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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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But so much of this money is being spent. Its being spent doing insane vanity projects, like Bezos's personal space program or Elon Musk's Twitter buyout. It goes towards massive ideological projects, such as the Koch Bros / Peter Thiel campaign to turn everyone into libertarians. Or towards ostentatious religious icons, like the Crystal Cathedral or the Joel Osteen Church.
It goes towards lobbying. Sooooo much lobbying. Hundreds of millions spent to influence government bureaucrats on everything from who can get an abortion to which country we're at war with today. Gates threwa big chunk of his fortune towards a project of education privatization and school voucherization during the Obama term, and the consequences are still echoing through my school district in the form of these obnoxious and pointless high stakes standardized tests.
We see these astronomical bank accounts turn towards reckless misuse of natural resources - Bitcoin mining consumed 110 Terrawatt Hours in 2022. Whole swaths of the airline industry exist to cater to this fraction of a fraction of mega-wealthy people who indulge in short-hop air travel. They sink fortunes on competitions to own the largest yacht or the most creepy sex island. Human trafficking as an enterprise is by and for the mega-rich, both for personal use and increased corporate profits.
You want to see a real act of billionaire (closer to trillionaire) hubris? Look at the Saudi's quixotic quest to build their supercity of Neom. How much money have we pissed away clinging to fossil fuels, so MBS can create a five mile long Mall of America?
The problem is not simply whether they can spend these enormous pots of wealth, but how they reshape the economy as a whole in the attempt. So much of the world exists to meet the whims of these plutocrats. We pay in our time, our health, and our political autonomy, so a handful of elites can have their every whim indulged.
Spent by being traded amongst rich people which does nothing at all to the economy. It's hoarding with extra steps.
Don't take my comment as excusing the wealthy. It wasn't intended to be critical of them, but it was intended to give an idea of the scale of the problem. It's not just rich people who are the problem. It's the system (which my comment is intended to be critical of). It's designed to make the rich richer. That's what needs to be dismantled.
Spending the money at the rate they would need to to put back into circulation would crash markets. It would make things worse for poor people.
The "spending" isn't nearly so much the issue as "what its being spent on".
We've got billions of dollars flowing into the media market so that Libs-of-TikTok and TurningPointUSA dorks can churn out reaction videos at an industrial scale. Meanwhile, we're privatizing PBS/NPR and downsizing all the journalist departments at the national news agencies, because its more important to generate profit for stakeholders than to do the thing these organizations ostensibly exist to do.
The material that's being produced - consumer ready mass media - is being degraded thanks to the sheer volume of money that's redirected from large publicly accountable news organs to independent vanity projects with ultra-wealthy sugar daddies.
You can play the same game with the education system, the energy grid, mass transit, fucking groceries. The very price of an egg is dictated by whether or not some fuckwads at Tyson want to pocket a fatter dividend by downsizing the department that monitors for bird flu outbreaks.
What money is spent on matters quite a lot. Spending $300 a week on groceries, and $2000 a month on rent or a mortgage is a lot different than paying $2000 for a new watch, and $300 for new shoes just because they're designer. But I do agree with your point. There's a lot of money changing hands behind the scenes to the detriment of poor people as well. My comments weren't a disparagement of or dismissal of this problem, it just didn't acknowledge that because I see a lot of people who want to blame a chosen few individuals, ignore a chosen few individuals who are just as problematic for the same reasons, and never come close to recognising that the system is rigged or understanding that the system is extremely broken.
But it is a system setup by and for them. They're the very people that make the system what it is.
And it's this way in implementation. If you hand more money over to 12 people than the other 299,999,988 people in the country combined...you're going to wind up with those 12 people having a lot more control and power over the country's resources regardless of what else you do. (EDIT: this is just hyperbole, I know it's not in actuality this bad, but it's pretty close with the exact figures being slightly different)
They designed the system in the first place, the founding fathers were tax evasive slaveholders.
If you don't have an actual conversation with them and keep blowing smoke up their ass, how is anything ever going to change? How do you dismantle the system that supports their wealth while propping up their throne and kissing their ring?
If we can't criticize these people, how are we supposed to "dismantle" anything? Critique and changing the discourse is a less drastic reaction than "eating the rich"...so if you're saying you're pro "eat the rich" but not pro "ask the rich pointed questions" how is that even possible?
I think mostly by using their tactics against them. There are more of us than there are of them. Withholding Labor, lobbying, pushing for more pay and benefits. I think there's a lot we can do that doesn't involve just pointing out that so and so is a billionaire. What are we doing currently? Because I don't feel like most people are doing much of anything.
Pointing out the problems and how things work so that people have a better understanding is at least a step in the right direction. Hence my wish for people to get educated about finances and my offer of examples to show the scale.
Sure there are more of us than there are of them, but the entire economy is oriented around their existence and continued support. We can strike and organize (and must) but it takes messaging to organize, and it takes messaging to win support from the public at large. It takes people pointing out just how absurd the current system and how morally and intellectually bankrupt its winners are in order for people to understand the need for change.
Also, "lobbying" involves money. We may have the pure numbers, but we do not have the money...and that's an important part of why you can't get there without being able to criticize the people who created and get the most benefits from the current status quo and shifting the mindset from "these people are smarter / work harder / are more innovative than everyone else" to something more akin to "these people are greedier and often times more morally bankrupt than everyone else".
EDIT: There's another thread here that's a messaging thing that I think is important: billionaires are often miserable themselves...the end game of this shit doesn't serve anyone...including the rich.
When poor people stop spending money, the economy goes into recession. We have buying power. Collectively we have enough money to make waves. We aren't organised and part of that has to do with the fact that we aren't all on the same page. Because we don't all understand what's going on. I know it takes more than just one or two of those things. But we had power and regulations once.
Worst case scenario is we burn it all to the ground. Because that's an ultimate equaliser. But it will absolutely have a detrimental effect both on the number of people dedicated to change, and their lives. Doing so has to be a last resort because it will cannibalize any movement that attempts it. Poor people will fight not to make their lot in life worse if push comes to shove.
Poor peoples' spending is less optional...you cannot exactly just stop buying groceries or clothing in hopes that the system changes. "Vote with your dollars" is essentially meaningless...especially when the very same billionaires we're talking about have conglomerated the goods in the essential economies. The food systems and the medical systems are practically cartels at this point. (i.e. Boycott Goya all you want, are you really sure that they aren't still producing your beans anyway under the store brand?)
I also think that the above is a gross oversimplification of what a recession is. The poor have been mostly buying only essentials for a while now (because it's all they can afford with the recent inflation) and we still aren't technically in a recession.
EDIT: I personally think a better means to protest monetarily for the non-well off is actually debt strikes. Most people don't have a lot of spare cash, but they sure do have a lot of debt. Unfortunately, it's another one of those things that only works if a whole lot of people do it at once.
For some reason the answer is never to fix existing towns that actually have people in them for a variety of reasons (resource availability, locations adjacent to ports, etc.) but to build a new city with no infrastructure or reason for being in the middle of nowhere.
I think it's because with existing areas you can't be ideologically pure...homeless people are already there, inequality is already evident, decay is already visible...but when you build a new "utopian city" and it'll just be empty so you can pretend that the same societal ills that plague everything else will not show up somehow magically when (or if) the people arrive.
The whole point of them is that anyone with a net worth of <X million would never be allowed within 50 miles of the place.