The Atlantic Magazine is among America's most venerable journalistic institutions.

It is a serious, sober journal that chronicles our events, our democracy.

And it has since the heights of the most dangerous era in American history,

the American Civil War, a sectional war between American regions fought over the issue of slavery.

Not since then has America faced an internal danger so grave and a threat so clear.

And so it is no surprise that it is the Atlantic Magazine that is the first to seriously highlight the danger ahead, what is coming, what is approaching down the tracks.

There is still time to prepare for what is ahead.

But before we can, it is important to look back because it is essential to understand

the loss of democracy, the loss of control, the loss of agency

that is to come is something that has been experienced by many, many tens of millions of Americans.

They have lost their economic agency because they got sick, developed

cancer, or their child did, or maybe they had a severe injury. It doesn't matter. Any family in

America that is captive to their health insurance company and cannot pay the bills to live a life worth living,

is captive and has long ago lost their agency and their democracy to a dictatorship of big companies, of greed.

There are other Americans who have lost their lives, their agency, their control to an evil

deal that existed between companies like Purdue Pharma that profited in the billions of dollars

while a million Americans were left dead,

and many hundreds of thousands of more on the streets, addicted, ravaged by opioids,

ravaged now by fentanyl, ravaged by the cruelty of a system that saw the food and drug administration,

which is supposed to protect the people, instead work with the opiate manufacturers to poison

them. It was a dictatorship of greed that did them in.

What the Atlantic Magazine is mostly talking about is a loss of political agency and political control,

...