Originally Posted by
eschatological
I bitch about capitalism all the time.
Hint: I am, and my family is, very successful. We are literally in the 1%. My father came to this country with $20, and made it. But he was always very clear: he could succeed because he was given opportunity in our home country (India) that he would have NEVER gotten here. Back when India was a poor, firmly 3rd world country, and decidedly socialist, they determined that anyone with the intellectual merit can and should have a university education. So my dad, who grew up in poverty Americans couldn't even understand, got to attend and graduate from the national university, with honors, and without debt. And then could become a CPA off of that. After which he came to the U.S. for his MBA. Had he started in the U.S., he would have been mired in a cycle of debt and poverty that likely would have killed his American Dream. I grew up in the ghetto. But I knew we were getting out, so I never gave in to it, and I had that knowledge not because of the opportunity America gave us - but because of the opportunity India gave us.
Capitalism, as implemented in the US, is a crony system of oligarchy, that serves only one purpose: to make the rich richer. I don't have to work another day in my life if I don't want to, because I could literally liquidate all my assets, put it into a low yield bond, and live off the non-taxed interest for the rest of my life, at a "salary" higher than 90% of the population......and make money doing it. It is a broken system.
And it disproportionately negatively affects black and latino communities, who are, because of historical reasons, more likely to start in that cycle of violence and poverty.