What is the Middle Class?

I want to start off today as well. I haven't been in San Francisco since before the pandemic. I come here. I've been coming to San Francisco to the Castro District, which is largely LGBTQ plus area, as an advisor with the Lesbians Who Tech and Allies organization. For the last several years put on two summits a year where we

have incredible speakers. We've had Hillary Clinton, Stacy Abrams, you know, among other big names that have come to talk on a variety of issues raging from social justice to tech

to everything in between. And since the pandemic, obviously we have had to move into doing virtual events and so this is my first time here, and what is striking is one if you haven't traveled as much or at all since since twenty nineteen, it's startling to roll up into places that you have very fond memories of or very distinct, I should say, memories of how they were and the cash stro to me in San Francisco has always been super bustling, with lots of you know, queer

folks and artists and musicians and restaurant tours and just had a different energy and vibe about it. And you know, my friends and I are here and walking around and there's an eerieness that is in the air. It's it's a quarter of the people, first of all, are walking around on the streets. Majority of everyone is masked, even if they're walking outside. But there is an eeriness. There's a sadness that is kind of that is lingering, that

is noticeable. And it's very different than New York. And I don't know if that is because I live in New York, you know, day and day out, and so there, while there has been significant changes, the vibration of the city has come back to life. Whereas here and even when I went to La recently, there is just like again, a sadness, a just a lingering sense that something is

off an off kilter. And I say that because it is present, you know, in so many different ways, whether you're still working from home, or have slowly started to go back into an office, or have been told that you're never going back into an office, or your plans were altered because of omicron, or you know what have you.

But I can't help but wonder how long. And I don't even just mean like the economic effects, but I wonder if we have changed just our emotional well being, our structure of society for the long haul, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, right which folks, I cannot believe that the calendar year is going to be changing, you know, but in a couple of weeks will be in twenty twenty two, which is mind blowing to me and I'm certain to many of you as well, But

we will be two years. The first reported death of COVID came in February of twenty twenty. There's a first reported death. Since then, America has surpassed, from what I said yesterday, eight hundred thousand deaths, which is significantly more than any other country. Like, let that sink in for a moment. Now, you know, we could say, we could say a lot of different things right about that reality.

We could say that, you know, it is we do the most reporting right and that we have been transparent about our reporting, whereas other countries may not have been right or may not have had the capability to have reported the amount of deaths. But I think that it says something right. It says something really striking and really upsetting that America has surpassed every other nation in the

number of deaths. And what is really frightening is that a quarter of those deaths have happened since we've had

the vaccine. Right, So just think about this for a moment, that even though we have a life saving vaccine, even though we now have mutated two major times since the alpha variant of twenty twenty, we've had delta and now omicrons, that we have vaccines, we have booster shots, because of scientists, because of doctors, nurses, healthcare practitioners, that we have a pathway out, and yet a quarter of those over eight

hundred thousand deaths have come after the fact. We are still, according to The New York Times, experiencing twelve hundred deaths a day. It makes absolutely no sense. You know, I almost want to go back to the history and the record books of other plagues and flues and pandemics that have wiped across the planet and see what the political

climate was like. You know, where people in the midst of the Spanish flu is, tens of thousands of people were dying so rapidly, where their protests in the streets, right when polio was ravaging many nations before there was a vaccine, where there are people in the streets that said no, it's God's will and everyone should get polio. I just find it's so absolutely bizarre and sickening that we are still at a place where we're hearing stories

about people now on their deathbeds saying give me the vaccine. Well, now it's too late, right, and now the vaccine doesn't matter, won't work because your body has been ravaged by COVID.

And I keep thinking as well, you know, because of hippo laws, right, because of the laws that we have that allow people able to have privacy right around their medical treatment and their medical care, that that has prevented us from actually being able to see exactly what happens to the body when COVID hits, exactly what the nurses and doctors right and healthcare workers are experiencing day in

and day out trying to save lives. Right knowing that we have a vaccine, it was different in twenty twenty. We didn't know what the fuck we were dealing with, But now we do. We have a better understanding. We are seeing how and why it's mutating. We're not able to stop it because, frankly, human nature, humans led by Right the likes of Fox News and other bull shit politicians, have made it so this is endemic. It's never going anywhere.

Right now, we're hanging on to the hope that omicron is not as lethal as delta or the alpha was, and that if you were vaccinated and boosted that it is unlikely that you will end up in hospital. But how long will it take for omicron, which is more transmissible than the delta variant, to take shape. And then once that takes shape, and we still have twenty five of our population that refuses to get vaccinated, how long before we have a mutation on top of that mutation?

And maybe we're not so lucky that the vaccines along with the boosters actually work, you see right now. They were announcements that came out earlier in the week that Alvin Elli, the famed African American dance company, was halting two of their shows because people within the company. I don't know if it's dancers, assistance, teachers, what have you, but people within the company have contracted COVID, So they've canceled two shows. New York University n YU has canceled

their events because of COVID. Broadway is worried, the Opera is concerned, right because as we get into the colder months, particularly on the East coast right and in the North Pacific Northwest, in all of these places that people are going to go back indoors, and we still have a couple of holiday humps to get over before we reach

the new year. And what we know about COVID and the holidays and cold weather is that it is exacerbated, right, that the numbers spike and if we have people who aren't boosted, right, because what we are learning about amicron is that even if you are double vaccinated, that depending on how far you are from your last shot, that if you are not boosted, you can get sick, and

I don't you know. Before I was just like, I just want to be able to go to the grocery store, not wash my cardboard boxes, and not feel like I'm going to die every time I leave my house. And if I can get back to that place, that will be good. We got back to that place, but now we're at a space where the lingering effects of long COVID we're still discovering. There are some people that contracted COVID and you know, they had a mild flu or

they were asymptomatic. There are other people that have contracted COVID and they are now able to get disability because they're no longer able to work, they have crushing migraines, breathlessness, right not able to climb a flight of stairs right walk from their bedroom to their kitchens without feeling completely and totally out of breath. That there is this lingering

brain fog. We don't know what that actually is, but that's what it's referred to, where you can't really remember things and things are kind of out of place in your mind. So as time goes on, people that have been affected by COVID, which are tens of millions of people, right, what will work look like? What will our lives look like? What will long term care look like? We're still only dealing with the immediacy of now, right, but we're there are people who are thinking about will shit, what does

this look like down the road? If all of these people now can have preexisting conditions because of their exposure to COVID, right, what does that mean for healthcare costs? What is that you know? So there are all of these unknowns, and so if the one thing that we do know for sure right now is that vaccines keep us from dying, they keep us from severe illness, and that we are fortunate enough as of right now that in the United States you're able to get these shots

in arms and boosted for free. That is not the case around the globe. That is not the case in so many places. And once again, it is capitalism that is stopping people from being able to stay well. Right.

This was the conversation that we were having a couple of weeks ago when I first learned about how disgusting the higher income countries were in not passing the trips waiver so that India and South Africa and other lower income nations could be able to develop their own vaccines and not have to rely on the benevolence of the modernas and the fisers and those nation states where they're

headquartered in doing the quote U quote right thing. The right thing would have been to lift the intellectual property rights from the vaccine that has ravaged the fucking globe and to ensure that we wipe out COVID and that be our first priority. Fuck your billions of dollars right that you want to fill your coffers with and give your CEOs these major bonuses, and your shareholders and oh, the members of Congress, particularly the Republicans that saw this

coming so that they could you buy up stocks. Right. I continue to say and believe that white supremacy coupled with capitalistic greed is going to be the death of us. And when I say the death of us, I mean the entirety of the planet. Right. Why we fight climate change with the urgency and the rigor that it requires, Oh, because we don't want to upset car manufacturers. We don't

want to upset industry. Because the excuse time and time again, and this is by both Democrats and Republicans, Because I can't even say, oh, it's just Republicans. No, it's by both Democrats and Republicans that they feed into the needs of the one percent and screw the ninety nine. So we can't make the major changes that we need because, oh my god, industry will tumble. Well, that was the same ship that they told us during the housing crisis in the beginning of the early auts. Oh, we have

to bail the banks out. Oh, we have to bail out the car industry. Oh, we have to bail out the airlines. But whenever we're looking for our quote unquote build back better, right, whenever we're looking for our own tax dollars to bail out the American people to support the American people to be reinvested into us and into community, which is supposedly what the Build Back Better Biden agenda is supposed to do. Oh well, now, by the way, that's being kicked down until you know, we're kicking that

can down the road until probably spring. Meanwhile, Democrats had set a self imposed deadline of Christmas to get it done, only to once again look like fucking failures that they don't know what to do with the power that the people have given them. So I look at where we are, and I want to get into the conversation around inflation

right now. And you know the fact that if you're going into stores, if you are filling your car up with gas, if you are trying to buy holiday gifts and the like, you are recognizing that your dollar is not going as far as it used to on top of everything else. And then they want to tell us the lie, Well, it's because nobody wants to work. So we had to end right all of the economic relief that we were providing people once again with their own

tax dollars back right whatever people whatever. Republicans want to turn around and say, oh, well, people don't want to work because the government is. They're just suckling off the tit of government. Well, actually, actually it's the other way around, because without our consistent payment of taxes, government wouldn't fucking function. And what we are looking for government to do with our tax dollars is to strengthen our social safety nets.

Is to ensure that nobody goes hungry, that roads are paved, that airports are maintained, that railroads are innovated upon, that we're able to build infrastructure that can fight against our rapidly changing climate. But anytime that you talk about providing relief to the American people, you ever listen to how politicians talk about us, Oh, they're lazy, right now, buildback Better is dead in the water. They're going to tell you that, oh, it'll get done, It'll get done. I

don't think that it will. And I think that that was the major mistake of breaking up Buildback Better from the larger Infrastructure, the larger building infrastructure part of Biden's agenda, because unless you were going to pass those things together, you were going to give the mansions of the world the ability to go through with their fine tooth comb and take out all of the things that people actually need, like, oh,

we're the only industrialized fucking nation that doesn't have parental leave, paid parental leave. You want to know why people are leaving the workforce? Oh, maybe because they don't make a living wage. They've decided that they're not anymore going to just work to exist, that there must be something better out there for them. But we're looking at a major problem right now with inflation, and they're talking about the supply chain issues, which we saw right with the ships

out in sea with nobody to unload them. Nobody to unpack them. We're hearing things like this is the highest level of inflation since nineteen eighty two. Right. But one of the things that I found disturbing, and I want to run it by all of you, is this in an article that I was reading. You know, I feel that it is important to recognize that our news is skewed through the eyes and the lens and the perspective

of the rich. Right. And so they tell us that there is a job shortage, and I tell you there isn't a job shortage. There's a shortage of good jobs. And what do I mean by good jobs? I mean jobs that you can work, where you have health benefits, where you have a four one K, where you are able to provide for your basic necessities as well as save and or invest. Right, there is a lack of those jobs. But what CEOs wants you to believe, and what our government wants you to believe, is that people

are lazy. Americans are lazy. So at once they want to tell us that you're hard working. But on the other hand, they're like, oh, but we're gonna end that student loan debt relief program that we promised you. Oh, We're not going to give you any more stimulus checks because in this article in the New York Times written by Jianna Smialik, inflation has arrived. Here's what you need to know, and here's what she writes. Inflation is a

loss of purchase in power over time. It means your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. Inflation is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for a basket of goods and services. In the United States, there are two main inflation gauges. Consumer Price Index or CPI, measures the cost of things urban consumers buy out of pocket.

The other, personal Consumption Expenditures Index or PC is released or is released at more of a lag, and measures things people consume, including things that they don't pay for directly, notably healthcare, insurance, government benefits, the government covers right, and your jobs cover some. What causes inflation? This is what

I found interesting. This is what she writes. In the short term, high inflation can be the result of a hot economy, one in which people have a lot of surplus cash or are accessing a lot of credit and want to spend. Now, let me pause right there for a second. Does anything about this current economy feel hot

to you? Does it feel like people are just you know, out there just making it rain at every store that they walk into, that there is such an increased demand for things that prices have to be raised in order to meet that demand. No, it's not. And while you can look at the jobs numbers, and I always want to know, like who is measuring this and how and where and what jobs are we talking about and what kind of quality jobs are we adding back in? But let me not, you know, let me ask too many

questions for disappointment, just a rain down. But the reality here is that that's not what's causing this inflation. But here's what she goes on to, right, But inflation can and often does rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions. Limited oil production can make gas expensive. Supply chain problems can keep goods in short supply, pushing up prices. The inflationary burst America has experienced this year has been driven partly by the

quirks and partly by demand. And by quirks, she's referring to the coronavirus. The coronavirus clog shipping routes helping to limit the supply of cars and couches and pushing prices higher airfares and rates for hotel rooms, which if you're trying to travel this holiday season, you realize that those deals are fucking long gone, that the long lines are back at TSA, and that the prices that the airlines are charging are through the fucking roof, as are hotel prices.

But also, she says, the case also the case that consumers who collectively built up big savings. This is what she writes. And when I tell you that I've read this article multiple times and talk to a couple of different people about it, because by the end of it, I was irate, and you will understand why in a moment.

But it is also the case that consumers who collectively built up big savings thanks to months in lockdown and repeated government stimulus checks, are spending robustly, and their demand is driving part of inflation. They are continuing to buy even as costs for exercise equipment or outdoor furniture rise, and they are shouldering increases in rent and home prices. The infatiguable shopping is helping to keep price increases brisk. First of all, I think that this is absolutely false.

One the stimulus checks, if you were able to get one because you made a certain amount of money, right, amount to two roughly twenty four hundred dollars right for those two big checks, big checks. I will tell you that in New York, for instance, the average rent right is roughly depending on what part of New York you are in. If you're in New York City, I'm going to say that the average rent is probably somewhere between you know, fifteen to twenty five hundred dollars, right, depending

on what you're looking for. If it's a one bedroom versus studio, you know, if it has a walk up versus elevators. But the average mortgage and rent in this country well exceeds twelve hundred dollars a month unless you are literally living in the middle of nowhere, right. There are very few places where you can roll up nowadays, right and pay five six hundred dollars a month and

rent or in a mortgage. So this quote unquote big surplus right is a false flag if I've ever seen one, because what it is making seem is that people have just been laying around suckling off of the Tit of government. They have all this excess cash that they're sitting on and now they're just buying up peloton bikes right an

outdoor furniture like it's nobody's business. The reality is so far from that narrative that is being pushed out, just in the same way that the narrative is being pushed out that there are so many jobs, but nobody wants to work and that's all because of the stimulus checks. Right. She goes on to say this, but you know, it's like,

here's the thing. Is inflation bad? And she says, well, for some people, inflation isn't good, right, And she starts out by saying that inflation isn't good for those that are on fixed incomes, like students and the elderly. And in my mind, I'm thinking, who isn't on a fixed income?

Because if you have been paying attention for the last two years that we've been living in COVID, you understand now at this point in time that anything is possible, right, That you could lose your job, that there could be a next wave that the vaccines don't work against, that if you are changing jobs, you better do something that doesn't require you to leave your fucking home in the event there is a next major fourth or fifth or sixth wave, right that who can stay at home and

still be able to provide for your family. That this surplus of money that you're talking about actually doesn't exist because millions of people had lost their jobs and needed those stimulus checks just to be able to put food on the table, or put medicine in their medicine cabinets, right, or fill up gas so that they can go around and actually, if they were essential workers, if they weren't gig workers, that they could pick up work here and there, right,

which requires its own investment in order to be able to do. But the narrative is that Americans are either lazy or sitting on a bunch of fucking cash. And that's what I took from this article. And I'm like, neither of those things are true. She goes on. Most everyone agrees that super fast price increases, often called hyperinflation, spell trouble. They destabilize political systems, turn middle class workers into paupers overnight, and make it impossible for businesses to plan.

Wem are Germany, where hyperinflation helped to usher Aidolf Hitler into power, is often cited as a case in point. Moderate price gains, even ones as a bit above the federal official goal, are a topic of more serious debate. Slightly higher inflation can be good for people who owe money at fixed interest rates, and she goes on to provide an example. But I want to say this. She then has a section entitled how does inflation affect the poor?

Poor households, she writes, spend a bigger chunk of their budgets on necessities food, housing, and especially gas, which is often a contributor to bouts of high inflation, and less on discretionary expenditures. If rich households face high inflation and their wages do not keep up, they may have to cut back on vacations or dining out. A poor family

may be forced to cut back on essentials like food. This, to me is actually the crux of the conversation we are not having, because when I was reading this, I was saying to myself, well, tell me, at this point in time, what constitutes a quote unquote poor household? What does that actually look like in dollars and in cents? Because here's the thing that people are not paying attention to. Everything in our society has been hyper skewed. Just take

our politics as one example. The further right right that the white supremacists Republican Party has gone has pulled the entire spectrum further to the right, which means that what was considered the middle, what was considered moderate, is actually right of center. The same is true with regard to our economy, and I don't need to be an economist in order to recognize this. You have people who are

uber wealthy. The uber wealthy have completely skewed things for the rest of us, those that are making millions of dollars a year. The rich during the pandemic got ultra rich, right, but that is not the same was not true for the middle class or for the poor. They did not move up right, So everything has been stretched towards the uber rich. So when we're talking about quote unquote poor households, to me, what that looks like is that you are

working forty hours a week. You are barely able to make your rent, to make your mortgage, to then also pay for your necessities. And if you're able to do that, then you are unable to actually save and or invest. So to me, that is actually working poor. So the conversation that we're not having is about how we have actually skewed what it means to be middle class. You want to talk about inflation in the price of goods?

Will our entire class and cast structure in this country has changed incredibly rapidly, Like we have always been having conversations about the quote unquote shrinking middle class. No, it just costs more now to be even perceived to be middle class. And the question that I would have for economists is what is actually considered middle class? What does

that look like? She says here that oh, if your middle class, inflation is about oh, maybe I can't afford this vacation, or maybe I can't afford this new car, whereas poorer people, lower income people are like, now, I can't afford that bread and peanut, butter and jelly. I gotta pick one. I gotta pick two of the three

because I can't have three of the three. And what I believe to be true, especially with the after effects continuing to linger and reverberate of the COVID economic meltdown, I believe that there are more Americans that are in the poorer household range than actually even want to admit it to themselves. So when she's having a conversation and we have this quote here from a senior economy at Macro Policy Perspectives that says this, for lower income households,

price increases eat up more of their budget. Duh, right, we know that, But the reality is is that what is government doing right in order to bridge that gap? And if we're going to have true conversations about how the economy is actually doing, we can't look to the stock market to be an indicator of whether or not things are going well because there's only a small percentage of people who actually have their money in that market. The rest of us can barely afford to keep roofs

over our heads. But listening to those CEOs and shareholders convince politicians to provide you with your money back in your pocket so that you're not just making ends meet, but that you're actually able to thrive is the real conversation. And that's why I say that we continue to push people right, There's only so far that they will continue to be pushed. There's only so much more that people

will take before they revolt. Case in point, you know, I was thinking to myself before it, before the news story had even broken about all of those workers that were caught in the tornado in the Amazon building and the Amazon building structure. The Amazon factory is like a fucking city city blocks wide, right, And I'm thinking to myself, we have a system in this country right that warns people that the weather is changing and that you need

to take cover. Right. We have tornado warnings, right, tornado warnings, tornado alarms that go off. Well, what was reported is that workers right in these factories were told by their overseers, because we can't say that they are anything other than that, that they were not allowed to leave, and that if they left because of fear of being killed or trapped by the tornado, that they wouldn't have a job tomorrow.

So literally, these people were faced with possible death right or loss of a job, which could also mean at some point, right loss of housing, loss of hell of care, loss of food supply, all of these things. What kind of choice is that to give to somebody? Either you stay here, right because this eight dollars an hour or ten dollars an hour job is worth your life, But because you don't know what's coming, you can't risk saving

your life in order to upset your financial stability. We want to talk about, you know, the end of unions and all of these things. What kind of fucking choice is that? And you know what, no one we'll get in trouble over that these companies won't take a hit. They'll get one bad headline, maybe two, and then they'll keep it moving. And you know why, because the networks need their advertising in order to pay their own bills.

And so you'll see these little stories and they'll be hot, you know, a hot moment of outrage, and then we'll turn the page. But there's a reason why those stories don't stay on the front page. And it's because those corporations, those rich CEOs, are the ones that get to call the shots, and they're the ones that get to tell the story. And until we all unite, right regardless of who we are, where we live, what we look like, and say that work in this country needs to fucking change,

it's never going to. But this story in the New York Times pissed me the hell off because I'm like, we're just not telling the truth, and there's a real like And again I say, I'm not an economist, right, but I'm smart enough to know when I'm being bullshitted, right, Like, I'm smart enough to know when things don't seem to be adding up in the way that they're being presented.

But you see, that's what they hope, because so long as you can keep people just scrambling to have their basic needs met, the more that you're able to get over to them, the more that you're able to use them. I mean when I said, I tweeted this the other day and I said, you don't have to watch squid Game. There's a reason why squid Game took over the globe.

And it wasn't just for its insane violence, right, but it was what led people to put themselves in these situations because they were so much in debt that death would have been some relief. Why is that a story that resonates in so many different countries, in so many different places at this particular time. You know, we watched this week the story in South Dakota. I talked about this earlier. You have teachers scrambling on the ground, putting

dollar bills into their hats, underneath their shirts. This was joy and entertainment for those around them, not an actual like just way to look at our country and say that this is fundamentally broken that right now, the Senate had no problem passing a nearly eight hundred fucking billion dollar defense bill, twenty four billion dollars more than the Pentagon actually asked for. But we have teachers in this country scrambling on the ground for dollar bills, and we

think that America is somebody's beacon. America is like that fucking before Pitcher, right, that's what it looks like now. It is no one's testament to anything that is substantial or great. And Tupacs said it, He said it decades ago,

got money for war, but can't feed the poor. You're giving the Pentagon an excess of twenty four billion dollars, But we have teachers scrambling around in order to pay out of their own pocket to supply future generations with the supplies that they need to be able to compete on anybody's global stage. How does that make sense? Make it make sense to me. That's why I tell you that it his greed coupled with white supremacy that is

going to be the destruction of this planet. Because everywhere you look, all you have to do is follow the money. And there is your reason. Why are things so fucked up, follow the money. Check out this article in the New York Times once again. It is entitled Inflation has Arrived. Here's what you need to know and it's written by

Jianna Smi Alec. Check it out and let me know in the comment section honestly what you were thinking about with the rise in prices, but more so the conversation that is being had as to why it's happening and who is to blame or how it is going to be stopped, because I'd love to hear from all of you. That is it for me today. Here, folks on woke a f as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.