Greed is murdering the economy

90% of people have increasingly nothing to work with.

Earlier tonight I ended an eBay listing I had to sell some spare monitors used during the beginning of the pandemic. It turns out that no one was seeing it; my listing’s view count was only 6, a majority of which were likely my own, and I confirmed it wasn’t showing up by searching “4K computer monitor” (this exact phrase was in my listing title) and even limited my search terms to 40” and up to filter out all of the Chinese garbage portable displays.

I listed it, and it’s as if I never did so! Initially this was free to do, but after 30 days, eBay was intent on charging me to renew this not-real listing they claim to have going for me. How they haven’t been sued for this is a modern miracle of racketeering: making sure everyone who could is exempted from this system where the rest of us have to pay to exist.

Of course, the racket against a nobody like me is simple: coerce and nudge me into paying to ‘advertise’ my listing up front. Never mind that this is the entire fucking premise of eBay to begin with, and that they collect listing fees and final value fees to supplicate that. No, they want more, and they’re lying to whoever they can in order to get more. I can’t sell a god damn computer monitor to a willing buyer on the Internet anymore without promising a bunch more money I don’t have to the same mob that’s already been robbing everyone now anyway.

Why do they do this? In a grand sense, the same reason the stock market is at all time highs while the real economy is tumbling. They don’t give a fuck about anyone else. Wealth stratification is not a problem for them because they have the wealth stratified away from the rest of us.

It’s getting so bad now—the amount of cash the bottom 90% of us collectively have to work with is so diminishing—that we’re being subjected to life-ending volatility spikes basically everywhere we turn, often for random things like consumer goods but also sometimes for core needs like food and fuel. And again, we see this bare minimum catering to the latter things – the bare fucking minimum getting done to prevent a total wildfire revolt. Fuel is artificially held below $3/gallon because that’s the bare fucking minimum the looters intend to do to prevent absolute chaos.

You can’t touch a CRT monitor of any kind now for a price it’s actually intrinsically worth (bear in mind these things are literal e-waste no one has had a use for in over 20 years, the market was fucked by email jobbers blowing loads of cash on ‘retro battlestations’ to play Super Mario on), and this is increasingly true for everything in the economy.

You have no fucking money anymore! Your wages buy nothing! You have no discretionary ability. You have no purchasing power. You can’t even make a single mistake anymore without it permanently financially ruining your life, which by the way no longer includes eventually owning a house for yourself or for most of you even having reliable transportation, even without making mistakes. I see this—quietly but consistently—more and more people getting dropped off by someone else to start shifts at fast food chains, and they’re not teenagers who haven’t grown up enough to get their own cars. They’re middle aged minority women with rock bottom expectations out of society, and somehow it continues to get even worse.

Have you heard about Stargate? Yeah, that’s where all this money lifted from you and I is going. Right up the asses of the criminals who usurped the executive branch of the United States federal government, cued in of course by the party before them by showing them how shamelessly unpopular they can be while holding power.

This just in yesterday from the Washington Examiner:

The partnership, which guarantees the federal government a bill of $1 annually per agency instead of the previously contracted amount of $191 annually per user, comes as the Trump administration pushes to lead on worldwide artificial intelligence initiatives.

How charitable. They got $200M in direct deficit spending expressly for this purpose and now they turn around and insult your intelligence like you’re supposed to believe this is charity for some wider future that includes their dog shit software.

They’re stealing from you.

(Sam Hyde channels the energy like a beast.)

So, are you getting it yet?