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How poor is the average American? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Kushia@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I've been watching a few American TV shows and it blows my mind that they put up with such atrocious working terms and conditions.

One show was about a removal company where any damage at all, even not the workers fault, is taken out of their tips. There's no insurance from the multimillion dollar business. As they're not paid a living wage the guy on the show had examples of when he and his family went weeks with barely any income and this was considered normal?!

Another example was a cooking show where the prize was tickets to an NFL game. The lady who won explained that she'd be waiting in the car so her sons could experience their first live game, because she couldn't otherwise afford a ticket to go. They give tickets for football games away for free to people where I live for no reason at all..

Yet another example was where the workers got a $5k tip from their company and the reactions were as if this amount of money was even remotely life changing. It saddens me to think the average Americans life could be made so much better with such a relatively small amount of money and they don't unionize and demand far better. The company in question was on track to make a billion bloody dollars while their workers are on the poverty line and don't even have all their teeth?

It's not actually this bad and the average American lives a pretty good life like we're led to believe, right?

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[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For one, propaganda is a hell of a drug. Fox ~~two minutes hate~~ "news" will tell anyone who listens that every single problem you have is the fault of ~~Goldstein~~ liberals/leftists/Democrats.

A point for Trump is that "conservatives" are also completely jaded and cynical about the system as well as we are, their chosen method is to use Trump to burn it all to the ground and "start new" with their "strong man" who will force the change they want to see. They see Biden as a feckless, weak, liberal who not only can't fix the issues we have, but won't do it because he's in x,y,z persons pocket (completely ignoring that Trump doesn't need to have someone to serve as he's serving himself.)

I think we're all fed up with the system, but the neoliberal greed is good 80s assholes will continue the beatings until morale is improved.

[–] ieightpi@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I didn't quite understand your last paragraph

[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 5 points 11 months ago

Those in government that make the rules are following the Gordon Gekko "greed is good" mentality (from a movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gekko) that corporations should always seek maximum profit because It Will Make Us All Richer™ (somehow?) everyone driven by self interest will grow the economy, etc.... and they'll continue to enforce that mentality to the detriment of us all.

We'll keep suffering and the extremist views of left and right will continue to grow in response so "the beatings will continue until morale improves" joke implys that they're going to continue to do the same thing that's driving us insane and somehow expect the results to change for the better.