Nothing gets done because thats how “the elite” are where they are.

What’s crazy is that wage theft includes both not adjusting for inflation and hiring migrant workers and not paying them the full value of their labor. Look at where minimum wage has been, and think about that the reason people hire migrant workers is because they’ll work for less than minimum wage. A lot of this wage theft is happening in full view of the public. It’s stuff we know about, and stuff our politicians game for clout. Like… When a poor white supremacists hates migrant workers, the real villain in that person’s life that they hate is their boss for committing an act of wage theft. But they get tricked into blaming their brother in the theft. The capital holders encourage and foster this white supremacist view because it allows them to keep their greed machine running. When I see a mass of rural voters pulling out the stops for someone like Donald Trump it makes me sad. Our capitalist culture of emptiness has removed all moral fiber from them, and removed all cultural ability to connect with who’s really on their side. That crowd views rap music as violent, mexicans as to blame for there no longer being agricultural work, and urban poor as being too different from them to ever understand them, and it’s like… Man, we understand you better than anyone. We want to be your friends, your allies, your brothers and your sisters. The policies the government implements that you hate, they calculate. Things like gas taxes that punish the consumer of petroleum products instead of the business that rely on them are specifically written to ensure that they disproportionately create a divide between rural america where car dependency is a fact of life and urban america where living carless is possible. The actual goal is to raise the temperature of the rural poor’s anger. And this isn’t new. Ever since black people got the vote, politicians have been looking for ways to make sure the poor white people who should be their strongest allies see them as enemies. The greatest tragedy of all to me is this. I want you to imagine a West Virginian. Just really picture in your head what you think someone from West Virginia would look like.

You pictured a white person, didn’t you? These days, I get where you’d be coming from. But Appalachia used to be a vast region where former slaves and poor europeans who were marginalized by society gathered because there they could be left alone. The modern structure of Appalachia, as a place that’s mostly white, happened because those with access to the levers of power knew they couldn’t survive a cultural region of interracial conversational intercourse realizing that their plight was shared. It was a region living on the brink of the greatest catastrophe America could possibly suffer: class awakening. So they implemented policies that encouraged black workers to move to urban centers and they gave the white workers billy clubs and told them that it was the black workers faults they were poor. And hey, doesn’t that sound a lot like what’s going on now with modern militia movements? Because it should. Because it is. Nothing is new under the sun. The only things that change are the specific ways they pit us against ourselves. Like I want to put together a playlist of music that explores how our nation has grappled with being on the brink of class awakening since the 1870s when reconstruction shifted from being about lifting black people up to being about smashing white people down. I’d start with old time folk music which blends African and Irish musical traditions, then I’d move into Bluegrass which blends African and Irish musical traditions with African-American gospel traditions. After that it’d be the early country music that was labeled as “hillbilly music” that takes bluegrass and adds some pop elements to make it more presentable to the masses, and go straight into early rock and roll when black people and poor rural whites started blending country music with jazz and rhythm and blues to create something new. After that I’d pull in punk, which has seen its early black roots completely erased and is re-discovering the contributions black artists made early on (including if you ask me, the first punk band was Death, not The Ramones, and what alerted me to this was The Ramones own view of who the first punk band was), and then finally the music of now with hip hop and bedroom pop.

Man. When I think back on the history of music in these cultural spaces, and I think about the things we teach in school about what does and doesn’t count as culture… It makes me sad. America’s most marginalized people have been begging eachother to wake up for years and instead we’ve sleep-walked our way into a culture of emptiness where people are more likely to listen to what Elon Musk has to say than a member of our community with a backpack of mixtapes. Capital gives you access to mass media, and instead of rejecting mass media, we embrace it. Look at how many people still use twitter even though it’s become a platform for amplifying far right extremism. I have more to say, but I have to feed my dogs.

Lately, profit driven inflation probably emerged as a strong contender for top means of corporate theft.

And inflation