I just went to Stubhub to check on tickets. They don’t have a lot left for tomorrow’s game. I don’t know if they represent only some of the tickets, or if they have access to all unsold tickets. I don’t know how ticketing works. But several sections are sold out, and the remaining sections have an average of a dozen or so seats left. Whatever.

Anyway…I am saving all my fretting for the game against the Vikings whom I loathe. And have reason to fear. The Texans cannot score enough. It would take a giant turd of a game by the Rams to lose this game, and I just don’t see any stretches of that at all, let alone any reason to think it’s possible for them to lay one out for an entire game.

The team looks focused and prepared to me, and well-coached. So well-coached that for the first time since Vermeil, I see a team capable of making meaningful halftime adjustments.

The Rams have laid absolute waste to bad football teams (with the early exception of the 9ers whom they merely beat convincingly in their first real game under McVay). The next time the Rams lose, it will be to a team that is better than they are, not to a team that is AS good, or inferior.

zn wrote:

On Sunday, the Rams will play a second straight game against a team ravaged by injuries, the Minnesota Vikings, whose two top quarterbacks have been sidelined by serious knee injuries (Teddy Bridgewater last year, Sam Bradford this year). Two weeks after that, they’ll play an Arizona Cardinals

Talk about looking past an opponent…

Anyway. This has been on my mind this season. They have been lucky so far.

The OL is where I’ve been casting a nervous eye all year. It’s a good starting 5, but the depth is thin.

Etc.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-a-year-after-trumps-election-nothing-has-changed-w511229

A Year After Trump’s Election, Nothing Has Changed
Polls show Trump would win a repeat of last year’s election – a year later, we are dumber, and more divided, than ever

Matt Taibbi

Exactly one year ago today, Donald Trump was elected president. For many Democrats, it was a trauma surpassed in their lifetimes only by 9/11. For some, it remains unsurpassed for sheer shock/horror value. And according to The Washington Post, not much has changed:

“Confronted with the events of the past 12 months and even Trump’s unprecedented unpopularity — 59 percent disapprove of his presidency — a new poll shows that 2016 voters look as though they’d still pick Trump, albeit about as narrowly as they did before.”

Yes, this is a poll, and polls are part of the reason we got into this mess in the first place. Reporters like myself believed in them too much last year, when we should have been reading the far clearer warning signs – like that the landscape between cities was wall-to-wall Trump signs, or that Trump rallies were massively attended and feverish, while Democratic rallies were more sparse and sluggish.

But polls still have some meaning, and the new one The Post cites should tell us a lot.

The Post piece argues the problem is a loss of enthusiasm among Democrats that is actually worse than the loss of enthusiasm among Republicans, who have about a million tweets worth of reasons to have lost faith since last November:

“Even as the Trump presidency has unified the Democratic Party against him and his policies, just 72 percent of Democrats said they would vote for Clinton in a rematch — vs. the 84 percent who said they did vote for Clinton last year. Trump’s share of the Republican Party, meanwhile, dropped just five points from 89 percent who said they did vote for him to 84 percent who said they would do it again.”

It’s very possible a generic Democrat, and not Hillary Clinton with her unique issues, would do better. But it’s also possible that isn’t true.

Another recent poll, this one conducted by ABC News along with The Post, shows the Democratic advantage for the 2018 midterms narrowing to a dead heat among the most likely voters. As awful as Trump has been, and as near-total the chaos has been surrounding the Republican Party, the opposition has not been able to capitalize.

Maybe that’s as it should be. In a divided country, Donald Trump makes perfect sense as a president. He’s belligerent, unrepentant, unapologetic and creates seemingly irreparable conflict as a matter of professional habit.

If we’re no longer one country but two, and that’s the political format to which both sides are committed, he might as well be manning one side. He does a fantastic job at keeping the civil war going, and the interest in ending that war for some time now has seemed limited to one or the other side hoping to capture the flag for a while.

The Democrats have not gained ground on Donald Trump in the last 365 days for the simple reason that they have been too busy during that time trying to take political advantage of Trump’s liabilities.

Cable TV for the blue-state crowd is one giant SCREW TRUMP! ad, and the progressive idea of a political discussion these days is a bunch of people sitting around comparing notes to see who is the most excited about “indictment day.”

It wouldn’t have seemed possible a decade ago, but behaviorally, culturally, Donald Trump has turned Democrats into Republicans.

Remember the Bush years? Remember that first experience with going to the house of some long-lost friend or family member, who had gone conservative in the intervening years?

Remember how you spent the entire time at that dinner trying to steer conversations away from politics, but your Republican counterpart kept trying to steer things back that way? Remember that peculiarly annoying form of needling?

“Bet you love the Clintons, huh? Bet you love Sean Penn, amirite? Bet you’re worried about the rights of terrorists, huh? Huh? Huh?”

Remember that horseshit? Remember how much you hated it? That’s us now. All we talk about is how much we hate Trump. And we don’t shut up about it.

It’s stupid. Not because Trump isn’t awful, because he is, but because opposing Trump and what he stands for is the easiest and most obvious thing ever.

Is there any intellectual defect worse than obviousness? How about predictability? If you want a million-ton dose of either, turn on MSNBC sometime. It’s a goddamned Sahara desert of obviousness. A Himalayan range of predictable messaging. And smart people watch it.

Jesus, what for? When was the last time you were challenged or presented with a surprising idea there? (And I know, I’ve been a guest. I’ve been part of this.)

All thought has been denuded in the past year. Trump should have been a boon to the comedy world, but he’s actually sort of destroyed it, at least at the mainstream level, where jokes have devolved into one-liner versions of MSNBC messaging. (Look, there’s Putin coming down Trump’s chimney! HAR!)

Obvious sells, and it will make some careers, but it’s a mental wasteland, and our continued appetite for this kind of thing is why absolutely nothing has changed in the year since the shock of last November 8th.

Despising Trump and his followers is easy. What’s hard is imagining how we put Humpty Dumpty together again. This country is broken. It is devastated by hate and distrust. What is needed is a massive effort at national reconciliation. It will have to be inspired, delicate and ingenious to work. Someone needs to come up with a positive vision for the entire country, one that is more about love and community than blame.

That will probably mean abandoning the impulse to continually litigate the question of who is worse, Republicans or Democrats. As a progressive, this has never seemed to be a terribly difficult question for me to answer for myself. For some reason, though, people keep insisting that both the question and the answer must be included in any effort at punditry or any public political discussion, almost like a disclaimer, as if audiences might forget. It has become our version of a loyalty oath.

Division isn’t an accident. It’s not even just a by-product of a commercial scheme, though the pioneering work of Roger Ailes and Fox News played a crucial role in our current mess, by showing media companies they could make easy money through the politics of bifurcation and demonization.

Division does make money, but beyond that, it’s highly political. It’s an ancient technique of elites, dividing populations into frightened and furious camps so as to more easily control them. When people are scared enough and full enough of hate, they will surrender their rights more quickly.

It’s not an accident that as the right-left divide has grown in this country, we’ve gradually given up on almost every principle that used to define us, collectively, as Americans. We surrendered our rights to privacy, failed to protest vast expansions of federal power (including to classify the inner workings of our own government – our government), stopped requiring due process to jail people and closed our eyes to torture and assassination and all sorts of other atrocities.

This was made easier first because conservatives were convinced liberals were in league with terrorists, and more lately because progressives have been told Trump and his like are in league with Russians. Mutual hatred and fear has made us much more easily disenfranchised.

A year after Trump’s election – T-Day, we’ll maybe call it someday, as it should have some kind of infamous nickname – we’re no closer to solving the enormous problems of this country. We are on the brink of a kind of civil war, but even suggesting that this is an eventuality to be avoided is becoming almost treasonous in both camps.

That the Democrats haven’t come up with this solution is no surprise. The party has for decades now been dominated by third-rate minds incapable of seeing beyond next week’s poll numbers.

The people running the Democratic Party are opportunists and hacks, and for as long as the despicable and easily hated Trump is president, that is what these dopes will focus on, not realizing that most of the country is crying out for something different.

Among other things, if we hate the guy so much, why do we waste so much of our lives talking about him? Thinking about him?

If we were serious thinkers, and not obvious or malleable ones, we’d have spent this last year coming up with ways to improve this country, or make it more just, or more beautiful, or less violent, instead of obsessing constantly about Trump. Even making the country more funny would be a start. God, are we an unfunny people now!

T-Day was exactly one year ago. It was an awful day, one of the worst ever for a lot of people. But we haven’t moved on. We’re actually volunteering to stay stuck in that awful moment. Is this really necessary? Do we have to keep our faces stuck in that particular diaper? For God’s sake, will this ever end?

zn wrote:

All-time record for points in an NFL season is 166, set by David Akers in 2011. Greg Zuerlein could SMASH that record. He’s on pace for 198!

J.B. Long‏@JB_Long
No.1 in red zone opportunities, but only 16th in league in red zone TD%. (Plus, 12 total giveaways.) #LARams

Those things are closely related.

PA Ram wrote:

The Rams were great in the Giants game. No complaints. They were great.

Just wanted to point out two quick things that jumped out to me.

#1) The offensive line. This unit can not get enough credit for how well it is performing this year.

#2) Goff has a quick release. He may not have Prescott or Wentz’s running ability but I would take his quick release over the other two. I think he edges them there.

I believe – at this point – that we can now safely say…The Rams have a quarterback.

A real one.

And that could mean a pretty good decade.

Let me get this straight:

It’s November, and we are having a conversation about how the Rams measure up against the top teams in the NFC. Do I have that right?

{“Zooey…Wake up. It’s time to get up and go to work….”}

InvaderRam wrote:

yeah to me it’s rams and eagles in the nfc. both offenses about as complete as you could expect. exciting offenses. it’ll come down to defense for me.

but i gotta say that performance against the broncos. i didn’t see the game, but on paper. oh boy. that’s scary.

What about New Orleans and Minnesota? My son says Minnesota has played a soft schedule, and we know they are helmed by Case Keenum.

Awesome.

I don’t know what to do anymore except hope that the demographic shifts happen faster than GOP machinations to deprive POC of the right to vote.

This is all over Facebook today, too, and I just don’t know WTF to say. Why is this a story?

Everybody is in shock over this, and I don’t get it.

It was obvious from the summer of 2015 that the DNC was tilted towards Hillary from the debate schedule, and the DNC’s manipulation of funds, the commitment of superdelegates, and the talking points issued in the media unfavorable to Sanders was out in the open early in the primary season. Then there was the Nevada debacle, and on and on.

Why are people acting like this is a shock? Because one of the guilty parties has come forward to admit it?

Why isn’t the story, “Hey, Fuckin’ Donna, why the hell are you such a fucking hypocrite for coming clean NOW when you were kissing Hillary’s ass the whole time you KNEW this was going on?”

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

But it might get the attention of the DNC…although you would have thought they would have noticed what happened in 2016. Who knows?

=========================

Well I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as “getting the attention” of the DNC. I think the DNC is what it is. They have corporate-souls just like hardcore-Republicans. I think they will always do exactly what they have always done. Because thats just who they are. Thats what they believe in.

There’s not enough of us, Zooey. There just aint.

w
v

You’re probably right.

It isn’t that they are doing what they do in spite of the little voice of conscience in the back of their head.

They are doing what they do because they believe it, and because they think progressives are truly wrong-headed.

So, in that event, no way do they read the tea leaves that “it’s safe to be a Democrat again.”

They think they are.

wv wrote:

===================

Well, that would mean four more years of Trump, right.

Once again, people are faced with the usual triangulations.

I’m never voting for a DNC-backed-Dem. Ever.
If that means endless Rep presidents, so be it. I just dont believe in the system anymore.

w
v

Probably. But maybe not. A lot of people are completely fed up with their own party. Bernie would have won if he had been the nominee. But…if it is split three ways – Rep, Dem, Bernie – probably nobody wins 270 outright, and it goes to Congress to decide. And that wouldn’t be Bernie. But it might get the attention of the DNC…although you would have thought they would have noticed what happened in 2016. Who knows?

All I know is that planet is we are all dead unless we shut off fossil fuels, and develop technology that can regulate CO2, and neither Dems nor Reps are gonna do that, so it is Hail Mary time anyway.

But…I don’t think Sanders is going to run. The time to do that was 2016, and he didn’t do it. No reason to think he will do it in 2020. He will either return to Dem, or he won’t run. My guess is the latter.

Anyway…it was a nice biosphere while it lasted. Some good times. Go Rams.

It’s the same thing Montana was missing.

It’s kind of funny that Montana is Goff’s idol because they are a lot alike imo. There was just something missing with Montana. Something that just “wasn’t there.” And fear, I guess, is as close to it as we can get. There is an absence of the consideration of failure. They lack the capacity of self-doubt. In most people, that is replaced by arrogance. But neither of these guys have that, either.

But it’s more than the absence of self-doubt. We’ve seen plenty of qbs crushed by doubt in their teammates, doubt in their OL. With a pretty bad OL last year, we never saw Goff buckle. Bad interception? Go sit on the bench and look at the photos, and talk about the next series.

I’m not sure what any of that means. The DNC and the Party Loyalists see him as a traitor anyway, and they would continue to see him that way even if he ran as a Democrat.

Secondly, the Democrats have done everything in their power to ostracize him and the progressive wing of the party ever since the Democrat Convention in August, so it’s kind of like firing an employee after he quits, or breaking up with a girlfriend after she’s already dating some other guy. I don’t think Sanders can betray a party that has rejected him at every opportunity.

In any event…what does it mean? It means Sanders thinks his brand as an independent in his state is worth more to him than the label Democrat. And that he probably won’t run for president in 2020 which nobody expected him to anyway.

wv wrote:

I dont disagree with any of that, but the Defense looked good against Bortles and Arizona, and Seattle. I dunno what they’ll look like when the high-octane offenses show up. Like New Orleans, etc.

They won’t look as good.

And everyone will be concerned that they aren’t as good as we think they are.

That’s what will happen.

Oh, hey. Look what I just stumbled across…an article by someone a lot more articulate than I am.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/what-is-the-intra-republican-conflict-even-about

OCTOBER 23, 2017
WHAT IS THE INTRA-REPUBLICAN CONFLICT EVEN ABOUT?

The GOP’s agenda is the same no matter who is in charge: cut social services, let rich people run everything…
by NATHAN J. ROBINSON

I know that Steve Bannon wants to wage “war against the GOP establishment.” But some days I am not sure what that war is even about. I know it is a fight over whether the right will identify as “nationalist,” “populist,” “anti-globalization,” “anti-interventionist,” and “protectionist,” and I know roughly what those words mean. And yet, to some degree, I still don’t really get what this means, because both sides in this “war” look very similar to me: both are authoritarian, both believe that the lives of immigrants and racial minorities don’t matter terribly much, both seem to believe that rich people should control the destinies of non-rich people. While I know there is some real-world implication to the battle over “protectionism,” I cannot help but feel as if a large part of the intra-GOP war is an ideologically empty power struggle.

Consider Peter Wehner’s recent New York Times op-ed “Going Against The Republican Herd.” Wehner is a “so-called establishment Republican” horrified by the forces of Bannonism and Trumpism. He insists there is an “existential” battle within the party between “the tribalistic, angry, anti-government wing of the party” who have “embraced white identity politics,” that some have “jettisoned traditional conservatism in favor of the Trump-Bannon brand of ethnonationalism” and “developed a disdain for the hard, intricate work of governing.” These new forces, he says, are “revolutionaries” who “peddle conspiracy theories” and have a “nihilistic strain” fueled by feelings of “powerlessness, resentment, and grievance” and encouraged by “Breitbart and Alex Jones.” Wehner calls on sensible Republicans to recognize “the danger Trumpism and Bannonism pose to the principles they claim to hold dear” and longs for “leaders of courage and purpose who, in a fractious and intemperate age, believe—and can help others believe—that one of the high callings of politics is to heal our wounds rather than inflict new ones.” Wehner and Bannon therefore share the same basic view of the state of Republican politics: there is a battle going on, and it is an important one, and the stakes are high. It is the forces of tradition versus the forces of revolution. And both agree that the revolutionaries will stop at nothing. As Wehner says: “Their rage at the establishment is off the charts. They want to burn the village down.”

And yet there’s something very strange about all this talk of a battle between “elites” and “radicals” in the GOP: I don’t know what any of it actually means for the real world. It almost seems like a fight over rhetoric: will the GOP have slightly more explicit xenophobia or not? The actual implications of it are always a little murky. It seems so obvious that there’s an irreconcilable ideological difference between Bannon and Wehner: after all, both of them say there is. But one peculiar thing about Wehner’s op-ed is that, while he uses a lot of general terms about those who are “angry” versus those who believe in “healing,” he doesn’t actually say much about what the policy differences between the two forces are. The most specific concrete difference he cites is that the new conspiratorial, angry right have a slightly more favorable view of Vladimir Putin than their establishment counterparts.

Presumably, the difference between Bannon and Wehner can be boiled down to the difference between Breitbart and, say, The Weekly Standard. But the main difference between Breitbart and The Weekly Standard is that Breitbart’s headlines are in all-caps. The schism largely seems to be one of tone: will right-wing politics be brash, vulgar, and shameless or sober and polite? Will it wear a tie and a flag pin, or will it have a five o’clock shadow and three open-collared shirts? In fact, when you look at The Weekly Standard itself, we can see how illusory the ideological difference really is. Their lead article right now is about how Trump, even though he seems unprincipled and not-very-conservative, is actually governing precisely as they hope a “small government Republican” would, refusing to issue new regulations and eliminating old ones. As they note, “it can be useful to distinguish between the person of the president, who has no discernible ideology, and his presidency, which, so far, has been strikingly conservative.” That means that while there might be a difference in theory between Trump and orthodox conservatism, and while the spectacle of Trump is certainly different from anything previously known in Republican politics, in practice they are virtually identical: tax cuts for the rich, gutting environmental protections, further bloating the military.

One odd thing about Steve Bannon in particular is that while he’s completely fanatical about his ideology, it’s often a little unclear what it would actually mean if put into practice. Probably the most comprehensive guide to understanding Bannonism is BuzzFeed’s “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World,” a transcript of a 2014 talk in which Bannon explains his basic political framework. And yet after reading it, while I understand that Bannon sees the world differently from the way orthodox conservatives see it, I don’t understand how Bannon wants to change the world in ways that differ much from what traditional conservatives want.

Consider Bannon’s perspective on capitalism. This is one of the points where Bannon differs from the rest of the GOP. He is, after all, a “protectionist” and “economic nationalist.” He also believes there is a “crisis of capitalism” and has spoken critically of “bankers.” That’s certainly not typical Republican talk! But then look at what he says about what the “crisis” of capitalism is:

I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis…. Principally in the West, but we’re expanding internationally to let people understand the depths of this crisis, and it is a crisis both of capitalism but really of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West in our beliefs… When capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the Jewish faith, they were active participants in the Christians’ faith, and they took their beliefs, and the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored. I can see this on Wall Street today — I can see this with the securitization of everything is that, everything is looked at as a securitization opportunity. People are looked at as commodities. I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

Okay, so Bannon thinks the world is in crisis while other Republicans don’t. But what does he believe in? He believes in a mixture of capitalism and Christianity. Whereas the rest of the Republican party are simply… Christians who love capitalism? I mean, I guess Bannon says he doesn’t like it when people are turned into “commodities,” and doesn’t think everything should be securitized, which is language you don’t usually hear from Wall Street types. But does that mean he wants to expand the purview of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Does it means he wants to increase the power of the SEC? Bannon was one of the few in the Trump administration who believed that rich people might need to have their taxes raised slightly, but even that was in the service of a massive tax cut for everybody else. So what are we actually talking about here? Is the difference between Bannon and Wehner the difference between whether you strangle the federal government with a tax cut for 99% of people or strangle it with a tax cut for 100% of people?

So much of the narrative around a divide between the “sensible, moderate” GOP of old and the “radical, fringe” insurgent faction seems designed to get us to forget just how radical the “moderates” have always been. Wehner is disdainful of Breitbart-ism for pushing “conspiracy theories” and “anti-truths.” But Wehner’s Republicans have spent the last decade pushing conspiracy theories about voter fraud in order to kick black people off the voter rolls, and Wehner was head speechwriter for the Bush Administration, for God’s sake, which was responsible for the deadliest set of untruths in recent American history. The idea that conservatives used to be “principled” but that people like Bannon and Trump are “unprincipled” is itself a shameless fabrication. What were these principles? When were they ever held? Were they the principles of Reagan, a man who funneled $1 million a day to death squads, worsened inequality with tax cuts to rich people, and cut social benefits for elderly, blind, and disabled people? It’s very common to hear attempts to distinguish the Good form of right-wing politics from the Bad form, but what you will rarely hear is a very clear explanation of what the differences would mean in practice for people’s lives. Unless I’m mistaken, both forms would like to see everyone kicked off food stamps, health care entirely turned over to the free market so that poor people will die from lack of coverage, and a system of mass incarceration housing millions of people.

The main obvious difference I can see between the policies of the “revolutionaries” and the “establishment” on the right is on immigration. The “establishment” are pro-business and want cheap immigrant labor, whereas the “revolutionaries” are xenophobic and want to deport every unauthorized person they find. It’s worth noting, first, that this is not really a difference between being pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant: it is a difference on the question of whether businesses should bring people here and brutally exploit them, or whether native-born Americans should be first in line to be exploited. It makes a difference in the lives of immigrants, but it’s not actually a substantive disagreement on who should hold economic power. However, it’s also important to be careful not to lapse into false nostalgia for some mythical “kind and gentle” GOP of the past. George W. Bush is known for his “compassionate” conservatism, for pushing immigration reform that would have allowed unauthorized people a path to citizenship. He’s therefore seen as representing a totally different Republican attitude toward the immigration question. But Bush was very clear at the time that, while he believed that deportation was impractical and immigration was important, he was in favor of radically strengthening control of the border. Increased border security, he said, was his first priority when it came to immigration:

First, the United States must secure its borders. This is a basic responsibility of a sovereign nation. It is also an urgent requirement of our national security. Our objective is straightforward: The border should be open to trade and lawful immigration, and shut to illegal immigrants, as well as criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists…Since I became president, we’ve have [sic] increased funding for border security by 66 percent, and expanded the Border Patrol from about 9,000 to 12,000 agents. The men and women of our Border Patrol are doing a fine job in difficult circumstances and over the past five years, they have apprehended and sent home about six million people entering America illegally… Despite this progress, we do not yet have full control of the border, and I am determined to change that. Tonight I’m calling on Congress to provide funding for dramatic improvements in manpower and technology at the border. By the end of 2008, we will increase the number of Border Patrol officers by an additional 6,000. When these new agents are deployed, we will have more than doubled the size of the Border Patrol during my Presidency…. At the same time, we are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history. We will construct high-tech fences in urban corridors, and build new patrol roads and barriers in rural areas. We will employ motion sensors, … infrared cameras… and unmanned aerial vehicles to prevent illegal crossings.

Bush did eventually succeed in his goal to more than double the size of the Border Patrol. He didn’t end up passing comprehensive immigration reform, but he did achieve what he said was his first priority, which was to crack down on illegal crossings. (Obama would go even further.)

So let’s be careful before buying the GOP’s own narratives about the different ideologies of its various factions. People like Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach may be vicious in their hostility to unauthorized immigrants, but George W. Bush was no friend to them. Breitbart may be “anti-establishment” but only in the sense that it doesn’t like the people who have traditionally been in charge of the party; in terms of preserving the powers of the American ruling class, both sides are firmly in agreement. We know that all Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric was nonsense: he’s a billionaire who immediately installed a bunch of billionaires in his cabinet, and there’s a reason the Tea Party was funded by incredibly rich people. As Vanity Fair’’s Tina Nguyen writes, Steve Bannon’s revolution seems more like a “power grab” than anything substantive, and “Even Bannon’s allies suggested that the wannabe kingmaker’s insurgency lies more in populist packaging than in a real anti-establishment ideology.”

It’s important to always evaluate political conflicts by their potential real-world consequences for people, not by the different kinds of rhetoric deployed by each side. And right-wing politics is right-wing politics, whether it is christened “pro-business” or “nationalistic.” Either way, it advocates the same thing: control of the world by a small fraction of wealthy people, as everyone else subsists for a pittance, with a tiny, cruel government making no attempt to alleviate the injustices inflicted by the free market.