In aggregate, America is the wealthiest nation in the world, and it believes that its capitalistic system is integral to the success that it has achieved. But at what cost? Because America is the same nation, in which those who desire to investigate or to spend even a modicum of time actually visiting areas of neglect and examining their entire community, they will quickly realize that not all is well within America.
Today’s America, despite its vast wealth, has an incredible amount of fellow Americans that live paycheck to paycheck, of which the general consensus is that around 50% of Americans are in that most vulnerable of positions, representing for most of them, that they do not have stable employment, nor is their employment wage a living wage, and they are often inundated with debts that they service but aren’t able to ever pay off.
This is the real America, the America that those who are the elites of America push to the side, and try to negate by ignoring such in the conversations of the age. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be ignored, because if America is as great as it claims to be, than what about all those that are not experiencing such greatness, but rather are living troubled lives, often filled with disappointment and misery, made even worse by the fact that they know that there is an incredible amount of wealth in this nation, but such alas is concentrated in the hands of the superrich, as well as mega-corporations of which this government is effectively captured by that elite, which thereby makes it their point to not tax sufficiently those that could easily pay their appropriate share and thus be of material help to those that need such aid.
So too, those who seek employment often do so in a construct in which their rights to fair employment have been eviscerated, and thus they are subject to being terminated, laid off, or fired at the sole discretion of the company that employs them. The question then must be asked is how anyone who has no job security can somehow maintain some decent standing in society when they no longer are assured that they can pay the bills and deal successfully with other obligations that they must attend to?
There was a time when this nation under a great President, made it a point, to see that a “new deal” was structured and because this new deal was well-reasoned and implemented with common sense, Americans, in whole, were benefited, because the superrich were taxed, and many laborers had the protection and the strength of labor unions to back them up so that they could receive a decent wage for a fair day’s work. Those days are long passed, and instead far too many workers are vulnerable to all the vicissitudes of life, of which while the government does its part to provide aid and service to them, it’s all done with that same government running huge deficits, year after year, as opposed to taxing those that have the money and can well pay for what they should and ought to pay.
Indeed, a people cannot be free when they have little or no agency and especially when that government of, for, and by the people is, in fact, nothing of the sort.