While all the evidence has been in plain sight for months, Robert Reich does a good job of summing the pieces.
He says the danger facing our democracy is a "perfect storm." The first part of the storm is the income disparity, where "[a]lmost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans" and "[t]he top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us." It's worth memorizing those numbers.
The second part is our friend, the Citizens United decision (my emphasis):
The third part of the storm is the deep hole most Americans are in. Yet at a time when people are looking to government to tide them through a horrible rough patch, Washington tells them there's no money:
If so, the Court certainly responded, and in spectacular fashion: Instead of issuing a ruling on the film's airing, as expected in June of 2009, it called for the case to be re-argued with an expanded set of questions, including the constitutionality of limiting any corporate political donations at all. In other words, the Court took a case about whether the airing of a film counted as an independently-produced campaign ad, and turned it into a "radical" expansion of the concept of corporate personhood.
And now, according to Think Progress, we have many of the elements of Reich's trifecta in coordinated planning meetings. The billionaires who have benefited from the income disparity are, thanks to Citizens United (a Antonin Scalia–Clarence Thomas special, I might add), meeting to figure out how to further leverage their advantage over the rest of us. And then there's this:
Are really we "losing our democracy" to a revolutionary force?
He says the danger facing our democracy is a "perfect storm." The first part of the storm is the income disparity, where "[a]lmost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans" and "[t]he top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us." It's worth memorizing those numbers.
The second part is our friend, the Citizens United decision (my emphasis):
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. [sic] Chamber of Commerce, a third.More on Citizens United in a moment.
The third part of the storm is the deep hole most Americans are in. Yet at a time when people are looking to government to tide them through a horrible rough patch, Washington tells them there's no money:
No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.There's money all right, Reich is saying; just none for us. His conclusion is spot on:
The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.About that Citizens United decision: It has occurred to many that perhaps the reason the case was brought had less to do with defending the airing of a Movement Conservative attack film than something else — a Movement Conservative attempt to bring just such a challenge to election funding before the Supreme Court.
We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.
If so, the Court certainly responded, and in spectacular fashion: Instead of issuing a ruling on the film's airing, as expected in June of 2009, it called for the case to be re-argued with an expanded set of questions, including the constitutionality of limiting any corporate political donations at all. In other words, the Court took a case about whether the airing of a film counted as an independently-produced campaign ad, and turned it into a "radical" expansion of the concept of corporate personhood.
And now, according to Think Progress, we have many of the elements of Reich's trifecta in coordinated planning meetings. The billionaires who have benefited from the income disparity are, thanks to Citizens United (a Antonin Scalia–Clarence Thomas special, I might add), meeting to figure out how to further leverage their advantage over the rest of us. And then there's this:
Past Koch meetings have included various Republican lawmakers, including DeMint, and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia as speakers.Let's not forget Ginni Thomas (yes, that Mrs. Clarence Thomas), of Liberty Central, a secretly-funded Tea Party organization, who may be bringing their own challenges to the Supreme Court. If you were David Koch, would you fund Liberty Central?
Are really we "losing our democracy" to a revolutionary force?
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