If something isn't done about the climate/carbon crisis, people... today might be living in the last generation to experience a stable atmosphere, an… - Thom Hartmann

America has ended up—mostly since around 1980—with one of the most corrupted political systems in the developed world, with billionaires and big corporations literally writing legislation to benefit themselves, from the federal to state to local levels.

All of these social ills come out of a small group of people... literally just a few thousand people in the United States or a few thousand families in the US owning something like 70 -80 percent of the entire wealth of the country. Three guys owning 50% of the wealth of the entire country... Wealth inequality in the US is worse than it's ever been, even worse than it was in 1929 which brought about the great crash...I think it's a mental illness... these guys have obsessive compulsive disorder, they're hoarders."

And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two “made” senators — there’s a very good chance that today’s cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade. But this isn’t as much a story about Sinema as it is about today’s larger political dysfunction for which she’s become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child. Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of American values, it’s become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them.... While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what’s far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court. In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written...