I think it started with the Mortgage Crisis and Bailout but even then Obama was didn't have the appetite to perp walk rich people and he caught lots of flack for his super mild and definitely warrant talk of Wall Street "fat cats".

But even still the GOP thought to run a super rich guy and their was lots of talk of the rich as Job Creators.

But you start to signs when you see the Rich as Villians in Hollywood movies and TV Shows. We've got from the stock villians being Arabs, and Russians in Action Movies to Tech Billionaires in kids movies like teh Incredibles 2.

But we really didn't turn the corner until Donald Trump was elected President. Even here there was talk that he must be a great businessman because he is so rich. I think Donald Trump proved to alot of Americans aren't necessarily smarter or harder working, alot just won the genetics lottery. In fact, Trump is going further to show that alot of the rich are rich by rigging the system or outright breaking the law.

And this SAT scandal, man this is manna from heaven for folks to show how much the game is rigged for the rich.

And this is while the economy is doing well supposedly. Just imagine if there is a major economic downturn.

People have been talking about a revolution for decades (including my pops) but I swear this feels like the closest we've ever been to one actually happening.

Or will this shit just pass and it will be the same ol same ol?





**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

>Or will this shit just pass and it will be the same ol same
>ol?

IMO.

the wealthy are sitting just laughing at rich people fucking up

With multiple companies like nikolamotor.com pushing a business model, for distance trucking, featuring the autonomous platooning concept--one seated person, acting as lead monitor of an autonomous tractor, with 2 or three other driverless rigs following directly behind it.
The future for traditional employees of that large industry is bleak.

Amazingly those trucks can brake on a dime and drive continuously for over 600 miles per charge. But beyond just CDL holders and those employed by truck stops and motels, even mechanics will be out of work--with the decrease of failed moving parts which battery power provide.

On top of Amazon fulfillment centers becoming increasingly less dependent on people, with no Labor Union representation (the real reason they pulled out of NYC) diminishing roles of people will continue.

Once all those begin to click into place as designed, I think outrage will ensue.

but we pulled back because of 9/11, support the troops and all

and people got rich off war...

weapons on one side tech on the other

And I don't mean the rich folks parotting humanist talking points to make themselves feel good inside, I mean the ones actually willing to part with wealth.

Like you have multi-millionaires campaigning on UBI/dividends for citizens, billionaires saying "no really, we should be paying more taxes" or pledging away their fortunes, etc

Did Marx ever dig into intra-class conflict? Like is this just a politicized version of the age-old "new money" vs "old money" tension or what lol

who makes GOOD money (like, more than most of the people I work with) who says the type of shit that used to be considered radical among that economic status. To be clear, it's nothing remotely crazy, just shit that you didn't used to hear from people like this regarding the morality of what corporations actually owe to the rest of us.

same ol same ol

the wealthy stay playin' us

there's always been resentment of rich people on some level, but I dont feel like it's any more than normal

These broke yokels are content worshipping a guy from New York who shits in a gold toilet so I'd say its probably decreased since the financial crisis, and occupy wall street stuff.

You might have a little more openness to people like Bernie and AOC, but I still dont see anything that qualifies as a shift.

Next recession we might tho

The below alone disproves the OP.

>These broke yokels are content worshipping a guy from New York
>who shits in a gold toilet so I'd say its probably decreased
>since the financial crisis, and occupy wall street stuff.

Trump's run was literally called the Flight 93 election.

A last ditched effort to save the country from, not sure what from the right wing perspective, but the metaphor signals that folks on the right couldn't deny that there was something very wrong and that the country needed something radical, or revolutionary to fix it.

That's the right wing intellectual view of it. The rank and file stupid yocals were sold on the idea that Trump will save them financially and make them more like him.

The idea that you too can become rich is the pipe dream that has made dummies protect our system for a long time. Trump being the huckster he is is really the first GOP candidate to shamelessly and explicitly told that lie to voters face. Yes it takes an awfully dumb person to believe a trump lie but they did. Now that that lie is being exposed, those yokels are slowly starting to see what's really going on.

Do you see the Repiblican party ever running another Mitt Romney type for President again? See Howard Schutlz. Last go round super rich Ross Perot was able to build some momentum behind the rich guy will fix it mentality. We see none of that with Howard Schultz.


And also Trump lost the popular vote so yea.



>The below alone disproves the OP.
>
>>These broke yokels are content worshipping a guy from New
>York
>>who shits in a gold toilet so I'd say its probably decreased
>>since the financial crisis, and occupy wall street stuff.
>


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

>those yokels are
>slowly starting to see what's really going on.

I know it's easy to find an article about Zeke the factory worker feels betrayed by Trump's trade policy, but on any kind of scale just about all these people still love this guy for telling it like it is, and protecting us from brown horde caravans, and fightin back against all this pc crap, and respecting our flag again by speaking out against those spoiled millionaires and their damn kneeling and what about hillary?

This dude just went to a disaster zone and signed bibles (on the front). everyone made fun of him, but the people whose houses and trailers just got blown off the planet loved him for it.

even if we going strictly anecdotal, I don't know a single trump voter who has even flinched in their support of him over the past two years.

and always will be.

But they're also not a big enough portion of the overall electorate to carry him to victory. He needed a pretty significant chunk of independents to either stay home or vote third party, and even then he barely won. This isn't like with Obama, where he could afford to lose a couple states form 2008 and still triumph in 2012, Trump needs to run at exactly (or better) than what he did when he had no record and was purely a hypothetical. And it's not as if he's won a bunch of former Clinton voters over since 2016, so he won't get help form there.

in those states he won that he can't likely pull this off again. There's a part of me that thinks Bernie is the only guy who could pull that off and bring some of those people over, but I'm also not convinced Bernie doesn't crumble in general election

i should also add that this is an out of my ass assessment based on zero research.

But Wisconsin and Pennsylvania went very strongly for Dems in the 2018 midterms, and if he loses those he can't win.

the system's own dysfunction has always enabled it... but grassroots responses like the labor movement, occupy, organizing across various interrelated sectors etc has kept it going. the flood of information we get from our allied peeps in solidarity across the world is a huge help in a global struggle.

I've been cheering the hell out of all of the recent teacher strikes. Good luck.

haha... it's crazy....when the moment came we were ready. which is what long game organizing is all about. i LOVED doing in the context of being an LA teacher in the often marginalized arts as well, and did so with the backdrop of rocking the news cycle as public teachers who want OUR youth learning in dignified conditions..and were in the strike line dancing in the rain to get it. our giant rallies were LIVE! even had aloe blacc sangin and having our backs with other powerful artists.

very intense at times, from stress of uncertainty, to the thrilling power of massing 50,000 deep and shaking the city hall building during negotiations to rattling the fuck out of the 1%ers by leading protests outside of their mansions at night. and then to come back onto the campus with the gains we earned, like 300 hired nurses, to the incredible respect from the students.
for a week LA was NO DOUBT the center of real resistance under this goon and his class, and each city this happens in is a manifestation of this... the strike was no joke and i'm blessed to have been a part of it.

how do you manage expenses during a strike? i think that fear keeps a lot of people from participating.

we really need more of this from all sectors.

>how do you manage expenses during a strike? i think that fear
>keeps a lot of people from participating.
>
>we really need more of this from all sectors.

Damn right we do.

Maybe it's more common than I think (I don't know for sure one way or the other) but typically strikes are organized by unions which is how they are able to take place, because unions keep people afloat while they aren't working.

That must've been so invigorating on so many levels. The courage it must've taken to stand up for yourselves and for the future/education at large in your community and the country in the face of such difficult odds, the subsequent feeling of accomplishment, witnessing the power of human collaboration and unity, etc. I admire you and your colleagues to the highest possible level. And glad it all worked out and that you feel like a larger movement was sparked by the work you did.

Also pretty incredible that Aloe Blacc was there singing ! Shit like that is not only cool as hell but lets you know you guys aren't alone. There's people behind you.

Always love hearing about these types of strikes from the ground level. I've been a part of several protests but never (and probably will never) been on strike.


>haha... it's crazy....when the moment came we were ready.
>which is what long game organizing is all about. i LOVED doing
>in the context of being an LA teacher in the often
>marginalized arts as well, and did so with the backdrop of
>rocking the news cycle as public teachers who want OUR youth
>learning in dignified conditions..and were in the strike line
>dancing in the rain to get it. our giant rallies were LIVE!
>even had aloe blacc sangin and having our backs with other
>powerful artists.
>
>very intense at times, from stress of uncertainty, to the
>thrilling power of massing 50,000 deep and shaking the city
>hall building during negotiations to rattling the fuck out of
>the 1%ers by leading protests outside of their mansions at
>night. and then to come back onto the campus with the gains we
>earned, like 300 hired nurses, to the incredible respect from
>the students.
>for a week LA was NO DOUBT the center of real resistance under
>this goon and his class, and each city this happens in is a
>manifestation of this... the strike was no joke and i'm
>blessed to have been a part of it.

like the way black churches did back in the day.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

would unfold. teachers, like clergy, are in every town and are on the pulse of community health and its most intimate measure - childrens' well-being. and with public sector union organizing for the most part still alive in many regions the capacity is there. and i don't see any reason for it to lose steam. many other nations already have a much more fully mature manifestation of the same phenomena in this and related sectors.

we need to make sure this impacts the lives of 1% families though, and part of that involves the charter system, in a financial sense, since their kids are often outside the system. we also need to move at a coordinated state and national level. at this local level in LA we have a ton of hollywood industry families impacted though, so it had even more resonance than neighborhood teachers and schools needing resourcing has. for example our union president (who has a wild bio in movement and teaching work) was a guest on bill maher's show and got a standing ovation since maher's sister is a teacher.

Maybe cause they know that the rich always funds, supplies, & hype up enemies to go at each other for profit, and those rich people usually the same race/religious people who claim everybody has been persecuting them since the biblical times.

History is always written from the point of view of the winner, the victor, not the schemer or the antagonist cause they make more money by being on the side lines & laughing at everyone else.

With the amount of "socialist" ideas out there and AOC getting on how unfair the ultra rich culture is. I feel there are shifts coming soon to the Americans views on the rich.

Remember when Obama got lambasted for saying share the wealth?


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

The GOP hates education and will use this as another way to show how the left and the Hollywood leftist liberals cheat their way into these indoctrination colleges.

telling their kids to skip college. Infact, a lot of them hate elite schools because they didn't get to go to elite schools.



**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

and some of them actually believe that shit.

I’m sure they won’t care about that, especially because obviously corporate Republicans still don’t align with the MAGAs

Becky certainly is a Romney Republican

and the 2008 collapse had everything to do with it. They were the only people who got bailed out, with the promise that it would trickle down to everyone else. Plus, there were several years where people who ordinarily would have become part of the professional class just didn't. If you graduated college between 2008-11, those opportunities weren't there, and by the time the economy stabilized, companies were looking more at new graduates. So those people just kind of got left out. It's never been more clear to *this many* people (including in the professional class) that it's a rigged game.

Now will this shift in attitude lead to any broad changes in the way this country works and our overall relationship to capitalism? I'm skeptical. But I have no idea why people are pretending like there hasn't been a shift in people's opinions of the rich, when there very clearly has (and Buddy's initial post summed up all the main points as to why.)

I can remember that debate here on this website years ago and I do believe there was a firm majority against it.

I think here and in society in general people have flipped on this issue because everyone sees how rich coaches and athletic departments profit off the back of unpaid athletes. It's not defensible to say athletes shouldn't be paid when schools make billions.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

say they don't understand why college athletes can't be paid. It's usually argued with a "free market" argument as opposed to an exploitative/labor rights issue. But I think we're at a tipping point where the public isn't going to keep buying the argument that it's for the student-athlete's protection/a scholarship is more valuable anyway.

Again, this probably won't change the NCAA member institutions stance on it anytime soon. But I don't think popular opinion is on the NCAA's side.

Marx is smiling.

Then it would be well-earned.

MAYBE a few more folks are 'turning on rich folks', but this is been being a thing for a looooooong time. It's all up in our music and our movies 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Lately, it seems like it is presented in a super lazy way where folks occasionally want you to believe that everyone who has some money is somehow bad, evil, overrated, dumb, unworthy of having money, whatever. Reality show byproduct surely. Then Robert Kraft gets caught getting hunnid-dollar handjobs and folks fall out of trees to say 'SEEEEE!?' and the stance has steam. Meanwhile, dude with Amazon is still chillin. Hella unpopular rich folks are doing all that they do in shadows and remaining mostly undetected.

Aka this shit will pass because folks will get broken up over something else. IE: do woke folks still care about Human Trafficking? Or was that just a multiplier to try get folks more mad at Kraft?

>I think it started with the Mortgage Crisis and Bailout but
>even then Obama was didn't have the appetite to perp walk rich
>people and he caught lots of flack for his super mild and
>definitely warrant talk of Wall Street "fat cats".
>
>But even still the GOP thought to run a super rich guy and
>their was lots of talk of the rich as Job Creators.
>
>But you start to signs when you see the Rich as Villians in
>Hollywood movies and TV Shows. We've got from the stock
>villians being Arabs, and Russians in Action Movies to Tech
>Billionaires in kids movies like teh Incredibles 2.
>
>But we really didn't turn the corner until Donald Trump was
>elected President. Even here there was talk that he must be a
>great businessman because he is so rich. I think Donald Trump
>proved to alot of Americans aren't necessarily smarter or
>harder working, alot just won the genetics lottery. In fact,
>Trump is going further to show that alot of the rich are rich
>by rigging the system or outright breaking the law.
>
>And this SAT scandal, man this is manna from heaven for folks
>to show how much the game is rigged for the rich.
>
>And this is while the economy is doing well supposedly. Just
>imagine if there is a major economic downturn.
>
>People have been talking about a revolution for decades
>(including my pops) but I swear this feels like the closest
>we've ever been to one actually happening.
>
>Or will this shit just pass and it will be the same ol same
>ol?
>
>
>
>
>
>**********
>"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then
>they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson
>
>"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-does-everybody-suddenly-hate-billionaires-because-theyve-made-it-easy/2019/03/13/00e39056-3f6a-11e9-a0d3-1210e58a94cf_story.html?noredirect=on


By Roxanne Roberts
March 13 at 12:21 PM

When did “billionaire” become a dirty word?

Maybe it was when former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz dismissed Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for higher taxes on fortunes of $50 million or higher as “ridiculous.”

Or when an audience atthe World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, laughed out loud at the suggestion that the super-rich should contribute more.

Or perhaps it was during the government shutdown, when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was baffled when federal workers went to food banks to feed their families. “I know they are, and I don’t understand why,” he said in a CNBC interview. Ross, a self-proclaimed billionaire and buddy of President Trump, suggested furloughed workers take out short-term loans instead.

Or maybe it was when Dan Riffle, an aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, coined a new progressive slogan: “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”

Schultz, who is worth an estimated $3.5 billion, told an interviewer that he doesn’t like being called a billionaire. These days, he prefers “a person of means” because billionaires have become shorthand for income inequality, tax cuts and special interests. Toying with a run for president, Schultz bills himself as a centrist alternative to liberal candidates such as Warren — and mocks her tax plan as unrealistic and unpatriotic.

“It’s so un-American to think that way,” he said with all the nuance and self-awareness of a man unaccustomed to either.

But Howard — can we call you Howard? — here’s the thing: Americans are starting to “think that way.” They’re starting to think that maybe it’s undemocratic for the richest 1 percent in this country to control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. In the 1950s, the average chief executive made 20 times more than their employees; now, chief executives earn 361 times more — about $13 million per year at the country’s top corporations. Those 2017 tax cuts? The primary benefits went to those who were already rich.

All this comes into sharper relief during tax season, when the average worker is crunching numbers and calculating how much of their annual income goes to the government. A January Fox News poll found that 70 percent of registered voters — including most Republicans — favored increasing taxes on families who earn more than $10 million a year.

This isn’t about blaming any specific billionaire, but a growing resentment that the richest people and corporations have somehow managed to get richer while most working stiffs are just one or two missed paychecks away from a food bank. It’s not a debate about marginal tax rates or the unregulated free market: It’s a gut feeling that the game is rigged, and the middle class and the poor are losing. The average American family can barely afford to send kids to any college, much less bribe their way into an elite university.

“I don’t think it really makes a big difference to someone in a steel plant whether Bill Gates is worth $10 billion or $20 billion,” says financial writer Roger Lowenstein. “It makes a lot of difference to him whether he’s making $40,000 with a good retirement plan and a good health-care plan or whether he’s making $60,000. And those types of jobs aren’t paying as well as they used to.”

For the record, estimates are that Bill Gates is worth $97 billion. Almost a third of the world’s billionaires are Americans, including the world’s richest man (and owner of The Washington Post), Jeffrey P. Bezos, who’s worth an estimated $131 billion.

And so the question of the moment — actually, of the 2020 election cycle — is this: Are billionaires contributing their fair share?

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is interviewed by Fox News Anchor Dana Perino for her "The Daily Briefing" program in New York. Schultz, who is a billionaire, is flirting with an independent presidential campaign. (Richard Drew/AP)

There was no federal income tax in the United States until 1913, almost two decades after Congress first passed a 2 percent income tax on the wealthiest citizens to curb the influence of big money in politics during America's first Gilded Age. That tax was struck down in the courts, and it took a constitutional amendment to finally enact it.

A century later, leaders of the second Gilded Age are equally resistant to higher taxes, arguing that chief executives are better suited to solve America’s problems than politicians.

During a panel on inequality at Davos this year, businessman Michael Dell (worth an estimated $26 billion) was asked what he thought about Ocasio-Cortez’s idea of a 70 percent tax on any income over $10 million.

The room erupted in laughter, knowing exactly what was coming.

“Wow, what a great question!” said Dell, shifting in his seat. The billionaire explained he felt “much more comfortable” donating millions through his private foundation “than giving them to the government. So, no, I’m not supportive of that,” he said confidently. “And I don’t think it will help the growth of the U.S. economy. Name a country where that’s worked. Ever.”

‘The United States,” answered Erik Brynjolfsson, head of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

What’s interesting, aside from the question of whether Dell’s personal comfort should factor into the tax code, was that he was unaware that from 1932 and 1981 the top tax rate in this country never fell below 63 percent and rose as high as 92 percent. It wasn’t until the election of Ronald Reagan that top tax rates dropped from 70 percent to 28 percent.

“For the last 40 years we have been living under a market fundamentalist ideology that you could trace to the Reagan-Thatcher revolution,” explains Anand Giridharadas, a progressive commentator and author of “Winners Take All.” He describes the basic tenets of that ideology: Government is bad, taxes are bad, regulation is bad — but rich people are not only good but will make the world a better place.

“We now know that this kind of winners-take-all philosophy allows the very fortunate, through rigging political power to assist their economic power, to basically monopolize the future itself,” he says. “I think people are well aware that there are some people who’ve managed to get themselves on the right side of every change. And most people haven’t.”



And yet billionaires, for the most part, have evaded criticism by branding themselves as great innovators, personifying the American ideals of rags-to-riches opportunity and hard work. (“If we did it, you can do it, too!”)

The 2008 recession challenged that narrative: An estimated 7 to 10 million Americans lost their homes; 8 million lost their jobs, and the average household lost a third of its net worth. Big banks got bailouts; homeowners didn’t. Only one banker went to jail, and Wall Street went back to business as usual, handing out millions in bonuses the following year.

The outrage bubbled up in 2011, when Occupy Wall Street took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park and camped out in other cities around the country. The protests made headlines with a message of economic inequality and corporate influence with the slogan “We are the 99 percent.”

Did anything change? Not really. The only lasting legacy of the movement is the term “the 1 percent.”

Then came Donald Trump, the populist billionaire who tapped into the grass-roots resentment of those left behind. Trump promised to restore their jobs and their dignity using his skills as a successful businessman and negotiator, says Giridharadas. To liberals critical of the president, he “literally became the definition of the elite charade of changing the world. He became the rich guy who says he’s fighting for the forgotten man while enriching himself. Win-win.”

Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut package was passed in 2017, with lavish assurances that the cut would boost economic growth for everybody. But the bulk of the benefits went to corporations and the richest Americans — who already have complicated portfolios of investments and deductions — not to average Americans.

In 2017, the median household income was $61,858. According to last year’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households by the Federal Reserve, 40 percent of adults said that they would not be able to pay for an unexpected expense of $400 without borrowing money, and 25 percent said they have no retirement savings or pension at all.
Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, who is a billionaire, speaks during an interview in Omaha in May 2018. (Nati Harnik/AP)
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is a billionaire, smiles during a picture with guests attending the "Tech for Good" Summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris in May 2018. (Charles Platiau/AP)

"I don't begrudge anybody making a million or hundreds of millions of dollars. I really don't," Joe Biden said last month. "But I do think there's some shared responsibility, and it's not being shared fairly for hard-working, middle-class and working-class people."

It’s fair to say no one likes paying taxes. Mark Zuckerberg (worth estimated at $62 billion) and his fellow billionaires point to their personal philanthropy, which is all well and good but not a substitute to paying into a federal system for public schools, infrastructure, courts, military and public health.

What’s fair? Blackstone’s co-founder Stephen Schwarzman was paid $786 million in 2017, adding to his net worth of almost $13 billion. He will not pay income taxes on the majority of those earnings, thanks to tax laws, deferments and other loopholes.

We don’t know how much President Trump has paid in taxes over the years, given that he has yet to release his tax records. When Hillary Clinton attacked him for paying zero federal income tax. Trump was unfazed: “That makes me smart,” he bragged.

That sentiment — billionaires are smart and know how to work the system, the rest of us are chumps — has sparked a new grass-roots movement for the rich to pay more. Warren’s 2 percent “wealth tax” targets people with a net worth of $50 million; those with $1 billion or more would be taxed 3 percent.

“The top 0.1 percent of Americans own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than all black households and a quarter of Latino households combined,” she says. “I’ve been talking about this extreme concentration of wealth for a long time.”

But — and you’ll be shocked, shocked — the richest Americans have not been enthusiastic about her proposal.

In a podcast last month, Gates said that politicians were “missing the picture” because most of the rich get their money from investments, which are taxed at a lower rate. That’s why Warren Buffett (worth an estimated $82 billion) famously says he pays a lower tax rate on his investment income than his secretary pays on her salary (earned income).

Two weeks ago, Buffett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “the wealthy are definitely undertaxed relative to the general population” but fundamentally, he doesn’t want to change economic policies that worked so well for so many years: “I don’t want to do anything to the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (worth an estimated $55 billion) was more blunt about Warren’s proposed tax, saying it “probably is unconstitutional.”

“We need a healthy economy and we shouldn’t be ashamed of our system,” he said during a January visit to New Hampshire. “If you want to look at a system that’s noncapitalistic, just take a look at what was perhaps the wealthiest country in the world, and today people are starving to death. It’s called Venezuela.”

Venezuela! There are many reasons for the country’s tragic collapse, but the only word that matters at the moment is “socialism.”

“Republicans and these plutocrats just love Venezuela,” says Giridharadas. “They want to convince us that the choice is plutocracy or gulags. Anyone talking about significant change in the system is a communist.”

The taunting label was the trigger word at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference: In addition to a five-minute video denouncing progressives, socialism was the go-to word for speakers to wake up the crowd. “You know what the biggest threat to America is?” thundered former White House staffer Sebastian Gorka. “Not socialism in Moscow, socialism here! In America!”

Which brings us back to Howard Schultz. Here, in America, he’s having a hard time making the case for billionaires.

At an appearance at SXSW last weekend, Schultz said he thinks taxes should be raised on the wealthy but hasn’t figured out the details. He said economic inequality is bad, but he loves the free market and thinks progressive Democrats are pushing “socialism.” When asked to define it, he responded: “If you want a good description of socialism, just look at Venezuela.”

The audience fell silent. A few people booed. “You don’t like that?” he asked the crowd.

It appears that being a really rich CEO does not prepare you for the campaign trail. Schultz said he was still mulling a White House run: “Give me some time to kind of feel my way through.”

Tick, tock, Howard. The 2020 clock is ticking, and waits for no billionaire.

Why do we hate the rich? Because of fucking disparities, because of stratification, because of the hoarding of resources.

That's easy. You get less for the same or more work. To top that off, while driving down wages, corporations (see: CEO's, Boards, etc) began to outsource jobs overseas for fractions of what would be paid here. This created more for the rich class and less for the middle class.

Add to that, anytime one of their industries pulls something shady that screws the US economy (see sub-prime loans), WE all end up paying for it (too big to fail and all). The public has floated the Auto industry, the Aerospace industry and the Banking industry all within the last 19yrs.

Yet, most Americans can't get a decent raise to keep up with the growing cost of products that have gotten remarkably cheaper to make (via outsourcing).

And now, the final waves of that = tax law that makes the middle class even poorer coupled with the growing boogieman of automation.

I swear, it wouldn't surprise me if this wasn't either

A) Some global scam to reduce population growth (the Slow-Thanos) so that we ease up on global warming and resource usage or

B) A plan to stockpile money/resources for the most wealthy as they've found a new viable/livable planet and intend to leave us all behind on this dying rock sometime in the next 25 yrs.

But to your point, it's changing because the pain is hitting home in the middle class more than ever.

Problem is, because of their influence, billionaires are great at distraction and creating narratives that facilitate dissension among the people who could end the imbalance if they united.

wealthy getting wealthier, meanwhile more middle class and poor people being shown how truly disposable they are.

Things started to swing in 2008 after the financial crisis. Grossly Simplified, but regular people got wiped out. A few rich folks had to sell off a few yachts, but mostly walked away unscathed after perpetuating massive amounts of financial fraud. Oh yeah, the wealthy people who were responsible for the crash also walked away with a massive bailout, while regular people had a lifetime of wealth wiped out, and no real prospects to replace it.

I'm not saying we're on the cusp of a socialist revolution, but we're getting a massive economic restructuring one way or the other.

That restructuring is hopefully one that's more equal, but if it's not that we're heading toward trillionaires and lots of people being permanently unemployed.

Good or bad, it's not about to be the same ole.

kickbacks and other bullshit these people receive to open a new hub that pays shitty wages.

I reject the binary way we tend to talk about these things.

Life is not extreme. We live in the gray areas. Even saying "poeple are starting to hate the rich" is too simplistic


its more accurate to stay that people are starting to understand that the super rich are not the saviors that we once thought they were..that hyper-philanthropy is a shell game where the super rich get to pretend to solve problems that they themselves have created, and use that as a PR shield while they rip us all off.

the rose colored glasses are coming off...and i'm happy to be alive to see this shift.

d

>its more accurate to stay that people are starting to
>understand that the super rich are not the saviors that we
>once thought they were..that hyper-philanthropy is a shell
>game where the super rich get to pretend to solve problems
>that they themselves have created, and use that as a PR shield
>while they rip us all off.

wrt Howard Schultz. I feel like in 2004, even 2008, people might have been responsive to a billionaire talking about how he was going to use the same skills as a CEO to fix the country using vanilla platitudes and vague nonpartisan phrasing.

Nobody wants to hear this now, though.

Like I don't expect a revolution today or tomorrow. or even in the next decade.

Big Ideas are 20-30 years in the making.

It took the ideas of Barry Goldwater 20 years to go from extreme fringe to mainstream.

AOC is just a harbinger for things to come.




>I'm not saying we're on the cusp of a socialist revolution,
>but we're getting a massive economic restructuring one way or
>the other.
>
>That restructuring is hopefully one that's more equal, but if
>it's not that we're heading toward trillionaires and lots of
>people being permanently unemployed.
>
>Good or bad, it's not about to be the same ole.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

I agree that the Great Recession changed a lot of things.

America has imported more warlord theocracy from Afghanistan than it has exported democracy.

So we should be skeptical about any impression about a societal shift on anything.

Every one of us now fine-tunes our media to avoid hearing from people we don't like hearing from. Maybe the societal shifts are just shifts in what part of society we're aware of.

And maybe I'm dead wrong and just out of the loop, and in my own bubble where I'm not noticing movement but i'm not really seeing it

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223211/worker-teacher-strikes-2018-record


A record number of US workers went on strike in 2018
Working-class Americans haven’t been this fed up with their employers since the 1980s.
By Alexia Fernández

Campbell@AlexiaCampbellalexia@vox.com Feb 13, 2019, 3:00pm EST
SHARE

Striking workers picket outside the Ritz Carlton in Boston in October 2018 after thousands of employees walked off the job at seven Marriott-owned hotels in the city. Michael Swensen/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Last year’s labor unrest started with a teachers strike in West Virginia and ended with Marriott workers picketing across four states.

A record number of US workers went on strike or stopped working in 2018 because of labor disputes with employers, according to new data released Tuesday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A total of 485,000 employees were involved in major work stoppages last year — the highest number since 1986, when flight attendants, garbage collectors, and steelworkers walked off the job.

The increasing number of workers involved in labor strikes suggests that average Americans are not experiencing the “economic miracle” that President Donald Trump has described. They see the economy expanding and profits growing, but this doesn’t extend to their paychecks.

Frustrated public school teachers were behind the year’s largest walkouts, but hotel housekeepers and steelworkers also organized strikes that lasted for days.

Working-class Americans haven’t been this fed up with their employers since the 1980s, as this chart shows:

Work stoppages had decreased in recent decades.
US Department of Labor

To be clear, not all 485,000 workers involved in the stoppages were on strike. That number includes people who couldn’t work because employers temporarily shut down operations during the walkouts. It also includes lockouts, in which an employer refuses to let workers do their jobs when they are involved in a contract dispute.

But nearly all of the 20 major work stoppages in 2018 involved massive labor strikes, which ended up boosting wages for thousands of workers. And public school teachers fueled a lot of the resistance.

Here are the four largest strikes of the year, based on workdays missed and number of employees involved.

The Arizona teachers strike
Arizona teachers organized the largest walkout of the year last April. About 81,000 teachers and school staff didn’t work for six days, adding up to a total of 486,000 lost days of work, according to the new data.

Teachers in the state were protesting low pay and cuts to public education funding. Like the teachers who went on strike in West Virginia and Oklahoma, teachers in Arizona are among the lowest-paid in the country and have suffered some of the deepest cuts to public school funding — largely a result of steep Republican tax cuts that didn’t bring the promised economic windfall.

Nearly all of the state’s 2,000-plus schools closed during the walkout.

The state’s teachers returned to class on May 4 after the state legislature gave them a 20 percent salary raise over three years, and some extra funding for public education.

Teachers didn’t get everything they wanted, though; they had asked legislators to raise business and income taxes on wealthy Arizonans to restore cuts to public education and boost anemic teacher salaries. Republicans gave in to some of the demands for more funding, but they’re not paying for the salary hike with new taxes on the wealthy.

Instead, the legislature passed a fee on motorists and shifted most of the cost of desegregating schools from the state to taxpayers in low-income school districts. Those levies will largely hit working- and middle-class households.

Arizona teachers were inspired to go on strike after watching teachers in Oklahoma demand higher pay earlier that month.

The Oklahoma teachers strike
Oklahoma educators organized the second-largest strike of 2018 back in April. About 45,000 school teachers and staff refused to go to work for nine days, adding up to a total of 405,000 lost days of work.

Oklahoma’s teachers were rebelling against years of deep cuts to education that have left 20 percent of public schools on a four-day-week schedule and average teacher salaries that rank 49th lowest in the country.

Teachers in Oklahoma demanded $3.3 billion over the next three years for school funding, benefits, and pay raises for all public employees. Many state employees joined the strike as well. They rallied for days at the capitol in Oklahoma City, prompting nearly half of the state’s 500-plus school districts to shut down (the schools that closed serve about 75 percent of the state’s students).

Nine days later, the teachers union returned to work. They got $479 million in extra school funding from state lawmakers, including raises, a fraction of what they wanted.

The West Virginia teachers strike
Teachers in West Virginia launched the first major strike of the year in February.

A total of 35,000 educators and school staff didn’t go to work during the stoppage, adding up to a total of 318,600 lost workdays.

Teachers in the state hadn’t gotten an across-the-board salary raise since 2014, and were among the lowest-paid teachers in the country. The average teacher salary in the state was $44,701 in 2016, according to the National Education Association, ranking West Virginia 48th in the nation in average teacher salaries.

Lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, have been cutting corporate and business taxes for more than a decade. As a result, public schools have been losing millions of dollars each year in state money, which is the main source of funding for local schools, followed by local property taxes. The amount of money the state of West Virginia now spends on each student is 11.4 percent lower than it was before the economy tanked in 2008.

So West Virginia teachers went on strike, shutting down all public schools in the state for nine days. The walkout ended after the governor and state leaders agreed to give teachers what they wanted: a 5 percent raise and a hold on increasing health insurance premiums.

The Marriott workers strike
The largest hotel strike in US history happened back in October, when 6,000 Marriott employees in four states refused to go to work until the company agreed to give them a raise and increase their benefits. By the end of the two-month strike, a total of 215,900 work days were lost.

In December, about 2,500 striking hotel workers in San Francisco ratified a new contract with the hotel chain after months of tense negotiations, according to their labor union, Unite Here. It was the final deal reached during the stoppage, which had spread to 23 Marriott hotels in eight cities.

Hotel housekeepers, bartenders, and other staff grew frustrated with Marriott over the summer, after the labor contracts for about 12,000 workers started to expire. They were trying to negotiate better contracts to replace the five-year contracts that were ending, but progress was slow.

By September, negotiations with the company had stalled, and workers across the country voted to authorize a strike. On Labor Day, police arrested 75 Marriott employees for blocking a street as they protested outside the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco.

The strikes came at a time when the company was making record earnings. In recent years, Marriott International has grown into one of the largest and most profitable hotel chains in the world. After buying Starwood Hotels in 2016, the company now runs more than 6,500 properties, including the Ritz-Carlton, Sheraton, and Renaissance Hotels. The company is valued at about $49.4 billion, nearly double the value of Hilton, according to Forbes, and made $3.2 billion in profits in 2017 alone.

The hotel chain’s workers wanted a larger share of that revenue. They argued that servers’ and housekeepers’ low wages (which vary by city) make it impossible to live in some of the nation’s most expensive cities. They also asked the company to ease strenuous workloads that often lead to injuries, and for more protection against sexual harassment and violence.

The new union contracts vary by city, but in San Francisco, housekeepers got a $4 hourly raise over the next four years. Right now, their median hourly wage is $23, according to the New York Times. Retiring employees will also get a small pension based on how many years they’ve worked at the company.

Marriott also agreed to provide GPS-enabled panic buttons for housekeepers to alert security staff if a guest makes them feel unsafe while they’re cleaning a room.

The new contracts ended months of loud, heated protests outside some of America’s most iconic Marriott-owned hotels.

The trend isn’t slowing down
There are no signs that worker angst has subsided. So far, in 2019, teachers in two major cities have launched their own strikes.

In January, Los Angeles public school teachers ended a strike that shut down the nation’s second-largest school district for more than a week.

As part of their deal with city officials, teachers agreed to a 6 percent raise and slightly fewer students in each classroom, according to Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, a labor union that represents about 34,000 public school teachers, nurses, librarians, and support staff in the city.

And more than 2,000 teachers in Denver are on strike right now. Educators want the school district to overhaul the compensation system, which relies heavily on bonuses that fluctuate wildly from year to year.

They also say their base salaries are too low for Denver’s high cost of living and aren’t keeping up with pay in neighboring districts. They’ve pointed out that the district has way more administrators than other districts of similar size, which eats into the school budget.

If 2018 is any indication, there’s a good chance that these new strikes are just the beginning.

'Cause I remember the eighties. You probably do too. They aren't really ancient history, and they weren't exactly a time of massive upheaval against the rich. I guess we could say there was a kind of "correction" in the early 90s where the general mood went from massively obsessed with greed to mildly annoyed with it. But that seems to happen every 30 years or so. I wouldn't call it a "shift."

I'm not saying there isn't anything going on. And I'm certainly not saying there's anything good about how we idolize wealth. I'm just saying it's always a little too tempting to say "this time it's different." It usually isn't.

Millenials are DEEP in debt and can barely buy a home. Student debt levels outta control. Auto loan debt outta control.

Shits going to get real in the next 10 years.