The Dead and Homeless: Engines of Profit

To a certain subset of our population, the fact that nearly 90,000 rent-stabilized apartments in New York City are deliberately being left vacant while the number of people sleeping in the street balloons is not a glitch. It’s a feature. It’s the point.

Those with their hands on the levers of power aren’t even remotely interested in making sure people are housed, fed, educated, and cared for. That might work for some pie-in-the-sky idealistic socialist wanker (uh, raising my hand here, yeah, that’s me) but the white men running this species into the ground have other ideas. After all, who in their right mind would willingly work at any of the millions of labor-intensive, dirty, dangerous, soul-sucking, low-paying, crap jobs this country abounds in unless they were desperate?

Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen.

And for those who might get any bright ideas about dodging that mess, there must be incentive to keep them showing up every day to do jobs they hate. Not carrots. Sticks!

I grew up on horror stories of the prison systems in Communist and third-world countries. Turns out Svetlana and Carlos are growing up learning about the nightmare privatized penal system of The Greatest Country in the World. I’m not ready to go over there and scope it out myself, but from what I read, Rikers Island — which is 9 miles from where I sit this minute — is a death trap that would make those snarly old Inquisitors green with envy.

Eighteen people have died in custody at Rikers Island so far this year.

This does not exactly work as a deterrent to criminal behavior (as a quick walk to the corner here will tell you) but then again the stock market doesn’t give a good Goddamn. Everything from public retirement systems to mutual fund warm-fuzzies like The Vanguard Group is cleaning up by owning millions of shares in the top-performing private prison stocks. A system that casually slams shoplifters, drug dealers, sex workers, and drunk drivers into solitary until some of them wind up dead is working exactly as planned.

It’s funneling enormous wealth into tax-dodging accounts all over the world.

And yet this country drools at the feet of the billionaires. It’s as if over 300,000,000 people are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome on steroids. These thieves enrich themselves by keeping us frantically working to simply sleep indoors and millions of Americans seem to think they’re role models.

I was the dummy who strove to gain admission to an Ivy League university to study literature and writing. Most of my fellow students were there with only one carved-in-granite aim: to graduate and earn millions.

When I attended my one and only writers’ conference (ack), I was surrounded by starry-eyed young writers intent on developing the next Big Franchise that would blow Twilight to smithereens. I finally gave up on talking with any of them because I couldn’t tolerate one more exciting elevator pitch. My pitch went nowhere but I still came home and wrote the darned novella.

We The People are the chow Tom Wolfe wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities.

We’re the crunchy coal being fed into Capitalism’s maw.

The bitter irony is that the beneficiaries of what gets pooped out of Capitalism’s giant butthole may think they’re winning, but all they’re doing is speeding up the process that’s going to take us all down. Certainly, some of them have well-stocked bunkers where they believe they’ll survive the coming collapse.

People who aren’t pathological hoarders of wealth and resources seek to live in a world where everyone is healthy and free. Where the sky is clear and rivers aren’t filthy gutters. Where all of us have enough and none of us have too much. Where trees aren’t being burned to power the electrical grid.

The world that our overlords are busily creating will have none of that.

We’ll be dead and they’ll be stuck with dwindling resources in a dying hellscape of their own creation. All because they cleverly figured out that denying their fellow humans access to shelter, food, healthcare, and education while keeping people fighting amongst themselves was the surefire way to financial superiority.

And still, they genuinely believe they’re winning.

Wait until they see what they’ve won.

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