So let's see, rents and real estate prices out of sight and going further ever upward. Eight percent inflation over a year's time and the wages barely go up if at all.

Don't forget education and health care -- already unaffordable for many.

AI will take your job.

People clearing out of California because they can't afford to live there. It's actually like that in major big cities across the country -- anywhere big capital has bought up the real estate.

The foreign policy is incompetent: having cost Ukraine 490,000 lives for nothing, they're now going to abandon it in support of Israel's efforts at genocide after having wasted massive amounts of ammunition in Ukraine. They can't negotiate or do diplomacy. Dedollarization will be the result of their hubris.

Gjohnsit already went over the bond market.

Abortion laws in red states have, basically, criminalized pregnancy there.

Two mass shootings a day.

Climate change disaster has come to stay.

So America is in decline. Its politicians are socially and mentally wired mostly to support what Riley and Brenner call "political capitalism":

Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’. These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s CARES Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act. All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

Everything else they do is a hobby or a distraction.

This is the context of a Briahna Joy Gray interview with Cornel West, being reviewed by RBN:

Gray asks West the question I wanted to ask in this diary. Where's the infrastructure to keep the eneergy going for the people who will be energized by your campaign? West's answer is inadequate -- I think I've shown -- to the problems faced by an America in decline. Sorry, Dr. West. If you can't find an infrastructure to attach your campaign to, you should be looking for someone else who can do it. The problem won't go away: the people he was going to solve it with, the Green Party, well, I guess they're inadequate or a hindrance or something. West will still need what Gray calls "scaffolding" even if by some miracle he wins the election.