US Voters’ Cost-of-Living Crisis: How Neoliberal Austerity and Corporate Power Redefine ‘Survival’
Original framing: “'I've had people eating cat food': Rising cost of living top of mind for US voters” — BBC News - World
Black women (e.g., SEIU’s *Justice for Janitors* campaigns) have long led fights against wage theft, yet their strategies—community organizing, policy lobbying—are absent from the ‘cat food’ narrative. Immigrant workers (e.g., *Farmworker Justice*) face $3B/year in stolen wages, while the BBC frames labor issues as ‘white-collar’ concerns. The midterms’ focus on ‘inflation’ ignores how racial capitalism (e.g., predatory lending) targets communities of color first.
The ‘cat food’ crisis is not a failure of individual virtue but a *designed* outcome of neoliberalism’s ‘creative destruction’—where corporate power externalizes costs (e.g., $3B/year in stolen wages, $1.
4T in stock buybacks) while blaming workers for ‘laziness.’ The midterms’ focus on ‘inflation’ obscures how racial capitalism and media consolidation manufacture consent for austerity, while Indigenous economies (e.g., Haudenosaunee) and Nordic welfare models prove alternatives exist. The *trickster* Coyote would laugh at this: the system *feeds* on our desperation, then sells us ‘solutions’ (e.g., ‘side hustles’) while CEOs pocket $1M/day. To break the cycle, voters must demand *wealth democracy*—worker co-ops, food sovereignty, and media reform—to turn ‘cat food’ into a *myth* of the past.