This is what is sad. The rich have gone around the country for the last 30 years telling people that Trickle Down Economics is the shit and all of the poor people bought it. As they have accumulated wealth they run around and buy lobbyists to convince the politicians, who are rich also, to keep lowering taxes. Then they go onto talk shows with their think tanks (Koch Brothers) and faux political parties screeching about how raising taxes on the rich will destroy the economy. The lobbyists do the same. The politicians, who get free trips and donations from the rich, don't want their meal ticket to end. Thus, they vote for tax cuts.
All because poor people are dumb and buy into the screed of the rich, falling into the Biggest Lie of propaganda. Goebbels would be proud.
It's really a lot more sophisticated and powerful than that as for how the propaganda works.
The politicians aren't really 'rich', but many are agents of the rich, effectively hired by them, who know where their bread is buttered.
And the more unequal things get, the more imbalanced it is for anyone who is not an agent of the rich to gain power.
There's a reason why the 'revolution' of the people against 30 years of abuse was to elect a guy whose biggest private donor was Goldman-Sachs.
And why the real 'revolutionary' candidates, by which I mean 'ones who more support the public interest than the rich', which is radical today, were not at all viable.
I've laid out a lot of the information previously, and think I won't make the long summary here again, but it's a movement that started in the 1970's largely as far as the propaganda side of things, where a massive infrastructure was created for manipulating democracy, the seeds planted by some well planted billionare funding, that has been ridiculously successful, altering America's citizens to a misguided state on issues of wealth not seen since the gilded age, if ever.
Much the way any organized ideology has taken over nations in the past, whether pro-empire or pro-Nazi or pro-hibition or many others, except greatly magnified by a culture with more sophisticated marketing and media, a population who all listen to 'input' from the machine but who do not talk to their neighbors about issues, than has ever existed, so that the 'people's' representatives in the debate can barely be heard - hidden in plain sight as about 5% of the population who don't have much impact.
It's not a machine that needs to be 'run' as a conspiracy - once kick-started, it's self-sustaining and self-propagating. It's a created monster.
One of its effects is to cause a loss of support for long-time institutions like 'democracy' as people look desperately for 'something' to save them - which ends badly.
There are helping hands at the ready to pull them - but not up as they are expecting to be pulled. All roads in this situation lead to oligarchy, likely a form of fascism.
The western world evolved out of a few rich having all the power - and now the few rich are having their revenge, moving backwards, not finding it to their liking.
There is a system for the rich - made of things like 'sociopathic' corporate laws without the intended guiding hand of the people - forcing things on society without a captain at the wheel, only secondary officers feeding the machine that is always, always, aimed at 'more for those with more', always marketing to sell this to the people.
It doesn't matter when even some of the 'more' recognize the problems with this and say the emperor has no clothes, like Warren Buffet or George Soros; they're brushed aside. Systemic 'fixes' that might help, like limiting the fuel for the machine of corporate cash in elections, are being removed instead of strengthened.
The Soviets lived in a bubble with their misguided ideology nearly unquestioned among the people, even the leaders - when communism fail, leaders said they were like lost children looking for what else they could do. We have a different misguided ideology, but we are similarly in our own bubble of misguided ideology.
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