Rising inequality subverts democracy. For the past 40 years, wages declined as labor productivity increased. The top one-tenth of 1 percent has as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

In the first decade of the 21st century, nearly 60,000 U.S. factories closed, jobs were lost to low-wage countries, and American workers were kicked to the curb.

Our crumbling infrastructure is unsafe, public universities and community colleges are starved of adequate investment. Youth, burdened with unsustainable student loan debt, face decades of financial servitude, their dreams of home ownership and new families deferred. The environmental crisis deepens. The nation is embroiled in endless war.

The main beneficiaries of this mess are the 1 percent who exploit stock buybacks, shelter profits in offshore tax havens, and cynically suggest that if we want to keep our schools, libraries, and fire departments open, we can raise property taxes to compensate for revenue lost to corporate tax evasion.

These sad outcomes are not natural occurrences. We are where we are because a rapacious capitalist class wants it this way. Capitalism is the problem. It can’t be transformed. It must be transcended. We can start by electing the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders president.

But more important than who’s sitting in the Oval Office, to paraphrase the legendary socialist historian Howard Zinn, is who’s “sitting in the streets, occupying, protesting and demonstrating.” No socialist president alone can change the system. That is a job for the people themselves. We need to build a mass movement for revolutionary change.

Christopher McKinnon

Augusta