Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age
(jacobin.com)
from boem@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 13 Mar 2024 21:46
https://lemmy.world/post/13088804
from boem@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 13 Mar 2024 21:46
https://lemmy.world/post/13088804
threaded - newest
lol, I used to work there. I sold David Blaine an iPhone 3G standing under that thing. I saw Seal climb up on a display case and sing Kiss From A Rose (and hype up a huge crowd) 3 times in a row until we had to make him stop. I sold Eddie Izzard 3 pairs of the same shitty Skullbocks headphones that kept breaking, but he refused to buy a better pair because he really liked them. I got Jonathan Groff’s phone number at the genius bar. He was wearing an Epcot T-shirt, and I had no idea who he was.
Working there was fucking wild.
K
It’s not just tech titans. Letting media companies megamerge left us with a handful of corporations that control the narrative. Studios shouldn’t be able to own the content, the tv channels, the set top boxes and the wires they’re transmitted on.
Especially considering what we know about the uneducation system in America. Now featuring flat Earthers.
Yup. News sources have been consolidating for the last 50 years. It used to be that every news outlets you watched was ultimately owned by one of 40 companies. Today, that number is 5. So if five billionaires get together and decide something is not going to be talked about, then it DOESN’T get talked about. This is why the Internet has them so freaked out. They can’t control it (yet) so it’s a threat to their version of reality.
This is also why our “liberal news media” does such a terrible job of speaking truth to bullshit. It’s not necessary to report “both sides of an argument” if one side of the argument is insane, woo-woo dipshiterry. What they’re doing there is gaslighting you into thinking that babbling nonsense is “just another point of view” It’s not in the interest of billionaires to have informed citizens, capable of critical thinking, so the point of this exercise is to keep us fighting with each other about where the REAL source of our problems come from while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the f*cking money.
Five dudes control more wealth than half the country shit’s wack yo!
Way I see it, the brackets should be marked first at the quintile thresholds for household income, then at the 5th percentile threshold, then at the 1st percentile threshold.
Then each bracket’s rate is the total of the percentages of wealth controlled by every bracket below the given bracket plus half the difference between that and the sum of percentages including the wealth that bracket owns.
So as an example, the 1%, they control 26.5% of the country’s wealth, so the base is 73.5%, plus half of 26.5 is 86.75% for income above the 1% threshold.
That’s how it should be.
But really that’s what gets the other side to whine for when they’ll leave the trailer park and become billionaires.
Even if we changed it to a fractiotof that it would still bring immense change. As long as it doesn’t go to the military budget I guess
Personally I think the surplus revenue should actually be set aside at first.
Turn it into a national sovereign wealth fund to use as a way to patch over lean times in the budget or to dip into during a recession or depression.
With so many people interested on embezzling or at least “using” it, which constitutional mechanism is going to ensure that doesn’t happen?
I’d just put it in the control of the Fed with a requirement of providing reports of performing their duty as a fiduciary controlling it.
Plus being able to quickly make use of it in an emergency would allow the Fed to be alot more dynamic on monetary policy where needed.
It’s still an organization made up of people.
I don’t have a better answer, I still think yours is not satisfactory.
Yeah but those people report directly to Congress, and personally I’ve got my own bone to pick with how Congress is set up so my pie in the sky version of things has a much better designed one
Also abolishing the independent executive because it inherently acts as a parasitic force dragging a country further and further from a democratic/republican core of design
If your taxes for the rich are too high, they will all take their ball and go home - to one of their many homes in a country that doesn’t have high taxes. Or just declare their superyaught anchored in international waters as their “home”. With “business travel” as their reason to spend time (maybe all of the time) on US soil.
When you have that much money, there’s not really much society can do to touch you.
The US has one of the highest exit taxes in the world, if it’s any concern you can raise it even higher, but capital flight is something the rich try to say will totally happen but that they never actually ever end up doing because paying high taxes isn’t worth the hassle that uprooting and moving everything to a new country entails.
That’s the kind of effort that gets provoked by imprisoning them for just complaining against those taxes, or by seizing everything they own without even nominal compensation.
Have you honestly calculated both to decide which is more expensive, or it’s just talk?
Because there have been a few instances of big companies doing just that.
Except not really because what that is is them saying they’re owned or headquartered internationally.
It’s not reflective of capital flight at the scale of hyper wealthy individuals, just of how fucked corporate tax law is in comparison to income tax law.
Similar exit tax laws for reheadquartering out of country or selling out to a foreign owner would probably help cut way down on the practice.
I think you are wrong but I’d like to see this tried, if not too catastrophic.
Well the highest marginal rate ever was about 90% in the 50s and there wasn’t significant capital flight at that time
There wasn’t significant movable capital either at that time.
in the 50s‽ Yeah sure whatever ya say.
Yes, you might have noticed that Microsoft, Google, Apple etc are the kind of companies which didn’t exist back then.
Yeah, instead there was a bunch of fruit companies, IBM, and GM.
The most bloated corporate valuation in history was the South Sea Company, and that fiasco went down in the 1700s.
I view the “take my ball and leave” talk as gaslighting. The rich are rich thanks to infrastructure we fund on a public basis. Roads, police, fire departments, and the very function of society is something we all collectively fund that they benefit from. I wish them all the luck in the world going to some third party totalitarian shithole with minefields, far more broken roads than we have, and warlords.
Have fun, fuckheads, please leave and don’t let the door hit you in the ass. That’s my response to any talk about uprooting.
I absolutely hate this mindset. I hear it now and then, and it’s being used even by left wing politicians to hand over more money, power and control to the wealthy, because “they have so much power with their money already, there’s nothing we can do”. Oh ok. So just capitulate then? Because we’re not starving to death? Nah fam. Work harder. Collaborate. Be creative. As creative as they are with their bookkeeping and finances. And if that shit doesn’t work, it’s violence time.
We’ve confronted robber barons before, and then stuff like the Sherman Anti Trust act happened. If we can collectively gain the resolve, society can absolutely touch these motherfuckers. We arguably had even worse politicians back in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, and after some serious incidents it became a politically charged enough issue to overhaul Congress and the Senate.
Can’t believe I can’t buy Spotify premium from their ios app. Thanks Apple