Like much of Corbin's writing, this piece is chock-full of lines that I wish were on billboards throughout the county and on our TVs every bit as often as the damn pharmaceutical and lawyer ads. Pick a line and put it on a billboard or a TV ad in your town. People running for office can find their campaign's motto in here. This is a gold mine.
“This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.
Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit.
The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species.”
"The billionaire who wants to own everything is celebrated as a visionary. The worker who wants to own a home is told to lower their expectations. That’s the scam."
They stole Christmas. They took Santa hostage and are selling him back to us in little pieces that we can't afford. Whoville is about to erupt and storm grinch mountain. Honestly ive never had Want and Get living close by, as a matter of fact, Get put up a privacy fence so Want couldn't see how much Get was getting at Want's expense. This year is the fist time, im 57, that ive made over 38k and im not complaining its just that I, like so many of my neighbors, was sold a pig in a poke, told that if I worked really hard for a really long time I could have a better life and all I got was a worn out body and a bag of disillusionment because every time my ship came in someone over at the department of Thou Shall Not sank it before it could dock and then sent me the bill! How F'd up is that? I feel a tremor coming a faultlines forming and Whoville losing its cool.
I hear you David! I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a stable family, in one house that my parents bought and paid off. I’m retired now, but I’ve been in various manufacturing positions my whole adult life , as supervisor and middle management. In the most recent years I have been painfully aware that more than half my employees were literally one or two paychecks from being homeless. (The other half lived with parents until they could afford renting). Living paycheck to paycheck, surviving hand to mouth, working ten-twenty extra hours per week just to keep heads above water. Very few had any savings or positive 401k balances. Those that had modest amounts saved in 401k’s used them as ‘payday-loans’ to purchase a needed new car or to replace tires on their 10 year old vehicles. Those folks will never retire. Their American Dream has morphed into a nightmare that repeats every day they wake up.
I recently saw a headline asking what are the similarities between the economy that lead up to the French Revolution and today’s American economy. I regret not reading that story, but I’m guessing there are many conditions today that would be familiar to the French peasants. This is not sustainable. America cannot survive long ‘eating cake’!
Thank you brother. That american dream was always an illusion for some the proverbial carrot on a stick and that dream was stolen right out from our hands while we were told this bogey or that bogey was to blame and now they're trying to snuff us all out using our own values against us calling racism patriotism people dont know what's up or down but some of us do know and we wont be fooled and be wont be drugged into some sort of stupor while they finish us off. If you're not mad yet you ought to be and im ready to go down with the ship before I let a despot and his sicko-phants rob us of all decency, dignity and self respect.
"The market is supposed to serve the people of this country, not the other way around. But somewhere along the line, that got flipped, and most of us forgot it was ever different."
The whole economy is meant to serve the people, not the other way around. Boom.
My local watering hole has a great happy hour, so I've been there many times, and the same bartender is always there. I noted this and then asked her about her holiday plans, and she said she was thinking of picking up more shifts, as she didn't have any plans. She said offhand that work and home were the only places she goes. And then that she was just grateful to have a job.
Not my place to judge her, but it sure came back to me when reading this good piece.
I so appreciate your writing and your insights, Corbin. Thank you.
It's been obvious to many for a long time, but lately it's big enough to be seen from space that capitalism and its slavish adherents are the root problem of so much suffering in our world.
I do have one bright spot to slip into your analysis of families though. For most of our two daughters' childhoods, we were one of those low-income 2 working parents households with rent, utility bills, doctor and dental bills and the upkeep of 2 working vehicles to maintain. There were plenty of daily, monthly and annual money worries, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes, and unavoidable tension and arguments that goes with those stresses. Our kids went to (rural) school with plenty of rich kids, (and poor kids, in-between kids) so they saw the game consoles at Christmas and the new cars for 16th birthdays of their friends.
But we managed to bring them up to know that shopping at Goodwill and Value Village was FUN, that re-using clothes and other items was smart, and later, for example, that if they wanted to get their drivers' licenses and use the family car they'd also have to help with the auto insurance through part time local jobs. (Of course this is back when such jobs were available, for the most part -- school came first but there was babysitting, working at a local grocery and a small rural library, and odd jobs that fit.)
We weren't as poor as some in our community, and we had a home where some did not, so for the most part we felt lucky!
So this is just to remind readers that financially poor families are not easily stereotyped to one size fits all. And thank you again for your thoughtful, right-on analyses of this country right now!
"They don’t want a nicer phone—they want the company that makes the phones. They don’t want better news coverage—they buy the network."
More fundamentally, they want to OWN people. We abolished owning people. That practice is called "slavery."
Cartel parties who want their wealthy benefactors to OWN their employee and their families through corporations controlling employees' access to health care, is "enslavement," or Is that concept a little too difficult to understand?
Politicians' pretenses to be doing the opposite to their constituents makes those of us not brain-dead want to vomit. As shown by the steady decrease in the two cartel parties' memberships, partisan stooges are fooling fewer voters each day.
You, of course, are correct. But what they really want is to feel something. They sold their souls a long time ago. They don't know what it's like to feel grateful or be moved by music or a good dinner. They are the walking dead, and I wouldn't trade places with any of them.
I don't know whether they could have changed the path that brought them here, but I suspect that too. When I see them, they seem to breathe emptiness. At times, I even pity Trump as one of the most miserable beings I've ever seen.
Donald Trump is an unusual case; I look at him, and deep inside I think I see the shriveled, blackened remains of what could, long ago, have been a better man.
He's always been the billionaire the other billionaires picked on, for reasons only they understand; it's the ones who don't dry-hump every camera they see who are the real monsters - and much worse even than the billionaires themselves, I think, are that ring of apparatchiks and courtiers who surround them and farm them like ants farming aphids, relishing above all a position of impunity from which they can delegate/infantilize up and rapegenocideabusetortureexterminate down.
"We live in the richest nation in history. We can conjure trillions for banks and wars and bailouts in a weekend. We can build stealth bombers and Mars rovers and computer chips so advanced they seem like magic. But we’ve been convinced that affordable housing and public healthcare and childcare are impossible dreams.
They’re not. We’ve built them before. We just stopped. Stopped, in part, because we were afraid someone ‘undeserving’ might get more than their share. Which is laughable now that the US has almost 12,000 centi-millionaires and billionaires."
My lord, as they say in the south, good gracious a live. Etc. Corbin, this is hard to read and even harder to acknowledge that this is what we have become. like Greg below, I, too, wish this could be written in huge letters on billboards ALL over the country.
It seems like everything is black or white. We are communists or socialists. We’re so rich, we have three boats to ski behind, or we have to sell matchsticks on the corner and beg for a morsel to survive. Wanting to own a home (not a seven bedroom mansion) is entitlement ? Earning a living wage is an unrealistic expectation? I live near Gary, Indiana where the steel mills were like cities and employed mostly men who could support their families and paid a wage that meant home ownership (thanks to unions). My dad owned a body shop and came home late at night smelling of gasoline and Wrigley Spearmint gum and cigarettes. As far as I was concerned, we didn’t want for much. Were they simpler times? Were things built better, so large purchases like appliances lasted a lifetime? We’ve lost the grayscale. There are numbers between 1 and 10. Have the billionaires bought 2-9?
We didn’t “wander off into addiction.” That was planned, too. Cocaine for the middle class; meth for the poor. Our prison pipeline is the only one that’s steady and growing.
True I meant wander in the sense of looking, looking for a remedy even if that remedy is another enslavement.Youre right all planned coerced manipulated and the prison pipeline grows as steady as the homelessness while our churches and banks grow more obese. Its obscene and the judgement is coming.
They didnt buy a damn thing. They took it and then blamed us for not having it. They build warehouses to store us in while they deplete us of our souls and then let us wander off into addiction accusing us of that too. We better wake up because the bars are closing and whatever brain fog we've been blinded by is destroying us and the hope that once was, the inheritance of this great nation but NO MORE.
As a blue collar guy born in 1960, I've lived this post in real time. And yet I was way more fortunate than young people are today. Both my boys are well paid professionals, but I worry about how long before their jobs are threatened by AI. When enough people get hungry and desperate enough there will be an uprising.
Some of us already are Mr. Schwarzkopf, respecfully sir, some of didnt have that far to go to get here either. I have neighbors without plumbing or electricity, they live in dilapidated old campers, haul their drinking water and shit i can only imagine where and these people work mind you tell me how did we get here were an able bodied man or women can't afford a roof over themselves and their children and get told that if they'd just work harder or longer they'd have it but we know that not true and if we dont move strategically it wont ever be true again because the ones in power aren't incentivised and the one that are incentivised dont have power. Time to get real serious because the facade is getting a little threadbear.
AND the number of homeless folks in this fantastical billionaires age today? How many more people will lose their homes due to medical debt etc or lose the ability to pay rent for a place to sleep? That issue appears to be a 'problem" that the wealthy solve by "sweeps" or just moving them somewhere else. Yes, drugs probably are a problem for some homeless, but then how did that happen? Was it the pharmaceutical industrie's push for "safe" pain meds?
I was so fortunate growing up in a small town - my dad had a plumbing/heating business - sole owner - which meant he worked pretty much every day - hurt his back and kept working for years with that hurt. But we had a nice home, never really suffered for lack of anything. Now I know how dam lucky I was! there are way too many folks today young and old, who have none of that.
And then we look at, for instance, Bezos Venetian wedding, or Musk's trillions!
Or - exactly how and what our politicians are doing "for" us.
Nothing of course, and they wont until forced. Its just the way these things work. Power is never relinquished willingly it has to be wretched from the hand that possesses it. Homelessness, MH and SU are all just symptoms of the same disease which is of course poverty but that's almost too simplistic an answer. Maybe so but no less so than the morality hypothesis that has been used exhaustively by conservative groups including our almighty church that has exploited its tax free status, amassing wealth at the expense of those it vowed to God to protect. Judgement is coming rest assured.
There exists a psychotic break inside the human brain. Perhaps it always has been there, or perhaps it has 'evolved' as that brain became more enmeshed with stress that it could not cope with in paleolithic terms.
If we are to believe our own experiences as animals, then we must admit that paranoia exists as a mental condition. Fear creates stress, but fear has impetus due to the presence of agents of stress. It is these agents of stress, accumulated across time via the expansiveness of the human brain to create new behaviors, that have created the paradigm of behavior we now call capitalism.
But here is the rub. All animals have, within them, many other animals. Animalia is paleolithic. The fear of need without satisfaction drives paranoia, creates behaviors that we might call ambitious, or even aggressive, that go far beyond finding the next meal or a safe place to hunker down for the night.
These animals within animals have many forms. One prominent and paleolithic form is parasitism. Some animals feed off other animals. Parasites, we call them, as if 'we' are somehow excluded from our own observations. This 'shift' in psychic observation could be labeled 'dualism,' or 'subjectivity,' Cartesian style. Them and 'us.'
This is the psychic break. We have to 'live,' while we can justify that 'others' die so that we can keep living. Survival, eh? Has to be right, que no? But scientific inquiry and information accumulation shows that not all animalia feed off others. Or at least there are limits to the scope of that feeding, that parasitism. It is not a 'kill or be killed' equation. In many cases, the feeding actually has benefits for both, or at least a break even behavior, commensalism. Animalia can eat plantae, and as long as the feeding is not absolute, the plantae stay alive, regrow, reproduce new plantae, and things can get rosy and easier.
This is known as mutualism in ecological terms. Do not behave in an absolute way, a winner take all way, and most if not all 'others' can survive too, and perhaps thrive. Now we have what we call 'obligate carnivores.' Animalia that have no choice but to eat other animalia - felines, some fishes, etc. Amazingly, as if some wiser force is present to affect behaviors, these obligates are few in number, and left alone in their paradigm, will not destroy their own food sources.
But when one obligate carnivore, a predator that must eat, lives inside another obligate carnivore, a sticky problem exists. Hunger never goes away, and if the overarching environment becomes imbalanced, the ferocity and consumptive behaviors of parasites living within parasites fuels this imbalance, and 'things fall apart.'
This condition is what we call capitalism - survival at any cost. Hunger is 'always' present because there exists within one predator another predator, a parasite within a parasite, perhaps more than one iteration than that. Soon enough, the hunger is insatiable, it cannot be appeased, and now only the rats live on the island, and they must begin eating each other. This is paramount capitalism - only hunger exists, and its end result is total elimination of the entire environment that supports from one to many animalia, and along with that, the plantae foundation that ultimately feeds and shelters ALL.
We humans cannot 'outbuild or rebuild' this parasite. We cannot build newer and more efficient parasites. The only solution, if there is one at all, is to reduce the number and type of parasites down to a volume that does not threaten, and may in fact enhance, a thriving biodiversity that exhibits balance and creative change. We humans are no where near this realization right now.
Before we build anything, like yet another War on Something, we have to realize and admit that we humans ARE the parasite that has way too many other parasites hiding inside our gut, metaphorically speaking. We have to relearn what life is like in paleolithic terms, where we keep balanced, keep Small, keep Beautiful, and keep our appetites not only in check, but in balance with the paradigm we call ecological stability, NOT rigid, unchanging stability, but dynamic but subtly changing stability.
If not, we have signed our own death warrant, and soon enough Earth will look like Mars, and Musk can stop killing the atmosphere with all its useless rockets and satellites that do nothing more than monitor the death of a planet.
Right on point and very well written. Thanks Corbin! Tom and Greg - I agree with you both. Let's help more of our fellow citizens to see and understand the structure of the "systems" we live under so we can change them for the better. Thanks again all 3 of you!
(Forgive me if the following has come out as a bit of a conceptual goulash):
One ongoing problem I think I see - and I may even see it here in what you've written - is people have a terrible habit of mistaking their circumstances for their entire ontology. It's one thing to decry America's lack of class-consciousness in the context of the '90s and '000s, but we DO NOT want to be like Britain or Germany whose labor-movement successes have come at the cost of internalized prisons (and JFC, have you seen them lately???).
Not only should the billionaires be able to imagine themselves as paupers, but the paupers should also be able to imagine themselves as billionaires. Class, like any other group-identity, is an imposed delusion. I can understand not being able to afford to go to an expensive restaurant, or having second thoughts about driving through an area you've been warned is dangerous, but that ought to be all there is to it. It's starting to seem to me like other people live under what could be mistaken for literal delusions, avoiding phantasmagorical walls that I, for one, have been walking through my whole life. Whatever happened to "there but for the grace of [X]"?
"Land of Opportunity" isn't "mythology" (and I hate seeing that word used so disparagingly as it often is, though you may not have meant it that way) - IT'S RECOGNITION OF A FICTION. One thing that has been hobbling the "Left" up for at least a century is the Victorian mistake of taking a "scientific" approach to things that are total make-believe...and consequently making us powerless to escape them (recent abominations have taken that to a whole new level, of course).
Famous illusions like the vase-and-faces, or the young lady/old crone, have been on my mind rather a lot in recent years; we need to make sure we're really seeing black and black and white as white and not the other way around, because they are NOT equivalent.
Thank you for these hard-hitting truths, Cotbin! As always, spot-on! I'll share, as per some of the suggestions as I thought this is indeed something we should try to make others aware of. However, while I was reading the piece, I kept thinking about the saying that a people gets the rulers it deserves. I'm not sure I agree but I think it's really important to think about this...
Like much of Corbin's writing, this piece is chock-full of lines that I wish were on billboards throughout the county and on our TVs every bit as often as the damn pharmaceutical and lawyer ads. Pick a line and put it on a billboard or a TV ad in your town. People running for office can find their campaign's motto in here. This is a gold mine.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, Greg Belzley
“This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.
Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit.
The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species.”
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-craziest-thing-in-the-world-is
"The billionaire who wants to own everything is celebrated as a visionary. The worker who wants to own a home is told to lower their expectations. That’s the scam."
Our current country, in a nutshell.
"Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
They stole Christmas. They took Santa hostage and are selling him back to us in little pieces that we can't afford. Whoville is about to erupt and storm grinch mountain. Honestly ive never had Want and Get living close by, as a matter of fact, Get put up a privacy fence so Want couldn't see how much Get was getting at Want's expense. This year is the fist time, im 57, that ive made over 38k and im not complaining its just that I, like so many of my neighbors, was sold a pig in a poke, told that if I worked really hard for a really long time I could have a better life and all I got was a worn out body and a bag of disillusionment because every time my ship came in someone over at the department of Thou Shall Not sank it before it could dock and then sent me the bill! How F'd up is that? I feel a tremor coming a faultlines forming and Whoville losing its cool.
I hear you David! I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a stable family, in one house that my parents bought and paid off. I’m retired now, but I’ve been in various manufacturing positions my whole adult life , as supervisor and middle management. In the most recent years I have been painfully aware that more than half my employees were literally one or two paychecks from being homeless. (The other half lived with parents until they could afford renting). Living paycheck to paycheck, surviving hand to mouth, working ten-twenty extra hours per week just to keep heads above water. Very few had any savings or positive 401k balances. Those that had modest amounts saved in 401k’s used them as ‘payday-loans’ to purchase a needed new car or to replace tires on their 10 year old vehicles. Those folks will never retire. Their American Dream has morphed into a nightmare that repeats every day they wake up.
I recently saw a headline asking what are the similarities between the economy that lead up to the French Revolution and today’s American economy. I regret not reading that story, but I’m guessing there are many conditions today that would be familiar to the French peasants. This is not sustainable. America cannot survive long ‘eating cake’!
Thank you brother. That american dream was always an illusion for some the proverbial carrot on a stick and that dream was stolen right out from our hands while we were told this bogey or that bogey was to blame and now they're trying to snuff us all out using our own values against us calling racism patriotism people dont know what's up or down but some of us do know and we wont be fooled and be wont be drugged into some sort of stupor while they finish us off. If you're not mad yet you ought to be and im ready to go down with the ship before I let a despot and his sicko-phants rob us of all decency, dignity and self respect.
"The market is supposed to serve the people of this country, not the other way around. But somewhere along the line, that got flipped, and most of us forgot it was ever different."
The whole economy is meant to serve the people, not the other way around. Boom.
My local watering hole has a great happy hour, so I've been there many times, and the same bartender is always there. I noted this and then asked her about her holiday plans, and she said she was thinking of picking up more shifts, as she didn't have any plans. She said offhand that work and home were the only places she goes. And then that she was just grateful to have a job.
Not my place to judge her, but it sure came back to me when reading this good piece.
I so appreciate your writing and your insights, Corbin. Thank you.
It's been obvious to many for a long time, but lately it's big enough to be seen from space that capitalism and its slavish adherents are the root problem of so much suffering in our world.
I do have one bright spot to slip into your analysis of families though. For most of our two daughters' childhoods, we were one of those low-income 2 working parents households with rent, utility bills, doctor and dental bills and the upkeep of 2 working vehicles to maintain. There were plenty of daily, monthly and annual money worries, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes, and unavoidable tension and arguments that goes with those stresses. Our kids went to (rural) school with plenty of rich kids, (and poor kids, in-between kids) so they saw the game consoles at Christmas and the new cars for 16th birthdays of their friends.
But we managed to bring them up to know that shopping at Goodwill and Value Village was FUN, that re-using clothes and other items was smart, and later, for example, that if they wanted to get their drivers' licenses and use the family car they'd also have to help with the auto insurance through part time local jobs. (Of course this is back when such jobs were available, for the most part -- school came first but there was babysitting, working at a local grocery and a small rural library, and odd jobs that fit.)
We weren't as poor as some in our community, and we had a home where some did not, so for the most part we felt lucky!
So this is just to remind readers that financially poor families are not easily stereotyped to one size fits all. And thank you again for your thoughtful, right-on analyses of this country right now!
Restack his posts and tell everyone to read him. Let's make him go viral! And subscribe if you haven't.
"They don’t want a nicer phone—they want the company that makes the phones. They don’t want better news coverage—they buy the network."
More fundamentally, they want to OWN people. We abolished owning people. That practice is called "slavery."
Cartel parties who want their wealthy benefactors to OWN their employee and their families through corporations controlling employees' access to health care, is "enslavement," or Is that concept a little too difficult to understand?
Politicians' pretenses to be doing the opposite to their constituents makes those of us not brain-dead want to vomit. As shown by the steady decrease in the two cartel parties' memberships, partisan stooges are fooling fewer voters each day.
You, of course, are correct. But what they really want is to feel something. They sold their souls a long time ago. They don't know what it's like to feel grateful or be moved by music or a good dinner. They are the walking dead, and I wouldn't trade places with any of them.
I don't know whether they could have changed the path that brought them here, but I suspect that too. When I see them, they seem to breathe emptiness. At times, I even pity Trump as one of the most miserable beings I've ever seen.
Me, too. Almost.
Donald Trump is an unusual case; I look at him, and deep inside I think I see the shriveled, blackened remains of what could, long ago, have been a better man.
He's always been the billionaire the other billionaires picked on, for reasons only they understand; it's the ones who don't dry-hump every camera they see who are the real monsters - and much worse even than the billionaires themselves, I think, are that ring of apparatchiks and courtiers who surround them and farm them like ants farming aphids, relishing above all a position of impunity from which they can delegate/infantilize up and rapegenocideabusetortureexterminate down.
"We live in the richest nation in history. We can conjure trillions for banks and wars and bailouts in a weekend. We can build stealth bombers and Mars rovers and computer chips so advanced they seem like magic. But we’ve been convinced that affordable housing and public healthcare and childcare are impossible dreams.
They’re not. We’ve built them before. We just stopped. Stopped, in part, because we were afraid someone ‘undeserving’ might get more than their share. Which is laughable now that the US has almost 12,000 centi-millionaires and billionaires."
That's why the next time I hear, "How is he (or god forbid SHE) gonna pay for it" I'm gonna scream, WITH THE BILLIONAIRE'S MONEY!
My lord, as they say in the south, good gracious a live. Etc. Corbin, this is hard to read and even harder to acknowledge that this is what we have become. like Greg below, I, too, wish this could be written in huge letters on billboards ALL over the country.
Read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It's a fictional accout that perfectly parallels where too many are and how they got there.
It seems like everything is black or white. We are communists or socialists. We’re so rich, we have three boats to ski behind, or we have to sell matchsticks on the corner and beg for a morsel to survive. Wanting to own a home (not a seven bedroom mansion) is entitlement ? Earning a living wage is an unrealistic expectation? I live near Gary, Indiana where the steel mills were like cities and employed mostly men who could support their families and paid a wage that meant home ownership (thanks to unions). My dad owned a body shop and came home late at night smelling of gasoline and Wrigley Spearmint gum and cigarettes. As far as I was concerned, we didn’t want for much. Were they simpler times? Were things built better, so large purchases like appliances lasted a lifetime? We’ve lost the grayscale. There are numbers between 1 and 10. Have the billionaires bought 2-9?
We didn’t “wander off into addiction.” That was planned, too. Cocaine for the middle class; meth for the poor. Our prison pipeline is the only one that’s steady and growing.
True I meant wander in the sense of looking, looking for a remedy even if that remedy is another enslavement.Youre right all planned coerced manipulated and the prison pipeline grows as steady as the homelessness while our churches and banks grow more obese. Its obscene and the judgement is coming.
They didnt buy a damn thing. They took it and then blamed us for not having it. They build warehouses to store us in while they deplete us of our souls and then let us wander off into addiction accusing us of that too. We better wake up because the bars are closing and whatever brain fog we've been blinded by is destroying us and the hope that once was, the inheritance of this great nation but NO MORE.
Co-signing everything you wrote here, Mr. Trent. As usual...
As a blue collar guy born in 1960, I've lived this post in real time. And yet I was way more fortunate than young people are today. Both my boys are well paid professionals, but I worry about how long before their jobs are threatened by AI. When enough people get hungry and desperate enough there will be an uprising.
Some of us already are Mr. Schwarzkopf, respecfully sir, some of didnt have that far to go to get here either. I have neighbors without plumbing or electricity, they live in dilapidated old campers, haul their drinking water and shit i can only imagine where and these people work mind you tell me how did we get here were an able bodied man or women can't afford a roof over themselves and their children and get told that if they'd just work harder or longer they'd have it but we know that not true and if we dont move strategically it wont ever be true again because the ones in power aren't incentivised and the one that are incentivised dont have power. Time to get real serious because the facade is getting a little threadbear.
AND the number of homeless folks in this fantastical billionaires age today? How many more people will lose their homes due to medical debt etc or lose the ability to pay rent for a place to sleep? That issue appears to be a 'problem" that the wealthy solve by "sweeps" or just moving them somewhere else. Yes, drugs probably are a problem for some homeless, but then how did that happen? Was it the pharmaceutical industrie's push for "safe" pain meds?
I was so fortunate growing up in a small town - my dad had a plumbing/heating business - sole owner - which meant he worked pretty much every day - hurt his back and kept working for years with that hurt. But we had a nice home, never really suffered for lack of anything. Now I know how dam lucky I was! there are way too many folks today young and old, who have none of that.
And then we look at, for instance, Bezos Venetian wedding, or Musk's trillions!
Or - exactly how and what our politicians are doing "for" us.
Nothing of course, and they wont until forced. Its just the way these things work. Power is never relinquished willingly it has to be wretched from the hand that possesses it. Homelessness, MH and SU are all just symptoms of the same disease which is of course poverty but that's almost too simplistic an answer. Maybe so but no less so than the morality hypothesis that has been used exhaustively by conservative groups including our almighty church that has exploited its tax free status, amassing wealth at the expense of those it vowed to God to protect. Judgement is coming rest assured.
The world's most unlikely, yet dreaded, rallying-cry sounds so much more fitting in French:
"PAIN!!!"
There exists a psychotic break inside the human brain. Perhaps it always has been there, or perhaps it has 'evolved' as that brain became more enmeshed with stress that it could not cope with in paleolithic terms.
If we are to believe our own experiences as animals, then we must admit that paranoia exists as a mental condition. Fear creates stress, but fear has impetus due to the presence of agents of stress. It is these agents of stress, accumulated across time via the expansiveness of the human brain to create new behaviors, that have created the paradigm of behavior we now call capitalism.
But here is the rub. All animals have, within them, many other animals. Animalia is paleolithic. The fear of need without satisfaction drives paranoia, creates behaviors that we might call ambitious, or even aggressive, that go far beyond finding the next meal or a safe place to hunker down for the night.
These animals within animals have many forms. One prominent and paleolithic form is parasitism. Some animals feed off other animals. Parasites, we call them, as if 'we' are somehow excluded from our own observations. This 'shift' in psychic observation could be labeled 'dualism,' or 'subjectivity,' Cartesian style. Them and 'us.'
This is the psychic break. We have to 'live,' while we can justify that 'others' die so that we can keep living. Survival, eh? Has to be right, que no? But scientific inquiry and information accumulation shows that not all animalia feed off others. Or at least there are limits to the scope of that feeding, that parasitism. It is not a 'kill or be killed' equation. In many cases, the feeding actually has benefits for both, or at least a break even behavior, commensalism. Animalia can eat plantae, and as long as the feeding is not absolute, the plantae stay alive, regrow, reproduce new plantae, and things can get rosy and easier.
This is known as mutualism in ecological terms. Do not behave in an absolute way, a winner take all way, and most if not all 'others' can survive too, and perhaps thrive. Now we have what we call 'obligate carnivores.' Animalia that have no choice but to eat other animalia - felines, some fishes, etc. Amazingly, as if some wiser force is present to affect behaviors, these obligates are few in number, and left alone in their paradigm, will not destroy their own food sources.
But when one obligate carnivore, a predator that must eat, lives inside another obligate carnivore, a sticky problem exists. Hunger never goes away, and if the overarching environment becomes imbalanced, the ferocity and consumptive behaviors of parasites living within parasites fuels this imbalance, and 'things fall apart.'
This condition is what we call capitalism - survival at any cost. Hunger is 'always' present because there exists within one predator another predator, a parasite within a parasite, perhaps more than one iteration than that. Soon enough, the hunger is insatiable, it cannot be appeased, and now only the rats live on the island, and they must begin eating each other. This is paramount capitalism - only hunger exists, and its end result is total elimination of the entire environment that supports from one to many animalia, and along with that, the plantae foundation that ultimately feeds and shelters ALL.
We humans cannot 'outbuild or rebuild' this parasite. We cannot build newer and more efficient parasites. The only solution, if there is one at all, is to reduce the number and type of parasites down to a volume that does not threaten, and may in fact enhance, a thriving biodiversity that exhibits balance and creative change. We humans are no where near this realization right now.
Before we build anything, like yet another War on Something, we have to realize and admit that we humans ARE the parasite that has way too many other parasites hiding inside our gut, metaphorically speaking. We have to relearn what life is like in paleolithic terms, where we keep balanced, keep Small, keep Beautiful, and keep our appetites not only in check, but in balance with the paradigm we call ecological stability, NOT rigid, unchanging stability, but dynamic but subtly changing stability.
If not, we have signed our own death warrant, and soon enough Earth will look like Mars, and Musk can stop killing the atmosphere with all its useless rockets and satellites that do nothing more than monitor the death of a planet.
Right on point and very well written. Thanks Corbin! Tom and Greg - I agree with you both. Let's help more of our fellow citizens to see and understand the structure of the "systems" we live under so we can change them for the better. Thanks again all 3 of you!
(Forgive me if the following has come out as a bit of a conceptual goulash):
One ongoing problem I think I see - and I may even see it here in what you've written - is people have a terrible habit of mistaking their circumstances for their entire ontology. It's one thing to decry America's lack of class-consciousness in the context of the '90s and '000s, but we DO NOT want to be like Britain or Germany whose labor-movement successes have come at the cost of internalized prisons (and JFC, have you seen them lately???).
Not only should the billionaires be able to imagine themselves as paupers, but the paupers should also be able to imagine themselves as billionaires. Class, like any other group-identity, is an imposed delusion. I can understand not being able to afford to go to an expensive restaurant, or having second thoughts about driving through an area you've been warned is dangerous, but that ought to be all there is to it. It's starting to seem to me like other people live under what could be mistaken for literal delusions, avoiding phantasmagorical walls that I, for one, have been walking through my whole life. Whatever happened to "there but for the grace of [X]"?
"Land of Opportunity" isn't "mythology" (and I hate seeing that word used so disparagingly as it often is, though you may not have meant it that way) - IT'S RECOGNITION OF A FICTION. One thing that has been hobbling the "Left" up for at least a century is the Victorian mistake of taking a "scientific" approach to things that are total make-believe...and consequently making us powerless to escape them (recent abominations have taken that to a whole new level, of course).
Famous illusions like the vase-and-faces, or the young lady/old crone, have been on my mind rather a lot in recent years; we need to make sure we're really seeing black and black and white as white and not the other way around, because they are NOT equivalent.
Thank you for these hard-hitting truths, Cotbin! As always, spot-on! I'll share, as per some of the suggestions as I thought this is indeed something we should try to make others aware of. However, while I was reading the piece, I kept thinking about the saying that a people gets the rulers it deserves. I'm not sure I agree but I think it's really important to think about this...