In essence, Capitalism has outpaced, co-opted and overshadowed Democracy. If only someone had predicted this very thing, we could have prevented it from happening…
Doh.
Billionaires should not exist, period. Governments should limit (through taxes and simple hard limits) how much one person, one family, one company can own, earn, and trade.
Put taxes in brackets and once you make over 50K per month, taxes on anything above that go to 100%
Once your networth crosses 10M, anything above that gets 100% tax.
No company should be larger than 1000 people
That sort of thing. These 100.000 employee companies are a cancer and ALWAY make the common folk suffer
Need investment? Have the government use all that shitload of tax money to fund a boat load of independent foundations that will fund companies, innovation, research
Have government fund multiple independent foundations that can fund news agencies with the limitation that they MUST be politically independent, and MUST be truthful as possible
This sort of stuff will make your world work and keep it working. The US now is a fat joke
FDR wasn’t a visionary. He was just summarizing what the world had just watched happen for fifteen years in Weimar Germany.
Trumpers I’ve met think FDR sucks for starting social security
A lot of them are on Social Security.
The irony is lost on them.
Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it
A more in depth analysis of fascism from the same time period as FDR for those who are curious
What if democracy voted in private power? What do we do then?
You know exactly what needs to be done and so does everyone else. The problem is that we’re all too selfish, lazy, or scared to do it.
Propaganda is also really effective. Most people think this is just another annoying trump term. Most maga think he’s absolutely killing it, being the best president ever.
No one but a small minority recognize the road we’re on and I’m unfortunately pretty damn sure no one will recognize it until it’s wayyyyyyyyyyy too late.
If we’re ‘lucky’, Trump will tank the economy quickly instead of slowly. That might wake people up.
There are other forms of democracy than this one kind with parliaments, which, incidentally, is only as as popular because its easy for private interests to control. What’s happening now is particularly blatant, there’s no more profit in hiding their intentions. Parliamentary constitutional democracy was def a progressive development over divine right of kings, but its been pretty ineffective for a long time, as well as the preferred form of government by private interests.
One might argue that parliamentary governments are particularly stable, and that’s why they are preferred by capital interests. But in that case, why then do capital interests prefer brutal dictatorships over any other form of democracy, even fairly stable ones? I think “stability” only matters with relation to business and finance, which dictators are often willing to deliver in service of their own power. These dictators are often praised in the imperial core, while other forms of democracy are called dictatorships.
I think that parliamentary “democracies” are particularly good at disempowering large swaths of the masses, while establishing various national ruling and administrative classes. This democracy that obscures class domination is barely any kind of democracy, when you pay close attention. But it is the only form of democracy acceptable to powerful private interests.
Here’s link to the full speech - worth reading the rest - https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message-congress-curbing-monopolies