Editor,
We are now experiencing, in the U.S., the near completion of a corporate coup, roughly 50 years in its construction: a takeover by our country’s wealthiest one-tenth of one percent, signaling the final stages of American democracy.
Our current president is not the real problem; he is simply a dancing bear distracting our attention from the hideous destruction of the social and economic fabric of our beloved country.
Capitalist elitists are dismantling our manufacturing capacity, moving it out of the country, and substituting gambling by Big Finance as our main economic base. The rising Gross Domestic Product, praised so highly by Trump and the corporatists, is a sham, a misdirection to confuse and mislead us.
Big Finance, while being the largest contributor to the GDP, creates nothing of value; it only shifts money away from the traditional working classes (us) to themselves. We gain nothing by this development. On the contrary, this only represents money taken from us, captured by the elitist/capitalist class, transferred overseas and hidden from taxation, while White House corporatists, other oligarchs and their minions cavort and hyperventilate to distract our attention (the whole impeachment circus is the perfect example).
With our attention misdirected, the corporate capitalists have been steadily destroying the two-party system, labor unions, public education, the courts, the press (criminalizing whistleblowers), colleges and universities, conservation and environmental protection, our industrial base and a living wage, while creating chronic poverty, mass homelessness and incarceration (world’s largest), militarized police and total surveillance (the watch-drones are coming.).
The upcoming November election may be our final chance to reverse this push toward a new feudalism, where a very few really will own everything (now, in our country, 25 oligarchs own more assets than half our population – 165 million of us).
At this time, we, the public, have been successfully removed from all national and international decision-making (70 percent of Americans want Medicare-for-All). Our current economic system (financialized monopoly-capitalism) is massively corrupt (bribery is legalized) and only rewards a small fraction of actual workers.
In order to resist this hollowing out of the great U.S. democratic experiment, Bernie Sanders may represent our last chance for real system change and the reviving of our, now so fragile, democracy.
Rand Cullen, Veterans for Peace (Arkansas)