To Shore Up The 1% They Were Willing To Destroy Democracy

They hate the government for taxing them and regulating them, so they decided to destroy it, which means they decided to destroy our democracy because that’s the kind of government we have here.

It began in the 70s with a memo Lewis Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce. Workers had rights, polluters were being regulated, corporations didn’t like being taxed and regulated by a public sector that inhibited them from predatory practices.

You can read up on Lewis Powell at Bill Moyers' website, and learn more about Powell's influential memo that stole the economy back for the plutocrats. Powell went on to sit on the Supreme Court and help convert it into a law firm for the wealthy.

In the 70s the super-rich decided enough was enough and decided to fight back.

Slowly, over the past 3 or 4 decades, workers’ incomes have flatlined and infrastructure, schools, and trusted institutions have been deliberately degraded.

The Right knew that the only way to destroy democratic government was to defund it, degrade it, discredit it, make it not work, make people distrust and dislike it.

Now the Congress is owned by the people who own for a living. The Court works for the people who own for a living. And the president is one of the people who own for a living.

The Citizens United court ruling turned democracy into a proxy operation by which ordinary people voted for their government but wealthy corporate clubs owned and operated one major party and dominated the Supreme Court through the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and a whole zoo of upliftingly and patriotically and vaguely named non-profits devoted to free market absolutism.

Bill Moyers has some very good analysis of the powerful octopus of tax-free lobbying operations led by Heritage.

They had a single goal: the total levitation of the owning classes above the bothersome social responsibilities that constitute citizenship, the stuff contained in the social contract by which you contribute of yourself and expect decency and fair play in return. The corporate absolutists who drove this Big Idea felt no obligations beyond themselves and felt the average citizen and his or her government owed them absolute freedom of action and total obedience. When you’re very very big and powerful your dreams are big too. The 1% now own the world.

A Killer Business Model

Headlining the business news this week is Martin Shkreli, 32 year-old former hedge fund manager and now CEO of his own pharmaceutical company, who bought the rights to a very effective drug used to treat critically ill infants and AIDS patients and promptly jacked up the price per dose by 5500%, raising it from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

Find something people will do anything to get and demand everything they have. That, my friend, is a killer business model. That is what American business has gotten especially good at in the past 30 years, since we learned to jettison all that Compassionate Society crap and finally ditch the New Deal. (Thank you Reaganomics!)

No more of this Jonas Salk giving the patent to the polio vaccine to humanity for free. Jonas Salk was an irresponsible fool––at least that’s the belief of American free market capitalists. Since money is the only measure of truth, they are absolutely right.

Pain and fear of death are wonderful motivators and American business schools keep churning out geniuses who know how to make sure every last fear-driven dime is carefully migrated out of the pockets of the sick and dying and into the pockets of smarter people who deserve it more and will spend it on $200,000 cars and party drugs.

Why do they deserve it more? Because they are Achievers. Because they are willing to go that extra mile. They are willing to do things most human beings would never do because it would make them feel like monsters. These businesspeople are able to turn off the small useless part of the brain that contains kindness, human decency, fellow-feeling, compassion and remorse. Being able to not think about other people makes them the most evolved, the most advanced, the most perfectly lethal form of the human species to date. They are unfeeling moneymaking machines and worth every penny they extort from people in pain.