This also applies to the inequity between nations. A poor nation pissed off about the rich nation meddling in their affairs. They will eventually find a way to bring the rich nation down.

I'm not sure why you're being down voted because the socio-economic inequality between nations is one of the greatest evils of our time.

I know why. It's because it doesn't really support the "rich people are evil" message. In the international scope we're the evil rich. People don't like to be reminded of this.

Have you been watching Russel Brand videos? Because this sounds like his talking points.

Entertaining handsome man for sure. Making bank off of capitalism all the while crying out against its tyranny.

I believe anybody voting this down has not studied history and what happens when social economic inequalities reach certain thresholds .

Yeah. It's like a tug of war of sorts between the wealthy and not wealthy where law and policy keep people in line but barely. It's rigged though making the not wealthy side will never have a real say in policy and instead just get appeased. We were never a true democracy.

Here's a shortlist to google for those who are interested:

Chinese cultural revolution.

Roman slave revolt (any of the 3 big ones really)

and of course: The French Revolution.

In every case the elite died in droves and the oppressed danced on their corpses.

It will happen again soon, but automation and militarized security forces means there will be a lot more corpses on both sides.

The Bolshevik revolution didn't work out too well for the Russians unfortunately. They were so close but Stalin ruined it all.

The Bolshevik inner circle weren't an oppressed proletariat, they were pseudo-noble landowners and business owners.

Sure, bolshevism was all about workers rights and the common man on the surface.

The leadership was, as usual, nearly as bad as the aristocracy they were kicking out.

As history proved.

Stalin's repeated idiocy and hyper machismo was only part of the problem...

Yeah. But trying to compare the US to this is crazy. Even the poor here live better than the majority of the world. They wont “rise up” like the left thinks they will. They are to comfortable. Ever seen people lose it when the power goes out? People demand it gets turned back on as soon as possible. A majority of the US population will be dead in a few months because they do not know how to even grow their own food & hunt. People in the US will not rise up because the conditions are to good. Ever think about what it would be like if a big enough solar flare wipes out the power grid? Anyone that doesnt own a gun is fucked.

Even the poor here live better than the majority of the world.

I disagree, though your statement has some truth to it.

A panhandler in the U.S. can make more than a merchant in say India.

The thing is, what does it cost for that panhandler to get the basic necessities of life? Several orders of magnitude what it costs that merchant.

If income is high and cost of living is high, then the net is a worse quality of life than places where the income is low and the cost of living is very low with supporting infrastructure.

That last part is the real big deal there, and it is something everyone ignores when it comes to wealth and quality of life.

A man with a billion dollars on an island in the middle of nowhere with no communication will have a lower quality of life than a homeless person living in the city.

Because of the infrastructure.

A homeless man with $10 is usually less than a 5 minute walk from food and hydration.

That billionaire on the island better spend most of his next few days setting up trapping and sourcing a water supply.

That said, $10 in the hands of that Indian merchant just bought a lavish dinner for him and his 5 best friends.

Quality of life is massively affected by available infrastructure and the buying power of an equivalent hour's income.

For example, my mother when making minimum wage back in the 60s had more buying power per hour than I do making twice minimum wage today.

The task I do requires more knowledge and experience than my mother's min wage job yet I have a measurably lower quality of life than she had.

And I've lived homeless for 6 months, and I can tell you this that there were days when I knew for a fact that a mud hut and a handful of grubs were twice the luxury I could muster.

It was miserable, an identity destroying ordeal that I wish upon no one. It took a lot of hard work to climb out of it and I have wasted a good chunk of my life making sure it never happened again.

So while your statement is in a sense true, it lacks the nuance to truly grasp the situation of world wealth inequality.

A majority of the US population will be dead in a few months because they do not know how to even grow their own food & hunt.

Agreed, and a lot of people who think they have survival skills because they've read a book and watched all the Mad Max movies are going to get a very lethal surprise when the grid does drop.

Being cityfolk is going to be a survival detriment soon. Thankfully I had a healthy country childhood.

That said, I don't own a firearm. I fully support the ownership of firearms, including assault rifles, by legal and licensed citizens.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that any equipment available to the police force, Coast Guard, or any other military branch operating on U.S. soil should also be legally available to properly licensed citizens.

Yes I include tank-like vehicles in this list.

Most Revolutions end with equal or worse leaders than the ones they overthrew.

America is the exception, not the rule.

It's why they try so hard to push the blue vs red propaganda so strong with trivial issues. The longer and harder poor republicans fight poor democrats the longer those at the top can stay in power. If we could figure out a way to unite and fight the inequality we could see real socioeconomic change. But as long as we're fighting eachother so hard it will never happen. Whether it's through civil disobedience or revolution there needs to be a stop to this income inequality. It's worse than it was during "The Guilded Age" but they're keeping us so well distracted it's only going to get worse while they're protected at the top. We need to unite and fight for change with eachother and realize their hate propaganda is only meant to keep us divided against eachother and not against them. Their militiarizing the rights hate and anger against those whom they perceive causes their economic strife through lack of education and militarize for xenophobia and the left is being told to hate those on the right. It isn't working and we need to fight back and punish those at the top who've pillaged us for far too long.

Are you for equality of opportunity or are you looking for equality of outcome? Indians and Asians are minorities in this country. Yet they do just fine in the current system. Why do you think that is if you truly believe this? Can you give me a specific example of what you're alluding to? I'm not trolling, I really just want to see where you're coming from regarding this.

Equality is a false concept.

We are naturally unequal. And our differences are why we thrive. Our ability to have multiple skill sets is a net positive for society.

Correct, and there is plenty of real-world data to support this claim. A recent signpost was Thomas Piketty's Capital, which does a very thorough job reviewing and summarizing the data (unfortunately it's written in a way that is torture to read).

The only identity politic that truly matters is rich v. poor and money is the number 1 control mechanism driving every problem in the world today. If you ask 'why?' enough times, the answer is always money. Evolving into a post-money society is the most important development in the quest for peace.

Awesome info. Thanks

The biggest risk to national security is the decades long assault on Free Speech, The Free Press and Fair Elections.

The second biggest risk to national security is the continued reliance on unaccountable experts.

The third biggest risk to national security is the attempt to use computing and communications infrastructure to control humans rather than using it to vet and disseminate claims.

The fourth biggest risk to national security is the attempt to enforce an intellectual property regime that stopped making sense centuries ago.

Since the establishment is incapable of changing any of these unsustainable policies we will all have to endure the consequences.

The biggest risk to national security is the defense establishment. These people, following the dictates of Israel are gradually enraging a world that will one day soon strike. Why sanction Venezuela? Why arm Ukraine? Why piss off the Russians? We need to find leadership that isn't so easy to push around, smarter.

Nice try, Ivan. How many rubles did you get for that post?

Excellent example of the classic logical fallacy "Ad Hominem" which means "attack the man" (not the argument). However, having said that, I feel no insult by using a common Slavic name, nor did I receive any remuneration whatever. Perhaps you should think before you soil your diaper in public.

An ad homnem fallacy would be me saying "your argument is bad because you are bad". In this case, I am just accusing you of being a Kremlin stooge. Your shitty arguments are irrelevant.

I've read your other comments and have no reason to further engage you as it would demonstrate the futility of *trying to smarten up a chump." Buh bye.

Now THAT is an ad hominem fallacy.

If one steps in it, it may be necessary to use the doormat to wipe the shit off. Shalom.

Stick to proverbs. They're your strong point.

Shouldn’t you be in r/safespaces?

Why is that? I'm totally comfortable confronting assholes in the subs that allow users to go against the narrative.

So you accused dude of being a Russian troll because he asked “why piss off the Russians”, yet you’re somehow not the asshole in this scenario?

You make a very good point, but the way I've been looking at it recently is that the money is a mechanism for control no matter if you have alot or a little.

Money itself is inherently worthless. We have 1s and 0s that are meant to represent paper money that represents a unit of gold but there is really no gold and the gold is artificially kept stable and only worth what it's worth because it was assigned a value by the ruling class.

Imo the problem is not some have more money than others, but rather that people focusing on attaining dollars is a mass distraction.

If the masses weren't distracted with attaining dollars (or other measures of wealth) what would capture the masses' attention? What would everybody be doing with their time?

I'm not really sure yet, but i think it would be better than sitting in a cubicle. I'm convinced that alot of benificial technology has been hidden for the sake of profit so there is that as well.

Our money hasn't been pegged to gold for a long time.

Wrong. The biggest threat to national security are the banks.

People tend to focus on income inequality, but that is a distraction from the real issue, which is wealth inequality. So much of the material wealth of the world is tied up in corporations that shield the value from being tied to the real people in control.

Don't forget the not only does money decide what politicians do once they are elected, money also decides who the candidates are to start with. Just like this last presidential election, it's the choice between a shit sandwich and a giant douche. I firmly believe that anyone who is able to be elected in this country is unfit for the job, by virtue of being 'electable' in the first place. It takes crazy amounts of money to run a campaign these days, even for lower offices like the house of representatives, and except for the rare cases where a candidate is entirely self-funded (and even those who could fund their own campaign don't, since lobbyists and special interest groups will throw money at them) they make promises to the lobbyists and donors to represent their interests, and not the interests of their constituency.

This is so true it's not even funny.

For example, I know someone who is currently campaign chairman of a really great candidate running for congress (house, not senate). The candidate is essentially someone from the middle class.

What is truly criminal is the parasitic "consultant class" that you apparently must have working in one's campaign. In this federal campaign you have to comply with the FEC rules, in order for a candidate to comply the FEC will send over a consultant, essentially for free, to help a campaign meet all the FEC compliance guidelines. Sounds about right doesn't it?

However, in order to be taken seriously as a candidate the campaign is going to have to bring on a "Compliance Consultant" and pay this consultant $5,000 dollars a month to essentially do nothing, because the FEC will send in someone from the FEC to help a campaign comply.

When the campaign chairman wanted to nix the paid consultant, and thus save the campaign around $45,000 between now and the election, they were overruled because if they did not have the $5,000 a month Compliance Consultant they would not be taken seriously and would not be supported by the Democratic Party and be the nominee.

The system is essentially rigged to prevent a non-millionaire from running for Congress right from the start.

I come from a wealthy family of Democrats and I’ve found that there is plenty I disagree with now that I’m in my 30’s. However I married into a lower middle class family that blindly vote republican. We were having a conversation about lobbyists and campaign funding and they just don’t get it. I tried to explain how these politicians are owned and act if corporate interests and the response was : well, the funding needs to come from someone right?

This is like, 101 shit man, yes, consolidation, read on it and yes it will lead to collapse

I thought it was Russians, marijuana, blacks, alcohol, russians, terrorists, mexicans, hussein, bin laden, russians, Iran, Iraq, Imarried, russians, north korea, ISIS, americans, russians.....guns?

The US is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic.

I agree entirely OP. No other factor has destroyed civilizations quite like inequality. The working class only takes so much shit

Sorry I'm not sure how much I can trust someone with that username 😂

Quick question here... are you people advocating for socialism/communism? Is that what the "equity with congruence" looks like? When everyone is equal, and we trade our government stamps in for the same gruel everyone else is eating? Or is it a utopian society, where everyone trades their government stamps in for prime rib?

How are you going to deal with unlimited wants with limited resources?

I see this a lot recently, and no one seems to want to say it out loud... but I believe what you want is to destroy American capitalism? What exactly would this society look like?

We need the equality of opportunity that capitalism offers, not the equality of outcome and race to the bottom that socialism offers as a solution though.

We havent had real capitalism in the USA in a long time.

Want fix the gap between rich and poor? Puy an embargo on China and all the other slave labour countries that doing business with has killed our economy.

People would have more jobs and more money if we stopped importing slave made shit and exporting all our money to countries that hate us.

Blame the consumers who vote with their dollars buying everything at Amazon or Walmart and mostly made in China.

How many bitching people in this thread harm their own economy by doing that? Attention Walmart and Amazon shoppers: youre cunts.

I have no idea what the fuck that's supposed to mean...

Yeah thats why i said Amazon and Walmart shoppers who spend their money on Chinese made junk are to blame.

Terrorism is a political label that the bourgeoisie uses to criminalize and strip rights from those that are considered enemies of the bourgeoisie state. Debating whether or not x should be classified a terrorist misses this crucial point and is therefore a fool's errand

This thread is why I come to this subreddit. Thank you. 👏

This is a problem both for internal and external security.

Having a lot or having a little is irrelevant to being a good person. So people should be good, regardless of how much material they think they own. In this way, we can have a respectable society that isn't affected by income disparity.

But if rest of the society are mindless zombies, what stops moguls to get even bigger? Nothing. They live on special islands and special worlds heavily guarded. Go watch the Snowpearcer movie

We have a billionaire president

And what do you want to do, play Robin Hood? It's the money that he and his family earned by work and smart investments while taking risks.

I agree with the fact that there are far too many politicians being paid public money and their numbers should be reduced.

But, if you will have underpaid politicians they will seek money elswhere and this could easily lead to treason under the table.

I'm not really sure yet, but i think it would be better than sitting in a cubicle. I'm convinced that alot of benificial technology has been hidden for the sake of profit so there is that as well.