The third time’s the charm. I’m realizing that writing about myself is significantly harder than I thought. Well, writing about myself is relatively easy but making it worth reading seems to be an insurmountable challenge for me at the moment.

The first two drafts were dreadful. Here’s a quick synopsis: I swear I’m cool and interesting and smart and look at how much I know about writing and how much I’ve read.

Getting anything onto the page these days has been hesitant, painful, and unnatural. Writing has basically become pulling out my own teeth. …

I have good news, in the 21st century, with our wealth and technology, we have the ability to end poverty in America — and the world for that matter. We could quite easily provide a comfortable and stable life for all humans.

The reason we don’t is much more ideological than it is material or logistics.

While migrant children are dying from thirst in the desert or washing ashore on Greek beaches, our governments give hundreds of billions of dollars to weapons manufacturers and corporations that extract resources and perpetuate conflict and forever wars.

While millions of Americans lost their…

We know corporations run America. We know they fund politicians and get whatever political favors they want. We know all of that, but what I never knew was how completely a corporation could co-opt the American judicial system to prosecute a citizen.

This case involves the Chevron oil company, the Lago Agrio region of Ecuador, and an American environmental lawyer. Texaco — who Chevron bought out — had left billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon that was wreaking havoc on the environment.

Steven Donzinger traveled to Ecuador hundreds of times, gathering testimonials and evidence on how the…

Even slight criticism of our economic system immediately devolves into name-calling, so I have to first say, “dude, chill.” I’m not saying Stalin is my hero. I’m not saying communism would be better. I wouldn’t even use the word ‘socialism’ once, but I know you want to dive into my comments right now and bandy that term about.

Why does it always have to be so binary? I know America has a long history of red-baiting, but it is 2021, the Cold War is over. We can tone it down and have a conversation. …

The root of most problems in modern America can be traced to the fact that it is no longer really a democracy. The will of the people has little to no bearing on what legislation is passed. And it is becoming less and less relevant.

In politics, the two-party duopoly effectively controls the parameters of debate and decides what are the important issues and the framing of those issues. They speak to different demographics on cultural concerns, but in essence, there’s very little difference between them.

They’re gatekeepers ensuring that nobody opposed to the corporate state gets into a powerful…

There’s no better way to explain what has happened in America over the last fifty years than to call it a corporate coup. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges says it all the time — the title and subtitle are stolen directly from him although “a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion” is a quote he attributes to John Ralston Saul.

It is an idea that made everything click for me. America doesn’t function as a democracy because corporations have purchased the political system: full stop. Whatever they want gets passed. …

Yeah, I know. I’m a rich-hater because I’m not wealthy. They work super hard and earn each penny they make every year. Without billionaires, there’d be “no jobs or innovation.” If you take a day off, you deserve to be laid off. Hustling is life, and we should all be grinding until we die.

I get it. I heard it before, and, in my late teens and early twenties, I even bought into it. That’s a different argument and not what this is about.

I’m simply curious if there is ANY point of personal wealth that, we as a society…

Like most people in America and Europe, I grew up thinking poor countries were poor because of corruption and economic mismanagement. While both play a role, it is far from the whole picture, and I’ve ultimately come to see that is a condescending and ignorant position.

To say developing countries are poor by their own doing is to ignore history. It ignores colonialism. And it ignores ongoing imperialism.

They are not underdeveloped; they are over-exploited.

Why are some of the most resource-rich nations the poorest?

Younger me thought, “They have so much natural wealth, if only they could set up their economy the way America has. …