A bit of a buried lede to amplify to the mountain tops: it doesn't have to be this way. The lives of wage-slavery most lead is a manufactured state of affairs

A bit of a buried lede to amplify to the mountain tops: it doesn't have to be this way. The lives of wage-slavery most lead is a manufactured state of affairs, very much to the liking of and very useful for the so-called 1%. If you aren't aware, since 1971 the US reversed post-WWII decade of increasing widespread prosperity during which gains in GDP and hence quality of life were relatively equitably shared across wealth-holders and wage-earners, and social mobility was on the rise. Access to high-quality health care, home ownership, and world-class education was understood increasingly as a goal and staple of a growing middle-class—and that often in the context of single earner households. In the last 50 years that story has changed profoundly for the worst. Why? Because the top 10% and most of all the top few % of wealth-holders found their (already biggest) part of the pie not big enough, and they have systematically and very effectively eviscerated the middle class and social mobility, producing not just lives of economic desperation and despair, barriers to stability security prosperity health and happiness, but deep political unrest. Why is the (class) enemy not known to the masses? Because this same period saw an intentional program of consolidated media ownership and the undoing of provisions for fair-and-balanced reporting, and the cooption even of national media like NPR and PBS, and the quiet acquisition of nominally "left" leaning bastions like the NYT and now CNN. Media market consolidation and the founding of FOX were literally, openly, intended to steer the discontent of the disenfranchised and increasingly desperate into tribal nationalist (and racist) action, rather than labor and class mobilization. Seriously, if you aren't familiar with the ways in which wealth has been consolidated since especially Reagan, it's not hard to find. So to with correlated numbers on social mobility, media consolidation, percentage of full-time wage earners, etc ad nauseum. This is not "Socialism 101," it's American history many of us have lived. Things could be drastically better, but we are right f---d now because wealth consolidation is now so total that both government and the media have been all but entirely captured. There is no conspiracy, there is just the aggregated impact of decades of venal self-serving manipulation by wealth of the mechanisms whereby wealth is secured and its accumulation accelerated. 99% of those who played a part believed in good faith they were merely acting according to their self-interest, as "anyone would." Anyone but the 90%+ of us being turned into miserable "boring" adults apparently. Me? I'm part of the precariate, the 10% of white collar wage earners being brought to heel (so we read) by corporate masters discomforted by too much intrusion into the sacred space of the managerial 1% capital class—like most of you reading this. We are part of the problem. We are the anxious halo around the truly rich, deeply enamored of and deeply dependent on our meager bag of formerly middle-class lifestyle affordances, like access to decent health care, decent education, and a modest amount of leisure. I like you am in no way interested in losing those things. I am interested instead of returning our society to one in which such things are vastly more commonly shared. The problem is NOT wealth to support this. It's there. We just have smarmy self-satisfied very old white men sneering at the notion that the bounty is to be shared. You know what's an X factor? The fascism lite and racist nationalism those men have unleashed, believing a seething mob of enraged deluded conspiracy theorists serve as useful shock troops... ...it may bring down the whole house. They're going to bring it down it all down one way or another—if not with civil war lite, with the slow burn of climate change bred massive upheaval courting logistic collapse. Don't forget the empty shelves and hoarding of the early pandemic, the stuck cargo chips, or if you have slightly longer memory, the unavailability of hard drives after Thailand flooded. So yeah. UBI? Bring it ASAP and remember: the enemy is above.