Submitted 2 weeks ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to workreform@lemmy.world
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/2d845ac6-d753-435f-b7f0-429adf1c8637.jpeg
Thats the billionaires squeezing profits out of every transaction, not just the enrollment fees, the rent on the property, the Healthcare and insurance premiums for the staff and the operation.
Everything they do is being optimized to squeeze wealth Into the mouths of billionaires.
Tax wealth not work.
I skimmed the comments and didn’t catch this, but don’t forget about all the PRIVATE EQUITIES buying up nursing home facilities, banking on SSI, Medicare and Medicaid funding, upcharging perscriptions, “maximizing efficiencies” (aka paying as little wages as possible), and the revolving door of customers…
Don’t forget those private equities buying up life insurance companies that are being used for dumping grounds for bad loans that’ll be bailed out through state-based guaranty funds instead of passing through bankruptcy. In other words, these private equities are using life insurance subsidiaries to offload the risk of bad loans (mostly AI-related) to taxpayers when those life insurance companies become insolvent.
Is that why they're defunding community care? 🤔
This makes me think of an issue we had around here recently. We have a public company running the majority of school buses in our area. They receive funding from the government that should be enough to pay their drivers around 24$ an hour. Yet, they’ve been paying them 18$ or less for years.
This year the drivers tried to negotiate for a higher wage and the owners weren’t even willing to go over 19$… So they went on strike and buses stopped; parents had to make alternative arrangements. This went on for weeks, the employer just kept playing hard ball and not budging.
Surprisingly, parents were overwhelmingly on the driver’s side which I was happy to see. It reached a point where the owners almost had their contract taken away. After about 2 months, they finally gave in and agreed to an increase to about 21$.
What kills me is that in another town nearby with a different company running the buses, divers are being paid 23-24$ an hour like they’re supposed to. So the employer still came out ahead after everything was said and done. Apparently, the owners are from Toronto (about 3-4 hours away from us) and are just using this company to make money which explains their unwillingness to increase their workers pay.
Unrelated tant: Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. It happened during covid with housing, they came over and scooped up every house they could just to rent them out for profit. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom apartment and some asshole from Toronto came over and bought it. Then when I moved out, they increased the rent to fucking 2500$…
I’m a school bus driver myself. We’re unionized (Teamsters) and the district operates its own buses. We make about $34 an hour and get subsidized health insurance and a small pension (after 10 years) as well. A neighboring district privatized their school bus service a few years ago; their drivers make $22 an hour with no benefits at all, their accident rate is 4X ours and the drivers keep getting busted for positive drug tests and drunk driving, and their operating costs (as measured per student/per mile transported) went up about 50%.
It is such an absolute no-brainer to realize that the only advantage of privatizing a service like this is to put money into the pockets of the bus service owners (as well as the officials and school board members that they bribe), and the disadvantages are literally every possible other aspect of the deal. And yet surprise surprise my district is discussing privatization to “save money”. It doesn’t help that our newly-hired transportation director is a member of the family that owns the largest private bus service in the area.
They also have their equity firms buy up anything still quality and decent, enshittify the product and wait for people to catch on and stop buying the product. Then they do it all over again with another company.
Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. Doesn’t matter where they are from, people can be assholes anywhere.
Damn, the school should make the contract have heavy penalties for each failed pick up.
The USA is just 3 Corporations in a trench coat. And corporations are just pyramid schemes.
People will lose their minds if you suggest giving someone medical care for free, but they keep ignoring all the landlords and CEOs and private equity groups and all the middlemen extracting the vast majority of all the wealth out, while also contributing the absolute least.
The fact that we have a system where one person works every waking minute of their life and still can’t afford basic food and housing and another person sits around all day on their 3rd yacht sipping one of a kind wines and rakes in billions is insanity.
Truly, Land of the Free (to exploit).
I hope Washington is enjoying the show.
He fought to keep America the way it was. Ya he was part of the problem.
Labor $200 Land $150 Materials $800 CEO pay and profits $1,000,000,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
Land more like 150,000
Oh yeah. I just left most of the numbers from the original meme because I didn’t feel like deciding on new ones.
Burn the CEO with candles until he accepts the unions demands.
One candle per worker and their loved ones they support
It adds up…
It adding up is the problem.
Because it means “job creators” who do nothing but posses titles to land and company stocks are syphoning off money.
If they need 3 staff for 21 kids, they’re going to pay as little as they can to keep 3 staff. And charge as much as they can to keep 21 kids.
There’s no correlation between what staffing costs and what prices are charged, why would there be?
Both are just line items, and the person in charge just wants the profit line to have the biggest number.
The larger the company is, the worst that becomes. Or if the company is small, but owned by someone with a dozen other companies.
Expecting salary to match what people pay is toddler logic, sure it would be great if it worked like that, but any adult thinking more than 2 seconds can see why that’s not related in the modern age. Hell, its been decades since the “if we pay workers a living wage a value meal goes up $0.02!”.
Americans literally all said they were fine with that, almost zero companies increased pay, and all of them.increaswd prices anyways
There’s obviously no correlation
“In reality high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages.”
But that quote is from famously woke Adam Smith in his wokeism opus magnum Wealth of Nations.
Labor is often the biggest expense, but it’s far and away not the only one. They may pay extractive rent, property upkeep costs, property taxes, administrative costs like bookkeeping and legal advisory, and insurance. (Any business involving the safety and well-being of more than a couple kids has to have unbelievable premiums just for liability.)
I wouldn’t be so quick to point fingers at the people running a fucking daycare ffs. If they run a tight ship, the owners are making at best a moderately decent salary - they’re not fleecing parents because they literally can’t. Look instead at all those auxiliary industries which are required for legal compliance - especially the “consultant class” - legal, tax/accounting, and insurance. They have leeches attached all the way up the chain, starting with individual workers.
Sadly this math adds up. In my country those are public services. So no corporate greed is involved and no significat ammount goes to corruption or overpaid management.
Sadly this formula for example in daycare is true:
(“Huge payment from us” x “number of kids”) / " number of people getting paid" = “low number”
We usually just do not account for cooks, cleaners, janitors, administration in our intuition.
Yet somehow a struggling mom can take on babysitting as a gig and watch four kids a day by herself, for like $50 each. That includes cooking, cleaning, changing, and a smile on your kiddos face when they come home.
My sister does this. Shes the cook, cleaner, janitor, and administration.
I think part of the problem is also the fact that entrepreneurial types have convinced us that the necessary architecture for a successful business also happens to be the architecture which makes us give up most of our proceeds.
You are capable and can make a difference by yourself. You don’t need them.
True facts. The “missing” money in the equation is all the boring expensive stuff. Rent, property taxes, legal, administration (bookkeeping, compliance), insurance (child safety/liability is a convenient excuse for sky-high premiums).
Assuming a 9hr work day to cover another persons workday… Likely closer to 10hr due to commute… but I wouldn’t know.
200/9hr=22/hr
BSing utils at 300/mo is a mere 0.40/hr
BSing rent/mortgage at 1200/MO is 1.64/hr
So basically she’s getting $20/hr assuming she does all 3 jobs just within that 9hr.
Not terrible but it does raise more questions and definitely doesn’t scale well. Like presumably these are older kids that can be ignored while cooking and cleaning or that 9hr estimate is low… And prob isn’t caring insurance for this? And utils, rent/mortgage is quite possibly off considerably…
Comparing someone doing it out their house vs an actual business is always going to be silly.
Concerning you did not list educator in her tasks, and instead focused on the least important aspects of “childcare”.
Children shouldn’t be a business model, but proper ECE is vital at that age where they learn more than any other time in their life.
It’s rent, and advertising. Shit costs so much and yet the landlord’s and advertising industry makes ya think it’s the cost of labour. I know alot of restaurant owners who work 5 days a week(alot close two days a week) and only vacation once a year just to visit family. they have steady business but still struggle due to costs. Only places I know are doing well are ones who own their building.
We were paying double daycare until recently. While it was never inexpensive, it was more manageable when our daycare center was locally owned. Then Kindercare came in and bought 80% of daycares in my major city. When we tried changing daycares we found that many daycares not explicitly named Kindercare were still under the Kindercare umbrella but retained their old name. I guess they caught on.
As SOON as the corporate takeover was complete they started increasing rates 8% per year BEFORE we had high inflation, instituted mandatory annual fees just to enroll, and mandatory fees for supplies that we use to be able to bring but now they charged us MORE than the supplies cost and they were super shitty quality items. So if you wanted to bring in supplies for your kid, you still got to pay the fee for supplies but then also had to buy the non shitty quality ones and bring them in.
To the point of the topic though, what pissed me off the most was that even though we paid 3k/month for two our center started bleeding employees because they simply wouldn’t pay them anything. So what this meant is veteran teachers left for more pay and new ones were only there long enough to get experience.
Same with universities and overworked, underpaid professors without tenure.
I think a lot more people would be willing to swallow the cost of a nursing home, if the loved one was guaranteed proper care and respect.
And let me tell you, I’ve worked in a lot of nursing homes (not in a medical position), and it doesnt matter how high end the nursing home is, the treatment is the same across the board.
There are ways you can try to tip the system in your favor to increase the chances of getting better care for your loved one.
Visit Frequently. Every Day is best (but if you had that kind of free time you’d probably have your loved one at home instead of a facility). Residents who get frequent, regular visits tend to get better taken care of.
Try not to have a visitation pattern, To avoid staff taking care of your loved one in preparation for that day. If you do have a schedule to visit every saturday, then atleast a few times a month try to pop in on different day at random (and don’t make it a pattern)
If your loved one can not advocate for themselves, put a granny cam in the room. You can decide if you want an overt one or a hidden one. Preferably one you can log into from home/where ever and monitor live, though this may require some kind of subscription.
3a) If you’re loved one can advocate for themselves, make sure they feel safe and secure to tell you any mistreatment/bad things/unacceptable response times they may be suffering.
Be respectful to the staff until they prove otherwise. Sometimes sucking up, and little gifts, and just generally getting to know the staff involved in your loved one will get your loved one better treatment.
Do not hesitate to take issues up with the building administrator. The administrator is the highest authority in the building, and doubly do not hesitate to escalate things to your state oversight agency if the administrator fails to satisfy the issue.
4&5 TLDR) Be sweet and kind to staff, but don’t hesitate to be a roaring asshole when needed.
and I want to be clear, none of this will guarantee good/better treatment for your loved one. It just increases the chances of good/better treatment. Some people are just too lazy, cruel, and lack a single ounce of give-a-fuck to care. and some facilities try to cut costs by hiring only people that have all but been blackballed from other facilities, at low wages, because the choice for worker is either continue to use the education and experience they have or start over at even lower wage in a whole new job they know nothing about, which means they are typically at the end of their give-a-fuck. But sometimes you can have a facility run by absolute goddamn angels… and its too random to be able to predict.
Why pay $80,000 per year in an expensive country for mediocre care when I could spend $10,000 for my parents in our cheaper home country for exceptional care. There’s like almost 200 countries in the world and life can be very very nice in honestly most of them with a bit of money.
because not everyone can fucking afford to uproot their entire lives to move their entire family to another country at the drop of a hat, on the hope and prayer that they can get any residency/citizenship papers fast tracked and not take a year+ of waiting on it,
Jesus fucking christ, the absofuckinglute stupid entitlement of this comment.
Can you just go there? Don’t you need a visa?
You see, honey, when a billion dollars and a billionaire love each other very much …
This is tangential, but I recently learned quite a bit about hospice care in Oregon. I was dating someone who worked in the industry. She said that private equity was buying up the industry, intending to bill Medicare for as much as possible. I asked why she and her hard-working co-workers didn’t start up their own hospice. Don’t quote me on the specifics, but 1) a new hospice here has to generate no profit for the first X years and 2) you have to have something like half a million in reserves in order to be allowed the license to start one.
The laws were well-intentioned, but they end up being a way for the wealthy to continue generating income on the backs of everyone else. If you have the industry knowledge and funding to start a hospice, you can do it, then sell it off to private equity after a few years. Rinse and repeat. The rich get richer and we all pay for it, largely via Medicare.
Yeah, if you are looking for waste, fraud, and abuse it’s this right here. It’s endemic in all things health related. Very few individual patients are wasting social welfare money, instead it’s almost entirely the providers who are milking the government.
Yet for some reason (hmmm) basically all the laws to “stop fraud” focus around the patients and not the providers. May have something to do with the fact that senators like Rick Scott being one of the biggest medicare fraudsters in the US.
Waste in government happens when private businesses get involved. There’s very little real waste (beyond, ironically, laws which create waste to try and stop waste or means test recipients).
Healthcare should be nationalized. We’d save huge amounts of money by eliminating all these private company hucksters stealing public funds.
My dad went into hospice a year ago and died less than a week later. We keep getting letters from Medicare indicating that his hospice program keeps submitting bills for services to them.
Jesus Christ. Hospice and private equity do not belong in the same universe together. The fact that this isn’t swiftly and easily prevented by the courts is an incredibly basic failure of society. We cannot have a civilization while something like that exists.
basically “higher quality” laws always make it very difficult for new players (such as your friend) to enter the market. which means there’s less competition -> providers don’t have to optimize on price so much -> they can get away with higher mark-ups.
First, there is corporate gouging. Anyone owning stocks wants to see a return, not a moderate one but a big one, on their investment. Second, it isn’t a straight one to one employee to patient ratio. 24 hour care is 8760 hours per year and full time work is 2000 (with 2 weeks paid vacation) meaning 4.38 employee years for 24hrs, 365 days. It isn’t quite that much because staffing is never 1:1. If it were 1:1, at $20 per hour paid to the caregiver, with vacation, sick days, health care, CPP, EI, WCB, it is a minimum of $58,000 per employee. That alone would work out to $4800 per month without housing, food, cleaning, equipment. It isn’t cheap to house people who cannot live independently. We need a different model for care to keep the costs lower while providing care that is necessary. This used to all be “free” in-home by older women (Boomer, Silent Gen, Greatest Gen) and still often is, if they cannot access care for family members. Much like child care, that again women used to do for 'free", it costs real money to have someone else cover that work.
They're not paying CNA that amount.
owners of these establishments are removing money from your pocket to there’s and their shareholders. Us common folk always get the shaft
I might not even put it on owners per-say. A lot of this money goes to landlords, lenders, and other higher-level extraction agents. When you get under the hood of some of these nursing homes and care facilities, what you’ll often find is Vulture Capitalism. An institution that did work and was humane, but got bought out and turned into a vehicle for siphoning away other people’s money.
At another level, they can be used by real estate companies looking to gentrify family homes. An elder person shows up and is roped into a reverse mortgage as a condition of residency. The nursing center might be fine enough on its face, but the costs are exorbitant in a way that’s invisible to the tenant. Bank accounts are drained. Housing is seized. And then the company makes its money effectively liquidating the assets of those in their care.
other higher-level extraction agents
I was shocked when I learned what the monthly cut for referral services like “A Place for Mom” is. After going through this with a parent, my #1 advice is to avoid every single place they recommend. Their “recommendation” is entirely based on how much money they get from the facility. And these kinds of referral “services” are increasingly being offered as a workplace benefit for a lot of people. It’s not the scummiest part of that economic sector, but it is straight up payola masquerading as healthcare advice, and should be illegal.
We used a recommended provider for a few months and it was a nightmare. We eventually moved to a facility A Place for Mom “couldn’t recommend” but was recommended by a hospice nurse. It was about half the price and 100x better.
This is also a very good possibility
When was it humane?
Tangentially related a bit, but I feel like this is part of why the “no one wants to work” became a meme after COVID.
Because everything shutdown, some of these people realized just how much they were paying for day care and getting lunch and gas, and how little they made formit, that they realized they were better off just, not working that secondary income job and didn’t go back.
On the other hand, that was also the time where there seemed to be an increase in the online bullshittiness jumping through flaming hoops to apply for jobs that ultimately didn’t exist because companies had to show that they were trying to hire so they didn’t have to pay back loans, while saying people weren’t taking the positions or weren’t qualified so they could keep the money.
I remember at the tail end of things waiting for my order in a burger place where the owner was working because they were short staffed and he was bitching about “no one wants to work anymore” with a customer. The guy sounded like a dick, and all I could think was that either he’s not paying enough or he’s treating his employees like shit - that’s probably why they don’t want to work for him. Either way that was the first and last time I went there.
I was in a corpo burger joint the other day (I know, not my choice, but an elderly neighbor I help out). It was filthy, understaffed, with kiosks for ordering. We refused to use it, and a 50ish guy in line told us it was faster. I said they don't pay us to do that, they can hire enough employees, and he made that no one wants to work comment. I said they can pay enough to live, and he said something about life choices. I said I know people with degrees working at Starbucks, he said he was a high school drop out and doing well, it was poor choices. I snapped and said, "No! They can afford to pay people a living wage, aren't doing that, and your burger still costs as much as Olive Garden!" He didn't say anything else, I continued chatting with the lawn guys ahead of us, as we waited.
Services are expensive. Where I’m from daycare is socialized but still considered expensive. I imagine a full price in for profit daycare must be brutal.
Like $800 to $1200 per month per child in the US.
Long-term direct care for humans at any stage of life in the US (that aren’t of extreme wealth) is both obscenely expensive and yet woefully inadequate. I work in brain and spinal rehab AFCs and we’re far worse than most average nursing homes.
The math definitely adds up.
Shit Policies + Shit Wages = Shit Country
*boomers finally cashing in there absurd housing appreciation
Younger generations: we can finally use some of our family money to get on the housing ladder
Private equity nursing homes: not so fast, you gotta give us half of that or grannies going to the streets.
Middleman economy.
The American dream:
Do no work Create no product Have no ideas Take a ever growing cut on everything in life
A leech provides value to a ecosystem, the same cannot be said for landed lords and lender lords.
Look up Welltower Inc. According to equilar, welltower’s CEO, Shankh S. Mitra, received $821 million in compensation last year. Welltower boasted $10.8 billion in earnings.
I would seem to me, there’s a market for opening a daycare that pays livable wages, and another where you could both undercut nursing facilities and pay the staff living wages.
I’m not a fan of capitalism by any means, but it does seem that this should market correct no? What’s stopping that from happening?
For a daycare, it’s because setting up a new one is expensive and risky. You need property, insurance, and licensing. You need employees you’ve vetted and trained. It takes months to do all this and during these months you aren’t making any income.
Nursing homes are even worse because they have a lot of legal requirements (that should exist!) which raises the barrier even further.
It’s hard to get the loans needed for these new businesses if you aren’t already wealthy.
The people that are wealthy enough to do this are instead investing in PE firms which buy up daycares and run them into the ground for profit.
With regards to nursing homes there’s a second level. I’m going to borrow from my own past writing here :
Due to the way that insurance pays these days and that they can take up to 18 months to review and deny a claim at which point you have to pay them back, it’s becoming harder and rarer for single practitioners or small groups to have the ability to have a practice (unless cash based, which is difficult and excludes a lot of people from care which I have FEELINGS about). Corporations have the administrative ability to have a dedicated coder, dedicated team for denial challenges etc. However corporations are predictably exploitative.
I really don’t see any way to run anything medial based without a dedicated admin team ensuring cashflow. Which sucks. It also costs a ton of money up front.
Interesting info, thank you!
What’s stopping that from happening?
Capitalism, actually. The purpose of a system is what it does.
insurance, frivolous lawsuits, lack of cooperation from regulating authorities, take your pick
Nursing homes in my area are like $3500 a month and they’ll have one or two people working the 12 hour shift from 7pm to 7 am making jack shit who don’t know a damn thing and then call the fire department for free labour if an elderly person has fallen to the ground and needs help getting up. The nursing home doesn’t want the financial risk of their employees getting hurt, or hurting a patient getting them off the ground. That might cost them a tiny sliver of the profits they take in.
FWIW, I’m a massage therapist who works in hospice. Legally, if someone falls I’m not allowed to try to get them up because that’s not an area of training for licensing/my scope of practice does not allow it. Someone working in a nursing home would be trained on safe transfers, BUT if there’s a chance the patient experienced an injury or is unable to assist in getting up themselves, it really is safer for all parties to get a lift assist from the fire department. If I had a loved one that needed to stay in a rehab/nursing facility and they sustained a fall, I’d rather the extra set of eyes assess before just putting them back in bed.
Exactly nothing prevents a NURSING home from having a nurse or first responder on the payroll there. Also keep in mind that they are calling for a lift assist. Not an injury. They’re making the determination that the patient isn’t hurt and opting to not have an ambulance show up. They’re calling for a literal $1,000,000 truck that gets 4 mpg with 4 people to show up and provide labor.
Factor in owner profit and executive compensation and it all sums up.
You forgot to add the billionaire shareholders variable to the equation
Oversimplifying but I think it’s worth thinking about an angle I haven’t seen here yet:
People to tend to trust Big Corporate care-givers and distrust private individual caregivers.
There are of course Good Reasons for this (Who do you sue if they hurt your loved one? Who licenses and trains them?), but among the Bad Reasons are: People just inherently trust a big name they’ve heard of before, especially if that big name has similarly gargantuan PR and legal departments who scrub any bad press away.
In other words, you could hire your neighbor to take care of your kids all day, but most people choose not to, and instead send much more money towards big businesses with massive overhead costs because people trust So And So National Healthcare more than Jane Doe.
I’ve said for years that daycares and nursing homes are extremely expensive, and they’re probably not charging enough. The profit margins for both of these businesses are extremely thin.
I think posts like this are narrow-minded because they don’t take into consideration the cost of operating these kinds of facilities.
Fundamentally, the reason daycares and nursing homes are so expensive is because the overhead is insane, much like in the American healthcare industry. A portable X-ray machine at a hospital can cost over $100,000, and even the metal slab they slide under you can cost around $10,000.
These machines don’t cost nearly that much to produce. The manufacturers are milking the system.
My gas company charges a minimum monthly fee. I’ve never paid less than $70, no matter how little gas I use.
If you want to make these kinds of services cheaper, especially in America, you have to start with the fundamentals and bring down the cost of the things these businesses are forced to buy and pay for.
I’m making ~10-15% off stocks while putting 1hr of slow chilly work a month into it. Guess someone had to actually earn that for me.
And no, while I highly profit of this rotten system does not mean I love it. I do not, and would gladly trade my wealth for a normal society, in which everyone is equally happy and content. But noone wants my input on dismantling the system and start anew.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The solution is this: every sector of the economy has been optimized to extract as much money from everyone as possible. The is the implicit role of government–to help people make money. Have an idea that makes money? The government will help you make it happen.
This through-and-through corruption means that people now graduate in lifelong debt, working jobs that don’t cover the rent of places they can never own and spend money on health insurance they can never use because they can’t afford the co-pays and they are forced to buy an expensive car because that’s the only way to finance because the busroutes have all been purchased by car companies and liquidated long ago.
We are no longer citizens. We are cattle.
This is unsustainable.
Rhaedas@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
It's about money. But a nice side effect is that it keeps the people busy so they have little down time to reflect on why they are in that condition, or more importantly, no time left to take action, as well as the threat that if they do anything, it could endanger their job and life. That's why they don't take away too much from too many, otherwise suddenly those masses don't have anything to threaten and a lot of free time to notice what happened and by whom. Bread and circuses.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
100%, The New Deal in the USA was largely a result of the fear of a communist revoltuion during the Great Depression.
ruekk@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
The U.S. is an open air prison
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Open-air farm.
oce@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
This is not the explicit role of government in a functional social democracy. Which the USA obviously are not
Maeve@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
They're functional for the owners of the government, which are not the majority of constituents.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
That’s a pretty good summary of the situation, but it’s the problem, not the solution.
Sooner or later, something’s gotta bend or it’ll break. The oligarchs know this, and that’s why they’re putting so much effort into pacifying with false promises while tightening surveillance and control. They hope to starve us out or put us down before we reach our breaking point. They want us broken and weak long before it comes to that.
And honestly, the level of technology and the global hegemony of the capitalist order present us with a situation that’s never been seen before. The level of control and the efficiency of the surveillance state, the impersonal nature of automated weapons, makes for more than just an uphill battle. Calling ordinary people the underdogs is an overstatement of the hope we have.
And with more and more tyrants in the world learning what they can get away with, and the so-called “free world” opting for passivism and appeasement while handling their own internal threats with kiddie gloves and being more or less complicit with the plutocratic interests behind it all, it seems there’s very little hope this time for outside intervention saving us either.
So much rests on these midterms coming up. I hope they happen fairly and without too much ratfucking, I hope the people come out in droves to punish the fascists for what they’re doing to our democracy, and I hope the results of the election are duly acknowledged and the peaceful transfer of power happens smoothly. I hope enough people of good will make it into the next congress to successfully put a halt to the fascist agenda and block them from ratfucking our elections even worse, and I hope in two years we elect somebody who will restore our institutions and see justice done to those who have been dismantling it.
I don’t believe it’s too late for the world to make a comeback, but so much rests on these upcoming elections. Doomsayers will come out of the woodworks to try to discourage us from voting. We cannot listen to them.
jimmy90@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
so what would be your first act as president
Maeve@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
Whatever the corporate owners say it is.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
After that speech, I guess I’d start trust-busting, but that’s presuming just being president would give me that power.