cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20368770
It’s easy to understand if you realize that America is essentially a corporation rather than a country, and that country is only representing its shareholders.
In case you’re confused - if you’re not rich and powerful, you’re not a shareholder. You’re an employee or a commodity or an expense, and you exist to enrich the shareholder class.
What is fucked is many other countries with healthcare have powerful privatization lobbyists also working their asses off to privatize essential public services. The Canadian and British healthcare system has been in jeopardy for years due to that.
It’s also the same crap conservatives do with the government in general in the US. Cut budgets and make institutions dysfunctional, then say that the dysfunction indicates it should be privatized.
What scares me is that the US and Canada Postal services might turn private… and trying to make them public again would have someone insist on debating ‘but how are we going to pay for this incredibly expensive service? It failed before’ when nothing about that was ever remotely true.
America is not a real country, it is three corporations in a trench coat.
The VP debate tonight had commercial breaks. Just a friendly reminder for everyone that regardless of the party, it is the almighty dollar that is in charge.
I agree with your sentiment.
Commercial breaks allow for the stylists and makeup artists to touch up their candidate mid debate. I won’t even imply that commercial breaks weren’t invented because of capitalism and the need to monetize everything, it seems that there were commercial/sponsorship breaks in the earliest of radio programs.
I am saying that they continue because, for live events in particular, it allows the crew to do their jobs and refresh the makeup of their actor for 30 seconds at a time.
I suppose you could have some other sort of break that is an exposé of feel good news, or puppies and kittens, but I don’t think that is fundamentally different than using the time to display advertisements. The content of those advertisements can be debated ad infinatum, since even in a fully democratic communist world, advertisements still need to exist.
How about instead of a commercial break it’s a fact check break where they go over the most glaring of lies given by the candidates
Love the idea… But let’s be real, Conservative rhetoric has depended on attacking peoples trust in acedemia, administrative government positions and anyone who is an expert who doesn’t reinforce the vibe of being a “dissenting voice”. Fact checks make those of us who understand sourcing feel like we’re owning the idiots, but for the Conservative audience iit very rarely shifts people out of their steadfast adherence and instead tends to make them distrust the medium the debate is held in.
Conservative rhetoric has been a poisoned well for a long time. To play by their game one has to look more at a vibes based playbook. Their voting block generally have a misplaced overconfidence in their own ability to read body language and tone. It’s literally not the words and definitely not the facts, it’s the affect they are delivered in.
It’s part of why they dunno how to think about Harris and have conspiracy theories about her earrings piping her answers. She is outperforming Trump on affect of delivery based on their playbook and they don’t know how to interpret that.
Lets be real. That’ll spiel the first, maybe even the second time with a special delivery planned to surprise everyone. The kind they’ll practiced across all TV and completely unrelated events telling people important noose.
The third time at the latest will not be talking about the real lies. They’ll be talking about the lies both of them practiced to be on the board together with no fucks given who would win.
This because they’re both telling the same lies. The truth isn’t easy to find and all of TV was always loud as fuck because they were always fucking lying even when they were telling the truth.
America had a moment in the 60s and 70s where real change might have been possible. Then Reagan took over in the 80s and selfishness and greed somehow became virtues.
They instilled a sense that helping others makes you dumb and gullible. Strong, smart people get theirs and fuck everyone else.
People who need help are just taking your money to buy drugs and can easily get a job and become middle class instantaneously.
Then a few decades later, the middle class disappeared, and everyone became poor and struggling. Corporate profits keep breaking records, though. Economic inequality in America has surpassed pre-Revolution France. Every billionaire is Louis XIV-level rich and indulgent.
Honestly, it’s incredibly naive to think that America’s issues started with Reagan. The McCarthy witch hunts against communism happened in the 1950s. They targeted education institutions, as well as people that believed in democratic socialism. It stopped a generation from coming up through college and having those values instilled. It was that generation that passed reforms like universal healthcare in other western countries. Reagan was just a product of that system, he wasn’t the root cause.
We survived the Gilded Age. We can survive this, if we fight. Labor revival, revitalized progressive movement, voting reform…
Nothing in life is guaranteed, but I still hold out hope that we’ll join the developed world in the coming years.
If we had an unlimited timeline I’d buy that, the problem is climate change will make all but struggle inevitable in ~75 years at the rate we’re destroying it.
Famine, water wars, and billions of climate migrants will destroy any hope of an egalitarian revolution…
75 years is a very optimistic timeline. The things you mentioned are already starting to happen.
I don’t want to burst your bubble, but the developed world, or rather the people in charge of it, took a good look at you guys and decided they wanted to live like kings as well.
Since then, they have steadily dismantled institution after institution while telling people that immigration is the reason their lives are getting worse. It won’t be long before we lose access to good, free healthcare, safe and affordable education, and all the other qualities of life we’ve enjoyed for so long
They instilled a sense that helping others makes you dumb and gullible. Strong, smart people get theirs and fuck everyone else.
That sense must surely have been already there, because you couldn’t instil it easily if most people genuinely believed otherwise.
It has taken the better part of 50 years to get from there to here. I wouldn’t say it was easy.
The evangelical bloc was the hardest to convince. They had to get some capitalist representation in the churches to counteract all of that business about “helping the poor” and “blessed be the meek” that Jesus was always going on about.
Once they got Joel Osteen to convince millions of viewers that Jesus wanted them to be rich, that really clinched it for them.
Reminder for people reporting this…putting “rule” in the title is not required.
