IN DEMOCRATIC STRATGIST JAMES CARVILLE’S enfeebled mind, there is a world where exposing our president’s dementia and other mental pathologies once more on prime time TV would suddenly awaken us all to the threat he poses. After criticism of CNN’s lack of coverage of 47’s 2020 election lies last night, Wolfe Blitzer asked Carville if they should have televised it. Carville responded,

“I think the president of the United States acting loonier than a tune is newsworthy. I don’t think we should have hidden that from the American people.”

Wow! Has Carville conveniently forgotten about all the free press coverage CNN gave the looney-tunes Trump campaign back in 2016? Wake the hell up yourself James and smell the irony in that.

I did not watch 47’s speech tonight about election fraud. I had no intention to but after I read that he was going to “reveal intelligence” related to the 2020 election, I began to laugh and haven’t stopped yet. Some words simply should not be allowed in the same sentence as “Trump” and “intelligence.” They are juxtapositionally disturbing. And yes, I just made up a new word.

I imagine Alfredo E. Newman of Mad Magazine fame wearing a propeller beanie, sitting behind his bullshit pulpit in the Awful Office spewing incomprehensible nonsense on national TV. Even the air waves should be disgusted at carrying such sophomoric, contrived, warmed over, conspiratorial bullshit.

“Beam me up Scottie. No intelligent life found.”

Secretary of Stupidity Pete Hegseth announced the formation of a new military command called The Misogyny Corps. To ensure its members possesses the maximum lethality to abuse, assault, and rape women, the secretary has ordered every one to be screened for testosterone. Anyone who falls within or below the normal range of a rutting bull will be put on a T-drip. “These highly trained, elite, professional misogynists will be able to overcome and penetrate any known defenses. They will be easily characterized by their thick facial hair, enormous bulging muscles, and dicks so stiff you can springboard from them,” said the Secretary.

They will also be recognized by their vacant facial expressions and inability to speak coherently. To facilitate communication amongst the troops, the Corps is developing a standardized system of grunts and groans.

AS EXPECTED, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the U.S. liar-in-chief’s mugshot will appear on a $1 coin of ochre-colored Play-Doh. The Treasury Department stopped minting one worthless coin—the penny—only to replace it with another one of less value. And with it, a reason to use your debit card: no change means no chance of getting one.

OUR FOUNDING FATHERS REJECTED DEMOCRACY because they believed it would lead to the election of populist leaders and, by extension, mob rule. They implied that democracy was a less virulent form of anarchy, yet something to be avoided like the plague.

In 1755, during a dispute between Benjamin Franklin, who was serving in the Pennsylvania Assembly at the time, and Governor Robert Morris, they traded insults accusing each other of attempting to make Pennsylvania into a democracy. In response to Governor Robert Morris casting blame on the Assembly, Franklin rejoined with,

“We are not so absurd as to design a democracy, of which the governor is pleased to accuse us. Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the world to make people incline to a Democracy, who would otherwise never think of it.”

Consequently, the founders built legal and institutional safeguards into the Constitution to ensure that their worst fears about democracy would never be realized. They threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, rejecting democratic principles in favor of representative rule, a key principle of republicanism. Two primary examples of this are the Senate and the Electoral College.

Senators are elected at-large, two per state. They are not representatives of the people like members of the House of Representatives; they are representatives of the states, or more accurately, the states’ legislatures. Before 1913, with the passage and ratification of the 17th Amendment, Senators were elected by state legislators. The Electoral College was designed as a political firewall against the election of a populist president. The electors are not representatives of the people; they are representatives appointed by state legislators. Historically, they have cast their electoral votes for the winner of the state’s popular vote for president. However, they are empowered to cast their votes for alternates if they choose. They are not bound by law to cast their votes for the popular vote winner.

In modern presidential election history, only two candidates have lost the popular vote but won the presidency by an electoral majority. George Bush was the first in 2000, when the Supreme Court stopped a recount of the popular vote in Florida that would have given Al Gore the presidency. Bush was a product of the Bush American political dynasty and not considered a populist. The other was Donald Trump, who won an electoral majority but lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton in 2016. Clinton was a long-time operative in American politics. Donald Trump is the personification of a populist, playing on people’s fears and emotions to win elections. At the time of his election, he was a political outsider.

It has taken our country 238 years to recognize that the republican principles and structures embodied in our Constitution do not prevent the election of a populist demagogue who also exhibits many fascist traits. Given the Herculean task of amending the Constitution, it may take far longer to fix it. In the meantime, Donald Trump will continue to dismantle and attempt to control our election system in his favor. And democracy, as a governing alternative, will grow even smaller in the rearview mirror of the American experiment.

If there are corrective measures to prevent further erosion of our constitutional ideals, who has the courage to show us what they are, explain what role the people can play in implementing them, and lead us through this national identity crisis? If America was ever a “beacon on the hill,” we owe it to the world to rekindle it.

When the Constitutional Convention delegate from Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, stood before the assembly and said, “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy,” he was referring specifically to state legislatures and their reluctance to tax citizens and remit the proceeds to the Confederation Congress, out of fear of violence. Think of Shay’s Rebellion, a yearlong tax revolt in western Massachusetts that was quelled in June 1787, the month after the convention began. This form of violence was on the minds of the founders, even as they conveniently forgot their own violent resistance to British taxes a little more than a decade earlier. In effect, Gerry equated democracy with a lack of money, providing the founders with a contemporary example to demonstrate the evils of democratic rule, namely, too much freedom to seek redress and too much equality.

Our founders did not reject democracy because a contemporary nation-state exemplified its evils; they rejected it on principle, relying on a flawed local example. They rejected it because it was messy and difficult to administer. They rejected it because it threatened the sovereignty of their wealth and the power derived from it. They rejected it and sought to wrest control from the masses, keeping it among themselves and those like them—elite, white men.

If our founders eschewed democracy and deliberately chose republican principles of governance instead, why did the French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville refer to America as a democracy in his two-volume book, Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840?

“Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.”

He did so because he wrote under the accepted social norms at the time that dispossessed and disenfranchised entire groups based on race and gender. But for de Tocqueville, even the appearance of equality among white males suggested the exercise of democracy in a society where they were the minority.

IF HALF OR MORE OF THE ELECTORATE thinks their majority-elected leader is a tyrant, it follows that a majority of the people elected a tyrant. Whether the leader demonstrated tyrannical tendencies before being elected or became a tyrant is irrelevant. But if he showed signs of tyrannical behavior as a candidate and was elected regardless, it follows that a majority of people willingly voted for a tyrant. If a majority of the people willingly elected a tyrant, was it because they preferred to live under the oppression of an elected tyrant rather than a self-appointed one? More simply, is the tyranny of the majority acceptable over the tyranny of the minority? Or is the tyranny of the majority the spoils of political war, an acceptable consequence of self-rule regardless of how the minority is treated?

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A central principle of republicanism is that tyranny should neither be tolerated nor adapted to be less tyrannical; it should be overthrown. The loss of republican principles has been supercharged by the loss of Republicans to Trumpism. As long as they continue to reap enormous financial rewards and power from their lack of principles, they will remain in the unprincipled fascist camp of Trumpism.

Once this political conflict is over, those of us who love liberal democracy should remember the lessons learned during the drafting of our Constitution and the Civil War: Do not allow the haters of liberal democracy back into the political arena. Protect their constitutional and natural rights, but disenfranchise them from voting or holding office for generations.

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If King Midas gets the honors for turning everything he touches to gold, we must honor Trump likewise for turning everything he touches to shit. The Midas touch is a fable. The Trump touch is a real phenomenon. Both are cautionary tales to “be careful what you wish for.”

As if to rub salt in 47’s butt crack, the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Washington Nationals. The irony runs far deeper than our nation’s capital MLB team being routed in a baseball game on July 4th. Pittsburgh took its name from the site of the British Fort Pitt. On America’s 250th anniversary of independence from Britain, the Brits got the last laugh.

Somewhere in our nation children laugh and shout,
But there is no joy in DC, our POTUS has struck out.

As if liberal Jews weren’t enough of a problem for the president, he also cast blame on Democrats. A call from Trump to the Pretending Attorney General Todd Blanche was all it took to get the DOJ and FBI on the case. Blanche is reported to have said, “Jews and Democrats are at the center of this July 4th conspiracy to make Trump look like an idiot. We will find you, and we will arrest you. If you are a Democratic Jew, we strongly suggest self-incarceration to avoid actions of our government against you.”

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In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman insisted that “economic freedom is… an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.” In 1933, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Finally, in 2014, political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, analyzing decades of policy data, concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. policy, while average citizens have little or no independent influence.” These thinkers from across the ideological spectrum converge on the same unsettling truth I have: in America, freedom is not equally enjoyed by all; it scales with wealth. In the American imagination, long shaped by the white male experience, political and financial misfortunes are often framed as the result of personal failure, lack of ambition, or poor decision-making. Yet our country’s recorded history tells a very different story.

The first African slaves arrived in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, brought by the privateer ship White Lion. For the next 250 years, they were systematically denied any freedom comparable to that enjoyed by others. On July 4, 1776, our country declared its independence from what our Founders described as the tyrannical rule of King George III. From June to September 1788, the Constitution of the United States of America was debated, drafted, and written in Philadelphia under total secrecy. It created a dual system of governance and economics that codified the prevailing principle among our Founding Fathers that political and personal freedom are derivatives of economic freedom. It makes no mention of any person or group being excluded from pursuing freedom. Since its ratification in 1789, what the Constitution says about liberty differs greatly from the lived realities of the people it has failed to protect. Yet some contemporary writers continue to suggest the Constitution is neutral on race and gender, offering an oblique, parenthetical nod to the plight of African Americans and women who were denied the same rights as those who framed it.

One such writer, Thomas West of the Heritage Foundation, rightly continues to champion citizens’ natural right to acquire property. Like many Founders, West leans heavily on Lockean reasoning, conflating an individual’s faculties of labor and creativity with overt expressions of liberty. In his telling, economic freedom flows naturally from the ability to buy, hold, and transfer property. But historical truth reveals two critical omissions. What West calls the “right to acquire” was, from the start, built on land expropriated from Indigenous Americans through conquest, broken treaties, and coercion, not mutual respect or agreement. Colonists did not acquire land in a moral vacuum; they dispossessed Indigenous Americans who had lived on and cultivated it for generations. Moreover, West quotes from Federalist No. 10, where James Madison writes, “The protection of these faculties is the first object of government,” yet he never explicitly acknowledges that these same faculties—labor, skill, and creativity—were categorically denied to people who were not propertied white men. If slaves had been treated as citizens and paid wages commensurate with their contributions to building our country, slavery might have ended more quietly and much sooner than it did. Instead, their work, ingenuity, and even their bodies were treated as the property of others. By Madison’s own logic, liberty was impossible without the protection of these faculties. Slavery was therefore not a marginal contradiction but a direct violation of the very principle West claims to defend. To repeat the Founders’ lofty principle today without acknowledging these exclusions is to practice civic amnesia: celebrating personal freedom while forgetting that the economic freedom on which it depended was built on stolen land and stolen labor. By refusing to acknowledge how constitutional silence favors the framers and those like them—elite white men—such writers don’t bring clarity; they deliver obfuscation.

These invocations must also be weighed against the contemporary reality of rising wealth inequality, which prevents citizens from having equal opportunities to flourish. Today’s laborers, renters, debtors, and the formerly incarcerated live along a continuum of economic enslavement. They may not be bound by chains or ownership, but by eviction notices, interest rates, subtle surveillance and profiling, and precarious wages. Their labor is coerced not by law alone but by necessity, the threat of homelessness, hunger, or jail. Some call this mere dependence. I view it as a modern, legally derived, and sanctioned form of economic bondage. It is less visible and less barbaric than chattel slavery, but no less real in its power to constrain human freedom.

Today, wealth inequality in the United States is approaching levels not seen since the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a period ruled by robber barons known as the Gilded Age. Beginning with the 1929 stock market crash, followed by the Great Depression and the implementation of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, wealth inequality decreased substantially. With the rise of labor unions and the middle class, this trend continued until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan became president. Reagan’s belligerence toward organized labor and the implementation of supply-side economic policies, such as the “trickle-down theory,” reversed the 50-year trend of decreasing wealth inequality. This was not an unfortunate side effect of “Reaganomics”; it was planned, intended, and expected.

Calling economic inequality, and by extension a lack of personal freedom, the fortuitous outcome of a benign meritocracy is to ignore how deeply economic enslavement has shaped the American experience from its beginning to the present, through government policies. It is to ignore that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” rests on the side of the scale of economic freedom that favors the wealthy. From cotton fields to prison labor, from redlined neighborhoods to warehouse floors, freedom in America has always been gated by wealth and access, by race, by gender, and by violence. Those without it are functionally unfree, caught on a spectrum that ranges from marginalization to outright dispossession. And if the apex of the wealth pyramid represents total freedom, doesn’t it stand to reason that the bottom must represent a form of bondage yet lacking the barbarity of chattel slavery?

When our government wraps itself in the patriotic colors of our flag and the idealistic language of our Constitution, yet systematically denies entire classes of people—based on ethnicity, cultural heritage, or gender—access to land, wages, legal protection, and markets, the outcome is not misfortune; it is a form of government-sanctioned economic enslavement—a new, more inclusive Jim Crow 2.0. Viewed this way, so-called personal failure becomes a constitutionally derived mechanism that obscures structural discrimination against “we the people.”

Our country declared its independence from British rule in July 1776, yet despite the lofty ideal in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” independence has never been enjoyed equally by all people. When our Founding Fathers chose to elevate the principles of republicanism and economic expediency over the principle of democratic equality, we lost not only the ideal of self-rule but also the ideal of equality itself, and with it our shared humanity.

“What to the slave is your 4th of July?”

—Frederick Douglass, 1852

When your welfare depends on the binding decisions of others, without recourse, you are under a state of domination, according to Dr. Phillip Pettit, professor, philosopher, and political theorist.

If you understand the experience of exposure and vulnerability to another—the experience of domination—and if you can see what is awful about it, then you are well on your way to understanding [civic] republicanism. This republican concern was always expressed as a commitment to freedom, since freedom in the republican canon requires the absence, precisely, of domination…in any aspect of our lives. (Pettit, 2003).

This contemporary form of Republican freedom is the absence of the power of a person or group to arbitrarily constrain the liberties of another person or group. In the political sphere, republicans are concerned not with the degree to which one group governs another, but with the latent power of a group to exert dominance. For example, a ruler with the power to tax a citizen one dollar would also have the power to tax her last dollar. Consequently, republicans have no interest in improving the benevolence of their overlords who govern arbitrarily, but rather in overthrowing them.

Compared with other forms of government, such as monarchies, autocracies, and dictatorships, civic republicanism is considered a progressive and liberal contemporary political doctrine.

Contemporary civic republicans aim to promote freedom, understood as independence from arbitrary power. Roughly speaking, there are two directions from which republican freedom might be threatened. First, there is the obvious danger of an autocratic or despotic government assuming arbitrary powers over its subjects. A second danger to republican freedom as well—one that concerns contemporary civic republicans just as much as the first, is the danger that some individuals or groups within civil society will succeed in assuming arbitrary or uncontrolled powers over others. (Lovett, 2022).

To illustrate non-domination as liberty, writers in the republican tradition offer two examples from late 18th-century America. To wit:

In the first, imagine a group of slaves with a generally well-meaning master. While the latter has an institutionally-protected right to treat his slaves more or less as he pleases (he might start whipping them just for the heck of it, say), let us suppose that this master in particular leaves his slaves for the most part alone. Now to the extent that he does not in fact interfere with his slaves on a day-to-day basis, we are committed to saying—on the noninterference view of liberty—that they enjoy some measure of freedom.

For another, consider the slave who, over time, comes to understand his master’s psychological dispositions better and better. Taking advantage of this improved insight, he manages to keep on his master’s good side and is consequently interfered with less and less. Thus, on the non-interference view of liberty, we are committed to saying that his freedom is increasing over time.

In the civic republican imagination, each of these examples suggests degrees of liberty—less comparative domination—and a paradox for liberty at large: a slave experiencing freedom. This fictional paradox vanishes under closer scrutiny.

We must not conclude that a slave experiences greater or lesser freedom merely because he is abused more or less frequently than another slave. Again, in the republican tradition, it is not the degree of domination one group exerts over another but the potential to dominate in any degree against which they rail. Similarly, we must not commit to the proposition that a slave who has been psychologically conditioned to eagerly comply with his master’s wishes due to the absence of abuse experiences more freedom than one who complies out of fear. The former is precisely the desired outcome: obedience and compliance to perform work to serve the master, not the slave.

A slave is constrained in two ways. First, he is constrained by the laws erected that institutionalize and protect the practice. Second, he is constrained by the desires of his master. The constraints of the master are incidental to the constraints of the laws. Without the coercive force of the government that ensured the continuation of slavery, the practice might have ended naturally, more quietly, and more quickly. Former slave Frederick Douglass understood this association perfectly when he said, “it was slavery—not its mere incidents—that I hated.” (Douglass, 1855).

If freedom has a condition or quality that, without which it is not freedom but some bastardized form of servitude masquerading as freedom, wouldn’t it be its equal application? Shouldn’t it be a government’s first priority to establish standards of freedom and strive to ensure all citizens are capable of exercising them to the best of their abilities? Shouldn’t freedom be about equality that does not scale with wealth? The person who is considered to have the most freedom in a society should set the standard. If his or her freedom is comparatively much greater than that of the least free person, the government’s role is to help equalize those disparate freedoms.

But their worst fear is the relentless, inexorable march of karmic justice.

Each year, our local fire department sends someone out to perform a pressure test on the hydrant. We live less than a half-mile from the water tank so it’s never been low. The previous three years, firefighters who checked the hydrant informed us that obscuring the hydrant is not good. One guy said it was against some rule.

This year, when the firefighter came to check the hydrant, she did not complain about the flowers but took this approach to solving any potential issue of finding the hydrant. All it took was some imagination, a couple of cans of spray paint, and a public street on which to draw. And, the street paint matches the hydrant. Feng shui preserved. Take a lesson guys!

Our irises are happy.

I should have known this would go badly—I forgot to bring my Apple AirPods. When I awoke the morning of the appointment, I thought about them, but within the time it took me to stumble to the porcelain facility, they were forgotten. I am normally a social person but have my introvert days as well. This was one of those introvert days. I just wanted to read, in silence.

After moving multiple times from one waiting room to another to avoid idle chit-chat, I thought I’d finally found introvert nirvana, a nice little waiting area nestled in the Retina Section of the Eye Center. Obviously, retina conditions were not the malady du jour. I actually got into my book again, comprehending what I was reading. Bliss.

My peripheral vision caught sight of a man taking a chair about 20 feet from and perpendicular to mine. When I looked in his direction and noticed he was using a laptop, I turned back to my reading assuming he was going to work silently. Nope. This asshole jumped on a business Zoom meeting and was the speaker. “Welcome everyone. I hope your day is going well. Let’s get started. Turn in your copy of the…”

OMFG! He was the perfect choice of leader and speaker. He knew what the hell he was talking about and had a deep, resonant voice. I was disappointed for not being on the call. My invitation must have gone to the spam folder.

I moved deeper into the Retina space taking advantage of all those non-patients with 20/20 vision. Within a couple of minutes, my cone of silence was disturbed again, this time by a med tech taking a patient into the examination room nearest me. Wasn’t HIPAA enacted to protect our healthcare information while making it more ‘portable’? Apparently, this tech was clueless about privacy but majored in portability. She left the door wide open as I listened to her go over the patient’s meds, check his vitals, and do a preliminary workup. I should have recorded the entire encounter and played it back to the patient. I wonder if he would have split the damage settlement with me?

As I’ve aged, my bladder seems to have conspired with my brain to frustrate even the most simple, short-term task. You know what I’m talking about—if you’re a male. How often have you begun to do something requiring you to put your hands in water and struck by an urgency to pee—immediately? That’s where I’m at. As much as I’ve tried, I cannot find an evolutionary explanation to this neural connection. Unless, of course, you’re a college student pranking your roommate while he sleeps off a drunken stupor.

I will forgo an image in this post and allow your imagination to run wild.

Every public building has an emergency fire alarm. If our founders had been paying attention to their own warnings, they would have included a “Pull in Emergency” clause in the constitution. James Madison, author of the constitution wrote, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Our current POTUS proved him right.

We are witnessing our government being consumed by a five-alarm fire, purposely set by the arsonists in 47’s clown car regime. Not only is 47 gleefully watching it burn, but he has also taken out an insurance policy from the Deep Pockets Fire and Casualty Company, underwritten by the taxpayers. Gives a whole new meaning to his famous reality TV phrase, “You’re fired!”

Earlier today, I was called a smart-ass on this very platform and began sobbing. To my relief and chagrin, as I read later in that same comment, he continued with, “but you’re not as smart as you think you are.” Whew! Dodged that bullet.

When I was 7, an uncle I admired for his childlike stupidity took me to a KKK rally. I had no clue what was going on—except that a cross was on fire. My youthful innocence stole that golden opportunity for stupidity to take root.

I vividly recall candidate Trump telling his constituents in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated,” after that demographic led him to victory in the republican primary there in 2016. The writing was on the wall and I failed to act. Mea culpa.

I also read an article about the genesis of The Apprentice TV series to which I should have paid heed. When approached about the reality series by NBC producer Mark Burnett, Trump retorted, “That stuff is for the bottom feeders of society.”

My most difficult challenge toward achieving stupidity is rehabilitating myself from an addiction to reason and intellectual curiosity. Those smug ass college profs taught me to question things, think critically, and think deeply. Maybe a master’s degree from Liberty University would purge me of these educational albatrosses. Stupidity for Dummies is the only textbook—and being a dummy already, I am halfway there.

Taking part in the J6 peaceful protest would have supercharged my race to stupidity and taken me across the finish line. Fortunately, my genealogy is like white on rice so I have that going for me. On the other hand, I have several strikes against me that would have prevented my participation in the event. I do not own a gun, an automatic disqualification for the crazy train. I bathe more than once a week—but my water bill may affect that habit. My beard does not look like a ZZ Top band member’s bird nest but I compensate with long hair elsewhere. I do not drive a monstrously large pickup truck with a stainless-steel scrotum dangling from the trailer hitch but envy the stupid people who do when I see them at the gas pumps. I do not drink Bud or Coors Light—but my water bill may affect that habit. I have not been intimate with a couch, although, admittedly, I have been in some recliners that pleasured me.

To conclude, allow me to wax poetic.

A Stupid Lament

Oh, to be stupid, to live carefree,
Make no decisions until someone tells me,
To embrace my inner Peter Pan,
Join the lost boys, as well as the Klan.
To always feel the unconditional love,
of the MAGA cult leader who rules from above.

If you or any of your loved ones aspire toward stupidity and there is still time for an intervention, I hope this post shows what not to do in that endeavor.

“Stupid is a stupid does.” —Forrest Gump

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”—P. T. Barnum

“If stupidity was money, wealth inequality would not exist.”—Wry Banter

There is no longer debate over the wealth disparity in the U.S. As one example, in the 4th quarter of 2025, approximately 1% of households, out of 131,534 total households in the U.S., held 32% or $56 trillion of total ($175 trillion) U.S. wealth. These 1,315 households, dominated mostly by white males, have an outsized influence over our government through donations to politicians. Among others, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, The Koch Brothers, and George Soros all belong to this elite plutocracy.

Because the plutocrats amass their fortunes using (and manipulating) the economy, in a manner of speaking, our economy sits atop our government—i.e., it is pre-eminent. The hierarchy becomes: plutocrats, government, people. In this way our government operates as a buffer between the people and the plutocracy.

The people seek redress by petitioning the government. The plutocrats buy redress by controlling the politicians. Capitalism is the economic system and the de facto political system. Only when people begin to change the economic system will they make changes to the political system. Unfortunately, the system is codified in our constitution. The plutocrats have used it effectively, ruthlessly, and remorselessly to their advantage.

Justice may be blind, but capitalism is not. It provides a mere 1,315 households the means to enrich and impoverish simultaneously—with eyes wide open.

Note: Pluto was the Greek god of the underworld, or Hades. His name has nothing to do with the word plutocracy, which is derived from the Greek ploutos, meaning wealth, and kratos, meaning people. However, in the hellish nightmare we are living, I used my literary license to make a point.