I've become convinced that the billionaire (and adjacent) class globally and especially in America suffers under a delusion I'm calling "oligarchical utopianism."
History indicates that utopia for the masses is likely unachievable. I don't mean a particular utopia, I mean smthg like the best use of resources to maximize happiness & security for the population.
I read somewhere, and I'm too lazy to look it up, that if you ask a rich person, from millionaires to Bezos, how much more money they'd need to feel secure and happy, they almost all say the same thing: about three times more than they have. theatlantic.com/family/archive…
Thus very few people feel adequately rich.
Imagine the anguish the twin prospects of higher taxes on their often brutally acquired wealth or lower profits from regulation of their often environmentally villainous companies must inflict on them.
What's a billionaire to do?!
The last period of such vertiginous differences between the wealth of the working class and the wealth of the owner/executive class, the 20s & Great Depression, coincided with the rise of communist revolution as one solution to such conditions.
American unions were very powerful, and communist organizers were given a hearing by the working class.
Having seen what happened in Russia, the American plutocrats realized they needed to do something big to avoid catastrophe (for them) and guillotines.
And so America created The New Deal.
Today's right-wing propagandists like to paint it as a bleeding-heart liberal handout, but it was more like a proactive extortion payment to avoid a mass revolt by the poor.
Today's rich either have not learned the lesson that poor and working-class people have a breaking point, or, and this is the correct answer, they feel that media manipulation, especially social media manipulation, will allow them to get away with their excesses indefinitely.
The power of propaganda to quell uprisings in even the most obscenely unequal societies has an avatar: North Korea.
Kim Jong Un's army, while impressive, would be no match for a huge popular revolution to improve living conditions for the masses there.
But it never happens. 😳
It never happens because the god-king's boot is on the necks of the people through surveillance, and because many of them are actually in thrall to his cheezy cult of personality.
Even mass starvation, traditionally a revolution clutch popper, hasn't done it.
(accidentally published the thread before I was done, so please forgive typos)
Circling back, I think oligarchs see North Korea as a model for their utopia.
- A totally cowed lower class, slaves in all but name, on the brink of starvation.
- An almost omnipotent upper class.
Think about Kim Jong Un. This rotund little dude is so powerful he has his fav movie stars kidnapped from other countries and brought to him.
(Sounds good, right? I mean, if I had a billion dollars and some nukes I'd treat awards shows as more like the Home Shopping Network.)
The main difference between North Korea and the US is that we still have free speech and a free press. This means the oligarchs can only propagandize the 30%-40% of people naturally susceptible to such messages.
So they needed to pit the masses against each other.
That solution is not new, but the technologies used to implement it are.
But will it work?
In America, at least, I think they will achieve many of their goals in the short run.
It's likely Repubs will win or steal one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and steal the White House in 2024. It's clearly their goal.
They will then accelerate their program of destroying/subverting American democracy and going with full frontal fascism.
But I think they underestimate how much societal chaos and the breakdown of fundamental institutions will get in the way of their fun-having.
It's no secret that a lot of these right-wing billionaires are shockingly ignorant and stupid.
So if they manage to tear it all down, they or their descendants will suffer, even if that suffering is simply that climate chaos is coming for all of us, no matter how much we spend on our luxury apocalypse bunkers. msn.com/en-us/money/re…
🧵We cannot forget the reasons agencies like the USDA and the FDA were created. They are not perfect. They have a lot of problems that need to be addressed by competent technocrats. But that's the opposite of Trump's crazy cabinet picks, who are meant to destroy these agencies.
Let's take a trip through memory lane back to the time, a mere human lifespan ago, when we didn't have these agencies.
You shld listen to the full episode of @bastardspod about the origins of the FDA, but I present some disturbing excerpts in this thread. podcasts.apple.com/tt/podcast/par…
(If this looks TL;DR to you, here's one sentence to whet the appetite.)
"And they notice that, as they describe it, the milk appears to be wriggling." 😳😬🤢🤮
Mainstream media is comfortable providing multiple layers of omission that obscure the decades-long fascist plots that are obvious to those paying attention to better sources.
The vandalization of the Voting Rights Act by the Roberts Court provides a perfect example.
(1/6)
The VRA wisely required the former Jim Crow states, which had proudly engaged in shameless suppression of black voters, to get "pre-clearance" for any new laws about voting.
(2/6)
In 2013, SCOTUS decided in Shelby County v. Holder that a black president must mean racism is over, and eliminated this requirement.
(3/6) scotusblog.com/2021/07/select…
🧵 Here's a violently nauseating story about the Republican mindset.
We have a friend in a red state who has suffered three miscarriages. Each time, she needed mifepristone to help expel remaining tissue to avoid fatal sepsis.
Her docs have no idea why she's miscarrying, so she is going to try one more time, and is rightly concerned that if she has another miscarriage she'll now have to travel far to get life-saving treatment because of new Republican laws.
But that's not the disgusting thing I referred to in the first tweet.
The disgusting thing has to do with a conversation she had about this with a forced-birther Republican relative.
Every weekday morning we walk a few miles invigorated by @KeithOlbermann's Countdown. His minatory tone and energy are required in this time.
We often skip the occasional sports coverage and the personal story at the end-unless it's relevant or juicy.
Then we usually switch to @NewAbnormalPod or @DeeTwoCents's Woke AF podcast.
If it's Friday we listen to @ProLeftPodcast.
On the weekends we listen to @JYSexton's The Muckrake.
Depending on ep. topics and what's in the news, we frequently mix in
@onthemedia for media criticism
@openargs for legal analysis of current events
@bastardsod for the history that got us here
@BulwarkOnline podcast for nevertrumper POV that ignores the history that got us here
Capitalism and democracy, though sometimes conflated by confused or cynical people, are not the same thing or even the same type of thing.
Neither requires the other. A form of capitalism can thrive under autocracy, for example.
But they have a few things in common.
In representative democracy, the form of all current democracies larger than a book club, there's tension around how your rep should act.
Are you electing them bc you trust their judgement or are they there to reflect the majority will of constituents?
There's no right answer.
Clearly the nasty state representative elected as a Dem in NC who lied about her views on abortion and switched parties after her election is exploiting a serious bug in the system.
Hey, how about a little review of some recent highlights from the US conservative movement?
In TN, GOP legislators expelled duly elected Dem legislators because they protested inaction on gun violence. vox.com/policy/2023/4/…
Remember when Trump dangled pardons for anyone who committed violence on his behalf? He got away with it, so the idea is inevitably going to spread to other GOP executives. They want you to know that if you fight injustice, you're risking your life.
Meanwhile, a Trump-appointed judge, bred in the cult-like Federalist Society, wielding judicial reasoning that is facially absurd, banned abortion pills for women nationwide. forbes.com/sites/alisondu…