Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Recent comments from a wealthy Australian property developer named Tim Gurner are going viral on social media right now for the unusual frankness with which he discusses the inherent conflicts of interest between the working class and employers, saying workers who’ve grown lazy and arrogant during Covid need to experience economic pain in the form of unemployment to rein them in and put them in their place.
When you tell people for the better part of three years that they are non-essential humans, their work is non-essential and pay them to loaf you get a population that begins to believe you and act like non-essential humans.
Tim Gurner and his ilk are the ones who created this mindset. They did it. Them. Their fault. They are the ones to blame. Turn that wagging finger around and point it at yourselves there, light-in-the-loafers buddy-boys and girls. They put that mind poison into the populace. Now they get to reap the crop they sowed. A lot of those non-essential humans took the time they were forced to take off reading up on the world of things, learning who thinks they're so essential they get to tell others they aren't. And they discovered a whole lot they never would've bothered to discover. And now the people like Mr. Gurner have a big and growing problem on their hands. And the lesson that's coming isn't the one that he and they think it will be.
"The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we’re seeing it. "
Yep, the capitalists are saying the usually unspoken part out loud nowadays. They're not hiding their contempt for the workers anymore. "Normality" to them means millions upon millions suffering hunger, joblessness, homelessness, hopelessness. Let's start fighting back, fellow workers. I think it's time the only people "unemployed" are the billionaires and their buddies. We can demonstrate to them how them being "unemployed" and the workers seizing the means of production is much better than guillotines.
Neoliberalism has been in effect for half a century . It is not only a declaration of war on the working class, but on democracy and whole societies. We are now in the ruins and the revolution starts with people educating themselves on what neoliberalism is and what it has done to our societies. So much of what is wrong now is a result of neoliberalism where corporate power dominates governments.
I am not at all surprised he would say what he says in public as this is part of the arrogance of the very rich and the contempt they hold for the working class and public interest in general.
I also suspect he was playing to his audience--as the multimillionaire redneck.
Every ploy will be used by the owner class to distract and deflect from the fundamental economic war that capitalist must continually wage on workers to make production as efficient as possible!
Land value (not the buildings) is the sole appropriate object of taxation, and along with judicious import tariffs could easily supply all the money that government needs.
Taxing work (income tax) discourages work. Taxing commerce (sales tax) discourages commerce. But taxing land at the right level does not discourage any productive activity. It discourages only non-productive land owning. The right level of tax on land is the rent on the unimproved land, which should be taxed at 100%. There should be 0% tax on improvements or buildings though, because those represent productive work.
Hong Kong has a partially Georgist tax system, and it works very well there, reducing their income tax and sales tax and encouraging economic growth.
I couldn't have said it any better. We need a new paradigm.
We still have the 70% who believe that they don't deserve to live without struggle.
Interesting that the most-liked comment here still regards the idea that "people have gotten lazy" (paraphrased).
The old idea dies hard. The one that says that your worth is tied to your productivity, and that the "problem" is that people got used to not working.
As I've said many times, the world is full of Einstein's that are tied up washing dishes or sitting at desks bored to tears. If everyone was allowed to do and had the freedom to do what they are best at, we would transform our planet.
But unfortunately most of those people are too busy trying to survive. And maybe it will take a time period where people get to just BE, and heal, and discover who they are.
Then everyone can be "productive" in their own way -- a way that doesn't necessarily satisfy an exploitative capitalist.
And if what this guy said isn't the perfect example of a caste system and ideology, then I don't know what is.
Right on, Caitlin. This is why I am a Marxist. People like Gurner and the rest of his class are the enemies of workers the world over. They need to remember what happened in the French and Russian Revolutions and will happen again.
I will keep this short and simple. The notion that employers shouldn't feel lucky to have workers means that they see labor having little to no value. Yet without labor, they wealthy don't profit. So when inflation goes up rarely do we see wages rising anywhere near the inflation, because wages have no cost of living adjustment for the majority of people.
Next, the concept of having employees experiencing economic pain on the level beyond the Americian great depression is insane. Worse than medieval oppression and essentially a point to legalize slavery or literally indentured servitude through debt. The wealthy feel entitled to their wealth and ability to oppress people. I wonder how many days they could work in their own sweatshops or assembly lines being paid what those people are living on. They forget that they steal money from workers, they didn't earn most of it.
When the reckoning comes, be discerning; the one who invents a better mouse trap then employs people who manufacture them should not be thought of as deserving the same as people who trade paper or trade people.
And how exactly has this self-important princeling measured the level of laziness among the working class? Has he ever talked with a worker? His saying all this BS is strictly for The Fraternity and like a red herring to steer away any considerations for government stipulated price freezes to halt the greed induced rise in foodstuff prices.
The kinds of people who accumulate enormous wealth are so often raw sociopaths that it's frankly surprising these disclosures aren't a daily occurrence.
In a month or so, they will be.
I must be a moron because I always assumed the super-rich at least saw the rest of us as human beings, albeit lesser ones. After all, I've spent most of my life in relative poverty, but as someone with a safe home and the health to run marathons along with the freedom to work from home well before covid, I had infinitely more than lots of people I knew.
I still do, being exited from impolite society notwithstanding. And I've never thought of a homeless person as an inconvenience, let alone discardable.
Imagine what these people talk about when drunk and away from recording equipment.
Billionaires are allowed and encouraged to exist for their the same reason kings allowed aristocrats to exist. They help enforce the ideology that the many exist to support a few.
Romans were clear about this and simply designated people as slaves, while allowing some slaves and other people of their assimilated cultures to work hard enough for the empire to become wealthy, themselves, though never, or rarely, could they attain ruling class status.
This creates the illusion that the class-based system is merit-based, which helps reinforce compliance among the many who remain and will remain poor, because they believe they could potentially escape their lower class status.
Someone clever once said that working class Americans voted for Republicans (Reagan’s Republicans) because they saw themselves not as poor, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Similarity, the British ‘reform’ of the parliamentary system was necessary, because as modernity led many to eschew religious promises of an opulent afterlife as payment for a life of good work and poverty, they needed a new illusion to govern the working classes. Otherwise, why instead of getting rid completely of the peerage system and house of lords, did they simply allow the PM to elevate some imperial boffins to peer status?
However, how many Republicans, ie those who want the monarchy abolished, are tapped in this way?
Wealthy Capitalist Accidentally Makes Great Argument For Revolution
When you tell people for the better part of three years that they are non-essential humans, their work is non-essential and pay them to loaf you get a population that begins to believe you and act like non-essential humans.
Tim Gurner and his ilk are the ones who created this mindset. They did it. Them. Their fault. They are the ones to blame. Turn that wagging finger around and point it at yourselves there, light-in-the-loafers buddy-boys and girls. They put that mind poison into the populace. Now they get to reap the crop they sowed. A lot of those non-essential humans took the time they were forced to take off reading up on the world of things, learning who thinks they're so essential they get to tell others they aren't. And they discovered a whole lot they never would've bothered to discover. And now the people like Mr. Gurner have a big and growing problem on their hands. And the lesson that's coming isn't the one that he and they think it will be.
This guy needs to be introduced to a wood chipper.
"The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we’re seeing it. "
Yep, the capitalists are saying the usually unspoken part out loud nowadays. They're not hiding their contempt for the workers anymore. "Normality" to them means millions upon millions suffering hunger, joblessness, homelessness, hopelessness. Let's start fighting back, fellow workers. I think it's time the only people "unemployed" are the billionaires and their buddies. We can demonstrate to them how them being "unemployed" and the workers seizing the means of production is much better than guillotines.
Neoliberalism has been in effect for half a century . It is not only a declaration of war on the working class, but on democracy and whole societies. We are now in the ruins and the revolution starts with people educating themselves on what neoliberalism is and what it has done to our societies. So much of what is wrong now is a result of neoliberalism where corporate power dominates governments.
I am not at all surprised he would say what he says in public as this is part of the arrogance of the very rich and the contempt they hold for the working class and public interest in general.
I also suspect he was playing to his audience--as the multimillionaire redneck.
Every ploy will be used by the owner class to distract and deflect from the fundamental economic war that capitalist must continually wage on workers to make production as efficient as possible!
Alexa, define the 'parasite class'...
The solution is not communism, but Georgism:
https://patrick.net/post/1346922/2022-08-05-georgism-thread
Land value (not the buildings) is the sole appropriate object of taxation, and along with judicious import tariffs could easily supply all the money that government needs.
Taxing work (income tax) discourages work. Taxing commerce (sales tax) discourages commerce. But taxing land at the right level does not discourage any productive activity. It discourages only non-productive land owning. The right level of tax on land is the rent on the unimproved land, which should be taxed at 100%. There should be 0% tax on improvements or buildings though, because those represent productive work.
Hong Kong has a partially Georgist tax system, and it works very well there, reducing their income tax and sales tax and encouraging economic growth.
I couldn't have said it any better. We need a new paradigm.
We still have the 70% who believe that they don't deserve to live without struggle.
Interesting that the most-liked comment here still regards the idea that "people have gotten lazy" (paraphrased).
The old idea dies hard. The one that says that your worth is tied to your productivity, and that the "problem" is that people got used to not working.
As I've said many times, the world is full of Einstein's that are tied up washing dishes or sitting at desks bored to tears. If everyone was allowed to do and had the freedom to do what they are best at, we would transform our planet.
But unfortunately most of those people are too busy trying to survive. And maybe it will take a time period where people get to just BE, and heal, and discover who they are.
Then everyone can be "productive" in their own way -- a way that doesn't necessarily satisfy an exploitative capitalist.
And if what this guy said isn't the perfect example of a caste system and ideology, then I don't know what is.
Right on, Caitlin. This is why I am a Marxist. People like Gurner and the rest of his class are the enemies of workers the world over. They need to remember what happened in the French and Russian Revolutions and will happen again.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - J. Krishnamurti
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media". - Noam Chomsky
"In Lak'ech Ala K'in" "I am you and you are me. What I do to you I do to myself." Mayan Saying
I will keep this short and simple. The notion that employers shouldn't feel lucky to have workers means that they see labor having little to no value. Yet without labor, they wealthy don't profit. So when inflation goes up rarely do we see wages rising anywhere near the inflation, because wages have no cost of living adjustment for the majority of people.
Next, the concept of having employees experiencing economic pain on the level beyond the Americian great depression is insane. Worse than medieval oppression and essentially a point to legalize slavery or literally indentured servitude through debt. The wealthy feel entitled to their wealth and ability to oppress people. I wonder how many days they could work in their own sweatshops or assembly lines being paid what those people are living on. They forget that they steal money from workers, they didn't earn most of it.
When the reckoning comes, be discerning; the one who invents a better mouse trap then employs people who manufacture them should not be thought of as deserving the same as people who trade paper or trade people.
And how exactly has this self-important princeling measured the level of laziness among the working class? Has he ever talked with a worker? His saying all this BS is strictly for The Fraternity and like a red herring to steer away any considerations for government stipulated price freezes to halt the greed induced rise in foodstuff prices.
The kinds of people who accumulate enormous wealth are so often raw sociopaths that it's frankly surprising these disclosures aren't a daily occurrence.
In a month or so, they will be.
I must be a moron because I always assumed the super-rich at least saw the rest of us as human beings, albeit lesser ones. After all, I've spent most of my life in relative poverty, but as someone with a safe home and the health to run marathons along with the freedom to work from home well before covid, I had infinitely more than lots of people I knew.
I still do, being exited from impolite society notwithstanding. And I've never thought of a homeless person as an inconvenience, let alone discardable.
Imagine what these people talk about when drunk and away from recording equipment.
Basically the slaves need to be reminded who their masters are.
We need to turn that around. Yesterday. FFS.
Billionaires are allowed and encouraged to exist for their the same reason kings allowed aristocrats to exist. They help enforce the ideology that the many exist to support a few.
Romans were clear about this and simply designated people as slaves, while allowing some slaves and other people of their assimilated cultures to work hard enough for the empire to become wealthy, themselves, though never, or rarely, could they attain ruling class status.
This creates the illusion that the class-based system is merit-based, which helps reinforce compliance among the many who remain and will remain poor, because they believe they could potentially escape their lower class status.
Someone clever once said that working class Americans voted for Republicans (Reagan’s Republicans) because they saw themselves not as poor, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Similarity, the British ‘reform’ of the parliamentary system was necessary, because as modernity led many to eschew religious promises of an opulent afterlife as payment for a life of good work and poverty, they needed a new illusion to govern the working classes. Otherwise, why instead of getting rid completely of the peerage system and house of lords, did they simply allow the PM to elevate some imperial boffins to peer status?
However, how many Republicans, ie those who want the monarchy abolished, are tapped in this way?