Corruption

If you live in Europe and think your democratic system is resistant to these things: it's not.

Don't wait until your version of Trump gets elected. Start organizing now.

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Italy elected Berlusconi (a corrupted tycoon who had ties with the mafia and bribed his way to the top of the Italian broadcasting world) in 1994. Y'all just catching up.

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- RIP Berlusconi.
  
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Don't wait until your version of Trump gets elected. Start organizing now.

No worries, he already has been elected last year!

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- Dick Schoof (yes, English speakers, that really is his legal name) is our Trump?
  
  I'd say Geert Wilders matches that description, and he did not become PM...
  
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Absolutely, over here we’ve recently elected a horrible party as the biggest one, with 25% of the votes. Dark times.

The difference is that in many European countries the head of state is more of a ceremonial position (at least in practice) and the head of the government holds nowhere near the amount of power a US president does. With proportional representation, the biggest party often doesn’t have an absolute majority and needs to form a government together with other parties, or might even end up in the opposition. Together they agree on who’s going to be the head of government (usually the head of the largest party), who will be the ministers and what will be the policy. If it doesn’t work out because of disagreements, the government breaks up and new elections will be held.

My point is: the risk is real, populism is growing, policy is shifting, but the dynamics are different. Having a first past the post system and concentrating so much power into a single political position feels like an accelerator.

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Time for an RAF reboot, asap the Nazis seize power again.

Only a dead Nazi is a good one.

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think your democratic system is resistant

It's way more resistant than in US - society is far less polarized, far less trusts politicians, and also, far seems to be less prone to cult of personalities

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- And yet the "blame everything on immigrants" strategy seems to work quite well here too.
  
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- far less trusts politicians
  
  crazy thing is... that is the exact reason why trump is winning in the States. Someone comes along, crass, rude, claiming to be a layman and the people here ate that up, thinking "now here is a person like us, not like the established politician class" and despite the rhetoric, or due to it, along with suppression and disinformation, he got elected.
  
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- Just wait a bit. It'll crack sooner or later.
  
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This is fascism 101.

Fascism is at least as much an economic system as a political one, or more precisely, it's more like an economic system hiding behind a political system.

And the way the economic system works is very simple - private ownership of the means of production combined with an overt and institutionalized revolving door between business and government, so that the end result is plutocratic oligarchy.

Basically, it's taking the system that already existed in the US, by which the wealthy bought access to political power mostly surreptitiously and nominally illegally unless they followed specific restrictions, and legitimizes and formalizes and institutionalizes it and moves it right out into the open.

And behind all of the white supremacist and christian nationalist and reactionary conservative rhetoric, this was always the real goal.

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If the numbers are true it costed him less than 0.1% of his wealth which is surprising how little it takes. Would you spend 0.1% of your wealth to elect a President and gain a government post that will bring you more wealth? Would you spend 1% of your wealth to become insanely rich? 10%?

In the society where power is measured by wealth ultra rich should not exist. Or better such society should not exist.

Also Musk wasn't even the biggest donor. And Harris was okay with this whole thing, she also received enormous donations. Who was against ultra rich? Bernie Sanders. No wonder he was sacked despite popular support.

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No I wouldnt spend 1 percent of my wealth to become insanely rich. Mostly cause that implies corruption and I aint nearly as bad as my kin though I have far more homicidal tendencies.

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nah, I like the Bannana man's method better. reference- Bannana man in honduras

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Speedrunning the decline and fall of the Roman empire.

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We're already speedrunning climate-based societal collapse, so there's not really much time to slow walk these things.

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What an absolute treasure Robert and Sam Reich are.

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He also spent 44 billion buying twitter to disrupt and control the conversations happening there as part of his efforts, and now the the government essentially has a data mining tool and propaganda machine without actually 'owning' it.

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Last stage democracy

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Late stage humanity

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- We don't need to be such downers about it.
  
  Let's just celebrate this as the age of facilitating future dolphin supremacy!
  
  We sucked hard, I have faith that they can do better because I can't really imagine how a sapient species could find a way to do even worse.
  
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Plus late stage capitalism.

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* plutocracy

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Any of those 2a weirdos gonna show us what 2a is for or not?

I see a lot of domestic enemies around and suddenly the obese, insanely loud dipshits aren't making a peep.

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No, they love the boot on their face, as long as someone they hate also has a boot on their face.

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To be fair, a couple of them already tried.

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Looks like it's time for the left to start collecting guns and trigger the "wait, not like that!" response from the republicans.

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As a 2A advocate, I've recently considered buying my first gun. I don't own one mostly because I have young kids and I don't want to risk them playing with it and getting hurt, but there have also been a some incidents where people got shot due to road rage, and it would be nice to have an option to defend myself.

That said, regardless of how many or what kinds of guns I end up owning, there's no way I'm using them against the government, there's zero chance that ends well for anyone.

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- You can't have a democracy if you can't hold it accountable. Violence is the last option, of course. But it must be an option in the face of the threat of more violence. Fascists will always exploit this weakness in liberalism.
  
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Turns out it really is all a big club and we didn't get invited.

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Carlin had it right 30 years ago

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I wish I had a schilling

for every senseless killing

I'd buy a government

America's for sale

And you can get a good deal on it

And make a healthy profit

Or maybe tear it apart

Start with assumption

That a million people are smart

Smarter than one

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Sounds like a James Bond song

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yes for him the USA is just a high return investment and livelihoods of the US citizens are just expandibles.

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The term is crony capitalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

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Just capitalism taken to the logical conclusion. This term implies there's some form of capitalism in which this doesn't happen. There is not.

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I guess technically he spent $44.13 billion

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Now look how much money Kamala received to "buy" the election.

The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024

woops

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I mean, yeah, but they'd be in a better position to make that argument if they hadn't been campaigning with Mark Cuban. (Not that Robert Reich needs to be told that, but it still needs to be said.)

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Okay but... blaming the other side gets tiring after a few decades. When will we blame those who allowed it, and moreover how much did Kamala Harris spend by comparison?

If it's still too raw and early for such, please just ignore me. I'm still spinning, like all of us, and seeing desperately for some reasoning to help make sense of it all.

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What do the campaign expenditures of Kamala Harris have to do with how much Elon Musk paid as what boils down to a bribe to Trump?

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- Trump received 3x less bribes than Kamala. What are you even talking about? It has everything to do with it.
  
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Its not about the amount of money that was spent, its about the obvious conflict of interest between the individuals private interests, and the government controlling how much tax payers funds are being funnelled into their private interests.

Have the dems fucked around and found out? Sure, but don't compare a failure to save a bad status quo (D) with a concerted effort to rebuild the status quo in a way that exclusively benefits them (R)

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- Well said.
  
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