Love that the entire internet, left, right, authoritarian, liberal, and everyone in-between came out to say “lol, get rekt, oligarch.” Nothing I’ve ever seen has been as unifying as this. Running for office under the banner of beheading CEOs might sincerely get you elected.
I think the powers that be underestimate our thirst for justice. This is the closest thing to justice for the rich we’ve seen in - maybe our lives?
I don’t want to live in a world of vigilante justice but this kind of thing is inevitable when the system fails us for as long as it has.
I hope we never find out who did it. The killer just becomes this DB Cooper-esque legend who came out of nowhere, kill a CEO, and disappear never to be seen again. And even better, proving the complete and utter incompence of the NYPD, when they can’t manage to catch someone who killed in broad daylight in a city of cameras.
Is it preferable to status quo? It may even be morally justifiable. But the world I’d want to live in is one where people like this face justice through the same system you and I would.
This is the closest thing to justice for the rich we’ve seen in - maybe our lives?
That submarine popping.
As a Brazilian living in Rio de Janeiro (golden handcuff effect), I highly agree. My country sucessfully improved human rights but as a collateral effect, gov’t refuses to build more jails so jail overcrowding resulted in de facto decriminalization of theft, and police releasing criminals just a pair of hours they get caught - and nowadays cops can’t even slap a scumbag in the face because our more important TV channel witch-hunts anyone who does anything that remotely resembles a potentially mild human rights violantion without even making questions to the parts involved, so we who live in the part of the city controlled by the government sometimes try to bring some vigilante justice… out of despair!
As someone that could probably best be described as center-left (guillotine oligarchs yes, UBI yes, abolition of private property and free markets no), I do dare say that not a single common person on the right likes the billionaires either. It’s just that their side of the political isle has been co-opted by the billionaires even worse than the “left” side because being anti-tax and anti-regulation is more useful to billionaires than pro-tax and pro-regulation.
These one or three pet billionaires have done a lot of image building to achieve this. They’re trying to be the “common man’s billionaire” and “just like us”. Musk spent a decade trying to appear like a nerdy engineer and when people started realizing he’s a shitheel, he pivoted to the “the elites are after me, it’s time for us to stop them together” shtick.
In general, the right (and I mean individual people, NOT politicians) hates billionaires almost as much as we do, but wrongly associates them with the left - but while it’s true that some billionaires are left-wing socially, they’re damn near all right-wing economically, because no billionaire is going to want to have less money.
Private property ≠ personal property. Private property is mostly owned by businesses and corporations, not a person.
As we can see in the US, housing should never be private property, since the number of units that have sat empty for at least 12 months outnumbers our homeless population by a factor of over 70:1 counting all residential types (apartments, condos, duplexes.) If you only count single family detached homes, those still outnumber the homeless population by a factor of 30:1
guillotine oligarchs yes, UBI yes
That’s called center left now? I thought that was far left.
Center left is what we used to have after WWII.
Far left is what we worked for during the labour movement. Or so I thought.
If you aren’t working towards the establishment of Socialism, you can hardly be called “far left.”
There’s a funny hodgepodge of ideology here… “Guillotine oligarchs” sounds pretty cool, invokes the French Revolution, which was radical left, at the time. But then the unwillingness to abolish private property is either an erroneous conflation of “private” and “personal” or an unwillingness to actually change the system that produces the oligarchs.
It’s like bailing out the boat but when someone says “patch the hole” your like “but we need the hole!”
The left is not pro “all private property abolished”. Only " all private property of the means of production "
Or, when someone says “abolish private property” they’re not talking about your toothbrush.
In this context, private property is the stuff you can use to generate capital. Personal property is your toothbrush, your phone, clothes, furniture, bike, car, house etc.
If you own a second house for rental income, that’s private property. The house you just live in is personal property.
How make no billionaires if capitalists allowed to keep owning means of production? Allow to get rich, and then kill?
Here’s a small set of proposals, definitely well thought of and not made up specifically for this comment to make a point:
Start taxing them heavily on wealth INCLUDING unrealized gains once it hits a threshold, but no wealth tax for normal people. Force companies to become either co-ops or publicly traded when certain thresholds are met - and if the founder has too much stock, the taxes on unrealized gains will force them to sell. But if it’s a co-op, don’t count anyone’s share in it as wealth for taxation, only any profit actually paid out by the co-op. My prediction is that companies with high profit per employee (think Steam) will become worker-owned co-ops and companies with lower profit per employee will be publicly traded (think Walmart, except of course Walmart is already publicly traded)
Essentially, I want people to be able to own property, but not own so much that it negatively affects everyone else - everyone should be able to have a primary residence tax-free and I don’t think it’s bad for someone to own a second home either, except that shouldn’t be tax-free. Hoarding property isn’t OK though - that affects everyone else’s housing situation. I don’t like the idea of the state owning all homes - I want there to be strong rules protecting me from being evicted because the state needs a factory built right where my neighbourhood is - but there SHOULD also be state sponsored housing for those who can’t afford their own homes, and they should be easily attainable, and built to a good standard.
I’m okay with people making a plentiful living from passive income off ownership in some company they built, I’m just not okay with it being so much that they make more in a year than the rest of us do in a hundred thousand.
I mean… If they’re forced to game the system so they stay just below the “rich” threshold all that extra money has to go somewhere besides their pocket.
I commented on a politics@lemmy.world post about a bunch of CEOs of publicly traded companies endorsing Kamala Harris saying that it hurts her campaign more than it helps and I got downvoted and had people replying to me saying “um, actually most people look up to CEOs, you’re the one out of touch.” I’m feeling pretty vindicated rn.
Yeah, I’m inclined to agree with you.
Same goes for the Cheney support thing. Felt pretty out of touch to me and I’m not even an American so idk how I get it and the presidential candidate who 1) is American and 2) has a truckload of money being used for voter research, did not.
Everyone except the sh.itjust.works mods who keep tripping over themselves to blabber about how he was such a great man and should be respected for his hard work and stuff.
Ninja edit: wrong instance
Never mind I got my instances mixed up. https://sh.itjust.works/u/imaqtpie
Yeah but there’s nearly 4,000,000 of us for each of them. It’s a numbers game.
Wow I think this is the first time I’ve seen this meme template used so appropriately.
Are people losing their minds, though? I thought the reaction was pretty muted. There was some celebration, to be sure, but I think that is a pretty rational response.
Over 100 Americans have died from diabetes since this guy was shot. Where are the headlines for all of them? Does the fact that they were murdered by a system instead of an individual make their deaths less noteworthy?
I mean to be fair we’re all here clicking on this one to cheer at the guy. News organizations are going to run stories that get them clicks. While we may consider his death important and noteworthy, none of us are going to click and read an article about how Joe Random died from his heart failure or diabetes.
More Americans die every year because of lack of access to medical care than from all of our wars combined.
Can I get a source on this? This sounds like a wild figure!
EDIT: Read the below comments. Wether it’s true or not… Still an unacceptable amount of preventable deaths. We have to do better.
Actual research finds that annual “deaths caused due to lack of insurance” is around 40-50 thousand (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2775760/)
and “if the usa had healthcare as good as france, 101 thousand annual deaths would be prevented” (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deaths-rankings-idUSN0765165020080108/)
as for war deaths, the ~100 thousand barrier is breached when all wars back to the korean war (1950-1953) are included. Then world war 2 is massively over
so the literal truth of the original statement is that it’s maybe mostly correct if you consider “our wars” to only be wars that the usa played a key role in starting, and only count the last century, but false if not
(eg. the civil war would totally blow the number out of the water, world war 2 would totally blow the number out of the water, and with the unpopular vietnam war it would depend on what exactly your standards of “lack of access to medical care” are)
You’re only considering people without health insurance, not people who have it, but are denied coverage, or can’t afford it even with coverage.
Actual research finds that annual “deaths caused due to lack of insurance” is around 40-50 thousand
We have people like the Joker who give us philosophical questions about our civilization but we’ve yet to see a billionaire use their infinite money and resources to dress up in a suit and mask, fight crime and build a fancy car or jet with exotic weapons to fight real life villains.
we’ve yet to see a billionaire use their infinite money and resources to dress up in a suit and mask, fight crime and build a fancy car or jet with exotic weapons to fight real life villains.
That’s a good thing, though. They may make for great movie and comic book fodder, but in real life, superheroes are pretty much just cops with fewer rules: rather than doing anything about the underlying causes of crime, they just beat up symptoms and theoretical bogeymen.
With his vast resources, Bruce Wayne could reduce crime by 75%+ by investing in prevention, but he prefers beating up people, most of whom are low level goons who probably turned to crime out of desperation, a lack of better options, or varying levels of coercion if not downright brainwashing by the main villains and their middle managers.
Batman would TOTALLY beat up a ton of entry level employees who AREN’T at fault as well as the CEO if insurance profiteering was illegal.
bruce wayne does in fact fight crime with money too. But it’s not enough, so he also needs to be the batman.
Yeah? What exactly does he spend on that diminishes the underlying causes of crime?
Does he provide housing for the unhoused?
Does he provide food for the food insecure?
Does his company provide a livable wage and reasonable benefits for every employee?
Does the hospital his dad worked at provide care that is free at the point of service?
Does he provide for schools with no cops to initiate the middle school to prison pipeline?
Does he pay for high quality pro bono legal aid for those who would otherwise be steamrolled by representatives of a system that incentivizes convictions regardless of guilt?
Or does he just cut a check to a Dickensian orphanage once in a while?
To be fair, the Joker was a psychopathic murderer. He wasn’t just laying out deep questions.
