If you have billions of dollars it shouldn’t be a crime to steal from you. You’ve got enough money that your security should be your own responsibility and anyone who manages to swipe from your hoard deserves applause for besting a supervillain
Over a billion and you reach the social connotations that dragons have, as in stealing from you is considered a Challenge rather than a Crime
- Stop saying “off the reservation”. It’s a reference to the pass system that was in place restricting Native people from leaving without permission.
- Stop making “1/16th”, “great-great grandmother”, etc. jokes. All of these reference blood quantum, a system designed to “breed out the Natives”. Indigeneity isn’t defined by a percentage, fraction, etc. Quit policing Indigenous identities and quit joking about genocidal tactics.
- Stop calling things your “spirit animal”. You don’t have one. Only Indigenous people from specific nations have spirit animals.
- Stop making dreamcatchers. They are sacred Anishinaabe culture and are not cute trinkets, crafts, etc. Buy them from Anishinaabe artists.
- Stop buying those little cloth “teepees” for your kids/pets/whatever. Also stuff with tipi prints
- Quit referring to your “tribe”. Enough with the “bride tribe” nonsense and all the rest. Stop trivializing tribal affiliations.
- Don’t wear “war paint”. Don’t put a feather in your hair. Don’t dress up as Native people or characters.
- Stop referring to your meetings/side discussions/parties as a “pow wow”.
- Stop supporting sports teams that use racist terms and logos and caricatures of Indigenous people.
- Stop using white sage. It is sacred and overharvested. There are lots of types of sage you can use instead.
- Stop “smudging”. Smoke cleansing exists in many forms in many cultures, use that. Non-Natives can’t smudge.
- Stop tokenizing your Native friends, classmates, in-laws, half siblings, etc.
Please add more!
- Stop treating Native spirits as generic monsters or cryptids, especially w*ndigoag and sk*nwalkers.
- Stop using imagery of skulls in Plains headdresses, especially as tattoos. This shouldn’t need to be explained.
Indigenous people are saying the out-of-control fires in the Amazon Rainforest were caused by people purposely lighting fires to illegally deforest indigenous land for cattle ranching.
President Bolsonaro says green NGOs started the fires to make him look bad.
Please tell me that we know well enough by now who we should believe. Please tell me that we trust and respect Indigenous peoples enough to know that they have every reason to be telling the truth and Bolsonaro has every reason to lie.
As an international community, we need to call for accountability. Not only are sacred Indigenous lands being destroyed, but the area of the world that supplies 20% of the planet’s oxygen is covered in thick smoke and burning away. This is an example of how climate change is a man-made disaster.
It’s also an example of the disaster of capitalism. Under capitalism, *nothing* matters more than money. Not Indigenous communities, not countless species of wildlife, not the babies in Sao Paulo breathing in smoke so dark it blocks the sun in the middle of the day. Surviving climate change means dismantling the capitalist system of greed at any cost.
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.
You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.
(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )
Jeff Bezos currently has 140 billion dollars.
$10,000 an HOUR while most of us barely making $12. Can y’all conceptualize now?
Will always reblog
Because this is still a difficult set of numbers for some folks to comprehend (legitimately–our brains have a hard time conceptualizing big numbers) a really good example I like to use is the difference between a million and a billion in time.
“We have a predator living in the White House. And I’m gonna tell you something: donald trump has a predatory nature and predatory instincts. And the thing about predators is this: by their very nature, they prey on people they perceive to be weak. They prey on people the perceive to be vulnerable. They prey on people who are in need of help, often desperate for help. And predators are cowards. What we need is someone who is gonna be on that debate stage with donald trump and defeat him by being able to prosecute the case against four more years. And let me tell you, we’ve got a long wrap sheet.”
