This is What Plutocracy Looks Like

Think of Donald Trump as a zombie.

I know it may be hard to think of him as an inhuman, manically-driven destroyer of other people’s lives but at least try.

So Zombie Don stalked through the media and the country in 2016 and bit into many of them including the GOP itself, turning them into followers, more zombies who mindlessly participated in the carnage he’s led. They marched and continue to march devoid of empathy and consciousness, seeing everyone else including the less-powerful zombies as nothing more than something to consume.

Zombie Don was on a mission to eat lives and brains and he continues to do so through this first year of his term. His gratification is all he cares about which is why those elitists and foreigners who set him on his path of destruction found it so easy to aim him and set him loose on the world to obliviously do their bidding.

However, while the forces that have now dragged the United States into a full blown plutocracy are winning right now, there is another force that always comes back from the dead throughout the history of America, the will of the people.

A plutocracy is defined as a country or society governed by the wealthy. Now who out there would try to debate that the United States is not a plutocracy? This massive abomination of a tax bill is opposed by a strong majority of Americans, only supported by 25% (made up mostly of Trump’s zombie army) and yet Republicans in Congress passed it. They included in it the repeal of the individual mandate in the ACA which will strip 13 million Americans of health care and jack up rates on all the rest of Americans by at least 10% more. And they previously tried to destroy Medicare and tear away health insurance from over 30 million Americans. They also refuse to pass even the most basic of gun control laws that 90% of Americans support after record mass shootings this year, which is an almost never seen majority, while currently trying to pass laws that force states to abide by the least restrictive gun laws from the most gun crazy states.

The disconnect between what the majority wants in this country and how the politicians only serve what the wealthy want couldn’t be more obvious after this disgusting vote to bury current and future taxpayers in trillions of debt in order to make the wealthiest Americans (and foreigners) far wealthier.

This Plutocracy/Oligarchy that now dominates the United States is not a new thing. Back in 2014, Princeton and Northwestern University conducted a study that concluded that the U.S. was already an oligarchy.

The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded.

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Researchers concluded that U.S. government policies rarely align with the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favor special interests and lobbying organizations: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4

The ultimate expression and undeniable proof of the oligarchy we live in is the passage of this wholly unpopular, indefensible transfer of wealth from the majority of Americans to a tiny percentage of the wealthiest that simultaneously burdens the nation with over $1.5 trillion in debt and paves the way for their dream of slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare and all other social safety nets for those they’ve just burdened with more unimaginable debt.

Some may ask, “Why are they doing this? Why do they want to hurt so many people?”

The answer is easy. Why would wealthy people be willing to cause massive damage and destruction, as we’ve seen throughout history, including the not-so-distant economic crash and Great Recession in 2008?

Greed. Pure and simple, greed. If these greed-obsessed degenerates have to pay one dollar in tax out of their pockets to support their own country and its people, they are outraged. It’s their money. Paying taxes is for suckers, they are above that, they shouldn’t have to pay tax (as Trump hasn’t for many years). It is the responsibility of the peasants to finance the lifestyles of the Kings and Queens who sit above them. They will scheme, plot, lie and bribe to avoid sharing the wealth that those very “peasants” have put in their pockets.

Straight up, the wealthy don’t care about the 99%, their lives are of no consequence. They are just leeches sucking away their wealth. Hence, the wealthy resent paying taxes that help to pay for the welfare of most Americans. So the solution is to starve the beast, a vicious circle of slashing taxes which shrinks the revenue of the government, forcing cuts to Social Security, Medicare, etc. and once cut, justifies the previous tax cuts and opens the door for more tax cuts later paid with more cuts to social programs. A truly vicious cycle, intended to enrich the 1% by slaughtering the health and futures of most Americans.

As Trump openly admitted when he started running and vowing to “drain the swamp”, the wealthy give lots of money to politicians to “own” them, to get them to vote the way they demand so they can get a big return in their investment in puppet politicians.

And it all has been leading to this destructive tax bill. Under George W. Bush, when the economy was still doing well after the dot com boom during the Clinton years and the nation was running a surplus, Bush instituted a massive tax cut for the wealthy which, combined with the trillions buried with over a million lives in Iraq and the derivatives fraud by banks, blew up the U.S. and global economy.

One can also plot a through line from that greed-caused global recession to the rise of nationalism and tyrannical, political strongmen across the world, as insecure and suffering people rushed to support “strong leaders” (aka “authoritarians”) to take control of everything bad and fix it quickly please. Get rid of them lousy immigrants taking our jobs or keeping our pay low, destroy the opposition who would stand in the way of Dear Leader from changing our society into the fantasy utopia he’s promised, support everything Dear Leader wants even if he molests women, embraces Nazis or brings us towards nuclear war.

Oligarchs despise democracy. They despise peace and shared prosperity. They know that they can only monopolize power over a country if the majority is divided and busy at each other’s throats. The viciousness of partisanship in America as the oligarchy seized power is not a coincidence, it’s a key part of the plan.

As this clip from 2009’s “Capitalism, A Love Story” documents, Citibank even wrote an analysis to its wealthy investors stating victoriously that America is no longer a democracy, it’s a Plutonomy that is only threatened by the potential of the majority to vote against their political puppets in pursuit of reversing economic injustice.

Which brings us back to the zombie allegory. Throughout American history, the oligarchy has risen again like the undead to take power, looting and pillaging the nation and casting most Americans into economic uncertainty and despair. What these compulsively greedy sociopaths always overlook in their manic pursuit of grabbing America’s money is Newton’s Third Law of motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The act of their seizing so much wealth from the country and 99% of Americans has already caused Americans to act in opposition. To the credit of the well paid propagandists for the wealthy, some of the ire of Americans at this inequality was misdirected to support Trump in 2016. Remember, he was standing up for the forgotten man, the little guy always getting screwed over and rudely reprimanded for hating Mexicans, blacks, Muslims, women, etc.. Trump was going to drain the swamp, protect Social Security and Medicare, repeal Obamacare and replace it with something much better and cheaper that will cover everyone, make the wealthy pay more in taxes, bitchslap China for its trade policies,  etc. Trump camouflaged the oligarchy he was part of with faux populism and some ignorant voters were (and are) so desperate to believe his BS that they supported him. That’s the reason he announced that he loved  “the uneducated voters”, he saw them as useful fools who will believe anything he says as long as it ends with “believe me”.

Now though, the facade is blown clean away. The majority of Americans recognize that Trump’s tax cut bill is thievery for the wealthy ripped from the pockets of the rest of Americans. And as Republicans now turn their energies to slashing the nation’s social programs to shreds, Trump’s and the GOP’s intentions and loyalties will become undeniable to all but the most zombified Trump supporters (but that won’t keep them from losing their welfare, healthcare and Social Security).

Democracy won’t die either. Like the hero in a movie, it can be temporarily defeated, locked up in a deathtrap that appears inescapable, it can be seemingly killed or lost…but it always returns to overcome its foe in the end.

The tsunami of true populism is rising and it’s already wiped out Republicans in Virginia, Alabama and other Republican-friendly states this year. It was already surging before this corrupt tax bill was passed and in the wake of it, it seems likely that it will swell even more massively and crash down on Trump, the GOP and the oligarchy behind them.

Just as it was passed, this tax bill can and will be repealed when Democrats regain power. It is temporary, it can’t resist the will of the majority and will be swept away before too long. There will be damage left in its wake but as usual, the Democrats will once again clean up the mess left by Republicans and hopefully, the fickle voters will retain this lesson for more than a year (unlike the 2010 election when too many so quickly forgot the economic hell Republicans and Bush had stranded them in, in 2008 and handed The House back to them).

A massive wave of democracy is coming next year and through 2020, a tsunami of voters to sweep out this current oligarchy we live under and it can’t come too soon.