Everyone is hurting due to the ever-increasingly radical transference of wealth from the many to the privileged few. When the average citizen is too broke to pay his/her house note, and to play an effective economic role as a consumer, merchants and other small-to-medium size businesses feel the impact almost as much as the affected individuals.

Is this caused by taxation and other governmental policies? I'm not so sure. I think this is a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: perhaps government favors the corporation so blatently because society as a whole has been cowed into deferring to big-biz interests.

It is abundantly clear that "our" elected public servants are generally dedicated to serving the interests of large corporations and not of human citizens, but how did such people get elected? And how is it that the average elected official is more reluctant to offend his lobbyist friends than his constituents?

I wish I could remember the exact numbers, but I read a few years ago that the average CEO of a Japanese corporation is paid something like 50 times as much money as the corporations lowest-paid employee, whereas at US-based multinationals*, the same ratio is more like 1,000-to-1 or more. No wonder our society is so out of whack!

(*I refuse to use the misleading term "American corporation": these outfits export jobs to the third world, hide their profits in foreign banks, are owned by shareholders without regard to nationality, and have no allegiance to ordinary Americans for, for that matter, to the government. They're "American" only insofar as they are unable to avoid obedience to US law and the US government ~ and now that they've come to exert such overwhelming influence upon that government, this distinction doesn't mean very much at all.)

Why do vast numbers of ordinary salt-of-the-earth white Americans so dutifully and regularly vote against their own economic interests?

I have more ideas on that topic than I have time to write at the moment.

For starters, and very briefly, I will offer the observation that Nixon, not Reagan ~ as the brains behind the GOP's "Southern Strategy" that dates back to 1968 ~ gets the lion's share of credit...

More later...