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The Plutocrats Are Winning (Don't Let Them!)
Authored by Bill Moyers via BillMoyers.com,
In the fall of 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, as families grieved and the nation mourned, Washington swarmed with locusts of the human kind: wartime opportunists, lobbyists, lawyers, ex-members of Congress, bagmen for big donors: all of them determined to grab what they could for their corporate clients and rich donors while no one was looking.
Across the land, the faces of Americans of every stripe were stained with tears. Here in New York, we still were attending memorial services for our firemen and police. But in the nation’s capital, within sight of a smoldering Pentagon that had been struck by one of the hijacked planes, the predator class was hard at work pursuing private plunder at public expense, gold-diggers in the ashes of tragedy exploiting our fear, sorrow, and loss.
What did they want? The usual: tax cuts for the wealthy and big breaks for corporations. They even made an effort to repeal the alternative minimum tax that for fifteen years had prevented companies from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. And it wasn’t only repeal the mercenaries sought; they wanted those corporations to get back all the minimum tax they had ever been assessed.
They sought a special tax break for mighty General Electric, although you would never have heard about it if you were watching GE’s news divisions — NBC News, CNBC, or MSNBC, all made sure to look the other way.
They wanted to give coal producers more freedom to pollute, open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling, empower the president to keep trade favors for corporations a secret while enabling many of those same corporations to run roughshod over local communities trying the protect the environment and their citizens’ health.
It was a disgusting bipartisan spectacle. With words reminding us of Harry Truman’s description of the GOP as “guardians of privilege,” the Republican majority leader of the House dared to declare that “it wouldn’t be commensurate with the American spirit” to provide unemployment and other benefits to laid-off airline workers. As for post 9/11 Democrats, their national committee used the crisis to call for widening the soft-money loophole in our election laws.
America had just endured a sneak attack that killed thousands of our citizens, was about to go to war against terror, and would soon send an invading army to the Middle East. If ever there was a moment for shared sacrifice, for putting patriotism over profits, this was it. But that fall, operating deep within the shadows of Washington’s Beltway, American business and political mercenaries wrapped themselves in red, white and blue and went about ripping off a country in crisis. H.L. Mencken got it right: “Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.”
Fourteen years later, we can see more clearly the implications. After three decades of engineering a winner-take-all economy, and buying the political power to consummate their hold on the wealth created by the system they had rigged in their favor, they were taking the final and irrevocable step of separating themselves permanently from the common course of American life. They would occupy a gated stratosphere far above the madding crowd while their political hirelings below look after their earthly interests.
The $1.15 trillion spending bill passed by Congress last Friday and quickly signed by President Obama is just the latest triumph in the plutocratic management of politics that has accelerated since 9/11. As Michael Winship and I described here last Thursday, the bill is a bonanza for the donor class – that powerful combine of corporate executives and superrich individuals whose money drives our electoral process. Within minutes of its passage, congressional leaders of both parties and the president rushed to the television cameras to praise each other for a bipartisan bill that they claimed signaled the end of dysfunction; proof that Washington can work. Mainstream media (including public television and radio), especially the networks and cable channels owned and operated by the conglomerates, didn’t stop to ask: “Yes, but work for whom?” Instead, the anchors acted as amplifiers for official spin — repeating the mantra-of-the-hour that while this is not “a perfect bill,” it does a lot of good things. “But for whom? At what price?” went unasked.
Now we’re learning. Like the drip-drip-drip of a faucet, over the weekend other provisions in the more than 2000-page bill began to leak. Many of the bad ones we mentioned on Thursday are there — those extended tax breaks for big business, more gratuities to the fossil fuel industry, the provision to forbid the Securities & Exchange Commission from requiring corporations to disclose their political spending, even to their own shareholders. That one’s a slap in the face even to Anthony Kennedy, the justice who wrote the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Citizens United. He said: “With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions.”
Over our dead body, Congress declared last Friday, proclaiming instead: Secrecy today. Secrecy tomorrow. Secrecy forever. They are determined that we not know who owns them.
The horrors mount. As Eric Lipton and Liz Moyer reported for The New York Times on Sunday, in the last days before the bill’s passage “lobbyists swooped in” to save, at least for now, a loophole worth more than $1 billion to Wall Street investors and the hotel, restaurant and gambling industries. Lobbyists even helped draft crucial language that the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid furtively inserted into the bill. Lipton and Moyer wrote that, “The small changes, and the enormous windfall they generated, show the power of connected corporate lobbyists to alter a huge bill that is being put together with little time for lawmakers to consider. Throughout the legislation, there were thousands of other add-ons and hard to decipher tax changes.”
No surprise to read that “some executives at companies with the most at stake are also big campaign donors.” The Times reports that “the family of David Bonderman, a co-founder of TPG Capital, has donated $1.2 million since 2014 to the Senate Majority PAC, a campaign fund with close ties to Mr. Reid and other Senate Democrats.” Senator Reid, lest we forget, is from Nevada. As he approaches retirement at the end of 2016, perhaps he’s hedging his bets at taxpayer expense.
Consider just two other provisions: One, insisted upon by Republican Senator Thad Cochran, directs the Coast Guard to build a $640 million National Security Cutter in Cochran’s home state of Mississippi, a ship that the Coast Guard says it does not need. The other: A demand by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins for an extra $1 billion for a Navy destroyer that probably will be built at her state’s Bath Iron Works – again, a vessel our military says is unnecessary.
So it goes: The selling off of the Republic, piece by piece. What was it Mark Twain said? “There is no distinctive native American criminal class except Congress.”
Can we at least face the truth? The plutocrats and oligarchs are winning. The vast inequality they are creating is a death sentence for government by consent of the people at large. Did any voter in any district or state in the last Congressional election vote to give that billion dollar loophole to a handful of billionaires? To allow corporations to hide their political contributions? To add $1.4 trillion to the national debt? Of course not. It is now the game: Candidates ask citizens for their votes, then go to Washington to do the bidding of their donors. And since one expectation is that they will cut the taxes of those donors, we now have a permanent class that is afforded representation without taxation.
A plutocracy, says my old friend, the historian Bernard Weisberger, “has a natural instinct to perpetuate and enlarge its own powers and by doing so slams the door of opportunity to challengers and reduces elections to theatrical duels between politicians who are marionettes worked by invisible strings.”
Where does it end?
By coincidence, this past weekend I watched the final episode of the British television series Secret State, a 2012 remake of an earlier version based on the popular novel A Very British Coup. This is white-knuckle political drama. Gabriel Byrne plays an accidental prime minister – thrust into office by the death of the incumbent, only to discover himself facing something he never imagined: a shadowy coalition of forces, some within his own government, working against him. With some of his own ministers secretly in the service of powerful corporations and bankers, his own party falling away from him, press lords daily maligning him, the opposition emboldened, and a public confused by misinformation, deceit, and vicious political rhetoric, the prime minister is told by Parliament to immediately invade Iran (on unproven, even false premises) or resign. In the climactic scene, he defies the “Secret State” that is manipulating all this and confronts Parliament with this challenge:
Let’s forget party allegiance, forget vested interests, forget votes of confidence. Let each and every one of us think only of this: Is this war justified? Is it what the people of this country want? Is it going to achieve what we want it to achieve? And if not, then what next?
Well, I tell you what I think we should do. We should represent the people of this country. Not the lobby companies that wine and dine us. Or the banks and the big businesses that tell us how the world goes ‘round. Or the trade unions that try and call the shots. Not the civil servants nor the war-mongering generals or the security chiefs. Not the press magnates and multibillion dollar donors… [We must return] democracy to this House and the country it represents.
Do they? The movie doesn’t tell us. We are left to imagine how the crisis — the struggle for democracy — will end.
As we are reminded by this season, there is more to life than politics. There are families, friends, music, worship, sports, the arts, reading, conversation, laughter, celebrations of love and fellowship and partridges in pear trees. But without healthy democratic politics serving a moral order, all these are imperiled by the ferocious appetites of private power and greed.
So enjoy the holidays, including Star Wars. Then come back after New Year’s and find a place for yourself, at whatever level, wherever you are, in the struggle for democracy. This is the fight of our lives and how it ends is up to us.
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Most people I see nowadays don't know how to navigate their way in the world unless it is with their thumbs, on their phones.
Good fucking luck with that skill set.
HAIL the survival of the fittest ...thumb in the ass
A plane hit the Pentagon?
Saying the plutocrats are winning is like saying the Harlem Globetrotters are winning. The outcome is known before you buy the ticket. It's best to have the option to stay away from the arena entirely, which is why a frontier is a requirement for a peaceful and growing human race.
Good point. There was a reason the plutocrats of their day slaughtered their way* all the way across the continent. They couldn't have a viable or even desirable system for their slaves, wage-slave and indentured servants to run off to. Hell, Ted Kazinsky tried to fight back, but to no avail. Assimilate or die...
*EDIT: Oops, meant to say: paid mercenaries and thugs to slaughter their way. The plutocrats don't do the dirty work themselves, except for pleasure.
RIP, Meadowlark
"A plane hit the Pentagon?"
Granted, there's no evidence of it happening — anymore than there's evidence that a plane crashed in Pennsylvania or that, for the first time in history, steel highrise buildings collapsed at freefall speed without controlled demolition — but what's important is that 9/11 got our government off its ass to fight the terrorism that it alone is responsible for creating.
Right and as if we needed more proof that was actually when the very last vestiges of any hope died.
After that happened and no one sufficiently questioned them and hounded them to the ends of the earth for truth and justice whatever was left of the tattered remnants of the republic just died.
So you can write articles like the article above until the cows come home but no one will do anything they have already proven they would rather not bother.
It's fucking OVER!
nah, it was a cruise missile fired from a Dolphin class Isreali submarine.
2 weeks ago, a kid of 25 years old asked me if I knew what apps are...
you know... people of your age...
THAT MORON WAS SERIOUS! I FELT LIKE SMACKING HIM! I'M FUCKING 39 YEARS OLD!
I MADE APPS FROM DAY ONE!
Those kids really think they own the world because they have 50 apps to upload their pictures in which nobody is interested.
You weren't wearing black socks and shorts while picking up sticks in your yard yelling at the yippersnapper to get off your lawn were you? :-) Just kidding, I've been getting the same thing recently.
I told one the other day that I watched the "moon landing" on teevee when I was a kid.
You should have see the look on her face as she said "but that's ancient history, you can't be that old"
Don't know if that was a compliment or not...
Described to one 20 somemething I watched Nixon resign on TeeVee and also saw Saigon fall too. He asked "Who was Saigon?"
I'm very grateful for the generation that's coming into the workforce now and has been for 10 years or so. They're so useless and fucked up from their self image and other dickwad problems they may have that I have never felt more job security. Those idiots couldn't do what I do if their lives dependet on it- and better yet - they'll never be able to pick it up because of their attitude and expectations. As more and more of these morons enter the workforce, my stock goes up, love it.
The first shadow government, referred to as COG or continuity of government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”
The second shadow government, referred to as the Deep State, is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.
Where do the CIA, NSA and other security forces fit in?
Agreed, Silvergeddon. The fix is in, the fight lost before it ever began. The only way to even slow it down would be a concerted, sustained civil war with major parts of all Federal Military personel, plus National Guard, plus civil police forces turning on the Federal Goverment. In other words, not a home-grown civilian uprising but a civilian uprising only AFTER a full blown coup d'etat. And that ain't going to happen.
Just give up.
As a strategist, you are not outstanding, imho. Please don't do this kind of recommending, you are really bad at it.
Have you heard of 'sabotage'? So easy, so simple, but puts the effort where its cheapest for us, most expensive for them. The 'us' and 'them' are pretty well separated, as good as a civil war ever gets, and the risks pretty much ditto. But, very important is the fact that it poises our knowledge and experience at running the systems we all live within against their enforcements.
You all know how that game turns out, right? A time when hard guys show you how badly they think before they are abandoned by the elites who run for other climes?
There is no possible way our elites win this next round. We are all just waiting until everyone understands the game "Make the masters humble". They can't run airlines if we don't want them to, and it doesn't even take very much wanting.
So stop the stupid advice. This is a dead-certain win for the voice of civilization, but only if we prevent the morons who are trying to own humanity from setting us at each other's throat. That will make it harder, and we will lose too much genetics, it will set our specie's evolution back throusands of years.
All this is the wrong question, you know? The question is how to best breed the next in our geneline, to extract the best from all of human genetics in doing so. We are all falling behind in the Red Queen race of genetics and culture, peaceful elements of the world are getting ahead in both.
Civilizations are defined the their central problems. I just can't think of one that would be better for all of us than that focus.
On a sidenote...
AMERICA IS SET THE BECOME THE 4TH LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD IN 2016!!
Used to be number one... before all of you decided it was cool to vote for Obama...
Fourth place? Next we'll be getting participation trophies in the world economy. I wonder who will be replacing us in first, second and third....
1. Europe
2. China
3. Japan
4. America <--- This is where Donald Duck lives
Was Scrooge McDuck Donald's rich daddy?
Japan? Ahead of us ?? !!
Isn't this the Land of the Living Dead Keynesians ? One long 25 year recession ? How can that be ?
Scrooge McDuck, the wealthiest guy in Duckberg!
"cool to vote for Obama..."
twice, after he broke all campaign promises the first time around
they count on people being stupid, but it's beyond that
“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”Who is going to be Bush 4?
Hey, we all make mistakes. At least I learned my lesson the first time.
Winning? They've fucking won.
What a waste of bytes and 1s and 0s.
No help from Paul Ryan. Therefore, we conclude Republicans are no help.
Hillary 2016!!!
good idea, lets elect a corrupt lawless self centered liar to our highest office AGAIN, where open borders will reign and dumbocrats can rule in perpetuity and fast track third world status for our offspring.
when they choose who will run, you can't win
and forget about the Dem-Rep distinction, there aren't any, except for the superficial ones that suck you in when you're too dumb to realize it
our behemonth self centered non value added gov't bureaucrafts are spending America down the river...sickening
There is little benefit in trying to take on Leviathan directly. You'll likely just get squashed like a bug. There is also little chance at effecting change in the current system. There's simply too much momentum to such a large bureaucracy.
The only way to "win" is to stay true to truth and principles and stay out of the way while the system crashes itself. Meanwhile, build out parallel systems to take care of those in need, your neighbours and your community. Done correctly and across the country the old systems will fall and the new grass-roots systems will take over with less mess than would have otherwise occurred.
That's right.
Vote for Hillary. Forget saving this system, focus on being a part of the rebuilding process.
I wouldn't go that far. I would just hold back participating in rigged elections. Don't give legitimacy to their circus or corrupt systems and more importantly, don't waste your time and energy on the same. There is much more important work to do now. I have gardens and livestock to tend, communities and greenhouses to build, soil to build, compost to make etc. etc.
On any day, we can stop everything.
Doesn't have to be a walkout, doesn't have to be obvious sabotage, even, just people making mistakes they can blame on others.
They can't run a complex system without cooperation. As soon as bunch of people understand that, and understand that it is a good solution and a game they can play, the game starts. And it starts because those idiots in positions of authority over buildings and processes will have to over-react, the same reason that airports and practically ever other federal facility are so easy to shut down, disrupt, etc. So natural events will blow out of control and paranoia on both sides and we win.
The day that we out here in the network decide, they start looking very stupid, and we tell them it is because they don't deal with 9/11, the False Flag, and when they start doing that in a way we approve of, the sabotage stops, maybe, but just so they know, 'we' is an amorphous thing.
If you document your exploits, be sure to encrypt them very well and carefully, or put them up on Youtube for everyone's pleasure and learning. Sabotage channels could get very popular.
The Plutocrats Are Winning (Don't Let Them!)
Good luck with that!
The general population here in the USSA has not a remote clue/idea what a "plutocrat" is, or cares for that matter
Most could not spell it without and app or google.
This country is screwed, look around you.
Far more interested in buying crap they don't need with money they don't have, and will sleep on a sidewalk to get it.
Why sleep on the sidewalk when mummy and daddy will provide you room and board while you suck them dry.
They have been trained in the FSA way.
BTW
I learned of a new "disease" today
Affluenza
"a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more."[1] The term "affluenza" has also been used to refer to an inability to understand the consequences of one's actions because of financial privilege.
I shit you not!
+1. Sleep on the sidewalk for 48, 72 hours straight, in cold, rain, wind, sleet and snow, just to buy something...millions watching the boob tube and their i-phones, hoping their $1 investment in Fan Duel will pay millions...more millions following every move, that Kim & Chloe make, instead of watching every move Hillary & Bill make...
The dumbing down of America is complete. You can't even go to the local bar or pub to have a few cold ones, without running into the unknowing, don't care, entitled, ignoramuses, who couldn't tell you anything you might need to know in life, unless they Googled it or have an app for it.
I could continue my rant, but I'll save it for a rainy day...
Richest 1% to own more than rest of world
I think they won...
There is no democracy.
Because there is no open ballot, and both parties' candidates are establishment candidates.
So, while there is voting, there is no democracy. Nothing of substance is selected in election.
I don't know which is worse?!
The constant drumbeat of articles bemoaning our sad fate under the ko$her nostra....and inability for real men to grow a spine and do something about it....
Or the constant demeaning of people on cellphones who seem to be able to navigate the internet without referencing their bible....
When it comes to the right and left of this country, its a battle for self destruction.
Who will destroy whom first?
Not that I care as most 'mericans I could do without and I am certain the universe concurs with me.
I mean really people. Talk about pathological narcissism.
Whom came first?
The idiots of this country or the oligrachy of money printing jews?
Its like a race to the bottom.
You want to know some actual advice that will work to deal with this shit?
You could try to do what Solzhenitsyn said to do which is to pay no attention to them. You have a couple of options and if you would rather live the only one left is to fail to participate to the maximum extent possible.
The reason some people are so depressed is that it's horrifying to contemplate being on the down roller coaster of western civilization.
We get daily updates on the rape of the middle class and how it's all falling apart, we get to remember what it was like and see it squashed and defiled daily, minute by minute and we get to see all this with a bunch of people surrounding us that make it all possible because they are afraid, so afraid that NOTHING will be done.
So here's how to deal.
Realize it's all gone and if it's not now it will be.
Get right with yourself and your maker.
Then go on living the best you can to spite the fuckers and try very hard not to be part of the problem and maybe someday the rest of those fuckers will get tired of getting up the ass until then wait.
That's it.
Seriously now, Bill f'n Moyers is writing about the plutocrats and democracy? The man who had LBJ for a mentor, wrote a biography praising Hubert Humphrey, then took a high paying TV job for NBC news, and then went on to milk PBS for millions. This is a guy who is warning people about the coming collapse of democracy? YOU ARE ONE OF THE ASSHATS WHO PROMOTED THE GREAT SOCIETY AND ALL OF THE DAMAGE IT DID TO AMERICA AND ITS CITIZENS!!!!!!! Take a little bit of responsibility and actually talk out of your real mouth and not the one that excretes refuse.
Come on Tylers, this sh*t isn't even funny anymore. Where is the benefit for anyone to re-publish geriatric trash like this? Are you trying to show us how really f'd up the world is because even the enablers are jumping on the bandwagon of coming armageddon?
Yeah it's like a government worker lecturing you on your work ethic or something.
The problem is that the whole of society is infested with the rot. There are so many that work for the government they are the largest employers by far.
They are OVERHEAD but they are paid mininions most of all and they don't want change.
Nothing will change until enough people get a boot up their ass and all the way along they will cling to whatever scraps they are given so tight they will have no time to even think about their lives, meanwhile the taking continues apace.
YADA YADA YADA.
Either become one of them or drop out and stop playing the game that's about it.
Yes, it is all about each of our individual Net Present Value Of Government.
For most of us and our familes, that is horrendously negative, but we don't control the spending side of the political system, nor the taxing side, just the paying.
Look at that, simple lists tell you where your strengths are compared to theirs.!!!
So what %age of the population would have to refuse to pay taxes before the government would fold? Is that larger or smaller than the proportion that would be feasible to arrest and incarcerate? Or not incarcerate?
Shooting a bunch of tax protesters and giving their properties to local supporters would be a measure of interest, it would no doubt galvanize our society. That is the game, we do something rational and relatively mild, they over-react, and we win. In the early games, they control the script, in the latter, we do. For them to control it now in any way that benefits them, is too obviously in their benefit to be believed, and mostly over-reaction. That over-reaction is natural when you understand their necks are literally waiting for nooses. They will be arrested and tried as soon as peace descends upon a rational jurisdiction in the world sufficiently outside of US power.
That defines our opponent's strategic objective, they must maintain their power and avoid peace. That will require ever-larger False Flags and other provocations, but notice that ISIS and Islam are not the great danger they were said to be, and never have been. That story-line is does not have the power to fire fear that it did.
Notice that the danger to the world resides in our own Israeli-Neocon network of deepstate, banksters, MIC, oil, ... There is a lot of digging that needs done in our society, and these guys don't want it to happen. The conitnued silence of MSM on the subject of 9/11 FF is a fine measure of their corruption.
Now we get to see them play end-game.
"within sight of a smoldering Pentagon that had been struck by one of the hijacked planes"
What's funny is there is no evidence I can find that a plane hit the Pentagon, and lots of evidence to the contrary. And it happened to hit the exact area where they were investigating the "misplacement" of 2.2 trillion dollars. What an unfortunate turn of events...
Oh well, I'm sure the government and media would never lie to us.
The plutocrats are winning. (Don't let them)??
Without a leash around the necks of the political dogs to bring them to heel, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that the so-called plutocrats can be stymied. Anyone know what that leash could possibly be?
If not, I for one welcome our new (old) slimy overlords.
Since millenials are too stupid to listen to reason, maybe we can make apps and games that will get the point across :/