the reason we don't see push back like in the past, is because we live now with a lot of amenities and distractions that people in the past didn't have. They had the pain of their reality more in their faces than we do. We have youtube and netflix now.
That and a lot of police departments have arsenals analogous to small militaries, tho Portland did show us how organized citizens can relatively easily resist police using less lethal munitions
And also we have secure access food, safe working environments, etc. people aren’t going to risk their lives because they have to live with roommates longer than they’d like to, or can’t afford the latest IPhone.
A fake reality; is NOT reality. The next pandemic; which may be deadlier; will show people that they need to wake up. So will the next ten years; during which climate change will get even worse. People can't seek comfort in Netflix when they're freezing to death; like in Texas for example. There's no place you can escape reality. Silly smart phones are good for nothing in the end.
Here's a thought: the free market can't work if we prop up failing companies. Bad ideas need to be allowed to fail. That's the whole point of competition. I guarantee if you gave that same money in bailouts to individuals that enough of them would use it to innovate and start new companies that within a few years everyone would be employed again. And best of all we wouldn't have a financial crisis looming over our heads as soon, since we got rid of the dead weight failure companies and made room for new innovative ones we'd have a healthy market.
@@CompuBrains27 I did the math, let's say one of the largest banks fails, that's basically a stimulus check for a month of rent and groceries, and only rent if you live in southern California (2000 a month for rent for small single rooms.) Now, for some companies it might work, but for others it wouldn't work well. Admittedly I only divided a billion, no idea how big the bailouts tend to be.
@@MrGamelover23 My replies to you keep getting removed automatically, I think it's because I was posting a Jon Stewart clip? Anyways in 2008 the fed gave $7.7T in 0% interest loans to banks.
I want to give a shout out to Michael, because even though everybody loved Jared as host, I think Michael does such a good job and I like his presentation style.
That’s all 99.9% of us want, but that 0.1% of us have about half the global wealth and don’t care about the fluctuations and problems that causes for the economy because they won’t suffer for their greed and misanthropic worldview, but we will. Capitalism is a broken system that only benefits the super rich and powerful.
@@BlaiseTighe first of all someones wealth increase does not mean your decreases second of all living standards have improved significantly in the past 100 years due to capitalism.
@tegarcho todo I’ve read the prince and while it gives insights into the workings of power I don’t see the point of you posting it here. This applies best to feudal times and does not (as it did not exist yet) take into account the functions of industry and capitalism and the relationship between workers, the state, and corporations (the third party Machiavelli did not live to see)
@tegarcho todo no it’s certainly something everyone should read along with the art of war and platos republic but my point was about its relationship to markets and labor history. Either way most people do not bother to learn anything besides who Kim kardasion is dating and so on so it’s good to be an educated voter. The nice thing about the internet is that you can get practically any text in pdf or audio format and learn while you work. Also on the note of understanding power, a good follow up to Machiavelli for me was Chomsky’s manufacturing consent. If you can put up with his left leaning attitude it shows the principles portrayed in both 1984 and the prince used in modern geopolitics particularly focusing on America. There are many other books however that also add context and history to the principles of Machiavelli. If you are interested economics however it is hard to recommend books without knowing your political leanings but for me reading saving capitalism by Robert reich and other works by Thomas Piketty like capital in the 20th century or if you’re interested in labor history maybe works by Rudolph Rocker were quite interesting.
@tegarcho todo u realize the president has weapons of mass destruction, and every solider has the fire power to bring a roman legion in a couple of minutes. Also maybe machiavelli wrote what he wrote cause the prince paying his bills was machiavellianism, in the pop definition of the word.
Democracy traipsing as one day a year event (election day), wasn't a real democracy to begin with. If there was democracy everywhere in all aspects of our society, oligarchy couldn't survive democracy.
That is a good question for sur tho I think the US system wasn't really that effective for democracy in the frist place. (there 0 limitation on how much funding or where they get the funding) vs other country got some type of regulation leting smaller party be able to take the power if ppl are really piss off. (exemple I think in Canada we got a max number of money you can put in the funding for politic and it likely ilegal to take money form 3 party (tho am may be wrong and there likely corruption in it if it isn't legal) Any way the point is more that the gouvernement and law maker don't try to control the oligarchie (and also that capitalism is still seen as god in usa and socialism see as the devil whene they aren't black and white)
We don't live in an oligarchy - remember when we all went out to vote and that decided the outcomes, that's democracy. Remember when billionaire Michael Bloomberg ran for the Presidency but didn't win it despite all that money - that's because of democracy.
It does tend to devolve into it. Tell me, do you think it's better to place the protection of the republic in the general populace or in an aristocracy?
Shout out to the Chinese immigrants whose exploitation help build the railroads, as well as other industries and infrastructures. We need to acknowledge them as part of the American history, more often. Shout out to the other immigrants, former slaves and poor folks of all hues who did the same.
Cheri Ann, does that include white immigrants as well? I'm not trying to start a fight , but so often when people say things like you did it's under the false notion that white people have ever only be the oppressors and have never suffered, which is bullshit, just look at the history of the Irish in America.
@@hermaeusmora2945 You should check out the fascinating story of the Rainbow Coalition. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton worked with confederate flag-waving white Southerners to fight poverty. They provided medical clinics and breakfast programs, entirely by and for the community. Sadly it fell apart when the government raided and shot Hampton in his sleep. As Hampton said "You don't fight racism with racism, you fight it with solidarity": www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/black-panthers-young-patriots-fred-hampton
@@hermaeusmora2945 The Irish are included in "other immigrants," and/or "poor folks of all hues." Capitalism exploits ALL -- though only some groups continue to be stigmatized to a greater degree, because of skin color. One cannot look at a fair-skinned person and determine if their ancestry lies in England, Poland, Scotland, et cetera, but people can be identified as being of African or Asian descent. The practices encoded in our nation's laws (Jim Crow laws, for example, or those that stated Chinese folks couldn't testify against white people, in court), have left dark legacies and divisions. Honestly, my point was just to acknowledge a few groups that history tends to ignore or misrepresent.
@@hermaeusmora2945 they literally said "and poor folks of all hues." Yes, it's a race issue, but it's also a class issue, and it's also a gender issue. That's why we need intersectionality in our politics. Nothing in life is that simple, but we can recognize the factors at play
I think the reason why there seems to be less resistance to this kind of rising oligarchy and income and wealth inequality is probably two-fold. Not only do companies and billionaires own many of the forums and means of protest and disagreement, but also there has been a cultural shift in our understanding of this reality. Through the use of media, they've manufactured consent and made the narrative to be "changing the system is by participating, succeeding and reaching its top". This kind of message is everywhere in our culture and is often visible in shows and films where they try to tackle systemic discrimination and inequality issues in a seemingly "deep" way.
Hold up kowalski, you have a youtube channel and don't bother putting videos on it. Get it together brotha, I need more barely intelligible audio of political musings from the great state Nebraska to complete my majority report bingo card.
Funny The Gilded Age is brought up when we’re currently experiencing the largest wealth gap since The Gilded Age. Maybe not funny, but you know what I mean...
@@jameelalom2961 the "circus" is the spectacle-- whatever it is ,like media, or sports, or anything performative-- put in *front* of the masses to entertain them. we are not the circus, we are given the circus, in exchange for complicity in our own subjugation. it's part what people farther up are talking about when the violence of the old labor movements is compared to the tepid protests and low morale/hopelessness of today. there's too much else to do, too much comfort to lose. the "bread" just means bread. (life necessities.)
On that respect, some people believe that in the wake on the pandemic a new Golden 20 decade is about to happen. We all remember what happened after that...
@@geraldmerkowitz4360 i dont think so i read a pdf on how the poor and the rich got affected by corona and apperantly it only took a few months for the rich to recover while its estimated that its going to take 10 years for the poor to come back to their regular state. Considering how the poor have been shit on by the system for such a long time now, i think they are going to be fed up. I dont think we are gonna see a golden age. I think we are gonna see a lot of revolutions and civil wars all over the world which will cause massive immigration to europe which they cant handle anymore. This in turn will give rise to right wing populism which has already become popular and might get them to win. This will make people from third war countries that already hate europe make their goverments even more fascist since european right wing populists are very clear on how much they hate brown/black people. And if every country is right wing then every country will want to protect itself from the othee by having a war. Also dont forget china basically dominating the world and corona virus helped it speed up its way to becoming a global superpower. Yes. Yes i am a pessimist. How did you know? 😂😂
this is why I don't like the idea of putting old ppl or their collective,culminated historical peer pressure ('tradition') on a pedestal-- a fair amount of the time it only means continuing old notions and refusing to self-examine and act on changing their possible limitations, to a dangerously stubborn level of defensive toxicity. Think about how many actual slaveholders had, had to die off before American civil rights truly kicked off in the 60's and even then there were horrific struggles; to be frank, I hate, I resent to think how it'll be the same with universal basic income and universal housing, all the more so b/c of medical tech being consumed by old ppl who likely proclaimed themselves to be 'too down to earth/'blue collar' ' and not nerdy when they were younger --and that's just focusing on the 'already privileged' English speaking parts of the world, not to say how many still painfully refuse 'to share' (i.e. let immigrants in, make socioeconomic mobility more --feasible etc). '_' I d---n well realize how I have 'to be consistent' in living up to those words by the time I reach the apparent 'post-retirement' demographic myself :I ..
@@noticias6111 Agree. And I hate how conservatives always conserve the worst things. Never the environment, old crafts, or trade unions; its always the isms and phobias. Its tragicomic how they are obsessed with the past, but never learn from it.
In regards to what Musk said about regulation stifling innovation: most research funding is public. Private industry almost exclusively iterates on publicly-funded inventions (the technology of iPhones, electric cars, and search engines, etc) then claim credit for the whole thing. So when they say that 'innovation' is being stifled by regulation, what they're really doing is replacing the word exploitation with innovation because all they really care about is finding new sources of income. It's not about advancing society in any meaningful way.
@@deriznohappehquite Americans are obese because we're overworked, have poor food quality, and poor education on health. Not to mention it's hard to eat well-made meals when everyone is in signs-parent homes now.
I once saw this image that said that if someone lived for 80 years and earned an average of $5,000.00 every day of their life, they still wouldn't be a billionaire, but rather have about $150,000,00.00. At the bottom of the image was a line that said that no one works to become a billionaire.
If you'd use 50% of said money in SP you'd be a billionaire lmao Inversely if you bought that much in Bitcoin for that long you'd have 500 billion dollars
The flaw in that is that no one has “earned” a billion dollars, but rather they are WORTH a billion dollars by amassing assets. There is a huge difference.
@@Mr_Case_Time THIS PERSON GETS IT, most of these ultra rich individuals are rich on paper. If they tried pulling out 10% of the system the stock price would drop like a rock
@@chris0000924 exactly. People that hate billionaires for being billionaires don’t really understand business economics. Even small business owners really only get to keep a small portion of their profits (if any at all), since most of it is used for expansion, hiring, advertising, etc.
One thing Frank Herbert taught me with his Dune books is that there is a bottled up energy that once released will steam roll everything, there is ALOT of hatred brewing in this world to those who stole the dreams of billions and when the time comes Carthage will look like a fairytale and the salt that will poured will bury them so deep that humanity will remember it in their bones
Don’t try to learn “deep principles” from fiction because the author gets to construct the world and the story where the proposed “deep principles” hold true. So ofc the author’s ideas won’t appear wrong.
@@michaelqiu9722 fiction is always based on day to day ideas. A good writer (and the one from Dune is one) usually need to develop a sociological, anthropological and phylosophical point for their work to be relevant. It's true that it doesn't mean that, automatically, everything written in a best seller is an unwavering truth... but if people like it, sadly (sometimes, because Mein Kampf is a thing) it means that the people believe the ideas and the principles, and at the end of the day, we are guided by those. Society is just a global ideological construct interdevelop through diferent theoretical avenues make practical. Is all just an illusion, just the dream of a bit more intelligent group of monkeys that have built empires just from a few thoughts. That's why books are censored. Leaders know that ideas can change society... and changing society can fuck them up. That's why writers are dangerous.
I feel like there could be a whole episode dedicated to corporate boot-lickers, the kinds of folks that not only voraciously consume product but lash out at those that don't
Michael, thanks for creating content that spreads class consciousness. Most of the time it feels like screaming into the void and you even get blowback from mushbrained bootlickers. How can we can we change that? Anyway, good on you for doing what you do. Keep it up bro.
We can start with this: ignore the mushbrain bootlickers and keep advocating for what is right. Protesting en masse in the capitol was an option until the Q psychos tried to take over.
The US has unions (UAW and Teamsters are two big names) and the NLRB. But the unions and the NLRB can do jack if the middle-class jobs get shipped overseas.
Part of me misses the good old days of raising an army and storming a castle, beheading a rich king and taking their wealth. It just doesn’t work like that anymore.
*"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."* Marly Krushkhova and Josef Virek Count Zero by William Gibson (1986)
The idea "anyone" could become a millionaire or billionaire with the proper idea and work ethic exists in basically the same way as winning the lottery tomorrow. While technically it is possible, the percentage and general chance of it happening is so small it's negligible. It's like telling someone that the .01% of bacteria leftover from using hand sanitizer might kill them.
Even if "anyone" can become rich and successful (although that's highly unlikely), everyone can't become successful in this system. As long as few people are allowed hoard such large amounts of capital, the majority will always be left impoverished.
Politics is playing the same game Coke and Pepsi played. The rivalry made them BOTH richer, and the common man was made the sucker. The bailout and citizens united marked the end of the US even trying to pretend it wasn't an oligarchy. The new generation just considers it a fact of life. Carlin would weep.
I think part of the reason that there isn't as much violent reaction to growing inequality is _infrastructure._ The car has isolated the vast majority of us from each other, there aren't masses of people working in the same coal mine or railroad as before. We can't all discuss things over lunch or on days off, we can't collectuvely realize how badly we're being screwed- because we've become so separated, physically.
I have another perspective on this infrastructure problem, and that would be the infrastructure itself. We live in an era where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a society that is not geared towards comsumism. Because of this, many people view the possibility of overcoming this (and in turn, stop validating the existence of billionaires) with extreme hostility.
"Why is there no outrage against the modern Gilded Age?" Because of Individualism. The modern narrative is that you can be rich too if you work enough part-time jobs. The modern narrative is that we live in a post-class society. Members of the gig economy do not perceive themselves as member of a socioeconomic class. Instead, they search for faults in themselves or other individuals. And thus, there aren't mass movements if there's no shared identity amongst people to rally behind.
@@SumerianScientist1 ... Someone having more DOES mean others have less, because there is a limited amount of resources and money available. It's really that simple. No one will ever work enough in their lifetime to deserve a billion of any currency, and even less several billions, and having so much when millions are starving in the streets and barely capable of surviving is immoral. I've yet to hear a single argument to convince me otherwise and I can assure you you're not going to find one.
@@SumerianScientist1 lol they amassed their wealth from sucking the blood of their workers, and the American taxpayers & government (not to mention taking advantage of what is essentially modern day slave labor).
@@chris0000924 it doesn't matter how much paper you print, what matters is the amount of real, tangible wealth a government has. If we print more money than we really have, money loses its real value and having more amount of money will be meaningless because it won't be worth anything. If poverty could be solved by "let's just print more money lol" no one would be poor. Think about reality for more than five seconds please.
Great episode! I would love to see one on the "modern day opiate of the masses" which really does keep people docile and inattentive to the economic inequality looming over them. As a millennial, I can tell you that travel is one of those opiates. The amount of friends I have in their 30s that still live with roommates and have low paying jobs, but weather it all as they look to that one trip abroad on their calendar is innumerable. Video games, porn, concerts, and even social media all serve to distract and therefor impede change. I would love to see you guys' take on this.
I think the uproar isn't as load now as it was during the Gilded Age is due to two factors. 1: such actions are incredibly taboo, I always hear people shaming those who riot even when it's most justified. 2: technology has allowed these billionaires to essentially become big brother, being able to target individuals and blacklist them or whatever else to make it impossible to do anything. This is mere speculation though, I could be way off, I could be oversimplifying, I don't know, I'm just spitballing here.
It's never an all-or-none question. Some billionaires may have more honest intentions than others. However, self-made or not, most of them fail to be positively influenced by mass numbers of people. How can you do what's best for everyone without money, when you haven't lived in a lower-income homes in 3 decades or more? The problem with billionaires is not money, but responsibility.
@@cometomatt I very intentionally didn't bring a specific political viewpoint into my original comment because rabid anticapitalists can be just as toxic and rude. We just tend to agree with them so we ignore it
once you realize the finite nature of money only then do you realize how bad it is to have rich people in general and why it is better for everyone to have what they need as opposed to what they want
Most of your "self made billionaires" come from your upper middle class roots. Most took out loans from their parents, and even if they failed they likely had cooshie office jobs waiting for them at the end of that failure. They aren't a rags to riches story but a riches to riches story. Also I would argue it is harder to fight back against the billionaires because they tend to treat their direct employees well, and the employees that they don't treat well work in situations where they could just shut down that business/branch and open it up somewhere else under a different name.
Renting workers, selling these workers lifetime back to the workers for more of their lifetime: make profit. Use profit to gain more control to rent more. Continue.
I had a very simple answer in my mind when you asked we "you guys are thinking". Eat the rich. Obscene wealth simply should not exist, especially not as long as there is poverty on this planet. People with such obscene wealth, even if they are "philantropes", get to decide on what they want to improve, and it might not always be the optimal thing to improve. For example, Gates' fight against Polio - it certainly is an applaudable effort, and it has gotten very far. But by now, there are even many scientists, as far as I'm aware, that question the effectiveness of the program, considering how many other illnesses still persist and how far polio has already been pushed back. The attention should be refocused on other illnesses - but Gates gets to decide. Why does he have the right to decide such a thing? Huge amounts of wealth simply justify too much influence, both on the domestic and the world stage. It is, in itself, undemocratic, and should not exist.
Of course people earn a billion dollars - they head up a company through contractual arrangements and create products that scale and bring in revenue accumulating to many billions. That is earning a billion dollars - without their work, it wouldn't have happened.
@@designeedesigner6182 I think you meant to say without the work of all the laborers it wouldn’t have happen. No one earns a billion dollars. Lots of people work and one person takes a larger share of the profits. Yay capitalism!
@@mabatch3769 @Designee Designer is right. As much as people love to complain about the disparity in income, laborers can be replaced with pretty much anyone but it takes someone special to orchestrate it all into execution.
@@designeedesigner6182 As Mabatch pointed out, they steal the surplus labour from their numerous workers (which is a lot), and accumulate and hoard all this capital over multiple generations. Even if you think one person should hoard all this money while the rest of the world has to deal with multiple problems, these people don't deserve it anyway
Not taxing carbon emissions is an incentive to pollute. Therefore emissions credits are not as much a subsidy for EV makers as a tax on polluters. Of course, a much better system would be an across-the-board carbon tax.
They thought they were the be-all end-all of our society- that their wealth and title was more important than our rights, freedoms, and quality of life.
You know you don't have to work for a rich boss right... Or buy the products that indirectly support rich people. You choose to participate in capitalist society.
@@mouwersor right, like you choose to be born into and live in a society, like you choose to not starve, choose to seek shelter, and choose to do more than survive- this ‘you choose to live in a capitalist society’ is a wealthy cop-out
The boom and bust cycle works almost like clockwork now. I forget whose quote this is about market crashes and bailouts, but it’s been said “We socialize the risk, and privatize the profits. “
That’s why organizing as working people is so important. To get to that point, it takes a lot: strategies, tactics, plans, conversations. There’s more working and poor people than there are billionaires. Also, big ups for the labor history and depictions of workers fighting
Is it that you're a subscriber, have activated the bell, and have set your settings correctly (settings/notification/general), yet you're still not being notified? Is that the problem? If yes and if you have a VPN and can make youtube think you're outside the US using it, try that. (I don't use a VPN and don't know if you can just always make it seem like you're outside the US. If you know what you mean by that.) I suspect they hide such videos only if you're in the US.
the reason we don't see the same push back is because we literally can't afford to. We're constantly overworked with barely enough to eat and pay rent, better yet additional utilities, luxuries, and experiences and we're thus forced to focus on keeping ourselves afloat. We can't fight against the powers holding us down because we are barely given the resources and ability to hold ourselves up, better yet push back against what is pushing us down.
We just accepted this is how it is and attack those who question the system, unlike the pre-gilded age people who knew alternate working systems, we never knew anything else.
The problem cannot be solved so simply by one solution, and especially in such a bloody way. Get to know better the Great French Revolution, because as a result, the fighters for democracy and justice themselves became the murderers of their own population, seeing in everyone an imperialist
@@marioronci5338 the point is not to go there, but prevent it to happen. taxing the rich is one of the bloodless solution but will hurt billionaires a little(poor guys). but that won't happen if their puppets are controlling the government isn't it?
Wealth will always flow to the SAME KIND of people. All over the world. All throughout time. Because wealth is a product of human activity and abides by definite rules. Reality does not care what we feel. It only responds to what we do.
That Elon Musk segment is missing important context. The man is not against regulation at all, there is good regulation and bad regulation. He has openly stated that AI needs proactive regulation, not reactive regulation: thenextweb.com/neural/2020/02/18/elon-musk-everyone-developing-ai-must-be-regulated-even-tesla/ Most regulation is reactive, and that can be a boon and a problem. Take seatbelts for example, and how car companies lobbied against them for many years. Which is insanity. Also, those ZEV credits? They are absolutely necessary. Especially, if we want to combat climate change. All these companies that produce cars that effect our climate for the worst need to buy credits from companies that produce green cars, essentially to support them and make them grow. Elon Musk's company is not the only one that benefits from it, all green companies do. So it always makes my head spin when people complain about those credits... because the alternative is not having them... which is worse for our climate. And even if that regulation is taken away, as of now Tesla would post a profit regardless if they have those ZEV credits. So, does he complain about regulation? Yeah, just like everyone, if its bad regulation that hampers people more than helps, sure maybe. No one is perfect though.
Billionaires can't become Billionaires without taking advantage of people. They'll do anything to remain at the top, and they never have to see the ladder of bodies they climbed up.
@@corieydadon Absolute truth. You can't amass 1 billion dollars through work alone. That much money is not only totally unnecessary, it's reserved for only the most powerful of the owner class. As a matter of fact, with wealth comes power and influence. Once you get that high on the ladder, you can make the rules whatever you want.
You should read the book Capital in the 21st Century. The history cited in this video isn't very accurate. The reason for the wealth equality in the US after WW2 was due to WW2, which was a rare event. Capital has always accumulated and billionares are considered the natural state of capitalism due to scale (as you alluded to with the railway - but railways were not the first ways to scale things - there are reasons why most prosperous cities are nearby water afterall). The US post WW2 saw unprecedented equality but things are now reverting to the mean.
Join your local DSA, start an essential workers union, get organized, start marching, prepare for the general strike. Power concedes nothing without a demand. STAND UP
That Wallstreetbets point is true, unfortunately the idea of "corruption for all" is impossible as the nature of these underhanded trading tactics relies on someone making a loss. However, I feel as if the governments response by protecting the hedgefunds clearly shows how twisted the system is.
The very interesting thing, to me at least, in all this is that everything's made up, in the literal sense, yet very real in consequences. The material value of anything is in our time spent making stuff, and the stuff themselves, the food we eat, the houses we shelter in, the clothes we wear, our clean water, electricity, etc. Yet, we let be rules that make possible for a huge amount of people to have not even the opportunity of work, and a very select and lucky (as in bets that worked out rather than flopped, such as a the few inventions that made new industries) few people have all the say and power. Those rules are sustained by our very own following them and being punished by our peers when infringing them. A dead end of our own agreement, yet to which we oppose.
The only market that is fair is a free market. Tax should only be paid for protection of the rights of every citizen which is the right to be free and the right of ownership to what you own.
@@bingoberra18 That is an illusion, really. No markets are free for long. Players amass power and resources to stiffle competition as soon as possible. Who will be in the position of monopoly is mostly down to luck. Every economic endeavor is inherently risky. Those who win dictate. The rest scrambles for the leftovers. Do I know the solution? Not really, but simplistic views of market purity are not it, from my point of view.
@@gmoraesalvarez Well companies in a position of monopoly are usually the ones owning the most efficient companies (product cannot simply be made better and cheaper) or buying up them up. As long as there is a margin to be had on a product you can always produce it cheaper. Which is great for the market because the price gets lower. The problems I see with a completely free market is pollution and land ownership. Because as you say, a gigantic corporation can basically buy and hold land. I think one of the most basic "taxes" should be renting the land from the country and its inhabitants, but that is also a hard nut.
Kinda hard to organize when you’re distant from the people you exist (note I didn’t say live) or work around. If you only care about pizza and two other people you’re not standing in the cold one line, willing to get your skull cracked, or going without pay.
My family were the ones working on the railroads and in the mines. My great grandparents were the first ones to finish elementary school. My grandparents were the first to graduate high school. My mom and my aunt were the first to graduate college and went on to recieve their Master's degrees. I used to feel almost exclusively pride in that my family "dragged themselves up by their bootstraps." But the older I get, the more I realize that they were incredibly lucky. My grandparents had the sense to get out of that tiny mining town as newlyweds, using all of the little money they had saved and scraped and recieved as wedding presents. They grew up with so much poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, addiction, lack of education and health care and dentistry, etc. all around them and they didn't want to raise kids there. The system was built to work against them and keep them poor and they were lucky to break the cycle. My family managed a touch of class mobility, but too many people are stuck still. Things need to change. These corporations need to change. They took away family members from me before I could even meet them. They led to family members dying young. They disabled my great aunt at birth and grandfather through a life of backbreaking labor. Also, we all (hopefully) know about the exploitation and medical experimentation on black people, but race doesn't protect you much when you're that poor. They ran the same experiments on my grandparents as children and got away with it because there was a culture of blindly trusting doctors and government
The philanthropy aspect of the Robber Barons was just another aspect of ego. It was another form of conspicuous consumption. They were basically competing with one another for status of who could donate the most. Now this doesn't necessarily lead to bad outcomes, but the problem is that no single individual should have the right or ability to choose how that much of society's wealth is used. It should be a bit more democratic than that.
Bitcoin should be transparent and it isn’t as easy as people thinks it is, there are so many strategies to be learnt and unfolded about Bitcoin trading
*Billionares should not exist.* They should be *taxed out of existence.* There is no ethical reason for or means by which, anyone gets that rich. Millionare should be the max possible wealth. Also... it really doesn't help that people just don't realise how much a billion is compared to a million. We throw around such similar sounding numbers but get this: *If their wealth was seconds you could live, a million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.* And worse, close to none of us are even millionares.
Take Elon Musk. He was a billionaire before he started Tesla, if he was taxed out of existence then Tesla wouldn't exist. If Tesla didn't exist then it wouldn't have played a pivotal role in pushing development of the electric car as it has which will play a key part of addressing climate change. Is the small cost of having billionaires worth an alternate universe that has lost a major tool in fighting climate change? Go back further, Rockerfeller co-funded the Green Revolution. Without the Green Revolution in the late 1960s we wouldn't have ended natural famine. In that alternate universe billions more people would have died and crop shortages would still cause massive problems that they don't today. This irrational jealousy would lead to a worse world had we followed your ideas in the past. If we follow them now who knows what else it could affect, maybe we wouldn't have gotten Covid vaccines as quickly as we have, who know what the effect in 10 years would be from the businesses and products that never got going because of this arbitrary cap.
@@designeedesigner6182 Not to be dismissive but all I can say about what you've written is that its all hypercapitalist apologetics and BS. Also, almost all of the tech that is often claimed to come from these 'innovative' corporations was actually done by the state. Look at iPod tech - all by public research projects/the military. Not to mention, that these uber corporations only exist because of massive tax breaks and giveaways by corrupt governments over the decades. In a properly free market, companies like Tesla would have long since collapsed. Please do some homework.
@@mouwersor Its actually really interesting that you even to need to ask... such is the depth of the manufactured confusion inflicted on us all, I suppose. But in short, I am against it. I am against any and all companies and/or monopolies so large that they can practicaly buy whole countries - which some of them have already. Whether they 'earn' their size or not is immaterial to the threat they pose to democracy and global stability/peace.
@@satyasyasatyasya5746 you can say it's BS but where's your evidence? Where is your refutation of my arguments? No, the work wasn't done by the state - if that were true then the state would have invented the iPod. Our collectively knowledge is built upon research upon research. For as much as you can say - well the state invented the microchip, I can say - well private industry invented electricity which the microchip is based on. If we go back to 'whoever invented the first thing owns all subsequent innovations' then the state loses that battle. Saying they exist because of tax breaks is absurd - that's like saying that someone woudn't have $1000 had someone not come along and stolen $200 from them. Companies like Tesla would not collapse in a free market, they would thrive, as they are doing, as Apple is doing, as Facebook is doing, as Netflix is doing, as Microsoft is doing, as Amazon is doing. The fact that you would rather we didn't have amazing tech services that improve our lives because you have some vague, unqualified notion of not liking billionaires doesn't make your opinion valid. As for homework, please pick up an economics book - it would do you well.
Once I was listening to a round table discussion on NPR in maybe 2016 i think, just before Trump was elected. They were arguing about the future of the job market for blue collar workers with technology taking over many jobs. I remember it because one of the people speaking asked "what do we specifically do for all those workers who are out of work from say a factory?" Another person responded, "if they were smart they'd start their own business, find what they are good at, and make money doing it. Many people are creative and can maybe make money selling their art." The person who asked the question responded "what if they are not creative? Then what?" I don't remember how the conversation ended but I thought, he are supposedly the experts in the field of economics and the job market and yet they have no real answers to what to do when most of a work force is forced out from their jobs. If everyone is home making jewelry or making music and the robots work the factories, then who's not buying the crappy necklace or ignoring your mumble rap? Answer: the homeless living on the streets of L.A.
@@MoneyGist not hubris just pettyness also they haven’t gained much because they bailed out their own remember Melvin lost over a billion in a week..... some men just want to see the hedgies burn....
I thought you were going to compare the average life quality of the current citizen to the ones of the old era you were mentioning, i think this explains a lot to why ppl are chill
@@andrewraby8008 yeah...sometimes being "based" isn't always a good thing. Take Trump, a lot of people loved him for being "based" and giving no f's...other's hated his guts. While i appreciate Michael speaking his mind...sometimes he's quite off the mark, his love of Foucault for example.
@@mouwersor There a video call why Capitalist are a bad business. In short the goal of any Capitalist is to make a profit. You don't need to be good at business. The easy way is cut employee's wages. A lot of so called innovation of Capitalism come from the public sector not private. The amount of wealth of Billionaires have is insane. All of the say Billy Gate wealth comes from the working class. If Janitors, Nurses, Doctor or Retail Workers stop doing their job for just a day. Society would collapse. I would agree Bill Gates deserve all his wealth. If he somehow build every factory. Drove the trucks to deliver the software, Cleaned all the factories, Did the accounting. Billy Gate made his money by owning the rights to the software. He didn't write it himself thousands of his employees did. ua-cam.com/video/yP9Oj65OweI/v-deo.html
@@undeadblizzard "The easy way is cut employee's wages." Luckily in a free market people can choose a different employer, start their own company or choose not to participate in capitalist society altogether.
@@mouwersor Try to live off of all those fancy ideas of yours, about enterpreneurships and the like, in this conservative free market utopia. It's simply not sustainable.
One thing on boom and bust cycles, up until the industrial revolution they used to have disaster cycles. Basically the population grew, less and less fertile land was farmed to support the population which lead to regular famines and population decrease.
Cant wait for the next 5 generations to look back at our time and say "Yea this shit was ridiculous." One poor kid will be forced to read the opening chapter about minimum wage workers
the reason we don't see push back like in the past, is because we live now with a lot of amenities and distractions that people in the past didn't have. They had the pain of their reality more in their faces than we do. We have youtube and netflix now.
That and a lot of police departments have arsenals analogous to small militaries, tho Portland did show us how organized citizens can relatively easily resist police using less lethal munitions
Do we need some accelerationism?
And also we have secure access food, safe working environments, etc. people aren’t going to risk their lives because they have to live with roommates longer than they’d like to, or can’t afford the latest IPhone.
@@deriznohappehquite until sufficient amounts of fight fit people become infantile in those regards. Yet, that is unlikely.
A fake reality; is NOT reality. The next pandemic; which may be deadlier; will show people that they need to wake up. So will the next ten years; during which climate change will get even worse.
People can't seek comfort in Netflix when they're freezing to death; like in Texas for example.
There's no place you can escape reality. Silly smart phones are good for nothing in the end.
"No more bailouts for the rich" should be the easiest step one ever and we can't manage that.
Because companies have made sure to bribe politicians into stonewalling that idea.
To be fair, if the company goes belly up, the employees are out of a job. We could bail employees out instead, but how would they go on without a job?
Here's a thought: the free market can't work if we prop up failing companies. Bad ideas need to be allowed to fail. That's the whole point of competition. I guarantee if you gave that same money in bailouts to individuals that enough of them would use it to innovate and start new companies that within a few years everyone would be employed again. And best of all we wouldn't have a financial crisis looming over our heads as soon, since we got rid of the dead weight failure companies and made room for new innovative ones we'd have a healthy market.
@@CompuBrains27 I did the math, let's say one of the largest banks fails, that's basically a stimulus check for a month of rent and groceries, and only rent if you live in southern California (2000 a month for rent for small single rooms.) Now, for some companies it might work, but for others it wouldn't work well. Admittedly I only divided a billion, no idea how big the bailouts tend to be.
@@MrGamelover23 My replies to you keep getting removed automatically, I think it's because I was posting a Jon Stewart clip? Anyways in 2008 the fed gave $7.7T in 0% interest loans to banks.
I want to give a shout out to Michael, because even though everybody loved Jared as host, I think Michael does such a good job and I like his presentation style.
But I still miss Jared-sama though, perhaps one day...
I WAS JUST saying to myself "whats his name". the guy in the video is cool...but he never introduces himself.
Did Jared make his own channel with his own videos? I hope so but i can not find anything about it.
Too many self depricating gags with Micheal.
tbh i prefer Michael
Lex Luthor impersonator is such an accurate description
Wait? He's not lex luthor?
For real, Jesse Eisenberg take note on how to properly portray the character.
@@tecpaocelotl who else could he be?
@@tecpaocelotl r/wooosh
I dont wanna be rich I just want to be able to live comfortably while not working myself to death
That is possible even with bilionares .Sweden give you thar even though they have the biggest amount of bilionares per 250 000 capita
@@haydenmachonisse4031 well tell that to the people in Africa they are exploiting.
That’s all 99.9% of us want, but that 0.1% of us have about half the global wealth and don’t care about the fluctuations and problems that causes for the economy because they won’t suffer for their greed and misanthropic worldview, but we will. Capitalism is a broken system that only benefits the super rich and powerful.
@@ThePhantomBean I am african and i can tell you that the reason we are this way is because we have the most corrupt governments in the world
@@BlaiseTighe first of all someones wealth increase does not mean your decreases second of all living standards have improved significantly in the past 100 years due to capitalism.
Heeyyyy look who’s raising class consciousness and teaching labor history
@tegarcho todo I’ve read the prince and while it gives insights into the workings of power I don’t see the point of you posting it here. This applies best to feudal times and does not (as it did not exist yet) take into account the functions of industry and capitalism and the relationship between workers, the state, and corporations (the third party Machiavelli did not live to see)
@tegarcho todo but why
@tegarcho todo no it’s certainly something everyone should read along with the art of war and platos republic but my point was about its relationship to markets and labor history. Either way most people do not bother to learn anything besides who Kim kardasion is dating and so on so it’s good to be an educated voter. The nice thing about the internet is that you can get practically any text in pdf or audio format and learn while you work. Also on the note of understanding power, a good follow up to Machiavelli for me was Chomsky’s manufacturing consent. If you can put up with his left leaning attitude it shows the principles portrayed in both 1984 and the prince used in modern geopolitics particularly focusing on America. There are many other books however that also add context and history to the principles of Machiavelli. If you are interested economics however it is hard to recommend books without knowing your political leanings but for me reading saving capitalism by Robert reich and other works by Thomas Piketty like capital in the 20th century or if you’re interested in labor history maybe works by Rudolph Rocker were quite interesting.
I LOVE the direction this channel went "recently"
@tegarcho todo u realize the president has weapons of mass destruction, and every solider has the fire power to bring a roman legion in a couple of minutes. Also maybe machiavelli wrote what he wrote cause the prince paying his bills was machiavellianism, in the pop definition of the word.
What went wrong is that democracy can't survive oligarchy
Hard to criticize Russia when the US did it without explicitly supporting corruption
Democracy traipsing as one day a year event (election day), wasn't a real democracy to begin with. If there was democracy everywhere in all aspects of our society, oligarchy couldn't survive democracy.
That is a good question for sur tho I think the US system wasn't really that effective for democracy in the frist place. (there 0 limitation on how much funding or where they get the funding) vs other country got some type of regulation leting smaller party be able to take the power if ppl are really piss off. (exemple I think in Canada we got a max number of money you can put in the funding for politic and it likely ilegal to take money form 3 party (tho am may be wrong and there likely corruption in it if it isn't legal)
Any way the point is more that the gouvernement and law maker don't try to control the oligarchie (and also that capitalism is still seen as god in usa and socialism see as the devil whene they aren't black and white)
We don't live in an oligarchy - remember when we all went out to vote and that decided the outcomes, that's democracy.
Remember when billionaire Michael Bloomberg ran for the Presidency but didn't win it despite all that money - that's because of democracy.
It does tend to devolve into it. Tell me, do you think it's better to place the protection of the republic in the general populace or in an aristocracy?
Shout out to the Chinese immigrants whose exploitation help build the railroads, as well as other industries and infrastructures. We need to acknowledge them as part of the American history, more often. Shout out to the other immigrants, former slaves and poor folks of all hues who did the same.
Bring together the rainbow coalition to eat the rich? I dig it
Cheri Ann, does that include white immigrants as well? I'm not trying to start a fight , but so often when people say things like you did it's under the false notion that white people have ever only be the oppressors and have never suffered, which is bullshit, just look at the history of the Irish in America.
@@hermaeusmora2945 You should check out the fascinating story of the Rainbow Coalition. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton worked with confederate flag-waving white Southerners to fight poverty. They provided medical clinics and breakfast programs, entirely by and for the community. Sadly it fell apart when the government raided and shot Hampton in his sleep.
As Hampton said "You don't fight racism with racism, you fight it with solidarity":
www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/black-panthers-young-patriots-fred-hampton
@@hermaeusmora2945 The Irish are included in "other immigrants," and/or "poor folks of all hues." Capitalism exploits ALL -- though only some groups continue to be stigmatized to a greater degree, because of skin color. One cannot look at a fair-skinned person and determine if their ancestry lies in England, Poland, Scotland, et cetera, but people can be identified as being of African or Asian descent. The practices encoded in our nation's laws (Jim Crow laws, for example, or those that stated Chinese folks couldn't testify against white people, in court), have left dark legacies and divisions. Honestly, my point was just to acknowledge a few groups that history tends to ignore or misrepresent.
@@hermaeusmora2945 they literally said "and poor folks of all hues." Yes, it's a race issue, but it's also a class issue, and it's also a gender issue. That's why we need intersectionality in our politics. Nothing in life is that simple, but we can recognize the factors at play
I think the reason why there seems to be less resistance to this kind of rising oligarchy and income and wealth inequality is probably two-fold. Not only do companies and billionaires own many of the forums and means of protest and disagreement, but also there has been a cultural shift in our understanding of this reality. Through the use of media, they've manufactured consent and made the narrative to be "changing the system is by participating, succeeding and reaching its top". This kind of message is everywhere in our culture and is often visible in shows and films where they try to tackle systemic discrimination and inequality issues in a seemingly "deep" way.
Is it just me or has wisecrack been getting labor oriented lately and helping spread class consciousness.
Kinda hard to make smart content without pointing out the relevance of this historical movement IMO.
Hold up kowalski, you have a youtube channel and don't bother putting videos on it. Get it together brotha, I need more barely intelligible audio of political musings from the great state Nebraska to complete my majority report bingo card.
@@jasonMontalvo1 soon
They should be, things are getting progressively worse
Funny The Gilded Age is brought up when we’re currently experiencing the largest wealth gap since The Gilded Age. Maybe not funny, but you know what I mean...
I think about that a lot
Welcome to Gilded Age 2.0 we have better tech, but gain absolutely nothing from the ultra rich.
It’s the point of the video
The Gildedest Age
You don't mean "Haha"-funny. You mean "This is giving me anxiety, depression, and a brain aneurysm"-funny.
"Bread and circuses"
Our bread is as dry as in ye olde days but darn it the circus has never been more colourful and noisy.
Explain please? Are the masses the circus?
@@jameelalom2961 the "circus" is the spectacle-- whatever it is ,like media, or sports, or anything performative-- put in *front* of the masses to entertain them. we are not the circus, we are given the circus, in exchange for complicity in our own subjugation. it's part what people farther up are talking about when the violence of the old labor movements is compared to the tepid protests and low morale/hopelessness of today. there's too much else to do, too much comfort to lose.
the "bread" just means bread. (life necessities.)
History really does repeat itself if nothing is learned in the process.
On that respect, some people believe that in the wake on the pandemic a new Golden 20 decade is about to happen.
We all remember what happened after that...
@@geraldmerkowitz4360 i dont think so i read a pdf on how the poor and the rich got affected by corona and apperantly it only took a few months for the rich to recover while its estimated that its going to take 10 years for the poor to come back to their regular state. Considering how the poor have been shit on by the system for such a long time now, i think they are going to be fed up. I dont think we are gonna see a golden age. I think we are gonna see a lot of revolutions and civil wars all over the world which will cause massive immigration to europe which they cant handle anymore. This in turn will give rise to right wing populism which has already become popular and might get them to win. This will make people from third war countries that already hate europe make their goverments even more fascist since european right wing populists are very clear on how much they hate brown/black people. And if every country is right wing then every country will want to protect itself from the othee by having a war. Also dont forget china basically dominating the world and corona virus helped it speed up its way to becoming a global superpower.
Yes. Yes i am a pessimist. How did you know? 😂😂
this is why I don't like the idea of putting old ppl or their collective,culminated historical peer pressure ('tradition') on a pedestal-- a fair amount of the time it only means continuing old notions and refusing to self-examine and act on changing their possible limitations, to a dangerously stubborn level of defensive toxicity.
Think about how many actual slaveholders had, had to die off before American civil rights truly kicked off in the 60's and even then there were horrific struggles; to be frank, I hate, I resent to think how it'll be the same with universal basic income and universal housing, all the more so b/c of medical tech being consumed by old ppl who likely proclaimed themselves to be 'too down to earth/'blue collar' ' and not nerdy when they were younger --and that's just focusing on the 'already privileged' English speaking parts of the world, not to say how many still painfully refuse 'to share' (i.e. let immigrants in, make socioeconomic mobility more --feasible etc).
'_' I d---n well realize how I have 'to be consistent' in living up to those words by the time I reach the apparent 'post-retirement' demographic myself :I ..
@@noticias6111 Agree. And I hate how conservatives always conserve the worst things. Never the environment, old crafts, or trade unions; its always the isms and phobias. Its tragicomic how they are obsessed with the past, but never learn from it.
@@majacovic5141 I hope we'll be better old people.
In regards to what Musk said about regulation stifling innovation: most research funding is public. Private industry almost exclusively iterates on publicly-funded inventions (the technology of iPhones, electric cars, and search engines, etc) then claim credit for the whole thing. So when they say that 'innovation' is being stifled by regulation, what they're really doing is replacing the word exploitation with innovation because all they really care about is finding new sources of income. It's not about advancing society in any meaningful way.
This! Honestly, thank you! I don't know why people, even scientist and engineers, don't understand!
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich”
You say this in the midst of a great Obesity epidemic.
@@deriznohappehquite Sir, this is a metaphor
They make more money, while producing and hiring less. How can we not be happy?
I accept this Modest Proposal, I'll take my Musk raw and my Bezos with capers.
Let's do this.
@@deriznohappehquite Americans are obese because we're overworked, have poor food quality, and poor education on health. Not to mention it's hard to eat well-made meals when everyone is in signs-parent homes now.
I once saw this image that said that if someone lived for 80 years and earned an average of $5,000.00 every day of their life, they still wouldn't be a billionaire, but rather have about $150,000,00.00. At the bottom of the image was a line that said that no one works to become a billionaire.
If you'd use 50% of said money in SP you'd be a billionaire lmao
Inversely if you bought that much in Bitcoin for that long you'd have 500 billion dollars
The flaw in that is that no one has “earned” a billion dollars, but rather they are WORTH a billion dollars by amassing assets. There is a huge difference.
@@Mr_Case_Time
THIS PERSON GETS IT, most of these ultra rich individuals are rich on paper. If they tried pulling out 10% of the system the stock price would drop like a rock
why would you put the comma after the first 2 zeroes?
@@chris0000924 exactly. People that hate billionaires for being billionaires don’t really understand business economics. Even small business owners really only get to keep a small portion of their profits (if any at all), since most of it is used for expansion, hiring, advertising, etc.
One thing Frank Herbert taught me with his Dune books is that there is a bottled up energy that once released will steam roll everything, there is ALOT of hatred brewing in this world to those who stole the dreams of billions and when the time comes Carthage will look like a fairytale and the salt that will poured will bury them so deep that humanity will remember it in their bones
Don’t try to learn “deep principles” from fiction because the author gets to construct the world and the story where the proposed “deep principles” hold true. So ofc the author’s ideas won’t appear wrong.
@@michaelqiu9722 fiction is always based on day to day ideas. A good writer (and the one from Dune is one) usually need to develop a sociological, anthropological and phylosophical point for their work to be relevant.
It's true that it doesn't mean that, automatically, everything written in a best seller is an unwavering truth... but if people like it, sadly (sometimes, because Mein Kampf is a thing) it means that the people believe the ideas and the principles, and at the end of the day, we are guided by those.
Society is just a global ideological construct interdevelop through diferent theoretical avenues make practical. Is all just an illusion, just the dream of a bit more intelligent group of monkeys that have built empires just from a few thoughts.
That's why books are censored. Leaders know that ideas can change society... and changing society can fuck them up. That's why writers are dangerous.
I feel like there could be a whole episode dedicated to corporate boot-lickers, the kinds of folks that not only voraciously consume product but lash out at those that don't
I weened myself off water and now only drink Monster Energy
@@baconknightproductions8297 Sincerely disappointed it's not Brawndo
It would be over an hour long and full of idiots
Or just on the notion that there is such a thing as 'the free market' or that there ever could be works too.
Great idea! Also the commentor below who mentioned the free market doesn't exist.
It's all "predicated on an illusion"
(I love that line btw!)
Imagine working your whole life only to make a billionaire even richer
Ah so the answer is to start a business
@@chris0000924 there's another answer, comrade...
@@chris0000924 Until that rich do hostile takeover of your company, it’s what every major company does. Good luck competing against Walmart or amazon.
@@angelgjr1999
Interesting I assume you must've owned a business(sarcasm)
@@angelgjr1999 You mean buy your company, making you rich
Michael, thanks for creating content that spreads class consciousness. Most of the time it feels like screaming into the void and you even get blowback from mushbrained bootlickers. How can we can we change that?
Anyway, good on you for doing what you do. Keep it up bro.
We can start with this: ignore the mushbrain bootlickers and keep advocating for what is right. Protesting en masse in the capitol was an option until the Q psychos tried to take over.
There's Breadtube giving hot takes on such topics and then there's how this channel has averted such scrutiny so far ;]
try reading marx's capital :D
That´s because the US doesn't have unions. It's almost impossible for workers to stand up without an organization that supports them.
We do have unions and their corrupt extremely corrupt
The US has unions (UAW and Teamsters are two big names) and the NLRB.
But the unions and the NLRB can do jack if the middle-class jobs get shipped overseas.
Part of me misses the good old days of raising an army and storming a castle, beheading a rich king and taking their wealth.
It just doesn’t work like that anymore.
Battle of Blaire Mountain, August 25th 1920. The first time there was a bombing on American soil-- on it's own citizens
So the Tulsa massacre was later? Wow didn't know that! Thanks
West Virginian here. We are proud of Blair mountain. It is still the largest civil uprising in US history
@@themanwithnoname4385 the Civil War begs to differ
*"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."*
Marly Krushkhova and Josef Virek
Count Zero by William Gibson (1986)
saw a T-shirt that said "Im a corporation. Reward my bad behavior."
I want that
The t-shirt. Hand it over.
In American we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich - MLK
"So you finally got a based Wisecrack?"
"Yes"
"What did it cost?"
"Jared"
So everything?
Too right
They were based. Just quiet about it. :)
@tegarcho todo It was also written down in the 6th century, called Tao Te Ching
When Jared was around, Marx was mentioned pretty frequently
The idea "anyone" could become a millionaire or billionaire with the proper idea and work ethic exists in basically the same way as winning the lottery tomorrow.
While technically it is possible, the percentage and general chance of it happening is so small it's negligible.
It's like telling someone that the .01% of bacteria leftover from using hand sanitizer might kill them.
Even if "anyone" can become rich and successful (although that's highly unlikely), everyone can't become successful in this system. As long as few people are allowed hoard such large amounts of capital, the majority will always be left impoverished.
@@okamisensei7270 well someone has to foot the bill
@@Kalanchoe1 Why can't everyone collectively do that? A system for something like this already exists.
@@okamisensei7270 i didn't say how big the bill was or who had to eat it.
But it does happen every single day you just don't hear about it
Well businessman forming armed militia groups to carry out vigilante justice? Sounds familiar
Batman really is an antihero, isn't he?
That wouldn't be the War on Terror would it? ;)
Politics is playing the same game Coke and Pepsi played. The rivalry made them BOTH richer, and the common man was made the sucker.
The bailout and citizens united marked the end of the US even trying to pretend it wasn't an oligarchy. The new generation just considers it a fact of life.
Carlin would weep.
I think part of the reason that there isn't as much violent reaction to growing inequality is _infrastructure._
The car has isolated the vast majority of us from each other, there aren't masses of people working in the same coal mine or railroad as before.
We can't all discuss things over lunch or on days off, we can't collectuvely realize how badly we're being screwed- because we've become so separated, physically.
I have another perspective on this infrastructure problem, and that would be the infrastructure itself.
We live in an era where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a society that is not geared towards comsumism. Because of this, many people view the possibility of overcoming this (and in turn, stop validating the existence of billionaires) with extreme hostility.
"Why is there no outrage against the modern Gilded Age?"
Because of Individualism. The modern narrative is that you can be rich too if you work enough part-time jobs. The modern narrative is that we live in a post-class society. Members of the gig economy do not perceive themselves as member of a socioeconomic class. Instead, they search for faults in themselves or other individuals. And thus, there aren't mass movements if there's no shared identity amongst people to rally behind.
We may be social animals, but heck, humans really are always looking for ways to get out of the "shackles" of depending on other annoying humans.
"Billionaires: what went wrong?"
They exist.
Someone having more doesnt make you have less. What happened? People are stupid and think wealth is zero sum
@@SumerianScientist1 ... Someone having more DOES mean others have less, because there is a limited amount of resources and money available. It's really that simple. No one will ever work enough in their lifetime to deserve a billion of any currency, and even less several billions, and having so much when millions are starving in the streets and barely capable of surviving is immoral. I've yet to hear a single argument to convince me otherwise and I can assure you you're not going to find one.
@@zoeb3573
Lmao this person doesn't know they literally print billions per day.
@@SumerianScientist1 lol they amassed their wealth from sucking the blood of their workers, and the American taxpayers & government (not to mention taking advantage of what is essentially modern day slave labor).
@@chris0000924 it doesn't matter how much paper you print, what matters is the amount of real, tangible wealth a government has. If we print more money than we really have, money loses its real value and having more amount of money will be meaningless because it won't be worth anything. If poverty could be solved by "let's just print more money lol" no one would be poor. Think about reality for more than five seconds please.
Great episode! I would love to see one on the "modern day opiate of the masses" which really does keep people docile and inattentive to the economic inequality looming over them. As a millennial, I can tell you that travel is one of those opiates. The amount of friends I have in their 30s that still live with roommates and have low paying jobs, but weather it all as they look to that one trip abroad on their calendar is innumerable. Video games, porn, concerts, and even social media all serve to distract and therefor impede change. I would love to see you guys' take on this.
I think the uproar isn't as load now as it was during the Gilded Age is due to two factors. 1: such actions are incredibly taboo, I always hear people shaming those who riot even when it's most justified. 2: technology has allowed these billionaires to essentially become big brother, being able to target individuals and blacklist them or whatever else to make it impossible to do anything. This is mere speculation though, I could be way off, I could be oversimplifying, I don't know, I'm just spitballing here.
It's never an all-or-none question. Some billionaires may have more honest intentions than others. However, self-made or not, most of them fail to be positively influenced by mass numbers of people.
How can you do what's best for everyone without money, when you haven't lived in a lower-income homes in 3 decades or more? The problem with billionaires is not money, but responsibility.
I'm here 6 minutes after this was posted, and I'm sure the comments are going to remain polite, respectful and reasonable.
trump supporters enter the chat
@@cometomatt I very intentionally didn't bring a specific political viewpoint into my original comment because rabid anticapitalists can be just as toxic and rude. We just tend to agree with them so we ignore it
Lol
won't someone think of the CIVILITY!?!?!
THE N WORD!!!
once you realize the finite nature of money only then do you realize how bad it is to have rich people in general and why it is better for everyone to have what they need as opposed to what they want
Unions are the only hope.
Most of your "self made billionaires" come from your upper middle class roots. Most took out loans from their parents, and even if they failed they likely had cooshie office jobs waiting for them at the end of that failure. They aren't a rags to riches story but a riches to riches story. Also I would argue it is harder to fight back against the billionaires because they tend to treat their direct employees well, and the employees that they don't treat well work in situations where they could just shut down that business/branch and open it up somewhere else under a different name.
There is exactly *_ONE_* thing billionaires are good at- giving themselves more money; all else is irrelevant
Renting workers, selling these workers lifetime back to the workers for more of their lifetime: make profit. Use profit to gain more control to rent more. Continue.
I had a very simple answer in my mind when you asked we "you guys are thinking".
Eat the rich.
Obscene wealth simply should not exist, especially not as long as there is poverty on this planet. People with such obscene wealth, even if they are "philantropes", get to decide on what they want to improve, and it might not always be the optimal thing to improve. For example, Gates' fight against Polio - it certainly is an applaudable effort, and it has gotten very far. But by now, there are even many scientists, as far as I'm aware, that question the effectiveness of the program, considering how many other illnesses still persist and how far polio has already been pushed back. The attention should be refocused on other illnesses - but Gates gets to decide. Why does he have the right to decide such a thing?
Huge amounts of wealth simply justify too much influence, both on the domestic and the world stage. It is, in itself, undemocratic, and should not exist.
ihc
Wow, this is very similar to my video: "Economics of Cyberpunk 2077" - inequality peaks in cycles. Great work!
The economy needs to work for the working class.
So make gold and silver money again
The economy should work for everybody, shouldn't it?
@@ThatWhatIs393
Abolish the federal reserve and most problems evaporate after 1 year
@@ThatWhatIs393 Well it does when its not zero sum and is negatively skewed towards poor people.
@@ThatWhatIs393 The problem is the people with the money don't need the power and the people who need the money don't have the power.
"You can save on your water bill, by just eating it dry!"
A million seconds is about a week and a half. A billion seconds is 32 years. No one earns a billion dollars
They worked for it tho!!!!1111
Of course people earn a billion dollars - they head up a company through contractual arrangements and create products that scale and bring in revenue accumulating to many billions. That is earning a billion dollars - without their work, it wouldn't have happened.
@@designeedesigner6182 I think you meant to say without the work of all the laborers it wouldn’t have happen. No one earns a billion dollars. Lots of people work and one person takes a larger share of the profits. Yay capitalism!
@@mabatch3769 @Designee Designer is right. As much as people love to complain about the disparity in income, laborers can be replaced with pretty much anyone but it takes someone special to orchestrate it all into execution.
@@designeedesigner6182 As Mabatch pointed out, they steal the surplus labour from their numerous workers (which is a lot), and accumulate and hoard all this capital over multiple generations.
Even if you think one person should hoard all this money while the rest of the world has to deal with multiple problems, these people don't deserve it anyway
Not taxing carbon emissions is an incentive to pollute. Therefore emissions credits are not as much a subsidy for EV makers as a tax on polluters. Of course, a much better system would be an across-the-board carbon tax.
They thought they were the be-all end-all of our society- that their wealth and title was more important than our rights, freedoms, and quality of life.
They'll definitely wind up as the end-all, that's for sure.
You know you don't have to work for a rich boss right... Or buy the products that indirectly support rich people. You choose to participate in capitalist society.
@@mouwersor Yeah, sure, suuuuuper easy to just disengage from capitalism. You don't need a house, or food, or clothes!
@@mouwersor right, like you choose to be born into and live in a society, like you choose to not starve, choose to seek shelter, and choose to do more than survive- this ‘you choose to live in a capitalist society’ is a wealthy cop-out
@@mouwersor tell a South Korean to not work for Lg or Samsung, and he'll laught at your face. Ametica will be the same in time.
The boom and bust cycle works almost like clockwork now. I forget whose quote this is about market crashes and bailouts, but it’s been said “We socialize the risk, and privatize the profits. “
That’s why organizing as working people is so important. To get to that point, it takes a lot: strategies, tactics, plans, conversations. There’s more working and poor people than there are billionaires. Also, big ups for the labor history and depictions of workers fighting
"you can save on your water bill if you just eat it dry"
I feel you man
Snuck a Pinkerton reference in right at the last second.👌👌
UA-cam didn't list this video in my timeline.
Interesting.
Is it that you're a subscriber, have activated the bell, and have set your settings correctly (settings/notification/general), yet you're still not being notified? Is that the problem? If yes and if you have a VPN and can make youtube think you're outside the US using it, try that. (I don't use a VPN and don't know if you can just always make it seem like you're outside the US. If you know what you mean by that.) I suspect they hide such videos only if you're in the US.
the reason we don't see the same push back is because we literally can't afford to. We're constantly overworked with barely enough to eat and pay rent, better yet additional utilities, luxuries, and experiences and we're thus forced to focus on keeping ourselves afloat. We can't fight against the powers holding us down because we are barely given the resources and ability to hold ourselves up, better yet push back against what is pushing us down.
One of my favorite quotes: “Behind everything great family fortune lies a great crime.”
We just accepted this is how it is and attack those who question the system, unlike the pre-gilded age people who knew alternate working systems, we never knew anything else.
if someone wants to bring darwin to a social economic discussion, they have to remember that the flea is as fit as the lion it their specific niche
I think that the whole problem can be solved with 800 tombs, aka French Revolution Style
The problem cannot be solved so simply by one solution, and especially in such a bloody way. Get to know better the Great French Revolution, because as a result, the fighters for democracy and justice themselves became the murderers of their own population, seeing in everyone an imperialist
Sure and once the rich are killed so will anyone who opposes the revolution. History will repeat itself
@@marioronci5338 the point is not to go there, but prevent it to happen. taxing the rich is one of the bloodless solution but will hurt billionaires a little(poor guys). but that won't happen if their puppets are controlling the government isn't it?
Wealth will always flow to the SAME KIND of people. All over the world. All throughout time. Because wealth is a product of human activity and abides by definite rules. Reality does not care what we feel. It only responds to what we do.
Money and Power. That’s it.
That Elon Musk segment is missing important context. The man is not against regulation at all, there is good regulation and bad regulation. He has openly stated that AI needs proactive regulation, not reactive regulation:
thenextweb.com/neural/2020/02/18/elon-musk-everyone-developing-ai-must-be-regulated-even-tesla/
Most regulation is reactive, and that can be a boon and a problem. Take seatbelts for example, and how car companies lobbied against them for many years. Which is insanity.
Also, those ZEV credits? They are absolutely necessary. Especially, if we want to combat climate change. All these companies that produce cars that effect our climate for the worst need to buy credits from companies that produce green cars, essentially to support them and make them grow. Elon Musk's company is not the only one that benefits from it, all green companies do. So it always makes my head spin when people complain about those credits... because the alternative is not having them... which is worse for our climate.
And even if that regulation is taken away, as of now Tesla would post a profit regardless if they have those ZEV credits.
So, does he complain about regulation? Yeah, just like everyone, if its bad regulation that hampers people more than helps, sure maybe. No one is perfect though.
Seize the means of production! Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Billionaires can't become Billionaires without taking advantage of people. They'll do anything to remain at the top, and they never have to see the ladder of bodies they climbed up.
Lie
@@corieydadon Absolute truth. You can't amass 1 billion dollars through work alone. That much money is not only totally unnecessary, it's reserved for only the most powerful of the owner class.
As a matter of fact, with wealth comes power and influence. Once you get that high on the ladder, you can make the rules whatever you want.
Its strange that he just yadda yadda-ed slavery, like that also didn't have an autocratic wealthy social elite that tried to shape the body politic...
What?
Well, I don't know if it's a problem or not. But it's not gonna go away. Not until every damn one stops wanting to be the next billionaire.
One thing is clear to me, meritocracy or not, no one... NO ONE needs that much money, While EVERYONE needs at least 15 dollars an hour.
You should read the book Capital in the 21st Century. The history cited in this video isn't very accurate. The reason for the wealth equality in the US after WW2 was due to WW2, which was a rare event. Capital has always accumulated and billionares are considered the natural state of capitalism due to scale (as you alluded to with the railway - but railways were not the first ways to scale things - there are reasons why most prosperous cities are nearby water afterall). The US post WW2 saw unprecedented equality but things are now reverting to the mean.
So nothing about the bretton woods system? Damn you were so close
Ah damn, you beat me to it!
"unprecedented equality"
I think 1968 and 1988 night have something to say about that.
Is there a limit to the subjects that Johnny Sins can philosophically analyze???
Join your local DSA, start an essential workers union, get organized, start marching, prepare for the general strike. Power concedes nothing without a demand. STAND UP
Politicians have been saying that they would take action against monopolies and their abuse of power FOR YEARS! As you can see, nothing ever happens.
what first made you decide to become a peeDoughFile ?
That Wallstreetbets point is true, unfortunately the idea of "corruption for all" is impossible as the nature of these underhanded trading tactics relies on someone making a loss. However, I feel as if the governments response by protecting the hedgefunds clearly shows how twisted the system is.
What went wrong: Everything
Love that everyone knows the SNKRS app is trash
The very interesting thing, to me at least, in all this is that everything's made up, in the literal sense, yet very real in consequences. The material value of anything is in our time spent making stuff, and the stuff themselves, the food we eat, the houses we shelter in, the clothes we wear, our clean water, electricity, etc. Yet, we let be rules that make possible for a huge amount of people to have not even the opportunity of work, and a very select and lucky (as in bets that worked out rather than flopped, such as a the few inventions that made new industries) few people have all the say and power. Those rules are sustained by our very own following them and being punished by our peers when infringing them. A dead end of our own agreement, yet to which we oppose.
The only market that is fair is a free market. Tax should only be paid for protection of the rights of every citizen which is the right to be free and the right of ownership to what you own.
@@bingoberra18 That is an illusion, really. No markets are free for long. Players amass power and resources to stiffle competition as soon as possible. Who will be in the position of monopoly is mostly down to luck. Every economic endeavor is inherently risky. Those who win dictate. The rest scrambles for the leftovers. Do I know the solution? Not really, but simplistic views of market purity are not it, from my point of view.
@@gmoraesalvarez Well companies in a position of monopoly are usually the ones owning the most efficient companies (product cannot simply be made better and cheaper) or buying up them up. As long as there is a margin to be had on a product you can always produce it cheaper. Which is great for the market because the price gets lower. The problems I see with a completely free market is pollution and land ownership. Because as you say, a gigantic corporation can basically buy and hold land. I think one of the most basic "taxes" should be renting the land from the country and its inhabitants, but that is also a hard nut.
Kinda hard to organize when you’re distant from the people you exist (note I didn’t say live) or work around. If you only care about pizza and two other people you’re not standing in the cold one line, willing to get your skull cracked, or going without pay.
this topic alone should be monthly series
Walter Ruther should be taught in the same section as MLK and they need to stop watering him down.
My family were the ones working on the railroads and in the mines. My great grandparents were the first ones to finish elementary school. My grandparents were the first to graduate high school. My mom and my aunt were the first to graduate college and went on to recieve their Master's degrees. I used to feel almost exclusively pride in that my family "dragged themselves up by their bootstraps." But the older I get, the more I realize that they were incredibly lucky. My grandparents had the sense to get out of that tiny mining town as newlyweds, using all of the little money they had saved and scraped and recieved as wedding presents. They grew up with so much poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, addiction, lack of education and health care and dentistry, etc. all around them and they didn't want to raise kids there. The system was built to work against them and keep them poor and they were lucky to break the cycle. My family managed a touch of class mobility, but too many people are stuck still. Things need to change. These corporations need to change. They took away family members from me before I could even meet them. They led to family members dying young. They disabled my great aunt at birth and grandfather through a life of backbreaking labor. Also, we all (hopefully) know about the exploitation and medical experimentation on black people, but race doesn't protect you much when you're that poor. They ran the same experiments on my grandparents as children and got away with it because there was a culture of blindly trusting doctors and government
I’m pretty sure beaver pelts is what made the first billionaires in the United States I could be wrong
If you account for inflation. Sugar, spices, cotton, banana, slaves etc could be a reason too. Lol
@@mueffe1357 yeah but the first was mad beaver bro
This channel is underrated & underappreciated wow
The philanthropy aspect of the Robber Barons was just another aspect of ego. It was another form of conspicuous consumption. They were basically competing with one another for status of who could donate the most. Now this doesn't necessarily lead to bad outcomes, but the problem is that no single individual should have the right or ability to choose how that much of society's wealth is used. It should be a bit more democratic than that.
Bitcoin should be transparent and it isn’t as easy as people thinks it is, there are so many strategies to be learnt and unfolded about Bitcoin trading
The zenith of investment platforms deals mainly with Bitcoin and forex trading.. investing wisely
@@jacetaylor9200 I agree with you
Have been trading offshore, I’m yet to make my first 1000usd... any recommendable expert to trade with?
@@КсенияУткин get an expert to trade with, giving you the required mentorship for a successful profit outcome... piss of advice
But I learnt the hard way. Blowing over $5000acct side trading with no mentor or expert
Their existence in the first place
*Billionares should not exist.* They should be *taxed out of existence.* There is no ethical reason for or means by which, anyone gets that rich. Millionare should be the max possible wealth.
Also... it really doesn't help that people just don't realise how much a billion is compared to a million. We throw around such similar sounding numbers but get this:
*If their wealth was seconds you could live, a million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.*
And worse, close to none of us are even millionares.
Take Elon Musk. He was a billionaire before he started Tesla, if he was taxed out of existence then Tesla wouldn't exist. If Tesla didn't exist then it wouldn't have played a pivotal role in pushing development of the electric car as it has which will play a key part of addressing climate change. Is the small cost of having billionaires worth an alternate universe that has lost a major tool in fighting climate change?
Go back further, Rockerfeller co-funded the Green Revolution. Without the Green Revolution in the late 1960s we wouldn't have ended natural famine. In that alternate universe billions more people would have died and crop shortages would still cause massive problems that they don't today.
This irrational jealousy would lead to a worse world had we followed your ideas in the past. If we follow them now who knows what else it could affect, maybe we wouldn't have gotten Covid vaccines as quickly as we have, who know what the effect in 10 years would be from the businesses and products that never got going because of this arbitrary cap.
@@designeedesigner6182 Not to be dismissive but all I can say about what you've written is that its all hypercapitalist apologetics and BS.
Also, almost all of the tech that is often claimed to come from these 'innovative' corporations was actually done by the state. Look at iPod tech - all by public research projects/the military.
Not to mention, that these uber corporations only exist because of massive tax breaks and giveaways by corrupt governments over the decades. In a properly free market, companies like Tesla would have long since collapsed.
Please do some homework.
@@satyasyasatyasya5746 " In a properly free market, companies like Tesla would have long since collapsed." So are you for Tesla existing or not..?
@@mouwersor Its actually really interesting that you even to need to ask... such is the depth of the manufactured confusion inflicted on us all, I suppose.
But in short, I am against it. I am against any and all companies and/or monopolies so large that they can practicaly buy whole countries - which some of them have already.
Whether they 'earn' their size or not is immaterial to the threat they pose to democracy and global stability/peace.
@@satyasyasatyasya5746 you can say it's BS but where's your evidence? Where is your refutation of my arguments?
No, the work wasn't done by the state - if that were true then the state would have invented the iPod. Our collectively knowledge is built upon research upon research. For as much as you can say - well the state invented the microchip, I can say - well private industry invented electricity which the microchip is based on. If we go back to 'whoever invented the first thing owns all subsequent innovations' then the state loses that battle.
Saying they exist because of tax breaks is absurd - that's like saying that someone woudn't have $1000 had someone not come along and stolen $200 from them.
Companies like Tesla would not collapse in a free market, they would thrive, as they are doing, as Apple is doing, as Facebook is doing, as Netflix is doing, as Microsoft is doing, as Amazon is doing.
The fact that you would rather we didn't have amazing tech services that improve our lives because you have some vague, unqualified notion of not liking billionaires doesn't make your opinion valid.
As for homework, please pick up an economics book - it would do you well.
I feel like not regularly seeing our co-workers sucked into gnashing mechanical teeth on a daily basis helps with the not rebelling thing.
Once I was listening to a round table discussion on NPR in maybe 2016 i think, just before Trump was elected. They were arguing about the future of the job market for blue collar workers with technology taking over many jobs. I remember it because one of the people speaking asked "what do we specifically do for all those workers who are out of work from say a factory?" Another person responded, "if they were smart they'd start their own business, find what they are good at, and make money doing it. Many people are creative and can maybe make money selling their art." The person who asked the question responded "what if they are not creative? Then what?"
I don't remember how the conversation ended but I thought, he are supposedly the experts in the field of economics and the job market and yet they have no real answers to what to do when most of a work force is forced out from their jobs. If everyone is home making jewelry or making music and the robots work the factories, then who's not buying the crappy necklace or ignoring your mumble rap? Answer: the homeless living on the streets of L.A.
Billionaires go well with a side salad and an aged white wine.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had these kind of relationship since Mac 1😂🙈
The working class hero is something to be!
"and had no access to reddit" lmao great line
The lower class: stop taking all our money
The National Guard: so anyways i started blastin
They exist
And I took that personally
Why
That’s why you gotta get some Amc or gme to hurt the hedge funds and who ever associated with em
Lol
You know hedge funds are also profiting right not every hedge fund has shorted the stock many likely jumped on the boat and made a bunch of money
@@caesarion4975 yes but you need to factor in their hubris and their zero understanding of the the number of apes
@@yao592 Buying an investment to hurt someone else is the very definition of hubris and lack of understanding.
@@MoneyGist not hubris just pettyness also they haven’t gained much because they bailed out their own remember Melvin lost over a billion in a week..... some men just want to see the hedgies burn....
4:21 Drag race season 10 finale lol
That sums up all my wealth schemes " THAT FAILED TOO!!! ARRGGHHH!!"
I thought you were going to compare the average life quality of the current citizen to the ones of the old era you were mentioning, i think this explains a lot to why ppl are chill
Is it just me or does anyone else miss Jared?
Sometimes. But this dude is based as Fuck
With this I must agree.
@@andrewraby8008 yeah...sometimes being "based" isn't always a good thing. Take Trump, a lot of people loved him for being "based" and giving no f's...other's hated his guts. While i appreciate Michael speaking his mind...sometimes he's quite off the mark, his love of Foucault for example.
Okay, here it is, the moment I've been made for
*clears throat*
EAT THE RICH!
nailed it
It is vegan and gluten free!
At what point does someone qualify as rich? How do you differentiate between wealth gained from competence and wealth gained by exploitation?
@@mouwersor There a video call why Capitalist are a bad business. In short the goal of any Capitalist is to make a profit. You don't need to be good at business. The easy way is cut employee's wages. A lot of so called innovation of Capitalism come from the public sector not private. The amount of wealth of Billionaires have is insane. All of the say Billy Gate wealth comes from the working class. If Janitors, Nurses, Doctor or Retail Workers stop doing their job for just a day. Society would collapse. I would agree Bill Gates deserve all his wealth. If he somehow build every factory. Drove the trucks to deliver the software, Cleaned all the factories, Did the accounting. Billy Gate made his money by owning the rights to the software. He didn't write it himself thousands of his employees did.
ua-cam.com/video/yP9Oj65OweI/v-deo.html
@@undeadblizzard "The easy way is cut employee's wages." Luckily in a free market people can choose a different employer, start their own company or choose not to participate in capitalist society altogether.
@@mouwersor Try to live off of all those fancy ideas of yours, about enterpreneurships and the like, in this conservative free market utopia. It's simply not sustainable.
this was so depressing, but good video nonetheless lol. we need to rise up and DESTROY THE SYSYEM
One thing on boom and bust cycles, up until the industrial revolution they used to have disaster cycles. Basically the population grew, less and less fertile land was farmed to support the population which lead to regular famines and population decrease.
Cant wait for the next 5 generations to look back at our time and say "Yea this shit was ridiculous."
One poor kid will be forced to read the opening chapter about minimum wage workers