YESTERDAY, I BEGAN BY pointing out two facts which, taken together, are quite frightening.
The first was that Scott Walker's campaign, in Wisconsin, was so heavily funded by the billionaire Koch brothers and other big money interests that the only surprise in his election was that he won by a mere 5 points.
I've since learned that he did not promise, as a part of his campaign, to strip state unions of their bargaining rights—so any argument that this is what the people voted for is nonsense.
He basically got elected under false pretenses.
The second fact, or set of facts, had to do with the economic direction the United States of America has been taking during the last few decades.
We have come to the place where about three-fourths of the country is owned by the 10% wealthiest, leaving 25% for the rest of us to share.
In terms of income, rather than ownership, the bottom 90%—those whose work actually produces the profit—have, on average, household incomes of about $31,000.
By contrast, the top 1% have household incomes of about a million dollars.
We're not talking about mere millionaires here—people who have over a million dollars—we're talking about people who add a million to their wealth every single year.
But it doesn't stop there.
The top .1%—ten percent of that last group—averaged 3 million per year, and .01%—one hundredth of one hundredth of us—brought in an average household income of over 27 million, or 875 times as much as the average household income of 90% of the country.
These posts aren't about fairness—I could go on and on about the likelihood that anyone is managing to earn that kind of money honestly, and I could ask all kinds of questions about how many yachts they really need when there are honest working people starving and homeless in their own country.
But that's not the point at the moment—the point is what they do with their money when they stop buying yachts.
They use it to influence elections, to influence legislators, and to influence the Supreme Court.
They use it to co-opt our Republic, to overthrow the democracy without firing a shot.
The Koch brothers are not the only ones doing this: they just happen to be the most obvious at the moment.
And this has been going on for some time.
It's largely what's behind such phenomena as Fox News and conservative talk radio—a daily barrage of misinformation, designed to "educate" the American people into voting against their own interests.
And it's coming to a head right now.
That's what Wisconsin is about—breaking unions, the last institution in this country which effectively pools the resources of those in the bottom 90% to counteract the campaign donations and lobbying money of the super wealthy.
It's about destroying the middle class, the last group with enough power and savvy to actually threaten big wealth.
If they succeed, we may quickly find ourselves in a sham republic, with elections that can only be won by those who kowtow to the real masters.
An invisible coup, perpetrated by the wealthy, to form a government of the wealthy, and for the wealthy.
We may be witnessing the death of that great experiment in the limitation of power which is the United States of America.
If we, the people, succeed, then we may get another chance to move that experiment forward.
But, like the nation's founders, we need to keep our eye on the ball.
The founders didn't get rid of one king just to replace him with another.
They developed a system of government which was resistant to the control of any one man or group—that tilted the scales toward the people.
We must respond to this new threat the same way.
It's not about the Koch brothers, or Scott Walker, or even the next election.
It's about finding a way—probably multiple ways—to strip big wealth of its power to control our society.
And it probably begins by addressing the inequality of wealth in this country, which means serious tax increases on millionaires and billionaires, and fixing the deficit as a side effect.
Gross inequality of wealth is inequality of power, and inequality of power is the opposite of democracy.
At least, that's what I think today.
