Karl Marx nailed it

A rare political rant, but necessary at this juncture.

Just a quick reminder why it is so vitally important to vote 45* out and flip the Senate in November. Remember Apartheid? This was a policy that lasted for years in South Africa which put the white people in charge and eliminated most rights for black South Africans.

But you know what? Those white people were by far in the minority. So how did they keep the system going? Simple. They made up the rules. They controlled the courts and the government, and they ignored the people. Sound familiar?

Even after violent protest broke out, the system persisted by repressing it even more violently, and it wasn’t until 1994 that Apartheid finally ended.

In American Apartheid, it’s the 1% trying to control everyone else — and that’s the only division, because there are certainly super-wealthy people who are not white, not straight, not Christian, not male, not native-born, not cis-gender, and not even citizens who have a vested interest in continuing the oppression.

So, yeah, the oppressors pay lip-service to opposing women, minorities, the LGBTQI+ community, non-Christians, non-capitalists, etc., etc. But this is only designed to scare that core group of straight, white, rural Christian people into supporting their own oppression.

As AOC put it so eloquently (paraphrasing): “You don’t earn a billion dollars. You steal it.” And that’s for sure. Anyone who is worth more than a billion did it by stealing labor and effort from people like you.

Who built Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla, WalMart, etc.? Not the CEOs or stockholders. They didn’t do shit. These companies were built by the people who worked for them and the people who bought their crap. But now that the rich are rich enough, they don’t care whether you can afford their crap. They’re already planning their escape to Mars or buying their own islands that are far enough above future sea level to be safe.

Why do you think there’s such an emphasis on things like self-driving cars, automated checkouts, and developing AI that can handle customer service? It’s to eliminate workers entirely.

They’ve also bought governments outright — the oldest story in the book — so good luck with reining them in via legislation, unless and until you manage to vote the right people into control of government, in which case they get to make the rules, and control the courts and governments, and maybe put things back to right.

Or… we could show late-stage capitalism its own flaws, remind them of what Karl Marx warned them about. Once capitalism could grow no more on its own, it would begin to consume the working class and the poor, driving them into debt while simultaneously preventing the state from being able to serve them. Profits would rise while incomes stagnate, pulling the middle classes into the quagmire.

Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, you haven’t been paying attention since the 80s, which may or may not be before you were born.

The only two solutions to this, per Marx, were socialism — a sudden and violent takeover — or democratic socialism — a gradual change in policies by the successive elections of increasingly progressive leaders. Now, since we got ourselves into this via the “boiling frog” method, we’ll probably only be able to get ourselves out the same way. It’s been forty years down this rabbit hole. Sadly, we probably won’t fully dig out until 2060.

But if we start now, the ‘30s could be pretty damn cool. We just have to lean hard to the left, and soft revolution these billionaire bastards out of existence.

First step after we re-take Congress and the Presidency: re-imposition of the tax rates that existed under Eisenhower (a Republican); plus add on a cap on wealth. No single person or company should be worth more than a billion dollars. (Hell, no person should be worth more than ten million — that would keep anyone for life, but I’ll be generous.) So in addition to the income tax rates, there’s a wealth cap tax, and it works like this. Any profit in excess of a billion dollars has to either be put back into the company to finance expansion and purchase of equipment from an absolutely not-affiliated company and to hire sufficient new employees with a salary at 10% above the cost of living for the community they’re being hired in and with full benefits; or donated somewhere within the state the business is licensed in to promote health, welfare, education, or the arts.

Additional first steps: Increase Social Security and Medicare benefits to match current cost of living, with realistic increases per annum guaranteed, and prohibit any reductions at any point in the future, as well as eliminate Medicare Part B premiums, so that they cost the same as Part A (hint: nothing); slashing the hell out of our military budget, outlawing defense contracts with any company that does business with any country that is not the U.S.; using what’s come out of the military budget to fund arts and education, and to provide housing and services to the poor and homeless — turn our endless random wars abroad into wars on real problems at home; kill the Space Force because, really? And create the Peace and Plenty Force.

Democratic socialism could achieve this in a generation. Don’t believe me? Look up FDR and the New Deal, because this is exactly what he did. And rich people hated him.

Pure socialism could achieve this in six months, but it would be messy and would involve the heads of a lot of elected officials stuck on pikes in front of government buildings all over the country, plus a lot of dead defenders of the status quo. Which is kind of another proof of why America has no Socialist candidates, and what you’re thinking of is Democratic Socialism. AKA The one way out of this nightmare.

End rant. Proceed with your day of being a consumer of corporate crap.

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