We are a country that has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies. This is due heavily to the control of the many by the few, which creates a democracy gap filled by a plutocracy.
—Ralph Nader
Look at the big picture to understand the forces at work behind the headlines.
See beyond the distractions to understand the con game of the plutocracy and the need for progressive policies that fight back!
We must not let ourselves become so distracted by Trump’s reality-show buffoonery that we lose track of the real-life damage being done by the legislation passed under this administration. It is important to understand the big picture—the problem we are up against is not just Donald Trump, he is the figurehead for a deeper and older rot. The policy and legislation being rammed through, that is so harmful to everyday Americans on so many issues, has one thing in common. It is beneficial to the rich. We can fight back by championing policy that is by the people and for the people.
The plutocracy—people like the Koch brothers—use the power of their money to shape politics so that they can make even more obscene amounts of money.
The plutocrats pay off the politicians through campaign contributions. They also have huge amounts of money and control in right-wing media, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. They use henchmen—politicians like Paul Ryan, thousands of behind-the-scenes lobbyists, and right-wing pundits like Sean Hannity—to shape public opinion. With their vast wealth, they are buying two things: the legislative policy they want (deregulating business so they can make even more money and keep it for themselves and their dynasties) and a media machine to bamboozle the right-wing base into thinking this is somehow in their best interest. They are using obscene wealth to increase their obscene wealth. The harmful policies being passed by the Republican Congress only make sense when this big picture is understood.
To sum it up, the con game works like this:
Rinse. Repeat. And the cycle continues. We have to break this corrosive cycle that is designed to funnel wealth to the top of the pyramid.
While Trump soaks up everybody’s attention span and the headlines, the plutocracy is robbing the country blind. America’s plutocrats are using the Trump era to roll back regulations and industry safeguards so that the already wealthy can get themselves an even larger slice of the pie, at the expense of the poor and middle class. In order to grab themselves more money, they lowered taxes on corporations, ended net neutrality, attacked affordable health care, stole protected natural wildlife lands, and that’s just the beginning. Left unchecked, they will only use their increased power and wealth to buy, swindle, and steal more power and wealth for themselves. They are attempting to warp our democracy into a system where they have all the power and the bought-and-paid politicians do their bidding. While wages for the lower and middle classes have stagnated for the past three decades, the richest 1 percent have seen their incomes spike by 275 percent.
While it can seem like a lot to keep track of, the motives of the kleptocracy are easy to understand. Money. Greed. Self-interest. That’s it in a nutshell. This is not really anything new, it is in fact about as old as money itself. Remember the 1920s? No, of course not, unless you happen to be a hundred years old. But we know from history, books, and movies what that was like. The wealth built up during the Gilded Age fueled the extravagant luxury seen on shows like Downton Abbey. In case you never watched the show, it involves a rich family who is served by a caste of lower-class servants who do the dishes, the cooking, the chores, and help the lord and lady of the manor to dress themselves.
While the upper crust isn’t currently going about in monocles and bustles, the economics are all too familiar. The richest 1 percent own more than half the world’s wealth. In the U.S. in the past four decades the richest 1 percent have accounted for 39 percent of America’s wealth. The four hundred richest people in America now control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of people in America. This is not by accident. It is a byproduct of the deregulation of the finance market. The rich make money by moving money around. Meanwhile the working class is squeezed out as more jobs are moved offshore. This imbalance is staggering, and it is that way by design—it will only get worse until people rise up and protest and organize and fight back. The rich are consciously, actively using wealth to rig the system in their favor. Money is behind all of the politics.
There can be no Downton Abbey without the other side of the coin—The Grapes of Wrath. In the city where I live, the streets and neighborhoods are filling up more and more with homeless people who can’t afford basic shelter and so live in piles of blankets under doorways, and in cars, tents, and shantytowns. Forty-one million Americans (more than the combined populations of Texas, Michigan, and Maine) are living in poverty today. It doesn’t matter to them if the stock market is doing well; these forty-one million Americans can’t benefit from investments when they can’t afford dinner.
While this tragedy is going on, we live in a nation that just gave the largest tax break ever to corporations and the wealthy! The tax scam passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in the dead of night was a $1.3 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the wealthiest tranche of Americans. Ladies and gentlemen, it does not make sense and it is morally wrong. Understand that the greed of the super rich has a real and human price. The greed of the billionaires is paid for in full at the cost of the homeless, at the cost of drilling for oil in the oceans and selling millions of acres of public land—these are the bargains with the devil that must be made for such obscene amounts of wealth to be concentrated into the hands of so few.
Trump’s cabinet is one of the wealthiest gangs of rich fat cats ever assembled, and also the most white and male of any presidential cabinet since Ronald Reagan’s. These henchmen are more than willing to steal from the poor and to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink in order to make money. These people are heartless in their pursuit of wealth. These are people who will use any dirty trick they can, including harnessing racism in the name of nationalism, but ultimately it is all in the name of heartbreaking financial greed.
In case after case, the person Trump picked as chair of each federal department is there to roll back regulations and dismantle the protections that the department is meant to provide the American people. From education and the EPA to housing and the FCC, the people in Trump’s cabinet are the definition of “the fox guarding the henhouse.” Here are a few prime examples.
Ben Pruitt: Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief thinks modern air is too clean. (WTF?!) He brought with him a host of “scientists” from the oil and chemical industries. It is like putting Ronald McDonald in charge of the Food and Drug Administration. Pruitt’s main goal is less regulation. Starting to sound familiar?
Betsy DeVos: Secretary of Education DeVos wants to privatize the public education system—in other words, run our nation’s education system as just another sector of business that the rich can profit from instead of being provided equally to all.
Ajit Pai: Trump’s FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, abolished the net neutrality laws that protected the Internet from censorship and made it so that providers could not charge different people different amounts to access the Internet. Another case of a person whose main interest is attacking consumer protection regulations in order to help out big business. He has raised caps on how much broadband providers can charge customers while cutting back on a program for low-income broadband Internet. What a guy.
Steve Mnuchin: Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, poster boy for the new Gilded Age, is the über-wealthy Goldman Sachs banker Trump placed at the helm of the national treasury. Super rich and entitled, to the point that he used government planes for personal trips to the tune of $800,000 of taxpayer money. That’s almost a million tax dollars spent just on private plane rides. Of course, a million dollars is not much to this plutocrat. Mnuchin had $100 million in offshore accounts that he “failed to report.” He is an expert in using offshore tax havens to hide his money. He made his fortune by being overly aggressive in foreclosing on people’s homes. Since he built his fortune taking advantage of poorer people, it seems his current position is a natural extension.
Understanding that the legislation being passed is designed to help funnel more money and power to the wealthiest individuals in America is the only way to make sense of the Trump administration.
Here is one more example: the chemical perfluorooctanoic acid causes cancer and birth defects. For years, the EPA has worked to prevent its use in products because it’s very, very bad for humans. But under Trump’s administration, a top EPA deputy hastily rewrote the regulations, making it harder to track this poison. This is a despicable but typical example. It is not even a well-known issue; after all, who can remember the word perfluorooctanoic acid—and it is difficult to keep track of things like this when Trump is grabbing the headlines each day by doing things like threatening to wipe North Korea off the face of the planet, or destroy the rule of law by firing anybody investigating him. And yet people will die because of this, and people will be born disfigured because of this. Why? So that some corporation can make more money.
Immoral things are being done while the public is distracted by Trump’s circus barker performance. It reminds me of a shoplifting scheme some small-time grifters used to run at a bookstore I worked at during college. They would run the scam in pairs. A couple would come in, and one of them would throw a big commotion, they would shout, get into a fight with an innocent bystander, swear, rant and rave and act like a raging toddler. All the bookstore employees focused on dealing with the person throwing an aggressive tantrum, and we would work to kick that person out of the bookstore. Only afterward did we realize that while we were so focused on the loudmouth, the sneaky, much quieter partner was shoplifting like crazy—stuffing the most expensive textbooks they could grab into a duffel bag for as long as the distraction went on. Then the two shoplifters would go across town to sell the textbooks and split the profits. It’s a classic two-bit scam. Trump is the distraction. The plutocracy is the other half of the shoplifting team. It is the same scam but for trillions of dollars.
These are human-caused problems and they have solutions; they are not impossible to fix—but we have to recognize what we are up against in order to overcome their selfish con game.
Here are some great examples of positive legislative actions we can push for to shift the balance of power back to the people. These are the kinds of changes we can make if America is ruled by the people, not the plutocrats.
The backlash is surely coming, and we should use it to create a democracy for the people, not just the rich.
Until the day that there are not thousands of homeless Americans, it is wrong for one out of a thousand Americans to accrue obscene amounts of wealth that they cannot even spend in one lifetime. Taxes on those who make more than $500,000 a year should be raised to 75 percent. This would be similar to the most progressive tax rates in US history, during 1944, when a 94 percent tax rate applied to incomes above $200,000. The tax rate remained high during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, never dipping below 70 percent for the wealthiest individuals, and those were decades of prosperity for the entire country, not just the wealthy elite.
With single-payer health care, everybody has their health care covered. Right now fifty million Americans can’t afford health care. Having all health care provided by one system streamlines everything—which allows for massive savings of over $350 billion annually. We spend twice as much per person on health care as any other nation. Single-payer would fix that. A single-payer system already exists in America; it’s called Medicare, which is health care for Americans over sixty-five. A simple way to enact single-payer health care would be to expand the Medicare age down from sixty-five to cover everyone. We are the only wealthy industrialized modern society that lacks universal health care!
Far too many people are living in poverty in America. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 is hopelessly out of date. No one can afford to pay for a place to live and food to eat on seven bucks an hour. A better minimum wage is overdue.
Regulations protect us from the greed of Wall Street bankers. Recent history has shown this is a very necessary safeguard! Glass-Steagall separates commercial banks, which are federally guaranteed, from investment banks. We should reinstate this common-sense legislation that prevented banks from gambling with depositors’ money. It prevents banks from taking on high risk—its repeal directly led to the risky business that caused the Great Recession. Without it, wealthy bankers can take on risky investments and then be bailed out by taxpayers when it goes wrong.
Imagine a nation where energy is 100 percent renewable. Through a combination of wind, water, and solar energy, it is possible. It’s a matter of working toward a future that benefits the earth and generations to come, instead of just a future that benefits the bottom line of oil companies. Mandating 100 percent clean, renewable energy would take a lot of work; in fact, that is a good thing, because it would also create millions of jobs. More importantly the planet would not be doomed to overheating and mass extinctions just so a few billionaires can buy themselves yachts and fancy watches.
Should nature, wildlife, and people suffer for the sake of the profit of oil companies? When the Exxon Valdez leak of 2010 happened (On Rex Tillerson’s watch), thousands of miles of ocean were contaminated in the Gulf of Mexico, killing untold numbers of fish and wildlife and causing health problems for residents of the gulf area that persist to this day. We should demand that Congress protect our oceans. The Trump administration is currently trying to reverse an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling in 120 million acres of ocean waters.
A corporation would sell any and everything to make a buck. If they could, they would sell off the air we breathe, and the mountains, the moon, and the rivers. That is why we need laws that don’t let them destroy the environment, laws that protect the natural beauty of this country and the national monuments from being sold off to the rich.
Germany, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and France all offer free college education to their residents. There is no reason America could not choose to invest in future generations rather than saddling them with crippling life-long debt.
Mass shootings (defined as an event where at least four people are shot) happen every day in America. Sadly, there is a real danger of people becoming anesthetized to this unnecessary violence. On average thirty people are killed a day by guns in America. There is constantly a fresh horrible tragedy in the news where scores of people are gunned down, and each time the politicians claim “now is not the time to politicize this tragedy.” Nowhere is safe, children are shot in schools, people are murdered in churches, at concerts, at dance clubs. twenty first graders were shot at Sandy Hook. And each time tragedy such as this unfolds we are told there is nothing that can be done. That is a lie told because guns are a multibillion-dollar industry. Gun control works. When gun control was enacted in Australia the occurrence of mass shootings dropped to zero and gun-related homicides dropped by 59 percent. We can start with a common-sense ban on things like assault rifles, and by closing the “private sale loopholes” that allow people to buy guns without undergoing any sort of background check. These measures would go a long way toward preventing the next Sandy Hook, the next Orlando, the next Las Vegas.
Net neutrality means Internet providers treat all websites the same. Without it, an Internet provider can slow access for certain sites, or charge more to access some websites. We should reinstate net neutrality, and this time make it a federal bill so it can’t be revoked by a panel of three Republican votes.
The Citizens United ruling of 2010 gave corporations a green light to spend unlimited amounts on ads in political campaigns. Corporations have spent billions since then influencing political campaigns, and look at where it has gotten us. This unlimited corporate spending was allowed because the Supreme Court said that this was free speech for the corporations. The four dissenting judges stated the obvious: a corporation is not a person, and it does not deserve the same protections to free speech that a person has under the Constitution. This terrible Supreme Court decision (thanks a lot, Scalia) is a big part of why we are in the mess we’re in now. We need to demand that our elected officials pass new, stronger legislation, undoing the damage done by the Citizens United ruling.
A corporation is not a person. A corporation is a greedy force designed to make money. Corporate greed does not care about you or your children; for a profit it will give you cancer, for a profit it will give you diabetes and high cholesterol. For a profit it will trap you in debt, or sell you a bogus degree from a fraudulent university. For a profit it will always give you the worst deal it can afford to give you. For a profit it will stifle creativity, for a profit it will poison the seas and the rivers, kill all the fish, and charge you more per month not to censor your Internet. All corporations are essentially the same thing, a greedy brute blind force, designed to do one thing only: make more profit.
If we organize, we can wrest control from the rich and give the power back to the people. They did it in the ’60s, with the mass demonstrations by the young people, and marches for women’s rights and black civil rights. Until we wake up and fight back with as much organization and feet in the street as was seen in the ’60s, the plutocracy will continue to use their power and money and henchmen to warp politics and give themselves more power and money in the vicious cycle that is the current big picture.
What we want is not radical, although we are told by the establishment that these ideas are too far-out and cannot be done. That is a lie. What we want is the will of the people. The more people understand the benefits of common-sense, good policies like universal health care, reasonable gun control, and making college available to all, the more likely we are to get there—don’t let anyone tell you we must give up on a good and beneficial idea because it is “not practical.”
It is common sense that we should end senseless gun violence in this country, it is common sense that not all of the money should be concentrated in the hands of so few, it is common sense that in a country as rich as ours we should not have forty-one million people living in poverty.
The status quo is in fact radical in its obscenity, the plutocracy is radical in its concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few. It is time for the rest of America to rise up and say enough!