A Trump Win Would Bring Both Monarchy and Aristocracy to the US [View all]

[appalachiablue]

A Trump Win Would Bring Both Monarchy and Aristocracy to the US, by Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, Oct. 8, 2024. Ed. - Long Read
-------
- Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been found by a jury of his peers to have raped a woman. - He’s a traitor who’s embraced foreign dictators, particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just sentenced an American to prison while actively bombing a democratic American ally. - He’s a convicted criminal who stole money from a children’s cancer charity & scammed students out of millions of dollars.
- He tried to end American democracy by force.
- Like Hitler justifying the Holocaust, he claimed some Americans are genetically inferior.

And he’s a whisker away from the presidency.

How is this even possible? You can trace it all back to dark money.

Ever since Citizens United (2010) legalized literally unlimited contributions to the new category of political action committees it created (SuperPACs), just in the 15 months from Jan. 2023 to April of 2024 over $8.6 billion was raised for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65% of that money—$5.6 billion—running through PACs. 9 years ago, former President Jimmy Carter said on my 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 being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over."

He's right. But it’s even worse than Carter imagined. Dark money—billions from the morbidly rich and giant corporations, often untraceable—has taken over the entire GOP and is the main weapon being used today against members of the Democratic Party. It’s also badly distorting public policy. For example, remember when Trump was outspoken about banning TikTok from America because the app is owned by Chinese billionaires beholden to that nation’s communist government? In Aug. of 2020, he signed an Executive Order that said, in part: This data collection [by TikTok] threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

.. Political ad spending is projected to reach new heights by the end of the 2024 election cycle, eclipsing $10 billion in what would amount to the most expensive 2 years in political history.. While Thomas Jefferson was still the U.S. envoy to France and living in Paris, just after the Constitution had been written but a year before it would be ratified, John Adams wrote him on Dec. 6, 1778 arguing that Jefferson’s fear of a strongman president wasn’t as big a concern as Adams’ fear of rich people corrupting American politics:...
Read More,
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-win-monarchy-aristocracy