(2024-05-19) Hartmann Are Our Oligarchs Going To Drag Us Into Civil War

Thom Hartmann: Are Our Oligarchs Going to Drag Us Into Civil War? The headline in this week’s Fortune reads: “Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war.”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6 in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government. (Samuel Alito)

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system—the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump

And that total is just what’s reported: It doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy

just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives... the only national television news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830–1860 era in the South.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of Southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs. And with it has come not just the threat of political violence but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6 (2021 Storming of the US Capitol) and the assault on Paul Pelosi.