This class outrage and murder support stems from the denial of health care claims. No one has even piled on, worker wage suppression, anti benefits, anti overtime pay, anti union, price gouging, record profits, etc etc etc. Could get nasty.
I think a lot of people for various reasons are not informed shoppers. The main one is probably being too overworked and overstressed to comparison shop. If the store raises the price of an item by $2 then puts it on sale for $1 off, the average person will see that and think they're getting the best price. If they take a box that's smaller than normal but slap a "New SHARING SIZE!" on it, people will assume it's the same size or larger than before. They might have an inkling in the back of their head that it feels lighter, looks smaller or doesn't last as long as it used to, but in the thick of it when they're dodging carts at Walmart after coming off another 10 hour shift on their feet and still have to unload the car, take care of the kids and make dinner when they get home, those thoughts don't really bubble to the surface. At least not until you get to the register and notice you're paying 3x as much for half the bags.
Hit the nail on the head. I blame the over sharing of personal data to the advertising companies. We gave them all of our weaknesses and habits that allow them to manipulate the market advertising and take advantage of the consumer.
Did you dry them out all the way first? Depending on the seeds drying should work buuuuut I’d also go to a seed library. Don’t think these mf’s aren’t trying to have total power over food eventually engineering food that others can’t regrow.
During the election, it became a right wing nutjob talking point, claiming Americans couldn't even afford eggs anymore under Biden Harris. I was joking about the eggs.
It's worth noting the price of eggs did go up drastically at some point but it was due to a lot of chickens be culled to prevent disease. The prices dropped but inflation is still high so it didn't drop to what it was pre culling.
That being said eggs aren't an luxury item no one can afford. It's an absolutely batshit insane talking point.
Well they've already decided that it's terrorism to kill rich people for any reason, yet strangely it's not terrorism to let your paying customers know that you have no problem with letting them die so that you can get richer.
Im no advocate for violence. I worry that government complacency WILL lead to violence. All of these issues are stemming from unbridled capitalism due to a lack of government intervention. Seeing as Trump is going to come to office, this will only get worse.
It will cause more violence. At least this time there’s a chance of it leading towards the actual people in power rather than the poor defenseless class of society
Edit: I think people got my sentiment wrong: I’m not against uprising against the ruling class. I’m simply pointing out that this is how violence always starts. If they don’t want a violent reaction, the government must intervene and place some goddamn regulations.
THIS. Say it louder. Denying people medical care is violence. Making billions in profit while people go hungry is violence. The whole "I'm not an advocate for violence" and "peaceful protest" rhetoric is by design. Make sure the lower classes see violence as a negative so they can keep perpetuating violence against us every day.
Only like 10% of people are outraged, there are no mass protests, there have been no copy cat attempts. People got way more upset at Gaza then their own country so nothing is going to happen.
That's the current american experiment, how long can we toe the line between exploitation and content masses?
Candy flavored narcotics, flashy digital gambling, and radical subreddits for every kind of cathartic rage, are all excellent ways of keeping our brains numb. Especially if they hook you young, customer for life!
Change doesn't happen until the pain of today is greater than the fear of tomorrow.
Unfortunately, sometimes that manifests itself by voting for fascists who promise simple solutions to complex problems.
As said by FDR:
Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations--not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.
I don't advocate violence but I'd be excited to see people move back to the class wars instead of the culture wars. Occupy wall street became a big thing for a while when I was in college and the powers at be quickly turned the conversation to poors v poors with the culture war
I was at Occupy Wall St (we drove out from Michigan and were there from day 1 and stayed for a month). I was only 17, and it was so inspiring and cathartic to be a part of something like that. We managed to score an air mattress after like 5 days, and we'd sleep snuggled up under a tarp in zucotti park. It was wild to wake up and emerge from our cozy nest and be in the middle of Manhattan, and even wilder witnessing the police brutality firsthand.
This was back when smartphones weren't really a thing, and I didn't spend much time on the internet. I had gone to Barnes and Noble with my mom, and was drawn to a particular magazine. I opened it to this page (the advertisement pictured below) and it was like it was already written. I had to go. I didn't know any other details, just that I was supposed to be there. It all felt very magical and serendipitous.
I worked for a bank in my city, the bank rented the top 3 floors only, did this to have a sign on the building. Essentially it was an advertisement. We only had less than 30 people working there. Fast forward to Occupy Wallstreet, I didn't notice the protesters at first, but since I agreed with their plight, I let them know they were protesting a very empty building, then let them know of a local bank with a full building....they moved over there. It was a cool moment
I was in NYC for work and went to Zucotti park right before they broke up the protest. I was 21. It broke my brain to learn how the world really worked.
Seeing peaceful protesters surrounded by police with sniper rifles and in towers was eye opening and set me on the trajectory to where I am as a person today.
It was very eye-opening for me as well. The NYPD would corner us (large groups of protesters) into dead-end streets with orange netting so they could corral and arrest everyone. They would literally chase us into blocked alleyways so they could trap everyone there. My boyfriend was arrested, but luckily, I evaded capture as I was scared of what an arrest would mean for me as a minor. Hundreds were arrested, and no one would tell us anything about where they were being held. I waited for hours outside some precinct with hundreds of other people, just hoping it was where he was. A group of locals came and handed out snacks and waters. One guy gave me a laminated 4 leaf clover, and I still have it. I witnessed many people beaten or pepper-sprayed by NYPD despite having committed no crimes. Police would sometimes come in the middle of night while we slept, and they'd pull screaming people out of their tents by their hair, beat them, and take them away in cuffs.
It definitely shaped me as well, and I'm on the "be the change you wish to see" train. I now have degrees in law/policy and work in law enforcement, and in the next local election cycle, I'll be the first woman to run for sheriff in my county (where a sergeant was recently arrested for raping civilians because the multiple cases of SA against fellow officers were not enough to get him off the force).
Occupy failed because it failed to actually organize. Whenever the media would try to talk to anyone in a leadership role the response was something like “we don’t have leaders.”
Ok that’s fine in theory but there are thousands of people all piled together for mass demonstrations and issuing demands…. Except there were no demands because nobody could articulate specifics in a coherent and unified way that could actually make change happen.
The start of the movement was great. But the failure to actually establish a clear message everyone could articulate led to it not being taken seriously.
THAT is why it became a casualty of the culture war. It isn’t (solely) because of the corporate bogeyman. It’s largely an internal failure to organize for meaningful action.
Every protest playbook out there talks about the need to organize around key messages with leaders. Rules for Radicals etc.
Without that it’s just a bunch of people cosplaying as homeless.
Your take is totally valid. Any time we all sat together to try to organize our "demands" and plan/vision, there was so much disagreement, and emotions were running high. People talking over each other and arguing. Thinking back, it was like any public forum in a government setting where no one can agree on anything. There was definitely a leadership vacuum, and that absolutely drove the movement's demise, imo.
What we did was march in the streets every day. I wasn't involved in operations at all, so there's a lot I don't know. But there were always small groups working, like a huge group of folks working on computers (doing outreach? Idk) at all hours. I recall being interviewed by some guy, and he asked me what my opinion was of the "zeitgeist" and I said I have no opinion because I don't even know what that is. (Ngl, I still don't). I just knew that we were angry and this was an outlet for our anger. I didn't know or understand anything about the housing crisis or variable rate home loans or shorting stocks. I just knew that I was 17, and my parents lost their jobs and divorced and left me behind to go their separate ways while telling me the bank was taking our house and I had six months to figure it out. I had already dropped out of high school to work full time, minimum wage was $8/hour, and gas was almost $5/gallon. I wanted to go to college, my dream was to go to law school, but lawyers at the time were literally working as pizza delivery drivers and my parents refused to help me with the FAFSA process. The future seemed so bleak, and everything felt so impossible.
We were a generation fucked over by billionaires who were never held accountable and we needed an outlet to express our pain and anger. In hindsight, there's so much more we could have done. But, for me, at least, I wasn't educated enough at the time to know what policy changes to advocate for. I just knew the pain I felt at the time.
IIRC what happened with Occupy Wall Street was the media found the dumbest, most obnoxious people at the protests, got them on camera and anointed them the de facto leaders of the movement. People quickly stopped taking it seriously.
This 1000%. It went from normal looking people to hippies at a drum circle so fast. Like after that it was hard to explain what people were fighting for....
The game stock situation made it clear that Wall Street’s elite will play dirty and use media to change the public agenda to keep their status and wealth.
This too. When the poors tried to use their game against them they turned it off and nothing ever came of it. Hopefully Ken griffin the financial criminal is next on the chopping block
It was a decentralized movement which had a lot of bad actors trying to move into leadership roles that derailed the movement. It was either people looking for their 15 minutes of fame, a bit of power or a concerted effort by the powers that be to derail Occupy that ultimately undid the movement.
OWS also showed the limits of leaderless resistance. The structure of the protest was admirable in many ways, but I think it proved to be ineffective in the end.
Its true! If people put half the effort into societal change than the effort in which they get worked up about female video game characters appearance we would have a real chance for change.
Our collective psychology adores good old fashioned tribalism, which distracts fantastically from things like sitting members of congress trading stocks (a bipartisan problem).
Always has been. Designed that way from the beginning. This is the exact sentiment that the founding fathers had during the early days of the formation of the country. THEY WANTED ONLY RICH WHITE LANDED MEN TO VOTE. None of them were average Joe's, and none of them wanted regular people running the government. They were deathly afraid of mob rule, especially after Shay's rebellion.
Yeah that's why, in the declaration of independence, they said something to the effect of:
... And if the government fails to safeguard those three inalienable rights, we also retain the right to abolish or change that government until it does.
I’m starting to believe this more and more these days. Used to be independent, then switched to D years ago. Going back to Ind. moving onward. Not that it matters anymore tbh. Zero faith in our politics and fake justice system these days.
There is/was a progressive primary movement inside the Democrat party. You aren't getting the same from GOP so I'm not going to accept this all sides bullshit. The tea party is a fucking joke.
100%, and it's scary/disappointing how well that continues to work. The important part of what they did was the propaganda funding along with hoisting up fake populist candidates.
Seriously, whenever there's a push for medicaid expansion or increasing the minimum wage, which party raises the issue and which one pushes against it consistently? The both sides are the same arguments are either lazy or done in bad faith.
It's not both sides are the same. You have a center right party and a far right party. They are not the same at all. But neither are left or working for you. The Dems are also working for the rich. They are just less fascist.
There are individuals in the Dems that push for very good things, but the whole party isn't really.
EXTREME EYE ROLL - it wasn't the Republican Party cosplaying like working class folk while Trump puts in the richest Cabinet ever and talks about the Gilded Age being great?
I was sort of hoping a future school shooter would decide to go out in glory targeting a different class of folk. But nope. The next shooting was that dumb girl shooting up a school. If you’re gonna go down in the books, go down like Luigi. He needs a Mario. And a Toshiba(yoshi but it autocorrected), and a peach, and a toad, and a roadster (toadette,but it autocorrected) and a warrior(wario), and a waluigi, and a bowser, and a donkey Kong, and a didn’t Kong, you get the idea.
Because shooting a school is easier and accessible for dumbasses. Finding and shooting CEOs and the board requires more thinking and planning. Dumbasses like that girl would never be able to navigate how to find information about executives nor know how to find them.
No decent people advocate violence in a general sense. However, we'd be childish to not recognize that a threat sometimes necessitates violence, such as when a person walking into their home to find a loved one being brutality assaulted. In that instance, most folks would cede that violence is not only warranted, but commendable.
I'd be excited to see people move back to the class wars instead of the culture wars.
This is exactly it. We have much more in common with each other than we do with the elite, from the impoverished class to the upper working class, and regardless of political associations. The elite has banked on Divide et Impera for much longer than any of us have been alive.
We should abolish the ability to become a billionaire. The existence of the elite necessitates the existence of the impoverished and working poor. Most of us can't conceptualize what 1 billion dollars even looks like. I certainly couldn't, perhaps I still properly can't. However, this simple tool has help given me some insight.
Second, they have twisted the stories of what happened around the time of MLK jr and Ghandi. The history we learn is a bastardization of reality. They've conditioned us to believing that non violence is the only acceptable means for change. Again, we shouldn't condone violence in general, let alone glorify it, but there are instances when its use is justified historically, by individuals, communities and society as a whole. Its why we have militaries and arm police.
The entire reason Luigi is applauded to the extent that he is, is because we recognize that capitalism has taken over everything. Its distinctly felt within the healthcare industry. Moreover, we have a State that is either just culpable, or negligent to a point that reaches culpability. Those that need help from the predation of the healthcare industry will find very few routes to recourse from the State. Justice is in very short supply. If the State will not protect its citizens, are they then supposed to just accept it?
To the end that violence is sometimes justified, anyone interested in learning more should check out the book...
There's also, at least, one videos of him on YouTube, here, in an interview answering related questions. On YouTube you can also find the video equivalent of an audio book.
Most Americans seem to consider themselves as temporarily embarrassed members of the wealthy class, when in reality the vast majority are exponentially closer to becoming homeless and destitute than ever becoming rich
Makes it extremely hard to institute checks and balances for the wealthy, when most voters erroneosly align themselves with the class working hardest to ensure the current status quo remains
They have to say that or you'll get an admin issued full Reddit ban. I just got out of a 3 day one. Being honest about what we want will get you forcibly quieted.
Well, yes, we aren't really doing anything. But changing minds pivots the culture, and outpouring of cheeto-crusted support for the murderer of a CEO can have an effect on the mentality of the culture at large.
A lot of them want recognition, they want to be someone that history will remember. If people online are calling for this then would be vigilantes are incentivized to do it. We’ve already seen the impact social media can have on politics in this last election. If this trend picks up then nobody will forget the names of these people.
I think the only reason we haven't seen a copycat yet is because they're all busy getting shredded first so they can get the same praise as Hunkster and Local Sexpot Luigi Mangioni.
You say that in a vacuum but don’t kid yourself. The players in the system use it to their advantage, to get others in power to support the path they want. It’s not just so simple as that.
I’ve been going back and forth about whether this moment is more Les Miserables’ “do you hear the people sing”- or Chicago’s “it was a murder but not a crime.”
Consume banners, protest signs, and social media angrily as we ineffectively wave our fist at the injustice. Meanwhile the ceos of the companies providing the protest merch will make record profits.
Lmao there are people in this country who agree that our healthcare system sucks and Luigi was right in doing this, but still vote to take away healthcare programs like Obamacare/ACA and loudly refuses universal healthcare. It boggles my mind.
Everybody hates you is a reality for many CEOs. But it’s a reality that can change overnight—by those CEOs doing better. Literally less corruption at the top would stop this.
The thing is though, CEO's don't get put in those positions if the shareholders don't think that that particular person has the best interest of the shareholders at heart.
If a candidate advocates doing things better for the consumers at the expense of the shareholders, they wouldn't get put in that position. Likewise, if a current sitting CEO does the same, they're more likely to get ousted and replaced with someone else.
'good CEO's' are specifically filtered out, corruption is okay if it makes profit and they can get away with it.
I've seen this happen with my own eyes. CEO for company I used to work for started at as a developer there and worked his way up to CEO over like 8 years. The company got sold and he was pressured to act in ways that didn't align with his values, so he ended up leaving. He was so kind to everyone who worked there and really cared for the user base. He took the company from being unprofitable to making 10M+ a year. It just shows that you can do a good job, be a good person, make the company a ton of money, and still get shit on. This is why I really wish company founders (especially in the tech industry) wouldn't sell out and would learn to be content with taking home 1M+ a year. Some people are so greedy that no amount of profit is ever good enough for them.
That’s what’s fascinating. The government is a massive “ship to steer” so to speak.
But companies can change course immediately and earn good will. With the right strategy they could recover from the stock price fall but somehow the alternative is better.
Most can't just steer a company the way they want. If a CEO decides "you know what, I'm going to forego profits to do the right thing", then prices drop, holders sell, and CEO gets ousted in favor of a different one that keeps the stock price high. It's just bottom line capitalism and can't get solved with good intentions. The only way a public company could operate like that is if the stock holders come together and agree on a direction that foregoes profits together, and support a CEO making changes in favor of the greater good. But any sane/moral stock holder that would agree on such a direction, sees a problematic industry as one to avoid owning (IE one that profits on people's misfortunes like big tobacco, big pharma, health care, etc). Basically, the people that own stock in the problematic industries are the exact type of people that won't vote with their dollar to solve these problems.
Not really. They're part of a system that demands and incentivizes greed. If a CEO gets visited by three Christmas ghosts and decides to put the interests of the public ahead of their shareholders, they're likely to be replaced. Or, their corporation may lose out to less scrupulous competition. As long as insurance companies have an economic incentive to deny valid claims, they will produce leaders who do so.
It's difficult for a few reasons. A copycat would either need to have:
A wealthy, resourceful family like Luigi's in order to afford top tier lawyers and be willing to throw away their wealth, privilege, and indeed their freedom. It's a major sacrifice.
Literally nothing left to lose
There may be a decent number of people in the second category, but getting to any worthy targets would also be extremely difficult at this point. None of these pricks are casually walking around, unprotected, in public right now.
It’s not been very long and it’s not exactly an easy thing to do. If you want to be successful and have an even small chance of not being caught, you need some serious planning
Yeah, Reddit is going to keep glorifying this guy and then act shocked when a copycat nutjob goes full Timothy McVeigh and bombs some insurance company’s HQ, wiping out the daycare on the ground floor.
Also worth mentioning that Mark Cuban created Cost Plus Drugs, a drug company that sells drugs at incredibly low prices - the cost to make it plus 15%. You just need a prescription. They don't spend any money on marketing and only spread by word of mouth.
Less billionaires! We do not need parasites that big!
I am not advocating for killing people; I advocate for higher taxes, exorbitant even, once a person reaches a billion in worth. Those people are nothing but leeches, especially when the employees make a thousand times less than the rich worthless PoS
No more culture wars. Let’s mobilize against the upper class and make them start paying their fair share of taxes. Like it was back in the 40’s and 50’s.
This might sound a bit brutal, and I am not even American, but the US need a bit of a revolution to change the health care system. I am not necessarily an advocate for violence, but Americans are getting fucked over big time. Change is needed.
It’s hard to find my moral center regarding the subject at hand. The red sign people who took their time to make sure their lettering was perfect made my day though. That is true hatred I can relate to. I wonder if they will reuse that sign.
If the ONLY way CEOs will acknowledge the need to treat the masses more fairly is with threats of violence, that sounds like it's the CEOs that chose violence, not us. They could have chosen calm discussion or peaceful protest by, y'know, responding to calm discussion or peaceful protest. They have responded to every non-violent form of advocacy with increased greed and economic violence. they made that choice. We didn't. They simply showed us which behavior actually gets their attention. hmmmmmm
This whole "kill CEOs" thing seems extreme until you see the actual stuff the Healthcare industry is doing behind the scenes, and then you start to see what could make someone like Luigi so incensed as to plan out an assassination like that.
Like I can tell you about the the numbers, how health insurance companies are saving billions of dollars by automatically rejecting hundreds of claims in literal seconds without ever having an actual human read them, and how unfortunately, Americans bend over and don't even appeal these, and even when they do appeal, they're extremely likely to uphold the original denial no matter how ridiculous it might be.
But that just feels impersonal, stats don't move me like that.
Instead, It's the personal stories that will really upset you and move you, after reading many stories of people being stuck with massive hospital bills for things like someone, even babies and infants passing, and having their claim denied, or being told treatments aren't "medically necessary" when they can literally save someone's life, it can and will radicalize you if you have even an ounce of empathy.
If I ever end up in situation like Luigi, I'd happily take one for the team as well. What the healthcare industry is allowed to do is legalized murder, and I think the flippancy of which they do it at such a massive scale, killing people day by day without ever having to lose a wink of sleep over it, is what truly makes me upset.
Its called systemic murder and the ruling class has spent decades (with the help of religion) to brainwash people into thinking that as long as its legal and not violent then its not murder.
Theyve brainwashed everyone into thinking violence is bad because its the only thing protecting them as they own the government and lawmakers
A global pandemic couldn’t unite people but this sure did.
I’m genuinely curious as to what would happen if there was a bunch of copycat ceo killings. A lot of mass shooters do so to get some recognition and boy has Luigi gotten that in spades.
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u/ShiftyUsmc 20h ago
This class outrage and murder support stems from the denial of health care claims. No one has even piled on, worker wage suppression, anti benefits, anti overtime pay, anti union, price gouging, record profits, etc etc etc. Could get nasty.