• Instigate
      link
      fedilink
      397 months ago

      Context for uninitiated and vision impaired:

      In the background, a man is sat atop a pile of cookies behind two other men who are seated at a table. This man is Rupert Murdoch, a former Australian and now American; the owner of a large swathe of right-wing journalistic and entertainment media whose empire has contributed to the distrust and downfall of democracy across the Anglosphere.

      Pictured on the left is a dark-skinned and bearded man sat looking despondently down at the empty table in front of him. Across from him is an Anglo-Australian man who is wearing a safety helmet and hi-vis vest - a nod to the working class of Australia - with a plate and a single cookie on it. Rupert is saying to the Anglo man: “Careful mate… that foreigner wants your cookie!”

      It’s a fantastic political cartoon and a great nod to the way that right-wing media and politicians have consistently convinced significant amounts of working class people to turn their frustrations at their lack of share in capital towards immigrants and foreigners as opposed to the billionaires who hoard all the wealth.

    • @rsuri
      link
      17 months ago

      deleted by creator

  • @reddig33
    link
    737 months ago

    Meanwhile people are concerned that the post office isn’t turning a profit.

    • Dettweiler
      link
      677 months ago

      Which has never made sense to me. It’s a government service. It’s not supposed to be profitable. It just needs to be affordable and reliable.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        377 months ago

        And yet they used to turn a profit. Until Republicans passed a law requiring them to prefund retirements for 75 years out with the USPS Fairness Act. Fairness Act, which imposes this burden on the USPS while no other federal agency (or private business) is required to prefund retirement benefits…quite fair.

        • @BigDaddySlim
          link
          English
          167 months ago

          This has been revoked recently, we no longer are required to prefund the plan. One good thing DeJoy has actually done.

          It hasn’t been beneficial in terms of us getting a raise or anything since there hasn’t been a contract with the NALC in almost 2 years now but I’m sure it shows in the now 66¢ cost of a stamp (price may be more by the time I press send on this message).

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      357 months ago

      “People” aren’t. It’s regressives that are trying to disenfranchise mail in voters. Then they put a regressive in charge of the USPS who is trying to run it into the ground so they can be like “oh gosh look how bad it is!”

      • @UnknownHandsome
        link
        107 months ago

        Republicans want to privatize every public work. USPS isn’t supposed to turn a profit. It’s supposed to be a public good that is sold at cost so we all benefit. It used to be subsidized.

        Republicans want to turn it into a new industry a la UPS, FedEx, etc, so it’d cost way more to send a letter. The love of money is the root of all evil. It’s also the root of the Republican party.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    68
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    This might seem like a minor quibble, but that money doesn’t really come from taxpayers, and understanding what seems like a very technical financial thing is really important if you want to understand geopolitics in general. Here’s an except from the beginning of David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 years, easily one of the single most interesting and enlightening books I’ve ever read:

    Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re- payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.

    So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as “empires,” and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these pay- ments as “loans” and not as “tribute” is precisely to deny the reality of what’s going on.

    • _NoName_
      link
      fedilink
      43
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      So it’s not coming from US tax payers, this is saying? It comes from Japanese taxpayers, German taxpayers, South Korean tax payers, etc. on top of US tax payers.

      That really does not change the situation. It still is a massive amount of money out of US pockets, and the rest is out of US allies’ citizen pockets. It also doesn’t change the failing to pass audits. It also doesn’t change their massive collection of known BS actions done in the past.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        127 months ago

        What it does change is that the availability of the money and the military machine are linked. It’s not just that American taxpayers are footing the bill; it’s that our military machine is funded by tribute, which we pretend is “debt” that we’re totally going to pay back one day. It’s one system.

        To be clear, it’s bad. I hate it. I just think it’s important to understand how the thing we oppose works.

    • Primarily0617
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      227 months ago

      arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers

      also, money is fungible with other money, so “this stream of money doesn’t come from there” doesn’t make sense

      • @Telodzrum
        link
        27 months ago

        arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers

        Not at all. The dollar’s valuation comes primarily from:

        1. Its backing by a stable economic and governmental system and the projected power of the military controlled by that government

        2. Its status at the global reserve currency

        Tokyo, Lisbon, and Santiago don’t hold debt and equity in USD because Phil from Bozeman paid the IRS in that currency.

        • Primarily0617
          cake
          link
          fedilink
          07 months ago

          Its backing by a stable economic and governmental system

          the only real backing the dollar has is that it’s the only currency you can use to pay US taxes

          1 is necessary for 2, so 2 isn’t really a separate point

          Tokyo, Lisbon, and Santiago don’t hold debt and equity in USD because Phil from Bozeman paid the IRS in that currency.

          They hold debt and equity in USD because USD is stable because there is always a Phil from a Bozeman who needs to pay their taxes, so they money will always have value to somebody

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        1
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        The fungibility isn’t what’s at issue. The link between the money stream and the military is a system that can’t be understood separately. Thinking of it as taxpayer funded doesn’t make sense.

        arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers

        I encourage you to read the book. It really changed my perspective on what value even is and what it means. I don’t think you’ll think this after reading it.

        • Primarily0617
          cake
          link
          fedilink
          07 months ago

          Thinking of it as taxpayer funded doesn’t make sense.

          if you raise a billion dollars from taxpayers, and then raise a billion dollars from foreign debt, and you have a problem that you need to spend a billion dollars to fix, any dollar from either pile can go towards fixing that problem

          this is like when red bull broke their spending cap in F1 and their response was to say that the overspend was from catering

          I encourage you to read the book.

          i can’t read

    • The Assman
      link
      fedilink
      97 months ago

      Damn, you really changed my perspective there. Thanks for sharing.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    577 months ago

    Anytime a journalist thinks about covering this they probably die in a tragic accident suddenly.

  • @RememberTheApollo_
    link
    477 months ago

    But it’s unpatriotic to question spending dropping multi million dollar bombs and using expensive tech to wage war in impoverished countries.

  • SirStumps
    link
    287 months ago

    We need the Karen’s to combine their might and talk the the Mega Manager.

    • @uis
      link
      9
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      I’m scared it might work. Or excited. Can they talk the Mega Manager into using bunker-penetrating bombs to get Putin?

      • SirStumps
        link
        137 months ago

        The Karen Bunker Buster is a secret weapon only the Elder Karen’s can nag enough to summon.

  • @LemmyKnowsBest
    link
    237 months ago

    We’re all outraged but theres no customer service complaint phone number for the black hole that all of our taxpayer dollars disappear into

  • @EatYouWell
    link
    157 months ago

    It’s funny because the audit process for FedRAMP approval businesses is an absolute nightmare.

      • @EatYouWell
        link
        187 months ago

        It’s the authorization a company has to have before their systems can access/store federal government data.

        The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has the 800-53 which is a ~500 page document that’s just a list of controls that must be followed, and companies have to get audited once a year to make sure they complied with the controls the previous year.

        The fun part is that most of the controls are worded super vaguely, and you’re at the mercy of the auditor’s interpretation of them.

        • Neuromancer
          link
          fedilink
          167 months ago

          I know one of the people who is an author of 800-53.

          It was funny since an auditor was arguing with her. The auditor said I know this better than you do.

          She replied back, I wrote it then showed her named in the credits.

          • @EatYouWell
            link
            57 months ago

            That’s pretty great. I had to go full Karen on our auditors to speak to their supervisors because apparently the NIST definition of a term doesn’t matter if the auditor feels differently. And it was actually an unambiguous definition.

            • Neuromancer
              link
              fedilink
              57 months ago

              The worst part is the auditor still claimed they knew it better than the person who wrote it.

              We got them removed as that’s a level of arrogance that can’t be tolerated.

  • @Donkter
    link
    137 months ago

    One day the Pentagon will just drop warp drives and energy 2 out of nowhere and the world will be like “what?”

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      10
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      “Drop” is the wrong word. It’s going to be more like “hoard for 50 years until they discover energy 3 and mega-warp, then sell the concept rights for energy 2 and warp to a corp”

    • @Mr_Blott
      link
      37 months ago

      I’ll have you know they’re fifty thousand dollar bombs, inflated to million dollar bombs because the taxpayer is paying

  • @affiliate
    link
    47 months ago

    the outrage will not be televised

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    37 months ago

    Well, the military has a lot of projects and operations the public doesn’t, and shouldn’t, know about. If you see about a sting in Syria on CNN, so do the hostile insurgents, or whomever are the enemies du jour. But how can you expense the operation on a public budget sheet, if the operation can’t, for security reasons, be public? The answer is simple: you spend $10,000 on $10 toilet seats, and the $9,990 now accounted for dollars are paying for equipment, ammunition, transportation, training, payroll, and benefits for something that officially never happened.