Anti-Democracy Coalition- Wealth Supremacists & White Supremacists. Protect US Democracy, R. Reich
Opinion, Why isn’t Joe Biden doing all he can to protect American democracy?
By Robert Reich, The Guardian, July 25, 2021. Both parties are beholden to an anti-democratic coalition. This is stopping real change.
You’d think Biden and the Democratic party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy. So far this year, the Republican party has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking white people’s fears that a growing non-white population is usurping their dominance.
Yet while Biden and Democratic leaders are openly negotiating with holdout senators for Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure proposals, they aren’t exerting similar pressure when it comes to voting rights and elections. In fact, Biden now says he won’t take on the filibuster, which stands firmly in the way. What gives? Part of the explanation, I think, lies with an outside group that has almost as much influence on the Democratic party as on the Republican, and which isn’t particularly enthusiastic about election reform: the moneyed interests bankrolling both parties.
A more robust democracy would make it harder for the wealthy to keep their taxes low and profits high. So at the same time white supremacists have been whipping up white fears about non-whites usurping their dominance, America’s wealthy have been spending vast sums on campaign donations and lobbyists to prevent a majority from usurping their money. They’re now whipping up resistance among congressional Democrats to Biden’s plan to tax capital gains at 39.6% – up from 20% – for those earning more than $1m, and they’re on the way to restoring the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, of which they’re the biggest beneficiaries.
In recent years these wealth supremacists, as they might be called, have quietly joined white supremacists to become a powerful anti-democracy coalition. Some have backed white supremacist’s efforts to divide poor and working-class whites from poor and working-class Black and brown people, so they don’t look upward and see where most of the economic gains have been going and don’t join together to demand a fair share of those gains. Similarly, white supremacists have quietly depended on wealth supremacists to donate to lawmakers who limit voting rights, so people of color continue to be 2nd- class citizens....
More,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/25/joe-biden-american-democracy-robert-reich
________
*DEMOCRACY INDEX, 2020 Global Ranks; US, 'Flawed Democracy'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
_________
* 'The Rise of Legislative Anti-Democracy, It isn’t just voter suppression.' State lawmakers from Arizona to Pennsylvania are trying to thwart any form of democracy that threatens their power. Brennan Center for Justice, March, 2021,
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/rise-legislative-anti-democracy
