America is obviously a cesspool of toxic dynamics that serve the rich and exploit those with lesser means.
So, we have all seen how corporations have brazenly taken advantage of many workers. We have seen repeat examples of corporations doing the following:
- Trying to unethically coerce and extort unpaid labor hours out of employees.
- In areas where minimum wage increases are mandated, companies comply but then cut hours.
- Contacting employees outside work hours, even late at night
- Dynamics where employees are sleeping at companies to work ridiculous amounts of hours or complete excessive amounts of work.
- Threatening employees who attempt to leave, remember the hospital who tried to legally prevent employees from quitting?
- Retaliating against employees through intimidation, shaming, firing, and filing lawsuits against employees who attempt to assert their legal rights after they have been treated illegally and unethically. In theory, advocating for your rights would and should work. However, corporations have lawyers and loopholes and attempt to destroy employees who report them. They throw their weight around because they have more power and know many employees have to work grueling hours just to pay for necessities. They take advantage and exploit. Obviously, the employees with the least income who need the jobs the most are the ones they hire and take advantage of. They are better able to exploit them because retaliation from a company could cause ruin in the life of an employee with little resources. No one puts these companies in check.
Many Americans are experiencing the following (and usually all together):
- Many employees live hand to mouth, as many companies refuse to pay a living wage.
- Many are working 2-3 jobs just trying to pay for their necessities with nothing left over. It's hard to aspire to improve your life when you work almost every waking hour just to pay bills with hardly any time left over for anything else. Many can't even sustain any kind of human relationships, or have access to any small amount of autonomy to just experience living outside of the excessive amount of hours working it takes to pay for just the basics. When your health goes to crap from being overworked and underpaid and you get sick, the psychopathic medical industry is there to shear you financially. The debt collectors are there to hound you when you can't pay the outrageously inflated medical prices.
- University pricing is extortionate, it's not called the college-cartel for no reason. Many Americans spend most of their lives paying off ridiculous amounts of money for student loans. Then, find that employers aren't willing to pay what the degree is worth, and are all too eager to trade an employee in for one they can get away with paying less.
- Employers pull all sorts of tricks to get out of offering any benefits.
- If you are able to get health insurance through any employer, there is hostile infrastructure so that you can't actually access it. For example: extremely high deductibles before you can actually use it, high monthly insurance payments. After paying for that while already living hand to mouth, if you are lucky enough to be able to afford to go through the whole process for any kind of medical issue a (initial appointment, tests, treatments, medicines, follow-ups), there are insurance companies who routinely deny medically necessary physician ordered diagnostic tests and treatments, because they want to maximize profits. It's been reported there are literally thousands of people who die every year due to this. After long drawn out battles with the insurance companies to try to get them to pay for things, many people die because they don't get the appropriate diagnostic or treatments in time. Which leads me to additionally state the obvious, medical care pricing in America is also simply extortionate. Many people go bankrupt just because of getting medical care when sick. Astronomical, unreasonable and unaffordable medical debt destroys your credit score if you can't pay it, which means you no longer qualify to rent an apartment, lease a car, etc. If things weren't already bad enough.
- Apartment rental prices are unaffordable and keep quickly rising due to greed. The middle-class is getting edged out from renting anywhere, even with making a full-time income in a middle class job. There are literally people who work white collar suit and tie jobs, who sleep in their cars and go into work every day. Not because they were drug addicts, or are irresponsible. Rather, because Profits-Above-All-Else Property Managers are raising rents hundreds to thousands of dollars quickly, and repeatedly. Renters have to pay up or get out. Some areas landlords are especially greedy. Even though 3x the rent price in income is hard to pull off with the outrageous rental prices in the first place, some landlords are even requiring 5x the rent in income. Property managers are allowed to practice income-discrimination and get away with it. No one is stopping them, yet we all need places to live to keep working.
- Since greed rules all in America, price-gouging is rampant. Just go to Amazon, you will often see items being sold at up to 10 times more than their in store price point. Grocery stores do the same. Everyone is digging into our pockets.
- Since many work grueling hours just to pay for necessities, there is hardly any time to relax or just simply live. How are we supposed to continue like this for the rest of our lives???? We only get one chance to live on Earth.
- Politicians are too far removed and lack enough concern to actually help American citizens when we are clearly in crisis. I can think of a few things that won't solve all of America's problems, but would help. For example, federal price-cap limits on apartment rental prices. Or, federal legislation that raises the minimum wage. If a business owner cannot afford to pay a living wage to prospective employees, they are not ready to hire them yet. Politicians are all too ready to play arm-chair social justice warriors online. They have their talking points, the reality is nothing has changed. American citizens are experiencing being eaten alive financially from all angles: by employers who don't pay living wages, the predatory medical industry, price-gouging goods and services vendors, and greedy landlords who make sport of raising rents on tenant to continually increase their profits from them, or replace them with more affluent renters.
The American government is asleep at the wheel, too consumed with their own benefit, and / or too embroiled in conflict to meaningfully solve the problems mentioned. America runs on capitalist greed. There is no way employers, the medical industry, property managers, and goods and services vendors are going to stop exploiting people on their own. If some do, it won't be enough to solve the problem. Since the American government is too ineffective to solve these problems, what are we supposed to do? Even between 2019 through now, everything seems unrecognizably worse. I feel like our chances to be able to live life even in small scope outside of being chronically oppressed and stressed is squashed out. Many Americans are being worked to death. Many are under extreme amounts of stress from lack of proper government safety net infrastructure. Many of us are holding our breaths hoping we don't get sick because it will mean financial and economic mobility ruin and possibly life-long debt. Many do ongoing poverty calculus to survive day to day. Many of us live having to be alert, on guard, and ready to defend ourselves because corporations in general (employers, medical industry, property management companies, etc.) actively look to exploit and extort citizens for additional profit. It is so tiring.
With AI, we know corporations are likely going to (if they aren't already) find ways to use it to cull jobs so they can minimize costs and maximize profits.
If there was a clear answer, I guess we would have it by now. I just can't believe we have to live like this. On top of all that, there is all the police brutality, aggressive racism and race-related abuses and murders, anti-intellectualism, and mass shootings daily. Living in America is a living nightmare. It's the land of the free (if you are rich), and home of the brave (if you are not rich, because you will need to be brave to live here if you are not rich). Politicians and greedy corporations are too rich from exploiting others and too drunk on power to meaningfully help society. We have to look out for ourselves.
I am trying to think of ways we can empower ourselves while in the throws of late-stage capitalism, and the American shit-show dynamics that show the country is in extreme decline. We cannot just live to be picked apart by greedy capitalists our whole lives. Our lives may not matter to them, but these are the only lives we get on this planet. I don't want my life to be dominated and wasted all the way to the grave by already rich jerks looking to get even richer by taking advantage of citizens.
Since we cannot rely on the American government to fix the mess, nor greedy capitalists to reform themselves, what are some ways we can protect ourselves and pull ourselves from their reach now and in the future? Here are some ideas I have thought of so far:
- Move to another country entirely / prepare to do so ultimately / get dual citizenship with another country. However this is very hard to do if you are not degreed or monied. The ones who would most benefit from moving to another country are the ones who likely will have the least hope of getting in. An alternative would be for a non-degreed person to move abroad on a student visa and get a bachelor's degree or higher while abroad. Add to this idea, find a country that is easier to immigrate to and start learning the language now. This way it is easier to hit the ground running in the new country, if one feels fleeing America needs to be done ASAP.
- Actively shift to self-employment completely, en masse. Ease out of traditional jobs and contracted jobs like Uber, etc. Rather, produce goods and services without an employer overlord. Obviously this is easier said than done, and very hard to do if you are working excessive hours just to make ends meet. The goal is to edge out any more powerful entity from having control over our income amount, hours worked, and working conditions. Some of us are more self-disciplined than others, and American lives are filled with stress. Therefore, it will be wise to institute, or utilize online resources for making the shift to self-employment and keeping on track. For example online and offline meetups for co-working, business masterminds, and accountability / productivity groups. Also, the self-employment path has its risks. There are many videos on TikTok, YouTube, etc., where people talk about how they are making $10K a month on Etsy, etc. It can be difficult to know what is coming from people who are legitimately doing that, and what videos are just people scamming others with fake info to hustle a course they will eventually try to sell to you later.
- Jump on the AI trend to make money before corporations exploit it to complete market saturation. For example, selling AI generated books, etc. Or, utilizing AI to construct business plans for becoming completely financially self-sufficient.
- Proliferating building of tiny home communities. Also, building living co-ops with functional systems that eschew capitalist methodologies, so people have more affordable housing and can actually live their lives in peace. Obviously, this would need to be started by those of us who are more monied.
- Exploring the possibility of (safe) medical tourism for medical and dental needs. Obviously this can be risky and not always possible due to laws. However, there are people who talk about paying far less by going to well-rated dentists in Mexico. Perhaps there are medical treatments that can be done in Mexico and Canada instead of America. Of course, much research would have to be done. This may be out of reach for some. For others with a little more financial leverage and vacation time, perhaps part of that could be used to get medical care more affordably. Alternate idea would be to find reputable clinics in Canada or Mexico that operate on weekends. This may not be the most practical idea, just trying to think of ways we can escape being hit with astronomical medical debts in America.
- Finding ways for the Anti-Work community to meet up locally (whether through online meetups or in person). Also, in these meetups people can possibly form work and resource alliances with each other as well as with community resources. Obviously, unless a person was born a trust fund kid, most of us have to work to make income. We may not be able to topple powerful greedy corporations, but we can look to side step them and their exploitation, by obtaining income independently and looking for ways to crowd-source and crowd-share resources, strategies, alliances, and ideas. It's great to share ideas online. Yet, I think there is additional power in grouping together locally. American systems like oppressive work environments can make life isolating. Grouping together is not just about emotional support, it's also about strategic power. Knowledge is power, and there is more power in numbers. The Anti-Work community may need to go by code names locally to avoid being targeted by people who don't understand the movement, or seek to malign it. We definitely need to bring back unions. Not sure how possible that is. However, local groups can align themselves with fair-employment community resources. This way should anyone in the anti-work group find themselves exploited by a company, resources are more apparent. Also, for those who do find good companies to work for it is a great way to network for trusted work opportunities. Obviously, we cannot trust any corporation 100%, but someone with a great experience could mean other people could also have access to that quality work environment through recommendation and hire. LinkedIn these days seems like a glorified perfect employee / candidate and company contest. Companies often put themselves in the best light possible. There is a lot of posturing and toxic positivity on LinkedIn. Knowing other people who have been burned by corporate America but found a decent employment arrangement, can reduce the chances of being hired by a company to be exploited later.
These are the ideas I have so far. Do you have any ideas how we can realistically pull ourselves out from under the oppressive system of American late-stage capitalism? We need to be able to actually live our lives without them being run into the ground by the greedy. What are your ideas?????