No one likes talking about the corruption in OUR system, yet it is present and it is a festering problem that threatens the social fabric we all depend on.
“Elections boil down to conflicts within the business community.” ( T. Ferguson)
When you add together the Reagan deregulations, the Clinton deregulations, the Bush deregulations with Citizens United allowing unlimited, unidentified corporate cash to flow into politics, and McDonnell v. United States letting that cash flow through to the hands of public officials, then the United States really did lose, not just in court. The people have lost control of the state to a hydra of business, government and criminal bad actors. The result is inequality so extreme, a regulatory environment so lax, and a judicial system so unresponsive that all the systems we’ve been patching and nursing could fail all at once with cataclysmic results.
“Forty years after the 1980 turning, the world today seems to be back on the course first charted in the Gilded Age. Bending and distorting economic and political systems to suit their purposes, globalized networks of kleptocratic elites compete in pursuit of wealth without limit. In the process, they are debasing or destroying priceless treasures and countless human lives.” — Sarah Chayes
Like the trajectory of the pandemic, I wish we could as a society seriously examine the history of what untrammeled greed does to to a society and move to mitigate the rot before it hurts more people.
I know, I know. Good luck with that. :/
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
December 4, 2021 at 6:28 am
silverapplequeen
The whole point of the Reagan Revolution was to end the New Deal & return the US to the Gilded Age. & here we are.
Watch popular TV shows from the 60s & 70s. They are anti-tax all the way. As a kid, I didn’t pick up on that & I would wager that most adults didn’t either, but like the picture of the hamburger that’s secretly put into a reel of a movie so that you don’t see it but you do see it & suddenly you’re hungry, all that talk about “tax is theft” primed the American public for the what was coming in the 1980s & 1990s. & now if you say that ANYONE should be paying more taxes, you are called a socialist or worse. But you can’t have a functioning society, government or culture without taxes. & we are seeing this now.
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December 4, 2021 at 7:39 am
John B.
The libertarians hired better comedians than the New Dealers. I couldn’t figure out which one of these guys was the straight man.
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