Thread by @doctorow

Between the pandemic, the uprisings, and the gloves-off/mask-off rhetoric of the GOP's white supremacist leaders (and the dog-whistles of the reactionary elements of the Democrats), it's clear that the system is very, very broken, and can't/won't survive in its current form.

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I often return to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," an anthem for looming rupture:

Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes



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A more specific, incandescent, and contemporary version is @chsm1th's recent essay, "For the Rich to Keep Getting Richer, We Have to Sacrifice Everything Else."

charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/06/for-ri…

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Smith opens with the apologists' chorus: "inequality isn't quite as bad as everyone claims"; "inequality is bad, but it's notpolicymakers' fault; the causes are all beyond our control"; "we're mystified how giving trillions to the super-wealthy somehow made them richer."

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And "We're perplexed why so little of the trillions we've handed the already-super-rich has trickled down to the little gals and guys struggling to keep their heads above water."

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This isn't a new phenomenon: it's part of a 40-year program that's left us with "no cultural memory of a time when "democracy" wasn't a pay-to-play bidding war between vested interests, insiders, billionaires, global corporations and PACs pushing self-serving agendas."

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This hasn't merely stripped most of us of our material wealth, it's also left us with "nothing binding the nation together except I got mine greed, narcissism and anger, all of which fuel a blood-soaked circus of fragmentation and disorder."

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The beneficiaries of this system have no idea how awful they sound when they explain why it's all fine: "Academics who've gorged on the $2 trillion in student loan debt have no idea how they sound when they insist that their class is so valuable that it's worth any price."

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"Healthcare and Big Pharma CEOs must not realize how offensively clownish their defense of $1 million medical bills sound to people who are being forced into bankruptcy so the CEOs can collect an extra $20 million in stock options this quarter."

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And while small business owners have to personally guarantee the loans they need to survive the crisis, big business has access to unlimited government capital and face no consequences when they squander it.

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"If you're the CEO of an airline who borrowed $46 billion and blew it buying your own stocks so you could cash in millions of dollars in stock options--never mind that, here's $50 billion in bailout money that won't require you to make any personal sacrifice whatsoever."

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"Consider this database of 6,300 major corporate fines and settlements from the early 1990s to 2015 compiled by Jon Morse. Nobody made any personal sacrifices or paid any personal fines or served any prison time for any of these thousands of violations."

#AFineIsAPrice

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