sakodak

Or they just use the gig to grift. Seems like there would be a lot of opportunities to take bribes in a position like that.

https://cwa-union.org/trumps-anti-worker-record

I'm sure others can back up the other claims, but you said "ANY."

I mean, yeah, but this is like showing a picture of the alphabet and saying "this is spot on for so many books."

< looks around at Western countries with militarized police forces, brutal suppression of protest, and high incarceration rates >

"This is fine. Tankies are authoritarian."

Clinton signed into law a whole raft of neoliberal policies that were started by Bush, and the cumulative effects of those policies over those decades are what we're feeling right now and what we warned about back then. The frogs have been boiled while the populace bickers about which neoliberal corporate shill sits on the puppet throne. They're after all our money and they're getting it by distracting us with the political circus and dividing us with wedge issues.

Believe me, I'm with you. But a complication to this is that insurance companies employ millions of people. Nationalizing them needs to take all those livelihoods into account, and would be nearly impossible without going full on socialist (which I am completely for, I don't think it's feasible to continue a capitalist system when it is clearly breaking down and killing the planet while doing so.)

And the same people that own the media also own and operate the state.

I'm so glad this stuff is starting to finally bubble to the top of the public consciousness.

Now, everybody read Marx.

You're preaching to the choir here, friend. I've been trying to shake people on the shoulders and get them to understand this for a while now.

The slightest bit of material analysis exposes the whole thing, but the minute you add "Marxist" to that sentence everyone shuts their brain off because of over a century of red scare nonsense. As designed.

When you Google for "best whatever" and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.

You'll find many cases where the only post they've ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.

A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.

Here's me discovering socialism, new to the (actual) ideas but vibing with them pretty well.

Start talking about it online.

Anarchist: fuck you you stupid fucking tankie.

I had no idea what a tankie was, but I figured out real quick that anarchists are the angsty atheists of the political world.

We are boiled frogs in regards to fascism in the US.

Look at the facts:

We have the largest prison population in the world, which is mostly black. Slavery is still legal as punishment for crime.

We have a surveillance state that watches all of us all the time.

Dissent and protest results in brutal militarized police response.

We have militarized police. With tanks.

We scapegoat immigrants (Biden hardly changed any trump policies.)

Criticism of US policy and actions is instinctively seen as unpatriotic by a large number of citizens.

The existence of our country is largely due to the genocide of native Americans, but that really triggers the national cognitive dissonance.

The wealth of our country was in large part built on the backs of slaves, and continues today in prison labor, but also in regular workers who get a tiny fraction of the wealth they generate for corporations and billionaires.

We do not have a democracy. Corporations and billionaires have captured our government and control 80%+ of the media we consume, easily drowning us in the propaganda they want to push. Nobody is immune, not me, not you. The largest consent manufacturer in history is operating in front of our eyes, but we can't see it because it's the sea we swim in.

Corporations and billionaires control who even gets to run in national elections by promoting those that will toe the line. Why bother fixing the actual elections when you can just control who is allowed to get the job in the first place.

The fascism people are worried about came in quietly and made itself at home. It isn't a Hitler. It isn't a Mussolini. Hell, it isn't even a Trump (although he would make things much worse.) The fascists are who they've always been. Pick your name - corps and billionaires, the 1%, the bourgeois.

It's already here.