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Capitalism certainly does not promote democracy. In fact, what it has created with the help of the legalized bribery of Citizens United is an oligarchic kleptocracy, the rich are stealing from everyone else and creating extreme income disparity hollowing out the middle class. I'm reading "Viking Economics" by George Lakey on how the Scandinavian counties dealt with this and now have strong economies with strong democracy and well-being. Believe the lessons could be applied to the United States but with some big hurdles like racial justice to overcome.

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And all you need to do is trace the money behind the litigators who brought Citizens United, Shelby County, the Texas attacks on privacy and you see the Donor's Trust and their ilk: Donor's Trust is proud that its purpose is to defeat affirmative action. AND THOSE donations are tax-free to the elite Americans. Gun laws fall in this mousetrap too. Senator McConnell is responsible and so too Manchin and Sinema: no voting rights, no sane gun laws, no masks: 1 million Americans killed by Covid because science isn't respected by Trump and his ilk. I am too angry to make a sensible plea. Pass the Freedom to Vote, John R Lewis Act, pass background checks, pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Respect citizens and not corporations.

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"At the conference, [Orbán] called for the right in the U.S. to join forces with those like him; yesterday, he declared martial law in his country." – HCR

This one sentence should make every US American's blood run cold.

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You cannot be in favor of both unregulated capitalism and democracy simultaneously.

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Heather, your decoupling capitalism from democracy is a powerful corrective to our discourse and political thinking. Along with what you assert, it is also true that unfettered capitalism appears to create an unequal society far beyond the specific skills of any individual. Thank you yet again for a thought provoking insight.

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Professor Richardson, I really don’t know what to think anymore, except that the country appears on a collision course with itself.

Yesterday I took a tour of the architecture of Gothic Cathedral of Cologne along with close friends and family visiting from the US. It was a quite an experience for someone like me who is not a fan of heights. We were up inside the Cathedral – all the way up to the iron structure that supports its roof – the first of its kind in a European Cathedral (Pre-Eifel Tower) and the feature that likely saved it from destruction during WWII.

But the thing that creeped me out at the time, and bothers me this morning when I think about it, was not the elevation, but the man who entered our external construction elevator at the last minute, an addition to our private tour. He was allowed to come along by the tour guide because he was alone and one of our group had cancelled.

The thing is – he was an American, from Texas. He kept slipping off during the tour, taking pictures of the support structure, and had to be called back more than once by the guide when he disappeared from view.

Now, he was probably just a tourist from Texas with an interest in architecture – who knows – but I could not shake the thought that he was casing the Cathedral. Two weeks ago, that thought would likely not have entered my mind, but yesterday it did. Normally, I would have engaged a fellow American in Germany and asked him about his visit here – yesterday I did not.

I must admit that a slow, encroaching distrust has been building, separating me from people with whom I would have previously engaged, but now consider potential threats just because they, for example, might come from Texas. That can’t be good.

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Isn't it ironic that they have succeeded in preventing any regulation of prices and profits, and yet the very voters who have put the Republicans in power are the the first to blame the President for higher gas and food prices? The horrible irony is that too many voters vote their pocketbook and aren't capable of looking past the rhetoric to the real causes. We are terribly immature politically.

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Professor R. got a shout out from Christiane Amanpour on her program last night on PBS for yesterdays post.I read in another place that Amanpour reads LFAA first everyday on FB. Keep up the good work Professor R.

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Heather, this is a remarkable piece. You’ve demonstrated such an essential connection between unrestrained free market capitalism and its inevitable sundering of democracy. You cite Viktor Orban reaching out to Republicans to overcome the fetters of democracy. What is the alternative? The New Deal and Great Society federal regulatory state? It has its benefits but is vulnerable to corruption and inefficiency and also must be held accountable. Is any “ism” the answer? Let’s wrap our heads around this one. We want a civil society where at a minimum children can safely attend schools, diversity and history aren’t censored and teachers are sufficiently paid and supported — and many other popular needs are met. But why do ee, the majority, fail to elect politicians who are public servants? One key for me is your Gingrich citation for deploying language as a weapon. In this regard, for years I didn’t recognize a canary in our coal mine. I often wondered why anyone would buy The National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout stand. It used a formula to push outlandish and gossipy fake news. And it hooked those who wanted to distract themselves with gossip. Those who fall for the inability to prove a negative found an opportunity to bask in schadenfreude for the rich and famous allegedly brought low. I recall that the publisher of the Enquirer was a Trump supporter. Recent conspiracy theories exemplified by National Enquirer absurdities merge with the GOP outrage machine to mobilize unsophisticated and frustrated citizens and lead them by their emotions to own the libs. Returning to your central theme that our politicians can’t get anything done, many citizens have given up on our political system thus undermined, and we, the majority, struggle to get out the vote. We need to reach those who have tuned out or bought into a Republican narrative that defines Democrats with fears, uncertainties and doubts that can’t be altered with credible proof.

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"Capitalism" is part of our language problem. When it merely means that privately owned businesses own the means of production, it's not necessarily a threat to democracy. But when government is no longer independent from the businesses, when oligarchs own both the means of production and government, then we have a plutocracy, not a democracy. And as government control narrows further to one "man", we have a gender biased autocratic dictatorship. When religion becomes part of the ruling criteria, we have a theocracy as well.

Russia, China, Iran and Israel come to mind among many nations that are not democracies. Voting is used these countries as window dressing.

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Unbelieveable that CPAC rejected democracy and has gone to Hungary to worship at the feet of Orban who, in this year's election campaign, allowed his opponents five minutes each of TV airtime (as reported on the "This American Life" podcast).

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The Republicans held the CPAC meeting in Hungary this year. We are like(no we ARE) standing by and just watching our Democracy being taken from us by these evil doers. If we do not find their Achilles and cripple these monsters they WILL destroy us. Money and Power are what they feed on. We must go to the polls in MASSES this year and show them that we will not tolerate their greed and callous behavior. Take Back America!!

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May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022

"At home, where our focus on free markets has stacked our political system in favor of the Republicans, the vast majority of Americans want reasonable gun laws, reproductive rights, action on climate change, equality before the law, infrastructure funding, and so on, and their representatives are unable to get those things."

AND want an end to exponential growth of deaths from opioid-based drug overdoses…https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220525080509.htm

AND want universal healthcare instead of the for-profit deprivation system killing between 30 and 90 thousand people a year https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/the-u-s-healthcare-system-is-broken-a-national-perspective

Two cartel parties are ensuring the citizens cannot get either of these too because their politicians are primarily concerned about alienating the 1% making obscene profits if legislators dare regulate any major corporations and punish their executives for their maleficence.

Avoiding governance with reasonable gun laws are not the only way our politicians who will not govern are killing our people. We have become a nation where life after birth has been rendered cheap.

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Competitive capitalism itself is not the enemy here—served us well for a long time b/c the risk/reward of it is why America created electricity, automobiles, the airplane, the pc, the tv, vaccines, medical & pharma advances etc but the abuse of it, monopolization of industries and dis regulation of dark $$ where avarice eclipses the will of the people and survival of humanity as in case of these massacres of innocent children—why did the gun stocks not tank yesterday? You’d think they’d plunge. Everything is about striking the right balance, w/the right trade-offs—we’ve always had managed freedoms and Founders knew something about human incentive to reign it in while reaping the benefits.Can’t achieve a free liberal democracy without prosperity either. But the abuse—CitizensUnited nail in coffin. Not just corp $$ but dark, unlimited $$ from any entity—foreign adversary govt or criminal—that sets up a shell llc. It’s secret from the American people—enemies of all we stood for —domestic & foreign—bribed our legislature and infiltrated our election stsytem upending checks and balances and corrupting out justice system. They set out to cause chaos, destruction and undermine our confidence in our institutions and the premise started in this letter—that we can’t get the will of the majority even on the table let alone executed—shows they’ve accomplished a takeover of our democracy. When children slaughtered at school and $13 million paid to Romney alone by the NRA; 50 yr precedent of a womens right to choose and so this gentlemanly approach from Democrats hoping and pleading for bipartisanship that power mongering autocrats, on the take, have shown over and over will not come—that ship has sailed and must take unprecedented actions and stop playing defense. Less Schumer and more Beto. These people are killing us, killing democracy and so wring hands hoping they’ll start to play nice in the sandbox? “Filibuster”?? That’s no filibuster it’s obstruction of legislation. A packed SCOTUS thru underhanded means? Try some things—expand the Court based on # of circuits we now have; don’t accept a sham filibuster —they don’t filibuster! somehow fight it/get creative—above all stop worrying about seeming “too political” that ship sailed and it’s literally killing us.

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Makes me think of Timothy Snyder's writing on this theme: https://snyder.substack.com/p/ussr-1922-1991-usa-1776-2025?s=r. On the matter of being victorious to death. On the danger of projecting your own problems on to your enemy, and to realize that you are missing something when he is gone.

The classic Chinese story of the emperor who asks one of his generals to make his empire stable, and to this end gives all of his authority to the general. The general is then ordering all staff at the imperial court to exercise at order in the yard. Two women are not taking part, standing giggling at the side. They are the favourite courtesans of the emperor, and they think they always have the emperors ear, and can have their way with him. The general then orders, as his first action to create stability, the two women to be beheaded for everyone to see. The learning we can take from this today is that secret power behind the power is a primary threat to authority. All economic support to people in power must be openly declared, and the source of hidden funding must be prosecuted and properly punished. At first sight it looks like the same old story of blaming women for everything, so I like to also quote another Chinese saying: "Wars come about from how men and women manage to get along with one another."

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May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022

Name people who yell and scream about government overreach when they get in line at the DMV to get a driver’s license or register the car, when they inspect the car annually, &c — cars are useful tools for living that can be deadly weapons.

It would be really hard to take a car to a school and take out a classroom of babies, although theoretically possible. Why do Republican legislators not yell about THIS assault on their freedoms?

Why do they repeatedly block funding for better mental healthcare and universal healthcare/access to it in this country and common-sense regulations (like registering, background check &c)?

You’d almost think they wanted to stockpile military-grade weapons to do an assault on the Capitol or start an insurrection or something.

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