one of the smartest executives I ever worked under had a habit of saying, “we’re just regular people, working together to do amazing things. We’re not as smart as the media are calling us today, nor are we as stupid as they called us the last time things went wrong”.
The USA is still the greatest country on the planet. We do, however, have some very serious problems to work on. In gaming terms, we have a set of exploiters in the game, violating not only the social compact and norms of civilized behavior, but also going about extracting rents from the economy rather than making the pie bigger for everyone.
So let’s fix the rules of the game, and enforce them. The USA had to go through this before, when a set of industrialist exploiters in the late 1800s took too big a share of the economy leaving too little for labor. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed by antitrust laws, estate/inheritance taxes (no hereditary rich), and income taxes supporting a social safety net.
Read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”. Capture of the legislative branch of the US government by the ultra rich (and probably the supreme court too) has been done before — remember the famous Hearst quote — and simply needs to be corrected. Fox News was conceived by a Republican PR strategist of the Nixon era, and funded and grown as a political messaging venue (that’s propaganda or disinformation if you’re more into the blue bubble). We need to undo this capture and polarization. It will be hard. But we can.
