this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
58 points (93.9% liked)
United States | News & Politics
2320 readers
1303 users here now
Welcome to [email protected], where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.
If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.
Rules
Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.
Post anything related to the United States.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The article sort of brushes up against the truth here and there, but to borrow a phrase from it, apparently doesn't have the cojones to actually lay it out clearly.
The Dem leadership isn't timid - they're corrupt. They're wholly owned by moneyed interests and have no desire to be anything else. They're not fighting the oligarchs simply because the oligarchs pay them to not fight.
Did the oligarchs pay the last 3 Dem presidents to raise taxes on billionaires and/or corporations?
They generally don't pay presidents directly at all. They pay the DNC and the PACs.
And no - they didn't pay for tax increases. They paid for loopholes.
And yet candidates raise way more money than "The DNC". The Harris campaign was giving money to the DNC, not the other way around.
And tax increases are what they got from Dem congressmen and presidents. Even though tax cuts are their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd top priorities. Sounds like billionaires are getting a way bigger return on their investment giving money to the GOP.
Not all oligarchs are intent on cutting their own taxes until the guillotines come out. That doesn't put them on the side of working Americans, it just makes them the marginally more benevolent tyrants. Even among slave owners there better and worse individuals.
It's not all about taxes. Under Democrats corporate consolidation has generally moved just as fast as under Republicans. Democrats have been almost as bad as Republicans on deregulation. They work in lockstep on feeding the military industrial complex.
It was Bill Clinton who said "The era of big government is over" right before dismantling much of the federal safety net programs. Bill won with the support of unions, then fucked unions over every chance he got.
Obama's first actions on taking office were to rescue Wall Street on the backs of workers. Then his singular major domestic accomplishment was to implement a healthcare plan that was designed by the same Heritage Foundation that wrote project 2025. That plan was explicitly designed to derail actual reform efforts, and Democrats have used if like a cudgel to do exactly that ever since it was passed. It was also arguably the biggest wealth transfer to the elites from a single law in US history.
Biden was a breath of fresh air in that he generally tried to nudge things in the right direction. He was pathetically the most progressive President since FDR, which doesn't make him a progressive President. Even Biden used executive orders to accelerate the privatization of Medicare, which is nothing but a government handout to insurance companies at the expense of vulnerable retirees.
Even Biden's most extreme tax reforms would have only clawed back a portion of Trump's tax cuts, and he made up for that with the oligarchs by handing them even more government power and wealth.
It is 95% about taxes. Almost everything else the GOP does is related to scoring tax cuts for billionaires. When it comes to the class war, there is actually a way to win the entire war, not just individual battles. We must raise top tax rate on billionaires back to 70% or 90% like it was before. If billionaires knew that know matter what else they did, there were still going to have a 70% tax rate, they wouldn't by trying nearly as hard to fuck us over on all the other stuff like enshitifying the entire government, lack of universal healthcare, and deregulating everything. Because there would be no point. Also they would have far less money to control politicians with.
Yes that fucking idiot created Accountable Care Organizations for seniors who weren't stupid enough to enroll in Medicare Disadvantage. ACO means that doctors no longer have to act in the best interests of their patients and because of it seniors can no longer trust their doctor's recommendations.
But that is what Obama campaigned on. Except that he promised us a public option and we didn't get that.
The US stopped enforcing the Anti-Trust Act in the 1980's. That finally changed under Biden and to a much smaller extent under Obama.
But "corporate consolidation" is still one of the hundreds of things related to taxes. If tax rates were way higher, they wouldn't be trying as hard to do shit like this.