Were you under the impression that the US is a democracy? Well, it never has been. As Benjamin Franklin allegedly said after the constitutional convention, “we have a republic, if we can keep it”. But do we have a constitutional republic now? The answer is clearly no, we have a country of battling billionaires who control not only both political parties, but also control all branches of the government and the corporations that comprise modern day America. The billionaires also control the Corporate-Owned-News (CON) which has been split into two camps backed by the Red and Blue Team billionaires. So now in the US, we have two diametrically opposite CONs, one tailored specifically to appeal to Red Team voters (for example, FOX) and one tailored to appeal to Blue Team voters (for example, MSNBC). It is very interesting that the Blue Team CON has grown larger than the Red Team CON, presumably because more billionaires prefer the narratives that come from the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post. But the Red Team CON typically pulls in more regular viewers, where we see FOX outperforming MSNBC on a regular basis.
The billionaires use the two distinct “news” universes to keep the population divided. It is very important for the wealthy oligarchs to make sure that the public is not paying any attention to what the rich are doing, so they need to keep the Red and Blue Team voters districted and arguing with each other over issues like guns, abortions and immigration. In fact, immigration has become a “crisis” according to the Red Team billionaires through their news outlets like FOX, because that is the perfect distraction for the Red Team voters. Think about it, the billionaires who are actually causing virtually all the major problems in the world are telling you that it is the poor, brown and black immigrants who are at the root of all our problems. The richest people in the world are telling you through their CON outlets that some of the poorest people in the world are destroying America. What the billionaires really don’t want you to think about is that the immigrants are coming in such large numbers because of the economic sanctions and wars started at the behest of the billionaire class. The billionaire class causes the problem of migration from sanctioned and war-torn countries, then they tell you that it is these poor people, fleeing the havoc caused by the billionaires, that are at the root of all our problems in the US. If you really want immigration to wane, then you should be contacting your representatives to demand an end to economic sanctions and endless wars. You should be protesting these things, rather than blaming other victims of the billionaire’s rampage across the globe.
As Grover Norquist famously said “my goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” A metaphor fit for a psychopath, to be sure. Well, we certainly have a situation now where the government doesn’t exist as a counterbalance to corporate rule, so they didn’t need to drown it in the bathtub because the government is now a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America. Before they can successfully run for office, the politicians now need to beg for funding from the billionaire class, as Joe Biden notoriously did in 2019. Kamala Harris raised over 300 million dollars in just a few days and before she was even the official Blue Team nominee. That kind of money does not come from $5 donations offered up from working voters, it comes directly from the billionaires.
This trend of billionaires controlling the world and politics has not gone unnoticed, as the following quote from the World Socialist Website makes clear.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/03/utai-a03.html
“Earlier this week, multiple news outlets reported the formation of “VCs for Kamala,” a collection of hundreds of venture capitalists, investors and tech CEOs who have signed a public letter pledging to vote for Harris. Politico reported that the group was started by Leslie Feinzaig, founder of the Seattle-based investment firm Graham & Walker.
Signatories include billionaires such as Mark Cuban, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team; Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, founder of Khosla Venture, and OpenAI investor; “angel investor” Ron Conway; and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Conway and Hoffman, through a Super PAC they created, Clear Choice, have spearheaded efforts to block independent and left-wing candidates from appearing on the ballot.
As of this writing, 645 CEOs, managing partners, founders, directors and managers have signed onto the “VCs for Kamala” letter pledging to vote for Harris.
In an interview with Politico, Democratic Party bundler Steve Spinner said the formation of the group was intended to “push back to the narrative that Silicon Valley is now split” in light of far-right billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks publicly supporting Trump.”
Then we have some of the newer and less savvy billionaires spilling the beans without realizing it, for example with Elon Musk tweeting about the US instigated and funded coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia. Musk famously tweeted; “we will coup whoever we want! Deal with it”. The key to understanding Musk’s pronouncement is the pronoun; “we”, indicating that as far as Musk is concerned, he is a part of the “coup process”, as are many other billionaires in the US. If you have ever wondered, as I have, why someone with 100 billion dollars in cash and assets would get up in the morning and say “I’m ready to make another $10 million today…. before lunch!”, then you are closing in on the prime affliction of modern capitalism, that it is an addiction. Billionaires are addicted to making money, and they end up losing their minds in the process, like any addict.
The extremely wealthy have more money now than any humans have ever had in all of history. This has allowed them to capture most of our modern societies in all spheres of influence, from government to big finance to “news”. They control the stories we see and hear from TV, Hollywood and the internet. They control the entire world financial system. They control us in every way imaginable. Many people wonder why the world seems so bizarre now, with wars and clashes across the globe, with mass censorship, mass surveillance and mass arrests whenever the people try to protest. My working hypothesis is that the ultra-wealthy have so much money and so much power that they believe the time is right for a complete takeover of world governments while stifling any protests or counter narratives. They don’t need or want to drown the government in a bathtub anymore, as they control it to their own ends. Big government now means big profits, in everything from endless war to massive corporate subsidies to sweetheart no bid contracts. All this requires a whole lot of “narrative management”, also known as propaganda. But now, even the propaganda that passes through the government is controlled by the oligarchs. How this can ever be rectified is anyone’s guess, because the oligarchs really do have near total control of just about everything, including the militarized police that face down any protesters.
Indeed, some have noted that the billionaires have created a new world order that most closely resembles a type of neo-feudalism. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/08/19/us-big-tech-monopolies-neo-feudalism/
What is needed now is to start to point the finger at the perps causing all of our troubles, as noted in this article: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/30/kxoy-o30.html
So, depending on who wins the election for US president today, you can be absolutely certain that one group of billionaires will be popping champaign corks while the other group thinks up ways to agitate the public against the results. The Blob is more than just the military industrial complex (MIC), in fact it has become more than the MICIMAT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank) because the key to the whole thing working the way it does is the battle between the billionaires vying for control. So next time someone talks about one candidate or another “fighting for democracy”, correct them by saying that they are fighting for either the Red Team, or the Blue Team billionaires, because that is what politics is all about now.
Right on the mark, John. I'll share this.
Saw your comment on my comment on Bracing Views, and turned to your article. So very true, the billionaires pull the strings for the elected puppets. Actually, though, I don't believe they have actual ideologies (Red vs. Blue), because they win no matter which party wins. I think that they "take sides" as a form of propaganda to make the public think that there will actually be a difference between the two so that they call lull us into believing that our votes matter, keeping up the illusion of so-called democracy.