But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities.
I think this is going in the wrong direction, because A) nobody cares about how much you’ve got in your 401k when 87% of the market is controlled by six guys and B) its the bare necessities that are skyrocketing in price, not the luxuries.
I’ve always thought the push for “average” Americans to get into stocks was just another way for wealth to trickle up.
It was a way of back-dooring a tax carve out for the mega-rich. Mitt Romney’s Roth IRA was worth $100M when he ran for office in 2012. Consider how somebody turns $4000/year in deposits into $100M in assets over 30 years and you can see the corrupt nature of our financial system clear as day.
The only way to win is not to play
The appeal of a general strike, I think, is misplaced. It fixates on the goods and services that make life in the US comfortable while neglecting the speculative assets that make wealth in the US grow exponentially.
Better than a general strike would be a debt strike. If you could convince 10M people to refuse to make a credit card payment in a given month, that would rock the fuck out of the capitalist class. If you could convince a union of service sector workers stretching from Walmart to McDonalds to simply refuse to collect payment for sold merchandise for a day, that would terrify the banking sector.
Because so much of this system is ultimately built on credit, not real material assets. So much is built on the theory of compounded interest, not materialist value. Wealth is, at its core, a promise of future income on rent. Attack the mechanisms by which people collect their rents and you can liberate the general population from an unnecessary expense rather than threatening them with a sudden onset of material insecurity.
I think this is going in the wrong direction, because A) nobody cares about how much you’ve got in your 401k when 87% of the market is controlled by six guys and B) its the bare necessities that are skyrocketing in price, not the luxuries.
It was a way of back-dooring a tax carve out for the mega-rich. Mitt Romney’s Roth IRA was worth $100M when he ran for office in 2012. Consider how somebody turns $4000/year in deposits into $100M in assets over 30 years and you can see the corrupt nature of our financial system clear as day.
The appeal of a general strike, I think, is misplaced. It fixates on the goods and services that make life in the US comfortable while neglecting the speculative assets that make wealth in the US grow exponentially.
Better than a general strike would be a debt strike. If you could convince 10M people to refuse to make a credit card payment in a given month, that would rock the fuck out of the capitalist class. If you could convince a union of service sector workers stretching from Walmart to McDonalds to simply refuse to collect payment for sold merchandise for a day, that would terrify the banking sector.
Because so much of this system is ultimately built on credit, not real material assets. So much is built on the theory of compounded interest, not materialist value. Wealth is, at its core, a promise of future income on rent. Attack the mechanisms by which people collect their rents and you can liberate the general population from an unnecessary expense rather than threatening them with a sudden onset of material insecurity.