What we forget is that it wasn’t always this way. In the days of the robber barons and the railroad tycoons, Americans understood that monopolies suck the economic life out of ordinary households and that governments that enable these corporatists accomplish the same parasitic goal through excess taxation. Somewhere along the way the focus was on globalization in the promise of “raising all boats”. Anti-trust enforcement largely went out of favor. Henceforth, what is “broke” about Democracy is not democracy — nor capitalism, per se — but the idea that we can have our cake and eat it too: Somehow we are to remain a “free country” accountable to ordinary voters, yet tolerate a gargantuan private sector and an equally obese federal government. Private and public sector are in fact two sides of the same coin: Big government exists because Big Corporations donate to political causes and provide the tax revenues that politicians feed upon at the public trough. So the answer to both corporate and political lack of accountability is the same: break both the public and private sector down to size.

Globalization favors a fusion of corporatism and big government — indeed many have worked toward “World Federalism” for decades now. Indeed, how do the global elite promote a “integration” between governments in the absence of globalization?

We the people must wake up to the common thread running through all these seeming abuses: Politicians are unwilling to break up corporate monopolies because it means making enemies, which threatens their career aspirations (one reason why NO politician should be eligible for unlimited terms in office).

It’s time to reimagine a system that is “human scale”. Neither the private or public sector is permitted to become too big to fail and therefore it will not be resistant to actual voter input/desires.

Thinking we can run complex public or private systems on a globalized basis without losing local accountability must become a thing of the past. Complexity is a cover for corruption and grift, which is why unlimited growth of government power/influence and corporate power/influence are unsustainable no matter WHAT we choose to call those systems. We need human-scaled economic and political activity — but that’s the last thing in the world those who have benefited from the architecture of the current “Big is better” systems want us to comprehend.

Politicians and their billionaire-backers in the World Economic Forum and DAVOS will not achieve a fairer or more equitable world — it is but a false promise as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen. They design BIG and overly-opaque political and economic systems to hide the fact that Democracy has been “sold” to the highest bidder. These same corporatists, technocrats and politicians want people to believe that Capitalism doesn’t work and Democracy doesn’t work — but they don’t have anything better to offer and, in fact, what will instead take place is more consolidation of corporate and political controls over our lives in the name of “solving” the problem. Don’t fall for it!

The establishment now openly refers to themselves as “stakeholders” as if to suggest the rest of us are not. THEY win when average people do not have the time, money, will or comprehension to “fight the system”. That is why their preferred systems, no matter what they choose to call them, inevitably promise that things will be better if we accept further centralization and monopolization of power. Of course they would argue that giving them more of the same will allow them to “fix it for us”. But they never have and they never will. It’s time to set aside the usual right vs. left political arguments and appreciate that until we cut both the public and private sector down to size, nothing changes. Democracy and capitalism can work for the rest of us — but only if we stop buying into their divide-and-conquer political narratives and unite around the fact that size matters. And they’re ALL too big.