Capitalism mandates winners and losers. Those who have succeeded under Capitalism love it, while a majority lose ground as it becomes more centralized which is a feature of Capitalism (not a bug that needs to be regulated). This I pointed out more than two (2) decades ago when looking at the Forbes annual richest 400 Americans annual list. Over the years (decades) the Forbes 400 richest Americans earned a greater percentage of the total income in the United States. While the percentages I list here may be off (I'm going off a fading memory), the trend was true then as it is now. The middle class in America has been eroded.
If you want one single phrase that sums up Capitalism, it would be the following... "If you're not growing you're dying.". While this term has traditionally been used in the Corporate world, it applies to everyone leaving under Capitalism. Simply put it means if your wealth isn't increasing it's decreasing. For corporations, this means if your company isn't getting bigger and swallowing up the competition, the competition is getting bigger and will swallow you up. For an individual or a family, this means that, if your wealth isn't growing, someone else's wealth is and they are absorbing your wealth through the following means. They own the things you need to survive: They outbid you on that home you fell in love with, so they own the apartment, condo or house in which you live: The shelter that costs you 30, 40 or 50+ percent of your take home pay every month; They sell you the food, water, clothes and gas on which your survival depends; They own almost all of the ways in which you communicate with one another, while manipulating those means of communication in a manner that distracts you from issues like America invading and occupying other countries, spending trillions in the effort and failing in almost every, if not in fact every one of those endeavors since World War II... Try to remember a war in which America decisively won. While you're doing that, I will list off just a few we lost, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan (where we tucked tail and left a bunch of high dollar military equipment).
The list goes on and what it points out to the rest of the World is that America, even with a military budget that is 10 times greater than the budgets of the next ten (10) country's military budgets combined hasn't prevailed in a single act of aggression or Humanitarian effort in a way that has benefitted the citizens of this nation. As a matter of fact, America's adventurism has harmed more Americans than anything that any other country, alley and enemy alike, have for decades.
Consider the fact that a majority of the World's supply of opium comes from Afghanistan and America's military controlled Afghanistan's poppy fields for the decade in which 30-40 THOUSAND Americans died annually from opioid addiction and overdose. Hell, before COVID, opioid addiction was the big epidemic in this country and our own military controlled it's availability. Our own military had the power to stop as many American deaths EVERY YEAR as those caused during the ten years of the Vietnam war!
PEOPLE, stop being distracted by things that ultimately have no impact on our survival. While you're worried about transgendered athletes, the processing of our food supply is making some rich while poisoning and fattening up the rest of us. While those in charge of this nation's health tell you to inject your children with unproven vaccines, our medical system is the number one cause of bankruptcy in this nation. Our water is poisoned with lead and whatever comes out of derailed train cars, our houses are being bought up by amoral corporations that put profit over people and their communities. Far too many people only date others based on the size of their wallet. People have to work 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet and some have to then donate plasma on top of their jobs to survive. Over 40% of homeless people work full-time jobs but all are deemed lazy or that they chose to live in the streets. Minimum wage has stayed relatively stagnant since the 70's because an increase of minimum wage would cause prices to go up... Prices have gone up for decades without the minimum wage keeping up.
We need to be smarter because those who lead us do not seem capable of stopping themselves from leading us off the cliff we are quickly approaching. Even with the threat of nuclear war looming, our leaders don't seem to be able to tone down the threats against the World's next two nuclear superpowers, while our allies and enemies ignore our threats and choose instead to peacefully trade with one another, weakening the only card in our hand that was sustaining our way of life: the Petrodollar.
You see, if you're going to play the role of the bully, you should be able to beat up at least one weaker opponent and America has bullied the World for a long time, but seems to only lose every fight it picks. Ukraine's invasion whether or not Russia is solely at fault for causing is yet the latest American failure (and seemingly the final straw) of which the rest of the world has taken notice. It has cost the American taxpayer over $100 billion dollars, while our fellow citizens sleep in the street. The only people benefitting from that war and every war since WWII are the people who manufacture the weapons of war and those providing logistics for those wars, while the Ukrainian, Russian, German, French, English and American people face inflation that not only threatens their ability to thrive but their ability to survive.
To those who judge people who have less than you as somehow having made poor decisions, I say consider the way(s) in which those who have more than you must be judging you. Consider the way(s) in which they must deem you as "less deserving".
If you'd like to figure out how we might turn this ship around through greater skepticism and analysis and by differentiating between those things our leaders say and what our senses tell us is reality, consider buying my book "Solutions: Enough complaining. Let's fix America.". https://www.miksonsentertainment.com/books
