The United States was founded by wealthy slaveowners.

The US Constitution/government was deliberately set up to protect the wealthy ruling minority from the toiling working majority.

In 1913, Charles Beard told us about the financial interests that guided this new ruling class in writing their Constitution. The US ruling class maintained chattel slavery for nearly 100 years before shifting it to other exploitative arrangements that included everything from sharecropping to the prison system, where it still exists today.

In 1935, WEB DuBois told us, "the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." The US ruling class has since relied on an entire population of wage slaves.

In 1883, Frederick Douglass told us about this "slavery of wages (capitalism) that is only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery." The US ruling class routinely crushed labor strikes and murdered striking workers. The US ruling class assassinated socialist/communist leaders who fought for working-class liberation.

In 1949, Claudia Jones reminded us about the exploitation inherent to the capital-labor relationship and the "superexploitation" that was prominent in US capitalism's treatment of the country's black population and women, attempting to rally the masses to oppose "the lynchers and big financiers and warmongers" who relied on these arrangements to control the country.

C. Wright Mills told us about The Power Elite in 1956.

Dwight Eisenhower told us about the unchecked military industrial complex in 1961. The US ruling class then conspired to destroy any remnants of democracy that had crept up during the 1960s.

In 1970, from his jail cell in San Quentin, George Jackson told us that fascism was already embedded in the capitalist system, describing the US form of "neoslavery" as "a small knot of men exercising the property rights of their established economic order by organizing and controlling" the working-class masses as if we were property.

The US ruling class officially solidified corporate governance (the precursor to full fascism) in the 1980s.

The US ruling class has siphoned countless trillions from the population since the 1980s while forcing us to work more than ever to barely get by.

Mass immiseration and the creation of a billionaire (and soon-to-be trillionaire) class is now the manifestation of 250 years of rule by a superwealthy minority.

Call it oligarchy, call it plutocracy, call it whatever... but understand that it has always existed. And as long as the capitalist system remains, the rule of a superwealthy minority will remain.