From Smirking Chimp
Have corporate/billionaire control of our republic reached such a point that it's no longer reversible? Have we passed the tipping point where democracy dies?
A few years back, on my radio show, President Jimmy Carter said that America, in large part because of Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, has become "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery."
He's right. It's the elephant in the room that everybody, particularly our corporate media, completely ignores.
While Republicans are doing the will of their oligarch owners, replacing real scientists with industry lobbyists and shills everywhere from the White House to congressional science committees to the EPA, the media stubbornly refuses to report in depth on it, preferring instead to following the Worldwide Wrestling moves of our tweeter-in-chief.
"Red-shift" election fraud (called red because it helps only Republicans) has been flagrantly on display across the country since the privatization of our vote by GOP-leaning voter-machine companies in the 2000-2004 period. GOP voter suppression in nearly 30 states has now been institutionalized with Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck scam (now a presidential "commission"). Pre-poll and exit-poll results "flipped" in Georgia's 6th district in a way that caused us to decry similar vote-rigging in the Ukraine (the result, like in Georgia's 6th, was measurably off from the exit polls).
Yet in the face of all this, enough to provoke revolution in countries like Egypt and Ukraine, our press instead focuses on the oligarchs' unproven and well-debunked claim that "illegals" are voting to help Democrats.
While climate change is ravaging the world, the administration of billionaire oligarch Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement and is rolling back climate-protecting rules on behalf other oligarchs in the oil, coal and gas business so they can continue to use our atmosphere as a sewer.
While billionaire-owned Republicans frantically work to roll back the 3.8% tax on investment income (for families with over $250,000 in investment income/year) their oligarch owners so despise, cutting millions of Americans off any hope of affordable healthcare access, the television media usually plays this tax-cut story as if it were about healthcare.
From trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which has returned to consumers billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from our country's banksters), to gutting environmental laws, to preventing students from even declaring bankruptcy when their efforts to join the middle class by going to college don't work out, the oligarchs who now largely run America are solidifying their power and their wealth.
This is rule by the rich. It's here. It's now.
As Vice President Henry Wallace predicted in a prescient New York Times op-ed in 1944:
"They [the super-wealthy] claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.
"Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Have they finally reached that goal which, in Wallace's day, they could only hunger for?
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