Robert Reich: Trump is the natural consequence of our anti-democracy decade
We’re coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It
began on 21 January 2010 with the supreme court’s shameful decision in Citizens
United vs Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money
in politics with the absurd claim that the first amendment protects corporate
speech. It ends with Donald Trump in
the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting
foreign powers to interfere in American elections.
Trump is the
consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic decade. By the 2016
election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans – 24,949 very
wealthy people – accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign
contributions. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate
and House elections with $3.4bn in donations. Labor unions no longer provided
any countervailing power, contributing only $213m – one union dollar for every
16 corporate.
Big corporations and
the super-wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican party because Republicans promised
them a giant tax cut. As Lindsey Graham warned his colleagues, “financial
contributions will stop” if the GOP didn’t come through. As Trump said in 2016,
'I give money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that’s how the system
works'. The investments paid
off big. Pfizer, whose 2016 contributions to the GOP totaled $16m, will reap an
estimated $39bn in tax savings by 2022. GE contributed $20m and will get back
$16bn. Chevron donated $13m and will receive $9bn. Groups supported by Charles
and the late David Koch spent more than $20m promoting the tax cut, which will
save them and their heirs between $1bn and $1.4bn every year….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/08/donald-trump-citizens-united-anti-democracy-decade
