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Cake day: May 4th, 2024

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  • Yes, but not necessarily the way you put it. You may recall some of the lawsuits against Trump, where he massively (and illegally) elevated value of some of his properties (I think he elevated Mar-a-Lago by an order of a magnitude? might be wrong on that) while devaluing others, it depended on whenever he was supposed to pay taxes on something or leverage something to get better loan. Those billions they “have” are based in valuation that they often had opportunity to tamper with. For example, there are vast expanses of privately owned land that are undervalued - if you were to give that land back to the community and build housing there, its monetary value (and more importantly utility) would dramatically raise, thus leading to getting more out of the guillotine mileage than the original estimation might suggest. Alternatively, billionaire could have their assets valued as such due to having a gallery of modern AI art used to launder drug money, which would be otherwise completely worthless. And that, I think, is even more important point than the repossession of their wealth - we, as society, would benefit tremendously from making sure the rich can not manipulate prices of anything. If a guy with a “art” gallery is able to leverage it to get a massive loan, and then use it to buy a ton of housing, then you need to compete with their unearned billions with nothing else than the results of your honest work and whatever meager loan banks are willing to give you. It’s less important how much stuff is “actually” worth, and more what is the relationship between the purchase power of the rich versus the purchase power of regular folk. If they can outcompete all of us at once and we’re left without healthcare, food, water, housing etc. then they can more easily extort us for greater share of our paycheque (which again, is not exactly related to our actual work because very similar dynamics take place in job market), which makes us more dependent on them and more willing to be exploited in other ways.

    tl;dr I agree it’s simplistic, but I think that getting a 1$ out of 1$ of removed billionaire is pessimistic estimation, and we would actually get far more, even if only long term.


  • That’s not an argument against removing billionaires though, right? You’d rather want to stop the spread of cancer instead of bemoaning the fact that we got sick at all. The best we can do is reposes their frivolously purchased assets and recycle them as much as it’s reasonable, and cast away what remains. It’s not all yachts, some of that wealth is locked in empty flats/houses, and giving those back to community would be very beneficial without needing to transform those assets further.








  • They are beholden to the same investors. It’s the investors that pick whenever we get rainbow flavored wage slavery or nazi flavored slave-wagery for the next 4 years. It seems that our overlords decided that it’s too costly to put effort into pretending that that’s not the case, so we got this piece of shit basicially saying the quiet part out loud. I am actually surprised how little backlash from the USA citizens happened so far, but I hope the guilottines get deployed soon, because it gets embarassing watching this farce.


  • voldage@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlThe Democrats theatre
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    9 months ago

    Doubting that this is the case, seeing how they are trying to push back against protests against Republicans, is just delusional. I refuse to believe them to be so incompetent, that they constantly act against their own interests and boost MAGA message instead. Bernie gets way more attention from the public than everything they are doing right now combined, and they barely acknowledge he exists.


  • People didn’t vote for Harris because her campaign sucked ass, it’s her and her staff who failed to convince people to vote for her, not people who voiced their dissatisfaction with her proposed policy. They need to do better, and if they do, then people excercising their freedom of speech on the internet won’t sway votes away from the party. Idea that people shouldn’t be allowed to complain about the genocide because it voices loudly the dissatisfaction over the party actions and that may lead to lower voter turnout is flawed to it’s core. Those comments are the symptom of the problem, the sign that there is something wrong with the way they directed the campaign, not the source of it. You will get nowhere by silencing the dissidents, you need to take away their reasons to complain, not their means. Until Dems learn this lesson, they won’t win elections again, not with the antiestabilishment vibes and lack of trust towards the government that are prevailent im USA. Not only this messaging of censure won’t work, it will only piss off the electorate and alienate them further. Before the elections I have assumed that this campaign to shame people into voting was a psy op, but it seems like it’s actually their position on the matter, which definitely makes me think they’re controlled opposition at this point. They can’t actually think this kind of messaging helps them in any way, right? This arrogant approach is specifically why Republican electorate hates them. If they want to win, like, ever, they need to work on that.


  • I don’t think many people on lemmy conflate marxism with leninism outside of .ml, and even there folks seems to see leninism as something on top of marxism and not inherently mixed.

    And then we also have people who feel stalinist style “communo facism” would work well because everyone you like will be fed and everyone you don’t like will be dead. I don’t think anyone ever liked those people, including themselves.