Themes of the Blog

After WWII, and for another 20 or 30 years, the US was the dominant economic power on the planet.
This dominance meant that we avoided the hardest part of capitilism - competiton; there was none; our chief industrial rivals, Germany, Japan, the UK, were prostrate, and our military might allowed us to scoop up raw materials from the 3rd world cheaply (by force if necessary - that most Americans don't know of the CIA coup history is remarkable) and sell goods across the world and at home.

Since, roughly the 1970s, first with the oil shock, and then with the rise of manufacturing power in low wage countries, and the rise in cheap shipping, computer systems that allow order tracking across continents, and computer aided systems that allow things like blue prints to travel everywhere for nothing, our ability to provide a standard of living based on exploiting the world has vanished.

That both the Democratic and GOP partys are, in the main, in the pay of the very small minority of very wealthy people who benefit has also hurt the average American.