There is a close connection between who rules and who benefits. Today in the U.S the gap between rich and everyone else has reached levels not seen since the 1890s. Tax breaks and tax cuts have enabled the top 1% to corner 20% of the nation's income and more than 40% of the wealth. Those numbers make the U.S. more unequal than any other advanced industrial country. The free press calls this the free market. The "ism" in Capitalism makes some people uncomfortable so better to speak in euphemisms. The systems of power and domination are glossed over or elided altogether. "It wouldn't do," as Orwell sarcastically used to say, to be too specific. Best to keep the natives in the dark.

Robert Jensen is professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Writing Dissent and Citizens of the Empire. His latest book is The Heart of Whiteness.