"Blame" is such a distracting word in all of this. It leads to this weird punching back and forth between which group can be looked at as unfortunate victims of

"Blame" is such a distracting word in all of this. It leads to this weird punching back and forth between which group can be looked at as unfortunate victims of social forces and influences or economics or "just trying their best to maximize shareholder value", and which groups are consciously "at fault." We somehow need to develop a language where we can talk about priorities that also include the unquantifiable, the fuzzy, and the hard-to-articulate. If all that enters the political calculus is purchasing power for consumers (and people only being consumers), and companies only being about making money without also being about building and maintaining communities and cultures, then society turns into a paperclip-maximizing GDP-chasing hideous machine where we end up losing things that we valued yet did not realize we valued.