This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
I cannot stop seeing this idea overlaid on every thing that I see or do or hear about. Every action is filtered through the lens of it being extractive and manipulative.
I feel extremely stressed because I see the bars of the cage and no one else around me wants to acknowledge them.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Reject consumerism, make things instead.
We have friends coming over, instead of ordering food from a mega corporation I am going to make pizza and potato wedges.
Where do the ingredients come from? Are you growing your own grain and milling it into your own flower? Do you have your own cows or goats to make your own cheese? Did you build your own oven? Fired with wood you cut down yourself?
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter. It only makes you feel like you’re doing something.
You’d be more effective buying the pizza from a locally owned place.
When making something nice I would buy the ingredients from local independents where I can. I can almost see the farm I get cheese and garlic from on a clear day but there is a hill in the way.
Its also risky though, they sell fucking massive slabs of halloumi style cheese. Its a lot of money but also a lot of cheese.
Can’t do it for every ingredient with every recipe, but I am fed up of the just give up attitude I often hear simply because something isn’t 100% perfect in every way and using that as a reason to not even try. So I do what I reasonably can.
Also, ingredients are cheaper than a fast food place. Better quality too.
Like I said, it makes you feel better, that’s fine.
But don’t pretend it’s fighting the fight. Though if you don’t pretend, it may not make you feel better.Other than refusing to consume, what do you suggest doing that will achieve more and is easy for most people to do?
Organizing, protesting, voting and voter registration drives, marketing and coms. Even starting a union owned business, or something similar. Those kinds of things make a difference. Individual purchasing decisions don’t.
Many of those are much more difficult for most people to do, are of questionable benefit or they already do.
Refuse to give them money, it is the only language they understand.
Even starting a union owned business
Hey everyone. You want to change society? Just start a business. Easy peesy! Don’t make small changes in your life, make massive financial overhauls.
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does. You’re cutting out the part with highest markup. Skipping an entire manufacturing process.
You can get the ingredients for a fraction of the cost compared to a finished product.
Maybe. But price wasn’t the argument being made. That’s a non sequitur.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Then do something. Why does someone else need to rattle the cage for you to break free? Why are Americans, who masturbate to the 2nd amendment, so afraid of taking back their country? There’s 350 million of you, trillions of guns, and merely a few hundred of them. Start turning the streets red.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
This is quite literally the stuff that results in revolutions. People can tolerate inequality only up to a certain level. Even some ultra rich can see the situation can’t remain stable.
Which is why they put so much effort into manipulating all of us
It just takes one person to start a revolution. Too bad the lot of you are waiting for someone else to start it.
This applies to you as well. Also what revolution was done by a single person?
I don’t live in a country under dictatorial fascism. So I don’t need to start a revolution.
Also what revolution was done by a single person?
Rosa Parks refusing to leave her seat on the bus was the catalyst for the Civil Rights movement just to name one. Greta Thunberg as an individual is the face of climate change and social economic change.
Then kindly shut the fuck up about what people you don’t even live with should do.
Cool. Enjoy ICE or something I guess. Hope you don’t sprain your ankle or you might end up homeless.
Little bit of data for you:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:1989.4,2026.2
That graph makes me sick
And Americans still refuse to do anything about it.
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I’d sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Which is still, just insane to think about.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there’s people out there, somewhat “commonly”, going “Hmmm yerrs, let’s put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed…”
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It’s nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just…damn.
I don’t wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)
Haha yeah sorry I was struggling to convey that properly. US American here.
Like, after the paycheck comes in, and we pay all the bills, yeah having some 1000’s just left over to decide what to do with would be quite cushy.
We’re a couple that both work decently paying part times. Living with family makes that possible, but unavoidable debts (and climbing insurance rates) the last few years balanced it out.
So I mean, we live comfortably and we’re materially content. But also times are really scary where another 2008 could hit us real bad.
So it’s still weird imagining people just having lots of padding floating around. Lol
How about a different kinda slicing?
Americans let children die in schools to gun violence for decades just so they can uphold the 2nd amendment which by definition doesn’t even guarantee access to guns to common civilians, but hide in the corner when their way of life is being taken away from them day by day because “They have guns too and I’m a pussy”.
The USA is 350 million fucking cowards, and they deserve what is happening.
…says someone who laments gun violence while encouraging gun violence.
If America actually had a civil war this person would write off everyone involved as “toxic and obsessed with violence.” I’ve dealt with folks like this before; they just want to differentiate themselves from Americans so that they can feel safe from what’s happening in America, and like it won’t happen to them. Really not too different from any other kind of victim blaming
It’s easy for people like me to differentiate myself from other Americans, considering that I am not American.
