You put out headlines with trump in the title to get the clicks. This is what you’ve been signing up for and now you’re being replaced assholes.
This week, the White House sank to a new low on that front, holding a first-of-its-kind “New Media Press Briefing.” While inviting journalists from smaller, less established outlets to the White House is ostensibly a good idea, that’s not what the administration did. Indeed, instead of inviting actual journalists to the event, the White House populated it with a slew of friendly influencers who were all too happy to kiss the president’s ass and ask White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt the softest of softball questions. It was bullshit questions and bullshit answers all the way down.
Leavitt kicked the briefing off by bragging about the administration’s various “accomplishments” over the past 100 years, er sorry, I meant days. “As I promised at my first briefing as press secretary back in January, the Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities—not just the legacy media who traditionally has covered this institution,” Leavitt said.___
The funny part is that the same people bank rolling the presidency are the same people bankrolling the legacy media AND the social media influencers.
There is one group to blame for all this and it’s not hard to find them … anyone that controls billions of dollars of wealth, controls the country.
I’m genuinely curious to know whether the majority of Lemmyites believe Tim Pool gets more money from Vladimir Putin’s bagman than Google’s YouTube advertisements and SuperChat kickbacks.
So many Americans do not seem to want to believe their own network of oligarchs have deep pockets and a wide net of social media influencers. As though organizations like DailyWire and One America News Network and the Murdoch suite of publications simply don’t exist. The Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, The Thiel Foundation, The Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute… its like they don’t even exist.
I think it’s time to make an American version of the guillotine where we replace the sharp blade with a giant rock, and keep everything else the same.
It seems appropriate
With every month that passes, a conviction grows in me: “Billionaires shouldn’t exist.”
Without a doubt, I say there should be a cap on personal wealth, say 1 billion, because I can’t really see why one person would ever need more than that to live comfortably. Then every dollar made over that goes straight to the federal government.
Essentially a new income tax bracket for only the wealthiest of individuals that is permanently set at 100%
I don’t know about a hard cap. Shelves and caps tend to inspire “creative accounting” just shy of fraud, and we can curtail runaway capital accumulation by just making the curve more aggressive.
A simpler solution is public equity. This is an idea I’ve been selling for a while so I have a spiel. Tap below if curious.
Public Equity
Public corporations should not be taxed based on declared revenue. Instead, a portion of shares should be owned by the public such that taxes are paid by dividends.
Also, any direct funding or “stimulus” from the federal government should purchase additional shares. The government’s failure to demand equity on behalf of its people when increasing their shared national debt to fund large corporations would be considered gross fiduciary negligence in any other funding scenario. For example, full bailouts should result in a controlling stake, i.e. nationalization.
It eliminates poverty, easily solves a truckload of difficulties we have taxing these corporations and their shareholders, promotes overall economic health, and is above all more fair to everyone, including the wealthiest.
Specifically:
- If shareholders are paid, taxes are paid. It would no longer be possible for a company like Amazon to have $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to its shareholders.
- It skips the “trickle down” step. Share appreciation is reflected directly and automatically in public equity growth, so if the paper wealth of the richest citizen increases, so does the paper wealth of the poorest.
- It prevents runaway capitalism, the situation we find ourselves in, where a government is too anemic to reign in corporate greed and the public servants within it too starved to resist corruption.
- It offers more direct control of inflation, since the Fed can simply not reinvest a portion of dividends paid on shares.
- It makes Universal Basic Income (UBI) trivially easy to implement, since what we are describing is essentially a universal pension fund that everyone has fractional shares in.
Most importantly WRT principle, it more accurately reflects the value afforded to every public company by the actual public; i.e., the society in which it operates.
Edit: forgot to mention UBI
There is one group to blame for all this and it’s not hard to find them
I’m told it is anyone who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.
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