The fork in the road

We Americans are a conquered people.  And we were conquered while barely firing a shot to defend ourselves.

The conquerors are not from overseas, not some alien race or ethnic group.  They mostly originated right here in the US, and they built up their power over us here, not from outside.

A tiny parasitic oligarchy has accumulated huge, obscene mountains of wealth that would make Louis XVI look poor by comparison, while year by year most people's situation gets harder and harder, in many cases desperate.  They did it mostly by driving down the pay and benefits of the workers at the enterprises they control, enabling them to skim off most of the value those workers' labor creates, and by various forms of financial manipulation.

The old cliché that you get ahead by hard work, and that poverty is usually the result of laziness, has become a sick joke.  People like Musk and Bezos do not work millions of times harder the average worker.  They don't produce anything at all.  Such people were mostly either born into wealth or had some opportunity to get into a position of financial power, and were ruthless enough to exploit a lucky break to the hilt and to start accumulating wealth on what eventually became a vast scale.  At the same time, millions upon millions of people work themselves half to death, work so hard that a typical oligarch forced to live their lives would literally drop dead from stress and exhaustion, and barely make enough money to survive -- because the system has been rigged to steal most of the value their work produces, pouring it into the pockets of the oligarchs.

We are told that we are the richest country in the world, and I'm sure someone can point to a bunch of statistics according to which this is technically true.  It's also meaningless, when a few hundred people hold such a huge fraction of the country's wealth.  A waitress making sub-minimum wage plus irregular tips, or a warehouse worker earning a pittance for back-breaking labor under degrading supervision and rules more suited to the life of a slave, do not benefit from Elon Musk's four hundred billion dollars pushing up the national average wealth.

Socialist European countries now have more social mobility than the US does, in the sense that a person born poor has a better chance of rising to a comfortable life there than here.  We're the only developed country that can't even manage universal health insurance coverage.

This increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of parasites has been going on for half a century and shows no sign of slowing down.  Lately they have used their wealth to buy control of the mainstream media as well as a dominant influence over both political parties.  They use that power to fend off any suggestion that wealth be redistributed or even that their taxes be restored to reasonable levels as they were in the fifties and sixties.

I cannot stress strongly enough -- cannot shout it from the rooftops loudly enough -- that voting one party out of power and the other party in cannot solve this problem.  We have been voting one party out and the other party in, back and forth, for the whole half-century that the situation has been getting worse, and it has availed us nothing.  The oligarchy just kept on siphoning off more and more of the wealth the workers produced, uninterruptedly, regardless of who was in power.  The Republicans have nothing to offer except even more tax cuts for the rich and more erosion of what is already the most threadbare social safety net in the developed world, while the Democrats offer only some minor tinkering around the edges.  The nearest thing to a serious proposal for change that I know of is California's wealth tax initiative, which would claw back a piddling five percent of their loot from the billionaires in that state, and the Democrats are against it.  Wholesale expropriation of the parasites' stolen wealth, to be returned to those whose labor produced it, is not even under consideration, anywhere -- even though polling regularly shows that drastic measures to curb inequality and billionaire power have majority support.  Change must come from the people themselves, acting through unions, the ballot initiative process in states that have it, and whatever other levers of power are available.  The political parties are useless.

We are at a dangerous fork in the road.

Consider what an objective outside observer would conclude, looking at this country.  Unimaginable concentration of ever more wealth in the hands of a few.  A middle class that mostly knows it cannot hope for the kind of rising standard of living that every previous generation took for granted, while a growing fraction of the country is struggling for bare survival.  Government assistance being cut and cut and cut to fund yet more tax cuts for the oligarchy.  The Epstein files will soon reveal that many of this privileged caste are so arrogant as to feel entitled to use the children of ordinary people as sexual playthings.  The inequality of wealth in our country is now far worse than it was in France in 1789.  And Americans as a whole are the most heavily-armed population on Earth.  What the hell would that outside observer expect is eventually going to happen here, if things go on like this?

It's true that the majority of the guns are in the hands of the more right-leaning half of the population, who have been carefully taught to blame anyone but the ultra-wealthy for their problems -- but events last year suggested that many of them have been breaking free from the indoctrination.  The impending cuts to ACA subsidies and SNAP will disproportionately affect rural, white recipients.  The great majority of our population is not highly ideological and is open-minded enough to see what is going on when it becomes obvious enough.  Every ruling class in history has had a propaganda arm striving to bamboozle the masses into accepting its power as legitimate.  And it worked.  Until eventually it didn't.

The West mostly avoided the kind of violent revolutions that happened in places like Russia and China because its leaders had enough sense to enact some degree of socialist policy to mitigate inequality.  Our own oligarchy had damn well better learn that lesson too, and fast.  Only redistribution -- real redistribution, not just some five-percent wealth tax -- can prevent a disaster which would risk sweeping away not only the parasite class but the whole Constitutional system on which our freedom and democracy and our very identity as a nation depends.

JFK once said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.  We need a peaceful revolution.