I said this about landlords a while back, but the same is true about businesses, even small businesses, when it comes to "we need to reopen or else we lose everything"

People keep looking at this, and politicians keep trying to frame it as, the oversimplified capitalist fairy tale about a closed system involving businesses and their customers. Don't believe that shit

Because we're all universally struggling through these specific effects of an unprecedented event, it's sort of a unique place from which to think about income, wealth, and why no one has to lose anything, if not for pure greed

So the customers stopped buying your widgets. Your widget brick and mortar storefront might have to close. Why? At this point it's not because of lack of customers, it's because of who is still charging you for things that they should NOT be charging you for

The biggest one is probably rent (this is why the landlord example dovetails so neatly). The property management company for the strip mall is still demanding you pay rent at a time when the government is telling you that that space cannot be open to take income

That's awkward, mommy and daddy are fighting. Let's grant that maybe the property management company is also a small business, owned by a childless elderly aunt and uncle just trying to make a living, with no wealth

So that means THEY owe money to someone who's still unreasonably demanding it, right? And on and on, you can continue granting the "validity" of the potentially small businesses all the way up the chain

Eventually, though, the chain ends, and in almost every case it probably ends at a multinational banking conglomerate. These aren't just words, look up the profits and assets of the banking sector in the past five or so years, post-bubble

The thing those banks intend to do with their blood money passed all the way up from the widget store is: increase their share value, and reward their C-suite officers for executing the toxicity of capitalism as ruthlessly as possible

The government, or the banks themselves, could end the destruction of all of the lives up and down that chain, by simply saying "man, we're all going through it, huh? Seems unreasonable to expect things to happen as if there isn't a massive, worldwide pandemic"

Whether that realization leads to debt forgiveness, etc, is a purely mechanical concern that I'm not interested in here. What I'm saying is that this is all EXTREMELY POSSIBLE because the closer you get towards the top, the more "idle money" you find, aka wealth

They have us fighting each other, while they knowingly make inhumane demands that will bolster their quarterlies (one fourth of one year's worth of profits!) in exchange for the permanent ending of lives and livelihoods

If that isn't fucked up beyond all belief to you, I don't know what to say anymore. We are not dying, you are killing us.

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