Welcome To New York City: Where Life Is Worth less Than $3 Dollars.

At the end of empires, the lies are harder to uphold.

Imagine being murdered for something as simple as a few pieces of paper and manipulated metal, or more likely in today’s modern world, a few characters on a screen deciding whether you are able or unable to do something.

Well, that’s exactly what happened on Sept. 15th in New York City – the world capital of capitalism. When NYPD officers felt the need to discharge their firearms and kill a man for fare evasion. Not only did they kill the fare evader, they also shot two innocent bystanders, and even one the fucking cops got clipped. This extreme escalation was over a $2.90 fare. The situation is fucking dumb no matter where on earth it occurs, but the fact that it happened in NYC makes it even more infuriating. 

New York City is home to Wall Street; arguably the worst place on earth. If a mass shooting were to take place on Wall Street and a bunch of bankers were riddled with bullets – while news outlets would call it a tragedy and Joe Biden would mumble his condolences, most Americans would quietly shrug because deep down they would understand why it happened. 

These people were the architects of the 2007 recession, which forced many Americans out of their homes and into poverty, and they were the biggest benefactors of the pandemic, which forced many small businesses to close without any meaningful government assistance. 

These people – these privileged elites, never face the consequences of their actions. They may get dunked in a congressional hearing by Katie Porter, but nothing substantial manifests from the cathartic tongue lashing. 

So, for the most part, society’s collective anger is acknowledged and released in art. When the Joker kills two bankers on the subway in the 2019 film Joker, the audience doesn’t look at him as a monster because they know that the system that supports the bankers would kill Arthur or anyone with similar circumstances to Arthur for $2.90. 

The execution of a fare evader coincides with America’s ongoing support for the Palestinian genocide. The absurdity of our bureaucracy is that we give a blank check to a country to continue their slaughter of a civilian population while we somehow are so strapped for cash that we can’t allow some guy to not pay a few bucks to ride on a train system that has been in existence since 1904. It’s arbitrary and frankly, kind of fuckin’ stupid. 

If you know anything about the American financial system, you probably know that our dollar has no inherent value, it’s completely made up. Since the Vietnam War, the United States dropped the gold standard, so essentially, the only thing that ensures the value of the dollar is our reserve currency status upheld by threat of military intervention. To quote Neel Kashkari, the President of the Federal Reserve bank of Minneapolis, “there’s an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve.” 

Which means there’s no scarcity determining the value of the dollar since it has been completely unpegged from gold. 

So, in other words, the man who was killed on the train wasn’t killed because he didn’t pay. It’s deeper than that. He was killed because he refused to participate in a system that exists to uphold a lie. The reason Palestinians are killed is because their existence is a living, breathing threat to its expansion. 

If enough people stop participating in the lie, the whole system grinds to a halt, and that’s pretty much the only thing stopping a small percentage of people from killing bankers on the streets, and a large percentage of people feeling completely indifferent to it when it happens.

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