Read: Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious About income inequality. About corporate power. About corrupt politics. And about being America’s next president.

Another headline of an article I read this morning: “Wall Street Donors Are Swooning for Mayor Pete. (They Like Biden and Harris, Too.)” Wall Street also loves Booker and Gillibrand. And that should tell you why Warren is one of the three candidates I’m loving, though I’d vote for anyone over President Trump.

“…For her entire career, Warren’s singular focus has been the growing fragility of America’s middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years while employees’ share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the 1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren’s view of history, “The constant tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it to their own purposes.” Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That’s why economists have estimated that the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent…”

I just spent a good 45 minutes this morning reading this long, and not-really-at-all boring profile of Elizabeth Warren. I’ve already talked about the three non-Wall-Street-money-trough-feeding candidates I’m supporting, thus far, here.

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Top comment on Reddit: 

Like Bernie Sanders recently pointed out: “The boomer generation needed just 306 hours of minimum wage work to pay for four years of public college. Millennials need 4,459.”

From 1970 – 2009:

• Income of top 0.1%: +413%

• Income of top 1%: +213%

• Income of bottom 99%: +7%

Since 1996 wage growth is far lower than increases elsewhere:

• Net worth of Americans aged 18 to 35 has dropped 34% since 1996

• College Tuition: +197%

• Textbooks: +207%

• Child Care: +122%

• Medical Care: +105%

• Housing: +61%

THE US HAS THE LEAST REPRESENTATIVES PER CITIZEN THAN ANY OTHER INDUSTRIALIZED NATION. and its still growing.

We elect our representatives and representation is increasingly disproportionate through gerrymandering, representative caps, voter registration purges. Money talks (and corrupts) and lobbyists get a phenomenal return on investment. We the people have our own lobbyists we pay with taxes, they’re called congress….and they don’t do shit. Every year, less and less legislation is passed.

Republican states lead in:

• Taking more tax funds than they contribute per capita

• Highest gun death rates

• Overdose deaths, cancer incidence & mortality rates, obesity & diabetes

• Highest teen birth rate, Maternal death rates & infant mortality

• Lowest disposable income and economic mobility, lowest minimum wages (or none at all)

• Highest medical bankruptcy rates

• Lowest ranked in education …. and also note that the US has a pretty pitiful ranking in the world for Math, Reading and Science.

• Lowest access to digital learning for students

• Brain drain: college educated adults leaving their home states

• LEAST LIKELY TO HAVE PAPER BALLOTS! see thread here on voting machine corruption

• MOST unhappy states

The top 1% of earners I would expect to be the one group that changes the least. Their wealth has grown far more than any other class, the last time they had this high a share of total US income was before the Great Depression.

• According to a study by the Tax Justice Network , which campaigns against tax havens, by James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co. an estimated $32Trillion is stored in offshore tax havens.

• I want to know why society values a CEO 400x + MORE than the lowest paid worker or how that benefits the world in the long-run. Building capital is exponential (easier when you have more), and the issue will only get worse when ownership of production and housing funnels upwards.

Money speaks, and I don’t see what good it is to structure our society so a collective few are calling all the shots. The largest corporations are made up of mostly:

• Fossil fuels ( $201 million annual lobbying to delay or block policies that tackle climate change). Running active campaigns to muddy the waters around science.

• Healthcare: We pay more per capita than any other country….and it’s not even close. These dirty DEMOCRATIC socialist countries are providing healthcare for cheaper and yet the best republicans can come up with is the long waiting lines and too many people suing doctors (tort reform)

• Defense (lobbying and profiting off of war is morally corrupt and these industries depend on the government to stay afloat. Ridiculous.

Two more comment beauties: