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Dear John,

We’re coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began on 21 January 2010 with the Supreme Court’s shameful decision in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the first amendment protects corporate speech.

It ends with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections.

Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic decade. ([link removed]) By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans – 24,949 very wealthy people – accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign contributions.

Big corporations and the super-wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican party because Republicans promised them a giant tax cut. As Lindsey Graham warned his colleagues, “financial contributions will stop” if the GOP didn’t come through.

The investments paid off big. Groups supported by Charles and the late David Koch spent more than $20 million promoting the tax cut, which will save them and their heirs between $1 billion and $1.4 billion every year.

The tax cut has contributed to record corporate profits but almost nothing has trickled down. Companies have spent most of their extra cash on stock buybacks and dividends. This has given the stock market a sugar high but left little for average workers.

Such workers have been shafted. Despite the longest economic expansion in modern history, real wages have barely risen. The share of corporate profits going to workers still isn’t back to where it was before the 2008 financial crisis. Never in the history of economic data have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long.

The so-called “free market” has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts and corporate welfare.

Meanwhile, confidence in political institutions has plummeted. In 1964, just 29% of Americans believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." By 2013, 79% believed it. In Rasmussen polls in autumn 2014, 63% thought most members of Congress were willing to sell their vote for either cash or a campaign contribution and 59% thought it likely their representative already had.

Enter Trump.

“Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” he charged at the Republican convention in 2016.

He then rode the rigging all the way into the Oval Office. A second Trump term could make the anti-democracy decade a mere prelude to the wholesale destruction of American democracy.
Thanks for reading,
Robert Reich

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