When it comes to corporate and economic injustice, when is enough enough?
Dr. Warren J. BlumenfeldNovember 14, 2025 (lgbtqnation.com)
New York, NY USA – June 29 2025 Zohran Mamdani and other officials march in the 55th NYC Pride Parade | Shutterstock
On November 4, as the results of this “off-year” election became clear, we witnessed the real possibility of the beginning of the end of Donald Trump and MAGA’s impact on U.S. politics.
Though Republicans will still maintain power in the House, Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, the 2025 Blue Wave reaching tsunami proportions could portend a Democratic takeover next year in national and state legislative elections.
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Hey, we might even see some prominent Republicans growing a spine by finally speaking out and distancing themselves from the draconian, democracy-killing MAGA policies they have supported because of their fear of challenging Fearless Leader in the Oval Office.
Democrats won big in Virginia, taking back the governor’s mansion with Abigail Spanberger. Virginia Democrats also won the Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General’s offices. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill has become the Governor-elect.
California voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of their Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mid-decade electoral redistricting plan, which could add an additional five Democratic U.S. Representatives to that state’s Congressional delegation. Newsom initiated this ballot initiative in an attempt to counter Texas’s action in drawing districts to give Republicans an overwhelming congressional advantage by adding more Republican representation.
Possibly the election with the highest national visibility was in the race for New York City. A charismatic progressive populist, a Muslim who self-identifies as a “democratic socialist,” Zohran Mamdani, beat the much better known former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an Independent after Mamdani beat him in the Democratic primary.
If the United States does not act to narrow the massive gaps in wealth and income between sectors of the population, I believe a class war — hopefully non-violent — is imminent in the United States until and unless we radically change direction.
At his victory speech, Mamdani announced, “Tonight, you have delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford.”
Two days prior to Mamdani’s election, President Donald Trump, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, issued a threat to the people of New York City if they elected Mamdani.
“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York,” he warned, “because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there.”
Either Trump is ignorant of the very real differences between “communism” and “democratic socialism,” or he is attempting to confuse and scare people. But how many people in the United States actually understand socialism? For that matter, how many of us are well-versed in our own socialist history?
David Bentley Hart, in his February 24, 2020 Commonweal article “Three Cheers for Socialism,” indicts the public for its ignorance on matters of history, social movements, and economic theory.
“Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth,” he argued. “They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’”
When is “enough” economic inequality and exploitation?
While economic disparities plague all nations across the planet, nowhere among the world’s richer nations are these disparities more extreme than in the United States. The top 1% of the population (who have an average annual income of $1,316,985) have amassed greater wealth overall than the entire bottom 99% (who have an average income of $50,107). So, when is enough enough?
When the compensation of corporate CEOs has risen an astounding 300 times more than a typical worker’s, when is enough enough?
When corporate profits have reached unprecedented heights, though the wages and benefits of the vast majority of workers have either stagnated or diminished (when accounting for inflation), then when is enough enough?
When Congress and President Trump passed their misnamed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” continuing the massive tax credits to the uber-rich, seriously limiting nutritional assistance, rising rates for healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act, and thereby effectively eliminating insurance while substantially increasing healthcare costs, when is enough enough?
When a few individual families own 20, or 30, or 40 or more fast food franchises while paying their workers less than a living wage — and keeping in mind that 26% of fast-food employees are parents raising children, and 68% are the major wage earners for their families — when is enough enough?
When a McDonald’s employee must work the equivalent of 930 years to match the salary that the CEO makes in a single year, when is enough enough?
When a family purchases two, or three, or four, or five, or even six homes that they occasionally visit —depending on their current mood — like the rest of us choose which pair of underwear to wear for the day, while many of our people, including youth, go homeless, when is enough enough?
When our elected officials in Washington, D.C. respond merely to the demands of upper-income groups and discount lower socioeconomic income brackets, then when is enough enough?
No, democratic socialism is not a magic panacea or some unattainable utopian vision from a futuristic film. Instead, democratic socialism provides a concrete foundation of action for real life to lift our nation from the ever-widening social and economic abyss in which we find ourselves, an abyss that poses an existential crisis far greater than any threat from foreign military or cyber invasion.
As the corporate sector increasingly dictates economic policy through the purchasing and ownership of politicians, all at the expense of the people of our country, fostering a corporate culture that eliminates workers’ healthcare and collective bargaining rights; a culture that promotes and maintains workplace inequalities based on race, nationality, age, sex, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, and disability; a culture that forecloses our homes through scurrilous business practices; and that holds students hostage to loan structures that jeopardize their futures, then when is enough enough?
When the military industrial complex marches to the beat of industry, when an educational system based on standardization and allegiance to corporate needs, and when a prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout society, then when is enough enough?
When corporations grab government bailouts with impunity while doling out exorbitant bonuses for executives, and when these same executives pay lower tax rates than their secretaries, then when is enough enough?
Even before the Cold War and the so-called “McCarthy Period” (named after Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy), individuals and groups on the political and theocratic right flinged the term “socialist” from their metaphoric sling shots into the faces of their political opponents to discredit their characters, dismiss their political ideas and policies, and to sway the electorate toward a conservative agenda.
“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country…. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump said in his second State of the Union Address in January 2019, setting a major theme for his future presidential bids by throwing to his base the red meat of socialism, characterizing it as an anti-American, freedom-killing political philosophy.
This continued, as evidenced by the political right wing and, in particular, the MAGA movement’s representation of Kamala Harris’s candidacy (and various other Democratic politicians) as “socialist left-wing radicals.”
Democratic Socialism as a cure to corruption & corporate injustice
As destructive and as freedom-killing as the right would have us believe, according to the World English Dictionary, socialism involves “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole,” where each of us has a stake and advances in the success of our collective economy.
Maybe if more of us challenged the vast array of widening and inhumane inequities, where each of us understood that we all have a stake and advance in the success of our collective economy, then enough would definitely and finally be enough!
So, what are some strategies to narrow the gaps in wealth and income between the economic classes in the United States:
- a governmental single-payer quality universal health care system not tied to individuals’ employment, which includes safe and reasonably priced prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs.
- guaranteed protection and enhancement of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid safety nets that are not taxed.
- a system of parental leave, paid sick leave, tax credits, and governmental supplements for quality child daycare services, as well as universal Pre-K education for all young people.
- guaranteed equal pay for equal work between the sexes, and the raising of the minimum wage so workers can significantly raise their standard of living.
- further nationalization of our parks, forests, mountains, rivers, streams, shores, and offshore waters, rather than allocating increased corporate mining, drilling, and timber rights.
- free and quality education, not only through grade 12, but throughout higher education and after for everyone who desires and works to achieve their fullest potential.
- government-sponsored programs that guarantee our seniors a retirement system, one that ensures a high quality of life free from economic burdens.
- guaranteed rights of workers in all industries to organize and to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.
- elimination of workplace inequalities and larger societal inequalities based on race, nationality, citizenship status, age, sex, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, disability, socioeconomic standing, religion, and other social identities.
- guaranteed comfortable and secure places to live, and governmental policies that actually prevent a banking system that forecloses people’s homes through scurrilous business practices.
- severe restrictions on the political process to prevent mammoth contributions by individuals and corporations looking to buy and own politicians and to influence public policy, while locking out individuals and groups unable to amass large political funds.
- challenges to the military industrial complex which marches to the beat of industry, and a prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout society.
- truly progressive tax structures where everyone pays their fair share, one that inhibits massive inequities in the overwhelming accumulation of wealth by the top income brackets.
- basic and effective restrictions on the so-called “free market” economic system which currently enables the creation and enhancement of mega monopolies, outsourcing of jobs, manufacture of defective products, and inhibition in the development of clean renewable energy technologies.
- a free and fair electoral process with equity-drawn voting districts without the fraudulent inclusion of gerrymandering, increased early voting options, increased use of mail-in ballots, reinstatement of deleted provisions by the Supreme Court and enhancement of the National Voting Rights act of 1965 to ensure bias-free and the non-partisan running of elections.
- the passage and enforcement of fair immigration and refugee-status legislation to provide rights and protections for qualified applicants, without fear of unwarranted arrest or deportation.
If the United States does not act to narrow the massive gaps in wealth and income between sectors of the population, I believe a class war – hopefully non-violent — is imminent in the United States until and unless we radically change direction.
Ironically, it will take a democratic socialist revolution to prevent the current capitalist system — lacking in oversight regulations, rife with corruption and influence peddling resulting in massive wealth and income inequities vastly favoring the super-rich — from imploding upon itself.
It will take a democratic socialist revolution to promote governmental sponsorship of previously private and semi-private sector institutions, such as insurance and retirement policy corporations and educational establishments.
It will take a democratic socialist revolution to compel the United States to live up to its overriding promise that anyone can succeed depending on their motivation, merit, talent; neither helped nor hindered by their socioeconomic birth ranking or their social identities.
It will take a democratic socialist revolution to ensure a firm and strong safety net to catch everyone who, for any reason, has been unable to ascend.
No, democratic socialism is not a magic panacea or some unattainable utopian vision from a futuristic film. Instead, democratic socialism provides a concrete foundation of action for real life to lift our nation from the ever-widening social and economic abyss in which we find ourselves, an abyss that poses an existential crisis far greater than any threat from foreign military or cyber invasion.
Young people, especially those steeped in history – or possibly protected from its murky shadows – can educate their elders who grew up in earlier generations when “socialist” was thrown as an evil and corrosive epithet.
The type of democratic socialism proposed by, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Zohran Mamdani —and while not referring to herself as a “democratic socialist,” Elizabeth Warren has articulated similar plans — is completely dissimilar from the crime and fraud-laded, freedom-killing National Socialism ruthlessly imposed by the German Nazis; and from the governmental system inflicted within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); or the ruthless Socialism of Venezuela and the Communism of Mainland China and North Korea.
Rather, the democratic socialism outlined by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani and the movement activists they have spawned resembles more the social and economic systems of the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
No country in the world today stands as a fully socialist state, but rather, some of the most successful economies combine elements of capitalism with socialism to create greater degrees of equity and lesser disparities between the rich, the poor, and those on the continuum in between.
This year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conducted its “Better Life Index” to determine the “happiest countries in the world,” according to its residents. Based on an 11-measure survey assessing quality of life, including housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, health, work-life balance, and life satisfaction, all of the Scandinavian countries, plus Netherlands, Iceland, and Switzerland, Canada, plus Australia, and New Zealand reached the top 10 ranked countries.
The United States did not make the cut in the top 10 but came in at 17 (down two places from the previous year). Therefore, we might do well to look to these countries for some of their socialist policies that sustain high levels of quality-of-life issues for their residents.
Many on the political right have established the false binary of capitalism on one side and socialism/communism on the other. But when we get beyond the fear and false generalizations and connections to tyrannical corrupt dictatorships, is socialism really so “anti-American”?
It will take more, though, than a president to do this. It will take the Houses of Congress to propose and pass legislation and the courts to maintain policies and regulations making the capitalist system more equitable and sustainable, and to conduct genuine oversight functions that prior Congresses have relinquished.
Yes, it will take a democratic socialist revolution by We The People to save capitalism from itself!
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Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is author “The What, The So What, and The Now What of Social Justice Education” and co-editor of “Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.”
