Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy three times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working-class people ahead of the oligarchs.This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief is taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.First, some background.While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.But there were real oligarchs in America in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.By the early 1850s, they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the Gilded Age known as the Roaring 20s.President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy, leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate, he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.So here we are now, 81 years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me 10 years ago on my radio program:“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.Since taking office, Trump has:— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,—...
Most casual EU observers have missed the connection between President Trump eliminating the U.S-Europe Marshall Plan via entirely new trade and tariff policies, and the aggregate financial collapse of the European Union. Over four years (1948-1952), the United States provided $13.3 billion (equivalent to approximately $137 billion in 2025) directly to 17 Western European countries, […]
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