General Discussion

There have been three iterations of America's flirtation with national suicide. The first was centered around the oligarchs of the slaveocracy. It took a Civil War and collapse of forty percent of the country try to bring us back from the brink on thar one.

The second iteration, the Gilded Age, began at the end of the Civil War and ended with the Great Depression. It took FDR, the New Deal, and WWII to pulls us out of that one.

We're currently in the third iteration. It started after WWII with the Cold War and the rise of the Military Industrial Complex, but really kicked into gear with Reagan and the administrations that followed. Sadly I don't see us pulling back this time, I think that we're going to have to go through the shitstorm, much like Germany under Hitler, and hope we learn and come out better on the other side.

This is the inherent flaw of capitalism, the rich get rich enough to buy the government, and destroy everything in their greed and lust for power and money. Capitalism can work, but it needs strong, immovable guardrails along with a strong safety net. The first place to start is publicly financed elections, but that's a topic for another post