Wisconsin Is Really About Plutocracy

Kevin Drum explains that you have to understand two crucial things about American politics:

First, income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off. [Mother Jones]

Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. 

Drum cites a study conducted in the early nineties by Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels where he studied the voting behavior of US Senators. It should come as no surprise that our elected officials respond far more kindly to the desires of monied interests. 

Bartels also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all. [Mother Jones]

It doesn't take a genius to come to the inescapable conclusion that if our leaders are more concerned about the well-being of the wealthy that they will enact legislation that benefits the wealthy. This reality creates a problem for everyone else.

Drum concludes with this prescient thought: 

First and foremost, it's an economic problem because it's siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.

As long as 50% of our citizenry are gullible enough to continue voting against their interests in the mistaken belief that they too can achieve the kind of wealth they fantasize about in their daydreams, our politicians will continue to enact legislation that benefit the 1% of the population who bankrolls our so-called "democracy".