When television first started, there were 3 channels and a handful of commercials. After a few decades of more channels and more ads appearing, cable showed up. Now you could pay a subscription to get premium content without ads!
But after a decade, not only were they putting ads on cable you paid a premium to watch, they were speeding up both the shows and the ads to fit more into breaks that kept getting longer.
Younger people are just starting to see the cycle is underway again with streaming services, but over the last 10ish years, I’ve noticed all the various cliques going “why is {our interest} going to shit” as if it were an isolated incident and not happening everywhere.
The first act of capitalism when it was created was the slave trade. Corporations have always been vehicles the ultra rich use to extract wealth.
Revenue is how much money a company brings in selling things. Profit is how much of that remains after paying for materials, leases, power, reinvesting into the business, and paying wages. Basically, CEOs are paid 300x more than employees to defer maintenance and suppress wages.
Economics 101- charge as much as you can, pay as little as possible. Any corporation that makes billions in profit only does so by gouging customers and stiffing workers.
Real wages are stagnant, pensions aren’t a thing, and they’re trying to get rid of social security. There’s a reason we’re told to use things like HSA, 529s, and 401ks: it enriches the already rich.
There is something called a fiduciary duty to shareholders which basically means publicly traded corporations must act in the best interest of investors. It SOUNDS like a good idea, but it’s not really well defined.
The reality of the situation is BlackRock basically owns the stock market and the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve is owned and controlled by a group of banks- not the US government. Those banks are publicly traded corporations that own chunks of everything and each other. It’s a giant rich guy circle jerk that basically means the recent uniform RTO mandates were probably from Larry Fink himself due to how central commercial real estate is to collateral for things like naked shorting.
Inflation isn’t things costing more; it’s the dollar being worth less as more money exists. The reason the rich buy art, watches, and shit is because they benefit from inflation. If you hold on to $5,000 for a decade you have $5,000 that buys less after a decade of inflation. If you buy a painting, jewelry, or whatever, it appreciates overtime being worth more than $5k.
Federal minimum wage was 7.25 in 2008. Not much, but you could buy 1-3 shares of AMD or 18" of Subway. Today, M2 (a measure of money in the economy) is three times what it was in 2008 and minimum wage is still $7.25 and might get you 6" of sandwich. AMD, on the other hand, currently sits around $120 a share.
Someone that works to eat will always be falling behind while someone that’s not struggling can just load up on wealth that keeps growing. A majority of the country doesn’t have money on hand to deal with a $500 emergency while more than half the wealth of the country is owned by a handful of people that make lifetimes of wealth through passive investments alone.
Unfortunately, it’s all very complicated and basically everyone is stupid most of the time with only brief windows of subject specific competence. Reason and rationality is a best case outcome but people act like it’s the default.
Welcome to the meat grinder. None of us matter.
Well the problem is that you’re hardly saying anything anyone doesn’t know, especially if they are on lemmy.
Why did China become capitalist?
Marx himself said that communism can only arrive through capitalism. Though he is hardly an oracle, that logic makes sense to me.
I don’t believe in communism, simply because I don’t believe that abolishing private property is something realistic, it seems even anti human. And so far the track record for communism is not great, because concentrating all wealth in the hands of the state (who is controlled by a few people) is somewhat of a bad idea it seems (who would have thought!)
I do believe in socialism. But the conditions are not here yet. Humanity grows on having something to exploit. We’re currently building the next exploited class which will be AI and advanced robotics.Once all human labor is rendered worthless, socialism will not only be viable, it will be necessary. Capitalism is the only force that provides the means to get there.
Is it unfair for us in the present? I guess. But it was also unfair for all the billions of humans who have died through history to create the conditions of the world we live in, which whatever you may think, is a vast improvement over every other period of time. Humanity is a constant project, and it is always the case that the present humans need to make sacrifices for the future humans. If that doesn’t happen our species stagnates.
The point of capitalism is that it creates endless hunger for endless desires and thus endless growth. In serving yourself you serve others. Of course capitalism needs to be curved if this is the case because it otherwise becomes destructive so in comes events of mass discontent, and massive political shifts much like you see now and in the Great Depression. We are soon approaching a point in which we will need a New New Deal.
But keep in mind this is not even the worst era of capitalism. Despite the disparity in terms of sheer wealth, the disparity in quality of life is much much smaller. I’m not dismissing the problems, but I think that one needs perspective as well.
Also people have a terrible idea of what democracy is. Democracy has never been “we all have equal say”. That’s a fairly recent interpretation of it. Democracy through most of its history has been “these specific group of people have equal say, and they decide for everyone else”. And that is basically the reality of almost every human system. We can make ourselves equal in rights but we will never be able to make ourselves equals in charisma or ability, and thus some people will always have more power than others, even if not officially others will look upon them for leadership.
Most people have a terrible understanding of most things because most subjects are basically infinitely complex and get worse the deeper you dig.
A representative Republic is the illusion of democracy at this point. You get to cast a vote for whomever you think will best ignore your ass while sucking off donors because the cost of elections is a product of capitalism and not a fault of democracy itself.
Any civilization that wants to function requires a government. The problem is usually who ends up in power.
Most people can’t understand all the issues. Elections are largely popularity contests for single issue voters. The key to popularity is lots of advertising. Supply, demand, profit, ensure it keeps getting more expensive because most media outlets are privately owned and publicly traded.
Trump was put into office via billions in free news coverage legitimizing an obvious and known fraud making election coverage a horserace for ad revenue instead of informing people about facts.
It’s never been easier to learn anything you’ve wanted to, but this is the first time people have actually started getting dumber to the point they dispute the shape of the planet under their fucking feet.
The better educated people are, the more questions they ask until they realize things don’t actually work like they’re told and then we get riots.
The US is a falling police state run by two private corporations that own the nation.
The dnc and rnc are privately held corporations that control who gets to run for office and both are well right of center entities.
Have you read about Smedly Butler and the business plot?
How can you actually write all this after saying capitalism is anti democratic, with the implication that being anti democratic is a bad thing. Look at what you wrote, and think long and hard if you actually want a popular democracy. The US system would work very very well if it had more parties and electors started acting the way they are intentioned to act (not vote for the president their constituents chose but rather the best choice according to their platform, utopic I know).
And yes both parties are right wing but that’s because Americans, on average are right wing. No shit political parties in democratic states mold themselves to be attractive to voters. But calling it a police state is the usual hysterical progressive stance that no one that has actually lived in a police state will take seriously. The US is not a police state. It is a corpocratic state though, no doubt. It’s a huge issue that I believe might come to a head soon, Trump is accelerating that with his blatant corruption. And then I hope money’s power over politics will be curtailed. Or not, we’ll see.
One thing I’d like to point out that Trump spent far less money than Kamala. And Kamala had the support of mass media while Trump didn’t.
What I get from you is that you are of course deeply troubled with the state of things but have not yet a clear idea of what would be a better system, you’re simply angry at what it is right now. Which is fair. But I think you need to make up your mind whether you think more government is good or if government as a human organization is inherently corruptible and therefore what we actually need is less government, and whether true direct popular democracy is good or whether we should become more technocratic/meritocratic/aristocratic because you seem to be flip flopping between one stance and the other. Even highly educated countries are electing right wingers right now so while education is a factor it’s not the only factor.
Yes I’m aware of the business plot. But I think you also need to understand the context in which that happened. The Federal Government was never meant to be as powerful as Roosevelt made it, the United States was envisioned as a state of states, kinda like what the EU is right now. So it is not surprising that a plot would form to take down a president that was trying to make a government that was much more powerful than it was ever meant to be. Trump is aesthetically a reaction to Roosevelt, but in reality is a result and even somewhat of a mirror image. Assuming that you are a principled person and not one that thinks politics is a team sports If you are outraged at the way Trump acts, you would be outraged at the way Roosevelt acted had you been there.
Yes, no, kinda, maybe.
The system is so bloated, corrupt, and convoluted there is no fixing it.
The bad actors are so many, so uniform, and so powerful there is no removing them.
The masses are so poor, tired, fractured, and ignorant, there’s no uniting them.
We’re looking at a likely push for a Trump dynasty. Even if the Democrats win, they’re really just controlled opposition to maintain the status quo and repiss off the red base by existing.
Say the impossible happens and all the bad guys die, there’s revolution that sees through the theatre of duopoly… Then what?
30% of the country eagerly embraced a convicted rapist after he spent decades being a piece of shit. 30% prefer Democrats making things worse slightly slower.
Everyone else checked out because they either know too little or too much about politics.
At the end of the day the problem is that nothing matters and it’s all just screaming into the void.
We could be 100% agreement on every detail and we’d just need 350 million other people to sign on to change a system they know is broken but don’t understand well enough to fix while very rich, very crazy people spend great deals of money to basically cause problems everywhere they can do they can sell a monthly treatment but never a fix because cruelty is basically always the point.