Trapped in an American Oligarchy (Script & Sources)
Added 2021-10-21 17:03:25 +0000 UTCGood morning, bad news: America is the richest country in the world, at its richest point in history. The post-pandemic economic recovery added 7.2 trillion dollars to individual wealth, and the average American has a net worth of $750,000. The problem is, those numbers have absolutely nothing to do with you. You don’t live in that America. In fact, your America is experiencing one the worst economic catastrophes we’ve ever seen, with widespread poverty, record-low wages, child malnutrition, an opiate epidemic, and a rapidly expanding police state that’s specifically targeting the poor.
While politicians and economists celebrate over the stock market hitting record highs, new data from the Federal Reserve shows another record high. The wealthiest 10% of Americans now own 89% of all US stocks, and during the pandemic, the top 1% gained $6.5 trillion dollars in net worth.
That’s money they didn’t generate or earn, but that is systematically being stolen from the middle and working class through deliberately exploitative economic and legal policy. That’s money they got by sacrificing tens of thousands of essential workers during the deadliest crisis any of us have ever experienced. That’s money they got by dumping billions of dollars on Congress in dark money campaign contributions to make sure that the minimum wage remained untouched for the last 14 years while reducing benefits, hours, and creating an entire new category of unprotected gig workers who are paid a couple bucks an hour, to generate $3,000 a second for people like Jeff Bezos.
And absurdly, nearly all new wealth creation in the last year has come from stock market gains, which are blatantly manipulated through capital investments by their own major shareholders - and that money comes from you, not only through wage exploitation, but through pure corporate welfare in the form of massive loans and subsidies to companies that don’t need them, and absurd tax cuts that exclusively benefit the ultrawealthy who don’t pay their taxes anyway.
To put all that in simpler terms, the wealthiest Americans have created a direct pipeline from the national debt into their own pockets, while categorically refusing to allow Congress to use any of that money to benefit anyone but themselves which is why student loan cancellation and universal healthcare are off the table - and that’s simply because nearly all of Congress is explicitly dedicated to maintaining this system because they are also ultra-wealthy and directly benefit from it - that’s why they got the job in the first place.
So what we’re left with is two distinct Americas. One is a pure oligarchy with a few thousand citizens who each enjoy a lifestyle that’s essentially the equivalent of a personal modern day roman empire. The other is a collapsing feudal police state marked by poverty and exploitation whose population is readily sacrificed to maintain the health of the obscenely wealthy oligarchy.
But you already knew that.
