January 2018: The Dictatorship of Bullet and Buck

 

The Dictatorship of Bullet and Buck 

In the past year, I have focused mostly  on all the crookery and buffoonery of Donald J. Trump and his crew. Today let’s look at a Democratic example briefly to prove a few of my regular points. 

____________________ 

“We expect a return on our investment.” 

Sec. of Education Betsy Devos,

explaining why she donated to politicians and political causes

____________________

  

A)    Where money and politics meet, money too often trumps morality. 

B)     The superrich don’t need more tax cuts. They’ve already created a system in which they win at every turn. 

C)    Concentrating too much power (and today financial power often replaces police state power) in too few hands is always dangerous to freedom and democracy. 

D)   The free press isn’t the “enemy of the people.” The free press, if it’s doing its job, holds the powerful to account.

 

Reporters digging into documents in New Jersey turn up evidence that a powerful Democratic politician managed to slip $300 million in tax breaks for just four companies into legislation, with the help of a sharp lawyer, who he allowed to edit the bills before they went up for a vote. 

These alterations were made despite the fact there was no public disclosure, and despite the fact the “benefits” to the state were paltry, indeed. 

Roughly $155,000.

* 

THE SIMPLE TRUTH is money power can be as dangerous to the rest of us who lack it as military power in dictator’s hands. The only difference: the money power guys don’t shoot you in the head. 

For example, Business Insider notes that Amway had to pay a $56 million class-action judgment in 2010. 

So: How does money power threaten us all? A shot to the back of your head is too messy; and your family wouldn’t stand for it. The money power has learned in modern times to be more subtle.

 

Amway, is the company founded by the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who prepared, famously, to lead the Dept. of Education, which oversees America’s public schools, by going to an elite private school her entire life. Then she sent her children to elite private schools. Now, she and her husband are worth $1.3 billion. “Her father reportedly helped found The Family Research Council, which The Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group because of its support of the notion that ‘the LGBT community is a threat to American society.’” 

Her mother Elsa Prince donated $450,000 to Proposition 8, to ban same-sex marriage in California. 

Her husband, Richard DeVos Jr. is part-heir to his father’s $5.1 billion fortune; and she and Richard Jr. own 12 planes and four helicopters. To Secretary DeVos’ credit, I suppose, she did say she wanted to work for a salary of $1 while in government. On the other hand, she’s made herself so unpopular her security detail has cost taxpayers $6.54 million, as of February 2018. 

Back in 1997, DeVos published a piece in the newspaper Roll Call defending her family’s massive contributions to the GOP and conservative causes. “I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence,” she wrote. “Now I simply concede the point.”

 

“We do expect something in return,” DeVos wrote. “We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”

 

That would include a fat tax cut.

 

To say that Sec. DeVos has a very limited understanding of how public schools operate would be an understatement. 

Again Business Insider lays out the goods: 

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and first lady Melania Trump visited Excel Academy Public Charter School last spring, DeVos praised the school as a “shining example of a school meeting the needs of its students, parents and community.” Melania Trump called the charter school “an exceptional example of a school preparing young women both academically and personally so that they may succeed in a global community.”

 

Unfortunately, we now know that the praise the school garnered during its brief time in existence did not match its poor performance. 

On Jan. 11, the DC Public Charter School Board voted unanimously, 6-0, to shut down the Pre-K-8, all-girls school at the end of the current school year. The board action wasn’t because of some sudden turn of events…Instead, records show, it was because the “trend for student performance over the past several years has been negative, despite any benefits that may have occurred from learning in an all-girl setting.”

 

Excel Academy charter school now joins the 200 to 300 charter schools that are shut down each year across the nation due to poor performance, financial shortcomings and low enrollments.

 

So: How does money power threaten us all? A shot to the back of your head is too messy; and your family wouldn’t stand for it, anyway. The money power has learned in modern times to be more subtle. 

Off the top of my head, let me list a few ways the money power works in the shadows. Rip-off charter schools, as I just said. Crooked for-profit colleges for older students. Trump University, of course. Sky high drug prices. Fat contributions to politicians to keep them that way. Gun companies backing the NRA with wads of cash. And the NRA drumming up fear of government taking away all the guns, so that millions more are sold ever year. Pushing opioids as safe (and tobacco in the past). Companies shipping American jobs to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even China – short-sighted capitalism selling out to communism, to be blunt. Exploding airbags, toxic chemicals dumped in rivers, paying off scientists to discount climate change, buying more politicians so that lawmakers don’t raise the minimum wage. Republican politicians in Texas howling about the need for a border wall; and then Texas companies donating to those politicians, while they turn around and hire undocumented workers by the tens of thousands (see: 1/22-23/18). Union busting new laws. Amway – essentially a pyramid-scheme type scam. NFL teams leveraging cities to demand free new stadiums. Citizens United, a Supreme Court decision (decided by five conservative judges), allowing companies to spend more on campaigns, to buy politicians up wholesale. Fox News, run by billionaires, with hosts paid millions, to tell the average American worker that tax cuts for the top 1% are a must. 

I’m sorry. I could go on. And on. 

And on.