Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age
Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age
jacobin.com
Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age
26 comments
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Five dudes control more wealth than half the country shit's wack yo!
Way I see it, the brackets should be marked first at the quintile thresholds for household income, then at the 5th percentile threshold, then at the 1st percentile threshold.
Then each bracket's rate is the total of the percentages of wealth controlled by every bracket below the given bracket plus half the difference between that and the sum of percentages including the wealth that bracket owns.
So as an example, the 1%, they control 26.5% of the country's wealth, so the base is 73.5%, plus half of 26.5 is 86.75% for income above the 1% threshold.
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That's how it should be.
But really that's what gets the other side to whine for when they'll leave the trailer park and become billionaires.
Even if we changed it to a fractiotof that it would still bring immense change. As long as it doesn't go to the military budget I guess
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If your taxes for the rich are too high, they will all take their ball and go home - to one of their many homes in a country that doesn't have high taxes. Or just declare their superyaught anchored in international waters as their "home". With "business travel" as their reason to spend time (maybe all of the time) on US soil.
When you have that much money, there's not really much society can do to touch you.
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When you have that much money, there's not really much society can do to touch you.
I absolutely hate this mindset. I hear it now and then, and it's being used even by left wing politicians to hand over more money, power and control to the wealthy, because "they have so much power with their money already, there's nothing we can do". Oh ok. So just capitulate then? Because we're not starving to death? Nah fam. Work harder. Collaborate. Be creative. As creative as they are with their bookkeeping and finances. And if that shit doesn't work, it's violence time.
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The US has one of the highest exit taxes in the world, if it's any concern you can raise it even higher, but capital flight is something the rich try to say will totally happen but that they never actually ever end up doing because paying high taxes isn't worth the hassle that uprooting and moving everything to a new country entails.
That's the kind of effort that gets provoked by imprisoning them for just complaining against those taxes, or by seizing everything they own without even nominal compensation.
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When you have that much money, there’s not really much society can do to touch you.
We've confronted robber barons before, and then stuff like the Sherman Anti Trust act happened. If we can collectively gain the resolve, society can absolutely touch these motherfuckers. We arguably had even worse politicians back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, and after some serious incidents it became a politically charged enough issue to overhaul Congress and the Senate.
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lol, I used to work there. I sold David Blaine an iPhone 3G standing under that thing. I saw Seal climb up on a display case and sing Kiss From A Rose (and hype up a huge crowd) 3 times in a row until we had to make him stop. I sold Eddie Izzard 3 pairs of the same shitty Skullbocks headphones that kept breaking, but he refused to buy a better pair because he really liked them. I got Jonathan Groff’s phone number at the genius bar. He was wearing an Epcot T-shirt, and I had no idea who he was.
Working there was fucking wild.
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Can't believe I can't buy Spotify premium from their ios app. Thanks Apple
26 comments
It’s not just tech titans. Letting media companies megamerge left us with a handful of corporations that control the narrative. Studios shouldn’t be able to own the content, the tv channels, the set top boxes and the wires they’re transmitted on.
Especially considering what we know about the uneducation system in America. Now featuring flat Earthers.
Yup. News sources have been consolidating for the last 50 years. It used to be that every news outlets you watched was ultimately owned by one of 40 companies. Today, that number is 5. So if five billionaires get together and decide something is not going to be talked about, then it DOESN'T get talked about. This is why the Internet has them so freaked out. They can't control it (yet) so it's a threat to their version of reality.
This is also why our "liberal news media" does such a terrible job of speaking truth to bullshit. It's not necessary to report "both sides of an argument" if one side of the argument is insane, woo-woo dipshiterry. What they're doing there is gaslighting you into thinking that babbling nonsense is "just another point of view" It's not in the interest of billionaires to have informed citizens, capable of critical thinking, so the point of this exercise is to keep us fighting with each other about where the REAL source of our problems come from while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the f*cking money.