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Do not let this single tweet provide you comfort that has no basis in reality. The rich and powerful are not scared of a tweet, but they are very happy you feel comforted and so placated by it.
If many thousand tweets get many thousand people on the streets to stay until a coherently developed and articulated program of change is enforced upon them, then they might might start to feel some fear.
The rich and powerful dont give a shit about any of our issues. They live on a whole other level. Now if you stop buying things that may get some fear in them.
Sounds like a very good part of a coherent plan to challenge the wealth inequality intrrinsic to fossil-fuel-powered neo-liberal capitalism, and climate change.
Poverty is a failure of the state.
Poverty is a function of the state. Not a failure of it.
Poverty is the implied threat that keeps people falling in line with the authority of the state to protect the economic interests of the owning class which control it.
People need to learn to govern themselves and their own communities to begin the process of taking authority away from this exploitative system and those who control it.
Poverty is a feature of this state. The same state that needs to go.
No, I mean the state, as in the ideology of statist politics is intrinsically exploitative in its hierarchical structure and only exists to serve the interests of capital at the expense of people who it claims authority over.
This state is just one of many. Others will follow suit if nothing is done. Right wing ideology is already on the rise across the globe because of these systemic forces.
no, there aren't scared.
This dude sounds like he should be president and not just mayor of NYC.
Which is not going to happen, and not only because he’s not born a US citizen.
Part of me wants to say that if Trump can skirt the law so much and even run a third time so can Mamdani, but another part of me is realistic.
Immediately after his primary win, Ogle and Mace were both sending emails to the DOJ and publishing them suggesting "denaturalization and deportation." They want to remove naturalized citizens. It's clear intimidation and disgusting.
They are certainly going to mess with the Zohran. A lot.
For a group of people that claim they hate socialism as much as they do, the GOP seems awfully fond of receiving very big cheques from the government.
Because they're commies
IT'S AFRAID
Edit: shit someone beat me to it
Bit ironic since Doogie Howser is the fascist in this movie.
It’s more expensive to incarcerate someone for sleeping in public than it is to house them. It’s more expensive to incarcerate someone for shoplifting than it is to feed them.
The suffering is the point.
Yes. And making sure people are so afraid of being destitute that they will work for low wages.
My dad used to say that it was more of an incentive to get the masses to actually work instead of just subsisting and bringing the general level of the economy down to the point that it can’t support UBI anymore.
I don’t see how anyone can worry about that when we look at how people behaved during the pandemic. Lots of people around the world were paid their normal wages and not allowed to work, and yes, Netflix was used a lot more, but labor intensive hobbies absolutely exploded. People aren’t happy just doing nothing all the time.
There have been numerous studies about this, and they have all shown that this doesn't happen. Canada did a multi-year trial with one town in the 2000s (before the program was shut down and the records sealed/destroyed by the conservative administration once they gained power) that showed a drop in workers in only two groups: high-school kids and pregnant women. It also coincided with a general increase in economic activity as well as a sharp increase in both grades in school and the number of kids graduating and going on to college afterward- especially among poor households. The general theory was that the extra money created financial security in poorer households and high-school kids didn't have to work/drop out and get a job to help put food on the table and could therefore focus more on school and have a better chance at going to college and better job prospects in the future, breaking the cycle of poverty.
Yeah, seriously... Humans love to work. We just don't like being told what to do and pressured to do it on someone else's time frame
Motivation is surprisingly easy to come by when you reap the full benefits of your labor.
In fairness, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people favoring the incarceration are not aware of it being more expensive. They only see the dichotomy of punishing the crime vs. allowing the crime.
Traitor lunatics don’t care. They say stuff like “deport every last one of them illegals even if it costs a trillion dollars”. But I think you’re right that most people have been manipulated into thinking there isn’t even an alternative to harsh enforcement.
But if you can get them into the private prison system the shareholders can make money at least! /s
This is the main problem when it comes to politicians not caring that incarceration costs more than helping people.
An entire industry is built on profiting from legally-permissible slavery, and the only way to achieve growth is to either extract more value from the prisoners or the number of prisoners. The former isn't an option since prison work isn't mandatory, so that means growth is only achievable by imprisoning more people.
To make that happen, the prison-industrial complex uses lobbyists to encourage more "tough on crime" laws and harsher sentencing.
It really isn't a surprise that the whole idea of rehabilitation scares the politicians getting kickbacks from a private prison industry that thrives on recividivism and driving people to do things that get themselves incarcerated. They don't give a rat's ass that it costs the taxpayer more money when the alternative means that their own livelihood will be negatively affected.
And that's precisely why we need more elected progressive politicians. The career politicians we have right now don't care about their constituents, they only care about themselves and by extension their corporate masters.
Agreed.
Also, they're not scared. They can still kill his candidacy, and if they can't, there are plenty of ways to blunt his power. Further, as we saw after Ross Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992, they can throw up institutional hurdles making it impossible for progressive candidates to have a shot at these offices in the future.
Most of all, though, it's hard for me to get excited about this after watching Obama rule as a conservative when he sold us 'hope and change'.
One thing I will say about Obama is that he did try. Years ago, somebody put together a list of all his campaign promises and the only one he didn't do anything about was closing Guantanamo Bay. Every other campaign promise said "blocked by Republicans" next to it. People forget that the rest of the government was controlled by a Republican party who said that even in the short time they didn't have majority control that they'd rather burn the government to the ground than let a black man pass any laws. The Democrats capitulating at every like they always do didn't help, of course, but it wasn't like he didn't try to do what he said he was going to.
All the other stuff he did, though? Yeah, that's on him. There was plenty of "business as usual" during his terms when it came to things like drone strikes on civilians and deportation camps.
It's to scare people into staying in work no matter how shitty it is because of the suffering.
It's why bankruptcy is so devastating for normal people but rarely for the rich (just look at Trump).
Being rich isn't a total amount lf money, its a differential between you and the majority, its the lack of laws that actually apply to you (drugs are the perfect example), its the lifestyle you can have compared to other people.
It's empathy being replaced by selfishness
It’s more ~~expensive~~ profitable to incarcerate someone for sleeping in public than it is to house them. It’s more ~~expensive~~ profitable to incarcerate someone for shoplifting than it is to feed them.
The ~~suffering~~ shareholder value is the point.
Turns out that imprisoning people in USA is a GREAT way to move public funds into select private pockets....
great news for the US economy,
half a million illegal people have just been created,
The purpose of a system is what it does.
I’m Canadian and if you watch the parliament channel you will hear politicians debating everything from paper straws to logging contracts to fishing laws. Everything except housing, food costs and wages. It’s like they go out of their way to avoid the issues we actually are in dire need of
"but I just got into politics for the networking so I could build my own wealth! Why should I have to care about the poors?! How am I supposed to deal with my ~~owners~~ donors now!?"
The only people politicians "service" are their donors.
