 The rising profitability of firms in the U.S. has financed an explosion of corporate lobbying since 1970. Given American financing of politics, it is difficult for people to stand for Congress without deep-pocketed backers, so that politicians of both stripes, left and right, are increasingly supportive of business interests. More than two-thirds of Americans believe that democracy is rigged and that they have little or no say in governance compared with business and the wealthy. The dominance of business in the rich in politics has brought an orgy of rent-seeking where firms and the rich get special protections that allow them to plunder the public. Doctors and car dealers, protected from competition by local and federal law, are well-represented among the top 1% of income. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to addict patients for profit while their representatives in Congress block investigations and change the law in their favor. The American healthcare industry is a particularly egregious case. Hospitals have been allowed to merge and raise prices. Officially designated non-profit hospitals pay their chief executives huge sums while keeping wages low, sometimes even conspiring with other hospitals to undercut pay. And as non-profits, they avoid most taxes. Private equity is discovered that healthcare is a profitable business. Patients often have little choice and can be easily exploited. Think of ambulance services in emergency rooms where customers are unable to make alternative arrangements if only because they're unconscious. Globalization, especially the globalization of capital has helped the rich avoid paying taxes. Money flows to international tax havens and international firms play off governments against one another to keep taxes low, converting countries into tax havens. With freely mobile international capital, the countries are losing control of their tax systems. Firms and bankers, not voters, get to write the rules. Meanwhile, the people that we did not listen to are angry and frustrated. They have lost trust not only in us, but in science and in expertise. Pandemics have become harder to control as has climate change. Voters have turned to populace who promise to do better and who might well do so for them, although at terrible cost, the undermining of democracy and perhaps even the loss of our planet. Thank you very much.