I'm watching s discussion on MSNBC and the consensus is that Democrats not only

[PatrickforO]

26. Indeed. This is part of the deeper reason behind the systematic union-busting.

Wages have gone down, stagnated, and real purchasing power has gone down along with union membership.

Now, it is a given that you will have to either live with roommates, or you will have to have two incomes just to keep your nostrils above water. In the meantime, you get nickel and dimed. Student loans, planned obsolescence, unaffordable housing and all the rest.

At the same time, companies like Comcast earn huge profits ($11.3 billion in 2018) and their CEOs stratospheric 'salaries,' (For Comcast, the CEO 'earned' $35 million in 2018).

I was watching a movie that had a profound dialog in it. I will paraphrase: "It costs around $95,000 to get someone elected to the US House of Representatives, and the average tenure is 18 years. A Congressman is the BEST investment a company can make."

So, in this system based on lust to amass wealth and lust to amass power, we end up having a massive transfer of wealth to fewer and fewer individuals - billionaire parasites - while the rest of us fight over a smaller and smaller piece of pie. When the top 1% of 'earners' hold 42% of the nation's wealth, when 25,000 people in the world STARVE to death each day, when lies are propagated by big oil and plastics to cast doubt on their environmental impact just so they can keep making massive profits, when big pharma and for-profit healthcare line up billions of dollars in opposition to healthcare for all Americans, then we truly have a problem.

To facilitate this, those who wanted to create this criminal imbalance in the first place realized they needed to dumb down schools, take over the media and make it profit-driven and systematically control information. This is why Arjit Pai took away net neutrality, and why AM radio so proliferated in the 90s. It is why the bought-and-paid-for judges 'decided' in favor of Citizens United, and why the Chicago School of economics invented 'trickle down.'

Sure.

But we all have to do what we can, and those of us who can more easily 'do' should do more. Nothing excuses us each from fighting the good fight every day. We cannot give up, because this cancer of 'free market' shareholder-driven capitalism is in its last gasp and is unsustainable for us as a species. We will either have to rethink the way we organize ourselves, and the way we 'do' economics, or else we will end up extinct and this planet a smoking cinder circling the earth.

Right now, we are such a cancer on this earth that if we went extinct today, EVERY other form of life would be better off.

And that, my friends, is a truly terrifying reality to confront.