Remember how Donald Trump, of his own accord, on national television, said he could shoot someone on 5th ave and still be elected to public office?
There’s hope for Luigi then!
I wish but nothing’s gonna happen
Oh I would vote for him
I’ll vote for Luigi all damn day. Even if he does get convicted, apparently that doesn’t matter.
Reminder: this is why they want a culture war; to distract from the class war. Starve class conflict and you feed fascism
What I think you all need:
- A manifesto with surgically specific changes you want done that will be guaranteed to permanently fix things (so healthcare reform along with a pre-prepared legal framework etc.). With as broad concensus as possible (so eg. with unions on board probably)
- A general strike to force whichever party is currently in power to implement that manifesto.
Pros:
- Still constitutinal. On paper it’s the politicians that opted for this and nobody forced their hand.
- A surgically specific manifesto will make it blatantly obvious whether your demands have been met or not – and hence whether the strike may cease. No space for watering down. This is why being specific is crucial.
Is there historical precedent for unions hoarding money so that they can supplant workers’ pay while they’re striking?
Yes, it’s what unions currently do over here. It’s tax free but lower that normal wage.
During media coverage of negotiations you sometimes hear, “the union has a large strike fund” to imply they are in a strong negotiating position, because they could strike for a long time.Going of the fact that Wikipedia only has articles on strike funds it in German and French, I think it’s not done much in American.
I know the big old Unions like auto workers and railroaders tend to have deep strike funds, but I think the smaller ones tend to focus funds on recruiting and benefits.
Most unions collect into the strike fund at all times. For every $100 earned, dues are usually $1.25 with the 25 cents going to the fund.
Edit: typo: per $100, not $10
Dues are 1-2 percent not 12.5 percent
You’re right, that was a typo
For every $10 earned, dues are usually $1.25
I think you forgot a 0 on that $10. If your union is charging 12.5%, I have a bridge to sell you.
You’re definitely right, I missed the other 0 and dues should never be that high
If I work for a month at that hrly rate I usually earn more than 600 Bucks per month. Maybe you meant 1.25 cents and fractions of cents?
what does Bernie stand for again? i watched his
reactionto trumps thingy on that YT platform and his goals seem very reasonable and like basic human rights(coming from an EU background)
bernie’s been ‘fighting the good fight’ his entire life. he’s a decent, compassionate, caring human who genuinely just wants what’s best for his country and the planet.
but that’s no good for corporate profits or the continued and unchecked accumulation of wealth, which is why the ‘powers that be’ wouldn’t let him have a real shot at the presidency.
what’s best for [their] country and the planet
maybe the best that can be achived in the US, via reforms.
social democratic societies are better for their people than rampant capitalism, but they are still deeply hierarchical. they still leave state and capital with too much power, while apeasing worker with the sham of parlamentary democracy, and benefits, that are controlled by the state. this is already not a great end goal, but its also unstable, because capitalists still have enough power to take away the reforms that were made, and they will eventually.
Bernie goes by he/him
i reject the careless use of gender in the english language. there is no point in mentioning someones gender every time you mention them, other than implied sexism. bernies gender was not relevant to my comment, so i do not see a need to mention it.
He’s been fighting his entire career for specifically universal healthcare. The other democrats are terrified of him.
My understanding is that the reason they’re terrified of him is that he’s not playing the same game as the rest of them. The career track for a Democrat on the national level goes something like this:
- Have rich parents to fund your first campaign, or a politician dad with a recognizable last name.
- Get funding for future campaigns through corporate lobbyists.
- Be a fence-sitter so you never have to pass actual legislation and risk offending your corporate backers
- When you get tired of politics, retire and become a lobbyist.
Bernie is doing none of that. He is as grassroots as grassroots gets. His campaigns are crowdfunded. People vote for him because he has repeatedly proven that he is honest and has integrity. If he ever gets his way, they can be sure their corporate backers will run for the Republicans as fast as they can, and then they won’t be able to have that cushy retirement as a lobbyist! In contrast, Bernie is only beholden to the voters who he represents, so his game is all about performing honesty and integrity constantly for the rest of his life. He doesn’t get to retire. He’s going to die on Capitol Hill.
Slightly related- one of my favorite photos is of Bernie in 1963, being arrested in Chicago during a civil rights protest. He’s really been fighting for other people his whole life.
How did people get anything done if they always had to hold a cigarette in one hand?
How did people get anything done if they always had to hold a cigarette in one hand?
They got things done with their other hand. Obv.
oh wow, he really sounds like a genuine human in a political position. why have i not heard more from him?
i only knew him from that one meme…
i’m so happy someone like him exists, i thought in America politics it really would just be evil capitalists either going
yeah, let's make monioreh, living is important too i guessbut apparently not! vrrrry happi to hear this <3How does Bernie have the money to not have to play the game that the other Democrats are playing? Can crowd funding really cover it all?
Yeah, actually. This is mostly because his decades of consistent integrity has earned him a cult-like fanbase of rabid superfans. Don’t get me wrong, he’s earned it, but I’ve met a suprising amount of fans of his IRL who seemed totally ready to throw hands with me after I made the mistake of saying that AOC might be a decent successor to him. A fanbase like that means money. Not anywhere near as much as his peers, of course, but combine the money from rabid supporters with the fact that word of mouth is the best kind of marketing and you get a very affordable campaign.
Also, the fact he’s not playing the game his peers are means he doesn’t have the lifestyle inflation his peers suffer. He seems to live cheaply.
He represents Vermont, our second least populous state, with only about 650,000 residents, and 371,000 votes cast in the 2020 election.
For reference, Washington DC has a population of 690,000, and cast 346,000 votes.
Additionally, Sanders is a long time incumbent. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1991 where he served until becoming a senator in 2008 (which was prior to citizens United). In Vermont, the house of Representatives is a statewide election due to their small population.
Despite being an independent, Sanders has in many ways been acting as a Democrat, so the Democrats have avoided running against him for fear of splitting the vote. Combined with the overall democratic lean of the state, that gives him a relatively secure position.
Many other Democrats are similarly secure in their own seat. However, as part of being members of the party proper, they are under much more pressure to raise money for the party as a whole to spend on competitive raises
It does. He doesn’t accept corporate donations. Even on his last presidential campaign the average donation was $27.
he’s basically what most of the rest of the world would call social democrat, democratic socialist, or green. basically he’s one of about 6 sane legislators we have
He’s self described as a democratic socialist that has to argue for the government doing stuff because he lives in America and we’re not seizing any means any time soon.
That’s pretty much it. But in the US, that makes him a commie bastard who not even the majority of the Democratic Party agree with much of the time.
He’s a normal human being and wants to help all of humanity
Jokes aside, would his case be dropped if we voted for him to be president like Trump?
He doesn’t have enough money to be constitutionally protected.
No, because billionaires don’t like him.
Yes. In fact, it seems to work pretty great. Something to think about
He’s got a lot of ‘official acts’ he needs to do…
They will keep him under the wraps until he is forgotten and are planning to never let him be the face of anything.
And we don’t mean electing Luigi.
This guys gonna rot in jail. His best years of life - gone. Dreams and aspirations, destroyed. Worse than death isolation that will change handsome young guy to a traumatised mental wreck, permanently. All for a minute of feeling good, achieving nothing.
Instead of living fully, finding love and pursuing the dreams he chose bleak walls of concrete. Where other people have memories of familial warmth with their loved ones he will only have memories of rusty prison faucet and grey stone.
Instead of helping someone he ruined two or more lives. His own and the ceo family. Negative force in the cosmos. Nothing but the suffering is the result.
And of course internet people are amazed because millions of silent volunteers that actually work in healthcare and elsewhere, help every single day to make this world better place, are not as clickable and sensationalist as someone shooting smoking guns on the street “fighting the bad guys”. That girl that helps the old lady with the groceries ain’t no batman but every single day she does more than this Luigi guy will ever achieve.
Truly a “hero” of the internet
He’s a martyr is what he is.
He is going to rot in jail. This is not a good thing. It’s just the same complete monsters that built this evil system flexing the power on plebeians like us.
What you advocate for is nothing more than complacency, accepting one’s lot in life and never complaining. And this is a lot more cruel than you realise.
Because of the parading, its very likely a mistrial. Even if they get around with some fuckery, finding 12 people unaffected by claims denials will be very difficult. I can totally see people saying they have no conflict just to be on the jury to say not guilty.
There’s no timeline where the people who are in power let someone like Luigi free. They would sooner ruin the whole country than let him out of the prison any time soon…
I want to remind you that currently Trump is elected and he said “I think it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him," It’s obvious threat to his power.
You can kill a prostitute, homeless and get away with it but not a ceo of big leading company. Not challenge the very ruler of the country. I doubt he is gonna see the light of day outside of prison in his life ever again. They will make sure of it.
That’s what happens when people are desperate and he was desperate.
He was very wealthy and could live however he wanted to. Or even use family money to do good. He chose this instead.
From all the things he could choose to do with his life he wanted to be a Batman. Not to really help anyone but for that sweet justice high. To get a toke of one of the most expensive drugs on the planet.
He did do good. Health insurance companies decided to cover anesthesia completely the very next day. Additionally, that week a chunk of medical debt were forgiven.
You should be asking why insurance companies don’t do more good with all their money instead of dictating how private citizens should spend their money.
He had a 6 figure job and his parents are multimillionaires. He probably had access to more money than the guy he shot.
I don’t condone what Luigi did, but I understand. Whether he is rich or not, what Luigi did is a symptom of a broken society, just like someone who has to steal a diaper or milk for one’s baby. And sure, even Trump getting popular is a symptom as well, not the cause. Many people are getting sick of an increasingly injust society regardless of background.
What we are seeing is a bottle gradually going to pop. We have been warned years ago of the growing excesses of a society becoming greedy and too individualistic, but we did not listen. We want to see how bloated and fat we can get before we all burst together.
I don’t understand you guys. We live in the best era possible in the best places of the world. First world, free of ailments of the poverty unlike other 85% of the planet. We don’t die out of hunger. We can earn money posting funny videos on the web and instagram or sitting in our chairs all day in AC temp controlled rooms.
We go back to home from work to watch milions of entertainment options, there are literally innumerable of them. You can import brushes made from animal living in some distant part of the world to your feet to paint some very intricate plastic works of art. You can get from one point of the globe to the other and back for a monthly wage flying in the skies. We squashed hundreds of diseases. We made an artificial network that lets you instantly communicate with everyone on earth.
Yet from the way you say things one could assume that we are in some kind of Middle Ages or worse.
I get the motivation to still achieve higher levels of civilisation and that’s what got us so far after all but I think some perspective is nice so you aren’t stuck in some crazy doomer bubble.
Patience. These things will come. they are as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow. But they need time and people who work for them to happen. Women and general equal chances, justice and independence are all the things we work for. But they aren’t magic, they need time.
However the trends are unstoppable as the water in a river. a slight regression under trump is just a symptom of the reaction to the progressive change. Temporary bump on the road. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
I am proud to be a human. I am proud for us to pioneer cosmos one day. I am proud that we got so far and I am positive that we will achieve even greater feats.
I don’t understand you guys. We live in the best era possible in the best places of the world. First world, free of ailments of the poverty unlike other 85% of the planet. We don’t die out of hunger. We can earn money posting funny videos on the web and instagram or sitting in our chairs all day in AC temp controlled rooms.
You must be. EXTREMELY, UNIMAGINABLY privileged if you’re saying that.
Poverty is at a high it hasn’t been since the great depression, most people are one paycheck away from homelessness and destitution. And most of the ones that aren’t on the “one paycheck” threshold are instead in the “one emergency” threshold instead, which is not much better.
In fact, if you have no debt and 20 dollars to your name you are officially wealthier than 90% of Americans. Don’t even need to be rich.
People rally around Luigi because what he did was incredibly cathartic, to punish one of the psychos responsible for our world’s rapid descent into some bizarre 1984-by-way-of-wall-e technodystopia. It might not accomplish anything… But it feels good. And people are desperate for some kind of good feeling.
Really I envy how naïve you are if you can’t see the way things have been going steadily downhill since the eighties with no real improvement.
Also lmao at thinking we will “pioneer the cosmos”. Elon Musk bullshit. We have driven our own planet into a now-entirely-unstoppable mass extinction event, and in ~30 years we’ll be struggling to produce enough food to feed ourselves, let alone going to some elysium in the stars.
So what you want to tell me is that the America sucks?
There’s worse places out there, to be sure. China’s worse, for one thing. They’re like America but you have a ton of limitations in what you can watch to distract you from the void. Russia who’s sending their own people to die over their dictator’s ego.
But I’d much rather be poor as a Brazilian citizen, where I have 100% free healthcare and education – Than to be poor in the US of A where you leave your unfortunate citizens to their own and blame them for their misfortune.
Ofc, given Murica’s foreign-interference-y habits and who’s currently in charge of your country, we might just become a fascist dictatorship again and all our public services might get defunded. It happened in the sixties, it almost happened in the twenty-tens, it can happen again.
I still find it hard to believe USA is so bad all of a sudden. It’s just mind bending, it’s hard to grasp how is it possible considering the statistics and strongest economy. I don’t think I will ever fully understand it.
One country instead of USA then for the “grass is always greener” fantasy I was kinda hoping to get into was New Zealand
China is literally right behind the US in “strong economy” stats and some expect them to surpass it… And that means jack and shit, because living in China fucking sucks, especially if you are under 30.
A strong economy means little if all that wealth is being used to…
… Uh. Kill people mostly.
Whereas the people’s lives have been getting steadily worse since 1980.
You know the Simpsons? It’s just a cartoon, right? It was originally a parody of eighties-nineties America.
The Simpsons as they were written in the late eighties were meant to be a lower-class family. They still owned their own house (a large, two story suburban property at that!), their own car, and all on the income of just the man of the house. They were “poor” by eighties standards because Bart didn’t always get all the newest and shiniest toys and they didn’t travel abroad every year.
The Simpsons’ economic situation hasn’t changed in the forty-ish years the show has existed for. But nowadays their lifestyle is considered insanely wealthy. There isn’t a single family in the US left that has their own home and car on the income of 1(one) man with a high school education, working for wages with no generational wealth, side hustles, or passive income. There just isn’t.
The fiction of the show has to make all sorts of excuses for that. It acts as an accidentally poignant time-capsule and depiction of how much the US of A has degenerated in the past 40 years. And the sad part is most of y’all seem to be cheering for this, or at least, resigned to the idea you can’t do shit about it – Like – This happened in America, these guys were Americans. Your ancestors took care of each other, in the face of authoritarian power, and often on the penalty of death. This is something you all seem to have forgotten.
Mind you, life has been getting steadily shittier since 1980 in – The entire first world really. Neoliberalism has done a number and a half on society. Reagan and Thatcher are the reason we all hope hell is real so they can go there. The living standards your generation has are shite compared to what your (grand)parents knew.
This is not the case here in the Third World… But that’s mostly because of how hard it sucked to live here in the sixties and seventies. Yeah, a messy society being eroded by cruel “austerity” measures is gonna be a dream come true when you are literally coming straight out of a military dictatorship that drained the country’s coffers and killed god knows how many people in the most cruel ways imaginable (thanks for that, by the way, US. Never would have happened without Operation Condor :3).
At least I can say I have like. A vote. And human rights after a fashion. And some hope that my life might maybe possibly not completely suck. All things with my parents didn’t have until they were… Literally in their mid thirties (which I’m close to but not quite at).
First world, free of ailments of the poverty unlike other 85% of the planet.
Excuse me, what? I know people living in poverty who can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads and don’t have heat/AC. I know people who cannot afford their nececary medications and are forced to go without or take out another credit card. I know people who were forced to start working at 14 in order to help their family survive. Not to mention the high rates of homelessness all over the country. You sound like you come from very privileged surroundings if you have not encountered this.
Additionally, a lot of actual third world countries actually try take care of their people. It’s far from perfect, in fact it kinda sucks. BUT. It is still miles better than the US that sees “being poor” as a moral failing that needs to be punished.
We live in the best era possible in the best places of the world.
That’s what people thought during the so-called Roaring Twenty’s before the Great Depression and World War 2 happened.
History repeats itself. People enjoy the highs; rest on their laurels; become too greedy and decadent; wealth inequality grows; the masses become pushed to extreme poverty; a demagogue comes claiming to save them; civil unrest happens; conflict happens; people learn and tell themselves never again; new wealth is generated; people become greedy again; wealth inequality happens again; demagogues reappear-- and the cycle continues. We have seen this happen from the ancient Chinese empires, the Roman empire, to the French, Germans, and now the USA. Just because it is good for now, it doesn’t mean the bad won’t ever come even if the tell-tale signs are present. It is the calm before the storm after as they. If the wealth inequality is not stemmed in the USA like what happened under Franklin Roosevelt, the situation that happened in Germany might happen instead there.
