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I would argue that we centralized power in the hands of corporations. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. That power should be diffused and shared. The whole neoliberal project has created a global oligarchic class, where eight families own as much wealth as 50 per cent of the world’s population. The world’s 500 richest people in 2009 added US$12 trillion ($16 trillion) to their assets, at a time when nearly half of all Americans have no savings and nearly 70 per cent cannot come up with $1,000 in an emergency without going into debt. This is the problem we live under. We don’t even control our own economies.

We live in a failed democracy, a system of inverted totalitarianism that has been a bipartisan failure. Neoliberalism runs rampant within both parties in the U.S. In fact, former U.S. president Bill Clinton was one of the main architects of neoliberal policies with the North American Free Trade Agreement and deindustrialization destroyed the welfare system as we know it. He deregulated the Federal Communications Commission, which gave unprecedented power to roughly half a dozen media platforms that now control what 90 per cent of Americans listen to or watch. Clinton allowed the destruction of Glass-Steagall, which tore down the firewalls between investment and commercial banks.

We live in a failed democracy, a system of inverted totalitarianism that has been a bipartisan failure

It was this neoliberal project that destroyed the society in Iraq in the way that neoliberalism has created the worst social and income inequality in American history. Instead of spreading the wealth, we have seen manufacturing jobs sent to places like southern China, where people are locked in their dormitories at night and there’s wage theft where they work 14 hours a day in abusive conditions. This is what unfettered capitalism does and in that process, the mechanisms by which we could ameliorate, affect change and reform our society were broken and destroyed.