Capitalists: "If you plebs are not getting poorer every year, we are losing."

That this unfounded #fearmongering is self-serving is perhaps too obvious to require stating.

But it is still not widely enough appreciated that these people are the ones primarily responsible for hot-housing the inflationary crisis through rampant #profiteering in the first place. The majority of recent price increases are down to rising business profit margins, not a contraction in supply. So this threat is effectively the bully saying, "if you complain too loudly about the fact that I'm taking your lunch money, I might just have to take your shoes as well, and we wouldn't want that, would we?"

#capitalism #inflation #VictimBlaming #JustWorldBelief #inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/31/australian-employers-claim-excessive-minimum-wage-rise-in-line-with-inflation-could-lead-to-recession

"After years of semantics and political rhetoric, the hearings confirmed robodebt as baseless, ethically indefensible policy. [Commissioner] Holmes rebuked the program as “amateurish, rushed and disastrous”. The core concept at the heart of robodebt was the tactical imposition of administrative burden on vulnerable people."

The Robodebt 'welfare cop' system implemented by Australia's conservative federal government was a form of corvée labour (unpaid, forced, intermittent) punitively applied on the poor and vulnerable purely because they are poor and vulnerable.

The criminalisation of poverty is the logical consequence of a capitalist system seeking to justify itself. In the logic of plutocratic PR, if the ultra-rich must be seen to have 'deserved' their billions (and the comfortably middle class are to be convinced to keep giving an electoral rubber stamp upon the interests of the ultrarich), then the poor and vulnerable must be framed as also 'deserving' their plight.

This is #JustWorldBelief in action, where the status quo must be justified, along with the suffering of its many, many victims.

The cruelty of Robodebt is a feature, not a bug.

@digitalpolicy

@nathanaelcbr Yes, that's the point: to make you so frustrated you give up and stop applying.

Cruelty and mismanagement are not bugs, they are features of a system that has been broken by design by those who think poverty ought to be punished, since people get what they deserve and if you are poor then you must deserve it, hence punishment.

The purpose of this belief is revealed by its correlate: I deserve my privilege and comfort and do no need to feel any empathy or pain for those who needlessly suffer on unimaginable scales. I can put them out of my mind, confident that they, like me, are getting what they deserve.

This is the core of #conservative politics, and is known as #JustWorldBelief. It entails #VictimBlaming as a core commitment. And justifies the deliberate infliction of cruelty (even the petty but real bureaucratic cruelty of pointlessly bad design for a welfare system).

#NotABug #CrueltyByDesign