The first official act of the stealing of democracy, occurred on 8/15/71, when Nixon ended the gold standard.
The second official act of the American Kleptocracy was the passage of the last amendment, the 27th, where congresspeople gave themselves the right to vote themselves raises– albeit only for the next, not the current set of members.
The third, ongoing, phase of American Kleptocracy is the accumulation of wealth by the truly wealthy.
Wealth is the means of power.
American Kleptocracy is the systematic conversion to Democratic control of the political discourse and choice of candidates, into a pay-for-play system. Candidates who do not sell out to corporate interests via lobbies, PACs, and SuperPACS simply cannot compete. When is the last time you or anyone you know voted for a Federally elected official who didn’t have a “this message paid for random wedge issue focused super pac” mumbled so fast you can’t really understand it and followed by a knowing smile and nod from the candidate in the ad who “approves this message.”
Statistically, never. Unless you’re voting for a 3rd party candidate and in a margins of the political discourse– which means your vote quite literally does not count, at least in the current winner-take-all system of federal elections– you statistically have not had the opportunity to vote for a federally elected official who doesn’t take a majority of their funding from corporate interests, as defined broadly (but realistically) to include PAC, SuperPAC, and lobby based funding, in addition to core corporate donations.
Consider wage growth since the first official acts of Kleptocracy in the 1970’s:
With this singular act, the middle class was doomed. The level of discretionary income that had facilitated a level of education and political engagement, where it was reasonable to expect that one would not only be able to afford to have children, but that they might have a reasonable chance at a college education and a future better than that of their parents.
Since 8/15/71, the ages of first marriage, purchasing one’s first home, having one’s first child, in the US, have risen. In 2025, our children can, on average, not afford to move out, because the costs of their college education and the costs of homeownership, are no longer achievable, even on dual incomes.
Speaking as one of the younger (vs the balance of the baby boomer population) most of us cannot afford our own homes, not that many of us can afford our own apartments, and can we most certainly cannot afford children. It’s doubtful whether the money we pay into social security will be around by the time we need it, and even if it is, we’ll most likely have to move to a 3rd world country to be able to afford to live if we don’t save outside of social security. If we do save outside of social security, and choose to invest, every time there is a crisis, our savings are destroyed, or they are eaten away by inflation if we choose not to invest.
A loan against your American dream
If you had the opportunity to buy a home in the 1970’s, and don’t support free college education, please die already. Your greed and medical bills are bankrupting the country. Like honestly, your generation invented the vulture capitalist playbook, used it to get your own cheap property, hold it until mortgage rates were the lowest in history, and then told us that the problem was avocado toast and lattes. The gross ignorance of your own privilege is so astounding, an outright class war is really the only logical response.
So the right pivoted from being the party of business, to being the party of tax cuts. This way they can make charity payments to the poor, by borrowing against the social security and other benefits we’ll never see. Thus MAGA, and the sheep voting for the wolves. Had the education system not been defunded to the point of dysfunction, after the other 5 guardrails described by Chomsky and Hermann in Manufacturing Consent were strategically dismantled, the voting public would have never fallen for it. Now that elections are just competitions in gaslighting and toxicity for clicks, though, the better angels of our nature are no longer invited to a rational political discourse
In our Kleptocracy, the ways in which the government redistributes wealth are as follows:
1. From poor to wealthy individuals.
2. From rich to poor regions (this is the vestigial populism that propels MAGA).
These two opposing forces of wealth redistribution are the only meaningful functions of modern American government. And this is by the design of the Kleptocrats, who have slowly risen to power over the last ~55 years.
The playbook of the kleptocrat and the playbook of the vulture capitalist are effectively the same.
For their part, while the left has pretended to be the party of the working class, they have sold out to the wealthy elite, who fund the majority of campaigns on both sides. There is no legitimate people’s party. There’s only the logging company who wants to buy up the family land to log it, rendering it uninhabitable for future generations, and the climate change party, who thinks that preservation of the spotted owl is fundamentally a blocking issue to all forms of use for any currently undeveloped land, and who also wants to hijack the language of 100% of society, for the benefit of 1% of society. While I can support the left and feel like a better person, and may even win more elections if I’m savvy, I’m still on a losing team, when it comes to the arc of power over time.
For over 50 years, since the age of the PAC (political action committe), which began with Roosevelt, corporate and wealthy interests have found more and more ways to increase their contributions to, and thus control over, the selection of candidates and issues in the American political process. If the concentration of wealth is the strategy of the elites in the long term conversion of Democracy to Kleptocracy, then candidate and issue selection are it’s tactics.
All these are why, since the 1970’s, the poor have become statistically poorer, in terms of income inequality, than at ANY TIME IN HISTORY.
This is why more rich white men have private rocket companies, than of the 537 federally elected officials got there without taking a majority of their donations from wealthy corporate interests.
Ben Franklin warned us that corporations had neither bodies to jail nor souls to damn, and that he had wrought us a republic, if we could keep it.
I would argue that if the republic isn’t already lost, it is at least in the grips of a crisis, and that nothing less than a new bill of rights, and some degree of at least reform, if not outright revolution, is necessary to return power to the people.
Here is my proposed second bill of rights.
We shall use a voting system leveraging proportional representation to select amendments 26-35.
My singular position on which i am unwilling to compromise in any way, is that this movement must never budge in its commitement that corporate interests may not have any legal influence on the American democratic process moving forward. This is the people’s wedge issue, to call out the leeches who so corrupt and make corpulent the public body, so they themselves can grow fat on its rich blood, and set fire to the system that lets them grow. Our movement cannot hope to succeed if we are fighting an unfair fight. If this amendment can come first, the rest can follow. All the better if we can form a caucus around a set of amendments, designed to drive the extremists back to under the rocks under which they live in the backwoods, and the ivory towers from which they so glibly pronounce half the country despicable, without a bit of the appropriate sense of irony in producing the system that defunded the very education, health, and social systems that made them so.
For shame, Democrats. For shame, Republicans.
We the people call for, nay, demand, the following amendments be discussed exclusively and before any supposed government business, as the only priority, in our efforts to restore our government to control of the people, by the people, and for the people, instead of of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
- Can’t die, can’t donate: 0 corporate $ in politics. 1 human donor, to one human recipient. No campaign war chests, any leftover funds must be donated to federal matching funds account. Eliminate SuperPACs and citizens united.
- Ban all stock trading for congresspeople.
- Align school and voting districts to eliminate gerrymandering.
- Term limits
- Age limits
- Lock government pay increases to COLA (same as Social Sec, etc).
- Limit non-profit status for megachurches: $5M annual max for church budget.
- Right to basic nutrition (not through handouts, but through access to community gardens or work exchange programs)
- Right to very basic housing (clean water and plumbing, not necessarily in a location of one’s choosing, and aligned to support the work one performs for the community, in return for meeting their basic human needs)
- Right to collegiate education, or UBI– not both (post secondary education is a substantial investment, and individuals who receive this benefit may not expect to also receive more than the most basic of housing and nutrition, unless they earn it through outsized contributions back to the community).
