actually, most of them inherited their ownings from ancesters who exploited the working class… and they have exploited some high paid workers to continue exploiting low paid workers for their profits… Yet, mostly, they did nothing…
You can’t say they did nothing.
That completely ignores all the theft, fraud, and bribery.
I would respect the hustle more if they were the ones actually doing the theft, fraud, and bribery. Pretty much all of that is being done by people in your c-suite. All they have to do is show up to the board meeting once a quarter to approve all the fuckery.
sorry, it was a try of humour…
We all need to slow down. When caught in a stupid job we can be as slow and dumb as one can be without being fired. It’s very relaxing to stop worrying about being ‘Not Good Enough’. Even if we are too weak to fight we can slow this trolley down, one stubborn act of silent quitting at a time.
And it’s not just rich people. We hear that big CEOs make thousands of times what their employees make and we don’t bat an eye. And so now, at least in America - this way of thinking has crept into the collective psyche as if it’s just completely natural and normal.
Consider installing some complex thing at your home. A contractor can purchase the materials for the job for say $4000. He then pays two of his techs $30-$40/hr to install it, it takes two days. So $4000 for materials and $1280 in labor. He thinks nothing about charging the client $12,000 for this work and so it becomes the new normal that this costs twelve grand when what it really cost, between manufacturing and installation - was $5280. It’s not that the guy who organizes it all’s time is worth nothing, it’s that his time is not worth more than what everybody else involved got.
But this is what everyone in America aspires to and is part of why we are where we are.
Yeap… Around 15 years ago there was a huge push for young men to enter the trades, with people saying stuff like a plumber or electrician is going to earn more than people with a higher education. That may have been true 20-30 years ago, but nowadays the only real employer out there is all through contract work.
Big business found a new market to exploit and started to edge out the mom and pop companies who would actually employ their trade workers. Now if you’re looking for a tradesman you either have to pay one of the nation wide companies or a mom and pop who has adopted the same methods to turn a profit.
In the end you’re going to overpay a company to hire an under paid contractor to do barely functional work. The only person winning in the scenario is the owner of the company.
The “poor are lazy” is just the other side of the idea that “wealth is the product of merit”.
The wealthy and the institutions they own (including most of the Press), in the process of pushing to society the whole bundle of ideas around them being deserving of the privileges they have and that discrimination by wealth is fair, just slander the poor as lazy for the sake of little more than consistency (since things like Social Security cost way less than corporate subsidies, tax evasion by the wealthy and the myriad of tax avoidance backdoors in the tax systems of almost all countries that are only accessible to the ultra-wealthy).
Also, of course, pushing the idea that working hard can make you rich is part of pushing the whole idea that “wealth is the product of merit”, hence “the poor must work harder”. This idea is of course absolute bullshit - just local at social mobility rates in your country - though in some countries (for example the US) it used to be true (as the US used to have very high social mobility, whilst now it’s very low).
Anybody who digs down finds that behind pretty much every rich person there is a rich parent or, at best, a priviledged upper middle class upbringing - wealth in the modern society is overwhelmingly NOT the product of merit, it’s the result of luck of birth.
Its the modern equivalent of a verbal whip crack.
Thanks Impact font positioned in a meme structure on top of a black background
I thought it was their opinion that poor people should work hard for the benefit of the rich
Everyone who can work should
