#low-income #poverty #labor #wages #organizing #media #cohost-repost
so, I saw this on mastodon but it's not about this article in particular. its a pattern.

this is not a doomer post.

anyway:

https://medium.com/@Albatross/civic-debt-5dd49e29fbfc

I could go on, but the point is that for over 40 years we have been neglecting our civic responsibilities and allowing these things to persist and grow. It’s obvious to almost everybody that Trump should be in prison and George Santos should be unemployed, but we don’t take to the streets to demand it. It’s plainly unethical to have a health care system that makes the most profit by denying care to the sick, but we don’t go on a national strike to demand universal health care like every other advanced nation has. And yes, protests and strikes ought to follow after pressuring our legislators and petitioning for change fail, but we’re not doing those either.

fighting for your wages puts you at risk. which means you need strike funds that can survive people getting unemployed. but everyone's already even more strapped for cash.

protesting gets you beaten by cops, always, if you're even to get the media to care. arrested for 7 days, injured for a month, maimed, killed. things that make it so you can't support the people you need to support because they fire you for the slightest absence.

national strikes require so much diplomacy and compromise that just doesn't exist anymore, and if it did, Congress would just say "okay, but we need this industry so suck it up" like they did with the rail unions.

petitioning legislators helps, sometimes, but you get form letters back and nothing to reflect they care, even in their votes, until the media makes it politically embarassing not to do the thing.

every step is aimed, if perhaps in some cases accidentally, to quell protest. because nothing happens. sure, you get a concession for a quarter, enough for the progressives to leave feeling like they've done their duty. and then everything's back to normal. the media maybe covers it if you threaten monetary interests or they need some good scary B-roll. but past that it takes so much effort, over so much time, to get any change. Incredibly high opportunity cost.

change needs to happen elsewhere first. you won't convince people that don't the thing that hasn't worked in the past will finally work this time with nothing changing. you have to take other routes.

the great thing about being outside the mainstream is you can play dirty. punch above your weight, don't just ask for more of the same. the women who poured the paint on that picasso after doing their research it wouldn't hurt it understand the media and public opinion far better than even the most well read progressives and leftists, and that worries me.

as the timeless adage goes, "you're not praying right. you're praying like a flare placed where no one can see it. you have to pray like a shotgun aimed at a house"