy meant well, they were just idiots. These fuckers are straight up evil idiots.
What's his favorite color?
"the best color"
Colors you’ve never see — you’ve never heard of these colors, he says, and many people are saying, I saw a mantis shrimp the other — can you believe — and mantis shrimp were treated very badly, what’s going on, and he said he’s never seen such a color, but they don’t report on that, the crooked lying media, I tell ya, if a mantis shrimp just one time — if, right in the mouth, if one of these journalists had to say it right to their face, one of these mantis shrimp, they wouldn’t last one second against — I’ve seen how fast these guys punch, believe me.
Man, I've seen many attempts that don't go off the rails enough, but this one is just... Chef's kiss.
Green
Gold or Orange
Some press coverage. Tim Pool was taking millions of dollars from the Russian government and White House press pool included a reporter from the Falun Gong-owned Epoch Times.
“Let me lie and brainwash you directly”
Why is this website so utterly broken? The cookie policy pop-up can't be dismissed and I can't click anything on the page.
Welcome to the future of journalism.
I run an adblocker, so I don't see any of that. I know it's harder on your phone sometimes, but firefox lets you there too.
They still can't top Jeff Gannon but they're getting very close.
Wtf? I was speaking to a bunch of people I know last weekend about this. Did all of the Trump stuff happen under Bush, and we were shielded from most of it because he didn't say it out loud? Twitter wasn't a thing yet either, so people didn't have an easy way to whistle blow or keep track.
I know that trump and the republicans did a lot of this same stuff last term. Most of it really, it was just that Republicans are in charge of every single branch now and cheating more and more. They're also setting it up to cheat even more in the future, so the new parts are really scary, but this went on last term too.
America has been compromised for a long time.
The White House faced fresh accusations of a clandestine propaganda campaign yesterday after it emerged it granted regular access to a rightwing blogger with a habit of asking President Bush easy questions.
The fake White House correspondent quit his job at the Talon News site on Wednesday after liberal bloggers found he had been operating under a pseudonym, and that he was linked to several gay pornographic web domain addresses under his real idenity, James Guckert.
The extent of Gannon's links to an earlier White House scandal - the leaking of the name of the CIA agent Valerie Plame - also remained unclear yesterday. Gannon has been targeted for questioning in that case.
"It's just common sense that the White House knew who Jeff Gannon was, and they were waving him in for a reason," said David Brock, director of Media Matters for America, the liberal monitoring group which named the reporter last week.
Gannon's unmasking comes only weeks after the Bush administration admitted paying handsome sums to three conservative commentators to promote its social programmes in print, radio and TV, and has led to calls from Democrats for an explanation.
Did all of the Trump stuff happen under Bush, and we were shielded from most of it because he didn’t say it out loud?
It was all widely reported and remarked upon for the better part of the Bush Presidency. But liberals just choose to forget. We don't talk about the gross abuses of power and manipulation of public opinion under Bush or Reagan or Nixon anymore. And if you bring it up, you're discounted as a crank or an apologist.
America has been compromised for a long time.
Practically since Day One. You can find parallels to this historical moment running straight back to the Adams administration. American liberal democracy is deeply flawed and fundamentally broken, thanks to the privatization and monopolization of so much of the social infrastructure surrounding it.
But we generate enormous amounts of wealth for an enfranchised minority. So please don't rock the boat. Just vote a bit harder next time. Everything will be fixed in the next election cycle, we promise.
You're right, you're right. The only thing I keep thinking is, the people are wonderful. You know, not the batshit 36-42% range that are die hard MAGAs, but the rest are amazing.
🔹We've fought for and won* many challenges that were then accepted in other parts of the world because of our movies and tv shows.
- Civil Rights
- LGBTQ+
- Women's
- Wars were ended
(they've had their ups and downs)
🔹When there is a catastrophe anywhere in the world, we send people, resources and money there. We do this as volunteers, Seattle empties a bit whenever there is a huge disaster anywhere. Donations are incredible to watch.
🔹We have non-for-profits that really do some great good in the world.
Whenever I think about our corrupt politicians, I remember the people are actually better than than the batshit 35% or so our politicians represent right now.