Mooday Monday: giving capitalists a free pass to destroy society and the ecosystem

[mellowtigger]

It's drizzling right now in Minneapolis. "But," I can hear you say, "Minnesota's nickname is the land of 10,000 lakes, so doesn't it rain a lot there?" Yes, but it's mid-January and one of our 2 coldest months. We're expecting several days of above-freezing weather. It's raining even in north Minnesota. Sure, it has rained here in January before, but this now is in the context of the unusual 3-year La Niña cool period. Our Great Lakes are at a near-record low ice cover, and the global oceans are experiencing record heat. Expect hotter El Niño conditions to take over soon. Remember that each year you live, it will be one of the coolest (and most weather stable) years for the rest of your life.

Read about employer and government problems...

There's a good TikTok video that shows this chart of US national minimum wage compared to monthly rent costs. It covers 1967-2022, which is my lifetime. It's bad news. It's very bad news, but it's not the complete story. We got here through repeated systemic choices. Capitalists have been allowed to externalize their (very significant) costs for so long that they no longer seem capable of understanding they too are part of a very complex system. I've written before about the shortage of nurses and pilots due to coronavirus damage they've suffered, after failures to provide adequate protective equipment or even requesting (and receiving) relaxation of pandemic protocols. Workers, they assumed, were disposable... until they weren't.

• Inhumane treatment has left Amazon unable to find (or retain) workers.
• Injustice across multiple government systems seems to leave Minnesota prisons unable to recruit workers, to say nothing of police department hiring.
• Minnesota teachers wanted to quit mid-year, even early in the pandemic. "... those who are teaching in in-person scenarios said they felt less safe."
• ABC News channel 5 on Minneapolis local television aired a segment about homelessness on January 13th at 6pm. They showed someone saying that our area needed 100s or 1000 more spaces for homeless people than we have. I can't find that segment on their website or YouTube now, but this article (not an impartial source) says the same thing. We're usually told lies that that our shelters are sufficient, that a few dozen more "affordable" housing units are sufficient. They are not. The suffering, particularly in winter, is a policy choice.
  edit: Found it! Or at least, a text version very close to the video report that I saw.
• Republicans think government is broken, and they'll break everything to prove it. They're already talking about letting the USA run out of money to pay its bills. (But they simultaneously want to reduce government tax income and let the already-rich gain the most from their generosity.) They know that somebody will profit from their action, and they intend for it to be themselves. Rules are meant for you, not for them.
• Moderna plans to drastically increase COVID-19 vaccine prices, despite already earning billions in profit, even at previous prices. If money exists somewhere, anywhere, then capitalists will try to siphon it away from all other uses. No profit is sufficient to satisfy neoliberal capitalism.
• A slum landlord in Minneapolis reached an agreement with our local government to start obeying the law. That's it. That's the judgement. No real penalty that I can tell. (There is a $5,000 payment for "cost recovery to the City", but not for disobeying rules.) The rich get ample opportunity to obey the law that they should already know better than the poor people they exploit. People are obviously upset. It harkens back to the polluter in my area who was given 2 more years to pollute, because mostly poor people live here, so clean air regulations don't matter.

It's depressing, but you can see these principles in action using a city-building game. The Spiffing Brit, a popular YouTube gamer who shows tutorials of a sort, demonstrates how government manipulation is done with profit in mind, with a recent video: "I Built A City Exploiting Suffering In Cities Skylines - (It made me infinite money)". There's a similar kind of explanation for the USA healthcare system, in one of the "Honest Advertisement" skits by Cracked.

It's a sustained pattern of government behavior. We all are disposable people, until there are no longer any replacements available from the larger pool of humanity. People care. It demonstrates that a LOT of people care, because they are refusing even to apply for jobs with some of these employers during a time of widespread hardship. It's one small signal that gives me hope. It matters what our government systems are doing to us. People are trying to distance themselves from the corruption and abuse, and they should. As I've said before, people can collectively choose to let bad systems simply collapse by their non-participation. It might have happened before, and it might be happening now.

Bring on the economic and political collapse. I'm hopeful for what we can create from the ashes.