I've been a worker my whole life.
there's always been workers.
the world is broken into those who dominate and those who are dominated. the strong dominate the weak. it's always been this way; it's why lions sleep 20 hours a day. the males don't even hunt.
at some point in history, there also became the manager. in the beginning, the manager probably also was a worker, but as his management duties became more and more, he stopped working and worked by telling people what to do.
so you have workers, and people who tell people to work.
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slave drivers and slaves
but i'm sure there are managers out there who think "well my job is shit, I get told what to do all the time" and that's also true. That means you're a worker, too. Your work involves telling people what to do.
but somewhere on the top, there are people who don't work, who own the whole tree itself. and as the trees get bigger and bigger, so does the money that makes its way to that person.
giant trees are also risky. if your tree dies, your business crumbles, you might be left with a pile of money, but your tree is dead, too. you can no longer generate wealth. So, instead of owning one tree, I own a fraction of a bunch of trees, so if one doesn't do well this year, the ones that did quite well will make up for it.
this is why a big company hires a new ceo to try something, and even if he fucks up, he still gets big money. the owners have to pay for the fertilizer, even if it doesn't work.
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so let's think about laws for a minute.
there are laws that are obvious - thou shall not kill - intended to protect consumers
and there are also laws you would expect for a business that are common sense ,too, to protect consumers - you must say the contents of something when you sell it.
every year, the leaves fall off the trees. replacing leaves might be more expensive that keeping them on, from a leaf's perspective. If a tree dies, the workers will be inconvenienced to have to find new jobs in the meantime, but the owners who take the free money take a huge blow. So, they also have laws to keep the labors trees alive. Some of them are there to protect little trees - like copyright, but there are also laws that exist to protect giant trees - like a no-community broadband restriction.
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So how do we change it?
First, why do we want to change it?
in 2017, the average WORKER produced a little over $100 an hour of value to the economy in the united states. That's incredible! However, for all but a disgustingly small fraction of a sliver actually saw anywhere near that kind of money in their pockets. Workers money goes up the trees - the owners and shareholders took in almost $4 trillion in 2016 - even if we average to the top 1% of Americans, those people take an average XXXX (look this up).
second,
in america, there's a lot of work to be done, and the vast majority of it comes in the form of products to make and products to fix. your body is also a product to fix. But, there's a lot of work that could be done around town to make the cities you live in.
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How many times have you heard "the government can't do anything right!"
it's a hoax. the truth is, the government doesn't really do anything, and it can easily be changed. The owners don't want to waste work on things that don't make money. A city just needs to contract out a private company to fix a bad road; to build a park. People should get free healthcare.
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However, not all workers are created equal.
the good workers are jealous. we've been taught that there are "unworthy others"; that not all americans are actually equal. But it's not true.
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so how do we fix it.
Voting.
right now we have two parties. you can guess which parties represent which groups. One party unabashedly represents the owner class. They don't even pretend at this point. the other party claims to represent the workers. Republicans ARE dominant, democrats are submissive. and on the lowest levels, republicans win because people don't want to be submissive, and they have created "undeserving others" as a boogeyman to prevent receiving something wonderful like free college.
the owners are also really good at using religion to keep themselves in power. The witchhunt is still real - candidates on the left are always berrated about how much they support abortion, or their record on gun rights. Gays can finally marry in this country, but has there been a popular openly gay politician? What are people scared of?
I was in montana this year to visit my family. Everybody has guns. It's a way of life. It's a hobby, it's to feel safe. We don't want to take all that away.
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there's work to be done, and there's plenty of money to put into the economy. spending money on a new sidewalk doesn't mean the money disappears. Are you still using that iPhone you bought in 2007? you paid for that, the economy moved on, and it's probably sitting in a drawer somewhere if it hasn't already been given to recycling. Spending money on public works, or on healthcare, doesn't mean it's wasted money; it actually goes back into the economy almost immediately. Instead,
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So, workers should be voting to create rules that protect them. If the workers banded together, in as few as 6 years from this video being published, no worker in this country would have to work more than 30 hours a week, labor jobs that don't produce value would still be paid enough that these people could relax when they aren't on their feet, healthcare would be free, and hundreds of inventors and scientists could be on their way to solving the climate crisis. Public spaces could be saved and developed, communities could build fast, neutral internet, and we could work with our allies across the globe to continue to keep everyone safe from terrorism and non-human caused threats as well.
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I've been fed a lie my whole life - work hard and you'll be rich. But it's not true. We're shown examples of extremely talented people who created a product or a system and are now multimillionaires. Jeez, if only I wrote a book about a magic boarding school for wizards; or invented the sham-wow, I'd be rich, too!
But it's a lie the owners want you to believe, because you'll work very hard. Take the game platform Steam for example.
If I created an amazing indie video game, a perfect woven masterpiece of gameplay, new features, graphics, sound, and showed it to the world, maybe it would catch like wildfire, and i could sell a million copies. - That's one way.
But, to steam's eyes, selling a million copies of one game is exactly the same as selling a a million copies of a whole truckload of games that individually might not sell a dozen all by themselves. So they encourage these "indie developers" to work really hard, boys, and holy crap they did. They created 4300 new games to steam in 2016. And they sold very very well. So, the labor tree in steam's case is a hell of a lot wider, and the owners in that case are still just sitting back and letting the money appear.
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But, don't the winners of this deserve the money they are earning? if somebody figures out the system, shouldn't they be rich?
I'm not advocating the utter takedown of labor trees and the end of western civilization. This is simply how a functioning society works. You've heard from many people and economists everywhere that say "Communism doesn't work". With no incentives and no structure, the west would collapse.
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what about the stock market?
We simply vote for bigger guaranteed pensions (social security) and earlier retirement ages. The money exists!! The workers exist!! The owners want us instead to put our money in the stock market - which allows them to control and build giant labor trees with a constant stream of new money. instead of work being done to improve our communities, work is being done to create more products that end up as waste.
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won't rising wages drive up the prices? how will small stores stay in business if they have to pay higher wages?
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what about my issue? the democrats are the only ones that care about me!
workers need to protect themselves first. as long as somebody performs a task, they should be protected from being fired or being paid less for who they are. if a law stated that everybody's salary had to be public, could a woman make less than a man if she had the exact same position?
"The government can't do anything right!"
it will when we are in charge of it.
What about guns!
You'll need guns to protect yourself from the owners.
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take my hometown for example. If they made a grand list of everything in town that needed work done to it, to make it a perfect city to live in, they may come up with tens of thousands of hours of work to do fixing city streets, building new parks, planting trees, improving security, building a new school, knocking down a burned out building. It would be massive, but it would be finite. All across the country, communities could sit down and not argue about what would be done first, but just what needs to be done at all. We could devote resources to our country first, and make our cities healthy places to be.
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but won't companies just move to other countries? america will turn into mexico!!
americans are the most productive workers in the whole world.
And even if the top lost 20% of their income,
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this is income distribution!
It's work distribution. Having people work is a natural way to earn money. By changing what people do to work, our countr
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but look around. public things suck! private are way better
they would still be privately built. They could be privately operated. If your post office was twice as big with workers incentized to get people out the door, how must faster would you get in and out of there? How about the DMV? If you asked anybody on the street how to make the post office in their town faster, they could tell you how. It's not rocket science, there just aren't enough workers to do the work.
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