1/This article describes in esquisite detail the forces aligned against us. Pls take a moment to read it bc we can’t fight back effectively unless and until we recognize our enemies! It’s long and dense but truly a MUST read!
2/Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite:
“U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires),
“U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires),
3/elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions. This “permanent political class. . . is taking us beyond plutocracy to oligarchy.
4/We get to vote but “government policy…reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office
5/Due to this,the US ranks near the bottom when it comes to key measures of social ill-health: economic inequality, social immobility, racial inequality and segregation, infant mortality, poverty, poverty,low life expectancy,violence, incarceration, illiteracy,and pollution. . .
6/Rampant racist voter suppression (which itself provided the difference for Trump in the 2016 election . . . and the transparently partisan hyper-gerrymandering of U.S. electoral districts live on despite occasionally promising and useful court challenges.
7/It’s a vicious circle. When citizens are relatively equal [economically], politics has tended to fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers.. . inequality and oligarchy are two sides of the same class-rule coin . . .
8/As the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies said in 1940, ‘We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’”
9/These few excerpts cannot do the author justice so please read the original article in full. And, although this article does not provide a solution to our woes, if that blue wave fails us in 2018, here is a plan that could:
