Witnessing the end of empire. The USA had a good ride from the 1930s until the 1980s, while the last 40 years has seen the beginnings of the end of empire. We are now in the acute phase of decline, and becoming what Britain became, a beligerent plutocracy that is a hollowed-out shell of its former self. There’s still time to save us, but we must act fast. Plutocracy that began in the 1980s under Reagan must be dismantled and a representative democracy restored.
“If you are someone who was able to overlook the genocide and cast a vote for Kamala Harris, then you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him.” Meg Indurti, Los Angeles, CA
Palestine: The result of “democracies” in the USA and Israel. Someone please awake the USA from its 40 years slumber. Aka: How the wealthy pummel and control the people.
The middle-class has severely retracted since the 1980s, and real wage increases for working people have been flat for 40 years. Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for the four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality in the USA had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number now has crossed the $50 trillion mark by 2020. In other words, the wealthy have extracted $50 trillion from the middle class over the last 50 years, with the extraction worsening over recent years. For example, remember when George W. Bush destroyed the economy from 2001-2009, allowing the rich to extract gobs of money from the middle class, and then Obama had to save the economy? To save the economy, Obama bailed out the wealthy using money from the middle class.
But many people in the USA middle class don’t understand why they’ve become poorer. And most don’t want to hear it. They’re in denial. The mainstream media in the USA promotes the denial. Young people find it harder and harder to buy a home and attain higher education, and those from the middle-class with higher education are the drivers of innovation and new businesses. As an example, UC Berkeley, the world’s best public (and affordable) college, graduates the largest number of entrepreneurs in the US. Berkeley and other world-leading colleges in California are a key reason why California is the innovation hub of the planet. And it’s part of the reason why California has the 5th largest economy on the planet (that fell to #10 under Republicans). As much as the rich conservative man and their shills, such as Reagan, tried to kill our public univesities, the people of California prevented them from doing so. But huge student debt on the middle class did arise. More of Reagan’s attack on the middle class. And why are homes so expensive now in the USA, including California? Reagan financialized housing, and now, for example, private equity owns many of the homes in CA, including in San Diego. And in our deregulated, privatized USA, the wealthy use algorithms to commit price fixing in the housing industry. Corporations, such as RealPage in Texas, offer these services to the wealthy. Many of the wealthy will do anything to make a buck. Anything. Cast your eyes on Palestine, and you’ll know what I mean.
We will be targeted once again by Trump, and given his guard raills have been weakened by the “Supreme” Court, guarding our institutions in California will be hard during these next 4 years.
The Reagan Revolution
Despite what Ronald Reagan’s handlers, self aggrandizing plutocrats, told him to say, government is the solution to most, if not all, problems. Saying that government, the power of the people in a democracy, is the problem, was a damnation of democracy by Reagan. Without proper democratic regulations, “free markets” (there is no such thing as a free market) become unstable and often crash – such as the Savings and Loan Crisis that Reagan ushered in, and the rich become richer. Reagan’s Neoliberalism would gut the middle class and manufacturing, and lead to a government run by plutocrats. Essentially, Reagan would make the government an enemy of the people, and then blame the government for gutting the people. Stupid people believed him, rich people prospered. To bring plutocracy to the US, Reagan would even commit treason by cutting a deal with Iran to block President Carter from bringing back the US citizens held hostage in Iran, thus diminishing Carter’s bid for reelection. The Republican plutocratic strategy works by persuading white working class voters to focus not on financial self-interest, but on race, conservative religious values and other perceived identity threats, and this blights the US economy. The national debt soared 3X under Reagan and the US moved from a creditor nation to a debtor nation. Other people’s money, taken from the middle class, fueled the Republican ideology of making the rich even richer. Reagan’s privatization and deregulation of healthcare, including for example, an FDA where the clinical trials are run by companies and half of the budget of the FDA comes from the companies being regulated, would lead to the medicalization of America and the world’s worst and most expensive healthcare system. As governor, Reagan would cut one of the most important things driving the innovation in California, the great public universities in the state. All of this meant that Reagan was moving money away from innovation and the public good, and into the hands of the wealthy. Later, the Reagan Revolution-Republicans would kill government funding of new technologies, sending lithium ion battery technology and solar technology to China, leading to the Chinese domination of these markets. While the Reagan-Republicans embraced ignorant private enterprise ideologies that have never worked, not in the history of mankind, and failed to back US developed technologies – the Chinese knew Reagan-Republicans wouldn’t back US developed technologies and took great advantage of decades long research and development in the US, buying US technologies for pennies on the (thousands) dollar. Dwight D. Eisenhower rolls in his grave.
Diminished R&D in the USA
And as the wealthy pay little or no taxes, and with Trump exacerbating the already huge problem, the government no longer has the money to drive innovation – government has been and continues to be the main driver of innovation. Think about it, the vacuum tube, the semiconductor, the 3-dimensional transistor, RISC computer achitecture, solar panels, lithium ion batteries, rocket technology, airplane technology, nuclear imaging, almost all of our drugs, including new cancer treatements, the internet, CRISPR, etc, were government innovations. Without innovation, businesses are not created to monetize that innovation. Decreased R&D by the US government is why the Chinese have surpassed the US in many areas of science and technology, including AI, and their economy has flourished like nothing else before it (not even the US so rapidly built an economy). Like in Rome, where the wealthy built colliseums to placate the people, so too does the USA build more and more stadiums to placate the masses. And it makes the billionaires even wealthier. What’s happening?
The USA Repeats the UK Downfall Scenario
History repeating. Between 1880 and 1920, Britain killed 100 million Indians. Empire was at its peak. The rich were drinking all day, enjoying drunkeness at their huge estates, including in India. Like many other “English gentlemen” of the day, Winston Churchill’s father had spent his fortune on booze and other indulgences and had to marry a rich US citizen to save his estate and way of life. Winston world carry on dad’s ways – a drunkard he was of first class. The drunkards would then start two world wars, declaring war on Germany twice – wars they could never win without enlisting the Americans to win the wars for them. Eisenhower led the Allied forces while Winston drank and made belligerent speeches. Today these types of rich people often use ketamine and make speeches that reflect something other than reality. After the big war, Winston, a huge bigot, would go on to wreak havoc in the Middle East. Overthrowing the democratically elected president of Iran (with the help of Israel and the CIA) and starting a war with Egypt (Eisenhower wouldn’t particpate in this nonsense), are just two examples. An austere, conservative UK government would support the wealthy, ignore the middle-class, and gut R&D. Even its once venerated National Health Service is in steep decline. Sound familiar? (The drugs don’t work because Reagan privatized clinical trials – hopefully RFK Jr can do something about this huge, costly problem). Today the UK is a place where little works and the country has fallen to 3rd world status, especially after having iniated the conservative’s plan of Brexit. Trump supported it of course and has iniated a form of it in the USA. History repeating.
Trump promises more privatization and deregulation, something that brings about corruption, inefficency, inferior products, and higher prieces, following what began in the 1980s by Reagan to benefit the wealthy. Reagan so disdained the middle-class that he instituted taxes on their social security income. Financialization of the housing market began in the 80s, and housing costs skyrocketed. The Savings & Loan crisis brought about by deregulation was part of the problem. The problems continue and worsen today. Even our “cherised and abandoned” military has suffered from privatization and deregulation. As explained by Col. Wilkerson, US weapons are now worse than those from Russia and China and cost three times as much. Price gouging is the rule. Before the Reagan era (error) we witnessed President Kennedy end price gouging by large corporations through direct action. As a result, the price gouging stopped. Those days are gone. Corporations own our politicians (except bernie). Companies such as Boeing are now a joke, having been cannabalized by the wealthy. But the rich become richer (yes, Reagan deregulated stock buybacks to allow the rich to become richer) and the middle class pays. And, of course, the poor people die, or, if they’re lucky, become indentured servents.
“We’re not going back!” Sorry, we went back in the 1980s, never to return.
Lewis “Corporations Are People” Powell, architect of the “Going Back Movement” where Robber Baron 2.0 started. Back in 1971, when the Robber Baron memo was prepared, Powell was a well-connected partner in the Richmond-based law firm of Hutton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson and sat on the boards of 11 major corporations, including the tobacco giant Philip Morris.
The 50 Year Republican Plan to Implement a Plutocracy
What we’re witnessing in the USA is the fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Lewis Powell laid it out in 1971 during the Nixon presidency, and every year hence, Republicans have followed it. Many Democrats have embraced it too. Look at the genocide in Palestine. Wealthy donor money from the Israel Lobby to both parties fuels the mass murdering of the innocents, as the invading Russians and Polish, such as Polak David Grun (aka Ben-Gurion) and Russian Moshe Sharett, setup, maintain, and expand their colonial, apartheid state in Palestine. Zionists laid down modern-day terrorism, something they learned from the British, in the Middle East. The citizens of the USA don’t support the genocide, but given no democracy in the USA, the wealthy donors are given what they want. Biden gives the genocidal maniacs all the weapons they want, receives millions in return, and Trump tells the genocidal maniacs to “finish them [Palestinians] off.” With a $100 million in his pocket from Israeli Zionist Miriam Adelson, Trump backs Polak, Benjamin Mileikowski’s (aka Netanyahu) plans for further stealing of Palestine’s land. Wealthy defense corporations and their senior leadership and owners are making a bundle by mass murdering innocent people. As Israel’s oldest newspaper says, ethnic cleansing is at hand. The U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related U.S. operations in the region between Oct 2023 and Oct 2024. What am I talking about here when I say wealthy donors?
The Powell plan was to turn the USA over to the richest men and the largest corporations. This was a plan to replace our weak democracy with oligarchy. Many of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks, deregulation, privatization, and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. Deregulation and privatization gave us Enron as one of many examples. Money flowed to the wealthy at Enron in Houston, TX resulting in the bankruptcy of many small businesses in California. Now coming in 2025, even more will soon come to the wealthy.
As any advertising executive or sales guy, such as Elon Musk, can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything. Given a highly religious USA and most people without (only 37%) higher education, fooling the masses is easy. Colonizing Mars – it’s a billion dollar scam. FSD – same. Hyperloop– same. Tunnels in Vegas – ditto. I could go on. Bullshit pervades. To see how stupid people are who voted for Trump, watch this. Those with a few synapse functioning above their midbrain are regretting thier vote for Trump upon realizing they voted against their own interest.
The Pitiful Binary Choice for President of the USA -Which Corporate Shill Do You Prefer?
Even a convicted felon, liar, fraudster, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies can and has succeeded. This is a guy who used the Presidency to self-aggrandize. On the other side, we had another bullshiter who couldn’t even tell the truth about where she was born and raised – Berkeley, CA. Her father, Prof. Dr. Donald Harris, Ph.D., a Berkeley-educated and preeminent econonmist at Stanford was nowhere to be found in her story. Why? Because post-Keynesian ideas to development economics are uncool in our new era of Neocon politics. We don’t help poor people, we take advantage of them. If the rich need to increase their profit margins and need cheap labor to make some fancy sneakers, enlist child labor in Asia. Middle-class jobs in the USA are lost and the great income divide worsens. It’s Reagan’s NAFTA legacy at work, and the Heritage Foundation is proud to have had a puppet in Ronnie. The Keynesian ideas were used in the days when the greatest builders of the US economy and the middle-class- Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, were loved by the people, but would now be labeled as communists by guys like Trump. Kamala appeared as a phony, and people don’t like phonies. Trump played himself- a dumb, arrogant, lazy, loud, beligerent, and boastful white guy, and uneducated religious people loved it. Trump didn’t listen to his consultants, and it paid-off. Roy Cohn, the tyrannical closeted gay Jewish lawyer had taught him well. Kamala listened, and was clobbered. Thirteen million demoralized Democrats stayed home on Nov 5, 2024. Democrats don’t like genocide, especially when we are the perpetrators. Politics makes for strange bedfellows in our Neocon era, and most of these dogs come away flea-infested.
America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in dishonest and misleading advertising, facilitated by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations. And third-party candidates, or candidates not selected by the donor class within the corrupt political processes of the two party system, were excluded by the wealthy donors. If you don’t cater to the rich man wishes, you don’t politically exist. You’re dead.
More broadly, and we find that corruption goes way beyond just this election; many of the crisis the USA is facing now are either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, the houses being wiped-out in Florida by hurricanes and flooding, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, that most drugs don’t work (hopefully RFK, Jr will exert positive results on this problem), even the lack of affordable drugs that do work, insurance, and healthcare.
Billionaires Choose Our Supreme Court Too
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who were handpicked by billionaires and who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process. Oil billionaires own many of our TV stations, for example.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were doing what they do best- lie.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped place them on the Court in the first place. The wealthy had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts. In this way, the wealthy have the court to back-up their money-making schemes.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented, writing:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now assured. The large middle-class was an annoyance to the wealthy as their power was being questioned by the newly educated middle class. All that was needed was a small middle-class to manage the wealth of the powerful – all other middle-class people needed to be purged so as not to upset the accumulation of wealth at the top. As so it began.
Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt. The Reagan Revolution had been primed, and the age of greed fell upon the USA for the next 40 years.
And it’s becoming worse. The Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government. Granted the alternative was not good, but the greater of the two evils won, bigly.
The USA is an Outlier
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. Their streets aren’t strewn with the homeless. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why they still have functioning democracies.
The ability of the USA to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate, and likely the House.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Many citizens of the USA who are cognizant of the problems that began with the Reagan Revolution will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the wealthy donor class. I will do my part too.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 