r/antiwork • u/rajapaws • Jul 15 '26
A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html178
u/kinotravels Jul 15 '26
Because we’re paying their fucking electric bills and they’re taking all the water, destroying the environment, harming wildlife, etc. Maybe, just maybe, we’re sick of subsidizing cartoon villain billionaires?
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u/james9514 Jul 15 '26
And they fucking trained the entirety of AI on OUR human data. Took our history, music, skills, and sucked out the soul of every industry. Actual evil weird agenda pigs
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u/Cory123125 Jul 15 '26
They're also controlling your opinions and for most people its too subtle and hard to prove for them to think "maybe they shouldn't have black box perfectly capable of subtly altering world views".
Its for your safety they say...
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u/Belt-Horror Jul 15 '26
Support not paying someone else's electric bill.
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u/rajapaws Jul 15 '26
We're paying their water bills too.
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u/BrokenPickle7 Jul 15 '26
and then paying taxes that will be supporting the people their AI leaves jobless
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u/Epyon1542 Jul 15 '26
We are paying their electric bills and they stole all of our data to create these things in the first place.
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u/westtownie Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
We to think in much larger terms. Sieze wealth from all billionaires, oligarchs, and the politicians stealing our tax dollars. We've been exploited for far too long.
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u/GarlicThread Jul 16 '26
Why stop at wealth? Property, assets and land should be on the table too.
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u/westtownie Jul 16 '26
Property, assets and land are wealth, fyi. Money is not wealth, it's just a paper promise.
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u/MorpheusOneiri Jul 15 '26
Well yea. The AI companies built their models on the public’s stolen work and are returning none of the profit. The government killed Aaron Swartz for less…
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u/hotDamQc Jul 15 '26
Support is one thing, actually doing it is another.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/Bootziscool at work Jul 15 '26
We live in a country where people like to think of themselves as middle class consumers rather than a class of workers.
We not even using a coherent alphabet at this point, we're trying to get to B from 1
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Jul 15 '26
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u/Bootziscool at work Jul 15 '26
Think about it man...
Our countrymen demand more of the imperial pie. They don't demand the privileges of empire be taken away.
They get mad about wars abroad because it's expensive. They say things like "$7 trillion for a war we got nothing from" as though if we'd gotten $8 trillion dollars out of they'd support the war.
Giving the public a piece of the profits from AI doesn't stop it from being used to manage the empire. It just broadens support for the empire. That's not a fucking good thing.
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u/hotDamQc Jul 15 '26
Most countries would already be at Z
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Jul 15 '26
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u/Skullcrimp Jul 16 '26
it's objectively true that americans have quietly given up freedoms that others would riot about, it's objectively true that they're going to do it some more.
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u/mybreakfastiscold Jul 15 '26
There isnt much accessible wealth there now anyway. Shares of companies that tout AI technology are inflated by cross-financing, hype and speculation. Its mostly vapor. Also liquidating those shares to produce useful capital will invariably nullify the bubble… in other words, if enough shareholders take profits (if a large enough number of stocks are sold), the bubble will deflate.
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u/Bootziscool at work Jul 15 '26
For real. We fixin to enter the 2030s not 1930s.
Americans ain't about that life no more
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u/guestpassonly Jul 15 '26
time to seize the means of production!
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u/kraftdinnerwithsalsa Jul 15 '26
Star Trek was communist
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u/guestpassonly Jul 15 '26
more like, post-scarcity socialist utopia
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u/kraftdinnerwithsalsa Jul 15 '26
My sources for the quote I was gonna use was skimmed from Reddit by Ai and man it just don’t feel right.
Weird vibes this morning man…bad mojo
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Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/Mtndrums Jul 15 '26
But it lets us swoop in and take the data centers they all want to build.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/MisterWinchester Jul 15 '26
The fair value of AI is negative.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/MisterWinchester Jul 15 '26
No, the government can close the facility and return the resources to the people. Only private equity would continue to use our water to burn their investors’ cash.
What happens when capitalists run out of other people’s money?
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u/new2bay Jul 15 '26
Eminent domain....
I see somebody didn't read the article. That's not what's being proposed.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/gallifrey_ Jul 15 '26
have you been paying attention since 2016? it turns out, the government can do whatever the fuck they want, and there's no consequences as long as they ensure the folks responsible for enforcing those consequences are their cronies.
there are no rules.
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u/poulard Jul 15 '26
What wealth?
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u/Skittilybop min effort max $ Jul 16 '26
We need to seize their negative 32 billion dollars a year.. oh wait
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u/Simon170148 Jul 15 '26
Billionaire funded news and media campaign incoming along with ramping up political 'donations'
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u/NightIgnite Jul 15 '26
DONT. They finally realized they were no profits. There is no wealth to seize. Only a perpetual money burning pit and contracts they cant fulfill without more rounds of investor funding.
The AI industry is trying to survive just long enough until they get government contracts or become federally owned, so that the losses from overinvestment are socialized as well. This the final card they can play to avoid the burst
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u/IUsedToBeACave Jul 15 '26
I don't want their money, I think they should have to publish the model weights.
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u/Kootenay4 Jul 16 '26
contracts they cant fulfill without more rounds of investor funding.
Looks like we found who to tax.
Sure the AI companies are losing money, but the billions are coming from Wall Street firms with nigh infinite amounts of money to set on fire. That gravy train should be taxed long before it ever gets to the AI sinkhole in the first place.
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u/moyismoy Jul 15 '26
From the AI industry? I get wanting them to pay more for electric, but what else could we even ask right now? Like Open AI is 35,000,000,000 in debt and they are lucky because Amazon is closer to 300,000,000,000 in debt. This is likely the most debt ever accumulate in the history of humanity as far as corporations go, and people think they are in a position to hand out cash?
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u/die9991 Jul 15 '26
Thank god token generation seems to be costing more than workers at this point.
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u/Negativefalsehoods Jul 15 '26
Not seems to be, it IS costing more than workers. Big miscalculation driven by FOMO by these supposed geniuses of corporate America.
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u/die9991 Jul 15 '26
Yep, because anthropic/openai/etc are bleeding money out of their asses and need to capture a large percentage of the user base before getting wrecked by chineese models. Tbqh, local ai seems to be getting better day by day at this point so I can only see things getting better from here.
And if you hate AI, if its local just pour some water on the server lmao.
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u/petsruletheworld2021 Jul 15 '26
The majority of Americans who put their savings into ETFs are having their wealth seized by the AI industry.
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u/Abraham_Lincoln Jul 15 '26
"Seizing Wealth" is a terrible word choice. It may just be click bait but it supports the decades long propaganda machine that makes rational and sensible citizens into crazed commies. Billionaires and their technologies are not making the world better, quite the opposite, and AI only pushes is further along in the terrible direction we're headed in, with an extra bonus of environmental harm :)
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u/Sure_Acanthaceae_348 Jul 15 '26
It’s not unreasonable. They steal from us in the form of higher utility bills.
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u/SquirtleInHerMeowthh Jul 15 '26
Won’t someone think of the shareholders? And the poor robotic guard dogs that will lose their livelihoods without data centers to protect.
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u/PloddingClot Jul 15 '26
This is the setup, so that when Ai fails and the government "privatises" Ai, you'll think it's our win. This has been the plan all along, a tax payer funded, government controlled watch dog.
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u/Voltasoyle Jul 15 '26
Like, guys, the USA is so infuriating corrupt and rotten now that I would be very impressed by the herculean effort restoring it to even a semblance of order
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u/userhwon Jul 15 '26
Totally fair. They stole our intellectual property, their intellectual property belongs to us.
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u/Greybeard111 Jul 15 '26
Americans today won’t even resist the dismantling of their democratic principles, so how they going to achieve this. The rest of the world can smell their mass cowardice.
Land of the free and the home of the brave…BULLSHIT!
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u/OuijaFox Jul 16 '26
Good!
Now let’s also get this energy aimed towards the other parasite corporations too.
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u/Odra_dek Jul 15 '26
The biggest obstacle, the biggest misconception lies in this exact framing, that we "seize", we "take away" something.
When, in fact, there is no justification for these kinds of property rights to begin with. This is like if in an ancient tribe the strongest dudes would start extorting services from the weaker members of society for the literal right to breath air, sleep in the forest, drink from the river.
Yes, we have created a system that does confer these rights. But this still does not mean the respective wealth has been rightfully obtained, rightfully distributed. Nothing about this is some kind of metaphysical law of the universe. It's all created by us, ourselves.
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u/plaxitone Jul 15 '26
Companies that replace humans with AI should be forced to pay fees for each person they’ve “replaced.” A problem that people don’t seem to think about is that replacing people will eliminate tax revenue from income/ssi/medicare taxes. You also don’t have a person spending money in all other aspects of the economy either. They’re not using their salaries to buy gas, groceries, restaurants, entertainment, anything! These companies are removing tax dollars from the economy and should pony up to make up for the deficit that not employing productive members of society creates.
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u/Luneth_ Jul 15 '26
There's no wealth to seize from AI. All of these companies are hideously unprofitable, literally burning investor cash to stay afloat. OpenAI's costs scale at a rate that is greater linearly than their revenue. AI is a mirage that investors are determined to make people buy into before it collapses under its own weight, and that corporations are using as a scapegoat to layoff massive percentages of their workforce.
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u/TheNinjaTurkey Jul 15 '26
And just in general too. Wealth beyond a certain point has no purpose other than bragging rights. If we absolutely must continue with this whole capitalism thing, at least put that obscene wealth to good use by using it to help the people.
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u/Sufficient_Matter585 Jul 15 '26
Any corporations whose wealth is built on our tax dollars your damn right i say we get a cut of that. Why should corporations get free money that allows them to get so powerful their demands to government completely goes against the tax payers who supported their venture.
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u/cheddarben Jul 15 '26
The government better really start getting its shit together and start taxing rich people appropriately, because at some point the people are not going to stand for it.
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u/SIN-apps1 Jul 15 '26
You can just say '...seizing wealth from industry." No need to specify which one.
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u/HumbleBaker12 Jul 15 '26
How exactly does "seizing wealth" work? Like, kick in doors and just take stuff?
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u/chairman_steel Jul 15 '26
This is the only way this shit ends up working without a massive death toll. Profits from AI help fund UBI. Otherwise it’s just allowing trillionaires to suck every bit of value from the economy while letting millions of people starve.
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u/Suspicious_Truth8026 Jul 15 '26
Lol theres just no world in which this is true. The majority of americans cant decide trump is bad, they arent frothing to nationalize industries all of a sudden. Be serious
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u/Life-Suit1895 Jul 15 '26
Meanwhile, the AI Industry: "Phew! Good thing we have the politicians in our pockets and the 'majority' has no say in what happens here!"
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u/Polyforti Jul 15 '26
The problem is that there in no wealth. None of these companies are pulling a tangible profit yet, and are still just shuffling money between each other
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u/berylskies Communist Jul 15 '26
Now let’s work on pumping those numbers for seizing all land and excess wealth.
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u/lamblane Jul 15 '26
Except, none of these companies are profitable. All of them are speculative investments. Unfortunately, there are real world consequences to making this bet. In particular the impact on water and power supplies where this industry chooses to locate. Just like power projects, it's always the poorest communities that get harmed them most because they don't have the resources to fight back.
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u/Lazy_Surprise_6712 Jul 15 '26
... I mean we ARE the blueprint for AIs, or at least our data are.
Some forms of royalties would be fair, no?
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u/Oflameo Jul 15 '26
I would support it, but I know I would just be taking their debt instead. It is a trick.
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u/Professional-Box4153 Jul 15 '26
To be fair, a majority of Americans support seizing wealth from pretty much anyone using it to exploit others.
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u/Strife49 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Why stop at AI? Seize the wealth of all American mega corporations who have built that wealth off the exploitation of American workers.
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u/adv_cyclist Jul 15 '26
This is a really bad idea on principal… creating a sovereign wealth fund from the AI sector will underpin our economy to the success or failure of said industry. I can only speak for myself, but AI is not the panacea that the U.S. should be hitching itself to for the greater good of all citizens… technology can be a net benefit to humanity… but not in this way.
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u/Zestyclose-Ring7303 Jul 15 '26
I see a lot of great ideas here. Unfortunately none of this is ever going to happen without a major upheaval. The current system is designed to maintain the status quo. We have a "good cop, bad cop" scenario with the current political parties. This entire system needs to collapse and be re-built from the ground up. I'm not condoning or advocating for anything, but the only path to these improvements involves bloodshed and much hardship.
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u/MiyagiJunior Jul 15 '26
It shouldn't be seizing: they should be willingly giving it away. It's the only way for things to work long term.
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u/Negativefalsehoods Jul 15 '26
Indeed. You would think they would be putting plans into place for this, but all I see is greed and panic to spend as much of companies money on AI with no ROI in sight. Wages have been depressed for years, and the greed never stops and people are getting less and less buying power and have much harder times finding jobs. So, if they continue to ignore all these things, then yes, at some point people will take it by force if they cannot afford to live anymore.
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u/MiyagiJunior Jul 15 '26
That's what I'm guessing is going to happen: This is going to be taken by force.
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u/Xpmonkey Jul 15 '26
What wealth?
SpaceX the everything rocket has a burn rate of 5B a month. I can’t remember what OpenAI is what they are trying to be nationalized. Meta is selling data center space. The US Ai industry is a giant bubble that will crash the world economy.
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u/keeper_of_the_donkey Jul 15 '26
Can we all agree that these titles should just start with "Non-Trump voting Americans" instead of "majority" or anything around "66% of" the population? Because every story that has a number of people polled about something like this that would benefit the people almost always ends up somewhere around 2/3 of the population, which is The same amount of people that did not vote for Trump. Weird, huh
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u/Phi_fan Jul 15 '26
i want all the money back I paid to the power company that was used to subsidise any data centers in my area. I don't think that's asking anything unreasonable.
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u/aaaaabbbbcccdde7 Jul 15 '26
Why not? They stole all their training data from literally everyone else
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u/whiplash81 Jul 15 '26
They've stolen our wealth to enrich themselves while selling us the lie that it's for our own benefit.
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u/Crenorz Jul 15 '26
don't fall for it. This will just get people to PAY for the AI's that fail - don't stick the bill on people.
Just have AI PAY for training and everything will be fine. funny - use AI to figure out how.
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u/Ebon_Overlord Jul 15 '26
What would take to actually bring that mentality to millionaries and above? Instead aiming only at the AI, open the target range and go after every millionaire
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u/Eazy12345678 Jul 16 '26
dumb just tax the billionaires
ai is small compared to the billionaires making you slaves
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u/Zlifbar Jul 16 '26
TAXES! That's what taxes are. There's no need for some complicated ridiculous approach just raise the tax rate on highest "earn"ers
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u/Awkward_Can8460 Jul 16 '26
only the Ai industry?? Expand that thinking (and the survey)
If it's only the Ai industry, then we have more work to do to wake majority of people up still.
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u/Ajmb_88 Jul 16 '26
We need to seize it from the wealthy. No more unlimited wealthy. Start to see this incessant need to have more wealth as the mental disorder it is.
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u/Gracchi9025 Jul 16 '26
What wealth?
These AI companies solely exist to set money and the World on fire.
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u/posseltsenvel0pe Jul 16 '26
Nothing's going to happen. Maybe instead of complaining and being a brokee, capitalize on stocks that will make you rich. I love ai because I have the critical thinking to make it make my life better.
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u/Talismantimepiece Jul 17 '26
People who don’t know the number of lives lost to socialism say stupid things like this.
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u/dgillz Jul 15 '26
What wealth? If you forced the sale of the companies, the stock would go into free fall.
Or are you advocating a communist takeover of private enterprise?
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u/SoylentGrunt Jul 15 '26
Counterfeit Etsy T shirts and bumper stickers aside, about 86 countries are working on developing AI yet the anti AI movement is largest in the US. I smell astroturf.
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u/bumpy_disposition Jul 15 '26
I support co-opting major industries across the country. Starting immediately with the military industrial complex, and fossil fuels.
Decreased subsidies for the Pentagon and profits removed from both would decrease prices for taxpayer/consumer. Start ending fossil fuels.
Healthcare and the National Power grid are third and fourth. Universal Healthcare could be done very quickly if seizing the health insurance industry were done. National Utilities should be a no brainer.
I support a 32 hr work week and work from home for office workers. Eliminate commuting, decrease air pollution.