The Meteoric Rise of Mediocrity in the USA

How the Right-Wing has diminished the greatness of the USA. Reagan caused the housing crisis and so many other ills of the USA.

Griffith Park, Los Angeles, built during the heyday of social democracy in the USA before the Reagan Republicans ruined our country.

Imagine publically funded projects such as the Capitol Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, The Boeing 747, the internet, lithium ion batteries, the transistor, solar panels, computers, Kennedy’s moon project, LaGuardia Airport, Griffith Park, to name a few, being invented and built in today’s regressive political and business climate. The libertarians are here, and they don’t build greatness. They conserve. Some of them, such as Musk and Ramaswamy, are thieves who employ pump-and-dump schemes. The insitution of social democracy that built a great USA, now gone, has been used by China to become the world’s leader in science and technology. Most people in the USA haven’t been to China. I have. And I can tell you that their technology is superior to ours in the USA. And if you think we have a democracy in the USA, wake-up. Our government is a corporate duopoly, coming under control of the wealthy during the Reagan years, where a few wealthy people choose between two people to represent them as president. However, when making a binary choice, the Democrats have been better than Republicans in supporting the middle class, manufacturing, and innovation in the USA.

Government funded projects, other than the military, have been on the wane since the 80s, and businesses, such as Boeing, are no longer innovating great products – instead they use their profits to buy back stock so that the rich become richer. Right-wingers saw to it that regulations preventing corporate stock buy-backs were eliminated, leading to cash in the pockets of the wealthy instead of cash for innovation. Example, the failed Boeing 737 Max. A cheap boondoggle. A poorly redesigned aircraft from the 1950s. Match that with the deregulated airline industry, and people are now riding in unsafe jets for much greater costs and with much less convenience. The airline industry was safter, more comfortable, convenient, and less expensive when it was regulated.

Kennedy’s moon project, something that stood on the shoulders of Eisenhower’s education and technology initiatives, in the 1960s was a thing of beauty. Something, one of few things, that could unite our country, indeed the world, if only, briefly. Kennedy’s Moon Shot brought much to the USA, and as a young boy growing up in the 60s and 70s, it helped to foster my desire to be a scientist and engineer. The fianance guys, not the scientists and engineers, are in charge of our technology companies. Sadly, the other large space company, SpaceX, is launching automobiles and billionaires into space, accomplishing what NASA did in 1965. And the Starship will never make it to the moon, and Musk’s studdering rants about Mars are dark humor – dark because his BS is robbing capital from the US people and destroying Earth’s atmosphere. The deregulation and privatization of NASA is one more right-wing folly. Letting SpaceX and Boeing essentially run most of NASA is a disaster. Bye-bye to our science and technology lead, hello to a hollowed-out industry interetsed in short term profits for the wealthy and billionaire fantasies..

With most of society’s capital flowing to rich men given they are no longer taxed (through various schemes), the working people’s capital is no longer used to support those who work – the middle class. Instead, we now have billionaires blasting themselves and their friends into space. This serves no one other than the billionaire class. Meanwhile, two middle class astronauts are stuck in space because of a failed space mission led by Boeing, a once great company hollowed-out by Republican’s deregulation of industry. As written in Fortune magazine, a pro-business outlet, “Boeing needs is engineers—not financiers—to lead it into the future.” Reaganesque financialization of our industry has led to short term profits and long term decay of our businesses.

As the USA, because of the Reagan Revolution, becomes what the UK (the Thatcher Revolution) has become, a hollowed-out shell of it former self, with China becoming the world’s new leader in science and technology, the USA must once again tax the wealthy and use its capital to support the middle class with the long-term investments in society and public institutions that innovation requires. Venture capitalists and private equity bring quick monetary schemes, little or no long term innovation, and extract enormous quantities of society’s capital for self-aggrandizing purposes. Using society’s capital in, for example, a venture-backed company in Austin, TX, RealPage, to create algorithms so that rich people can collude to overtake the rental and real eatate markets. leaving the middle class destitute, is part of our deregulated, rich man’s government that is destroying the USA.