the mellow tigger's musings

I've written here at least once over the years that I think GDP is a bad measure of the condition of an economy. I think the GINI coefficient needs to be included in any measure of national health. Maybe you can understand my frustration when, year after year, we see president after president get up for a State Of The Union address and declare that the USA is "strong".

I've been saying at least since the Occupy movement that things are bad and getting worse. I know I sound foolishly unrealistic when I say it, given all the politicians and newspapers and journals who say otherwise. Consider, though, this chart that was brought to my attention on Reddit. I decided to check the validity of it. I went directly to Google to generate the same graph. It shows how often people in the USA search Google with the phrase "food banks near me", from 2004 to 2023.

Somebody needs to explain to me how things can be so bad and can continue getting worse for so long, yet "the system" keeps telling us that everything is alright.

I don't see how any of this can continue. Please, explain it to me like I'm stupid, because it doesn't make any sense to me. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong, but I need to understand why I'm wrong.

I've written before about how it's expensive being poor. The comedian Cody Johnston also makes excellent arguments in his new hour-long piece, "Why Being Poor Is So Expensive". As usual, not all of the jokes are great, there's a lot more cussing than the humor really demands, and it takes too many minutes to build up to a valuable performance... but within it all there's still a lot of good logic. This video essay even mentions the small detail that I've experienced recently: the availability of a laundromat assumes that you have your own private vehicle for transportation. Cody covers a lot of ground, even the loss of leisure time when you're poor. It seems like deteriorating conditions in the USA are coaxing people to think about these issues.

Minnesota Public Radio did a great write-up of the grocery closure, explaining just how far away the other "big grocery" options are. I know I keep harping on it, but I really can't overstate how terrible this loss is for the north Minneapolis community, which was already at a low economic level. The Walgreens pharmacy, which I already said was expecting to close in March, has advanced its exit. It's now closing on Feb 22.

What about other low-cost options for transportation? Sure, the bus lines run through my Jordan neighborhood. Yes, the buses are safe space. The bus stops, however... definitely are not. Over the years, I've heard too much gunfire at the end of my block near the bus stop. The stop at the Cub grocery store is the spot I've written about many times already. And I've never ridden my bicycle since moving to this house in 2016. People here die on bicycles, even 2 blocks away from my house. People here are killed specifically to take their bicycle, even a dozen blocks northeast of me. So bicycling isn't a safe option here.

The luxury of private vehicle ownership is simply not a given here in north Minneapolis, which is why these essential service closures are so hurtful. In general, lower vehicles per capita are associated with richer, denser, or northern cities (read: liberal strongholds). The truth is more nuanced, with big cities allowing rich folk to outsource the expense of vehicle ownership (perhaps using online and traditional taxi service instead). Slate did some excellent journalism on this topic of transportation back in 2019, "Where Rich People Don't Own Cars":

But if the Green New Deal is a pure social justice project, it should probably just give poor people cars, because access to efficient transportation is the most effective predictor of escaping poverty, auto loans make up the fastest-growing segment of consumer debt profiles, and sprawl makes it challenging to provide good public transport. How do we square that circle? By redesigning cities so that driving—and by extension, car ownership—can be a choice and not, as the U.S. Supreme Court has put it, a “virtual necessity.” That would be good for the environment, good for low-income people, good for the mobility of seniors who shouldn’t get behind the wheel, and good for the 100 million Americans who are not licensed to drive, a number that includes children, undocumented immigrants, and the disabled. What Romem’s dataset offers is a map of which neighborhoods in which cities have succeeded in crossing that bridge to a place where the wealthy don’t own cars—an indicator that vehicle ownership, in those places, is a choice. We can try to build more cities like these, where jobs are accessible by fast, frequent transit and housing is dense enough to support walkable amenities. Or we can make it possible for more people to live in the neighborhoods that have gotten something right.

At this time last year, Aldi's expected to become the third-largest U.S. grocery retailer. Their exit (and Walgreens) from north Minneapolis might lead a pessimist to think that these corporations expect conditions to worsen soon, and they don't want to be in certain locations when it happens. I understand that the reality is probably a lot more complicated than that too-simple explanation.

I know it's stupid, but I still mourn the loss of the local Burger King in 2018. That building is still a boarded-up eyesore in 2023. Burger King is one of the few restaurant chains around here where a person can get non-meat fast food.

There's so much trouble in the USA recently that it's impossible to pick a single topic for Moody Monday.

• Minneapolis homeless people freezing in winter? Yes, of course, after all of the camp evictions. What did you expect from our cold winters? It's -20C/-5F outside (wind chill -29C/-20F) as I type this blog post.
  
  
• Police murdering citizens? Yes, more of that. I never watched the Tyre Nichols video, because I learned all I ever needed to know from George Floyd's murder here in Minneapolis. The key point (ignoring the sheer brutality of the roving gang mentality and the follow up lies) is that the officers knew they were behaving badly while they were doing it. "Police reform" went nowhere.
  
  
• Police corruption? Yes, more of that. A sheriff was caught destroying evidence of misconduct for at least a decade. To be fair, corruption is also a problem in the UK.
  
  
• Climate change? We learned that oil giant Exxon knew about the global disaster of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even back in the 1970s.
  
  
• Political corruption? Ohio Republicans redefined gas as "green energy". I'm sure they'll get rich bringing the worst climate outcomes to all of us. (Liberal efforts to paint a "good" future are growing ever more convoluted as realism sets in.) Arizona Republicans exempt themselves from the state's open-records laws. You know what that means.
  
  
• USA civil war? How about a tactical SUV for the Mad Max murderscape that is the USA?
  
  
• More mass shootings? This is the USA, of course we have more mass shootings.
  
  
• A billionaire corrupting Twitter? Yes, more of that, with Musk targeting an activist who helped identify US Capitol rioters. That activist is now on Mastodon.
  
  
• Capitalism on display? Tech layoffs are numerous and swift, making my own job hunt even harder. COVID vaccines are set to skyrocket in price. Because that's what capitalism dictates. (There's no other choice, or so we're frequently told.)
  
  
• SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19? In the USA, workers are still calling in sick at record high rates, rural America saw death rates climb 90% recently in a spike of otherwise "low" avoidable tragedies, but USA denialism grows more dangerous. Infection changes the gut microbiome, which is bad for a lot of reasons. The virus spreads directly cell-to-cell, avoiding drugs and immune system. Infection is permanent, which is true even while PCR tests are negative, a possibility that I've warned about for 3 years already. Some people knew all along how dangerous this virus is, while some people just now learning that it damages the immune system, but the rich elite at Davos are protecting themselves with technology that should be everywhere for society's protection. Mainstream news is finally (FINALLY!) providing accurate warnings.
  
  

And that's mostly just the news of the week. Go home, 2023. You need a "time out". And I still need an income... or win a lottery. (I'd have to play first.)