As an independent writer with no contract from any giant publishing firm or news organization, my influence upon the world is akin to that of a gnat wrestling a big crocodile.

I recognize this and accept it. This independence, however, permits me total freedom to write what I think and believe to be the truth. The pay’s not too good, but as a vet with a pension and social security I no longer have to struggle for income.

Before writing these days, I commonly spend a week or two reading several publications and Internet sources.** Since all but Fox usually share similarly investigative – if widely varied – perspectives, it and other right wing publications would dub me a “liberal.”  I dub me an independent; however, I admit to a few biases.

Primarily, I find capitalism as it has evolved in America to have become an utterly predatory economy. Originally, it signified that you or I could start a business of our own and compete in an open market. Those days are long gone.

Under the ravenous greed of an authoritarian, monopolistic, corporate culture, small business is currently a term that the militant, petroleum-digital-industrialized world utilizes to pretend to care for the small guy in the street, while continuously fleecing her or him in the alley down to silk panties or cotton shorts.

Controlling almost all media, as it purports to be concerned, the corporate world determinedly hamstrings itself with the fanatic belief that “the free market” is the solution to the ills of the human race. Contrarily, I perceive it to be little more than a faintly disguised confidence game.

It is the social collaboration of a relatively modest number of extremely highly-positioned financial figures in both big business and government who collectively define the process that keeps 80% to 90% of the American public working 40 to 50 hours a week, while forcing the other 10% to 20% to the edge of abject poverty.

It keeps them busy exploiting physical and human resources and competing against one another to attain “the latest new thing.” It has the American citizen striving for what is called “luxury” as millions of Americans and the entire world’s people  fearfully struggle to keep themselves in the game of life.

The alleged leaders of all nations are dependent on these moneyed interests at the top of the heap. In Russia, Putin is largely able to control this phenomenon. Trump does his best to do the same. Even Obama slept with big money. Biden does too. Senate leader Mitchell and House leader Pelosi are not untouched.

One insightful Leader, Bernie Sanders, shot himself in the foot trying to sell Socialism to an audience repeatedly taught by our economic apparatus that any socially helpful government system was, of course, Communism, which was equated to The-Devil-Thriving-in Hell. And the very bright corporate critic, Elizabeth Warren, also went down in flames.

Now we are abruptly trapped in a biological nightmare that has one-half the wage-workers of the world headed toward existential disaster; our cultural system is so biased by profit-obsessed capitalism it is incapable of effectively safeguarding the human race.

What do all people minimally require to sustain themselves? A roof over their heads, clothing, food, education, work, income, and medical aid. With fanatical luxury-fixated consumption as our established norm, we now do not live in a practical manner needed to support life for all people.

Rather, capitalism is so confused that even during this virus pandemic it now has landlords illogically striving to evict non-working people from their domiciles – although there will be no one else able to move into their places to pay the mortgages and rents.

It is an indication of massive Intellectual paralysis. We are so hypnotized by a concept of what we accept as normal that we cannot even recognize we are in a true battle with survival, as a culture and possibly as a species. Our luxurious greed has blinded us to reality. Thirty million workers in America are now without income and beginning to face potential inabilities to feed and house themselves. Our leaders cannot even grasp the immensity of our situation.

News publications continue to run luxury ads with impunity. And we, the addicted consumers, appear incapable of comprehending the intensity of the danger to our own financial and ecological survival. A potentially optimistic perspective is that the present slowdown in consumption might conceivably permit all of us to more carefully take stock of the facts, seriously consider the potentially damaging consequences, and possible solutions.

However, if we note that most of the research-oriented news institutions mentioned before are read only by a fragile tiny minority of people, that perspective seems a futile hope. Facts have become obsolete in our world. Uninteresting. Irrelevant.

We have an anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-fact, pretending-Christian leader supported by some 35 million Americans of limited education, all onboard with an ill-conceived multi-billion dollar wall as millions of refugees face devastation.

While a multi-billion dollar upgrade of nuclear weapons and a new space military insure the future’s profitable new wars for the financial elite, the rest of us remain so divided in our opinions we find it impossible to share a common vision of what is going on.

It does not motivate one to jump up and dance a jig.

As the capitalist juggernaut fights to barrel forward to even more luxurious over-consumption, we are obviously going to see much more human suffering before anything approaching rational sustainability exists.

Welcome to our disgustingly near-sighted timid new world.

** These include: ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, CNN News, Fox News, Politico.com, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Paris Match, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Time, New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and various others depending on subject.