Public opinion used to matter, now they onow that they can get away with quite literally whatever they want.
They need reigned in.
If they can do anything, and we know humans are corrupted easily when given so much power, is there any other option to stop them, other than death?
You say this as if that weren’t the desirable option…
We should have a rule where you don’t get to talk tough until you have actual blood on your hands. It is so fucking tedious to have to read your coping, identical to that of an army of other impotent keyboard warriors. STFU and do it or just STFU.
Are you ok? Because you don’t seem to be ok.
Are you? When are you gonna do it, killer?
Turn off the internet, go outside and if it doesn’t work, seek help. You are hating the wrong people here.
I’m not so much a lone assassin kinda guy as an angry mob kinda guy.
we know humans are corrupted easily when given so much power
Are people corrupted by power?
Or is corruption a means by which people accrue power?
is there any other option to stop them, other than death?
Mass opposition movements can quickly defang a corrupt official. At the end of the day, you only have as much authority as other people are willing to give you.
But social networks of patronage give each individual a strong incentive to defend the corrupt organization as a whole. So the network only fails when an even greater number of dissidents stop taking orders.
Threaten the guillotines more aggressively. That’s what worked previously.
Better yet, start forming / joining militias, so we have some working class mobilization efforts going on.
Billionaires used to build libraries and hospital wings
Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rupert Murdoch laying down bricks. Are you sure those libraries weren’t build by workers?
Billionaires once bribed public officials to put their names on libraries.
But now we don’t fund library construction, so they buy the rights to naval warships instead.
Isn’t capitalism great? Aren’t you glad we’re not doing the Scientific Socialism thing?
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Tbh america should just rebuild their democratic system so it works for multiple parties
In my country we got over 10 political parties parliament
Unfortunately, laws are only able to be changed by the same group that stands to lose if something like that law gets passed. The system all but guarantees a two-party system eventually.
It guarantees a one party system.
The two party system only holds up when you have large, disparate regions when one party local government can operate independently.
The spoiler effect: obvious to literally everyone, except to those innocent candidates who must not know, bless their hearts.
Can somebody please tell me what that Citizens United ruling is all about ?
( Brit in Australia )
Citizens United is a Conservative nonprofit but people talking about it are usually referring to the court case.
allowing large corporations to wield disproportionate political power by allowing them to spend unlimited amounts of money to support their chosen political candidates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
AU Accessibility
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˙ǝsɐɔ ʇɹnoɔ ǝɥʇ oʇ ƃuᴉɹɹǝɟǝɹ ʎllɐnsn ǝɹɐ ʇᴉ ʇnoqɐ ƃuᴉʞlɐʇ ǝldoǝd ʇnq ʇᴉɟoɹduou ǝʌᴉʇɐʌɹǝsuoƆ ɐ sᴉ pǝʇᴉu∩ suǝzᴉʇᴉƆ
C> itizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court about campaign finance law, in which the Court held that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and labor unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United in a 5-4 decision, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing the majority opinion. All Democratic-appointed justices dissented.>
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
I am not a lawyer but as I understand the issue the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that money = speech, and since there is no point at which an authority can say “You’ve spoken long enough”, there is no point at which an authority can say “You’ve spent enough.” In public city council meetings people do get arrested if they speak considerably longer than the allowed time limit.
Just to add, there are still limits in place that prevent corporations from giving money directly to political campaigns or candidates, but there’s nothing that prevents corporations from telling people who to vote for or spending millions on ad campaigns in support of their preferred candidate.
So a given candidate’s campaign may raise only a modest sum, but they don’t need a lot of money to run ads when Megacorp A is willing to spend $1 billion on their own series of commercials to get them elected. And if that politician happens to provide favorable treatment to the corporation after they win, then it’s seen as an investment worth spending.
CU wasnt the first time SCOTUS ruled in favor of corporations being human, the first was not long after the 14th amendment
I’m going to correct you. Billionaires were also evil during the guilded age they literally burned company housing down with families in them and had the army shoot down stikers. The thing is people took up arms and we were able to gain some workers rights because the pedophile class was scared not because they were kind. After all that they started doing things like that to repair their reputations. We’re at the part of the story where an uprising is needed but the mass surveillance police state is being rapidly built in anticipation of this
That’s a stupid thing for them to build, too… it could easily inform the next “Terror” who to kill as well.
We can only hope
They rewrote the tax laws to get the tax breaks where they didnt have to do philanthropic works
if you wanted a single image or chart or graph to illustrate what happened and when, to get where we (the u.s.) ‘are’ today…
this is it.
The wage gap between working people (the 90%) and the ultra-rich (the 1%) is also pretty comprehensive:
Therein lies the problem.
Thank you for sharing this, OP.
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JFC. Would be interesting to have this adjusted for inflation as well!
You know, I don’t think inflation will make much of a difference in this case
Edit: I looked it up. $1 usd in 2000 is $1.94 in 2026 money. So… Amount in 2000 is $36 million. Not quite the 2.6 billion today
Before, the millionaire/billionaire was raised with the classist attitudes that often included charity works for the masses to keep favor with “the people” despite the horrible working conditions that they often kept the lower classes in. Orphanages, libraries, schools, hospitals, homes for the disabled, etc were all on the board for these kinds of “giving.” Of course there was no secret who donated, if their name wasn’t on the building.
Now the donations come with strings attached, rights to any profits from the research these facilities generate, naming rights, tax writeoffs, and can even be donations to charities already owned by a family member or someone already a subdivision of a subdivision of an LLC owned by a parent company of the billionaire.
The modern wealthy are completely divorced from country and city. They no longer build a mansion and improve the town they built it in…now they own several mansions in different countries and the real status symbol is the private jet. The ability to go anywhere at anytime without any strings attached.
Wealth redistribution, American style
This goes to show America is a democracy for coorporations only. If you are a natural person, you are merely a wage slave.
