Stress-testing a socioeconomic system: enduring and intractable problems of structural inequality percolate to the surface at moments of extreme duress. The truth is, this system is not foundationally oriented towards supporting anyone other than those who least need it. The people who most need help when the crap hits the fan (as it most certainly has) are those who are never going to receive the actual and substantive assistance they require and it is they who can also be expected to suffer most, even while they carry a burden of accusation that they are entirely responsible for their poverty when it is quite clearly a structural, system-wide inequality that is responsible. Meanwhile a widely unacknowledged nepotism pilots this ship. Freedom is as freedom does, America…
On the topics of nepotism and structural inequality, and for what it’s worth, the US is really no worse than any other industrialised economy in this regard – it is just that a specific historical and institutional context creates and amplifies a particular instance or kind of the dysfunctional sociopolitical theatre that underpins this deeply inequitable system.
Daedelus Kite 