That way of putting it has always belied the sheer amount of propaganda the rich have poured into making people believe they can be the chosen one to get rich. From scam artists selling get rich quick schemes to syrupy news stories about the kid who dropped out and got rich. Financial news regularly runs stories meant to make people think they’re not budgeting hard enough if they can’t make ends meet. (spoiler alert there’s always a tertiary source of income involved, but it’s buried deep in the article.)
And when things are clearly enunciated, like plans to tax people over 400k, there’s suddenly tons of stories about how they’re just normal people who can barely make ends meet. They’re just like Mr. Fast food worker, they might even have to sell their house if you taxed their stocks! (Just never ask which vacation house that is or how many rooms it has)
Rather than “copping out” by pointing all this out, I want a counter narrative. Until we get a strong counter narrative people will continue to succumb to this propaganda.
I almost forgot, the numerous commercials where corporations swear they’re a good corporate citizen and you can trust them to have your best interests in mind. While they put all their wrong doing under legal secrecy so people can’t even see the problem we need to fix. For example did you know Walmart and Pepsi got caught in a massive price fixing scheme? One that likely extends across most Walmart grocery products and could be partially responsible for our high grocery prices? (Pepsi collaborated to make sure no other store could afford to sell Pepsi products for less than Wal-Mart by charging those stores more if they dropped their prices. This effectively let Wal-Mart set the price floor wherever they wanted.)
You don’t get this stuff on CNN. And it’s the stuff that actually impacts our daily lives.
That way of putting it has always belied the sheer amount of propaganda the rich have poured into making people believe they can be the chosen one to get rich. From scam artists selling get rich quick schemes to syrupy news stories about the kid who dropped out and got rich. Financial news regularly runs stories meant to make people think they’re not budgeting hard enough if they can’t make ends meet. (spoiler alert there’s always a tertiary source of income involved, but it’s buried deep in the article.)
And when things are clearly enunciated, like plans to tax people over 400k, there’s suddenly tons of stories about how they’re just normal people who can barely make ends meet. They’re just like Mr. Fast food worker, they might even have to sell their house if you taxed their stocks! (Just never ask which vacation house that is or how many rooms it has)
Rather than “copping out” by pointing all this out, I want a counter narrative. Until we get a strong counter narrative people will continue to succumb to this propaganda.
I almost forgot, the numerous commercials where corporations swear they’re a good corporate citizen and you can trust them to have your best interests in mind. While they put all their wrong doing under legal secrecy so people can’t even see the problem we need to fix. For example did you know Walmart and Pepsi got caught in a massive price fixing scheme? One that likely extends across most Walmart grocery products and could be partially responsible for our high grocery prices? (Pepsi collaborated to make sure no other store could afford to sell Pepsi products for less than Wal-Mart by charging those stores more if they dropped their prices. This effectively let Wal-Mart set the price floor wherever they wanted.)
You don’t get this stuff on CNN. And it’s the stuff that actually impacts our daily lives.