collapse

That's why for YEARS, I have been saying that Campaign Finance Reform is the issue from which ALL other issues flow.

Billionaires pay a miniscule, totally unnoticeable percentage of their fortunes to strongly, relentlessly lobby for laws,.rules, regulations, loopholes, tax breaks, etc. that will bring them even more money, many more times than what they invested.

Lobbying, and trading favors for campaign donations, has to end, it is literally the reason behind nearly every bad thing in our country, and it is only getting worse.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

-LBJ

And it doesn't matter if you're talking about different races, different sexualities, attached vs detached earlobes, whatever. Point to a group and tell everyone "They're the problem" and you're going to have an automatic following.

Pretty much, yeah.

Fascism, at its core, is Us versus Them. Under all the complexities and layers is one simple idea: Our problems are because They have Our resources, and we need a strong leader to go to war (figuratively or literally) against Them and take Our stuff.

And I think this is incredibly seductive because it triggers our old hominid instincts, from back when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah, and when our territory was hit by drought, or fire, or natural disaster, and we didn't have enough resources, the solution really was to go into another tribe's territory, drive them out, and take their stuff.

Lebensraum is as old as stone knives and bearskins.

And the more desperate people are, the more frightened and hungry and angry they are, the stronger those old animal instincts become.

But, you know, a good leader can simplify complicated issues. A good leader can identify problems, articulate actual solutions, and direct people's angry monkey brains towards fighting for those solutions instead of persecuting scapegoats. Not Us versus Them, but All of Us, together, fighting poverty and climate change and economic hardship and building a better future.

Unfortunately, in the United States and the "free world" as a whole, we have a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who benefit from all the economic and social failures that are causing the problems we suffer from. And they want people to believe in a simple violent solution that blames the wrong people and doesn't actually fix anything, because they don't want the problems fixed.

And you don't get elected unless these extraordinarily wealthy people give you enough money to win an election.

So we don't get any good leaders. We get a choice between fascism and the status quo, which is also fascism.

Yay, democracy.

I mean, the solution is easy: remove billionaires or dismantle capitalism.

Oh yeah, we left the EU and that fixed all our problems. Wait no that didn't work it actually made things worse, ok but trust me lets blame all the immigrants now.

The K-shaped economy in action.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

And when young Americans finally lose their fucking temper - when we get "Occupy the Suburbs" instead of "Occupy Wall Street", when the rhetoric is turned against the 10%, whose stocks and bonds and 401Ks ballooned in value as a side effect of the hyperbillionaires looting and pillaging the American working class in the greatest wealth transfer in history - those old fucks aren't going to have the slightest idea why most of America hates them.

And the hyperbillionaires who maintain their power by dividing Americans against one another are going to laugh all the way to the bank.

But you need it for life, unfortunately, so it’s already there. Even many homeless people have smartphones, though they’re a little busy trying to stay alive to get to stuck on a phone.

That's only 4.5 % per year. You are beating inflation!

The city appraisal of our house increased $100k since we bought it 5 years ago. We've made no improvements :/

It's a general trend as far as I can tell all over the West.

I saw the steady empoverishment already back when I lived in Britain in the 2010s and am seeing it right now living in my native Portugal.

It is especially obvious by all the stores that closed and never opened again or did open and then closed again not long after, the more away from city centers the more common.

The realestate bubble that really took of after the Zero Interest Policies that were chosen as "temporary" measurs to "recover" from the 2008 Crash (and were never fully undone) is eating the parts of the Economy which are not Rentierism and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands (of those who own the most assets, i.e. the Owner Class) and doing so via multiple pathways:

• Businesses which before could survive and generate a steady trickle of income now can't because rents (which pretty much doubled in the last decade) eat up too much of revenue to the point of wiping out all profit.
• People are having to allocate a higher and higher fraction of their income (which has been going up below inflation, because salaries aren't increasing as fast as living costs) to housing, have less money to spend on anything other than essentials. The steep increase in consumer debt has for a while compensated for that, but that's reaching its limits again (just like it did pre-2008).

The other side of the coin is visible in the rise of the Far-Right - as people feel more and more squeezed, the Owner Class funds parties which "explain" the pain as being caused by foreigners, be it "immigrants" (in the words of the farthest Far Right) or "foreign interference" (in the words of the more Neoliberal Far-Right) - the implicit message is always one scapegoating others to dismiss the responsability of those who by far have and had for all these years the most power and hence shaped things to be as they are now: the very much local power elites and the politicians who are either themselves part of it or willingly act as their minions.

(This is why, for example, Britain ended up with Brexit)

This trend was already visible and the increasingly shitty state of thing was already painfully predictable a decade ago for those paying attention to Economic subjects, but naturally that's not most people and the Owner Class very purposefully bought most of the Press (were they could, hence why places with a huge Press ownership concentration like the UK and US being even worse than most of Europe) and used it for Propaganda purposes such as spreading the above mentioned "it's the fault of foreigners" messaging.

Mutual aid groups. Prefigurative politics. Starting local with boots on the ground, finding little ways to make your community better, actually pays off.

(Nobody tell the MLs.)

Lol. Let's call it a "positive" externality. Pretty much everybody who's employed, or who wants to be employed, or who wants to stay in contact with friends or family, needs to have a cell phone and Internet access. And if you have to pay for that stuff anyway, you may as well doomscroll on it.