Hey there, it's Stephen Dovner.

What you're about to hear is an updated version of an episode we released just before the

COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the US.

We thought with an upcoming election, it might be useful to hear it again.

Hope you agree.

The United States, like many countries around the world, seems to have entered a period

of broad and deep discontent.

Much of this discontent is related to economic issues, some of them specific, like wage stagnation

and the spike in health care and college costs, and others are more systemic, like inequality

and crony capitalism.

This discontent has grown into an indictment of our entire political and economic system

with multiple constituencies harboring multiple grievances, some overlapping, others

in deep conflict.

I'm telling you nothing here, you don't already know.

You also know that different actors have harnessed this discontent in an attempt to steer the

country in different directions.

Perhaps the most successful to date is Donald Trump, who in 2016 defied just about every

prediction on Earth to win the US presidency.

The Democrats have also tried to steer that discontent in their direction, especially Vermont

Senator Bernie Sanders, a long time registered independent, who was for a time, a leading candidate

for the Democratic presidential nomination.

We now have an economy that is fundamentally broken and grotesquely unfair.

...