Trillionaires Gotta Go
4d 23h ago by lemmy.world/u/return2ozma in politicalmemes
I remember a time when being a billionaire is seen as too much, and now we have a trillionaire.
Don't worry market will regulate itself just wait a little longer. /s
It’ll trickle down. Any day now.
US need Luigi's menthod as a guideline for the nation
Well if this administration can be believed (...I doubt it), there have been at least 3 attempts on Trump's life in the last two years.
I know that I can't take no more
It ain't no lie
I wanna see you out that door
Baby, Tri, Bi, bye (Bye, bye)
Billionnaires too. They're not off the hook.
86 the trillionaire(s)
We now can say " the difference between a trillion dollars and a billion dollars is a trillion dollars." So we got that going for us, which is nice
Doesn't deserve to exist. Will burn.
A society that is in desperate need of a revolution 99% tax rates for extreme wealth
You wanna make a mess, make it in your neighborhood. I want the problem solved today by bank transfer
Say, how will you convince them today to do that transfer?
Not all revolutions are violent, but the ownership class will sooner hire armies to defend their wealth and power than submit to a general strike, or the laws of a liberal nation.
Then there's the matter of the climate crisis, exacerbated by data centers and the US' cling to fossil fuels.
The mess will absolutely come to your neighborhood whether you want it to or not.
The point is that won't happen without a revolution
I suggest a new system where the primary goal is increasing human and environmental wellbeing. All policies are tested and if they fail to increase wellbeing they are no longer Implemented. Why do things based on beliefs and feelings when we can have facts and knowledge..
The important part being that policies are tested. Every policy should come with a desired outcome, the time scale for achieving it, and a way to measure it.
Exactly. I find that most political structures and policies aren't informed by facts but just raw belief or faith it's a good idea. Most political structures are from hundreds or thousands of years ago and aren't informed by science, more so something we've inherited and kept up with through familiarity. The basis is why rely on faith when we can easily have facts on what best fosters human and environmental wellbeing
Also similar to the scientific method, there can be revision if there's new information substantial enough to show old information was incomplete or incorrect.
That sounds like central planning, and the thing about that is when your bureaucracy gets big enough to test all the policies for a whole society, corrupt bastards sneak in and start meddling for personal gain.
You wouldn't test something just once. You pick a few towns or cities to test on or few regions. Maybe you can mess up the numbers for one or two but multiple would be difficult.
It's a sign of a failed system, but even billionaires are too much. No one individual/family should have that much wealth or power. The first billionaire was just over 100 years ago, and look at us today. The point is, once someone has that amount of wealth, reality bends around them making them powerful enough to protect themselves. They then influence the state which is not there to represent them, but us. All serious nations must consider a 100% wealth tax on anyone with over 10 million in net worth. Capitalism has made it a long time, sure. And one could argue life at the bottom is marginally better than feudalism or whatever, sure. But obviously we're at the end of the experiment and need a reset.
Not yet. A revolution takes place once it's safer for the average person to join the revolution than to keep the status quo.
That's how far the status quo needs to drop before a revolution happens.
Well, not exactly the average. Just the 10% or so people most in danger.
But yeah, I don't think the US is there.
You need enough people to be able to overcome the military and law enforcement. So that differs depending on the country.
The USA has 2.81 million service members, so nearly 1% of the population. I'd say that one soldier with training and incredible amounts of war machinery could easily take out 10 untrained average americans even if they have guns, so 10% is likely not enough. Might be enough in a country with no money and hardly any military, but just think about it. How many angry people does it take to take out a tank or a fighter jet?
Come now, there's just one trillionaire.
Yeah which is 1000 billionaires or a million millionaires. Its... an insane amount of money. Like thats fix the world money but to get that amount of money he had to fuck the world up.
And yes we're all aware at this point that stock value isn't real money. That almost makes it even worse. As a society we're more concerned with fake numbers on screens than we are with people in our communities.
Violent revolution.
checks watch
Any second now...
shakes watch
3 trillion is so much money that you could be visited by 1200 ghosts of Christmas past EACH SECOND since the Triassic period and still be bound by the chains you forged in life
Just as Jesus foretold.
back in my day we used to say this about humble billionares
RA2 cnc had a parody of the gates, where he was a trillionaire, instead its musk now.
I really hope the revolution comes before we have to update this meme to quadrillionaire.
Money has never been more fake. But it will be more fake tomorrow than it was today.
His companies have been valued at $X billion/million each. That doesn't mean he (or any of the "richest people") actually has that much wealth. It means that he has gamed the system of company valuation. He needs that for his fragile ego.
Of course they're all still wayyyyy too rich, but -
Fuck that "trillionaire" shit. Every time this is mentioned, Musk's ego is stroked. And I feel dirty just writing that last sentence. Eww.
This is a misunderstanding of what "wealth" actually is for the capitalist class. You are imagining the dollar value as a means to purchase commodities. It makes sense if you think of money as a means of holding the value of labor. You're interaction with money is in earning a wage doing labor. You then use that money to purchase the things you require to survive. You use that money to get the products of other peoples labor. Money for you is a means of holding the value of your labor.
This is not the relationship with money that the capitalist class has. Money is not a result of their labor. It is a result of their extraction of value from the labor of others. They are not concerned with their ability to "afford" something. They are concerned with their ability to maintain power within the capitalist class.
The dollar value of their wealth is measured in the control within that class structure. The measure of their wealth is the measure of exploitation and influence they have over the rest of society.
So, yes, it's not dollar value trillion in a bank account. But that doesn't matter. At the degree of wealth we are talking about it doesn't matter if you use USD or bottlecaps; just so long as you're measuring it consistently to describe the power and influence that unit of measurement describes.
Saying "they aren't really a trillionaire" isn't really meaningful. Money is fake. We made it up. Society accepts this measurement as a measure of describing the fucked up distribution of resources. That's all this term is really describing.
Saying "they aren't really a trillionaire" is basically just saying "they don't really have this much control over us". When, yes, my every material metric they do.
I know what capitalism is. But this company valuation business is also corrupt. Musk really really wants to be the richest man on Earth so he games it for all its worth. I bet a neutral and transparent re-valuation would reveal that he's NOT a trillionaire by a long shot.
edit: I bet a neutral and transparent re-valuation of all his businesses would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
It's not corruption. It's capitalism functioning as intended. It's internal contradictions are not corruption. They are features the capitalist class exploits; for as long as the rest of us allow.
While I agree with the sentiment of this post, homelessness was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Certainly, people suffer unimaginable things, even to me as I only saw a slice of homelessness over four years in four cities. But, there are many people who benefit from homelessness and actively enjoy it. For me, it cured me of my entitlement and made me a better person that I otherwise could not have done. My purpose to making this comment is to remind people that homeless people are human beings. They're not stray dogs. They have as rich of a story as you, and perhaps even a better one. Don't JUST be kind. Be empathetic and try to understand the people this meme casts in a single light
What are you going to take, stocks in companies that are overvalued and don't turn a profit and try to use that to solve hunger?
You wouldn't be able to extract anything if value from him during the revolution.
We can nationalize his assets, which, while not necessarily worth a trillion is not worth nothing. Even if we liquidated his businesses and sold the materials for pennies on the dollar, it would be enough to feed hundreds of millions.
In fact, we can do the same with all the billionaires, investigate them and then hold them accountable for their wrongdoing. One doesn't get to a billion dollars from running a clean business, the way one doesn't buff out like Arnold Schwarzenegger without anabolic steroids.
Musk, after his unethical business practices, has blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, for which he has suffered no consequences. If justice will not come to him, then pure revenge should.
SpaceX should probably have been nationalized back during the Biden administration when Elon single-handedly decided to turn off Starlink to the Ukrainians when it didn't suit him (they were using it to guide drones to targets).
I do agree you could realistically get a free billion from his assets. But no where near a trillion. At most 10-100 billion. That would possibly save the homeless for a few years, but who would be voting these assets to make the liquidity. Most luckily china. So we sell off what little manufacturing we have, to so y homeless for a free years. But we would be causing a ton of loss for the US markets causing future homeless. It really would be a kick the can down the road, and China would own us.
You appear to be really worried about China, when the federal government in the US is eating the nation alive.
Musk's Tesla factories are so subsidized by the US that it raises questions whether those factories are actually doing favors for the US workforce. We'd lose jobs, but have a not small amount of gain for -- what did Musk call them -- entitlements. But you're right. Maybe we should nationalized Tesla, but keep it running, and offer a public option EV. We might even be able to make some better decisions, such as removing or fixing Autopilot so that fewer Teslas are responsible for deadly collisions. Heck, considering the successes of the US when it invested in big science and big engineering, we might be able to improve them so they're competitive with China's EVs on the global market, and require Ford, GM and Chrysler to offer something other than bloated Non-Passenger Work Vehicles SUVs. But that's all blue sky fantasy.
Trump has already handed the superpower baton over to China. Trump already took the knee to Xi Jinping the way he once did to Putin, and has already declared China a superpower, and a peer to the United States.
China doesn't deserve the superpower title yet, but Trump is also sabotaging the US' ability to force project, which is the key ingredient to staying a superpower, and China is dominating the renewable energy industries while Trump is subsidizing fossil fuels and even coal. So the US is clearly in decline while under the thumb of its aristocratic class. The US' political class may be more corrupt than China's already, and that deters businesses from wanting to invest in the US. They're investing big into China.
Yes, China teems with humanitarian problems, but then the US is building more concentration camps every day, so we're catching up if we haven't caught up already.
Right now, Musk has a phenomenal amount of power, enough to purchase the entire US federal government if he liked, or at least hire another 100,000 lobbyists (including retired elected officials) and continue to assert massive control of the US government. Frankly, that is a greater danger to the US right now then liquidating a few factories.
I agree with you China will be the next world power. I read "how to deal with changing new world orders" by ray dalio. Everything he wrote is coming true. I just didn't know how people think taxing Elon will do anything positive, and also believe America is on the decline. Both can't be true.
I think we are in a huge bubble, and trying to gain anything if value from the bubble will be fruitless, and China will be the next world power. We are 39 trillion in debt. Even is we got 100% value from elon, would being 38 trillion in debt change anything?
The 39 Trillion in debt (the rising of which just keeps accelerating) raises a too-big-to-fail question. If the US just collapses, then all those bonds become worthless, so there are an awful lot of creditors who should be invested in keeping the US afloat. And some of those creditors are smart, or at least have smart people to advise them that letting the US collapse would be really bad.