The movie "They Live" is happening in real life in slow motion. A small percentage, but fairly significant number of people is waking up and seeing through propaganda mainly because of the Internet.
One of the aspects of the movie that's very distorted, however, is that the malaise and corruption in society is solely due to an external alien agent. That's obviously not true. Instead, people's collective lack of concern for themselves and others ends up being concentrated into individuals and organizations. The general lack of virtue, and more importantly conscious choice, gives power and life to the entities that oppress them.
That said, there are some prosaic things that people can do as individuals and as a nation to reverse trends of the past couple of decades in their favor and for the general benefit of all. This could be an enormously long rambling post if I itemized things, e.g. investing locally or using local banks instead of blindly shoveling cash into a 401(k). Instead here's the general concept. In recent decades, the laws of the United States and really the world were changed to favor financialized corporations as the pre-eminent means of producing every single thing from entertainment to food. It's really not all that hard to roll all that stuff back. It would probably take years to do it, but it's probably preferable to do it piecemeal anyway if that's what people really want.
But as I said above, the laws and the corrupt government and organizations are really not the problem. People are dispossessed because they dispossess themselves. They barely think and make conscious choices. They lack information and the ability to see the information they do have. Maybe most importantly we're guided by bad myths.
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