We are fighting the wrong enemy.

[PatrickforB]

39. Well, you're not wrong...quite. But I would drill down even just a bit further.

I am an economist who sometimes feels like Galadriel, who told Frodo she had 'fought the long defeat' for three ages.

I have long touted economic policies like childcare assistance, national healthcare, defined benefit pensions and so on that actually HELP people like you and me. But one by one the greed of the few has ended those and left us all worse off.

The Republicans are the face of this worsening, for sure, because they enact policies.

BUT WHO DRIVES THESE POLICIES?

The billionaires. Indeed, if you peel the onion back layer by layer to its core, you will invariably see an old, white, male, liver-spotted hand grasping for more PROFITS.

The enemy is the billionaire parasites. They have been waging a successful class war on us for the 95 years since the New Deal came to be in 1935. The deterioration began in earnest in 1971 when Nixon Supreme Court pick Lewis Powell penned 'An Attack on American Free Enterprise' at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce. This was because we were beginning to win, to have real social change - the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, and finally when Ralph Nader wrote 'Unsafe at any Speed,' which forced Detroit to put seatbelts in cars, Wall Street financiers and billionaires had enough. So Powell's 'manifesto' laid out the plan for a corporate takeover of this republic. WHICH HAS HAPPENED.

Then, at the behest of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and at the same time deregulated the cable industry. This allowed Fox News and AM right-wing talk radio to metastatize throughout the country using sophisticated brainwashing techniques. Note that we get biased news because all our public 'news' media outlets are publicly traded - Comcast, Disney and so on. So the fiduciary responsibility of senior producers in these media 'news' shows is always and only generating shareholder profits - there is nothing in the charter about truth in news. So it is biased, and designed to drive wedges.

In the 1970s and 80s, the culture wars were born when the Coors family bankrolled the Moral Majority.

The Tea Party was not organic either. the Koch brothers bankrolled that.

Then you had Grover Norquist, and the Chicago School of economics touting the trickle down (supply side) approach. Everyone knew it was a lie when Reagan slithered into the White House with it, because he said, "Oh, if we cut taxes for corporations and wealthy people, increased payroll tax revenue from all the jobs they created would more than cover the tax shortfall."

But carry this to its logical conclusion and we see the burden of FUNDING government programs has increased for individual taxpayers from generating ~45% of the government's tax revenue to over 80% now, while the corporate 'contribution' went from ~35% to its current 9%. At least the last time I checked, but you get the idea.

And W tried in 2004 to privatize the Social Security trust fund so that Wall Street financiers and today's new Robber Barons could speculate with it. Fortunately that did not happen, but look at today's efforts to undermine Social Security through DOGE, and Medicare by forcing people all onto the privatized 'advantage plans.'

The Wall Street/Billionaire machine is relentless. They have fought the long game of raw greed and lust for temporal power since 1935.

Bottom line, the entire earth GROANS under the weight of the raw greed of these billionaire parasites.

They are the real enemy. Of all of us.