Toxic workplaces aren't management failures - they're profit strategies. High turnover means lower wages, no accumulated benefits, constant fear. Toxic cultures keep workers compliant, prevent organizing, maximize extraction. The cruelty serves capital; your suffering is someone's quarterly earnings.

Prisoners work for pennies, producing goods for corporations who profit massively. It's slavery by another name: forced labor, no meaningful compensation, captive workforce. The 13th Amendment didn't abolish slavery; it relocated it behind prison walls where we pretend not to see.

Endless war is profit engine. Defense contractors need conflict to justify budgets. Politicians need threats to maintain power. Media needs drama to sell advertising. War persists not because it works but because powerful interests benefit from its continuation.

Charter schools defund public education while serving fewer students and producing mixed results. Not education reform - wealth transfer. Tax dollars flow to private operators while public schools starve. Privatizing education creates tiered access: quality for the wealthy, remains for everyone else.

Voter ID laws, purged rolls, closed polling places, felony disenfranchisement - suppression isn't glitch but feature. When voting is hard, poor people and people of color vote less. Voter suppression maintains minority rule by wealthy white populations.

Nonprofit boards require wealth and connections, ensuring rich people control organizations serving poor communities. Decision-making power concentrates among those least affected by problems. Boards become gentry philanthropy, maintaining class hierarchy while claiming service. The helped have no voice in helping.

Technology could reduce necessary labor, giving humanity leisure, creativity, fulfillment. Instead, automation threatens workers while enriching owners. We could work less; instead we're insecure about working at all. Automation under capitalism is threat, not liberation. The machines should free us, but ownership determines outcomes.

Borders don't stop migration; they create illegal status that enables exploitation. Undocumented workers are more exploitable, less likely to complain, easier to deport when organizing. Borders aren't about security - they're about controlling labor and wages through artificial legal categories.

Insurance companies profit by collecting premiums and denying claims. They hire actuaries to minimize payout, lawyers to fight coverage, lobbyists to write favorable laws. You pay for security but receive bureaucratic warfare. Insurance is legalized gambling where the house always wins.

Climate change will displace hundreds of millions, creating refugee crises that dwarf current ones. Wealthy nations caused climate change through pollution; poor nations will produce refugees. Then wealthy nations will close borders, letting people die for climate crimes they didn't commit.

We live in an age of unprecedented abundance, yet scarcity defines most lives. This isn't natural - it's manufactured. Resources exist to house the homeless, feed the hungry, heal the sick. What's scarce isn't resources but the political will to distribute them. Artificial scarcity maintains hierarchies that benefit few.

Payday loans prey on desperation. You need money to survive this week, so you pay interest rates that would make mobsters blush. Legal loansharking extracts wealth from those with least. Poverty is expensive; desperation is profitable. Financial predation is business model, not crime.

The news doesn't inform - it frames. It sets boundaries of acceptable discourse, defines reasonable positions, marginalizes radical alternatives. Not through conspiracy but through institutional pressures: corporate ownership, advertising dependence, access to power. Manufacturing consent is the media's core function, not an occasional failure.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, they say, while systematically dismantling every ladder previous generations climbed. Affordable education, stable employment, accessible housing, strong unions - all gone. Then they blame you for failing to climb what they deliberately destroyed.

The algorithm isn't neutral - it's a crystallized hierarchy. It learns from biased data, amplifies existing inequalities, then claims objectivity. Automated discrimination at scale, operating too fast and too opaque for accountability. The machine doesn't create injustice; it launders human bias through technological mystification.

Employers steal more through wage theft than all robbery, burglary, and vehicle theft combined. Unpaid overtime, off-the-clock work, misclassified employment, denied breaks - wage theft is systematic and mostly legal. When workers steal from employers, they're arrested. When employers steal from workers, it's called efficiency.

Your burnout isn't a personal failing - it's a wealth transfer mechanism. Every hour you're too exhausted to organize, too depleted to resist, too tired to imagine alternatives, is an hour the system extracts maximum value while facing minimum opposition. Exhaustion is governance through attrition.

Pharmaceutical companies created addicts for profit, lied about addiction risks, bribed doctors, targeted vulnerable communities. When people died, companies paid fines smaller than their profits and executives avoided prison. The opioid epidemic is corporate murder at scale, treated as public health crisis instead of criminal enterprise.

Every billionaire represents allocation failure. That concentrated wealth could have funded schools, housed homeless populations, healed the sick. Instead it accumulates in individual hands, purchasing political influence that prevents redistribution. Billionaires aren't success stories - they're indictments of our priorities.

Mental health services expand while material conditions deteriorate. Instead of changing circumstances that make people miserable, we medicate individuals and teach coping mechanisms. The therapeutic state locates problems in individual psychology rather than social structure, making depression a personal failure instead of rational response.

Isolation isn't just emotional - it's economic. Atomized individuals are better consumers, worse organizers. Community threatens profit. Solidarity enables resistance. So they sell you substitutes: social media instead of friendship, streaming instead of gathering, consumption instead of connection. Loneliness is the market's ideal condition.

Your trauma is profitable. Therapy apps, mindfulness courses, wellness products - an entire industry extracts revenue from suffering that capitalism creates. They don't want you healed; they want you managing symptoms while continuing to produce. The trauma economy treats effects while protecting causes.

Student debt, medical debt, housing debt - these aren't unfortunate byproducts of modern life. They're chains that ensure compliance. Debt keeps you working jobs you hate, accepting conditions you despise, voting for incremental changes instead of demanding transformation. Financial bondage masquerading as personal responsibility.

Pollution isn't equally distributed - it's strategically placed in poor and minority communities. Factories, incinerators, toxic waste: all carefully situated where people have least political power to resist. Environmental racism is class warfare through poisoned air and contaminated water.

They're raising the retirement age because they need you to die before collecting what you paid in. Social Security was supposed to support your final years; now it's structured so many won't reach eligibility. Work until death, die before benefits. The greatest retirement heist is happening in plain sight.

Algorithms embed historical discrimination into automated systems. Credit scores, hiring algorithms, risk assessments - they learn from biased past data and perpetuate inequality at machine speed. Algorithmic redlining is efficient, scalable, and claims objectivity. Discrimination becomes infrastructure.

The rich created climate catastrophe but the poor will die from it. Carbon emissions correlate with wealth; climate impacts correlate with poverty. Those least responsible suffer most. And when climate refugees flee uninhabitable regions, borders close and nationalism rises. Climate change is class warfare by atmospheric means.

Disability benefits are deliberately insufficient, forcing disabled people to justify their existence through poverty. You must prove you're disabled enough to deserve help but not so disabled you can't navigate bureaucratic cruelty. Capitalism can't comprehend human worth beyond productivity, so disability becomes moral failure.

They sell you meritocracy while running a hereditary aristocracy. Talent matters, they claim, while legacy admissions fill elite universities. Hard work pays off, they insist, while inherited wealth compounds tax-free. The meritocracy myth is how privilege justifies itself to those it excludes.

Society depends on care work - childcare, eldercare, healthcare - but refuses to value it. Care workers are underpaid because their labor is feminized, racialized, associated with emotional labor rather than skill. We can't function without care work but treat care workers as disposable.

Your data isn't just collected - it's weaponized. Every click, search, purchase builds profiles that predict and manipulate behavior. Surveillance capitalism doesn't just watch; it shapes. You think you're making free choices, but the environment of those choices has been algorithmically designed around your psychological profile.

Your attention is harvested and sold. Social media platforms engineer addiction, fragment focus, monetize distraction. Sustained attention threatens profit; scattered scrolling generates revenue. They're not giving you a service - they're selling your consciousness to advertisers. Attention extraction is the business model.

They told you education was investment in yourself. They didn't mention the return would accrue primarily to your employers. You bear the debt; corporations reap trained workers without training costs. Education debt is privatized expense for socialized benefit - except the socialization flows upward to capital.

Housing scarcity drives up prices, which benefits landlords and developers. Empty homes outnumber homeless people, but homelessness persists because housing is treated as investment commodity, not human necessity. The housing crisis is manufactured by those who profit from artificial scarcity and desperation.

Poverty serves capital. It creates a desperate labor pool willing to work for less, accept worse conditions, tolerate greater indignity. The poor aren't failed by the system - they're required by it. Their desperation is someone else's negotiating advantage. Poverty is a feature, not a bug.

Gentrification isn't neighborhood improvement - it's displacement. Working-class communities are made unaffordable, long-time residents forced out, culture erased, replaced with boutiques serving new affluent populations. Urban colonization by cappuccino, making cities playgrounds for the rich while exiling the poor.

Mass incarceration isn't crime control - it's social control and profit extraction. Private prisons need inmates to profit. Communities need prison jobs. Politicians need tough-on-crime rhetoric. So we criminalize poverty, addiction, mental illness. Then we profit from warehousing the desperate in concrete cages.

Your employer monitors keystrokes, tracks emails, watches screens, measures productivity down to seconds. Surveillance masquerades as optimization. They say it's efficiency; it's control. Digital panopticon in every workplace, turning workers into performance metrics constantly evaluated and found wanting.

The gig economy strips away every worker protection previous generations fought to establish. No benefits, no security, no collective bargaining, no guaranteed income. Just algorithmic labor markets that pit desperate workers against each other. We're regressing to pre-industrial labor relations, wrapped in apps and called innovation.

They called you essential during the pandemic, then denied you hazard pay, adequate protection, and living wages. Essential means necessary but disposable. Your risk was mandatory; your compensation negotiable. Essential worker is capitalism's way of saying: we need your labor but not your wellbeing.

We call it democracy but money determines outcomes. Campaigns require millions, lobbying shapes legislation, corporate interests write regulations. The vote is theater; capital is governance. Real power flows through donations, not ballots. We have elections, but the wealthy have representation.

When the economy crashes, bailouts flow to banks while austerity falls on citizens. Public services cut, social programs slashed, safety nets shredded - all while the wealthy accumulate more. Austerity isn't fiscal responsibility; it's class warfare disguised as necessary medicine. You pay for their crisis with your deprivation.

The rich don't just hoard wealth - they build systems that make inequality appear natural, inevitable, even meritorious. They construct legal frameworks that protect capital over labor, then convince you that questioning these structures is radical. The architecture of injustice requires our collective amnesia to stand.

Commuting is unpaid labor. You spend hours daily traveling to work, buying that time back from your already insufficient wage. Rich people work from home; poor people commute. Your unpaid transit time is their stolen productivity. Class segregation by geography, measured in wasted hours.

Being poor is increasingly illegal. You're fined for sleeping outside, arrested for panhandling, jailed for unpaid fines. The legal system extracts revenue from those least able to pay, then imprisons them when they can't. Debtors' prisons were abolished in law but reconstituted in practice.

Education requires massive debt because society refuses to collectively fund what benefits everyone. You pay individually for public good, then work decades repaying loans while universities and banks profit. Student loans aren't unfortunate necessity - they're wealth extraction disguised as opportunity.

Your health is held hostage by employment. Insurance ties you to jobs you'd otherwise leave, making you tolerate abuse, accept stagnation, endure indignity. This isn't accidental - it's strategic. When survival depends on employment, workers are compliant. Healthcare hostage-taking ensures docility.

Nonprofits let capitalism off the hook. Instead of demanding systemic change, we fund charities to address symptoms. Corporations donate money they should have paid in taxes, get public relations benefits, and maintain the status quo. Charity becomes a pressure valve that prevents revolution.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.