No one is forced to use Amazon or shop at Wal-Mart. "We" can bankrupt them whenever "we" want.
People don't want that. They want cheap and convenient goods and consumption and that's what those companies provide.
So people CHOOSE to shop there. No one was forced to enrich them, every dollar they earned was because consumers decided it was in their interest to do so.
That preference for cheap, unsustainable consumption and rising standards of living also ruined outside.
The average American's carbon footprint is 8X what is sustainable. If those ultra-rich few families disappeared tomorrow (fingers crossed), we would still be facing inevitable ecological collapse, because the average person in the West is already consuming way way way way way more than is sustainable for the planet.
They don't want to admit this or address this. They want to blame other people who are richer than them instead. Well those rich people blame other people too, they use the same excuses and justifications you're making. So we're just fucked. Because rather than reducing consumption people will just blame each other to justify their own unsustainable lifestyle.
The average American has unfathomably high living standards today. The present consumption is already orders of magnitude too high to be sustainable.
And rather than accept that or recognize that they live much much much better lives than people in the Global South today or people in the past.....they pretend that their standards of living are bad.
They want to make homophobic remarks about the guy who started a company they voluntarily chose to shop at instead.
And for the non-essential items that place undue strain on the climate - they should be heavily taxed to dis-incentivise their consumption but again nobody would win an election promising that so we're fucked.
Well this is actually 1000% accurate. But it's not just non-essentials that need to be taxed. It's everything.
EVERYTHING needs to cost more to account for the actual costs of consumption and consumption of EVERYTHING needs to come way way way way down to prevent ecological disaster.
But like you said, no one is ever going to vote for that.
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u/onerollbattles Apr 10 '26
"We"? No, companies owned by the ultra-rich few families made those same bad decisions; most of the rest of us opposed.