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In America, the rich controls the government. In China, the government controls the rich.
(lemmy.ml)
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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I'm not living in USA but I think people got exactly what they voted for, didn't they?
Now the question of it being an educated vote and people being equipped to navigate modern media with modern disinformation techniques is another subject.
Not really. The people get only two choices of candidates who are selected by campaign popularity. Those candidates have to raise the money for it by themselves, which means making truthful private campaign promises to their donors while making false promises to the public.
That's fair. In France law requires transparency on how you fund your campaign and sets a limit. We often have candidates who bend the rules but justice at least make it harder.
Ofc it's hard to compare our two countries, the US is a fking continent.
If france is anything like the UK, I'm sure there are many ways for the capitalist class to exert influence over their choice of candidate.
In France our main concern is about "Bolorisation", which is about two billionaires owning most of the mainstream medias (including Vincent Bolloré, hence the name). We still have major independant papers but they hardly choose what's on the public debate.
Yeah that's what I meant by my initial message, there people still have access to somewhat reliable source of information, mostly thanks to publicly owned TV and radio, but it's very very very fragile right now. Education to media and information would be critical to navigate this mess, but we suck at this.
brilliant insight. merci beaucoup mon ami!
I mean, if you count the (registered) non-voters, which I think is more than fair considering the fact that Harris and Trump only represent a fraction of the (electorally viable) politics expressed in the US, Trump only scrapes about 46%.
The American political system has been designed to disenfranchise as many people as possible. Some ways are overt, like disenfranchising and deregistering black, ethnic, and imprisoned citizens (the latter don't even count towards that 54%!). How about the ways democrats and republicans explicitly outlawed "third" parties such as PSL, Greens, Libertarians on some state ballots?
Less overt ways are how most of the American electoral process is carried out during the working week, with zero affordance to workers to vote unless by post (inherently less secure) or by the altruism of their bosses. Disabled and elderly people are simply ignored if they wish to vote in person.
Then the final way Americans are disenfranchised is the simple act of alienation of the political class from the working class. No matter who won in November, most of these crises would be playing out in some form.
Elon may accelerate some of the rot, but oligarchs have had direct control of the American political system for its whole existence. American bombs would still be raining across the middle east, the Ukrainian war would be unjustly spilling blood in the name of empire, abortion would still be illegal across most of the US, and the govt would do nothing to challenge spirally costs of living for workers.
I mean, the electorate is definitely unqualified to pick their own leaders, but that's what decades of gutting education funding with absolutely no public pushback gets you. An unqualified electorate elects unqualified representatives.
Power and wealth control governments ... every government.
Once humanity figures out how to provide more equitable power and wealth to every person everywhere, then we might be able to evolve beyond jungle rules.
In the meantime, it doesn't matter what you want to call it ... communism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, whatever ... as long as we allow unlimited wealth and power to flow to small groups of people, any system will always end up with the same results.
Inequality absolutely needs to be eliminated to have a truly equitable society. That said though, it's pretty clear that China does have a dictatorship of the proletariat in place. If it didn't then same things we see happening in capitalist societies would be happening there as well.
I don't support the CCP, but I do think about these things. How do you create an open system like a democracy that leverages some of the benefits of capitalism, while also insuring economic inequality is minimized and every citizens basic needs are met, without gradually seeing the rich gain influence in that system over time, corroding the protections that make it work? I think as long as the system is open, the rich will use their power to gradually gain advantage and then destroy the system itself. I think the only real shot at it would be for wealth to be seriously capped. Like, no one person can have more than 100% more wealth than the bottom 1%. Anything above that should be taxed away. Also, corporations are not people and corporations should not have shareholders that are not workers.
The PRC largely keeps their bourgeoisie in line by holding almost all of Heavy Industry and large firms in the Public Sector. The owner of a rubber ball factory has far less influence over the economy than the Rubber Factory. In the PRC, banking, energy, steel, infrastructure, and many more critical industries the Private Sector must rely on are held in Public hands. That's the basis of SWCC.
Time will tell if this was the "correct" choice, but so far the gamble appears to be paying off. There's a long way to go, but the path forward is open and not closed.
Honestly I’m not the biggest fan of everything in China but these are the types of problems the Chinese government seems to try to figure out a lot more than our governments do.
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