America needs enough jobs and housing to provide income and homes for the 20% of our citizens living desperately poor lives.  Giant government and multinational Corporations, owning all available land and assets, could collaboratively provide both if they would stop supporting the immensely rich, real estate-based Oligarchy controlling the U.S. economy.

Those of us citizens having acquired adequate incomes and housing have also become the allies of giant government and multinational corporations. We sustain with overconsumption and taxes their alleged free-market capitalism and alleged benevolent Christianity. It is time we face up to our religious hypocrisy and our smug, well-paid existence achieved at the cost of the one- in-five poor Americans.

If government, corporations, and we would equitably share all available work by collaboratively educating and training the poor 20% – and sharing available jobs – our poor would not be so desperate. By sharing, all Americans could have housing and living incomes.

We have allowed our irrational, profit-obsessed economy to establish a permanent poor class in America. Doing so, we have abandoned the most fundamental tenants of our alleged religion. We are today all living a duplicity we have helped create and sustain. American Capitalism has, thereby, institutionalized the perpetuation of its poor.

What fate awaits us for replacing Democracy and Freedom with an economically and philosophically oppressive Oligarchy?

Our fate is the corruption of our ethical integrity and the deconstruction of our intellectual cohesion, which is precisely what we are experiencing today. We could eliminate this state of affairs by melding the best of Capitalism and Socialism and, thereby, empowering the lives of our poor citizens.

The corporate wealthy and their government have abdicated any serious responsibility for attending to this situation. For meaningful change to occur, we – the complacent middle class – must become politically aware and active.

We have bought into the concept sold to us that we each, individually, have the right to acquire whatever we want, no matter the cost to one fifth our population. It is our own abdication that is to blame for our country’s social and political problems, for the malaise now dominating us.

Until we shoulder this responsibility and become active participants in the rebirth of a common vision for its future, America is going to continue to deteriorate and lose its once morally dominant posture on Earth.

Until we stop being consumers and become citizens again, our fate is sealed.