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powell memo
Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
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The Rich and Their Right-Wing Allies Have Poisoned America; We Hold the Antidote
This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Time is short, and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.
Mar 22, 2026
President Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s been accused of raping 13-year-old girls. He made a shocking joke in the White House on Thursday, speaking with the prime minister of Japan, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him.
The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.
Our country has been poisoned for decades now, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken around 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis.
First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.
Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.
Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America.
“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business,” Powell wrote, “is Ralph Nader, who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”
Nader (who wrote the Foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream) and people like Rachel Carson, with the environmental movement her book Silent Spring had inspired, threatened, Powell believed, the core of America’s free enterprise system.
Regulation, Powell (a tobacco lawyer) asserted, was just step one to a total Stalinist takeover of America.
“The overriding first need,” Powell wrote, “is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival—survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”
The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: It was speech.
That decision greased the path for the later doubling down with Citizens United, and produced a tsunami of corporate money that flooded into the GOP in 1980 (at the time the Democrats were largely funded by labor unions; their embrace of corporate money would come in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”), floating Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal Reagan Revolution into power.
Since then, big business and billionaires have discovered that the investment of a few million dollars into buying politicians can produce billions or even trillions in returns. When morbidly rich hedge fund guys poured a million or so dollars into Kyrsten Sinema’s coffers, for example, she demanded changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that saved them $14 billion.
That’s one hell of a return on investment, and similar deals are made every day now: The entire GOP and the “corporate problem solver” Democrats are all in on the scam.
Whether it’s money from fossil fuel, big pharma, big chemical, big banking, big airlines, big telcom, big tech, or any other billion-dollar industry in America, the entire GOP and a handful of those “problem solver” Democrats in the House and Senate have their hands out. Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.
Next came poisonous memes designed to turn working people against each other.
As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.
The morbidly rich, and the corporations that made them that way, hate labor unions, aka “democracy in the workplace.” Unions reduce their profits and inhibit their ability to maximally exploit their workers; unionized workers also demand accountability, a word anathema to corporations.
Reagan promoted the idea that “union bosses” were exploiting union members for their own advantage and, even though the argument made no sense (unions don’t have stock or bonus systems like corporations, so “union bosses” get a salary just like everybody else), it was picked up by the media that was, itself, run by corporations unhappy about being unionized.
TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s routinely featured corrupt or mobbed-up “union bosses” as parts of their plots, while state after state adopted “Right To Work For Less” legislation, authorized by a Republican Congress over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, that makes it difficult for unions to survive.
Right-wing radio and Fox “News” echoed the message, and, since Reagan’s election, we’ve seen union representation go from about a third of all Americans to around 10% in the private workplace today.
Along with the poisoning death of our unions came the destruction of the American middle class. When Reagan came into office some estimates put the middle class—a single family’s wage earner being able to buy a home, a car, take a vacation, put kids through school, and save for retirement or have a pension—at around 60-65% of American families. Today it’s under 45%.
Conservatives then set about poisoning American race relations.
This is not to say everything was hunky dory, but in the 1960s and 1970s we were making real progress. Politicians from both parties—with the broad support of the American people—passed Voting and Civil Rights laws; we made good faith efforts to integrate schools and workplaces; and even television shows in the 1990s, led by Norman Lear’s genius, brought positive portrayals of non-white and queer people to straight white people’s TV screens in a big way for the first time.
First came Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” openly welcoming Southern white racists into the GOP. Next, tragically, in 1988 George H. W. Bush proved that appealing to white racism could still win elections with his notorious Willie Horton ads, setting the stage for two generations of race-baiting Republican politics that reached its zenith with Donald Trump’s racist declaration about “Mexican rapists” when he announced his candidacy in 2015.
The GOP continues this strategy today, promoting racial and religious fear and hate with Muslim bans and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, generating hysteria about brown refugees and fighting to block any true portrayals of American racial history in our schools.
Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.
Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement—which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights—into the GOP. Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.
The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.”
"What we saw on Tuesday,” Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s TV show, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”
Robertson replied:
Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.
Falwell then doubled down:
The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen.”
Robertson, nodding vigorously, added:
I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.
And now we have evangelists like the newly reinvented Mike Flynn—a convicted and pardoned secret foreign agent who spied on us from within the White House—traveling the country today calling, essentially, for replacing our democracy with an authoritarian “Christian” government like in Russia and Hungary (and Germany and Italy in the past).
“If we are going to have one nation under God,” Flynn tells audiences repeatedly, “which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”
Forget about the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Goats and Sheep in Matthew 25; get yourself an AR-15 like Flynn recently strutted with on stage. And let’s do something about all those Jews and Muslims, like Nick Fuentes recommends!
The National Rifle Association (NRA) and weapons manufacturers then poured the poison of guns across our land.
Using the money Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, combined with Justice Antonin Scalia’s twisted Heller decision, the Supreme Court and the NRA have unleashed an epidemic of gun violence in America.
The average of all countries in the world is 9.86 guns per 100 civilians. The United States is highest in the world at 120.5 guns per 100 people. Yemen, which is in the middle of a war with Saudi Arabia and dealing with an internal insurgency, comes in second at 52.8.
No other nation is even close; even Afghanistan and Iraq average around 20 deadly weapons in the hands of every hundred people. European and Asian countries range from 10 to as low as 1 gun per hundred people.
Over on Fox “News,” one brilliant idea to deal with the slaughter of our children in our schools was to issue “Ballistic Blankets” to every school. This is how sick and twisted the Republicans taking money from the gun industry and their allies have become.
Twenty years ago, car accidents were the leading killer of children and youth: Today it’s guns. This year, almost 11 out of every 100,000 children died from guns while only 8 per 100K died from car crashes. Nothing in America kills more of our children than the 400,000,000+ guns in which our country is awash (and that have made billions for the weapons industry).
White Supremacists are doing their best to poison our police and military.
There’s an active movement among white supremacist groups to spread the poison of fascism, racism, and hate to the government employees who carry the authority to legally kill people. As ABC News reported last March:
Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI's division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would "very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of" their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month."
And the epicenter for this appears to be Stephen Miller’s ICE.
“Semi-Fascist” MAGA Republicans are poisoning our system of governance.
Former President Joe Biden rightly called out the MAGA faction of the Republican Party; they are actively working to undermine our republic and replace it with their beloved autocratic strongman models of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Putin’s Russia. They’re even promoting Hungary and Orbán on Fox “News,” doing fawning specials live from Budapest featuring the Big Man himself.
In multiple Republican-controlled states, legislators have made it harder to vote—particularly for low-income people, minorities, and college students—while openly working to terrorize Black voters. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paraded a group of mostly Black “illegal voters” in Florida, while Texas politicians have promoted far and wide their arrests of Black “felon voters.”
It’s all about trying to terrify Black people away from the polls, if less severe efforts like outlawing “Souls to the Polls” by ending Sunday voting aren’t enough to swing elections to the GOP.
The Brennan Center documents how:
As of January 14, legislators in at least 27 states have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrictive [voting] provisions.
Dozens are now law, and next is their SAVE America Act, which they don’t expect will pass but they will point to when Democrats win this coming November, claiming those victories were the result of fraud.
Meanwhile, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court let Republican secretaries of state cancel the voter registrations of over 20 million Americans in the last dozen years with their Ohio decision.
The Supreme Court has also allowed Republican secretaries of state to reduce the number of voting machines and voting locations, particularly in Black, Hispanic, and college town neighborhoods, to force people wanting to vote into long, discouraging lines.
And they’re poisoning our social and news media.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”
As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power.
Today CNN is about to be taken over by a hard-right nepo-baby billionaire just like CBS and TikTok (which has banned my show). There’s a network of “nearly 1,300” websites purporting to be those of local newspapers but that are really right-wing propaganda operations, and dozens of actual right-wing “local” newspapers that are often stuck for free in people’s mailboxes.
Putin, Trump, Orbán, Xi Jinping, and other autocrats and right-wing billionaires are trying to poison democracies worldwide.
Donald Trump famously embraced autocrats, dictators, sheiks, and killers while snubbing leaders of democracies and working to destroy NATO and the United Nations. His family has taken in billions from the Middle East as he pursues a war against Iran that Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have lobbied American presidents to undertake for over a generation.
Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese intelligence services run disinformation campaigns that fill social media with lies and information designed to tear democracies apart; they’re having considerable success in their efforts, including putting Trump in the White House in 2016 and 2024, and pushing through Brexit.
Forty-plus years of Reaganism... is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.
Republicans in Congress are even openly opposing Ukraine in that nation’s valiant battle against Russia’s terror campaign: Most recently it was 11 Republican Senators and 57 Republican members of the House who proudly voted with Putin over America and Ukraine.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who secretly carried a stash of documents (from Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom?) to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump to hand deliver to Putin’s intelligence service, even argued that we should end the Espionage Act, while his Republican colleagues were demanding Congress defund the FBI.
This November we can deliver the antidote to all this GOP poison.
This isn’t the first time “conservative” racists and fascists have poisoned America.
The oligarchs of the Confederacy did it in the first half of the 19th century, and progressive President Abraham Lincoln defeated them in the Civil War.
And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”
As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.
FDR, Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower—two Democrats and a Republican—renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.
They taught us that civic engagement—voting and participating in our political system—is the best antidote to fascist poison.
Forty-plus years of Reaganism, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.
Steps that Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats have fought tooth and nail in their service to spreading the fascist poison of giant monopolies and the morbidly rich. They profit from keeping working peoples’ wages and benefits low, exploiting student debt, and forcing our public schools into crisis with bizarre anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion laws and book bans.
This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Fully 60% of Americans will have an “election denier” Trump-humping Republican on the ballot this November.
Time is short, and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.
Double-check your voter registrations (they can be challenged by Republicans even in blue states) and do everything you can to wake up friends and neighbors to this very real danger to our republic. And get out on the streets on the 28th for No Kings Day!
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Brutality, Oligarchy, Murder, Trump: What the Powell Memo Has Delivered
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media—particularly if you are willing to lie—you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
Dec 08, 2025
With so little pushback to Hegseth’s murders in the Caribbean and ICE’s cruelty and violence that highlight Trump’s brutality, we’re watching the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.
It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions.
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media—particularly if you are willing to lie—you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
You can even sell a nation a convicted felon, rapist, and apparent agent of America’s enemies.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.
America was overwhelmed in the 2024 election by billions of dark-money dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1,500 hate-talk radio stations and podcasters, many subsidized by Russia and rightwing billionaires.
Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just that election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by those corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They’re responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, $2 trillion in student debt, our housing crisis, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the ongoing brutality of ICE, and even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yacht experiences and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, a spouse’s employment, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, according to reporting, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has reportedly made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch apparently got a sweetheart real estate deal and his mother had to resign from the Reagan administration to avoid corruption charges; Amy Coney Barrett has refused to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs buying and running our media, social media, and funding our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations should take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years—all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776—no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that money is the same thing as free speech. In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But the Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.
That ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.
It’s no coincidence.
And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And now it’s hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class.
It’s why people living in other developed countries can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why—with the exception of Hungary, which Trump is now emulating—those countries are still functioning democracies.
The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed, even with the extraordinary showing in the streets with the No Kings protests.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.
Thus, right now we need to prepare for the 2026 elections, join with organizations like Indivisible to stand up and protest this corruption, and make sure everybody we know is registered to vote.
Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich supporters of this neofascism.
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Trump, Zeldin, and Wright Want to Set America’s Rivers on Fire Again
The Trump administration is trying to turn back the clock on environmental and climate regulations. But they can’t control physics. Or the falling cost and rising efficiency of renewable energy.
Mar 14, 2025
I spent part of the morning reading the Powell memo—the famous document written by the future Supreme Court justice in August of 1971 arguing that American business and industry had to get its act together so it could dominate the country’s political life and prevent the threats to “the American system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
In the short run, Justice Lewis Powell was unsuccessful—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been formed a few months before his memo, the Clean Water Act passed a few months after. As William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA (and a Republican appointed by a Republican president) said, the agency “has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.” Over the next years the agency enacted a critical series of rules that—with surprising speed—cleaned America’s air, rivers, and lakes, and became the template for similar laws around the world.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality.
But the forces Powell helped set in motion with his memo to the Chamber of Commerce never accepted the premise that American business should be regulated—as he had recommended, they built a powerful set of institutions—think tanks, tv stations, publishers, and above all political lobbies—and now, 54 years later, they would appear, on the surface, to have won their final victory. Lee Zeldin, a distant successor to Ruckelshaus as EPA head, announced what he called the “greatest day of deregulation in American history.”
As the Times explained, under Zeldin’s plan the agency
would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.
In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.
In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”
The reason, he said, was to help the president “usher in a golden age of American success.”
It was language echoed in a second extraordinary speech, this one by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking to fellow oilmen in Houston, who promised to “unleash human potential” mostly through the use of artificial intelligence, which would require “unlimited energy.” Yes, he said, we’ve already increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 50%, but climate change is simply “a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.” (That is a phrase that will live in infamy)
The triumphalism of those speeches is in some ways well founded—as the Trump administration ravages university budgets, as its allies turn once-great newspapers into mouthpieces, and as the GOP Congress marches in complete lockstep threatening even to impeach those judges who might rule against this crusade, it’s hard to see precisely how they’ll be stopped. Yes, there will be widespread resistance (join us at Third Act and many other groups on April 5, for the next big round of rallies), and yes there will be lots and lots of court cases. (Some good news on that front this week, as the Supreme Court denied an industry request to keep states and cities from suing them for climate damages). But for the moment these hard-faced men with greed as their compass occupy the political high ground. For the moment they can do much of what they will.
And yet and yet and yet. There are some forces they can’t control. One is physics. You can prattle all you want, as Zeldin did, about how ending efforts to address climate change will “decrease the cost of living for American families,” but thanks to global warming the price of insurance is going through the roof—the latest data I’ve seen from, say, Summit County, Utah shows premiums doubling, and in some cases going up 300%. That’s if you can get it at all—in the wake of the LA fires, California’s largest insurer said this week that “writing new policies doesn’t make any sense at this time.”
And if you can’t control physics, you also can’t control—at least completely—engineering and economics, the disciplines that have led in recent years to the breakout of renewable energy. On the same day as Wright’s speech belittling clean power, these numbers emerged from the consultant Wood MacKenzie:
The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That’s enough to power 8.5 million households.
Why do you think the energy industry spent record amounts on Trump’s election? (Fracking baron Wright and his wife gave $475,000). It’s precisely because of the size of this threat.
As Abby Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association put it: “Solar and storage can be built faster and more affordably than any other technology, ensuring the United States has the power needed to compete in the global economy and meet rising electricity demand. America’s solar and storage industry set historic deployment and manufacturing records in 2024, creating jobs and driving economic growth.”
As the CEO of NextEra Energy (which builds both gas and renewable plants) explained at the same conference that Wright addressed:
The cost of gas turbines and the skilled labor to install them are both up threefold from just two years ago, and new gas infrastructure faces years-long delivery backlogs. Renewables plus batteries, he said, are the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to meet the surging power demand from data centers driven by the acceleration in artificial intelligence.
“We’ve got to be really careful here, from an affordability standpoint, about the choices that we’re making. What we don’t want to do is drive ourselves to only one solution—that being a gas-fired solution—that’s now more expensive than it ever has been in its history,” he said. “It just so happens that the most economic solution comes with clean energy benefits, as well.”
And as the technology keeps getting better, so do the numbers—a U.K. study released today found that rooftop solar alone could supply two-thirds of the world’s electricity.
Zeldin, Wright, Trump—they want to take us back to the glory days before 1970, when rivers caught on fire. And to do so they’ll try to take us back to the days before 1958—word came yesterday that the federal government was planning to break the lease on the Hawaii facility that supports the carbon observatory on Mauna Loa.
“It would be terrible if this office was closed,” atmospheric scientist Marc Alessi, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group, said.
“Not only does it provide the measurement of CO2 that we so desperately need to track climate change, but it also informs climate model simulations.”
Others said the Trump administration had already made their work harder, after the White House froze credit cards held by agency employees for a 30-day period under DOGE’S “cost efficiency initiative.”
“It has already become very difficult to continue our global greenhouse gas monitoring network,” an atmospheric scientist involved in NOAA’s measurements said, asking not to be named.
“It requires continuous shipping of sampling equipment black and forth all over the world. Suddenly, we cannot use our government-issued credit cards anymore… It looks like our monitoring program will soon be dead,” the scientist said.
But even if they stop monitoring carbon it will continue accumulating—in fact, the instrument at Mauna Loa showed that CO2 passed the 430 parts per million mark for the first time this week. And even if the federal government does all that it can to shut down renewable energy, the embarrassing numbers will keep piling up—Texas, world capital of hydrocarbons, set remarkable records this week for renewable energy generation.
In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality (hats off to those Texans who rallied outside the conference that Wright addressed, and that’s why you’re supposed to set aside Sept 20-21 for Sun Day). Wright, Zeldin, Musk, Trump—they have powerful sticks to try and beat reality into submission. But reality has a way of biting back.
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Right-Wing Control of Media Has Crushed the Promise of US Democracy
If progressives want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.
Jan 15, 2025
Republicans are using their massive structural media and social media advantage to try to destroy Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the California Democratic Party.
It follows an old script, that’s recently been played out in Russia and Hungary, among other nations: Want to seize control of a nation and turn it into a neofascist state with the consent of the people? Just take control of the channels of public information and news, and then turn lies about your opponents and their supporters into a perceived reality.
Over the past 50 years, Democrats have been busy focusing on and working out policies to benefit average Americans. Increasing access to medical care, $35 insulin, reducing student debt, the CFPB to protect people from banks, cleaning up the environment, American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.
Republicans and billionaires aligned with them, however, have not only fought against all these efforts, but, far more importantly, have engaged in a massive power play to shift control of popular opinion — and thus control of our government — toward themselves in a way they believe could be permanent.
The plan for this wasn’t a secret; it was laid out in a 1971 memo by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972 where he could participate in putting the plan into action — as he did with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (Powell wrote the latter) legalizing political bribery by saying “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”
It began the corruption of the American government by the Reagan administration.
But the details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.
First, Republicans realized that public opinion drives everything, so they set out to seize as much control over the instrument that drives public opinion as they could: the media.
The details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.
Second, they realized that the Senate was the power-based linchpin for control of the legislative branch and the key to controlling both the Executive and Judicial branches because only the Senate confirms presidential cabinet positions and federal judges.
If they controlled the Senate much of the time and occasionally got a Republican president, they could also easily stack both the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.
To control the Senate, they knew, they had to control a majority of the states. And that came back to controlling public opinion through the media, particularly in low-population or largely rural states where media could be bought or coopted cheaply.
To first influence public opinion, back in the 1970s-1990s era, billionaires associated with the GOP built a whole series of institutions whose sole purpose was to influence public opinion in ways that comported with the billionaire’s oligarchic agenda.
They crank out policy papers, write op-eds for newspapers and websites, engage in social media, and provide “expert” guests for TV, radio, NPR, and podcasts. Another major function is to “educate” and lobby Republican elected officials about policy and nominees to executive and judicial positions.
Those include:
— Cato Institute
— Mercatus Center at George Mason University
— Americans for Prosperity
— Heritage Foundation
— Manhattan Institute
— American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
— DonorsTrust
— Independent Women's Forum (IWF)
— Federalist Society
— Judicial Crisis Network (Now Concord Fund)
— Republican State Leadership Committee
— Alliance Defending Freedom
— Marble Freedom Trust
— 85 Fund (Formerly Judicial Education Project)
They also created the State Policy Network, which funds and guides a network of state-based think tanks in every state in America. They similarly influence political discussion through interactions with the media by publishing papers, participating in social media, and lobbying/educating Republican governors, state representatives, and senators. (At the end of this article is a list of them.)
There is no similar infrastructure on the left because no lefty billionaires ever set out to create one.
There are a few left-leaning think tanks and policy outfits like Public Citizen, NAACP, ACLU, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Demos, and the Century Foundation. None of these, however, have levels of funding, inter-agency coordination, or integration with the Democratic Party that even begins to approximate the list of conservative organizations above.
In addition to creating powerful, well-funded groups to influence public policy, conservatives focused on the media itself, which they had historically seen as their enemy. Early efforts included Lee Atwater’s famous 1980s “work the refs” strategy of complaining loudly whenever media outlets reported on partisan issues that reflected poorly on the GOP and its politicians.
These were followed by funding and rolling out Rush Limbaugh’s show (1988), Reagan fast-tracking the citizenship of Rupert Murdoch and the subsequent start of Fox “News”; Sinclair’s purchase of hundreds of local TV stations; billionaires like the Dickey brothers purchasing hundreds of local radio stations; and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital purchasing Clear Channel (2008) and then taking progressive Air America programming off their stations (2010).
Multimillionaire televangelists and wealthy rightwing Hispanics got into the game as well over the past two decades, purchasing over a thousand radio stations nationwide.
The result of these collective efforts is around 1500 radio stations programming rightwing talk (and hundreds of young “farm team” rightwing talk show hosts learning the trade in local markets), almost a thousand “nonprofit” religious stations that also push rightwing politics, and several hundred rightwing Spanish-language stations (that had a huge influence on the Latino vote in 2024).
Rightwing media is now a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise that includes three major cable TV networks, and more recently rightwing billionaires have ventured into the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong picked up the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post and The Wall Street Journal, and New York City-based hedge funds run by rightwing billionaires own around half of all local newspapers in the country.
And now they’re focusing this media behemoth toward their efforts to destroy the Democratic Party in California and neuter Governor Newsom’s hopes to one day become president.
Again, there is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.
A major parallel strategy Republicans followed was to use this media monster to take over enough states to take control of the Senate and, even when not in majority control, use the filibuster to block Democratic efforts at reform.
There is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.
Their initial focus was low-population and largely rural states, as radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in those markets are often very cheap.
By the end of 2010, when Romney/Bain shut down the progressive Air America radio network that had helped get Barack Obama elected in 2008, one could drive from coast-to-coast and continuously hear rightwing talk radio but only rarely (when passing through big cities or on SiriusXM) find a progressive voice.
This silencing of progressive talk radio and absolute dominance of the airwaves, both on radio and TV, made it easy for Republicans over the past 35 years to flip low-population and rural states that had been Democratic for generations into the GOP’s camp.
West Virginia, Arkansas (former governor: Bill Clinton), Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Montana (former governor: Brian Schweitzer), Iowa (former governor: Tom Vilsack), Wyoming (former governor: Mike Sullivan), Tennessee (former senator: Al Gore), Georgia (former governor: Roy Barnes), Missouri, and Texas (former governor: Ann Richards) all went from solid blue or largely blue to solid red, as there have functionally been no dissenting voices heard in local media since the 1980s.
A large handful of other states followed a similar trajectory, giving Republicans majority control of the least democratic of our legislative institutions, the Senate, where Wyoming (pop: 584,000) has the same two senators — and thus the same legislative power — as California (pop: 38.9 million).
Following these victories, Republicans turned their attention to the fastest growing aspects of the Fourth Estate: Social media and podcasts. With help from Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency and Wagner Group trolls, GOP operatives, politicians, talk hosts, podcasters, influencers, and cyberbullies began to saturate social media and podcasts with messages condemning Democrats for every little thing that went wrong in America.
Most recently, they’ve brought control of X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp under their banner, both through allowing the uninhibited spread of political lies and disinformation and by tilting their secret algorithms that control what content people see toward the right.
As a result, Republicans — using their vast think tank and media power — have succeeded in rolling back voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and taking an axe to public education. And now they’re using lies and slander to go after Gavin Newsom.
This massive machine was so successful in recasting the public perception of elected Democrats that millions of dispirited formerly-Democratic voters simply gave up and failed to vote in the 2024 election.
Next in their sights — along with more tax cuts for the billionaires who funded all this — are healthcare and Social Security, as they work to roll back the last 100 years and end the New Deal and Great Society.
If Democrats want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.
The coming election of a new DNC chair presents an opportunity to begin reforming and redirecting the efforts of the Party to a 50-state strategy that can effectively compete with Republicans.
And billionaires with a social conscience — like MacKenzie Scott, Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Tom Steyer — need to consider emulating the efforts of Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, and Ken Griffin.
Republicans have already decided to exploit the climate-change-driven wildfires on the west coast to try to flip California from Blue to Red in the next elections. They’re using their massive media machine to promote naked lies, blaming the fires on Democratic politicians while obscuring the role of the climate change driven by oil industry executives who fund the GOP and many of their think tanks.
Without an all-hands-on-deck effort to build out a Democratic media machine now, our precious democracy may soon be replaced with an authoritarian dystopia that serves nobody but the morbidly rich.
And California could become their biggest victory since the election of Governor Reagan.
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Trump Win Fulfills Oligarchy's 50-Year Plan for Right-Wing Takeover
The billionaires have won. They have successfully killed the American Dream. And now we have to fight back.
Nov 06, 2024
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)
We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it.
It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
This is not the end... hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies.
America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations.
Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.
Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.
It’s no coincidence.
And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why they are still functioning democracies.
The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich.
And so will I.
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Dear Republican Friends: The Democratic Party Is Not Your Enemy
Sep 16, 2024
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." —Oliver Cromwell, 1650, imploring his executioners to reconsider
This is a missive directed to Republican voters, wherever it finds them. And here is the message: the Democratic Party is not your enemy.
No, your enemy is former U.S. President Donald Trump. He and the Republican Party care a great deal about your votes, but they don’t give a damn about you. They rely on your fierce loyalty to get elected and then betray you, serving instead the interests of great American corporations and a tiny stratum of immensely wealthy citizens. (The towering achievement of Trump’s presidency was a massive tax cut for precisely these clients.) The betrayal is not readily apparent, of course: It is disguised brilliantly and successfully with distortion, fabrication, and lies.
Donald Trump tells you the Democratic Party is a radical, far left, socialist enterprise and it must be defeated to protect the America we know and love. At his rallies you roar in approval, shouting USA! USA! USA!
Your patriotism is genuine and praiseworthy, but please heed Mr. Cromwell’s plea for open minds: Think it possible—just possible—you may be mistaken about the integrity of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party, and the messaging. Think it possible you are not being protected but victimized.
Let’s look at the evidence.
Mr. Trump is the spokesman and the Republican Party is the front group for corporate oligarchy, a tyrannical form of federal governance put in place decades ago, when corporate money overpowered American democracy. The well-being of the American people no longer takes priority in crafting public policy. Foremost now is the assurance of financial security for powerful corporations: creating new profit streams or enhancing and protecting those in place. This is what the Republican Party hides from view.
We must rid the corrupted Republican Party of its greedy corporate captors, and that means, first, Donald Trump and Republican Senators and Representatives must suffer a smashing defeat in November.
Corporate oligarchy is comprised of the corporations, yes, who contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns eliciting the candidates’ favor and spend billions more in lobbying for quid pro quos. But it also includes individual corporate owners and managers, and conservative billionaires with similar interests who pour personal funds into friendly campaigns. (Think about Elon Musk, say, offering Trump $45 million per month to win this campaign.)
The core ideology of corporate oligarchy is neoliberalism: “Free market capitalism” best provides for society’s needs, and “government regulation” only degrades the process. It is legitimized by conservative think tanks—notably the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.—and disseminated by sympathetic media—think the Fox News empire and conservative talk radio which blankets the nation with right-wing propaganda 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The consequences of corporate oligarchy are not trivial.
American people are suffering today the largest increases in food prices in 50 years, while the corporations marketing food products are reaping unprecedented profits. In two years from 2020 to 2022 the Cargill corporation (grains and meat products) doubled its profits, from $3.3 billion to $6.7 billion. In just a single year, from 2021 to 2022, the profits of the Kraft-Heinz company (cheese products, condiments, frozen meals, snacks) rose 448%, from $225 million to $887 million; Cal-Maine Foods (the country’s largest egg producer) grew 718%, to $323 million.
Extortionate consumer prices are not the only outrage imposed by corporate oligarchy. The rampant social and economic injustices in our country today are not the consequences of a functioning democracy: They certainly do not reflect the wishes of the people. Unprecedented inequalities in wealth and income are producing a two-tiered society of opulence and hardship. Homeless colonies blossom coast to coast. A full 31.1 million Americans, almost 10% of our citizens, lack access to healthcare, suffering unnecessary illness and preventable death. A total of 13.5% of American households are “food insecure:” They don't have enough to eat. ChatGPT will tell you it costs up to $60,000 per year to live modestly in America; a minimum-wage worker earns $15,080. Do the math.
Fifty years ago America was flourishing. The middle class constituted almost two-thirds of the population, and it was thriving. A single income was sufficient to raise a family, buy a home, cover healthcare costs, send the kids to college, and retire in comfort. Today, with both parents working full time, this good life is out of reach.
The ravaging of the American people was driven by corporate oligarchy—nothing else, not “socialism,” not the Democratic Party.
Republican friends and neighbors, who is your enemy?
The Republican Party is, because it has been the driving force for the emergence of corporate oligarchy. The process began in 1971 with a lawyer who specialized in corporate mergers, who defended the tobacco industry in the smoking-and-cancer litigation, who advocated segregation in public schools, and who as a Supreme Court justice wrote the majority opinion that corporate political spending was an exercise in free speech.
His name was Lewis Powell, the progenitor of corporate oligarchy.
In 1971 the nation’s campuses were ablaze with protest, against the Vietnam War, against racism, against the savagery of capitalism. Ralph Nader was firing broadsides at American corporate corruption.
The United States Chamber of Commerce was alarmed. It commissioned Lewis Powell to propose a strategy for a corporate counterattack, and he did. On August 23, 1971 the Chamber published what came to be known as the “Powell Manifesto.” The Chamber carpet-bombed the business community with the Manifesto’s message: Corporate America needs to become politically active, quickly and massively. Especially vital was educating the American people about the virtue and vulnerability of “free market capitalism”: it can optimize society’s welfare only if it is uninhibited by “government regulation.” Neoliberalism had to become widely known and appreciated.
Corporate money rose quickly to the challenge, literally creating two of the most influential think-tanks in Washington today and funding a massive redevelopment of the third. The Adolph Coors Foundation and Koch Foundation provided the seed money that created the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, respectively, in 1973 and 1977. The American Enterprise Institute, pre-dating the Manifesto, was greatly enriched by the subsequent flood of corporate money flowing through a dozen conservative philanthropies.
Today these three powerhouses are virtual subsidiaries of the Republican Party, writing policy agendas for Republican presidents (cf. the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 written for Donald Trump) and providing revolving-door services: their members move seamlessly into staff positions in Republican administration, and when the party is defeated they return to the think tanks.
The pattern was established early. Soon after Ronald Reagan’s election, the Heritage Foundation submitted to the new Administration a list of 2,000 specific policy proposals aimed, among other objectives, at “reducing the size of the federal government.” By the end of Reagan’s first year in office 60% of them were implemented or initiated. Ronald Reagan said in later years the Heritage Foundation was a “vital force” in the achievements of his presidency.
The most vital achievement was Reagan’s suspension of the long-standing anti-trust laws. A staunch neoliberal, he reduced government regulation to allow free market capitalism to work its wonders. In doing so Reagan exposed the absurd contradiction in the neoliberal creed.
“Free market capitalism” will optimize a country’s economy only if intense competition for customers is present among many, many sellers. That’s Econ 101. Good for society, yes, but bad for the sellers who, historically, connive and conspire to minimize that competition—in the Golden Age of the late 1800’s, say, by the formation of “combines” and “trusts.” The sellers consolidated, becoming fewer and fewer but with greater and greater power to raise prices and reduce wages.
The counteroffensive was political, in the passage of the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts—government regulations—prohibiting “the restraint of trade.” Consolidation was made illegal, keeping free markets competitive for society’s benefit.
This we know: “free market capitalism” will benefit society only in the presence—not the absence—of “government regulation.” But neoliberalism gets it entirely backwards.
But Ronald Reagan bought in, virtually halting the enforcement of the anti-trust legislation, sparking a 50-year frenzy of mergers and acquisitions across the spectrum of the American economy.
Virtually every industry was consolidated into far fewer but immensely larger corporations. A quick ChatGPT query shows five grocery chains—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Albertsons, and Ahold Delhaize—today control more than 60% of the market. (And Kroger and Albertson's are in the process of merging.)
The number of American corporations was cut in half concentrating American industries into literal oligopolies, with pricing power to match. Compared to European countries—where anti-trust laws remain in force—American families pay on average $5,000 more per year for living expenses.
Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism did this. Republican friends your enemy is not the Democratic Party.
As the dwindling number of corporations expanded their economic clout they chafed at other government regulations—clean air and water, safe workplaces, fair labor practices—but had no means to do much about them. They lacked a corollary political clout.
Wittingly or otherwise the Republican Party provided this, too.
Since 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court has displayed without interruption a conservative majority—justices appointed by Republican presidents. And in that time the Court lit the fuse for corporate oligarchy to explode. It offered corporations the legal means of bribing Congressional candidates and tilting presidential elections as well—with corporate campaign contributions.
In the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, the Court declared spending money is the equivalent of free speech. In the 1978 case First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Court declared corporate contributions to political campaigns were an exercise of free speech, too. Finally in the 2010 case Citizens United v. the FEC, the Court declared as unconstitutional any limits on those corporate campaign contributions.
It did so with this preposterous reasoning:
...this Court now concludes that independent [campaign] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That [corporations] may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.
The Court with 100% predictability was dead wrong. In 1964—before the genesis of corporate oligarchy—77 percent of the American people trusted the federal government. Today—14 years after Citizens United—only 22 percent retain their “faith in democracy.”
But corporate campaign funding of public officials—some say the corporate purchase—is only one element of corporate oligarchy’s success. The other is the dominance of corporate lobbying, where obligated public officials get their marching orders to favor corporate interests over the public’s. Does corporate lobbying prevail? Corporations outspend citizens’ organizations in hiring lobbyists by a factor of 34:1.
Before the triumph of corporate oligarchy partisan conflict was congenial and productive. Republicans were conservatives, anxious to maintain the status quo which at a given point in time was quite satisfactory. Democrats were liberals, impatient with the status quo which at a given point in time could always be changed for the better. The two points of view were imperative in a functioning democracy and the tension between them produced public policy compromises that served the nation well, avoiding stasis on the one hand and turmoil on the other.
We can regain that form of governance.
Those of us in the rank and file of the political parties have far more in common than today’s bitter divisiveness suggests. We all love our country, cherishing its past and hopeful for its future; we treasure our families, honoring our predecessors and nurturing our children; and we find gratification in productive work and comfort in spiritual practice. We are ordinary Americans and conscientious citizens, millions and millions of us. We are the People, all of us victimized by corporate oligarchy and its patron, the Republican Party. If we put aside the partisan invective and focus on the imperative of restoring democracy, we can do it.
We must rid the corrupted Republican Party of its greedy corporate captors, and that means, first, Donald Trump and Republican Senators and Representatives must suffer a smashing defeat in November. Then, perhaps, the GOP can be rebuilt as the necessary and responsible voice of true conservatism—the indispensable countervailing force it was in the past. Democracy can flourish again.
Republican friends and neighbors, listen up.
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Trump's Far-Right Army Is Threatening Bloodshed. Believe Them.
We must not only resist, but prevail. If we do not, it will be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s right-wing billionaires have set us on.
Jul 05, 2024
Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation (largely responsible for Project 2025) just implicitly threatened Americans that if we don’t allow him and his hard-right movement to complete their transformation of America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, there will be blood in the streets.
“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” he told a TV audience, adding:
“The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
He’s not wrong. America has been changed as a result of a series of corrupt rulings by Republicans (exclusively; not one of these rulings has been joined by a Democratic appointee) which have changed America’s legal and political systems themselves.
As Roberts notes, this is really the largest issue we all face, and our mainstream media are totally failing to either recognize or clearly articulate how radically different our country is now, how far the Republicans on the Court have dragged us away from both our Founder’s vision and the norms and standards of a functioning, modern democratic republic.
These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.
First, in a series of decisions — the first written by that notorious corporatist Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) — Republicans on the Court have functionally legalized bribery of politicians and judges by both the morbidly rich and massive corporations.
This started with Powell’s 1978 Bellotti opinion, which opened the door (already cracked a bit) to the idea that corporations are not only “persons” under the Constitution, but, more radically, are entitled to the human rights the Framers wrote into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).
Using that rationale, Powell asserted that corporations, like rich people (from the Buckley decision that preceded Belotti by two years), are entitled to the First Amendment right of free speech. But he took it a radical step farther, ruling that because corporations don’t have mouths they can use to speak with, their use of money to spend supporting politicians or carpet-bombing advertising for a candidate or issue is free speech that can’t be tightly regulated.
Citizens United, another all-Republican decision with Clarence Thomas the deciding vote (after taking millions in bribes), expanded that doctrine for both corporations and rich people, creating new “dark money” systems that wealthy donors and companies can use to hide their involvement in their efforts to get the political/legal/legislative outcomes they seek.
Last week the Republicans on the Court took even that a huge step farther, declaring that when companies or wealthy people give money to politicians in exchange for contracts, legislation, or other favors, as long as the cash is paid out after the deed is done it’s not a bribe but a simple “gratuity.”
So, first off, they’ve overthrown over 240 years of American law and legalized bribery.
Last week they also gutted the ability of federal regulatory agencies to protect average people, voters, employees, and even the environment from corporations that seek to exploit, pollute, or even engage in wage theft. This shifted power across the economic spectrum from a government elected by we the people to the CEOs and boards of directors of some of America’s most predatory and poisonous companies.
Finally, in the Trump immunity case, the Court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution under criminal law, regardless of the crimes they commit, so long as they assert those crimes are done as part of their “official” responsibilities. And who decides what’s “official”? The six Republicans on the Supreme Court.
These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of this, or its consequences. We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.
In America 2.0, there is no right to vote; governors and secretaries of state can take away your vote without even telling you (although they still must go to court to take away your gun).
They can destroy any politician they choose by simply pouring enough cash into the campaign system (including dark, untraceable cash).
The president can now go much farther than Bush’s torturing and imprisoning innocent people in Gitmo without legal process: he can now shoot a person on Fifth Avenue in plain sight of the world and simply call it a necessary part of his job. Or impoverish or imprison you or me with the thinnest of legal “official” rationales.
We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.
America 2.0 is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy, as I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The South has finally — nearly — won the Civil War.
While it will be months or more likely years before all of these new powers the Republicans on the Court have given the president, rich people, and corporations begin to dawn on most Americans, they will, step-by-step transform this country into something more closely resembling Hungary or Russia than the democracies of Europe and Southeast Asia.
The only remedy at this late stage in this 50+ yearlong campaign to remake America is a massive revolt this fall at the ballot box, turning Congress — by huge majorities — over to Democrats while holding the White House.
If we fail at this, while there will be scattered pockets of resistance for years, it’ll be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s rightwing billionaires have set us on.
There has never been a more critical time in the history of our nation outside of the last time rich oligarchs tried to overthrow our democracy, the Civil War. Like then, the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a nation of, by, and for we the people.
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The Six Corporate-Owned US Supreme Court Justices Have Completed Their Assigned Mission
The series of devastating rulings over the last week are the consequence of a corporate strategy launched 53 years ago.
Jul 03, 2024
For years, conservatives have railed against what they call the “administrative state” and denounced regulations.
But let’s be clear. When they speak of the “administrative state,” they’re talking about agencies tasked with protecting the public from corporations that seek profits at the expense of the health, safety, and pocketbooks of average Americans.
Regulations are the means by which agencies translate broad legal mandates into practical guardrails.
Substitute the word “protection” for “regulation” and you get a more accurate picture of who has benefited — consumers, workers, and average people needing clean air and clean water.
Substitute “corporate legal movement” for the “conservative legal movement” and you see who’s really mobilizing, and for what purpose.
**
I spent four years as policy director at the Federal Trade Commission, advising the commissioners on how best to protect the public from corporate excesses. I spent four more years as secretary of labor, protecting American workers from the depredations of big American corporations.
Most large corporations I dealt with obeyed laws and regulations designed to protect the public, but they spent a great deal of money trying to prevent such laws and regulations from being created in the first place and additional efforts contesting them through the courts.
Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for the FTC, the Labor Department, and dozens of other agencies — ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Highway and Safety Administration — to protect Americans from corporate misconduct.
On Thursday, the six Republican-appointed justices eliminated the ability of these agencies to enforce their rules through in-house tribunals, rather than go through the far more costly and laborious process of suing corporations in federal courts before juries.
On Friday, the justices overturned a 40-year-old precedent requiring courts to defer to the expertise of these agencies in interpreting the law, thereby opening the agencies to countless corporate lawsuits alleging that Congress did not authorize the agencies to go after specific corporate wrongdoing.
In recent years, the court’s majority has also made it easier for corporations to sue agencies and get public protections overturned. The so-called “major questions doctrine” holds that judges should nullify regulations that have a significant impact on corporate profits if Congress was not sufficiently clear in authorizing them.
Make no mistake: Consumers, workers, and ordinary Americans will be hurt by these decisions. Big corporations — especially their top executives and major investors — will make even more money than they’re already making because of them.
**
These rulings are the consequence of a corporate strategy launched 53 years ago.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then a modest business group in Washington, D.C., asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, to recommend actions corporations should take in response to the rising tide of public protections (that is, regulations).
Powell’s memo—distributed widely to Chamber members—said corporations were “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.
In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II, ensuring that corporations be responsive to all their stakeholders—not just shareholders but also their workers, consumers, and the environment.
Powell saw it differently. He urged businesses to mobilize for political combat.
Business must learn the lesson … that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
He stressed that the critical ingredients for success were organization and funding.
Strength lies in … the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.
On August 23, 1971, the Chamber distributed Powell’s memo to leading CEOs, large corporations, and trade associations. It had exactly the impact the Chamber sought—galvanizing corporate American into action and releasing a tidal wave of corporate money into American politics.
An entire corporate legal movement was born—including tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, public relations flaks, think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and corporate recruiters to the courts, such as the Federalist Society.
In 1972, President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court.
Within a few decades, big corporations would become the largest political force in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals.
I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974, it was still a rather sleepy if not seedy town.
By the time I became secretary of labor in 1993, Washington had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America—replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor to the margins of the district and made two of Washington’s surrounding counties among the wealthiest in the nation.
The number of corporate political action committees mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980. By the time I became secretary of labor, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them. That came to more than 100 lobbyists for each member of Congress.
**
The so-called “conservative legal movement” of young lawyers who came of age working for Ronald Reagan—including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.—were in reality part of this corporate legal movement. And they still are.
Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court emerged from the same corporate legal movement.
The next victory of the corporate legal movement will occur if and when the Supreme Court accepts a broad interpretation of the so-called “non-delegation doctrine.”
Under this theory of the Constitution, the courts should not uphold any regulation in which Congress has delegated its lawmaking authority to agencies charged with protecting the public. If accepted by the court, this would mark the end of all regulations — that is, all public protections not expressly contained in statutes—and the final triumph of Lewis Powell’s vision.
Corporate capitalism in the United States has always coexisted uneasily with democratic capitalism. The underlying question is which is in charge—big corporations or the people?
The current Supreme Court, and the corporate legal movement that spawned it, is intent on the answer being big corporations.
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Make America Mad Again—Mad About the Trillions of Dollars Taken From Them by the Very Rich
The 40-year trickle-down delusion, fashioned by right-wing economists, politicians, and financial experts, has deprived average Americans of the means to support their families in a comfortable, debt-free manner. It was planned. It's insidious. It's ongoing. And it should outrage every last one of us.
Jan 19, 2024
Middle America's anger is misdirected: toward liberals because of the misperception that educated elites are trying to foist socialism on a capitalist nation; toward minorities and immigrants, even though their financial struggles are similar to those of moderate-income white Americans; and toward the federal government, even as Republican state leaders reject Medicaid expansion and food assistance for hungry children and families. But largely unnoticed is the 50-year quietly coordinated and insidious campaign to transfer American wealth to the richest people.
The Massive Takeaway
A 2020 TIME magazine article reported that in just over four decades $50 trillion has been transferred from working Americans to multi-millionaires. According to the Credit Suisse 2022 Global Wealth Databook, in approximately the last decade (2010-2021) America's wealth has grown by over $80 trillion, up to $60 trillion of which was taken by the country's millionaires and multi-millionaires (about 10% of the population).
The sordid history of the wealth grab is one of power, greed, and manipulation.
This is a staggering takeaway of wealth. The TIME article suggests that the amount is "enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year."
This is where America's anger should be directed. The 40-year trickle-down delusion, fashioned by economists, politicians, and financial experts, has deprived average Americans of the means to support their families in a comfortable, debt-free manner. It allows multi-millionaires to siphon off our country's wealth effortlessly with the inevitable rise in the stock market. And it undoubtedly has contributed to the surge in "deaths of despair"—those from drug and alcohol abuses as well as suicide—that continue to increase among poor Americans.
How Did This Happen?
The sordid history of the wealth grab is one of power, greed, and manipulation. In 1971, corporate lawyer and soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell wrote a lengthy memo that rallied conservatives in their desire for business growth and free markets. Government, universities, and the media were the enemies. Political equality and shared prosperity were un-American.
Defenders of the rich argue that they've earned their wealth. But for the most part, they've simply learned how to exploit American prosperity.
Conservative think tanks sprung up. The "greed is good" philosophy of Ayn Rand was becoming justified. The influential economist Milton Friedman said "The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people" and then infamously teamed with economist Arthur Laffer to convince American leaders that decreasing taxes on the wealthy would allow increased revenues to "trickle down" to the rest of the country.
We were then comforted in years to follow, as inequality grew, by the Wall Street Journal claiming that "income inequality is simply not a significant problem" and The Economist boasting that "the world now knows how to reduce poverty." The Charles Koch Foundation tried to shame us into compliance with the reassurance that earning $34,000 a year placed you in the Top 1% in the world.
The Labors and Taxes of Our Parents and Grandparents Created Our Nation's Wealth
Defenders of the rich argue that they've earned their wealth. But for the most part, they've simply learned how to exploit American prosperity. Beginning in the 1950s, funding for modern computer technology came almost entirely from taxpayer dollars through the Department of Defense and other branches of government. As explained by Mariana Mazzucato: "From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system—all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam." Adds political economist Gar Alperovitz: "Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s the National Science Foundation spent $200 million to build and operate a network of regional supercomputing hubs called the NSFNET. Connected to the ARPANET, this network established Internet access for nearly all U.S. universities, making it a civilian network in all but name."
In a similar vein, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't exist without money from the taxpayers, who have provided support for decades through the National Institutes of Health, and who still pay for most of the basic research for new drugs and vaccines. Yet both the tech and pharmaceutical companies claim patents on the products paid for and developed by the American people.
Overall, in the U.S. today, the federal government continues to be the largest source of funding of basic research.
We Need a Wealth Tax
Stock growth represents American prosperity driven by 75 years of shared effort. Everyone should benefit, probably by receiving a guaranteed income. Just a two-percent tax on total financial wealth would generate enough revenue to provide an $18,000 annual stipend to every American household (including those of the richest families).
With typical overreaction, the Wall Street Journal laments that "A tax on securities trades would...create large economic and societal distortions." We already have economic and societal distortions. Taxing stock ownership would be straightforward and fair-minded, while barely disrupting the portfolios of the millionaires and multi-millionaires who own close to 90% of all stocks.
Perhaps, with a tax on the effortless accumulation of stock market wealth, average taxpayers would finally receive a return on 75 years of American prosperity.
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