• MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “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.”

  • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    The worst hot take of this nature I’ve personally heard so far, in Canada: “Fuck man this customer service job pays me peanuts when I’m busting my ass! I tell ya, it’s those damn Indian immigrants saturating the service industry and driving the wages down!”

    • peanutdust@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Worker saturation does reduce the power of the workers. A small town strike is a huge deal, it can shut the business down with nobody around to easily replace them. As opposed to place they can be easily replaced with low cost workers, the conditions will slowly move towards slavery with every replacement.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Aren’t most of the Indian customer service workers in India though? Nothing to do with immigration

  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I luckily don’t hear that much. I mostly hear fellow wage slaves making barely enough to slowly die repeat bullshit news headlines like “no one wants to work anymore” all the while working harder and harder for less and less. It’s incredibly depressing.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      When I worked at DGX, basically EVERY customer said this in response to seeing me being the only one behind the counter…

      No… No, this store just has shit pay, forces EMPLOYEES to pay for parking, and is willing to fire people at the drop of a hat.

  • PatFusty@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    Billionaires are a minority… something like 1% of the 1% of people

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      You’re still overestimating them 200x over. As of 2021, there were about 3300 billionaires worldwide.

      That’s 0.00004% of the population, or one for every 2.1 million people.

    • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      (not disagreeing) And due to capitalism, they and the exploited will always exist, and have the power they have. If the billionaires of today didn’t exist, some other people would be in their place, and nothing would have changed. Capitalism is the root.

      • SaltyIceteaMaker@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        No matter wether capitalism or something else. People want power. Thise who have more will do anything to keep it. People fight back. reform Or social collapse. Repeat.

        It’s a cycle that will repeat as long as their is something to opress.

        Im not saying we should stop fighting. But even if we win it will happen again.

        • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Yeah, the focus needs to be on specific issues where we can take immediate action to improve peoples’ lives. Trying to abstract things out to be about systems and ideologies just promotes complacency and paralysis. Every system can and will be corrupted. We need to identify the specific mechanisms through which that corruption is currently occurring and attack as many of them as we can every time an opportunity to do so presents itself. Wanking about some grand revolution that will solve everything everywhere just promotes inaction since that revolution will never come.

  • Gnubyte@lemdit.com
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    10 months ago

    Unregulated lobbied capitalism. I’m okay with capitalism and competing ideas. What I’m not okay with is some of the late stage problems we’ve encountered as a society. Assuming the US average person lives to be a very low of 50, we are four generations deep. Ive known two generations in my own lineage. That’s not very long.

    It’s okay to make better systems. Even for billionaires its okay because a rising tide floats all the boats. This is something that needs to be taught better to the upper class. If these guys had less complaining workers, people willing to contribute more so in their enterprises, workers who are happy to make their products, it would be fine. Putting the squeeze on the little guy does nothing for these dudes besides some tight margins.

    Coupled with a very elderly legislative body we are left with senseless greed in both trade and politics. Portions of the population just consume politics like it’s a sitcom. What we’re left with is a system in need of refinement.

    • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      When economic power is functionally political power, and self-perpetuating economic inequality is the default under capitalism, this is inevitable over time.

      You can push against it’s nature with that kind of thing, and you might see some temporary improvement, but the baked-in incentive structures will inevitably be followed, and the decline to late stage capitalism and collapse will continue.

    • aksdb@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      If these guys had less complaining workers, people willing to contribute more so in their enterprises, workers who are happy to make their products, it would be fine.

      I am not sure that would work. Happy people start to get self-aware and then start to make demands. People who are suffering one way or another are easier to control.

      Look for example at how people behave after a war. They work together, build stuff together, do everything to manifest peace. Look at how they behave a few decades later … it has fallen back to in-fighting. Once everything is in order again, people fight among each other. Neighbors fight for shit like wrongly places trees, some build gangs and move around to destroy stuff just for fun, etc.

      Humans are shit. We are just not made for being happy.

      • TheBurlapBandit@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        I have the perfect plan. We hook all children up to a lifelike VR war simulation shortly after being born. Then when they reach a certain age we pull them out of it so they’ll behave cooperatively.

        • aksdb@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          Well, if we believe the great prophets Wachowski in their prophetic depiction called “The Matrix”: the people in that simulation would just go crazy and die.

  • SirBucksworth@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    „1% of people hoarding 99% of wealth in the world, and most of them have the same skin color and religion like me? It has to be the fault of people with a different skin color and/or religion that I’m not getting richer!“

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      “Have we considered blaming the people who are reviving old religions for our society’s moral failing instead of acknowledging that the political leaders of my country share my religion

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    Simple, under this system the more desperate folks undercut him. They don’t see the rules of the game are what is causing that. They couldn’t imagine a system under other rules, except for Stalinist nightmares. So crushing the people who undermine them is the only option they can imagine (and have been lead to believe by the preachers of hate)

  • LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.ml
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    10 months ago

    When people have lived their whole lives marinating in anti-communist propaganda, they’re ideologically unable to reach the obvious conclusions and instead have to substitute shit like this or lizard people conspiracy theories.

  • am0@beehaw.org
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    10 months ago

    I think prefer my memes to be generally funny, instead of angry and political

  • sleepy@reddthat.com
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    10 months ago

    Do billionaires and millionaires count? What? Do we call them rhe financially unchallenged? /s