#destroy the oligarchy

[goodnightngoth]

me watching people vandalize tesla dealerships, vehicles, and resources

[freyan2973]

[lost-carcosa]

[antiestablishmentaf]

🔗 Posted to r/democrats by u/TrinkieTrinkie522cat

[mikkeneko]

"The contemporary sovereignty movement remains splintered regarding statehood. Some, who argue that the U.S. has illegally occupied the islands, have advocated for a restoration of land, along with compensation. Others, who believe a complete restoration is impossible, have sought federal recognition of Hawaiians as Native people—with some lands returned. Some have argued against the kingdom’s restoration and national recognition; instead, they’ve sought the decolonization of Hawaii under the International Trusteeship System created by the United Nations for territories under the control of foreign powers.

"In 1993, the federal government issued a formal apology for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy—and acknowledged that the Hawaiian people never formally relinquished their lands. In 2009, a bill seeking federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as an Indigenous tribal group passed the U.S. House but has since stalled. Known as the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, a.k.a. the Akaka bill, it would allow Native Hawaiians to form their own government on par with that of the federal government. If passed, it would provide their first self-determination since America overthrew the monarchy in 1893."

I don't think it's a radical ideal for the want of Hawai'i to become their own independent country. It should have never been taken over by the US in the first place. For a country whose entire foundation is based upon "separation from a colonial country" it's laughable that they made an entire population that was self governed into a state. It's insulting. It's already blatantly obvious that this whole country was based on lies and blood, and it only continues to perpetuate that. I'm shocked that the Hawai'ian sovereignty movement isn't mainstream even though they have been fighting for it since 1997. Fuck the American government.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

☠️☠️☠️

He can now turn the money flow for all government payouts on or off at will. All the money disbursements from all Federal Departments and agencies run through him. He can make any payment in any amount to whoever he chooses for any reason. He can block any payment to anyone at anytime, whether it be a social security payment to a citizen or money owed to a federal contractor. He can shut off payments to any department or branch of the government he chooses. He can put individuals, departments, or contractors on permanent np pay lists.

He can shut off money to your local school department or shut off all monies earmarked for your entire state. If he doesn’t like what an agency is doing he can immediately shut it down. If an individual citizen or individual government employee runs afoul of him he can cut off their checks. Conversely he can reward any agency or any private or public figure he chooses.

I don’t think anyone grasps how serious this is. He literally has control over the entire government and everyone and everything dependent on it. A madman hopped up on Ketamine now can dictate everything to every individual, agency, municipality, state, or elected official in the country.

Donald Trump has made Elon Musk the Dictator of America and we are all at his mercy. This is highly illegal and even the courts told Trump he could not stop federal payments or re-allocate money already designated by Congress there is nobody to stop him. He literally seized the spigot that controls the flow of money. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world. Two deranged drug addicted billionaires can destroy anyone and anyone through the power of the government purse. This is unprecedented and we are no longer a true democracy but a fascist oligarchy.

The media needs to make clear to the public just what the implications of this are but so far few are even mentioning it.

[forgetriestowrite]

Allura got me thinking about M9 again

she said they have a "resilience to [the weave mind's] strengths" which is true but I haven't truly thought about HOW true it is, I was too busy screaming MIGHTY NEIN VOX MACHINA over and over in my head

but like... they really are the best people to take down a hostile hive mind

not only have they literally done that before, but Beau fought off the mind-controlling hold of a demon that had kept her wife captive for years

Then Yasha broke that hold on herself

Jester literally believed so hard in an archfae that she turned him into a deity, and she made friends with an ACTUAL HAG in order to get her friend's curse broken, and it WORKED

Fjord started the campaign in a soul-eating pact with a demigod and ended it as a champion of the Wildmother, which was jumpstarted by him doing the most insane thing he could have done to break Ukotoa's control

Caleb's whole journey was self-love and healing and learning to accept the dark parts of his past and use them for good

Veth not only helped him with that, but also spent the whole campaign working on herself so she could be the person her husband and son knew her to be

Caduceus found a way to bring Kingsley back even though it should have been impossible, because he saw how much his friends wanted it, and he knew what happened to Molly and Lucien was unfair

And to top it all off, they found out one of their own had been manipulated and abused his entire teenage and technically also his adult life, and proceeded to find the person responsible and bully him relentlessly ("I hope someone will mourn you when you are gone" is still the rawest line in cr history), then beat his ass and eventually kill him

these people have shown time and time again that they will not tolerate any kind of authoritative control, especially if it hurts one of them. They refuse to buy into it, and they will destroy anyone who even tries to manipulate someone else.

There is no one else who can go to the moon and completely dismantle their oligarchy. I don't know if there is anyone else who would be willing to do it.

[scottguy]

Fight sociopathic oligarchs and their henchmen like Alito, Thomas, and speaker Mike Johnson.

They are destroying America just to benefit the rich!

[balteus]

actually re: fromsoftware politics. i do think it's very interesting that the anti-colonialist RLF, ostensibly considered the 'good guys' of the game, were initially explicitly called the communist faction. armored core always has been a series critical of oligarchies and hyper-capitalism, but it's... very interesting to see just how blatant that is in ac6 specifically

you'd think that fromsoftware would eventually drop the ball on the "the ruling class will kill you and cannibalise itself in order to stay alive" considering that they're considered elite AAA devs rn, but thinking about elden ring and ac6's narratives, they've really only gotten more obvious about it - the horrors of colonialism and genocide and the sympathy given to the rage of its victims is something that's actually insane to see, to me, from such a big studio - fromsoft doesn't even attempt to be centrist about it.

for example, the frenzy flame ending. the only thing melina can tell you to dissuade you from pursuing it, ie literally destroying the world forever, is that there's still beauty in the world, apart from the suffering the golden order had caused. at no point however is the sheer despair of the people that the flame represents villanized. if anything, it's portrayed as a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is a tragedy. the only villain is the order who slaughtered all of these people, the flame of despair is something that emerged in them as they were buried alive. and the flame isn't even intended as a revenge upon the world, it's simply a means to end the pain they feel for being subjected to this.

their grief isn't something for the player to judge, it isn't something they're forced to overcome, it's simply a physical manifestation of the reality that was forced upon them. and these people, the merchants, are still kind to us, even knowing the order that we pursue. (in fact, the true, considered best ending of elden ring, is literally just sacrificing yourself in order to achieve complete anarchism. and getting a cool wife to endure the loneliness of space along the way)

in ac6 then, ayre is so terribly forgiving towards us, knowing what we are, knowing what made us, knowing what we participate in. some of this undoubtedly is because of her narrative role, she has to be a sympathetic character. but we do get to see her rage at the end, her grief for her species being seen as nothing more than a resource to be exploited or burned fully vocalized. but the RLF is sympathetic too as resistance fighters who want their home back. the only criticism the game ever leverages towards the RLF is that they're actually not radical enough in their pursuit of freedom, and that criticism is made by a villain.

it's so... i almost want to say optimistic? other games would have tried to pull a "ooh but what if the good guys did bad things (poor attempt at moral grayness)" but no, the RLF is justified at every step of the way. idk it makes me feel things. i dont particularly want to portray fromsoftware as these bastions of political correctness or sth - they're not perfect and i don't expect that ever lmao, but it's so fucking weird that their games are this progressive and have been for a long ass time.

[avelera]

I adore Silco and think he’s one of the most fascinating complex characters in the whole show, but let’s not flatten the complexity of Zaun vs. Piltover plotline by pretending he was a saint or doing anything to help the common people of Zaun while he was alive.

Silco’s goal for Zaun was self-governance, independence, which is a laudable goal. Especially once Piltover stopped caring about the Undercity entirely because of the Hexgates, it was frankly criminal to consider them subjects and to neglect them as much as Piltover did, an injustice that Jayce recognized and IMO was the tipping point for him accepting Silco’s terms.

But Silco flooded the Lanes with Shimmer, which was developed directly by him, as part of his operation. He used it to personally enrich himself, to give himself power, and to win loyal followers to his cause specifically using substance addiction. His actions are monstrous. He tore apart families, the poverty has skyrocketed while he was in power, people like Huck were abandoned and left to rot unless they were of use to Silco then he gave them more Shimmer and pointed them at his battles to die for him.

A real argument can be made that Jayce should have turned down Silco’s proposal for the Undercity’s sake. Handing it over completely to Silco and his oligarchy of Chem Barons is a dubious decision at best, made only marginally the lesser of the two evils because of Piltover’s abuse and neglect. Yes, Zaun deserves to self govern, but does it deserve to be governed by Silco, and Renni, and Finn, and Smeech without any other recourse?

Piltover and Zaun are not democracies. They are two oligarchies run by the wealthy of their respective cities. Silco wasn’t proposing a democratic paradise for Zaun, he was proposing a second mirroring oligarchy for it, a personal fiefdom with himself in charge on the nominal argument that he’d treat it better than Piltover did, when we’ve seen what he did with most of that power already, which is flood the place with drugs to morph it into his own personal army and screw anyone small or powerless enough to not be able to fight on his behalf.

An argument can be made that Silco’s Zaun, without Vander to check his worst instincts, wouldn’t have been the AU of Ekko’s journey but a horror show and a nightmare. In the end, we don’t know if Silco was telling the truth about winding down Shimmer operations or if he truly intended to become a just and fair ruler of his people once they had independence, but we do have as an example what he has already done with similar power, enough to cast doubt on his honesty and good intentions in that moment.

Silco is a phenomenal character, a complex revolutionary and a villainous crime boss, a loving father who deliberately, methodically turned his beloved child into a weapon against his enemies, the would-be father of a nation and a monster who poisoned and destroyed his own people to achieve it, and I’m so tired of all of that being forgotten in order to simplify that Zaun vs. Piltover discussion into an easy good vs evil story.

[surviving-the-next-4-years]

How to survive the next 4 years!

Hey there! You may not know me and I definitely don't know everything and will not be pretending to know everything, but I'm trying to document and preserve data so we all can survive President Musk, Vice President Vance, First Lady Donald Trump, and the entirety of the Republican Party's attempts at destroying the United States of America.

It is evident that we live in an Oligarchy, and we are going to need everything we can to survive.

If you go to my blog you will find the tabs that have everything you need, for those of you on mobile here are the links:

-- Things to Stockpile

-- Preserving Your Food

-- Books to Buy

I will be updating these things as often as possible, along with adding more tabs so I will be reblogging this post with updates and more!

I will also be trying to keep everyone updated on news when I can to fight back against the Republican Party's misinformation campaigns.

I am not rich and I work full time so please understand that I will not be consistently posting as much as I wish I could.

Be safe. Stay healthy. Do not surrender.

[sotomato06]

trump going on and on about everything he planned to do on day one. End the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, lower prices, especially the cost of eggs and "make America great again!". wanna know what he actually did? He cut aid to struggling people both within and outside the nation by cutting cancer research funding, USAID funding (which help both overseas people AND Americans), and threatening aid for California wildfire survivors.

In his first month, he instituted tarriff that's are proving to be detrimental to the us economy and the stock market, antagonized all of our allies overseas by threatening them needlessly and has now allied the United States ideologically with oligarchies and authoritarians world wide. To put that into perspective for all those who were unaware, we voted WITH RUSSIA to not condemn the war in Ukraine. What the actual fuck. He also filled the government up with so many rich, corrupt hacks who are destroying the foundations of our governmental process.

but don't worry Republicans, because a body of water is now named after our failing democracy and you can say there's only two genders as everyone in this nation suffers because of the actions of a tangerine terror and his behind the scenes army of Broligarchy Christian nationalist techbro Hitler wannabes. And I don't even care that I just used a bunch of buzzwords because they're correct description words for the scum of the earth, I would rather eat dog shit than be in the same state as any of them, worthless pieces of literal trash that surround the current administration.

I'm embarrassed to be American, but I am and I'm not going to let some shit head, wanna be daughter fucker ruin this beautiful country for the rest of us.

[evilgrrrlofficial]

the part where marx said the petit bourgeoisie will eventually return to being part of the proletariat? that's what we're going to see in rhe next few weeks, months, and years as the economy plummets and only oligarchs can afford to continue to own the means of production. by petit bourgeoisie i mean small business owners, independent lawyers (small firms), restaurant owners, etc..

marx said academics and artisans were outside the divide of proletariat and bourgeoisie because they are not a part of the inherent class struggle between owner and employee. this is where marx is wrong. with a rise of fascist oligarchy we are already seeing a rise in anti-intellectualism. we are seeing artificial intelligence prioritized over an educated populace. we are seeing academia systematically defunded and made unattainable for anyone but those wealthy enough to favor oligarchy anyways. would-be academics become the proletariat when academia is destroyed.

artisans too are hurt by the oligarchy - our current consumerist hellscape demands things quickly and perfectly, without the perfect imperfections of human labor. artisans are replaced by machines that make hundreds of mugs an hour as opposed to perhaps a dozen at most, if they're thrown rather than slip-cast. artisans become the proletariat when art becomes manufactured and sterile.

eventually everything boils down to a binary. it is not proletariat and bourgeoisie in the way marx wrote. it is oligarch and everyone else.

value your art. value your flawed, chipped teacups. value your academia. value your imperfect grammar and ink-stained fingers. if you don't, techno-feudalist oligarchy has already won you.

note: i'm not a total communist. marx had some good theory on labor and the evils of capitalism, however, his social theory requires homogeny and atheism. full homogeny is only possible through genocide/ethnic cleansing and i am not an atheist. additionally, marx's vision of communism would never work on a large scale without authoritarianism 🫶

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The GOP is not the party of workers

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/13/occupy-the-democrats/#manchin-synematic-universe

The GOP says it's the "party of the working class" and indeed, they have promoted numerous policies that attack select groups within the American ruling class. But just because the party of unlimited power for billionaires is attacking a few of their own, it doesn't make them friends to the working people.

The best way to understand the GOP's relationship to worker is through "boss politics" – that's where one group of elites consolidates its power by crushing rival elites. All elites are bad for working people, so any attack on any elite is, in some narrow sense, "pro-worker." What's more, all elites cheat the system, so any attack on any elite is, again, "pro-fairness."

In other words, if you want to prosecute a company for hurting workers, customers, neighbors and the environment, you have a target-rich environment. But just because you crush a corrupt enterprise that's hurting workers, it doesn't mean you did it for the workers, and – most importantly – it doesn't mean that you will take workers' side next time.

Autocrats do this all the time. Xi Jinping engaged in a massive purge of corrupt officials, who were indeed corrupt – but he only targeted the corrupt officials that made up his rivals' power-base. His own corrupt officials were unscathed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Putin did this, too. Russia's oligarchs are, to a one, monsters. When Putin defenestrates a rival – confiscates their fortune and sends them to prison – he acts against a genuinely corrupt criminal and brings some small measure of justice to that criminal's victims. But he only does this to the criminals who don't support him:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy

The Trump camp – notably JD Vance and Josh Hawley – have vowed to keep up the work of the FTC under Lina Khan, the generationally brilliant FTC Chair who accomplished more in four years than her predecessors have in 40. Trump just announced that he would replace Khan with Andrew Ferguson, who sounds like an LLM's bad approximation of Khan, promising to deal with "woke Big Tech" but also to end the FTC's "war on mergers." Ferguson may well plow ahead with the giant, important tech antitrust cases that Khan brought, but he'll do so because this is good grievance politics for Trump's base, and not because Trump or Ferguson are committed to protecting the American people from corporate predation itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Writing in his newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan describes all the ways that the GOP plans to destroy workers' lives while claiming to be a workers' party, and also all the ways the Dems failed to protect workers and so allowed the GOP to outlandishly claim to be for workers:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/you-cant-rebrand-a-class-war

For example, if Ferguson limits his merger enforcement to "woke Big Tech" companies while ending the "war on mergers," he won't stop the next Albertson's/Kroger merger, a giant supermarket consolidation that just collapsed because Khan's FTC fought it. The Albertson's/Kroger merger had two goals: raising food prices and slashing workers' wages, primarily by eliminating union jobs. Fighting "woke Big Tech" while waving through mergers between giant companies seeking to price-gouge and screw workers does not make you the party of the little guy, even if smashing Big Tech is the right thing to do.

Trump's hatred of Big Tech is highly selective. He's not proposing to do anything about Elon Musk, of course, except to make Musk even richer. Musk's net worth has hit $447b because the market is buying stock in his companies, which stand to make billions from cozy, no-bid federal contracts. Musk is a billionaire welfare queen who hates workers and unions and has a long rap-sheet of cheating, maiming and tormenting his workforce. A pro-worker Trump administration could add labor conditions to every federal contract, disqualifying businesses that cheat workers and union-bust from getting government contracts.

Instead, Trump is getting set to blow up the NLRB, an agency that Reagan put into a coma 40 years ago, until the Sanders/Warren wing of the party forced Biden to install some genuinely excellent people, like general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who – like Khan – did more for workers in four years than her predecessors did in 40. Abruzzo and her colleagues could have remained in office for years to come, if Democratic Senators had been able to confirm board member Lauren McFerran (or if two of those "pro-labor" Republican Senators had voted for her). Instead, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Synema rushed to the Senate chamber at the last minute in order to vote McFerran down and give Trump total control over the NLRB:

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/11/schumer-nlrb-vote-manchin-sinema

This latest installment in the Manchin Synematic Universe is a reminder that the GOP's ability to rebrand as the party of workers is largely the fault of Democrats, whose corporate wing has been at war with workers since the Clinton years (NAFTA, welfare reform, etc). Today, that same corporate wing claims that the reason Dems were wiped out in the 2024 election is that they were too left, insisting that the path to victory in the midterms and 2028 is to fuck workers even worse and suck up to big business even more.

We have to take the party back from billionaires. No Dem presidential candidate should ever again have "proxies" who campaign to fire anti-corporate watchdogs like Lina Khan. The path to a successful Democratic Party runs through worker power, and the only reliable path to worker power runs through unions.

Nolan's written frequently about how bad many union leaders are today. It's not just that union leaders are sitting on historically unprecedented piles of cash while doing less organizing than ever, at a moment when unions are more popular than they've been in a century with workers clamoring to join unions, even as union membership declines. It's also that union leaders have actually endorsed Trump – even as the rank and file get ready to strike:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yz_Z08KwKgFt3QvnV8nEETSgTXM5eZw5ujT4BmQXEWk/edit?link_id=0&can_id=9481ac35a2682a1d6047230e43d76be8&source=email-invitation-to-cover-amazon-labor-union-contract-fight-rally-cookout-on-monday-october-14-2024-2&email_referrer=email_2559107&email_subject=invitation-to-cover-jfk8-workers-authorize-amazon-labor-union-ibt-local-1-to-call-ulp-strike&tab=t.0

The GOP is going to do everything it can to help a tiny number of billionaires defeat hundreds of millions of workers in the class war. A future Democratic Party victory will come from taking a side in that class war – the workers' side. As Nolan writes:

If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise.

Nolan's remedy for the Democratic Party is simple and straightforward, if not easy:

The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either—the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)

Cosigned.

[parkerellis]

i’m not even that upset about penske at the white house tbh because it doesn’t matter who is in office. kamala harris is a war criminal, joe biden is a war criminal, barack obama is a war criminal, and they all protected and advanced american oligarchy when they were in power. yes it’s upsetting because trump sucks. we know this. and it proves they as drivers have no backbone. we know this. but like. we have much bigger fish to fry. the enemy is imperialism and in the heart of a dying empire, choosing to associate w an imperialist flailing for power is what members of the oppressor class will do to maintain the status quo. this has happened and will happen in every sports league in the u.s. until capitalism falls.

but i understand it’s jarring for class politics to pop up like this when you think you know who an athlete is. but again. oppressor class. imperialism. the ultimate goal is so far beyond standing next to a “good guy” in the house built by slaves on top of genocided native peoples promoting a sport that makes the rich richer and destroys the planet. you are not the moral failings of your entertainment.

[1americanconservative]

@DefiyantlyFree

Here is a list of billionaires who are exclusively contributing to the Democratic Party:

- George Soros

- Michael Bloomberg

- Reid Hoffman

- Hansjorg Weiss

- Tom Steyer

- Sam Bankman - Fried

- JB Pritzker

- Marc Benioff

- Neil Blum

- Mark Cuban

- Laurene Powell Jobs

- Bill Gates

Here is the list that have contributed to Republicans in the last year:

- Elon Musk

- Zuckerberg

- Bezos

Oh yes, be afraid of the oligarchs, but not the ones on the right. The ones on the left who have been systemically funneling all of their money through 501(c)(4)s that have been purchasing elections by destroying election integrity measures across the country, investing in insane ballot measures, and overall funneling $2 billion worth of dark money per election cycle.

Please tell me some more about oligarchy Bernie Sanders, from one of your 4 mansions no less.

Oh and please fact check me.