It's easy to call us cowards, in reality we live in a surveillance state that makes trillions of dollars by killing and torturing it's own citizens. In a place like this lacking morals becomes a question of survival. Definitely not excusing it, but it's the truth.
that, and none of the people who so flippantly dismiss us all as cowards have ever seriously considered the realities of spending considerable time in the American penal system, our favorite way of breaking people who color outside the lines. They're usually people from countries where prison is a place of rehabilitation and not punishment.
Everyone wants to see another Luigi, nobody wants to go through the kind of grief he is going or will go through.
No, just last week 250 comrades were arrested from a sister group of ours in Turkey.
Turkish prisons are not very pleasant. But when you have something to strive for, you do what is right and not what is easy.
I guess it was easier in Nazi Germany to keep your head down and go with the flow, too.
Don't worry, people don't forget!
Well, they've also been brainwashed into extreme individualism, "if you fail at life it's your fault" kind of thinking. The fact that losing your job means homelessness, no healthcare, and with extremely powerful corporations handling pretty much everything you do or own makes it incredibly hard to organise.
Revolutionaries have succeeded in worse conditions, like Russia, China, Cuba, etc. The reality is that a good portion of the US Empire's working classes are bribed by the spoils of imperialism, and that there is a huge settler population that benefit from settler-colonialism. Organizing in the US needs to primarily be from a decolonial and anti-imperialist standpoint, which is largely why the Black Panther Party was so successful in garnering support, along with the mutual aid and community defense they performed.
A lot of the Black Panther Party was inspired by global south movements, including juche socialism from the DPRK, and Mao's policy in China. They focused on independence, sovereignty, and self-reliance, which is why their community defense and free lunch programs were so critical to their strategy. They believed that they needed to correctly show the working classes how to properly be a disciplined, working class party, bringing them up to their level theoretically and practically.
The problem is not that you are cowards, the problem is that you are stupid cowards.
You don't organize, you don't know how to either. And yeah going to prison sucks but that is true for the whole world.
There’s just very little solidarity. I’m from the US, and I didn’t realize it was missing until I moved to a country where it’s normal. Nobody trusts others to have their back, so why would they risk anything?
That said, it looks like it’s slowly developing. Ten years ago, I would not have expected Minnesotans to en masse refuse to help ice agents caught in the snow, for example. That may be because of my own ignorance, but in my home state of Connecticut there is a group of insurance professionals (not your local brokers, more like actuaries and people who work at the insurance company headquarters-not a group inherently predisposed to solidarity with immigrants) who coordinate shopping for local immigrants.
Man covid was devastating
Capital consolidates in crisis. Each crisis, which is fairly regular in capitalism, results in the bigger capitalists buying or squeezing out the smaller capitalists that cannot weather the crisis, resulting in greater centralization and consolidation of capital, and greater absolute disparity.
Kind of weird that it somehow made the rich richer...
Never let a good crisis go to waste they say
Man, seeing this graph that was a literal inflection point where their wealth exploded compared to a literal decade before.
If you zoom out, these jumps and explosions happen following nearly every crisis. It's intrinsic to capitalism.
This is a worldwide problem, not just a US one.
The world needs to collectively make these people's vast accumulation of wealth and thus power illegal. Old and new money regardless of where it came from.
Always hard to interpret these bottom procentile numbers because a certain procentile has 0 wealth or negative wealth. A quick search says 25% of Americans have 0 or negative wealth. I myself have negative wealth because I recently graduated and I have student loans. A homeless guy with 0 debt and 1 dollar in his pocket therefore can be said to be wealthier than 25% of Americans, and myself. However my quality of life is very good with an above average wage. And I can be expected to start going into positive net wealth later in life as I start paying off those student loans.
I would love to see numbers in lifetime wealth generation or something similar that would take into account that a lot of people are understably at 0 or negative wealth at early points of their life. Otherwise I have a hard time interpreting these bottom procentile numbers. Makes for great headlines though!
You make the assumption that negative wealth is okay when you're young.
I don't agree with that.
Some say that time is wasted on the young. They have so much of it that they don't know what to do with it. I say that wealth is wasted on old people, for the same reason.
A society should invest in young people. They spend the money back into the system and shape the future they have to live in by how they spend it. Old people do none of that. They just tuck it away, and clutch their pearls.
I'm grateful to live in a society that has welfare to pay young people to study, so they don't start their lives in debt. I hardly used it myself, but I'm still happy to pay my taxes knowing that our society has raised the bar so that nobody is forced into negative wealth just to get their life started. Poverty is low, homelessness is low, education is high. This is the society that I want to live in and pay for.
Some would call it socialism. It's not really, and it isn't perfect, but whatever it is, it's surely better than a casino where the house always wins, also known as the American Dream.
And yet, people still think the top tier earners deserve to live in houses with unbroken windows and unburnt lawns...
It's not about spine, it's about the system. There is currently no mechanism to change this, even if we wanted to, which we generally do. We have to change the system first, so that a change in how we handle Sociopathic Oligarchs is possible.
And frankly, we're working hard on that. We've got a Midterm Election coming up that Dems have been working very hard to exploit as much as possible (for a change), and more than that, the people who are running and winning primaries are the kind that are going to insist on substantial changes when they get in office, starting with leadership. If the Dems take the Senate, Schmuck is out as leader, and then out of his office in 2028.
When we change the profile of the party, take control of Congress, then change the leadership, we are on the path to make bigger changes that can have a real impact.
One of the main issues is that too many think their shade of sociopathic oligarchs is going to save them
Americans? It's fucking planet Earth (share your country and I'll demonstrate)
Seriously, what should I do as an individual to singlehandedly change this?
Not in a fedposting get-you-to-incriminate-yourself way, I'm genuinely asking what you expect me to do, one person out of nearly 400 million
I'm fucking trying, I'm doing everything I can in my rented apartment and my shitbox from the '90s
Who the fuck is the target audience for this on Lemmy, Europeans glazing each other because they did their imperialism before the internet existed?
You can not single handeely change this. They only way is to work together. If you havent already, find a group (ideally in person), and meet regularly. Find a project you can all work on together. Everyone needs to chip away at the hydra.
This week, each one of you has a homework assignment. You're gonna go out, you're gonna talk to a coworker about pay. You're gonna tell a coworker how much you get paid even if that's cringe.
Unfortunately, even thinking the word "solidarity" is grounds for termination here
Not just America, the entire world works like this. It's sadly our obligation to make people aware and understand how to fight against it, every small step we take will slowly build towards a more just place especially when we have big communities.
Ah yes, the old raped, dead husk of the stock market still working for the rich.
It's (ass all other bullshit the USA does) probably coming to the EU too, just some years later
I've always said this, the Americans who ended the gilded age and elected the Roosevelts will be rolling in their graves after seeing how spineless their descendants have been.
Of course they don't. Our country was founded by religious extremists. Puritans, Quakers, Calvinists, Mormons. One of the quotes of Jesus is "For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away."
It also says in the OT that God appoints our leaders, and rebellion against our leaders is rebellion against God.
The vast majority of Christians in the USA are fundamentally opposed to anything that would financially better the lower and middle class. That's socialism, and it's evil. But the rich becoming this rich? That's holy. If they become even more rich, that just means they are even more holy.
Reading the graph, it looks like the bottom 50% have about $4T. A quick glance at the wealthiest 5 individuals shows that they have about $2T.
Not good.
This may be hopium but my perception is that the first few stem cells are finally coming together and starting to form the framework of a spine.
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