Capitalism, amiright?

Above: Milton Friedman, the guy
who is a large part of the reason we use
cancer terminology to describe capitalism.

I'm a renter, and have been my entire adult life. And last night I was sitting here in my rented apartment when one of the vertical blinds just sort of fell off. Like, broke and fell off. And this isn't a woe is me post. I mean, I live in Santa Cruz California, and everyday on my way to work I pass by people who have it far, far worse than I. That is, they don't even have crappy plastic vertical blinds to disappoint them in the first place. What this is is a bemoaning of the general shittiness of twenty-first century, end-stage capitalistic America.

This is in fact the third set of these blinds I've lived with over the years, and over several apartments, and in all three cases they simply fell apart. They're cheap, and rather than replace them with something that lasts, the building management just replaces them with the same thing. Because cheap. Because profit margin. I don't know, I'm not a business guy.

This is not a picture of my apartment, but it might as well be.

Pictured: consumerism. We do this to
ourselves on purpose, if you can believe it.

But I'm not here to complain about blinds, but I am here to complain. For the umpteenth time, I opened my laptop and found the battery nearly dead despite being freshly charged. I thought enough is enough, drove to the store and participated in the only human activity actively rewarded by our civilization: consumerism. I pointed to the very computer I am now typing this on, said "that one!" and handed over my credit card. Done. Right? Capitalism: achieved. 

It's been used as a verb since the
sixteenth century and is perfectly
correct, but I don't have to like it.

A few days later, I got an email explaining to me that my credit score had been "impacted." Setting aside any questions I might have had about using "impact" as a verb I logged into the site I use to track such things, and sure enough I was ten points down. The horror! Ten points? What did I do? How have I disappointed the credit bureaus? It turns out I had committed the grievous error of actually using my credit card, and while I carried that balance for exactly three days (only two of which were business days), I have been forever marked as a credit risk. Well, at lest for a few months or whatever.

I suppose I should have
seen that coming. 

But how did this come to pass? Evidently, I spent a greater percentage of my limit than they were comfortable with, so ten points. There's no appeals process, I have no recourse. The credit lords have spoken. Woe is me. But for real, what even do they want from us? They who? I don't know, whoever stands to gain from a system that's increasingly stacked against those making fewer than six figures? Whoever stands to gain from preventing us from ever being able to get ahead. Whoever stands to gain from--oh, right, rich people.

I mean, it's probably not an actual table. They
probably all get on a zoom call or something.

And it's not like I think there's some secret cabal of rich, shadowy figures who sit around a conference table thinking up ways to screw over the rest of us. It's just a system that over time has gone from being indifferent to the best interests of most of us, to openly hostile. I'm not an economist or a political scientist, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that allowing money to mix with politics has some pretty foreseeable consequences we rarely seem to be able to foresee. 

And look, I know it's just a dumb credit score, and I'm far, far from the biggest victim of this system. Like I said, I have a place to live (albeit one with cheap vertical blinds), which is more than an alarming number of Americans can say. But at some point this becomes unsustainable, right? Like, if something doesn't change, at some point we're all going to get tired of being judged by Equifax, and grab some pitchforks and torches?

"Bad consumer! Bad! You're doing it wrong. I deduct ten points."

-Whomever's in charge of credit, as a thing