Trump, the GOP, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the ~150 billionaires who made him president again are all on the side of oligarchy. And we’re already most of the way there, thanks to five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.
As President Jimmy Carter told me eleven years ago:
“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
Oligarchy.... is when the morbidly rich own the government and dictate policy, the “consent of the governed” be damned. We’ve been creeping in that direction since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, when rich people stopped paying taxes, corporate consolidations exploded, unions were attacked and wages stagnated, and it began to cost a fortune to get decent healthcare or a good education.
But the danger of oligarchy isn’t just that rich people get richer and the rest of us get poorer, which has been the steady trajectory of the Reagan Revolution for 44 years. As I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, oligarchy is almost always just a transitional system.
It doesn’t last, because working class people eventually get tired of being ripped off by the morbidly rich. Which is exactly what we’ve been seeing with our political system for the past two decades: whichever candidate — the best examples are Obama and Trump — who promises “change” gets elected, because the people are angry about the morbidly rich oligarchs having taken over the government and turned it exclusively to their own benefit. More
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