Trying? Abolished? Sigh. Words. Slavery never left. Put all the pretty paint you want on those bars. It’s the change of perspective that comes with wisdom. Use that power well.
You can’t keep slaves anymore, but you can own a company and pay your workers an amount that makes it hard for them to pay for basic necessities so they don’t have time for leisure, or organising unions, or finding other jobs. The workers are free to go, of course, but then they’ll fall into financial ruin and not have healthcare.
Nah, most will just say get a better job, you’re not working hard enough etc. Lots of people I speak to tend to frame it as a worker problem rather than a problem with the system. It’s also why lots of people seem to be anti strikes…
Well I did use a qualifier. I know. I was in McDonald’s one day getting a soda and they took forever. A young woman was griping that “it’s those kids! No one wants to work anymore!” I told her for those wages and what was expected, i don’t blame them. I got an angry glare.
Too many people seem to think that chattel slavery is the only thing that counts as slavery, and that even that doesn’t count if a slaver is less horrible to their slaves than other slavers are.
I wish one of the bigger industrial countries had the balls to curb the state-like influence of billionaires, by flat out capping the amount of wealth they get to wield. It’s not even that people should not be allowed to be “rich”. But “rich” should mean owning 1-50 millions or so. Not billions.
Rather than worrying about trying to tax 1 person heaps (they will dodge it anyway)
Why not put in place improved worker protection and pay laws.
Higher minimum wage - say equal to the bottom quartile median house price in the area, mandatory health care even for the lowest paid employees, absolutely no overtime.
They can dodge this by moving manufacturing overseas… But they already did this.
You should try visiting Scandinavian countries. While being ultra rich isn’t disallowed, it’s so heavily taxed that ultra rich end up providing more for the welfare than any other group.
Not true at all. Sweden has worse wealth equality than the US. Sure we have high income taxes, but basically no wealth or inheritance taxes. The only reason social democracy ever took off in Scandinavia was due to the fear of the nearby Soviet Union. The moment the Soviet Union collapsed all the countries of Scandinavia started dismantling the welfare and privatising.
If we’re not going to abolish money, it should really be entirely illegal for the highest paid person in a company to make more than, say, 15-20 times more than the lowest paid person.
Reliance on the state to make things right is the fatal flaw. The purpose of the state is not to make our life better, it is to protect the powerful from us.
You’re assuming I’m in favor of keeping our existing government intact. I don’t. It was shit from the start, and now it’s entirely unsalvageable.
Even if the government itself was salvageable, the US is far too ideologically divided into sides that cannot and should not be reconciled with each other.
This country cannot and will not hold itself together much longer, and the only potentially viable course of action is to mitigate the harm that is going to happen no matter what by breaking it up in as controlled and peaceful a manner as possible.
Yep, all of this “inflation” and “rising cost of housing” bullshit is essentially wealthy people turning the screws. They know regular people can barely make this work, and they love that.
I’m traveling in Europe right now and the prices everywhere are so reasonable it really pisses me off. Inflation my ass, I’m convinced it’s just American corps squeezing us for everything we got.
Very nice hotels for €100 in downtown areas that would cost easily $300/night in USA. Food in restaurants and cafes very reasonably priced, I got a couple coffees and pastries for like €8 and the coffee alone would be that much in the states let alone multiple pastries. €5 felafel. I can’t remember the last time I paid less than $15 for lunch.
Gas is super pricey but who cares when your cities are designed to be walkable and you have great public transport everywhere.
I get that I’m on the tourist route so this doesn’t represent true cost of living, but I understand rent is far cheaper in general, plus availability of healthcare and education leads me to believe COL in general is lower and some googling supports this.
I don’t know anything about their tax policies so I can’t comment on that either.
Inflation has hit us too, but not nearly as bad as the US. My grocery bill has essentially doubled and we’re paying €2.25/liter for gasoline ($9.14/gallon!)
But I saw a bag of chips for $12 in Chicago last year and I still haven’t recovered from the shock.
Yeah gas is expensive for sure. But who cares when you have all that sweet public transportation and nice walkable cities that are genuinely pleasant to be in. I can see how it would be a much bigger issue if you roads looked like this
Well I’m from the US so I’m unfortunately familiar with shit infrastructure. Also unfortunately, our public transportation in NL is a total joke (extremely expensive, dwindling , and unreliable) thanks to privatization and conservative politics. We are very lucky to have excellent bike infrastructure, but the weather makes it extremely inconvenient.
That’s surprising to hear, I’ve been all over NL and have a real high opinion of it (except the weather heh). It’s always kind of comforting though to hear that once you get past the surface there’s issues everywhere.
With enough inequality and without a strong social net, wage labour is equivalent to slavery. They cover the minimum costs of your survival and you spend as much time working as they ask or else they’ll find someone more desperate.
Reminder that slavery was never outright abolished in the US, the constitution explicitly allows slavery as punishment for a crime which is why private for-profit prisons are a thing in the US.
Can’t we do both? I think the issue is that we’re sending people who can be rehabilitated to the same place we’re sending the “very bad people” with little to no hope of reintegrating into society
The thing is this is purely cultural conditioning. And every nation has to ask itself what it is willing to sacrifice. In European countries e.g. people sacrifice a few (read 10-20) unlucky victims amongst millions to people that are “too far gone” and exploit the rehabilitation system by being repeat offenders. The US sacrifices extremely large parts of their relative population (over 1 million prisoners) and minorities on very flimsy accounts and puts them away for good, sometimes with no reason. All to prevent repeat offenders and keep them locked away.
So you gotta ask yourself are you willing to completely ruin the lives of a million people (and have probably a greater death toll than a few dozen from that) and not have to trust anybody or are you willing to sacrifice a few innocent people on the grounds of failing to rehabilitate rare “uncurable villain” criminals?
This has always been the case. Look at immigrant exploitation, the truck system, sharecropping, child labor, exporting work to undeveloped countries to exploit unregulated labor forces there.
It was always about bringing back slavery without calling it slavery.
And it will always be so long as we let them keep trying.
Violence is not the answer until the hour that it is.
I half wish it did. Within the far-right sectors of the social mediaverse, calls for murder or desires to engage in pogroms are commonplace, and are typical in the social media histories of rampage killers in the weeks leading up to their respective incidents. It’s conspicuous how often their rage-filled comments discussing violence have failed to trigger an investigation to see if that there fellow needs to be watched for a while.
In my case, I’m not going to engage in violence. At very least, I’m not fit for service in mischief or sabotage. My own next step is to do some research on mutual aid organizations which can serve to support protestors and, if necessary, saboteurs and other makers of mischief.
My comment is a reminder to myself that yes, violence eventually does end up on the table, as happened with Iran when the Mahsa Amini protests were responded to violently by Iranian law enforcement, which is when the banners were swapped for molotov cocktails, and state offices were burned to the ground.
In our case, we know the public will not gain rights until we make it disadvantageous to our governing officials to not do so. And as we’re seeing, they’re glad to take those rights away once they believe the threat has subsided. This is the justification for The Terror in France: while The Terror itself ended with Robespierre, the guillotines came out and aristocratic heads were piled high multiple times in the following century when kings had a propensity for rolling back established constitutional rights.
So long as we’re not going to tear the establishment down to distribute power more sparsely, we’re going to need some way to hurt officials who fail to defend the public interest from their donors, maybe so hard that it hurts the donors. How to do this is well beyond my pay grade, but without such capacity the transnational white power movement is going to continue advancing, and we can expect the US Supreme Court to keep stripping away our rights.
What’s this “trying to” bullshit? The for profit prison system and a legal system that punishes people for being poor would suggest they have already largely succeeded. Never mind that slavery is explicitly legal when it comes to prisoners.
Educated in history here (history should have no bias), while there are a greater number of slaves today they represent a smaller portion of the population than during the 1800s. In addition modern slavery is not the same as chattel slavery which is infinitely worse given that it denies the slave’s existence as a human being. Im not saying slavery is OK Im just saying your claims aren’t entirely accurate.
Responses from historians will rarely make you feel better, but will help you understand the complexities that people without that specialization often overlook.
Automation means that proportionally fewer slaves can provide more. That “denies the slave’s existence as a human being” bit is rather vague. Are you saying modern slavery is not denying the slave’s existence as a human being? What does that mean?
The way they’re viewed really isn’t the problem. Someone being imprisoned and forced to work really isn’t affected by the man with the whips opinions of them, because of they slave away they don’t get whipped. They’re existence has been stripped too bare for such distinction to make a difference. Slavery is like war and war never changes.
That simply isn’t true. When your slaver looks at you as less than human they can justify a lot of mistreatment they would not do to another person.
There’s a reason why Western chattel slavery is so vilified because almost every other nation still thought of slaves as people. Chattel slavery thinks of them like livestock.
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