8 Shocking Ways the Billionaires Have Schemed to Rob Us of Every Last $

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The great irony of course is that it wasn’t the voters who plundered the public treasury, but rather, the super-wealthy who plundered the public and subverted democracy. But this is worse than mere irony; Reagan was the billionaire’s Trojan Horse to power. They rode on his drooling senile smile into power, on the worst assumptions about the American people and how we’d use our democratic power to take their wealth; so the minute they got the reigns, they plundered us first, before we could get to them. This is what I mean by America’s billionaire class as an alien, colonial overlord class: they hate us, quite simply, and the more they plunder America, the more they both loathe us and fear us, or what we might do to them -- or should do.

As for the dictatorship that Reagan speaks of, it’s already here, thanks in no small part to Reagan himself. But it’s not the crude, old-fashioned dictatorship, the kind with cool uniforms and parades. That wouldn’t last a week, because we’ve all been trained to look out for it and spot the crude old saber-toothed dictators. Instead, today we have a kind of highly-evolved dictatorship concealing itself as a functioning democracy. But in all the important issues, where billions or trillions are at stake, where their yachts and private jets are pitted against Americans’ lives or the national interest, you can spot the dictatorship’s horrific Predator-beast head rising from the swamp… such as when the vote on the public option was put to the Democratic supermajority-run Senate committee, and it got crushed by the same margin as if the Senate was split, or run by a Republican supermajority.

Which brings me back to Dead Souls: despite the title, the book is actually one of the greatest comic novels of all time, a kind of comic poem, “laughter through tears” as the author, Gogol, put it. But I’m not sure Gogol would find our 2009 version of Dead Souls very comical. And Hollywood would never buy it. There’s nothing redeeming, no characters an audience can possibly identify with. Our American Dead Souls is just too … depressing.