Warren power

I stayed at a South African equivalent of a Travelodge, where in theory customers can access comfort and convenience. This is only possible if you are prepared to navigate through the add-ons and corporate approach to maximum profiteering. It’s a sad fact that the lives of billions of people each day are made more challenging/annoying/downright unfair than they need to be by a world that celebrates corporate profiteering over reasonable treatment of people. It would be more understandable if we weren’t all paying over the odds for services that don’t deliver. This hotel is far from cheap and my inconveniences today are clearly completely trivial and relate to paltry internet allowance (additional paid packages available...) and a breakfast that couldn’t cater for the number of guests, but serve a broader point that we all gleefully spend money and it often results in dissatisfaction. And that’s before we even get into the real travesties of corporations compromising people’s abilities to survive, of which there are countless examples.

After check-out time I ‘reclaimed’ some of the expense of this hotel by lingering on the terrace, and I tried to cause maximum wear and tear of the chair by shifting my bulk a lot. I reckon that through increased maintenance I dented profits by about 5 rand (around 40 US cents), which didn’t offset the fact I hadn’t been able to get through the breakfast scrum to load my plate.

My petty tales illustrate why I heavily support movements like Elizabeth Warren’s US presidential bid, with her desire to restructure society to favour the private sector less. I hope she is successful; that country needs it more than most. And because the US is still seen as a blueprint by many (although not by as many as a lot of ‘Muricans like to think), a President like Warren may have some important global influence.

We are all instilled with a neo-liberal mindset to some degree but I think we should all recognise that denting the way that the private sector can run riot over all aspects of society does not necessarily mean less economically successful societies. In fact it might lead to happier, more equal societies. It is a common political campaign tactic to discredit ideas by the likes of Warren as wasteful and in the UK a very common criticism made of the more left-leaning elements of the Labour Party which would prefer more checks and balances on the private sector.

After I’d ruminated on corporates for a while and had to leave the hotel, I didn’t have many other options than to hang around at the neighbouring mall, awaiting the bus departure back to Mozambique in the afternoon. It was a bit like teenage days of hanging around Festival Park retail centre in Stoke except with fewer chavs in shellsuits and more biltong and undertones of racial inequality.

I occupied myself with a good session of Duolingo. Practising with background noise was useful to boost the listening skills, which lag behind the others.