The Millennial Democracy

The United States of America has long been a nation of free enterprise and personal freedoms, the land of opportunity and protector of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yet, America is also a nation founded largely upon stolen land, much of it built by enslaved peoples and exploited immigrant laborers, where industrialists, tech tycoons and wealthy folks of all shapes and sizes have wielded huge and corrupting levels of power and influence for most of our history. Greed and exploitation has defined America just as much as freedom and prosperity has, yet the powers-that-be overwhelmingly push to remind us of the latter traits over the former. In fact, if one points out the rampant corruption and greed inherent in our current system, or makes an effort to discuss our history in its truer form, they are often labeled 'un-American', 'unpatriotic', 'socialist', 'woke' and any number of other politicized slurs used over the years to dampen dissent and p...

News of President Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Program, in the amount of $10,000-$20,000 per borrower, is a welcome fulfillment of one of the President's most well known and oft-cited campaign promises. With over $1.7 trillion dollars collectively owed in student loan debt across the nation, our higher education system has produced an unstable debt bubble slowly eating away at the economic progress and upward mobility of the American people. From holding off on having children to being unable to afford mortgages on their first home, student loan debt is saddling entire generations with a burden that's only getting worse. While the positive personal and economic effects of this debt forgiveness program will likely be felt for years to come, the program's very existence reveals a much deeper and wider problem with how higher education is structured in the modern United States. Back in the early 1960's, one could attend a community college full-time for an average ...

In 1935, already a handful of years into the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Hiring millions of unemployed American workers to complete various infrastructure and public-good projects such as maintenance of roads, building dams and the construction of parks and schools, the WPA constituted one of the most ambitious components of FDR's New Deal programs. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA created nearly 8 million jobs. At its peak in 1938, the WPA provided paid jobs for 3 million unemployed adults, with unemployed youth also given work through their own division, the National Youth Administration. The goal of the WPA was to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment. The stated goal of public building programs was to end the depression, or at least alleviate its worst effects. Millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was pr...