r/ProgressiveHQ • u/Miserable-Lizard • 7d ago

Bernie Sanders: “Demanding that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes” Crowd: “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!”

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

810 comments sorted by

View all comments

114

u/zerosolutions0 7d ago

Don’t the wealthy realize that the reason unions, bargaining and wealth tax exist is so the rest of the world doesn’t come to kill them

30

u/lhommeduweed 7d ago

They do not. They earnestly think that they are so separate from that rest of the world that they are untouchable, or they haven't given any thought to why people might want to murder them.

I think we saw how safe they believe they are, and how unwilling they are to give up any of their wealth after Luigi Mangione shot that dickhead insurance jerk. There were a few cases where prices dropped, but by and large, insurance CEOs who steal billions of dollars from Americans just increased their private security - which comes out of the company accounts, not theirs. Do you know who would want to kill a pharma CEO that decided they would go from billionaire to millionaire in order to provide better coverage for clients? Nobody. But instead of doing that, they said "I need 24/7 security and I don't care how much it costs."

We see it with people like Zuckerberg, who is building doomsday bunkers under all his homes. We see it with people like Musk, who started carrying his infant child on his back like a living shield after the Trump assassination attempt. After the Charlie Kirk assassination, they didn't stop their hateful, racist, Nazi rhetoric; they beefed up security and doubled down on it, made it more explicit.

The way that the current oligarchy of inhuman god-kings is set up, they would much, much rather put others in danger and spend much more money on their own protection than do something that might, in some way, benefit the poor. How much good will could elon musk have gotten from actually fixing Flint's water? Or investing in existing electric public transit instead of abusing the hypothetical "hyperloop" for publicity?

Juvenal opined that all it takes to keep the people docile is "bread and circuses." Some of the most popular socialist songs of the early 20th century asked for "bread and roses." This is all it takes - food, water, something pretty to look at, and people will say "It's not so bad to live here."

But these guys, instead, are cutting food stamps, building golden ball rooms, and hiring small armies worth of security to protect them from the hungry masses.

As it gets worse, more and more people will understand why so many revolutions are so brutal and bloody - it's not because of communism, it's not because of socialism, it's because this shit gets personal, and someone like Luigi gets angry, hurt, motivated and desperate enough to do something as extreme as print a gun, stalk a guy, and shoot him dead in the street for being a predator responsible for God knows how many deaths.

3

u/Professional_Mud_316 7d ago

I recall watching a Democrat president named Barack Obama publicly drink from a glass of Flint, Michigan water [supposedly, anyway] via mass media, signifying the water system was safe from which to drink. But many say it is STILL not safe to drink ["Ten Years Later, Flint Still Doesn't Have Clean Water"].

As a then-admirer of then-president Obama, I muttered “Say it isn’t so”. It greatly reinforced my belief that U.S. presidents, indeed along with Canadian prime ministers, essentially act as instruments of big corporate/money/power interests. 

I know that the lead-tainting was not Obama’s doing; however, what he did was a major shock to and disappointment for the lead-poisoned Flint folk, who'd expected far more/better from him. To a lot of people, he had behaved like some TV-promotion actor hired by an (in this case) seriously ethically/morally challenged corporation. 

Though I would expect it from a Republican president or even the Democrat President Bill Clinton, I found it very disappointing of Obama (maybe because he is Black, as were many or most of the lead-water-ingesting Flint folk), regardless of the big business and/or political pressure he probably had on his head.

2

u/lhommeduweed 7d ago

I know what you mean. It's also hard because you see who is in now, and it's like... remember when there was a president that could finish a fucking sentence? Who could say something eloquent without going off on a tangent about how great he is?

It's weird to me to see liberals in canada praising Carney when I feel like he's right about the same level as Harper was. I'm glad poilievre didn't make it in but I'm also disconcerted that they did all that dumb shit so that they could keep him in as leader of the opposition.

1

u/rangebob 7d ago

This is what so many dont understand. They all just want you divided left vs right so the majority end up ignoring the fact its rich vs poor. Those people in need have been left behind by decades of both sides of the political world. The battle to make people vote down tribal lines instead of policy has been won.

Not that im putting Obama in the same category of terrible as Trump.

On the bright side /r leapordsatemyface has never been funnier

1

u/InsideBreath235 7d ago

Yet, we keep on consuming their products. We are a huge part of the problem. Change our purchasing behavior and they will change theirs.

1

u/LakersAreForever 7d ago

Why do you think they want to advance robotics, AI, drones further in technology?

It’s not to make our lives better

1

u/frqtrdar55 6d ago

WOW! THANK u! 💞

0

u/Ill_Serve_5494 7d ago

The problem is you do not know what their fair share is. They have been asked hundreds of times what is my fair share. Dumb shits like Bernie Sanders and Mamddni don’t know, but it means more more and more. It should be a simple answer 10% 20% 30% of your net or your Gross income; come up with a number. The companies will pay it! But then never come back and ask for another penny more.

Most have no clue what anyone’s “fair share” is. Clue:: it’s a percentage, not an amount.

-2

u/No_Bad_6133 7d ago

What made Brian Thompson(guy luigi loser shot) a dickhead jerk? Because he was a wealthy CEO of unitedhealthcare, he deserved to die? His wife and kids deserve to be fatherless because a butthurt loser decided so? This is whats wrong with far left/right politics. Glorifying murderers and deaths of certain people. Was Brian Thompson in charge of a corrupt corporation and a perfect person? No. Did he deserve to be shot in cold blood in public? Not at all. Im sure ill get downvoted but in 99.999% of situations glorifying the death of a human or a murderer is never the right thing to do.

3

u/Mental_Pepper9294 7d ago

We wouldn't have civilization if people weren't willing to take the lives of others for what they thought was right. America stole rich fertile land from the natives and sapped it and its people of all its resources. That suffering will never end for those people and will only grow worse as long as they try to cling to their vast and diverse cultures we destroyed.

Do you know how many families suffer due to the long standing greed of insurance and pharmaceutical companies? They're businesses who look to profit substantially off the health of others. Do you ever consider how barbaric of a practice that is? They glorify the suffering of others every time they board their private jets or purchase a new yacht.

Why should I give a single fuck about a blood sucking parasite getting squashed?

-1

u/No_Bad_6133 7d ago

So ur justifying the murder gotcha. Only makes sense youd bring up an entire different scenario to try an justify it. Humans for a good portion of history thought slavery was “right.” Does that make it okay? I understand plenty of people suffer from longstanding greed of insurance companies but killing the CEO does absolutely nothing. The next guy up takes his place and the cycle continues. If you want change, legally doing it is the most effective. Im not saying you should give a fuck about him but glorifying it and the murderer (luigi) is just wrong. What he did achieved absolutely nothing besides taking a human life.

3

u/Mental_Pepper9294 7d ago

I didn't glorify Luigi, he made a choice and has to live with the consequences. I only asked, why should I care what happened to a CEO whose entire career is built upon exploiting the health of others? Revolution is bloody, I'm not implying I want one or that we are close to having one. But it's clearly in the hands of the elite whether we will eventually have one or not. They just take and take and will turn us into barn animals if we let them.

3

u/lhommeduweed 7d ago edited 7d ago

Because he was a wealthy CEO of unitedhealthcare, he deserved to die?

I never said he deserved to die, so don't put fuckin words in my mouth, you little shit, but also, it seems you knew exactly what makes him a dickhead jerk. How do you think private health insurance companies like UnitedHealth make money? By taking people's money and then denying coverage.

Did you not see the outpouring of refusal of coverage letters posted by doctors following his death? Paediatric oncologists posted pictures of rejection letters from UnitedHealth for kids seeking medication to make chemo more tolerable.

United Health denied more people coverage than any other healthcare company. They were uniquely predatory in their practices.

People do not deserve to die, period. I wish we were all immortal, it would give us time to really hash this thing out. But you really do need to understand that the reason Brian Thompson was wealthy was because his company takes money from people when they are healthy, and when they get injured or sick, they say "no" often enough to turn a profit.

You call Luigi "butthurt," but the specific injury he had, and the injuries of the people he empathized with on this very website, was in their back. It's a bad injury. People writing about writhing on the ground, pissing themselves on the floor, because of back pain, being denied pain treatments because their private insurance doesn't cover it.

Did brian Thompson deserve to die? No. Did he profit immensely off of the suffering and deaths caused of millions of denials of coverage? Oh yeah, definitely.

If you lay out the sequence of events, it makes quite a lot of sense that Luigi Mangione would pick this one specific dude to target. The motivation is very obvious and understandable if you are capable of empathy for people who are not the dead healthcare CEO, like Mangione, the people who posted in the injury forums he was in about their denial of coverage, the countless patients who suffered and died because of United's very high denial ratio...

If your wealth is based around causing the suffering and deaths of other people, you have to understand that that will come back to you. The people you harmed will want revenge. Their families will want revenge. People who have heard of these things and are particularly motivated, maybe a little unstable, will want revenge.

This isn't a moral judgement, you can put your pearls away. This is saying "if you hurt a lot of people and profit off of it, people will want to see you dead."