Kind of ironic to be arguing about capitalism vs socialism while a foreign company buys the means of production out from under us. This was all predicted by ac

Kind of ironic to be arguing about capitalism vs socialism while a foreign company buys the means of production out from under us. This was all predicted by academics in the late 70s and early 80s. Reagan's trickle-down economics was designed to halt wage increases so that capitalists could collect worker productivity and control the money supply. Then invest those capital gains in regulatory capture to install right wing cronies to carry out the amoral aims of corporations to remove all labor and environmental protections to maximize profit. Allowing the national debt (currently $30+ trillion) to be run up above GDP, making it easier to sell the public on selling off public lands and other resources from the commons to pay it off. Eventually undermining democracy enough to form a constitutional convention to restructure the federal government as a patriarchal society like the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, at the top of a New World Order controlled by wealthy financiers. The sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel should probably have been stopped due to national security concerns. It's especially troublesome that it happened on Biden's watch. But that's how all of this works. In post-New Deal politics, the economy gets targeted during democratic administrations to undermine it enough that people vote for republicans. Then republican administrations run up the debt further to roll out more of their programs while nobody is looking. The worse things get, the more the public votes against its own self-interest. Rinse, repeat. The public never catches its breath long enough to figure it out, so we're still caught in this dysfunction in 2023. I only mention this because I believe that this endgame transcends politics, in the way that pushing a Monopoly board off the table transcends the game itself. We're at a point now where the democratic party as it was once known probably no longer exists, and can be thought of as the 1980s republican party, favorable to corporations, gentrification, tax cuts for the wealthy, neoliberalism, colonialism, exploitation, etc. The republican party today works more like a line of succession, where the vice president is the man behind the curtain, and each level below contains leaks through PR and ownership of the mass media to keep the public in the dark while it's being fleeced. So democrats are in the business of losing while republicans are in the business of winning, while both sell out to the highest bidder. With the Boomers retiring and Gen X not wanting to pursue revisionist history fever dreams, Millennials and Gen Z are in a unique position to stop what seems inevitable now. I could see a return to middle class strengthening, sort of an Atlas Shrugged but from a government captured by capitalism: https://time.com/6343967/bidenomics-is-real-economics/ https://time.com/6343967/bidenomics-is-real-economics/ A plainspoken take on the dysfunction: https://www.tiktok.com/@watchfulcoyote/video/7311503851977215274 https://www.tiktok.com/@watchfulcoyote/video/731150385197721...