By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” The cry echoing across the internet.
Chamel Abdulkarim, a 29-year-old contractor at a Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California, is accused of filming himself setting fire to multiple pallets of paper goods and posting the video to Instagram, saying, “all you had to do was pay us enough to live” and “there goes your inventory.”
The blaze destroyed a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse estimated to contain $500 million worth of product, with the building itself valued at another $150 million. Federal authorities say Abdulkarim appeared motivated by hostility toward corporations and allegedly compared himself to Luigi Mangione, who is currently facing felony murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. People across Reddit are already calling Abdulkarim “Warehouse Luigi.”
Over in San Francisco, a 20-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house. Are these outliers? I don’t think so. This feels like the beginning of something, not the end. People are tired of feeling disposable.
Oracle recently cut tens of thousands of workers—not because it was losing money, but to free up cash to build AI data centers. Quarterly revenue hit $17.2 billion, up 22% year over year. They’re growing and firing at the same time. That’s the new economy hell we’re living in.
Worker productivity has surged more than 60 percent since the late ’70s, while wages have barely moved, rising maybe 15–20 percent. We’re producing more than ever and still falling behind. CEOs now make roughly 300–350 times what the average worker does. That used to be closer to 20 times. Somewhere along the way, the whole thing shattered.
It feels less like a functioning economy and more like something out of The Running Man or Demolition Man. We’re not at The Road—yet.
Republicans and Democrats alike are realizing that capitalism isn’t delivering on its promises. The people driving luxury cars and sitting on boards don’t know what trickle-down economics looks like for the rest of us—and they don’t care. They maximize profits while we put $20 in the tank and barely move the needle.
Rent is still sky-high. Buying a house is out of reach for most people. Housing costs have outpaced wages by multiples over the last few decades. Groceries feel like highway robbery—food prices are up more than 25% since 2020. Kimberly-Clark made $19 billion last year, and most of us are still making the same wages, still wondering why we’re broke, still thinking about a side hustle even though one job is exhausting enough.
Savings account? Mine had eighty cents in it. I have a full-time job.
The state of the American economy isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a class issue. People are being squeezed from all sides, and more of them are realizing neither party is offering a real solution.
Jerry Murrell, CEO of Five Guys, once gave away a $1.5 million bonus to employees after a promotion overwhelmed staff. Why? “I didn’t want anybody shooting me in the back,” he joked. Even said in passing, it lands; executives are waking up to the reality that people are one missed paycheck away from making a life-altering choice.
The system feels rigged against us. The gap keeps widening—wealth consolidating at the top, debt piling up everywhere else. Without meaningful change, the anger doesn’t go away. It builds. And it starts to make sense why someone would strike the match.
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