About Making America Great, Again

 Let me say I never bought Donald Trump's Make America Great Again pledge. What we have seen since 2016 is only part of America was great and that is the richest part of America. Yes, MAGA has attracted all sorts of fascists and the fascist-leaning thumping the drum for restoring white supremacy. What MAGA has done more for is making fat cats like Donald J. Trump absolutely obese. MAGA has convinced the whites who think they deserve a free lunch to give their dollars to the super-rich with the hope that the super-rich will deign to give their poorer supporters scraps from the oligarchs' tables. I knew a fellow who used to say don't tell me it is raining when you're pissing down my neck. That is the true nature of trickle down economics and that is all the super-rich give back to the people.

Since 1975, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in America that has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.

During this terrible pandemic, when thousands of essential workers died doing their jobs, some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2tn richer. Today, while the working class falls further behind, multibillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are off taking joyrides on rocket ships to outer space, buying $500m super-yachts and living in mansions with 25 bathrooms.
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 Today we have more concentration of ownership than at any time in the modern history of this country. In sector after sector a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we pay for it. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of over $20tn and are the major stockholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies. In terms of media, some eight multinational media conglomerates control what we see, hear and read.

In terms of political power, the situation is the same. A small number of billionaires and CEOs, through their Super Pacs, dark money and campaign contributions, play a huge role in determining who gets elected and who gets defeated. There are now an increasing number of campaigns in which Super Pacs actually spend more money on campaigns than the candidates, who become the puppets to their big money puppeteers. In the 2022 Democratic primaries, billionaires spent tens of millions trying to defeat progressive candidates who were standing up for working families.

 

So wrote Bernie Sanders in The US has a ruling class – and Americans must stand up to it as published by The Guardian. What will you do about such a country?

sch 9/2/22