Today’s episode of DemocracyNow had long pieces on two subjects.

One was the imprisonment of migrant children in horrifying conditions by the US Government–Senator Merkley was on to talk about how the Donald’s friends in the prison-industrial complex are getting paid $750 per child per day to stack kids in abandoned Walmarts, but somehow can’t afford to provide the children with beds or toothpaste.

The second piece was on how the rainforest is being burned en masse in Brazil by their equally insane president, a man who complained that his own country did a worse job than the Americans at exterminating the indigenous people there. Who live in that same rainforest.

The host tied it together by saying:

The wrong Amazon is burning.
The wrong ICE is melting.

Today I taught the beginner’s class. I didn’t use the words “surveillance capitalism” with them, but I described how it works, and how carrying around those convenient phones is the same as cows or deer tagging themselves voluntarily.

I’m not doing enough–I’m barely doing anything.

But like I pointed out in my closing riff to them, about how the convergence of genetics and technology will inevitably result in a permanent income inequality with a designer-baby ruling class and an old-fashioned random breeder slave class–this isn’t my personal problem. I am part of the generation that caused the problems, but by the time the shit really starts hitting the fan, I’ll be worm food.

The students themselves, and their children, will not be so lucky.

That seemed to get their attention a little. I think they might even be a little mad at me for pointing it out.

It hope they get a hell of a lot madder, before the Empire Gravy train flies off the end of the bridge that isn’t there anymore.