https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/who-controls-the-us-political-system
The #Billionaires Got #Organized. The People Didn't. The Rest Is #History
#THOMHARTMANN
Jan 04, 2024
..."Regulating #polluting #industries and fossil fuel emissions was all the rage in the 1970s, and people loved it. But the billionaires hated it. As the #EPA historian noted, by the time Russell Train had become the EPA Administrator in 1973, they were starting to get organized and active:
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That was also the year that America’s industrialists got serious about taking tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell’s Memo’s advice: the rich needed to step up and start buying off politicians and judges, seize control of the media, and use their endowments to stock universities with rightwing professors while pushing out the old-line liberals.
They got a big boost in 1976 (Buckley) and 1978 (Bellotti) when five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that billionaires and corporations buying off politicians was no longer considered criminal bribery: from those years forward it was, instead, “Constitutionally protected First Amendment free speech” and corporations were no longer legal fictions but fully “persons” who could claim protections under the Bill of (Human) Rights.
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The think tanks got to work, backstopping the GOP at every opportunity. Money flowed to Republican politicians, both state and federal. A small army of commentators was organized, some of them scientists and economists willing to go on-the-take, to convince Americans that regulations weren’t something that would protect average people but were, instead, instruments of socialism or communism.
Their factotum, Jude Wanniski, even came up with a bizarre new economic theory that included techno-sounding phrases like “trickle down” and “supply side” to justify massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich.
The agencies like the EPA that were doing the regulating would, henceforth, be known as the “deep state,” a designation so creepy that few would choose to defend them.
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The indoctrination of the Republican voter is so complete that when then-President Trump gutted over 100 environmental regulations — making it more toxic and dangerous to live or work in America and putting our children at risk of childhood cancers and birth defects — there wasn’t a peep. Most Republican voters don’t even know it happened,
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This fifty-year-long plot executed by some of the richest men (with few exceptions, they’re almost all men) in America to gut income taxes and environmental regulations has been a stunning success. Without the burden of income taxes, they’re now richer than any humans ever before in the history of the Earth. Richer than the pharaohs, richer than the Caesars, richer than any king in European, African, or Asian history.
Do they care that they’re leaving the rest of us a dying planet? That their actions have created a toxic brew of paranoia and distrust — along with an obese orange-faced monster — that is on the verge of ending the American experiment? That Americans are dying every day from the pollution and climate change their products produce?"...
