Most Americans don’t see themselves as workers, they see themselves as just some a main character who is only struggling due to a personal fault in a quick time event rather than corporate planed actions that worked with the government to enable that thinking in the first place.
Most Americans at this point are a product of capitalist indoctrination via privately owned for profit media propaganda, and public schools defunded and in utter ruin by capitalist captured government to cut their taxes, despite still profiting directly from a pre-literate workforce to draw from that they just don’t want to pay for.
And now, through the long laid, long paid for installation of capitalist interest to the SCOTUS through their Federalist Society judicial extremist group, they now effectively own our… I’m sorry, their judicial branch of the government we have to suffer without recourse or appeal.
…They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it…
-George Carlin, decades ago.
This is also why study of the humanities is under attack in academia, btw. Believe it or not, maximizing growth/metastasis/GDP isn’t healthy as society’s sole practiced value and pursuit. Gotta hurry, a few thousand greedy sociopaths aren’t getting richer fast enough, herp derp.
maximizing growth/metastasis/GDP isn’t healthy as society’s sole practiced value and pursuit.
One of their greatest achievements was brainwashing the country into believing that somehow higher higher higher GDP somehow means a better economy for everyone when it’s literally just tracking business profits…
They’re perfectly ok with the idea that our income doesn’t need to increase at all, but their profit MUST increase at all costs…
every other american seems to talk about their huge salary compared to other western countries but then complain all they do is work and have little free time to use the money
“Unlike the Europours, we have so much money! We get paid more!”
- No healthcare if not working
- Rarely paid time off
- Less holidays
- Less workers rights
- Most states don’t allow time off for voting
- Tax dollars go more to bombing people than education of the future workforces
- No major way of sending donations to political groups
- Taxes are done inefficiently on purpose to enable companies to get money from doing your yearly legal requirements as a citizen
- Still tested for drugs on your private time
- Longer commutes other nations
- Commutes are often paid by the worker, not the company
- Commutes are in cars because public infrastructure doesn’t allow most workers to get to work on time or doesn’t have the last mile covered.
- Cars that cost money to just exist, let alone actually use.
- Commutes and needing to eat food take time away from the 16 hours “free” from work, meaning people have to cut on sleep or other important self regulations
I feel so fucking free you guys man we have it good.
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Unemployment insurance payouts are at or below poverty level at best, short in duration (normally 12-24 weeks at most) despite complete wildcard on how long finding a job may take, and aggressively restricted or even denied in many states(remember Republican controlled states refused free federal funding to bolster their unemployment payouts because they wanted people back working during a global pandemic without a vaccine at that point).
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Unions and organizing and employees thinking of organizing are aggressively and illegally attacked, discriminated and retaliated against while the enforcement mechanisms to hold powerful companies to law are so underfunded the laws nearly don’t exist
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OSHA, FLSA and other cornerstone pieces of workplace law are so routinely broken and have been by so long and enforcement so underfunded and penalties so trivial the laws don’t exist in practice. Injuries at work, minimum wage, overtime are so commonly violated, suing through the courts has been the only recourse for employees. With the court system now captured, even that menial disincentive is gone for companies to comply.
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Companies systematically underpay and are able to collude on wages thanks to market salary tools to suppress wages. Switching companies is the only way to get a raise.
Reagan was super anti-worker, and that’s when the drift started. After the PATRIOT act, the entire justice system (including the court systems) started seeing the public as the enemy (after all, we were harboring terrorists) which corresponds to the shredding of the Bill of Rights (specifically the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States). Business interests (and their plutocratic masters) were the true citizens of the US, with us lowly proletariat becoming second class citizens. Citizens United took us by surprise but we haven’t really done anything and won’t until the police are busting our own heads (or we see enough officer-involved brutality – which is, incidentally, how La Résistance got started in Paris).
Now recently
- SCOTUS neutering regulatory agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
- SCOTUS deciding in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that civil and criminal penalties for camping on public land do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.
If you’re too broke to have a place to live (easy to do right now), then you can have life, liberty and property stripped from you by the state. Essentially, being a human being is very much insufficient to have rights in the US. You must also be able to afford renting or owning a place to sleep. (As tempted as I am to rant about this, I’ll stop here.)
The end of true representative democracy in this country began the moment the courts accepted the “corporations are people / money is speech” arguments. When that happened, governments stopped representing the needs of ordinary people and only listened the needs of billionaires and their lobbyists.
It’s taking decades to play out, but it’s going to end badly.