United States | News & Politics

Yeah, the gap between the wealthiest and everyone else literally does not matter at all, when it comes to 'motivation for revolution'.

The overall level/amount/condition of poverty is what matters. And let's be real, things are not nearly as bad in the US today as they were in France before the French Revolution. Not even close.

Fact is, if you magically bumped everyone up so that no one was making less than $75k a year, the wealth gap would be essentially identical to what it is now, because the gap between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the gap between 75k and hundreds of billions. But no one would be suffering in poverty, so would anyone care about the wealth gap, then? I seriously doubt it.

McDonald's charging $10-20 for shit-tier burgers in some of the US:

McDonald's is expensive now.

A double cheeseburger was a dollar a few years ago, sure. But it's almost that much for a single nugget these days.

A hash brown is 3.50 at the one by my office.

It only takes about 3% of the population to push effective revolution. That's still over ten million people. We might be getting close.

Ahhh so the Wall-E form of public control.

I can see it

Just offer free food and specially free opiates if they start a revolution. There's many means to a end

Conspiracies happen in secret. There's no hidden agenda, just the publicly-stated agenda.

America is a frog getting slowly heated in a pot of water. The only hope is to turn up the heat fast enough and high enough that the frog jumps out of the pot before it gets cooked

As if the US is currently a Democracy

Despite the current wealth inequality

It's not "despite" the gap, because the gap itself does not cause poverty. If the poorest person in the US made $75k/year (in other words, poverty completely eradicated), the size of the gap would still be pretty much exactly the same (after all, the difference between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the difference between 75k and hundreds of billions, which is the current net worth of those with the most wealth).

After all, 50 years ago, the gap was significantly smaller, but the overall incidence of poverty was much higher.

Someone's always going to have the most. And new wealth is constantly being created. And net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of cash (which is the primary reason it can go up as fast as it can--cash money simply can't do that). Given these facts, expect this gap to always exist (and almost certainly continue to widen), even after poverty is eradicated.

Careful, bub, there are people lurking who think this quite seriously

Not sure where you're getting your income percentiles from.

This site shows that 90th percentile (top 10%) household starts at $230k and 99th percentile (top 1%) starts at $631k.

For individuals the same site shows that the 10% starts at $150k and the 1% starts at $430k.

No dude you mixed some numbers up - 5%/yr of 440 billion is 22 BILLION dollars per year.

Unless you meant he could put 0.1% of his wealth (440 mil) to pull 22 million a year.

In fact, he could put less than half of his total net worth, 200 bil, into a basic savings account returning 0.5% a year and live off of a billion dollars a year, which is equivalent to the median income of 16,666 others.

What’s interesting is that this doesn’t even tell the whole picture.

Because those people earning $170k/year? More than likely their net worth is negative. They owe more than they’re making, and even at that income rate and excluding long term debt, they have just enough in savings to last three months max.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut

Rockefeller hid in his guarded home for years before he and Carnegie did their philanthropy PR stuff. Carnegie fled to England, and was putting out press releases that supported the Unions, while at the same time telling Frick to gun down the strikers. The gilded age was full of violence that created folk heroes to this day. Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid, Pretty Boy George, Al Capone. These people were absolutely loved by the masses because they would destroy all the paper that said that old widow Johnson still owed on her mortgage. Bankers were beaten, hung, and shot for attempting to evict poor people.

We may have revered Washington, but since The Gilded Age, lots of us were taught by our grandparents and great grandparents that the greedy have no end to their greed, short of a bullet to the brain.

Really, I think anyone considering themselves a Leftist needs to read False Witnesses and Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing." Both are excellent examples of why people don't change their minds when seeing indisputable evidence, they willingly go along with narratives that they find more comfortable. It explains the outright anger liberals express when anticommunism is debunked. That doesn't mean Communists don't do the same thing, but as we live in a liberal dominated west (most likely, assuming demographics) this happens to a much lesser extent because liberalism is that which supplies these "licenses" to go along, while Communism requires hard work to begin to accept. This explains the mountains of sources Communists keep on hand, and the lack thereof from liberals who argue from happenstance and vibes.

It's one of the main reasons our owner class has sought to mock the French with "surrender" slurs and "freedom fries."

They'd very much like the citizenry to forget Frances contribution to America and "western culture" over the last 200 years lest they get any ideas.

the propaganda machine seem to do its job better in the us

i saw someone else try to share a similar message on tiktok yesterday and the overwhelming majority of the american users referred theory as little more than "book clubs for intellectuals" despite the chinese & latin american users trying to defend its usefulness on the same post.

getting my feet wet with this reading list is making it clear to me that i'm still a heavily propagandized american liberal and some of the tiktokers who called it a book club had seemingly more knowledge of theory that I did, so i wasn't qualified to speak up. what would your response be to such a criticism?

funny how such a big anticommunist meaning to predict socialism just ended up predicting capitalism

I wouldn't glorify Orwell, he was violently reactionary, even Anarchists fighting alongside him questioned why he wasn't on the "other side." He had a deeply aristocratic worldview, admired Hitler, and despised the Working Class for their "stupidity." I recommend reading On Orwell as well as A Critical Read of Animal Farm.

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