[[link removed]]

A TRUMP WIN WOULD BRING BOTH MONARCHY AND ARISTOCRACY TO THE US  
[[link removed]]


 

Thom Hartman
October 8, 2024
Common Dreams
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This election may be America’s last stand against this country
becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy run of, by, and
for a small, malevolent group of the morbidly rich. _

The Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump,
speaks during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on August 8,
2024 in Palm Beach, Florida. , Joe Raedle/Getty Images

 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump
[[link removed]] has been found by a
jury of his peers to have raped a woman. He’s a traitor who’s
embraced foreign dictators, particularly Russian President Vladimir
Putin, who just sentenced an American to prison while actively bombing
a democratic American ally. He’s a convicted criminal who stole
money from a children’s cancer charity and scammed students out of
millions of dollars. He tried to end American democracy by force. Like
Hitler justifying the Holocaust, he claimed some Americans are
genetically inferior. And he’s a whisker away from the presidency.

How is this even possible?

You can trace it all back to dark money
[[link removed]].

Ever since _Citizens United
[[link removed]]_legalized literally
unlimited contributions to the new category of political action
committees it created (SuperPACs), just in the 15 months from January
2023 to April of 2024 over $8.6 billion was raised
[[link removed]]
for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65% of that money—$5.6
billion—running through PACs.

Nine years ago, former President Jimmy Carter
[[link removed]] said on my program
[[link removed]]:

It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great
country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with
unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the
nominations for president or to elect the president… So now we’ve
just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to
major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for
themselves after the election’s over.

He's right. But it’s even worse than Carter imagined. Dark
money—billions from the morbidly rich and giant corporations, often
untraceable—has taken over the entire GOP and is the main weapon
being used today against members of the Democratic Party.

It’s also badly distorting public policy.

For example, remember when Donald Trump was outspoken about banning
TikTok from America because the app is owned by Chinese billionaires
beholden to that nation’s communist government? In August of 2020,
he signed
[[link removed]]
an Executive Order that said, in part:

This data collection [by TikTok] threatens to allow the Chinese
Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary
information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of
federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal
information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

Proving the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day,
Trump was right about TikTok and its owner, ByteDance. Federal
lawsuits blocked his ban so it never went into effect, but in the
meantime a fellow most Americans have never heard of—Jeffrey
Yass—either flew down
[[link removed]]
to Mar-a-Lago and spent time with Trump or met him
[[link removed]]
backstage at an Elon Musk event (media reports conflict).

Yass—the world’s 64th richest
[[link removed]]
person worth an estimated
[[link removed]]
$40 billion—owns Susquehanna International Group, a trading company
that owned large blocks of stock in both ByteDance (TikTok’s parent)
and Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the company that merged
back in March with Trump Media & Technology Group just as that company
was desperately running out of cash.

Reportedly
[[link removed]],
the merger not only prevented Trump’s Truth Social app from going
bankrupt but also let Trump take the combined company public, putting
an estimated $3 billion in his own personal pocket.

Even more interesting, given Yass’ holding $15 billion in ByteDance
stock—the largest holding outside China, representing 7% of the
company’s stock—after the Trump/Yass meeting the former president
suddenly reversed his opposition to TikTok. As _ABC News_ reported at
the time:

[T]he former president has been rebuilding his relationship with a GOP
megadonor who reportedly has a major financial stake in the popular
social media platform.

And that megadonor has been busy.

While Pennsylvania-based Yass’ entire donation portfolio to
Republican politicians was reported as a mere $78,000 in 2012, this
year he’s the nation’s second largest political donor, reportedly
having dropped more than $80,000,000 in support of Republicans over
the past few months. He’s spent more in Pennsylvania than the top 10
corporate PACs _combined_, according to the _All Eyes on Yass
[[link removed]]_campaign.

You and I have one vote each, and are limited to giving a maximum of
$3,300
[[link removed]] to
any one political candidate. Pretty much every penny after that falls
into the simple category of dark money, or potential dark money.

And America’s billionaires and corporations are pouring billions of
that dark money into PACs and SuperPACs that are, right now, flooding
the nation’s airways with attack ads against Democrats.

How did it come to this?

In 2010, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it super
easy for billionaires to give lavish gifts and support to Supreme
Court justices and members of Congress. Their _Citizens United
[[link removed]]_decision
blew open the doors to a bizarre new era of dark money-driven
oligarchy in America.

Right-wing billionaires are nearly in control of our government—and
easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in
Congress—but now they want _all of it_. And they sure as hell
don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.

A report from Americans for Tax Fairness
[[link removed]]
details the damage these democracy-destroying decisions, made by
SCOTUS members who, themselves, were at the time being groomed by
billionaires, have done to our political system.

This is the brave new world Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote
brought America when the Supreme Court, in their 2010 _Citizens United
_decision, legalized both political bribery and massive intervention
in elections by corporations and billionaires.

Prior to Thomas’ vote on that decision, Harlan Crow—who helped
finance
[[link removed]]
the original Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004—and other
billionaires had lavished millions on him and his family.

Crow gave the group that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, started a half million
dollars; he bought Thomas’ mother’s home and others in the
neighborhood so she could live rent-free for the rest of her life; he
put Thomas’ nephew through an expensive prep school. Another
billionaire bought Thomas a quarter-million-dollar luxury RV.

It was a remarkably successful investment for Crow, his family, and
his billionaire buddies. Just his own family’s political
contributions went from an average of a few hundred thousand dollars a
year during the decade preceding 2010 to multiple millions
[[link removed]] every year
after Thomas’ vote. Americans for Tax Fairness calculated it at an
862% increase just for the Crow family.

 

 
(Graphic: Americans for Tax Fairness)

In 2010, the year of the _Citizens United
[[link removed]]_decision,
all of America’s billionaires together spent a mere $31 million on
elections: There were still substantial limits on dark money in
American politics.

That number jumped to $231 million in the 2012 and 2014 elections, and
over $600 million for both 2016 and 2018.

The dark money blowout came in 2020, when Trump was running for
reelection and there was a very real chance the billionaires could
seize complete control of our federal government.

They spent a total of $2,362,000,000 in that election, with $1.2
billion of it going to elect conventional politicians who would then
be beholden to their patrons.

As Americans for Tax Fairness notes
[[link removed]]:

The report finds that almost 40% of all billionaire campaign
contributions made since 1990 occurred during the 2020 season.
Billionaires had a lot more money to give politicians and political
causes in 2020 as their collective wealth jumped by nearly a third
[[link removed]],
or over $900 billion, to $3.9 trillion between the March beginning of
the pandemic and a month before Election Day.

Billionaire fortunes have continued to climb since: as of October
2021, billionaires were worth $5.1 trillion
[[link removed]],
more than a 20-fold increase in their collective fortune since 1990,
when it stood at $240 billion, adjusted for inflation.

These campaign donations are a profitable investment: They buy access
to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save
tycoons billions of dollars. While that $1.2 billion “investment”
in 2020 was massive, it totaled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth
(and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth),
leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire
campaign spending.

And this year will be far worse, once the dark money numbers come in
this winter. As _NBC News_tells us
[[link removed]]:

Political ad spending is projected to reach new heights by the end of
the 2024 election cycle, eclipsing $10 billion in what would amount to
the most expensive two years in political history.

While Thomas Jefferson was still the U.S. envoy to France and living
in Paris, just after the Constitution had been written but a year
before it would be ratified, John Adams wrote
[[link removed]] him
on December 6, 1778 arguing that Jefferson’s fear of a strongman
president wasn’t as big a concern as Adams’ fear of rich people
corrupting American politics:

You are afraid of the one—I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the
many should have a full fair and perfect representation.—You are
apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy.

Today, if Trump is reelected, we will have both.

Vice President Kamala Harris
[[link removed]] has made it clear
that if she’s elected her first order of business will be to pass
the For The People Act
[[link removed]],
which will overturn large parts of _Citizens United_ and again
regulate dark money in politics.

That’s probably why our airwaves are currently saturated with
hit-piece ads against Harris and other Democrats—paid for by shady
dark money PACs—that make George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads
seem tame [[link removed]].

Right-wing billionaires are nearly in control of our government—and
easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in
Congress—but now they want _all of it_. And they sure as hell
don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.

This election may be America’s last stand against this country
becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy
[[link removed]]
run of, by, and for a small, malevolent group of the morbidly rich.
But, to paraphrase Jim Morrison’s 60’s protest anthem: _They got
the money, but we got the numbers._

And now we must turn out those numbers if our democracy is to survive
this all-out assault by a handful of obscenely rich people who think,
as does billionaire-funded
[[link removed]]
Curtis Yarvin (JD Vance’s favorite philosopher) that we should just
all “get over
[[link removed]]”
our “dictator phobia.”

Vote!

===

* Trump Election; Citizens United; Dark Money;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]