Friday’s Follies Followup

Waddya Know

We just voted in an administration that intends to reward the wealthy and make sure corporations pay less taxes and are not accountable for their crimes against the American people. The Biden Administration was at least attempting to address malfeasance in Corporate World by cracking down on all the ways that corporations—through excessive paperwork, hold times, and general aggravation—add unnecessary headaches and hassles to people’s days and degrade their quality of life.

Most likely, all of these attempts will be rescinded by executive order with Fuckleroy displaying the order from behind his desk for all to see. Morons will cheer.

Which brings me to a Substack piece that addresses the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth Insurance Company. It has caused an avalanche of responses on social media which has been in engulfed in expressions of anger at many Americans’ dire experiences at the hands of health insurance companies and outrage at the large profits that they generate.

J.P. Hill, who pens the Substack New Means, writes What we’re called to ask is why the murder of one man must be described as unspeakable violence, but the systemic denial of life to 100,000 people is an acceptable business practice. We’re called to ask why profiting from the denial of life earns a person millions while the people denied care ought to accept drowning in debt and disease. We’re called to ask why only certain lives are precious, and only in certain circumstances. Why does playing by the rules render someone innocent, even when the rules produce a stream of death and devastation?

We are charged, right now, to not just discuss one murder, but to take an intentional look into a system that condones and even incentivizes the denial of life on the biggest possible scale. Capitalists in the United States have worked for decades to deny us the care that our counterparts in other wealthy countries receive. The ruling class fights to deny us universal care and to instead tether us to our jobs with employer-funded health care, while the quality of that care simultaneously deteriorates.

Perhaps instead of thinking in the black & white terms of Republicans vs. Democrats we should be focused on the billionaires vs. everyone else. America’s billionaires are now collectively worth a record $6 trillion. Their wealth has more than doubled since the passage of the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. 800 billionaires hold more wealth than half of the nation. Guess who was in charge then?

Once again we’re going to get the old replay from the Reagan era that lower taxes boost the economy, create jobs and put more dollars in everyone’s pockets. Progressive tax groups contend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts will cost the nation $1.9 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years, citing research by the Congressional Budget Office. They say extending the cuts, as Trump proposes, would cost another $400 billion a year starting in 2027.

Hamilton Nolan, a journalist who has written for the Guardian and was a full time labor reporter for In These Times magazine, says in his Substack about wealth inequality: This is no novel insight. But it is easy to see that the mistake that many befuddled political analysts make as America’s political leadership become increasingly absurd is to think that democracy itself is the core value, rather than “what sort of lives democracy produces for most people.” The scary part of American politics right now is not “Donald Trump got elected.” It is that, as capitalism naturally produces inequality and nothing adequate is done to remedy this, fewer and fewer people in America have the means to exercise true political power. First the democracy gets hollow, and then, when it gets brittle enough, it falls apart.

The value in thinking about politics in terms of social power distribution is that it makes asking the right questions and finding the right solutions to our predicament much clearer. It is not about identifying the next perfect candidate who can charm those last few swing voters into voting for the party that has also allowed inequality to flourish for the past half century, just a little bit less. No. It is about saying: How do we distribute power throughout American society more equally? In a nation like ours, where there is high economic inequality and also a system in which wealth equals political power, there are two basic ways to make our representative democracy healthier. Either you sever the connection between money and politics, insulating elections from the influence of wealth; or, you distribute the wealth in your society more equally. Both would be nice. Both are worth working towards. In reality, achieving the first is an idealistic project that will take many lifetimes. The second, however, is something that we know how to do.

America’s entire anticommunist proposition to its citizens and the world at large—that capitalism would deliver not only higher wages and living standards for all workers, but also would create shared prosperity in the form of widespread shared ownership of companies via small investors and their pensions—is looking more and more hollow. It has always been the case that Wall Street vultures and their rich investors are poised to redirect all corporate profits into their own pockets as soon as they are able to do so.

The Biden Administration, in a few short years, did their best to reverse the trend of trickle-down economics. It was just a beginning of what-coulda-been had Harris been elected. Unfortunately, Biden was wrong that Fuckleroy’s previous years in office were “an aberrant moment in time,” and as the mainstream media now see the Biden years as a failure it just goes to show how lame and shallow our political and informational systems are.

And now…