How We Got Here

It didn't happen overnight,
It was a slow and steady slide,
Forty years of trading futures
For a short-term rising tide.

They said the market knows the answer,
Let the wealth flow down from high,
But the wealth stopped flowing somewhere
And nobody asked them why.

This is how we got here,
This is how the story goes,
A thousand little choices
That nobody ever chose.
The lobbyists wrote the language,
The think tanks wrote the rules,
This is how we got here —
And we don't have to stay fools.

The unions lost their power
When the laws were rewritten slow,
The media got consolidated
To six companies or so.

The schools got underfunded,
The prisons got built up tall,
The safety net got shredded
And they called it standing tall.

But here's the thing about history —
It's not a one-way street,
Every system that was built by hands
Can be rebuilt complete.

We know what works, we've seen it work,
In countries all around,
The question isn't can we —
It's will we stand our ground.

This is how we got here,
And now we know the score,
A thousand little choices
That we're making evermore.
The lobbyists wrote the language
But we can write it too,
This is how we got here —
And we know what we must do.