I hate when people in the upper middle or upper class say “eat the rich” and then someone chimes in like “you’re the rich”. Yes! I acknowledge my position of privilege! I do not face any of the struggles that come from a position of financial instability, and I never have! I know that I do not have an intimate knowledge of what being poor is like, and for that I am eternally grateful. However, we aren’t TALKING about people who get to live comfortable lives. Most of us (and by that, I mean people who say “eat the rich”) aren’t even talking about the families who have a vacation home, or bought their kid a pony, or the ones with a backyard pool, or even the ones who have like five TVs or a huge house! I, at least personally, am not talking about people who have enough money that they can live in luxury, go to expensive restaurants for special occasions, or spend a year abroad. Yes, that is wealth! Extreme wealth! But that kind of wealth isn’t inherently harmful, because that is the kind of wealth that could have been made without completely fucking everyone else over, or inherited. I still think people in these positions should make donations to charity every so often, and so on. Of course, I think that anyone who has the means to help others should. But frankly, to say that these are the people we need to be burning at the stake, is just idiotic. Eat the rich is a saying most effective when applied to those with excessive wealth. Billionaires- people who can buy companies, people who could own hundreds of vacation homes without making a dent in their wealth. People who can comfortably spend 250,000 big ones a piece to go on a suicide mission to see some wet metal at the bottom of the sea. People like Bezos and Musk who have screwed countless people over, and will continue to do so without batting an eye until the day that they die. And somehow, manage to keep doing so after, as well. There is ABSOLUTELY no way to obtain that amount of money without stepping all over innumerable people, ruining lives, and damaging our planet. People with that much money could never even BEGIN to spend it all. Yes, there are rich people with big houses and swimming pools! There are also rich people who stockpile the amount of money that could end the homelessness crisis and choose to never touch a penny of it. I think that you can live comfortably and acknowledge that the ultra-rich need to be taken down. I think that you can live INDULGENTLY and acknowledge that the ultra-rich need to be taken down. The billions that they hoard aren’t a rainy-day fund, or in case of emergency, or them saving up so they can go to Spain during spring break. They’re just there. They could EASILY change millions of lives and barely make a dent in their wealth. That’s what sets them apart. “The Rich” in “eat The Rich” aren’t just rich people. They are people with enough money to change the world for the better, who choose not to.
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lol in france
just for information in france, the general fund for retirement is in deficit of 13 billion euros, today we have just learned of searches at 5 banks including 1 English for tax fraud 130 billion, tax on dividend not paid to the French state
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My eyes are irritated from the smoke. Basically there are massive fires in my department and the wind has pushed the smoke in the direction where I live. Didn't think it would be something that would happen to me. The fires are like 50km away. It feels apocalyptic. I mean I'm lucky to just have some inconvenience in my eyes. But it's absolutely terrifying for people out there... I know people who have family and friends there, I mean it's not really a there for me it's here in my home department that I love the most of all of France... Went so many weekends around the coast, would still be going if I had a car. There's nothing I can't really do so far (can't even shelter pets cause my apartment is too small). But fires are not only here. There has been a lot of fires in the country including in the most rainy part of France (and that really freaks out of lot of people because we joke constantly about how Breizh is under a heatwave when it's 25° there but fucking 40°???? I feel so bad for them they are even less equipped than we are in the south West (we're not that much tbh)). And we hit records temperatures with more than 42° out there... Wanna know the "fun" part? In my region, the precedent "historical" heat records were from like three weeks ago... Yeah.
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Monet’s red period
He was the sugar-sweet Tchaikovsky of impressionism. But as the Royal Academy's blockbusting new exhibition will show, Claude Monet was also a radical
By Andrew Mar, Sat 9 Jan 1999 22.19 EST
The Guardian
"...There is not much cachet in liking Monet; rather the reverse. This is art for the easy-on-the-eye brigade, the philistine rich and the know-nothing middle classes. Isn't it? He is soft, luscious and commercial; the Tchaikovsky of the paintbrush, turning out sweet, dancing little Sugar Plum fairies of paintings, isn't he? It's clever, technically brilliant; but eye-candy. No?
Such snobbery tends to drive curators to justify Monet exhibitions by insisting on his political and art-revolutionary relevance. There is a slight embarrassment about the very popularity of Monet shows, as if they were like the 'erotica' section in posh bookshops which keep them in business but are hardly the sort of thing one would wish to be judged on.
So the curators of this show have gone to some lengths to reclaim Monet as a hard-edged artist, just as happened with the 1990 show, 'Monet in the Nineties'. Then, the emphasis was on putting Monet's images of haystacks, poplars and Rouen cathedral in the context of resurgent patriotism, closely connected with the land and traditional art: he was political, see. Now, the catalogue includes an essay on the connections between late Monet and New York abstract expressionism - almost as if Monet has to be excused, or validated, by linking him with Jackson Pollock.
In each case, the arguments are meticulous - the US academic Paul Hayes Tucker worked on both exhibitions and contributes a superb essay to the catalogue. And indeed, these are not only deliriously beautiful but also radical, extreme and sometimes even difficult paintings, created by an artist who might have been old - he was 60 in 1900 - but was a full, wide-eyed observer of the first quarter of our tragic century.
When it opens, he is recovering from the great trauma which ripped French society apart a few years before: the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish captain was wrongly accused of passing military secrets to the Germans, court-martialled, degraded and deported to solitary confinement. It split a worried nation in two, with viciously anti-semitic, Catholic and right-wing forces, against the Left and the liberals.
The anti-semitic, anti-Dreyfus campaign included, to their shame, Degas, Renoir and Cézanne. But when, with huge courage, Emile Zola led the charge for Dreyfus, Monet sprung quickly to his defence. Zola was convicted of libel and sentenced to imprisonment; instead he fled to England in 1898..."
"Zola was not a Marxist, but he was anti-capitalist; almost everything he writes is a denunciation of the greed, brutality, corruption and hypocrisy that characterised French capitalism in his day"
Emilie Zola, A Political Reading
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You are enslaved to money because you can just never have enough to live like you want.
I'm enslaved to money because I don't have enough to get what I need.
We are not the same.
But neither of us is enslaved to money like the billionaires are. They can never have enough. They have more money than God and still cause wars and atrocities and fight every labor law and bust every union and artificially deflate our paychecks and pass on their tax burden and do all sorts of atrocities, banal evil, and outright thievery of their best, most faithful employees. And they just keep hoarding. Always more and more worthless money. Loses are unacceptable. Exceed the performance expectations or else. Just hoarders who can throw pocket change at politicians and get whatever they want. So they don't need it to buy power. They can live like emperors with Jeff Bezos yachts for infinite generations living lavishly as they know how and never ever have to attend to steering the ship themselves while their money does justice as it increases. Instead they are chaotic evil. They not only don't need it but it is utterly worthless to them they won't let us have enough to even live comfortably as Europeans, let alone upper middle class like they easily could.
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