Handouts for the rich. Talking leftist politics in a small-town Appalachian bar.
And.. Small business owners are relatively poor. Large business owners face little risk.
Words From John
It’s weird to go viral. Which is what happened last week. By the way, hello to the couple hundred new newsletter members from TikTok. For god sake, leave a comment, and let’s make this thing interactive. Older members who’ve been lurking forever, maybe say hi to the new people?
It’s an eclectic group here. There are redneck high school friends, people who’ve seen me wear a suit and speak professionally, college besties who witnessed me commit several misdemeanors, my landlord/soul brother, regulars at the bar I live above and work at, and about 1,100 of you randos from TikTok and other corners of the internet. That’s just under 25% of the newsletter. It’s amazing and I’ll be forever grateful for your ears and eyes.
So how about a little vent sesh? What bees have been in your bonnet lately? The more political the better. Please, start a bar fight in the comments. It won’t be the only one I have to deal with this week. Or better yet, give me feedback to take all this to the next level.
For the newbies, this thing evolves every week. The most consistent thing I do is transcribe my TikTok and link to important sources. My pie-in-the-sky hope is to build a model for lean/mean independent, self-sustaining, pro-working-class media based in Appalachia and for places like it everywhere. Most things around here, from factories to local papers, have died off and taken valuable societal stuff with them. This is a tiny rebuilding project in real-time.
If you love that and want to make it possible, please subscribe for $5/mo ($60/year). There’s no pay wall, everything is free, but that won’t work unless people who want to see it work pitch in.
Member-Supported Short Videos
Viral: Talking leftist politics in a small-town Appalachian bar
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About this:
This one did over 2 million combined views on all platforms. It was shared by notable national politicians and even stitched by a major recording artist, Grandson.
Transcript:
I talk left-wing politics in my small-town bar with people mostly whose idea of a leftist is the actual devil.
So we were talking about workers owning the means of production when somebody made an interesting point.
They were like, "here you are working your ass off at this bar, do you really want to split your paycheck with a person who's panhandling outside and doing no work?"
It's an interesting point because it's similar to working for say, $20 bucks an hour. In that hour, I produce $100 of value for the company, I take my $20 and then I hand out the other $80 that I created to a small group of wealthy owners who were not there, did none of the work, and had no part in creating the $100 of value other than just owning the means of production.
Now a lot of people will say right-wingers are just too far gone. It's not worth it. And I hear that point. It's true for a lot of folks. But a simple shift in perspective can make people think.
“But big business owners took a risk” - privatized profits, socialized risk
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Transcript:
“Business owners deserve all the profit because they took a risk it might all fall apart.”
Except in the 2008 financial crisis, right? Or a global pandemic. Or every financial crisis before that, where taxpayers ended up paying for the risk that big businesses took.
The only place where big business pays for risks that they take is trickle-down economics textbooks. In the real world, we're a too-big-to-fail economy where the profit is privatized, and the risk is socialized.
What happened to investors that nearly caused the second Great Depression? They got golden parachutes and bonuses, while employees got laid off and taxpayers picked up the risk.
What happened to captains of industry when a pandemic hit? Essential employees kept their businesses running while they stayed at home safely and billionaires added 2 trillion to their net worth.
People working in essential sectors were associated with higher COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths than were those working in non-essential sectors, with the highest per-capita COVID-19 mortality in the agriculture (131·8 per 100 000 people), transportation or logistics (107·1 per 100 000), manufacturing (103·3 per 100 000), facilities (101·1 per 100 000), and emergency (87·8 per 100 000) sectors.
This talking point about the rich taking all the risk is only real in fantasy land. In the real world, the ones who are taking the risks are the people keeping the businesses running - the workers.
For your consideration… this video is from a business owner doing $2-3 million per year in the fashion industry on business owners’ exposure to risk and “piercing the corporate veil”.
Small business owners are poor… relatively. Big business is the problem.
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Transcript:
Small business owners are poor...relatively. Let's do the graph thing again. Each square on this graph is $5 billion. Down here is a person with no dollars at all and the richest person on earth, Elon Musk with $218 billion is all the way off the chart.
The 1% starts here and you need $11 million of net worth to be in it. And as you can see, there is no visible difference between the 1% and someone with no dollars. Because the scale of wealth inequality in America is so bad, it's literally hard to imagine.
Now, small business owners are not millionaires. The average small business owner makes $71,813 per year. 86.3% of small business owners make less than $100,000 a year. 3.3% of them are millionaires, and less than 3% of millionaire income comes from small business operations. These last two are from 2011. But the point stands because you need $11 million minimum to get into the 1%. And even then, on this scale, there's no difference between the 1% and someone who's dead broke.
Also, an incredible 99.9% of all businesses in America are small businesses. But even if you add all of those businesses together, they only bring in 40% of the revenue generated. The other 60% is made by the top 0.1% of huge monopolies - Walmart, Amazon, and the country's top employers.
This brings me to my point. My ranty leftist videos are only directed at big businesses because that is who owns and runs America. When we're talking about evil, greed, and the drivers of wealth inequality, I am not blaming the local hotdog stand CEO. It is not their fault.
Small businesses have nothing in common with huge monopolies. Billionaires need small business people to think that they're on the same side because they need the working class divided to continue their power and their existence.
Owners, workers, temporarily embarrassed millionaires, whatever it is, if you must work to live, then you are working class and you'll share more in common with other working-class people than you ever will with billionaires or CEOs or big businesses.
And big businesses in America are never, ever held accountable and it's the root of most of our problems.
Hello from SW Minnesota! I am actually running for the MN House of Representatives right now. I stumbled upon your Video's the other night and I was hooked instantly! Keep the great content coming!
Hello from Anchorage, AK! Saw your TikTok and figured I'd like to hear more. Really frustrated right now because it feels like, even with Ranked Choice Voting, our ineffective governor is going to be reelected. Hoping that doesn't happen, but the other candidates have been campaigning against each other instead of against him, and it feels like they'll split the vote too much. Fingers crossed for a better outcome!