I just watched the 2005 Jim Carrey movie Fun with Dick and Jane, about a nuclear family whose father loses his job, pension, and house working at a place like E

I just watched the 2005 Jim Carrey movie Fun with Dick and Jane, about a nuclear family whose father loses his job, pension, and house working at a place like Enron or WorldCom while a CEO resembling Ken Lay played by Alec Baldwin steals the whole pension fund. Watching it yesterday was a shocker though -- I had forgotten (having been so young) that the 2008 financial crisis had roots so much earlier. But then I reminisced a little more: this was based on what I recall actually going on at the time. I was a kid at the time, who got his first minimum wage high school job working side by side with a lady who was there because her husband had his pension stolen at WorldCom. A certain class of elites really got away with a lot then, and were never held to account. Instead, their elite grifting culture just spread wider and wider. We tried in 2011. If you were alive then, you know how big Occupy Wall Street was getting. You remember how big Bernie was. But they figured out how to use social media to divide us and redirect our anger into right vs left politics instead of ultrarich crooks vs everybody else working hard. Even I had been starting to forget until Jim Carrey shook me out of my millenial reverie. The youngest kids if they have any political consciousness now it's solely channeled safely into the left vs right pattern, unable to effect meaningful change to the robber baron economy. Smartphones and recommendation algorithms truly were a powerful technology that generated great value after all-- for just a very small elite that can use it to hold off any accountability for their monstrous crimes.