The Plutocrats are Overplaying Their Hand: How About Doing Something About It?

[LawDem]

Steven Day
Common Dreams
July 27, 2024

When will big money’s corruption of democracy become so obnoxious people will find it intolerable?

Perhaps a couple of troubling “hypothetical” examples will do the trick. Let’s pretend, as absurd as it sounds, that an American citizen, the wealthiest person in the world, happens to also be a rabid conspiracy theorist and, frankly, a bit of a political nutcase. And let’s further hypothetically pretend this person decides that by throwing enough of his money around he, together with other far-right billionaires, can effectively turn America into a plutocrat’s Shangri-La.

Unfortunately, this Shangri-La will be run by an authoritarian leader who throws his political opponents into jail, reverses environmental regulations while all but embracing climate change, subverts the Constitution, makes the ridiculously wealthy even more ridiculously wealthy, finishes the job of stuffing the federal courts with ultra-right political hacks, and so much more. To accomplish this, he will join with other ultra-right billionaires in opening his checkbook to help propel former U.S. President Donald Trump back into the White House. He is doing this by way of his own pro-Trump PAC. (He now denies making a $45-million-a-month commitment).

Or how about when another group of wealthy individuals—admittedly less rich, less nutty, and less evil in a Lex Luthor sense—decide to publicly join together to put pressure on the incumbent Democratic president to get out of the race by withholding campaign contributions? Now, to be hypothetically fair to this hypothetical group, unlike the Lex Luthor wannabe, most of these folks’ hearts are largely in the right place. But, leaving aside whether asking President Joe Biden to withdraw was politically wise, does it bother anyone that they felt so free to try to dictate to the broader electorate who should run for president? Is that a privilege we really want to cede to the wealthy?

But if we don’t want either of these things, where’s the public outrage?

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/plutocrats-u-s-politics

[Marcus IM]

1. Cubans rejected this. And were retaliated by the US for doing so

Sixty five years later and the collective punishment and systematic extraterritorial sanctions designed to destroy the economy of an entire nation continues to harden their resolve for solidarity.

Interestingly, Cuba's mistreatment is a bipartisan policy ... with several ebbs and surges in the stridency of the cruel and unusual collective punishment.

[Dustlawyer]

2. Been hollering for Publicly Funded Elections for years but no one is interested.

[Metaphorical]

3. It's Building

A few years ago, Musk could do no wrong. Now, he's openly despised, and even the "he's rich therefore he's important crowd" are having second thoughts about how brilliant Musk really is. At least in the tech sector, there are a lot of former programmers and IT people (now struggling to find new jobs) who are pissed as hell about the Tech Bros, and OpenAI, which is kind of the poster child for everything "hot" in Tech, is distinctly losing steam and openly being called fraudulent. Add into those the ones who lost their shirts over the BitCoin pump and dump about a year ago, and you have the makings of a middle class tech revolution.

[orthoclad]

4. I prefer "oligarch", because

they rule us ( "arch" ), and they're organized in a club/cadre/mob/whatever.

Vance uses the term "ruling class". Also accurate. They rule, and they're a class.

edit: sorry, I meant to reply to discussion.