UHD posted:

haven't most empires in history crumbled from poo poo leadership

obvs not all tho

quote:

I believe that we in the American political and economic elite face an extraordinarily inconvenient but undeniable truth: Our country will not get better until our fellow citizens feel better; and they will not feel better until they actually do better. And this is the hard part for many of you: The American people will not do better until they are actually paid more.

And they won’t be paid more until we change the way we manage our economy. This is the stark, simple fact at the heart of our ailing political system. Nothing is going to get better until we enact laws and standards that persuade or oblige every business to pay every worker a fair, dignified and livable wage. Everything else, from Trump on down, is a distraction or a lie.

***

Yet, when I make this case to my wealthy friends, even the progressive ones, the reaction is almost universal: You look down at your shoes, or start talking about “messaging” or “narrative”—or charter schools. When I urge you to focus your energy and resources on the kinds of direct action that can actually make a real difference to working people—like, for instance, a state or city minimum wage campaign—you roll your eyes, or prevaricate. You insist that the only way to fight Trumpism is to fight Trump. But you couldn’t be more wrong. The only effective way to fight Trumpism is to address its cause by ensuring that the middle and working class do better.

Trumpism poses a threat to all Americans, but to the superrich most of all—because we have the most to lose. Sure, estate tax repeal might at first sound like win, but permanently creating a class of entitled aristocrats out of our own kids isn’t likely to improve our democracy, Meantime, if you aren’t already planning to give away the bulk of your fortune, you’re kind of a selfish jerk. That’s why, as counterintuitive as it might sound, the single best way to advance our own interests is to put more energy and money into advancing the economic interests of others. For example: by fighting to pass a $15 an hour minimum wage.

$15? Crazy. I know.

“That’s impossible,” one retail executive told me, “you can’t pay people that much.”

“A $15 minimum wage is a job-killer,” sputtered the CEO of a large restaurant chain.

“That will destroy the economy,” a manufacturing executive tut-tutted.

Bullshit. It simply isn’t true that reasonable wages, decent labor protections and higher taxes on the rich would destroy the economy. Such were the norms back in the 1950s and 1960s when America’s growth rates were much higher—and there’s no empirical evidence to suggest that we couldn’t support similar norms today. The truth is that when economic elites like us say “We can’t afford to adopt these higher standards,” what we really mean is, “We’d prefer not to.” We like to frame our claims as objective truths, like the so-called “law” of supply and demand, but what we’re really asserting is a moral preference. We are simply defending the status quo.

In my circles, few seem to want to confront the reality that our political environment won’t improve until the actual economic circumstances of our fellow Americans improve. We rich folks crave the variety and stimulation of progressive blue cities, yet we’re often not willing to fight for basic progressive policies like higher wages and the right to organize. We pound the table, ranting about diversity and inclusion without recognizing that the 43.7 percent of Americans earning less than $15 an hour, mostly white and rural, simply cannot afford to be included in our pricey, progressive, pluralistic enclaves. We smugly #resist when an airline beats a passenger bloody, but we do so from the safety and comfort of our own private planes, literally looking down on the shuttered factories and struggling small towns of middle America as we luxuriously jet from coast to coast.

Today in America, tens of millions of lower- and middle-class workers are routinely subject to poverty wages, unpaid overtime, wage theft, dehumanizing scheduling practices and the constant threat of automation or off-shoring. But the plight of these workers rarely comes up in conversations with my peers. Maybe the problem isn’t sexy enough. Maybe it seems too big. Maybe it requires the uncomfortable admission that some of our outsized profits are coming at their expense. But whatever the reason, we’ve let the problem grow too large to ignore.

Many of my peers prefer to hide behind the enduring myth that today’s crisis of economic inequality and insecurity is the result of forces unleashed by unstoppable trends in technology and globalization. “It’s not my fault I have so much while others have so little,” we comfort ourselves, “it’s the economy.” That is nonsense. There’s no intrinsic reason why the social and political changes delivered by technological advances and globalization have to massively concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. We simply exploited changing circumstances to take advantage of people with less power than us.

Over the last 40 years, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP have increased from about six percent to about 11 percent, while wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen by about the same amount. That represents about a trillion dollars a year that used to go to wages, but now goes to shareholders and executives. One trick we use to keep profits high and labor costs low is to refuse to schedule workers for the 30-plus hours a week they would need to qualify for benefits. Today, an astonishing 6.4 million involuntary part-time workers are denied the full-time work they seek in order to keep our profit margins high. You can call that “the market” or you can call that “stealing,” but from the point of view of a disgruntled worker it amounts to the same thing. How could they not be angry?

Another elite excuse for inequality is “education.” If everyone had a Harvard MBA, the argument goes, then we’d all be fine. Don’t get me wrong; the better educated our citizens, the better off we all will be. But someone is still going to need to clean the hotel rooms, flip the burgers, pour the coffee, assemble the cars, cut the hair, etc. But if that job doesn’t provide a decent and dignified life, then we have made little collective progress. And while it’s true that college graduates earn more on average than those without college degrees, wages for young college graduates have stagnated since 2000, with wages for young female graduates falling 6.8 percent. Churning out more college graduates can’t close the inequality gap if wages are stagnating or falling across the board.
...
A century ago, as communism and fascism threatened to overrun Europe, our nation struck a grand bargain: We plutocrats would continue to be tolerated—even celebrated—as long as broadly rising incomes meant that each new generation of Americans continued to do better than the last. But through the policies we championed in the corridors of power and through the longstanding social norms we violated in the corporate boardroom, we broke our end of that bargain. And now the pitchforks are coming for us, my friends, from both the right and the left.

Concerned Citizen posted:

you goetta be kidding me

Scent of Worf posted:

lmao the trump thread is lamenting the fact that trump has done his first sensible thing in office, not arming right wing religious extremists in syria

Captain_Maclaine posted:

I'm not kidding, and don't call me Goethe.

Scent of Worf posted:

not arming right wing religious extremists in syria

the bitcoin of weed posted:

my rap sheet is embarassingly small, hit me chief

got any sevens posted:

so why doesnt she do anything about all the people she put behind bars for specious reasons



its her 'public' position

you can probe me if u want squiz, idk. watchin commando then goin to bed

Squizzle posted:

woof sorry it took me so long, getting to these now!!!!! hope the movie was enjoyable and the sleep restful friendo

zegermans posted:

where haev you been

zegermans posted:

6 me up squizzy

Karl Barks posted:

this was a typo, he meant "30 days me squizzy"

Venom Snake posted:

She seemed like a nice lady at the time

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Weren't you patrolling this thread like last week and threatening all the suck zone posters with probations for lovely posts but you think zegerman trolling is good?

Karl Barks posted:

this was a typo, he meant "30 days me squizzy"

Squizzle posted:

idk maybe i was, who can remember anything from that long ago????

Concerned Citizen posted:

https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/887313680030892036
https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/887320252656254976

Tunicate posted:

She's the one who illegally kept people imprisoned because they needed the free labor, right?

Maarek posted:

It's been said before but it's impressive how someone without any personality whatsoever was able to develop such a strong personality cult.

Condiv posted:

yes. but she didn't know her guys were gonna argue that. they just kinda did on their own

ThndrShk2k posted:

I can kinda believe that underlings were terrible, Cali is a big place with a lotta people working in the system so a few of them are bound to be bads.


I'm staying agnostic on her whole deal cus it won't matter until 2019, or at all if Bernie Sanders is the sexual b-ball god he was in his prime.

ThndrShk2k posted:

Imagine this: Space Jam but it's Bernie Sanders debating for 1.5 hours, including through credits.

Serf posted:

there should be no wage gap. the profits should be distributed equally among the workers, who elect and recall their own managers at will and vote on the direction of the enterprise

Serf posted:

they should pay us more and we should still come after them. no use for them to have all that money when it could go to improving the material conditions of all people

Thoguh posted:

Oh Snapple! posted:

suck zone remembers

Oh Snapple! posted:

suck zone remembers

Joementum posted:

this is the future liberals want

https://twitter.com/JStein_Vox/status/887762844573474817

Al! posted:

well???? what did bernie say

Joementum posted:

this is the future liberals want

https://twitter.com/JStein_Vox/status/887762844573474817

punk rebel ecks posted:

Okay, is there anyway I can request my avatar being changed back?

I'm very short on cash and I'm not sure if I have the money to change it back.

I promise I won't try to he funny and post weird stuff but please change it back. I'll take a weeks ban as punishment if that means I can have a non-avatar and tag again.