Statist Robert Reich : Trump is the natural consequence of our anti-democracy decade

Robert Reich reports:

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.

It's if Robert Reich is unaware that Hillary Clinton won most of the wealthiest congressional districts in the 2016 election... Go figure.