THE TRANSITIONAL OLIGARCHY

Thom Hartmann - Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government’s efforts to increasing their own wealth and power.

We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.

It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to “dark money” SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don’t list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

And none of that covers the additional billions in “free media” Trump got from FOX “News,” rightwing hate radio, and Musk apparently altering the Xitter algorithm to favor messages friendly to himself and/or Trump while suppressing anti-Trump or pro-Harris posts.

This is extraordinarily bad for average Americans: With billionaires calling the shots in the upcoming Trump administration we can expect more pollution, fewer consumer protections, a war on unions, a frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage, bigger subsidies and grants to billionaires’ companies (from the fossil fuel industry to defense and SpaceX), lower taxes on the morbidly rich, and cuts to social services and entitlement programs.

But far more concerning is the simple reality that oligarchies are merely transitional forms of government, as I mentioned on Ali Velshi’s show Sunday morning and wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Ever since Ronald Reagan embraced neoliberalism (free trade, gut unions, low taxes on the morbidly rich) the top .01% have pillaged the American working class, essentially stealing over $50 trillion over the past 43 years and using that money to buy megayachts, penis-shaped rockets, European chateaus, private jets, and to fill their money bins.

So far, Republicans have been able to largely distract Americans from this naked theft by tossing out red herrings; blaming the ills of America on immigrants, big-city Black people, teachers, and the queer community.  But there’s a limit to how long you can gaslight people; eventually working-class Americans figure out what’s going on and who’s behind their falling behind previous generations.

When that happens, oligarchies begin to tremble, something that’s been gradually happening...

Once protest against the oligarchs buying politicians and manipulating government reaches a critical mass, the oligarchy is faced with a terrible but necessary choice. 

They can allow democracy to proceed and end up being voted out of power (as happened in Brazil when Bolsinaro was thrown out), sometimes even facing jail themselves (as happened here in 2020, although Merrick Garland dragged his feet for two long years).

Or the kleptocratic government can clamp down on their opposition, labeling protestors and democracy-advocating politicians as terrorists and “the enemy within,” using the power of the state (guns and jails) to suppress popular pro-democracy movements. More