A hard hitting, lucid critique of the trajectory of corporate-controlled politics in this country.

America has always been a country with its full and fair share of flaws, but for quite some time during the middle part of the twentieth century, we got one thing reasonably right. There was a bargain then, between elites and the government and the public. According to the terms of the deal, the aristocracy would still be fantastically rich, but there would be limitations on their wealth, because some of that wealth, some substantial amount, needed to be shared with the working people and the middle class, and it was the role of government to make sure that that happened. Many among the well-to-do even shared that consensus.

Since Ronald Reagan rode into town, however, that deal is off the table, replaced by what is essentially a new New Deal — or, more accurately, simply the Bad Old Deal. Under the terms of this new/old arrangement, the unregulated wealthy grab absolutely everything they can get their hands on, the middle class scrambles for whatever bare existence it can maintain, and the rest of America, the working class and the poor, fall deeper and deeper into third world-style poverty. Under the terms of this new system, the role of the government is no longer to provide for the welfare of the people, nor to ensure that there are limitations on what the plutocracy can liberate from them. Under the terms of this new arrangement, the function of the government is simply to serve as a tool, assisting that plutocracy in depriving America’s own people of everything that can be taken from them.

That means that in the last thirty years we’ve entirely restructured the economy so that the super-wealthy have become obscenely-super-wealthy, and the middle class are lucky to have stood still, and haven’t really even managed that. If one examines the destination of the considerable GDP growth that America has sustained over the last three decades, it’s gone entirely to the richest of Americans. The middle class has actually lost ground. That’s an astonishing fact, but think about it: Despite robust economic growth, workers today actually make less than they did back in the 1970s.

Even more amazing, it wasn’t that hard to pull off. All you had to do was to fool the people and divert their attention to other circuses to go along with the remaining crumbs of bread. Meanwhile, unions were decimated by changes in government policy. Jobs were exported — first to the south, then to Mexico, then to China, now to Thailand or Vietnam, and probably soon to Africa — in a never-ending search for the cheapest possible way to wring value out of the working people of the world, leaving Americans without any sort of remaining industry or economic base. Tax policy was also deployed, channeling money from current working Americans, and especially from their children, and diverted it to the already wealthy. The upshot of all these policy changes was that the richest Americans became absolutely, astonishingly, fabulously rich, and the rest of us are barely holding on, if that.

If the Russians had come here and done this — if they had come and stolen our resources, if they come and enslaved our children into inescapable soul-numbing jobs, if they had left us with environmental degradation and a wrecked economy and destroyed education system and a crumbling infrastructure and a sieve-like healthcare regime — if the Russians had come and done any or all of this, we would’ve risen up in anger and hostility and patriotism and nationalism, and we’d have loaded up our weapons and killed every last one of them.

But it wasn’t the Russians that did it, it was our own overclass. And worse still, it was our own government acting as though they were protecting us from the evil bogeyman du jour, while in fact they were assisting the wealthy in bleeding us dry, until our anemia left us fit only for our profit-seeking hospitals.

This piece is pretty critical of Obama and his administration’s policies, but it can be hard to argue with the premise of those criticisms.

The upshot is that today American voters have two choices. They can have the party that represents the maximal plundering of America, at the maximal speed. Or they can have the party that represents nearly the same crime at almost the same velocity.

Either way, the United States has ceased in any meaningful way to be owned by citizens. Its voters vote, but their representatives in Congress and in the administration are beholden to economic elites, and act entirely accordingly. The country’s institutions, infrastructure, and social relations are all being dismantled piece by piece and either relocated elsewhere or sold off in order to wring yet another drop of wealth out of the hides of working Americans, so that those who are already wealthy beyond belief can be even further enriched.

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