Whatever AOC! It’s super easy, barely an inconvenience, to do. Over the span of a 40 year career you simply need to earn $25,000,000 on average each year without exploiting labor, committing fraud, violating antitrust, cheating investors, market manipulation, stealing, or any of the other ways billionaires became billionaires.
The real story is that having a billion dollars and not aggressively using your wealth to fix the problems in the world/society makes you a monster. Full stop.
The problem here is not her message, it is how the headlines present it.
She is not saying that having a billion dollars is wrong per se in a vacuum. she is saying how you go about getting a billion dollars in the real world is what makes it wrong.
That distinction is far too subtle for the average voter. She is talking about the rules of chess while ~50% of the country barely knows how to play checkers.
The better thing to focus on for people is probably the methods by which billionaires go about making their money more so than the specific amounts of money they end up with because of it.
Well, nothing is wrong in a vacuum because there’s nothing there to be right or wrong, but having a billion dollars is wrong per se, because no one person, no matter how brilliant or diligent, can actually do something that is worth one billion dollars.
Also, I don’t think individuals should have the amount of power that comes with that much wealth.
Money, money, money. The artificial middle-man of questionable value that we kill each other over. This is getting embarrassing already. Universal basic income. No-one should lack food, warmth and shelter nowadays, at the very least. Watch progress take off when everyone has a full belly and hope.
I’d hate to be the soulless fool who downvoted you
Probably just a McMansion guy with dreams of a superyacht. /s
Thank you. Idk if this will be beneficial to my emotional wellbeing or not so I will likely forget about it
Even if you could, you shouldn’t want to.
This is the problem that needs to be fixed. As long as we embrace greed we will be ruled by it.
Power. The more you have, the others have less. You are more special with each billion extra.
I just don’t get the point. Felon and bozos have more money than they’ll EVER be able to spend. What is the point of hoarding even more? It makes no sense. I just don’t get it
I think at a certain point it becomes about power and money is just a way they measure it
The hoarding becomes the point. It’s a form of psychosis.
It’s big that she said this. It’s a big political risk.
It’s common knowledge here, but certainly not everywhere it needs to be.
Nah. They are few. We are many.
They own all of the media. I guarantee that the propaganda machine has started up against her already.
The propaganda machine includes this very article. It’s already been going since her first primary run, and it will continue churning the propaganda against her out.
What shitty media do you read?
There’s dozens of amazing independent news outlets in the US.
I am of course referring to mainstream media that reaches the plebs. The ones who don’t exist terminally online and consume their information through all the small media outlets that are prolific here. People who watch NBC, CBS, and ABC and who regularly consume Fox News and CNN as their primary news source. Those are the people that are getting a 24/7 fire hose of misinformation about her.
I’m pretty sure those people are so old that they hardly count as existing
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
Yeah, and there’s only a few corporate ones. We have more independent news orgs in the US than corporate ones
But in terms of reach, Fox News and conservative talk radio trump them all.
You have more access than most people in the world to firearms. Glass bottles are cheap, and gasoline, while increasing in price, is relatively still inexpensive
You’re just one plane ticket away! Surely that won’t stop you from showing us how it’s done.
good luck
Oh, okay. You’re doing all you can, yeah? Not at all mistaking cowardice for helplessness? Nah. Couldn’t be. Weird how your whole country dined out for a couple centuries on the myth of being REALLY good at fighting tyranny against great odds. It’s almost like you made it your entire deal and used it as a cudgel against those who suggested you weren’t living up to your stated ideals. Huh.
Your country probably bought into that lie.
And by the way it was and is Boomers who pushed that. 🤷♂️ We’re just along for the ride here.
The capital class wants to divide the working class.
Creating generational divide is one way.
You have way more in common with your grandparents than with a billionaire.
You could at least get your own country to stop using the US dollar, stop trading with the USA, stop buying weapons from the US at least, and stop training with the US military. That would help a LOT.
But, instead you’d rather enable the USA. Disgusting.
It’s a plane ticket for either one of us, and since you’re the smart one with all of the solutions, you should of course lead the way. Like you said, glass bottles and gasoline are cheap, and so are plane tickets, so hop on the plane and SAVE THE WORLD.
Or… just sit on your ass and tell other people what to do, while your own country enables the USA. You’re doing all you can, right?
No, keep going.
Keep getting defensive and illustrating exactly why they’re steamrolling you. Don’t stop. It’s already clear enough to me, but I think it’s useful that other people see the mindset that’s keeping US liberals from stopping MAGA.
Big media calling her a communist is all it needs to destroy a candidate in Murica.
If you pay any of your employees a non-living wage you’re not “earning” your billions. You hire someone you’re expecting them to show up, but also be well rested, hydrated, clothed, physically healthy, mentally fit, and motivated. They can’t be all of those things if you’re not compensating them well enough and providing them the flexibility life demands. If your employees depend on government services just so they can show up to work then it’s the taxpayers that are padding your pocket, not your own “hard work”.
Not arguing against you, just using your comment as a jumping off point:
If you are part of the owning class, you aren’t “earning” your wage. You are skimming the surplus value created by your employees and calling it “profit”
Capitalism not only encourages exploitation, but requires it. The whole purpose of capitalism is amassing capital, maximization of profit, and the way to do this is through taking the surplus value created by employees.
For example, when a car is created, raw materials go in and are assembled (at least in part) by people. The value created by turning those raw materials into a car is created by the employees that turned it into a car. The difference between the fair market value of that car and the raw materials put in is the value added by the worker.
If we were to actually pay these workers what they are worth, by the value they added to that car, there would be no profit. But because capitalism incentivises maximization of profit, the owning class pays you a wage that is always less than that value added, and they have incentive to make that wage as small as you are willing to take, after all, you can’t build the car yourself because you do not own the means of production
And therein lies the fundamental problem of capitalism. He who owns the means of production has the power.
Editing to add: If the workers owned the means of production, then there would be no reason for the owning (billionaire) class to exist – because they don’t actually do anything, they just own things.
Poverty wages are not evidence of a broken system, they are evidence that the system is working exactly as intended. We need an economic system that does not incentivize profit, period.
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How about Taylor Swift? By all accounts she pays her employees very well. I realize as with any rule there will be exceptions, and I’d say there are a few. Very few.
She’s not Mother Teresa, but not an absolute monster either, and just barely a billionaire. Most of that billion is intangible assets, she doesn’t literally have $1 billion in her bank account.
It’s hard to hate or speak against someone like that when they’re so insulated and it’s not clear how much class consciousness they even have. At the same time, someone like that could obviously do more.
Most of Taylor Swift’s wealth comes from the record label, not her employees’ labor. UMG certainly is a mega corporation that monopolizes the industry and is valued at tens of billions of dollars currently.
This is exactly why I don’t like this hard “billionaire” line. Because it detaches the argument from how they amassed their wealth and instead focuses on “they’re wealthy so it’s bad”. I don’t know enough about Swift to know if she in the socialist sense “earned” her wealth, but let’s say that she did. Let’s say her labor is that valuable and within the framework of of what she can reasonably influence she hasn’t deliberately exploited anyone for her benefit. If she put in the labor and walked away with a billion, what is wrong with that? Are we supposed to virtue signal and claim that she should’ve gone above and beyond to make sure every penny was ethically obtained? Are we supposed to perpetuate the capitalist misinformation that socialism is when you’re not allowed the fruits of your labor is it makes you too rich?
And are we also supposed to turn a blind eye to all the investor leeches who do no actual labor but take a profit margin from the labor of others? You know, as long as their wealth stays below a billion. Are you some kind of an ethical capitalist if you give away every penny that would make you a billionaire?
Yes, the vast majority (if not all) billionaires haven’t earned their billions but I think we should be emphasizing how they made their billions instead of the fact that they have a billion. It’s far more important to get rid of the leeches than it is to get rid of billionaires. Even if there aren’t any ethical billionaires getting rid of them isn’t going to get rid of all the multi-millionaires who are doing the same horrid shit.
If your scenario were true then we need to change the system, or how we teach our children what is right or wrong.
If I was Taylor Swift in your example, I would split all of the money with everyone who helped put my shows on, since its literally impossible for me to do it alone.
Part of the problem is that people see Taylor Swift as a one person act, when its hundreds. This puts her up on a pedestal, and everyone else is forgotten.
Taylor Swift isn’t THE problem, but she is absolutely a symbol of the problem.
The word “billionaire” exists because “slave owner” had a negative connotation.
I like the way both of those words sound, right before the new industrial revolution begins churning out freshly sharpened guillotines.
In both cases, the people rejoice and get a free ball to kick around.
That sounds like a really good way to break a foot. Heads be heavy af, yo. Stay safe
Here’s the relevant quote from the article:
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
This woman for president, enough is enough!
100%, although I think I might rather see her take down Schumer for his senate seat and then become majority leader…
The irritating thing is that the voting population is, on average, stupid, easily led, and anti woman. She would not fair well no matter how good she’d be in charge because brown woman bad or something equally idiotic. We’re nothing if not committed to shooting our own feet and wondering how it happened
Don’t forget the “id vote for her but she’d never win” crowd
If people say they’d vote for her and don’t during the primary, they’re fuckasses and can be called out as such. Also the people who vote for her specifically because she’s a woman of color. Her skin color and gender are not important. Furthering progressive ideals of “kids and poor people not dying”, “healthcare should be between the person and their medical team, not including insurance and landlords”, “not having to choose between eating, seeing a doctor, and housing/utilities”, and so forth.
Is she perfect? No but the enemy of good is perfect so we need to push for progress, not perfection. We also need to be aware of how any chosen progressive candidate will be maligned and be able to combat it. The red scare is still a factor in today’s time as are racism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. People automatically shut down upon certain words or ideas without listening to the actual content being said. There is no trying to understand, only soundbites and tweets and headlines.
Anyway, back to point. She’s a hard sell to the average idiot. Doesn’t mean we can’t try though. The opportunity is there to push for more progressive movement
About the only billionaires that I might excuse are artists, who take a blank page, or a black canvas, and write song, or a book, or create some work of art out of their thin air, using only the ideas in their head. If they can create something out of their head, and get enough people pay them for it, then they deserve the money.
The problem is, in order to transfer than money from the fan to the artist, especially in massive amounts, it usually takes some gargantuan corporation that does all the exploiting on the part of the artist.
So while the artist wasn’t exploitive in the creation of his art, his distribution company that collected the money for him, certainly was.
IMO, I think that artists, like any other person, should have wealth and income limits imposed on them. No one should be rich enough to buy influence, and artists would be especially dangerous if they had mogul money and the ability to popularize ideas through their works. JK Rowling, Ronald Reagan, Kanye West, Alex Jones, and others come to mind.
The answer isn’t to make artists rich, but rather to eliminate poverty and provide a baseline of living that allows anybody to succeed at life.
Valid.
No one deserves to be a billionaire. Most artists are not wealthy in their lifetime. In fact, most art is never even sold. It is so strange that we are so addicted to money that saying an artist deserves billions makes sense to people.
I didn’t say that artists deserve to be billionaires. I said that if an artist writes a song, and enough people buy that song to make him a billionaire, at he hasn’t done it by exploiting thousands of workers, and keeping profits that should have been shared with those workers. He got rich because people were willing to buy his ideas.
However, I also acknowledged while his side of the process may be exploitation-free, the side that actually distributes that song in the marketplace is NOT exploitation-free.
I’m not excusing any billionaires, I’m just saying there’s a big difference between wealthy artists, and people whose business was conceived with exploitation baked into the business plan from the start.
Sorry, I was not trying to make it out like you said that. Just generally that people are so obsessed with money it has perverted their view of art. Art is not about making money even if a few people successfully do this. It is about expression.
Trying to make art about money is a perversion which can be seen on platforms like Spotify where artists now pay more than streamers to get their music heard. This is not art/expression, it is commercialization.
While I am not against artist trying to sell their works, I am against corporations stealing and taking the lions share of the profits. Think musicians who don’t own their works or graphic artists that regularly get ripped off by corporations.
Corporations are so addicted to greed they are even trying to cut out the small portion of profits given to artists with AI and all signs seem to indicate they are going to be wildly successful pushing slop without any human artists.
This, of course, is not the end of art by any means.
Most actors and singers aren’t successful just because they have talent, it’s because they have the right connections in Hollywood.
This. And nearly no artist makes big money on art unless a.) they die first or b.) it’s some BS “modern art” paint splattered on a page made for the explicit purpose of being purchased by a bazillion are and “donated” to a museum so they can make a huge tax write off. (Read: used to dodge taxes)
Well JK Rowling made over a billion dollars from book sales alone, so it’s possible to make a billion dollars.
Suppose I should have been more specific, I meant “visual” artists like painters lol. Plenty of artists have made billions off book, movie, and song deals.
Wow, you really don’t have a clue about art.
Can you name a living visual artist (ya know painters or whatever) that are alive?
I can name a LOT of them: Damien Hurst, Banksy, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and many, many more. Plenty more that have died recently, but were hugely famous during their lifetimes, like Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein, who are displayed in nearly every museum in the world, including the Met and MOMA. Many artists like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Monet, and many more, were extraordinarily famous in their lifetimes.
The idea that famous artists and composers didn’t get famous until long after they were dead, is an exaggeration to the point of being mostly false.
I have a degree in music history, and I can name 10 famous composers who were relatively famous in their own lifetimes, for every one that became famous posthumously. Many famous artists and composers were very famous in their lifetimes, which is why they became even more famous in death. There are the notable exceptions like JS Bach and Van Gogh, but there are a lot more like Beethoven or DaVinci, who were enormously famous during their lifetimes. Even those that are known for becoming famous after death, like JS Bach or Schubert, were still well known among local and regional musicians, which is why their music was preserved after death.
And that’s where I concede that there may have been great composers who NEVER became famous because nobody ever heard their music, and nobody ever preserved it. But that’s not the same as becoming FAMOUS after death. That’s a bit of a cliche, with few actual examples.
I can name a LOT of them: Damien Hurst, Banksy, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and many, many more. Plenty more that have died recently, but were hugely famous during their lifetimes, like Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein, who are displayed in nearly every museum in the world, including the Met and MOMA. Many artists like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Monet, and many more, were extraordinarily famous in their lifetimes.
I think you’re being very naive. One of the people you mentioned did something exactly for the purpose op was saying. 20 artists in the last century in museums isn’t a lot of people either. All of that is decided by the tastemakers, the people who have connections and/or lots and lots of money to run the museum. Bill Gates mom ran the Seattle Art Museum for years.
I wasn’t offering a comprehensive list of “famous” or “great” living artists, just a few examples. I’m not naive, I know about Damien Hurst, and his consortiums, but he’s the exception. I chuckled typing his name as an example, he’s a K-Pop band, on a stage with Springsteen and Dylan, but technically he IS an artist, just like technically the K-Pop band are musicians. He’s just figured out a way to monetize his art, but he’s an exception. Koons is another one. So was Thomas Kinkade. These guys are bomb throwers, not serious artists.
Most artists don’t have that kind of notoriety, nor do they want it. Most artists I know, would be happy just making their living from their art, so they can only do art. Some don’t even want to make money from their art. Generally, success is based on how well they personally feel they rendered the emotion they were trying to explore.
And the wealthy have ALWAYS been the best benefactors for the arts, especially music and painting, that’s nothing new, and should be strongly encouraged. Most of Haydn’s greatest compositions were written while he spent decades employed by Prince Esterhazy. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and just about every composer took commissions from wealthy patrons.
And why shouldn’t an artist take it? The wealthy generally have more money than brains (most inherited), so if they are going to throw away their excess excess excess money on obviously metaphoric rockets, throw some dough to the artists instead. It’s one way to get that promised trickle down money, although you got to squeeze that tree really hard to get the juice out of it.
There are a lot of different kinds of artists, not just actors and singers, and while Nepo-Babies are common in Hollywood, they are less common in most other art forms.
Art tends to be very merit-based. Bad artists don’t tend to be very successful. Good artists don’t always find success, but bad artist almost never do, and never on a huge basis. Wealthy artists are generally very good at what they do.
How many artists are actually billionaires? It’s a lot of difference from being a millionare
There are getting to be quite a few these days. Musicians like McCartney, Springsteen, Dylan, Sting, Beyonce, Jay-Z, and more, are reaching Billionaire status these days. Most of them have sold their publishing for $500 million, putting them halfway there, with a lifetime of royalties. Being a Rock Star used to be a great path to serious wealth, when records actually sold in the millions.
Visual artists are another story. I feel sorry for them. They create a beautiful painting, and then sell it for a bit of money. Then that buyer holds it for a few years, and sells it for double, but the artist doesn’t see any of that. All he gets are the proceeds from that initial sale. Being the artist that holds the record for the largest sale by a living artist has got to be rough. Some guy just got $50 mill for a painting that you sold 20 years ago for rent money.
You can’t move up that high financially and be a honest person. Some people do get lucky by having a great idea or business model at the right time. What keeps them there is they can look around at others struggling and justify “I deserve this more.” Than continue to exploit as much as they can to keep it.
i think notch is the epitome of “getting lucky”. He made a game he loved, MS bought it for billions and now he’s sitting pretty doing whatever the fuck he wants.
I can think of one guy who deserves to be a billionaire and it’s the guy who invented a commercially viable blue LED.
But he’s not.
Because billionaires robbed him.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Agreed, it is impossible. Hedgies should be immediately punished and pay reprimands for the rest of their lives
She’s not wrong.
Since billionaire don’t have a billion dollars she is literally right as well.
What do you mean?
I mean billionaires have stocks that are worth a billion. They don’t have a billion dollars. So you are essentially taxing money that doesn’t exist. So where does the money come from?
You tax the money they borrow against their stock holdings as income, and allow them to deduct money used to pay back those loans. You could also tax a percentage of their wealth, which they can pay by selling some stock.
So you want every billionaire to have to sell stocks every year, on evaluations they don’t control.
Guess you want everyone 401k to go belly up which stocks crash, and products become more expensive because companies will just pass the cost down to the consumer. The money cones from somewhere, and it would be the buyers of these stocks. Which is us.
