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It's weird how in the Western world we rarely call them oligarchs. That seems to be reserved for the wealth-hoarders in former-Soviet countries.
I’ll use it if you do.
Pinky swear?
I've been trying my best for a while now, friend. I'm also trying to normalize treating having too much wealth as embarrassing. Like, it should fully be seen as a character flaw to have more money than anyone could ever use. I'm far from advocating for enforced equality, but there should be some limit to wealth upon which exceeding it is viewed as gross by the rest of us plebs. Those parasites certainly shouldn't be fawned over like so many people do now.
You are the first rando to ever call me friend like my friend does and I’m super here for it. Thank you for that, I really liked it. :)
I’m super behind you, friend. I will continue to call them oligarchs, I will continue to make wealth an embarrassment. I mean I’m poor and always have been so of course I’ll rail against the overlords… but 40% of the US population is poor, we are nearing a majority and that is super fucked, and that’s a huge potential voting bloc! We should really do shit with that!
Gosh, it must suck to have so much money and not do anything good for society with it. How embarrassing for you to have so much and do so little with it.
I mean look, if we just taxed shit appropriately we’d probably be mostly ok. There’s a reason tax cuts are so influential. And there’s a reason anyone over a certain income bracket should have $0 worth of loopholes. I’m down with tax loopholes but if you have more than $x in any bank account you are disqualified from claiming. Why not, right? Who does it harm? Nobody who matters.
I'm truly glad I was able to help you have a nicer day. We all need to look out for each other and prop our friends (current or future) up in this system rigged against us.
I'm with you in that most of the population are comparatively poor. The problem is that the oligarchs know exactly how to keep us down, by playing our minor differences off against each other. We need a whole lot of love and understanding to counter that power.
I mean, I'm so goddamn fortunate compared to like 95% of the earth's population. I grew up fairly poor to working-class parents who had to really struggle to provide for us and keep a roof over our heads. But poor in Canada is a whole world's difference from poor (or even doing okay) in most other places, and I include the USA in that latter category.
I'm now nearing 40 and for the first time in my life I don't have to outright directly stress about money. My wife and I are lower-middle-class, and along with the rest of my family were able to buy the business we all worked for. It's still a struggle - now I have to worry about keeping the business afloat for everyone who depends on it, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. (It's still up in the air whether my mom, the president of our company, will be able to retire in time to enjoy it.) That said, part of the reason we could make this happen was because we had my wife's family to fall back on and have "temporarily" been living rent-free in their basement for 9 years now. This is something else that so many other people lack. I can't remember the technical term for it, but having a family or other social network to lift you up is so crucial to keeping people out of poverty or otherwise helping them better their lives.
This is getting stupidity long-winded, but the point I'm getting at is that for the first time in my life I have the potential to become very wealthy over the next few decades. However, myself and my family are in full agreement that we don't want that. As our business becomes less of a struggle we certainly want to pay ourselves a little better (with our skills and experience we could make far more anywhere else than we can currently afford to pay ourselves), but we want to raise the wages of our staff right along with our own - never making much more than the average person we employ. To us, that's the real mark of business success - creating a thriving organization that lifts up everyone involved.
We've all seen what egregious wealth can do to a person and want no part in it. If our business does well enough to potentially make us rich, I want us to be taxed punitively- to properly incentivize us to reinvest our profits into creating more jobs and paying them increasingly well. To get rich would be the death of who we are as people.
With this all being said, all of us who want to make the world better in spite of the egregious power of the rich need to stick together. Leftism is so prone to infighting over minute technical details when we ultimately all want the same core things. I'm certainly critical of certain strains of leftism, but at the end of the day I have way more in common with ya'll than I do with the rich. (In fairness, my family technically owns some of the means of production, but the tiny sliver we own is worth less than a typical house in our low cost-of-living area and we don't own houses because of it. As such, I think the worst we could be accused of is being petite bourgeoisie.)
The rich, on the other hand, possess a remarkable class consciousness. A white warehouse worker has far more in common with a black supermarket worker than a Saudi Sheik has with an American or Russian oligarch, but you'd never know it. They've gotten so good at playing us against each other while cooperating to keep us all down. It's a tale as old as time.
I really liked you long winded post.. genuinely.
And I wrote out a really long reply but.. I deleted it. Because it was probably too much trauma to throw at someone I don’t know :) and I really enjoyed what you wrote to me, but I know that I’m “much”, sometimes “a bit much”, sometimes “too much”.. either way I don’t want to lead on that because it never works out for me so.
I really enjoy you friend and I want you to know I read everything you wrote I just don’t have the gonads to actually engage with this the way I want to.
Instead, here’s something that helped me be who I am today (jokingly, old humor you may recognize)
I definitely recognize that video! I'm sure I saw it on Ebaums World or something way back before YouTube.
As to your comment itself - don't worry about being "too much" with me, especially after that info dump I fired at you. Many of us at my work struggle with mental illness and joke about how blatantly we trauma-dump on each other all the time. Sooooo, I'm used to it, and regularly perpetrate it myself. I've also been through two full-on mental breakdowns myself so not a lot can shock me.
It's late and I need some sleep but if you ever need a friendly ear to vent to, add me on Mastodon ( @herrcaptain@geekdom.social ) or straight up shoot me an email ( herrcaptain@proton.me ). I skimmed some of your comment history and you seem like a good egg and we have a lot of common ground for a friendship.
I appreciate you friend. It’s been a solid while since I drank (which is better for everyone, I’m a fucking mess!) and so I’m kinda very aware of myself. I’m trying to be a better person and I fail every time. So if I limit my exposure surface area I can’t be so abrasive right…? Or something? (Frankly idk what’s wrong with me, but I’m clearly unlikeable so I try to limit my.. exposure surface area I guess? Hence deleting my post. But telling you about it because i want to social..
I hope you have a wonderful night, and sleep wonderfully. I always like to encourage my friends to have soecific thoughts, so if you read this before you go to bed, I hope you fall asleep thinking about a random mountaintop stream leading into a lakebed. I hope you see trees around you, filled with fireflies. You see the lake lapping at your feet with the wind, and bioluminescent glow around your toes.
Have a great night friend and wonderful dreams :)
You as well, my dude! And for the record, you seem very likable to me. Please do feel more than welcome to reach out if you ever need a friendly ear. I often feel powerless in the world, but one thing I am capable of is acting as a sounding board for someone who needs to vent. As I said in another comment earlier today, I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, so these days I focus on just helping people where I can.
Aww that’s super nice of you :) even my friends struggle to…. Not dislike me :) I struggle with it myself but you made it a bit easier today, being very open to things.
It won’t be tonight but I do hope to run into you again. I… can’t reach out to you, it just isn’t a thing I can do at this point (always goes horribly) but if you do want to keep touch, please do feel free to dm me, or whatever that looks like on Lemmy/fediverse..?
Honestly it has not happened, and irl people who give me their contact info tend to do so with zero expectation of follow-up (I have learned through failed attempts to follow up), so idk how to do it or what it looks like.. but I would like to keep contact if you’d be into it.
But if not o hope you have a great night all the same :) no pressure or whatever :) but do think of that mountain stream, maybe throw in glowing trees if you feel adventuresome! I have a whole dream town and it’s so fun to have a place to explore. Give yourself a glowing woods while you can ;)
The problem is they don’t give a flying fuck what we think of them because they don’t have to and never will.
They can buy an army of bots on xitter to say nice things to them.
Also you will buy their products and watch their movies and work for them so you don’t starve to death.
or create a tv show and watch as millions fawn over their every move
As a British person, I had a few awkward conversations with other British people when I've asked them to explain the difference between a royal or a higher level aristocrat and an oligarch.
It seems to be something to do with the length of time society had to endure their bastardry. Well, it's either that or that they're not from the Oligar region of Russia. Its one of the two.
I guess the technical difference would be that one had ancestors who took their power by force and managed to cement it into hereditary rule, while the other acquired it as a "captain of industry" and then largely did the same thing through lobbying or other forms of cronyism.
Mostly the same end result, but for some reason we put one on our coins and hold celebrations in their honor.
I do prefer your champagne analogy though.
Would you still feel that way, about the very first part, if I was to remind you that some of the Russian oligarchs were crime bosses who took power and wealth by force?
Admittedly, it doesn't have the hereditary rule part but that, for me, would simple fall under "the difference is the passage of time." I see it much like the difference between a cult and a religion.
Very fair point. And just to clarify, I loathe them all about equally regardless of how they obtained their wealth/power or what country they're from.
Here in Ukraine, we don't really have those illusions about them, yeah. Some of it might be remainders of Soviet collectivism, but even back then there were people who hoarded money and power, just under different pretenses
So it really is the same everywhere.