Prison Bars Masquerading as Democracy

We’ve been told the system is broken. It’s not. It’s captured. If we want to change anything, we have to stop defending the cage and start using power.

For four months, I've been proving the American Dream is dead—and showing who killed it.

That it takes three incomes to buy what one income bought in 1950. That your kid's college costs a decade of your life. That we're watching genocide on our phones while our government sends the bombs. That the bottom 80% of this country is drowning in debt while billionaires build rocket ships.

America's bottom 80%: Spending 105% of income on basic necessities. Going broke just staying alive.

But here's what I haven't explained yet: Why nothing we do fixes it.

It's not that we're not trying hard enough. It's not that we need better candidates or cleverer messaging or more donations. The problem is that the system isn't broken - it's been captured. And the people who captured it have convinced us that their cage is democracy itself.

What America's Undoing Is Really About

When I started this project in February, I thought I was documenting decline. What I discovered was theft. Not just economic theft - though $79 trillion has been stolen from working Americans since 1975. But the theft of power itself.

Power is intended to flow from people, to government, to action. Instead it flows from Wall Street to politicians to theater. Democrats and Republicans put on a show while the real decisions get made in boardrooms and Fed meetings and rooms we're not allowed to enter.

Bernie can fill stadiums. AOC can go viral. Trump can storm the Capitol. Nothing fundamental changes because they're all playing inside a system designed to contain them.

The Tools vs. The Wielders

Here's where I lose some people: Trump understands power better than Democrats do.

I'm not praising his agenda - it's fascist garbage. But he grasps something crucial: these institutions Democrats defend aren't democracy's foundation. They're prison bars. The Fed isn't "independent" - it's captured by finance. The FDA isn't protecting you - it approved OxyContin as "less addictive." The Supreme Court isn't interpreting law - it's enforcing corporate rule.

Trump uses these tools for evil. But at least he knows they're tools, not sacred objects. Democrats mistake the cage for the bird.

When Trump talks about firing Jerome Powell, he's right that someone should. Powell has overseen massive asset inflation while hiding real inflation - housing, healthcare, education - behind manipulated metrics. When Trump says judges who violate their oath should be removed, he's right. He just wants to remove the wrong ones for the wrong reasons.

The chainsaw isn't evil because a murderer used it. We need someone willing to use these tools to dismantle monopoly capitalism, not defend it.

Why 2026 Won't Save Us

People keep saying "wait for the midterms" or "let's see who emerges for 2028."

They don't get it. By the time someone becomes a "frontrunner," they've already been vetted by the system. They've internalized its limits. They've agreed to play by rules designed to preserve concentrated wealth and power.

The ideological capture extends beyond elections. It's in our schools, where we're taught that markets solve everything. Our news telling us that change is "unrealistic." Our language that makes "disruption" sound negative and "stability" sound positive when stability means slow death and economic misery for millions.

We're not facing a small policy problem. We're facing vertically integrated monopolies that control entire sectors. Healthcare - one-fifth of our economy - operates like a feudal state. The bond market holds our government hostage. Silicon Valley owns our communications. Wall Street owns our homes.

This isn't capitalism. It's corporate feudalism with elections.

What Comes Next

Not better messaging. Not younger candidates. Not waiting for demographics to save us. We need an ideological revolution that rejects the lies we've been taught:

• That government is the problem (when corporations are)

• That markets self-regulate (when they self-destruct)

• That incremental change works (when we need transformation)

• That the rules are sacred (when they're rigged)

We need people willing to use power the way FDR did - to fundamentally restructure the economy. To break monopolies. To build public alternatives. To treat concentrated wealth as the threat to democracy that it is.

This isn't about left vs. right anymore. It's about whether we'll remain corporate subjects or become citizens again.

The Path Forward

Want to see what this looks like in practice? Take healthcare. We don't just need Medicare for All - we need the government to build hospitals, train doctors, manufacture drugs. As I've written before, real change means public competition, not just better insurance.

But we can't stop at healthcare. We need to envision this across every sector that's been captured by monopoly power:

• Childcare: Not just subsidies for private centers that jack up prices, but publicly run childcare facilities in every community

• Housing: Not just affordable housing mandates, but the government as a major homebuilder competing directly with private developers

• Energy: Not just regulating utilities, but public power generation and distribution that puts private monopolies out of business

• Banking: Not just better regulations, but public banks that offer real alternatives to Wall Street

• Broadband: Not just net neutrality, but municipal networks that make Comcast obsolete

• Transportation: Not just subsidizing private companies, but building public alternatives that actually work

What we're talking about is a reset of our entire market system. We need to re-ignite real competition - and the only way to do that in a system this captured, this monopolized, this sold out is through massive public competition.

Grover Norquist famously said he wanted the government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub. He had it exactly backward. Government IS us - it's the only institution that's supposed to answer to we, the people. It's what can stand between us and Big Pharma jacking up insulin prices, Big Ag poisoning our food, Big Tech surveilling our lives, the military-industrial complex bleeding us dry, and a foreign policy that enables genocide.

What we need small enough to drown in a bathtub is corporations. When they're more powerful than the state, they're more powerful than us. And that's not a market economy - that's corporate feudalism.

Public competition breaks their power. It forces them to serve or shrink. It makes them small enough that we, through our government, can actually hold them accountable.

And let's be crystal clear: returning to the pre-Trump "normal" is both impossible and suicidal. That normal is what created Trump. That normal is slow death by a thousand cuts - your rent creeping up, your healthcare getting worse, your kids' futures getting dimmer. All while Democrats tell you everything's fine because GDP is growing.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Trump showed that the rules are fake, the norms are optional, and the institutions serve power, not people. Going backward means pretending that didn't happen. It means more decades of managed decline while we're told to be patient.

The choice isn't Trump's chaos versus Democratic calm. It's transformation versus decay. Build versus decline. Public power versus private monopoly.

Only we can do this. Not as isolated consumers with no leverage. Not through better shopping choices or boycotts. But as a people united through our government - the one institution that's supposed to answer to us, not shareholders.

The revolution everyone's waiting for? It requires rejecting everything we've been taught about how change happens. It starts with understanding that the system isn't broken.

It's working exactly as designed.

And it's time we designed something better. We need a Brand New Congress. A Brand New Economy. We need a Brand New Future.