I'm going to ask you to try to look at the last thirty-plus years in the U.S. through a purely empirical lens, if you could. Try to put political partisanship aside, just for a few minutes, and just look at a series of events and see if you can discern a pattern.
You may be familiar with the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in 1999, with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (aka the "Enron loophole"), with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, with the passage of the Iraq War Resolution of 2002.
Then there have been literally thousands of ALEC-written laws across the entire country basically striping U.S. citizens of all kinds of human and workers' rights, and pushing laws like conceal-carry, stand-your-ground.
Then there is the growth of the private prison industry, the privatization of public education, curtailment of habeas corpus, mass media conglomeration into he hands of 5 or 6 corporations (the result of deregulation), the government claiming the right to detain citizens without charge and indefinitely, the right to assassinate citizens extrajudicially (a "right" that it has already exercised at least two times), a relentless assault on labor unions which has resulted in the lowest level of unionization in modern history.
And then there was the wholesale looting of the nation's coffers (i.e., your money, your wealth, your retirement, your safety net) by the Wall Street racketeering criminal cartel, and the appointment of the same folks implicated in the crimes to top government positions, all done with in-your-face chutzpah, and total impunity.
There are thousands of other data points that can be identified in this trajectory, but the above description gives you a pretty clear idea...
In the meantime income inequality has reached the highest level in recorded history.
Now, all this is a clear trajectory of the system as a whole.
Now, let's take a step up from the root level and get back into the political level.
It's basically a circus. You are given two "choices." To the right you see a crazed guy, drooling, spewing all manner of lunacy while wielding a machete in one hand and a AK-47 in the other (the Republican party). To the left you see a nice-looking guy, nicely dressed, well-spoken, and seemingly reasonable all the way around.
You are offered the option to choose between those two guys as a leader in charge of solving the nation's problems.
Under those circumstances, the choice is a no-brainer, of course.
I call the whole thing a con.
It's time to organize and start a real social justice movement!
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