It’s very cloudy and if it’s not raining, the air itself is filled with water, casting the world in a soft gray veil. It’s quiet, and though it should feel gloomy, it doesn’t.
I was reading about an imminent strike by dockworkers and it struck me the way the article blamed any disruption by the strike on the workers and not on the corporations or the over-compensated executives making the decision. We view the entire world through framing.
Instead of implying a strike–and its inconveniences–could be avoided by workers wanting less, how about looking at it as tax-dodging, corner cutting companies not meeting their obligations?
It’s not like they’d end up losing money either, outside of creative accounting.
Our country is seething and roiling in its own greed, hidden in the most boring of terms like “inflation” and “regulation” and “tax code.”
Because if you glaze over when they start using the words, they know it’s a safe place to hide.
But we’re seeing it in the constant and serious food recalls; we’re seeing it in corporations doing whatever they can to prevent the election of people who will call on them to pay their fair share; we see it in prices that shot up because they could.
Even corporate attitudes toward us seem to have evolved into a place where we are no longer “customers” but “consumers,” living, breathing vacuum cleaners that will suck up whatever they dish out. They give us less for more money; they put less food into food; they grudgingly provide whatever service you pay for, and then scale it back and back and raise the price.
It is as though they believe any money we have belongs to them and any risk or harm belongs to us.
Not ideal.
And all of that, all of it comes back to framing. All of it comes back to a new concept that somehow, by providing goods and services and utilizing employees to do so, corporations are performing an act of largess, that it’s generosity and not the desire for ever more money money money driving the whole thing.
Nothing can survive at the extremes. Including capitalism.
If things continue as they have, with wealth concentrated in the very few, all will collapse. That’s what they want, you know, an extremely desperate and vulnerable population ripe for exploitation on all fronts.
And yet another reason we need to elect VP Harris, whose plans include, in addition to affordable drugs and housing, fighting food price gouging.
We’re not talking about abstract political ideas. We’re talking about basic survival, whatever your side of the aisle.
And I’ll tell you that you may think you’re the exception on the other side, but you are always the exception until you aren’t. It’s time to start thinking of your own interests.
And with that, I leave you to your Tuesday. Have a great one.
A Bit to Read 
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