Carrot & Stick. The carrot is you get a fraction of the money you make your boss; the stick is you will live on the street if you don’t. Capitalism needs a pool of desperate/poor/unemployed workers.

I’m bad at picking titles. But I do agree with what you guys are saying.

Here’s the plan: we nationalize Walmart.

When that poll asked Americans who is most to blame for a deal not being reached and subsequently causing the shutdown, they indicated Democrats in Congress and President Donald Trump were tied for most blame, while Republicans in Congress received the least amount of blame.

Welp, this country is going to get the healthcare it deserves apparently.

The showwriters for The Boys had to get this explicit for right-wingers to get the picture.

This is why the strike needs to generalize to a workers’ and renters’ strike. Much easier to keep striking when you’re not going to work and your entire building is refusing to pay the rent.

The Woman’s March, BLM, Occupy Wallstreet, and the first No Kings were all successfully ignored. Millions of Americans marching is clearly not enough for us to be heard.

Unpopular opinion, but we need to hold more of these on weekdays. Hundreds of thousands of people taking off work will disrupt the economy and send a stronger message.

That third panel is gold lmao

I won’t brush away the missteps and abuses of certain leaders. We must, however, place these injustices in their proper context.

Socialist countries faced opposition from the most economically and politically powerful nation in the history of the Earth. Given the successes that socialist economies did achieve – in providing healthcare, housing, transportation, food, jobs, etc. – can you imagine how much more successful they could have been had the United States helped instead of destabilized them at every turn? But the US could not peacefully allow us to develop socialist production of goods for direct consumption. This economic model is a direct threat to the capitalist’s appropriation of profits.

Fortunately, all systems decay over time and after collapse there is a period of time where a decentralized, democratic system can exist for a period of time.

I hope you’re right, but time will tell.

No, it is not a post hoc fallacy. The claim is not simply that death and dictators occurred after capitalism rose to dominance. The claim is that the economic incentive of infinite profit explains why these events happened. Specific wars were fought in to protect the interests of multinational corporations; the CIA installed dictators (e.g., South America, Africa), in order to stop the spread of socialism; there are slave laborers mining minerals in the Congo so that Tim Cook can make another billion.

If you want to get philosophical, perhaps we could agree that it is a category error to say that an economic system of commodity production caused death and dictators in the technical sense of causation. It would be better to say that these events find their ground or explanation in the incentives of capitalism. But I doubt most people care about this distinction.

Not to mention that many capitalists nations had the benefit of established industry whereas the Russians and Chinese had to transition from an agrarian society into socialism.

And how is capitalism working? We never want to talk about the needless wars, deaths, dictators, and literal slavery sanctioned by capitalism. Capitalism has been the dominant system for some time now: it has had every opportunity to reform itself into a fair and equitable system. Instead it exploits the global south, prioritizes profits over people, and puts a paywall on necessities that we now mass produce-- forcing the working class to generate more profits for the wealthy. It is a barbaric, corrupt, hypocritical system that forces us to sell ourselves, by the year or by the hour.

Sure, they’ll do this just as soon as they enact universal healthcare, or federal maternity leave, or get money out of politics. Any day now …

We have two parties that are shifting to the right and prioritize the rich at every turn. And yet, somehow, we’re supposed to keep pretending that voting is going to fix anything in this country.

Voting is a bandaid and we’re bleeding out at this point.

Now carry this to its logical conclusion folks: the global exploitation of the land, labor, and resources of so-called “developing” nations is an ongoing geopolitical strategy of both parties within our two-party system. They told us that we were the world’s police while U.S. companies and politicians raked in the profits.

People need to realize that Trump is 50 years in the making. He was not the first to put “undesirables” in camps and arrest people based on racial profiling. He’s not the first to give tax cuts/subsidies/bailouts to the rich while the cost of living gets progressively worse. He’s not the first president to bomb countries without Congressional approval.

These trends are accelerated by Trump, but will continue after he’s gone because they are systemic.

White privilege is not having to realize that rights are being infringed at all. The abuses of the government are justifiable for certain groups, but a terrible tragedy for me!