What are you voting for?

This is election year in the USA where a vicious cycle will continue in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, and even more power. This is most apparent is declining rates of tax on corporations and their CEOs along with a profusion of government bailouts and subsidies to Big Business. Economic rules favor the wealthy. Billionaires like Donald Trump can use bankruptcy to escape debts but average people can’t get relief from burdensome mortgage or student debt payments. Giant corporations can amass market power without facing anti-trust lawsuits (think Internet cable companies, Monsanto, Big Pharma, consolidations of health insurers and of health care corporations, Dow and DuPont, and the growing dominance of Amazon, Apple, and Google, for example). It is easy Wall Street insiders to profit. The corporations giant firms can extend the length of patents and copyrights, thereby pushing up prices on everything from pharmaceuticals to Walt Disney merchandise.  They can wangle trade treaties that protect their foreign assets but not the jobs or incomes of American workers. Military contractors can lobby to secure huge appropriations for weaponry, and to keep the war machine going. The result of this vicious cycle is a giant upward distribution of income to the wealthy and powerful from working folk, people who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere but increasing cynicism about democracy so that some actually begin to sympathise with the populist neo-fascism of Donald Trump.

The problem the tiny minority who own all the wealth in society, that deliberately enslaves by poverty the laboring-class of society.

The way to end this vicious cycle is to replace capitalism. How can this be accomplished?  Only through a workers’ political movement for socialism. The plutocrats and oligarchs have got us right where they want us right now, on our knees and they plan to keep us there forever if possible. It is time for the people to rise like lions from our slumber as Shelley put it.

Based and adapted from this mealy-mouthed article