Thursday, August 06, 2026

What We Now Call Communism

The young people here might not remember this, but those of you who are a little older might. Not so long ago, you could afford to live a good life here in America.

You could buy a home in your 20s. You could go to college for cheap or free. You could support a whole family on one paycheck. You could afford to get married, have kids, and retire comfortably. You could fulfill your God-given potential.

We called it the American Dream.

In the middle of the 20th century, we invested in healthcare and education. We built homes and highways. We protected workers' rights and paychecks. We blocked consolidation and encouraged competition. We built the largest, strongest middle class in the history of the world.

But today that middle class has disappeared. For too many of our neighbors, the American Dream has become an American Nightmare.

We can't afford a home, but Jeff Bezos has at least a dozen. We can't afford to fill up our tank, but Mark Zuckerberg is launching helicopters from his mega-yacht. One in five Texas children live in poverty — but one of our residents became the world's first trillionaire.

The top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall.
50 years ago, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell circulated a memo around DC — a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.

The Powell memo outlined a strategy. Unite corporate special interests, privilege corporate perspectives in the media, appoint sympathetic judges to the court, and buy politicians in both political parties.

And it worked. Republicans and some Democrats sold the false gospel of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economics is not a theory, it is theft.

Since the late 1970s, mega donors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties. And then those politicians turned around and rigged the economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense.

We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.
We are getting screwed. Whether you're a little more conservative or a little more progressive — none of us can afford groceries, none of us can afford gas, none of us can afford healthcare.

The billionaires buying politicians like Ken Paxton don't care who you are. They don't care about your politics. They only care about their profits.

They see us as one opposing team — so we might as well start acting like one.
When Greg Abbott starts sounding like James Talarico, the Overton Window is moving:
We cannot let artificial intelligence become yet another arena where billionaires write the rules for the rest of us. Working people must get a say and a share of that AI future.

We can start by cracking down on the data centers that are jacking up our utility bills and using up all our water.

And we can establish an AI dividend, so every American citizen owns a piece of these American AI companies. If they are going to use our human ingenuity and our collective intellectual property, then we want our royalty checks.
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1 comment:

  1. rustypickup9:07 AM

    "The top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall." A campaign theme the Dems should run on for the next couple of election cycles, it captures so much that is wrong at the moment in the country. We also need one that captures the bigotry that fuels the right.

    There is no other place to put this, but I would appreciate some prayers. I lost my dad on Friday (at near 90 what can be manageable health issues can quickly spiral out of control) and on Tuesday I signed my mom up for hospice. There have been other family challenges, so much so that my pastor asked me, "feeling like Job?" There have been good things too, graduations, an engagement. It's just everything all at once. By the end of the summer I will be halfway though seminary. Despite all the challenges of attending while working, family and all, I continue to feel more and more I am on the right path. So if you can pray for George and Priscilla, I would be grateful.

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