If You're Wondering What's Wrong with America . . .

. . . is the title of a piece in Business Insider that my sister alerted me to. You can find it here. Here's a preview. 

Five years after the beginning of the financial crisis, the US economy is still staggering. Here's the context: unemployment tops 7%; growth is anemic; consumers don't have money to spend.

Why? "The answer is that our 30-year obsession with "efficiency" and "return on capital" has produced a business culture that believes that companies only exist to make money for their owners, instead of also serving their other stakeholders – customers and employees.

That's what the charts in this piece illustrate. And they are much more graphic and much more sobering than the words that follow.

Chart number one – corporate profits and profit margins are at an all-time high
Chart number two – wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.
Chart number three – fewer Americans are employed that anytime the past three decades. Reason is employees are regarded as costs, not people.
Chart number four – the share of our national income that is going to the people who do the work ("labor") is at an all-time low.

I continue to believe that this country does not have what it takes to fix these problems. We are a greedy, smug, and ignorant people who refuse to consider that we may not be God's chosen. The country will continue to go down in flames, and nothing will be done about any of this until everything collapses. The country and its government are being run by the corporations who have neither conscience nor soul. I really wish I could be more optimistic. But I know too much history for that.