lokicolouredglasses:

imathers:

abraxuswithaxes:

smallrevolutionary:

trungles:

shorterexcerpts:

styro:

salon:

Ronald Reagan pretty much ruined everything for millennials.

fuckin’ ronnie

I try and bring up how he ruined free in state tuition in the name of hippie bashing when he was California’s governor often, but don’t exactly have the biggest platform.

“Worst of all, these students’ sense of the future is constrained by planning for and then paying down their student loans, often for decades. Economists are waking up to the fact that when young Americans enter the workforce burdened with over a trillion dollars in cumulative debt, they become risk averse, unwilling to move, less able to make major purchases, and slower to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, they don’t feel safe enough to register any major protests against the society that’s done this to them.”

Damn.

i am reblogging again because….. fuck ronald reagan forever and ever and ever and ever.

Economists should be adept in their fields, how are they only now realizing that paying off our student debt is a fucking priority over anything else other than food?

Weird, it’s almost like there’s something missing from the study of economics.

Who would have possibly thought that a young generation owing trillions of dollars could have a negative effect on the economy?

alanaisalive:

tiwaztyrsfist:

thebaconsandwichofregret:

mythiass:

edgy-night-fury:

“wouldn’t you rather earn something than have it just handed to you?”

Yeah when it comes to actual awards and fancy goods, but when it comes to basic needs, basic human decency, and accomodations, those things should always be handed to people. No one should have to “earn” those things.Value people as people, not base it on how much they produce.

yeah but that creates a severe dependency that could be exploited easily, and creates a slippery slope @musical-clarity

Actually studies show that people who live in places with universal income (who are given money with no strings attached just for being citizens) do far better work than those who don’t and are more enthusiastic to do work.

This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.

Some people will always be lazy and take advantage of the system, but they are always a tiny percentage and it seems ridiculous to me to punish the majority and severly hamstring their abilities just because a handful of people will simply live of basic income rather than work.

It’s been tested a couple times. In Canada, in some European countries, and the results are always the same.

There are two groups of people who show a statistically significant (Greater than one half of one percent, or 1 in 200) increase in Not Working and living off the guaranteed income. Parents of Children under school age, and full time students.

Among ALL other groups, employment actually INCREASED. Why? Because guaranteed minimum income means that homeless people can get at least a basic low end apartment. It’s hard if not impossible to get an above board job without a permanent fixed address. Also more people were able to have and maintain a BANK ACCOUNT. It is often hard to get a decent job without an account that can accept Direct Deposit for paychecks.

Also, lost work time due to illness and injury decreased across the board. It turns out if people are getting a decent amount of money each month they can A> afford to eat better, and B> obtain decent medical attention both preventative and emergency. Crazy right?

So why hasn’t it caught on?

Because it doesn’t directly benefit the people in power, and it increases THEIR PERSONAL taxes, their CORPORATE TAXES, and thus decreases their PERSONAL INCOME.

So, because Jeff Bezos and Alan Greenspan might fall from making 100 billion dollars a year to making 99.8 billion dollars a year, it’s a hard NO and we can all fucking die..

The End.

The other reason the people in power hate it is because it fundamentally changes the relationship between employer and employee. In regular capitalism, the employer has all the power because if you quit you starve and if you get another job it’ll be equally shitty because all the bosses know that they have you by the gonads.

But with universal income, power is given to the workers. If your boss is an asshole, you can just quit without worrying about starving. So the employers are the ones that have to sell themselves and offer value for your time in order to keep enough staff to survive. And they HATE that.

fecklessstudios:

she-minions:

kierongillen:

carriagelamp:

dearnonacepeople:

So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”?

You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.

In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…

until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.

“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“

Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.

From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.

The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.

It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.

(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)

Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly.

Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…

Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.^[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.

And then the Parker Brothers pushed her out and stole the game thereby demonstrating exactly what capitalism is

geekandmisandry:

robotlyra:

nickbilz:

chescaleigh:

reverseracism:

welcometonegrotown:

It’s an extremely popular opinion among middle and upper class white people.

Also, aside from this completely uneducated reasoning as to why minimum wage was created…

I can guarantee that there are tens of thousands of teenagers who have to pay bills and help support their families or are the only financial supporter to their family.

not to mention, if minimum wage was meant solely for high school students how would the business survive when students are in school?? are they only supposed to be open on the weekend? this “unpopular opinion” makes no sense.

Unpopular fact: in the 70s a minimum wage worker could pay for college with a summer job.

Unpopular fact: minimum wage was conceived to be the minimum amount of money a person would need to support themselves and their families when working 40 hours per week.

Unpopular fact: minimum wage was created because working men and women in this nation fought–figuratively in the negotiating room and literally in the streets–for a fair working wage, with sweat and blood and tears and death.

Unpopular fact: military service personnel are not the only people who have fought and died for your rights as American: labor leaders and common workers laid down their lives so that you could have a 40 hour work week instead of 80 hours; so you could have a 2 day weekend instead of none; so you could have lunch and bathroom breaks instead of going hungry and shitting your pants,; so you could have a three day weekend in September.

Capitalism would NEVER dole out basic human decency without literal human sacrifice.

Additional unpopular fact: the minimum wage jobs “meant for highschoolers” require as much effort, dedication, and skill as the “big boy/girl jobs” that are supposedly worthy of higher wages. Minimum wage jobs can entail customer service, resource and supply management, staff coordination, multitasking, adherence to strict health and safety regulations, physical and mental endurance, extended hours, high intensity rush periods, and unpredictable situations of any stripe. Treating jobs like they’re worthy of less compensation because the worker wears a plastic nametag instead of a tailored suit is classism and labor devaluation at its most insidious.

Also just because someone is a teenager doesn’t mean their labour doesn’t have value? They are doing the same work but you can pay them less.

elandrialore:

the-tin-dog:

cerula:

joanspoliticalposts:

aeonlamb:

krysthebear:

femoids:

femoids:

Another epic fail for the free market

Dumb bitch in the notes arguing planned obsolescence is necessary to keep costs down,

I thought planned obsolescence was to prevent your phone from just suddenly turning off and never working again? Like it’s meant to be an “oh, my thing isn’t working, I should invest in a new one soon.” Kind of thing?? Like shits gonna break either way, I just thought this let us know like a month earlier than it would otherwise.

I mean… that’s kind of what they want you to think?

Sure, throttling your phone’s cpu so that the battery doesn’t wear down faster is certainly… a thing that’ll extend battery life… but, uh………… Hey, why don’t we just allow customers to replace their old batteries, you know, just like batteries were originally designed to do?

This extends far beyond phones/computers/etc as well. I recall, there’s light bulbs that exist from around the time of their invention that can still burn to this day. But companies only manufacture light bulbs that degrade and burn out over a few years, so that they can keep selling more light bulbs and turn a profit.

There’s a lot of examples of this, really. But, no, the main purpose of this is simply to make people continually have to replace their old “““broken”““ products for new ones, when the only reason they break to begin with is because they purposefully build in deficiencies that cause the product to degrade over time. It’s capitalism, baby

My mom had one vacuum cleaner all through our childhood. That first generation of vacuum cleaners was made to a very high standard because the companies were trying to convince people who had never seen one to buy them. Now, unless you buy the very high end models, they break in five years.

Can confirm, once helped my dad paint a client’s house interior and needed to vacuume after due to all the sanding we did. Dad’s shop vac would have taken us hours to clean since it was made for small messes and not whole carpets. Dad dug out the client’s home vacuum (with permission) which was this ancient heavy metal kirby from the 70s and holy shit not only did it still work but it had the strongest suction I have ever seen in a vac and it was that day that really hammered into me that planned obsolescence was A Thing.

I can literally go to a junk mall, but a 1920s sewing machine, oil the moving parts, replace the rusted needle and sew on that damn thing for the rest of my life.

And if one part or piece breaks, literally takes the mechanical knowledge of a 3yr old with plastic tools to fix it. I can access every part of that machine and fix it with a screwdriver and needle nose pliers. No special screws so only a “””professional””” can fix it. No parts that can be “so hard to fix you might as well buy a new one”

Corporations CAN make functioning lasting products. They just choose not to.

My mom still has her Kirby from the 70s and it still works better than the one I just bought less than a year ago. I’m planning on having her give the damn thing to me in her will because it’s a Beast and will likely last beyond my lifetime.

If robots turn sentient in the future and have to steal parts, they’re going to be made of kirby’s, I’d swear it.

infamous-legacy:

kennedying:

bemusedlybespectacled:

flockof:

stayingwoke:

intergalacticsociety:

But they aren’t documented so they wouldn’t be pa…..nvm

This is a huge misconception for regular Americans. When the government uses the phrase “undocumented” they’re using it incorrectly because if they were truly undocumented then they would’ve be in system. However these immigrants are in the system and they pay taxes, file tax returns and get no benefits that citizens and legal residents get. They also get to see ICE showing up at their doors because the government has their addresses.

Fun fact. “Undocumented” workers pays $12 billion dollars every year in taxes.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/10/06/how-much-tax-do-americas-undocumented-immigrants-actually-pay-infographic/amp/

Reblogging for info.

“Undocumented” just means “without papers,” i.e. a social security card, valid visa, etc. They’re still on databases and whatnot, they just don’t have the documentation that allows them to reap the benefits.

so if it didn’t click- the government is aware of their presence and gladly taking their money under the table while simultaneously promoting the idea that undocumented people are a threat and encouraging hatred and distrust of them
it’s super messed up, literally the scheme of an evil villain, and it’s really happening

🗣 undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles contribute more to the GDP than the state of Montana and like 5 other states

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

nbtomcatcultureis:

thepeacockangel:

karadin:

reagan-was-a-horrible-president:

This is a good article.

We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics.

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check.

The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check.

Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check.

The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.

Social and economic mobility is low. Check.

Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.

Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.

How did we get this way?

What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?

Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.

Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”

What can we do?

We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.

If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly.

The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions.

We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans.

We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector,

reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and

focus on embracing an integrated American population.

We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.

We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”

Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.

Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.

In Other Words Revolution

Capitalism’s bad

I really hope i don’t see any fellow white Americans on this post talking about how we don’t deserve this because we’re “the greatest country in the world” or how “this shouldn’t be happening in America of all places”. It shouldn’t be happening ANYWHERE, it doesn’t need to be happening anymore, and the fact that it was already happening in predominantly nonwhite countries is largely the fault of white supremacy