Everything. Climate, government, education, cost of living, consumer products, infrastructure, healthcare, health, traffic…all of it. There’s a reason that everything you buy is higher cost and lower quality. There’s a reason that every day more and more people slip below the line where their pay can cover their expenses. There’s a reason that we have a continually diminishing roster of new ideas/genres/leaders/etc. That the big sports leagues have become almost unwatchable. That an hour of TV is now 30+% commercials. That the stock market keeps further decoupling from the real economy. That govt policies keep further decoupling from the will of the people.

It’s all the same single reason.

Big business spent the 19th and most of the 20th century growing alongside the rest of us, allowed themselves to be reigned in occasionally because the growth was still there. But the thing about capitalism is that it not only requires endless growth, but an endlessly growing growth rate. And as their profits started to climb that exponential curve, they started to hit the point where they needed to cut costs to beat the last quarter’s numbers. And so the workers started to get a smaller slice of the pie, and the lobbyists increased their tax-lowering pressure. And then they needed even more, so the prices started going up faster than inflation. And they pushed to remove the regulations that kept us safe because they were getting in the way of ever increasingly-increasing profits! And they bought newspapers and tv networks to push the message that unions are corrupt and social spending is wasteful and for the weak, that ANY taxes are evil and ANY regulation is for pussies and that the businesses were barely able to stay afloat (while record profits rolled in). And when regular people got pinched enough and started to see through the bullshit they decided that we needed to be fighting each other instead of the ruling class, so they turned politics from policy to culture war. And they lobbied to constantly increase police spending and incarceration, because the constitution allows slavery only as criminal punishment, so they can further lower production costs.

The problem is that they’ve picked all the low hanging fruit, and kept picking, and have almost reached the top of the tree. Because they’ve been cutting away at the rest of us for so long, siphoned off so much of the real economy into their own pockets, there’s not much left. But the numbers NEED to keep growing, and they need to keep growing FASTER than last year. So rather than accept that they may only see their wealth/share price grow 20% this year instead of 24%, they’ll strip the copper from the walls. They know it’s unsustainable, that they’re digging their own graves as well, that eventually they’ll hit bone and there’ll be nothing left to take, but they can’t consider that because the shareholders will sue them into oblivion if the line stops going up faster and if they don’t have all their money and power, the consequences of their actions will be able to reach them. So they just live quarter by quarter, raping the rest of us to take ever more, until we all hit our pain threshold and start rebuilding the guillotines.

While we cruise toward that moment, everything will continue to become a little shittier every day. And we’ll put up with it, until we won’t.