In the more than sixty years since the New Deal brought this nation to a state of near civility among its people, we have descended to borderline madness in human relations, and absolute injustice in the distribution of wealth. When FDR spoke those words in 1935 he expressed an idea that most could agree with, unless they were of the minority inheritor class. That clan has grown in number, but even more in the wealth it controls and the damage it causes our alleged democracy. And the gap between those groups has widened since 1977, when the top 1 percent had as much as the bottom 49 million. The political system is a sub-division of this unjust economic arrangement, with parties and candidates operating at the behest of their financial employers.
Democratic theory is nice, but our practice relates more to oligarchy .
We supposedly offer small business endeavors an opportunity to compete in a free market place. But the economic distance between the Main Street majority of small businesses, and the Wall Street minority of corporate monopolies grows greater every day. Just as the income and wealth gap has become an abyss, the business gap has become a chasm between believers in the dream of competition, and the harsh reality that is modern global capitalism. Massive mergers are a daily occurrence, with gigantic conglomerates first engulfing the small, then devouring the large, and finally buying out or merging with the very large. This creates competition-free zones in the economy, despite rhetoric of a free market which , like democracy, exists only in a mental or metaphysical state, not in reality.