We're definitely in a class war.

when they retreat to their gated enclaves…

we only have to keep them from getting back out, and the gates can be locked from the outside also.

In the age of telecommunications and internet they can do great damage without ever leaving their mansions/bunkers

It's not like they use any public services such as roads, airports, water, electricity, waste management, police, firefighting, EMS, etc., etc., etc. The nerve of us to ask the rich to pay their fair share to maintain everything that keeps society going. Shame on us all!

🧶🧶🧶🧶 1️⃣7️⃣8️⃣9️⃣

We ARE way past the HALL OF MIRRORS.

wealthy are doing great in their stock portfolios and we can't let the government get more of their measly 15% tax that they'll be paying on all of this after all of their other tax breaks

Where have you been for the last 50 years or so?

(I am joking around.)

It is not a question of 'thinking' the world would be better off, it is the truth. The fact that we have convinced so many other countries that this corrupted version of capitalism is anything other than a rich person scam is what is the most horrifying aspect of the 'legacy' of the United States.

We are going to be historically seen as no different than any other two-bit conquerors at the rate we are going. That is partly due to what I just said. Our desire to make the entire planet a capitalistic nightmare so we can control it all.

History is not going to be kind about it.

OK, if a person is just getting out of high school and only now coming to the realization that the rich have been exploiting this count since -- well since forever, welcome aboard. But if a person is an adult who has ostensibly living in the real world, for a decade or two, it is way past time to wake the fuck up.

We don't need "course corrections." We don't need a "return to normal". We don't need "solutions ar the margins".

We need to be thinking in revolutionary terms. And let's give the MAGA people some credit. They aren't very good at processing information to arrive at clear understandings and appropriate solutions, but dammit, they DO understand this system is really fucked up and we are all in big trouble if we can't overthrow this class of oligarchs

We actually have a lot more in common with the MAGA people than we do with the "moderates" and "Institutionalists" who have enabled this fascist machine to establish itself over the past 45 years. Talarico, Platner, AOC are talking to these people in terms they can understand. Trump is losing this crown. We need to take this opportunity to educate them and bring them to our side. I am not talking about the Confederate flag-waving racists and gun-totin' nut cases. They are lost causes. But there are many who have felt an affinity with MAGA because they sense just how fucked up the system is and nobody else was acknowledging that.

Eat the Rich.

I do agree that there exists a fed-up but malinformed demographic that has voted for Trump 1-3 times because of dissatisfaction with the current economic structures, but many more feel that Trump is going to raise their chances at grabbing the brass ring by lowering taxes, electrifying the economy, and handicapping the marginalized.
I’ve talked with a lot of younger males recently that are convinced they just one bit of knowledge away from the right hustle or market trade hack before joining the wealthy. There are day trader, stonks, prediction trader, influencer, and crypto success stories, but they by necessity involve concentrations of wealth which of course keeps more $$ off the table for the rest of us, including their fellow wishful traders. There’s a lot of people fed up with the system, but there’s also a lot of people who believe that higher taxes on the wealthy will come just at the time their investment in Fabiocoin or some MLM&Ms or real estate bogus purchase scheme pays off. We are now offering cash for older homes.
I know people in their 70s that still oppose progressive tax structures because they may hit the figurative or literal lottery. I guess the thought for all ages is if your dream is to have more than your fair share, why would you want a fairer distribution of wealth?

There may be 20 million that are so stupid or so racist as to be beyond any reach. We don't need them and should not be wasting any time with them.

But there are probably 25 million that are pissed off at Trump and the whole scene right now. They will listen to a populist message. But we need to speak in specifics, as Mamdani has done, as Platner is doing, and to some extent Talarico, although his preacher training makes his still pretty abstract.

We will not win simply by hoping people are so mad at Trump that they will vote for Democrats. And if we do not articulate any tangible plans, and then follow through if we do win the election, we will just be out again in 2028. And our "plans" can't just be about good government (voting rights etc). We must talk about how we will address the things that really animate people. This is health care, economic unfairness, privacy, ICE, the abuses of AI, the abuses of social media, holding billionaires accountable and taxing them heavily, and breaking up the most abusive corporations. And those are just categories. We need specific plans for each of those categories. We need to name names. We need to say what we will do about AI, for example.

Eat the rich.

the training did not work on you, I conclude you must be more intelligent than the average citizen

Mangione had the right solution.

That's fucked up. No normal person would advocate for something like that.

you're for gunning people down in the streets without due process? WTF

The others, not so much.

I'm reminded of an encounter my husband had a few months ago when the lottery was very high. He was at the liquor store and several people buying lottery tickets were discussing what they would do with the money if they won. An elderly gentleman turned to my husband and said "I'd walk up and down Main Street and give $1,000 to each person I pass". That pretty much says it all. Some people are about "ME", but the truly good among us are about "WE".

A married couple, who started their own company, worked hard and were good people, lived in a working class neighborhood. Well, once when the lottery was really high, Mrs. Custodian, said she would buy up a lot of houses and help get homeless people back on their feet. They had adult children, married, doing the best they could, but when the conversation turned to the lottery, she wanted to help truly desperately poor. She didn't say she was going to spend the money on herself or her family.

Thank heaven for them. Thanks for sharing this, cksmithy.

We have some of them that have power over us.

It is unfortunate but a reality of life.

Anybody that is voted into a government office has power over us.

A tremendous number of people that work in the government have power over us.

People that either vote with us or vote against us indirectly have power over us.

The Judiciary and law enforcement have power over us.

People that control economic institutions have power over us.

Fair or unfair it is a reality of life. We can never shake it. In previous times we may have been able to find a remote location and live our lives without anybody having power over us but those times are long gone.

he is responsible for an estimated 600,000 deaths in Africa, mostly children, from cutting USAID funding. He eliminated livelihoods for over 300,000 government workers, most of whom had families and communities they supported.

Democracy - choosing our own overlords -- has been subverted by the psychopaths. We must revive democracy, AND remove psycho-billionaires' abilities to destroy lives, governments, economies, and the environment. We are in a race against time to get them under control.

into a selfish, power hungry, psychopathic fascist".

hey, is that a pun?

They will not be happy until they have it all. That is the source of all struggles today.

do these people EVER have enough fucking money?

"the first thing we do, let's kill all the billionaires."

I approve this message......

what is that, some kind of Mangione thing?

however you want to interpret it.

...and I have YET to see one use their tax cut to improve the levees around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

And yet, somehow, we’re allowing them to rule everything and return nothing to the People. We get nothing for our tax money. No healthcare, education, food security, housing, jobs…..nothing.

They’ve managed to convince huge swaths of the country that not only is this acceptable but it’s desirable. This is how it should be, which is absurd. We’re allowing the greediest, most self-centered wealth hoarding scumbags to present themselves as victims. I mean, what the fuck are we doing?

We need a complete overhaul of this entire system.

And they aren't getting any more tolerable.

Capitalism is as inevitable as DNA, gravity, and an oxygen-containing atmosphere. The only choice you have is how you regulate capitalism. The human species is natively capitalistic, even in intangible values.

Capitalism is hard to avoid. It's a far-from-perfect system, but nobody's come up with anything better yet. Just about every country has capitalism to some degree, but they regulate it in different ways. How you regulate makes all the difference in the world. Capitalism in the U.S. needs to be regulated more. Some people seem to think that the few safeguards we have will keep the stock market from crashing again and causing a depression. It can happen, and it probably will happen. We probably won't do any serious adjustments to our economy until we have another depression. Seems we can't get anything done until we have a catastrophe.

In other words, is it just a "undesirable form" of capitalism we have or is it something else? When does quantitative decline in regulation amount to a qualitative difference. Isn't totally unregulated capitalism merely anarchism or the law of the jungle?
One of the basic aspects of capitalism is the willingness to commit capital to take on risk. What happens when risk is eliminated for the very wealthy? I would say that is a type of fraud that I have no name for - maybe some type of rent seeking - but not capitalism.

They don't want regulations on economics, but they damn sure want their shit protected. That's why they're attracted to fascism. Reminds me of what was done by Pinochet and the Chicago School of Economics in Chile. They've done these little experiments all over the world, thinking they're converting the economy to "pure" capitalism. What it boils down to is akin to feudalism. A few oligarchs will own everything and the rest of us will just work and rent, if they decide to let us live.

Semantics may vary - but in the main I agree with you. I am very concerned that with the imposition of a corporate surveillance culture.., to paraphrase you - they're locking it down for themselves. Goodbye social mobility. I think one of the best moves we can do is to counter or go around the surveillance by studying what others have done in oppressive states. Communicating old school - or using short burst radio. Installing our own cameras at strategic locations, etc. Learning about and implementing monitoring techniques used by intelligence operatives. Not for anything nefarious - but to simply better understand what the fuck is going on in our cities, counties and states - because the ground is moving under our feet.

That is how bad I hate them. I’m to the left of Bernie on this issue. I want to tax these greedy people out of existence.

with anybody making more money than me.

I don't like Bill Gates. To me he is an asshole. However, he created a company that employs tens of thousands of very high paying jobs. He also pays more in taxes in one day than I will in my entire life.

I'm also using his products to type this post.

I live in a neighborhood where almost everybody is richer than me. I get along with them. I want them to continue to make money so they can pay Social Security and Medicare for my wife and me.

I have a lot of problem with many kinds of injustice but hating on the rich ain't one of them.

are mostly made up of sociopathic leeches.....

Democratic politicians too.

I'd say the 10% at least, more likely the 20%. We've become so anti tax that no one wants to pay anymore. We've cut out our social insurance to the point of almost a million homeless. No one, including many in our party, want to pay taxes. Taxes are how we build roads and clean the environment. We've cut the incomes of the working class to the point where they'll vote for Trump.

Like there's nothing we can do to reverse this. We outnumber them. If we don't like what's going on we can change it but we seem resigned to our fate.

As someone else put it, we're being "managed".

Don't get me wrong, but we too often use ambiguous terms like "rich," "wealthy," "uber rich," to describe those whose assets run into the millions or billions. What we don't do is quantify what it means to be "wealthy." For example, I live and owned a home in a small city where the average housing price is over $2 million; does that make me "wealthy" or "rich?" For me, someone who is wealthy are those who assets exceed $10 million and who make over $500,000.

We, supposedly, have a tax system that is progressive so those who earn more pay more in taxes but in reality the tax laws are written to protect those with tens of millions/billions of dollars and not the average or lower income earners. I believe those should and must pay more in taxes since they tend to use their wealth to influence government officials at all levels to benefit themselves and others like them. So, if they're going to use their wealth to unduly influence government then the price for that influence is higher taxes on them. I'm in favor of the federal tax rate of 45-50% with few deductions for those making over $500,000.

I know there's been talk of a billionaire's tax that is, IMO, unrealistic. The problem is how do you identify the assets of a billionaire? Does anyone actually think they'll tell the government all their assets? For me, it would be best to raise the tax rate on these people with few deductions and at the state level, impose a 1 - 5% increase in state tax rate. That way, the tax wouldn't be a one-time tax and the federal and state governments would receive more money to address the needs of their citizens.

(Feel free to disagree. I think it explains a lot.)

I'm so sick of their greed and utter lack of social responsibility.