Jun 19, 2024
Eric Zuesse
America’s approximately a thousand billionaires donate at least half of all of the money in the U.S. that funds political campaigns in both of their Parties. Moreover, each of the political Parties is unaccountable to its voters because it is a private club, a tax-free ‘non-profit’ or ‘charity’ which appoints its own members, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or the Republican National Committee (RNC), which consist of representatives of their supporting billionaires’ corporations and their lobbying firms, and who are therefore well qualified for those representatives of the billionaires to select as their Party’s nominees for public office only candidates whose fundraising efforts will be funded by their interests sufficiently to succeed so that the nominated candidate will have an authentic chance to beat the other Party’s nominated candidate in a ‘democratic’ election that’s actually only a s‘election’ from those two billionaire-approved nominees. Each Party’s political primaries and caucuses functions only in order to fool its voters to think that the outcome in the purely-for-show primary contests depends upon their votes instead of on billionaires’ dollars. In order for the billionaires to be able to carry out their end-result — that the public are only to be fooled, not served — they also control enough of the ‘news’-media and accredited ‘experts’ at their think tanks, foundations, universities, and other ’non-profits’ (which ‘experts’ are then approved to be interviewed by their ‘news’-media), for the billionaires to have reasonable confidence that the winner of each political contest will ultimately turn out to represent either their own Party’s group of billionaires, or else the opposite Party’s group of billionaires (and so always be billionaire-friendly), instead of represent the non-billionaire mere voters, who get to select only from billionaire pre-approved nominees. That’s the way the system works.
Among the tricks that the billionaires’ Government has established in order to prevent access to power by individuals who don’t represent the interests and priorities of billionaires, is the arcane system in which they have had their U.S. Presidents and Congress-members create tax-laws which favor ONLY donations being made by a ’non-profit’ to an employee of, or other beneficiary of, a ‘non-profit’, never to any unaffiliated person (i.e., never to an individual who is no beneficiary of a donor who is rich enough to be part of the ‘non-profit’ system and thus to be either among billionaires or else close to that — in other words, the applicant needs to be already financially dependent upon the insiders, in order to be able to qualify for a grant from the given foundation or etc.).
There are many people who try to apply for a grant who stop their filling-out of the application form when they are required to enter onto the “Organization” line of the ‘non-profit’s application form the ‘non-profit’ that they represent; and, so, the Foundation Source Website even has a page “Grants to Individuals: Using a Private Foundation to Give Directly to People in Need”, in order to pretend not to represent only the interests and priorities of the super-rich. But, even there, it says “to People in Need,” so as to restrict any such donation to only an outsider who is personally needy, instead of to any who wishes to propose a project that would help the public. In other words: anyone who is unaffiliated and wants to propose a project to benefit the public, is barred even from completing the ‘non-profit’s application. The tax-laws for ‘non-profits’ have been written this way, looking down upon outsiders, as being only needy persons, not as being competent to think rationally about how society ought to be organized or about what the Government’s policies ought to be: these laws are extremely beneficial to the donors who create ‘non-profits’, but in order for a ’non-profit’ to continue qualifying for these federal and state tax-benefits, the organization must accept project-applications only from representatives only of other such ‘non-profits’. The only exception to that is in the rare cases when an outsider is seeking largesse in order to become able to compensate for the applicant’s personal emergency.
There are numerous other ways in which access by the public is effectively blocked from actually participating in Governmental policy-formation. For example: if an individual wants to contribute an article to an academic journal, virtually all such journals now require that the given prospective applicant must first fill out a form in which the person must select from a list of hundreds or thousands of qualifying academic institutions, which one the person is “affiliated” with. Outsiders are virtually prohibited to submit articles to academic journals. And, of course, the academic institutions themselves are largely if not totally dependent upon founders and donors who are, if not billionaires, among — or close to — the super-rich.
And, so, those are just two of the thousands of examples to display how America’s billionaires have made their government actually, from a practical standpoint, inaccessible to the public. The Government, and the entire American system, represents ONLY the super-rich.
This system is not unique to America; but, because the U.S. Government controls the Governments in its colonies (‘allies’), it has become normal throughout the empire. It’s simply more extreme here in the U.S., than elsewhere. Consequently, there is intense suffering in America, and it results from the billionaire-controlled U.S. Government.
On June 4th, I posted my proposal for “How to Reduce the Harms that Billionaires Cause”; but, of course, the least-likely country to pay attention to it would be the United States. However, readers here might be interested in that article, in order to consider what the options are for addressing this problem — a problem that has been getting worse for the last 50 years. The article argues that this proposed new law would fundamentally change things.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/how-americas-billionaires-have-made
Newsessentials Blog 
Posted on June 20, 2024
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