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 the selloff of the American democratic system, is the accumulation of wealth and power by the fabulously wealthy. Made possible by 40 years of stagnation in wages, amidst vastly growing corporate profits, the wealthy became able to donate VASTLY more to candidates than everyday people. This is specifically accomplished, since 2010, via the PACs and SuperPAC’s made possible by the Citizens United supreme court decision, and the corresponding Speech Now vs FEC decision.
With these decisions, wealth became an unrestricted means of electoral power.
These decisions were a systematic conversion to 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– funded by the proceeds made possible by these decisions– simply cannot compete.
Democracy has been sold out, just like Sears, KMart, Toys-R-US, and most likely, many mom and pop businesses that used to be near you, and offer jobs that offered a living wage, and benefits– unlike the 1099 gig workers who do an ever increasing amount of labor, at a ever decreasing expense– and wage, thus quality of life.
People want “the left” to say what we’re for, not just why we’re against. Easy.
We are for government of the people, for the people.
In 2025 we have government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
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).
Put simply, blue states fund red states, and the rich get richer.
These two dynamically opposing forces of wealth redistribution are the only meaningful functions of modern American government. This is 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: Gain Control, Sell Assets
Gang Green
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.
When America was great, for around 225-235 years, we had a system where the government made sure that the conditions for a safe life and a improving standard of living existed. This was because the government was selected by, comprised of, and directly responsible to the people. This has ceased to be true.
Since the 2013 Citizens United and Speech Now decision, and the rise of the Super Pacs, corporate and wealthy donors have been able to VASTLY outspend everyday Americans. This has liberated candidates from the actual *responsibility* to their constituents. Sure, they have to get the votes of their constituents, but they don’t need their donations anymore. For 200 years of politics in this country, political donations had to be traceable. This required some degree of honesty from candidates, and helped contain races to their own demographics (people in one state weren’t donating to affect races in another state, county, city, etc).
The unrestricted flood of funding unleashed via the Citizens United and Speech Now decisions, in the last 10 years, has *directly* resulted in the increased division we see today.
Every time in the last decade you’ve heard a political ad that ended with a sound byte at the end of an ad with a candidate saying “I’m (another corporate shill), and I approve this message”, you’ve voted for someone who has sold out to corporate interests, and is parroting some rich interest’s wedge issue of choice.
We weren’t made great when my white ancestors enslaved black people (I’ve read the will where slaves were described in the same way as animals, and I choose to recognize that as a stain in my heritage), or when they made my indigenous Chickasaw ancestors walk the trail of tears.
We were great when a poor white boy from a poor part of Oklahoma who had fought through Pearl Harbor and the Pacific theatre came home, met a pretty half-Chickasaw girl, had a couple kids with her, and loved her till the day she died. What we’re doing now isn’t making us great, it’s making us hate– and it’s directly because money, the root of all evil, is what’s running our politics now.
We still vote, but we don’t decide who we vote on.
This isn’t a red v blue, a left v right thing. This is the gangrene in the entire body politic thing. This is the corruption that is so pervasive, so damaging, that without addressing the source, the patient will, without question, die.
Paths Forward
There are two ways to address this. Not more, and not less.
The first is challenging the Speech Now decision at a federal appeals court level.
The other option is a second constitutional convention. This may seem far fetched, you but roughly 2/3rds of the states who need to call for one *already have*.
I can’t find the link, if I will I’ll edit this to include it, but there’s an effort to challenge Speech Now vs FEC, in Maine, in early 2026. If we can get this done before the midterms, the rotting, racist, MAGAt wing of the Grand Old Party will wither away without their ability to funnel money into their extremist candidates.
This single court decision would signal the return of of honorable and principled men like John McCain to the forefront, relegating the extremists to backup roles, as they were then. Since Citizens United and Speech Now passed, every centrist republican speaker of the house was forced out (John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy). The party was shifted, literally and figuratively, violently to the right, by the extreme amount of money the wealthy injected into our democratic system.
They chose the issues, and they chose the candidates, to divide us, to start the era of government shutdowns and brinksmanship politics that got our national credit downgraded 3 times.
They know that united, we won’t tolerate their selling out our democracy.
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.
Here is my proposed second bill of rights.
We shall use a voting system leveraging proportional representation to select amendments 28+.
- 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).