Senator Whitehouse: A Court Shaped by Fossil Fuel Dark Money
March 31, 2022
There’s a whole book about this, Democracy in Chains by Nancy Maclean.
The whole culture war thing, abortion and all the rest, is just is just a sideshow to pull in the rubes. The real game is destroying the government’s ability to curb in any way the power of the wealthy and powerful.
March 31, 2022 at 2:01 pm
Amen
I love Sheldon Whitehouse
April 1, 2022 at 8:58 am
I asked a friend and colleague — a philosophy and political science prof (at U of T Austin in his later years) — what form of government the U.S.A. has. “Oligarchy,” he said, without hesitation… Lately, the “democracy” cover story has frayed to the point of complete transparency. Until climate change really starts to terrify the most protected and secure people in the country (that is, until it threatens their wealth), this is going to be an uphill fight…
April 1, 2022 at 11:47 am
We have a representative democracy dominated by moneyed interests. ‘Oligarchy’ is a shorthand epithet for it, but it’s often too glib, and it’s false equivalency when it’s used to suggest we’re essentially no different than authoritarian and oligarchic governments like Russia and China.
The oligarchic term was actually put to the test with Trump. The moneyed interests in the GOP found they couldn’t control the popularism of Trump, with a generally ticked off vast swathe of middle and lower class Americans, and have largely adapted to it as a result.
Additionally, moneyed interests are not exactly a small group, as in the definition of oligarchy, and those interests can often conflict with each other in the specifics of U.S. policy.
All that said, moneyed interests manage to block nearly every effort to either control their power or income. We ‘can’ overcome that influence, and very occasionally do, but it is an enormous uphill fight to do so.
April 1, 2022 at 12:08 pm
On the video and the GOP accusations of ‘dark money’ for Jackson, a reliable indicator of the GOP’s modus operandi is in what they accuse the Democrats of doing. They almost always claim that the Democrats are doing EXACTLY what they themselves do on a regular basis with zero compunction.
April 5, 2022 at 1:49 pm
EAIAC
Every
Accusation
Is
A
Confession