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We're led by a billionaire crook because, for decades, billionaires ran America like a club for their own benefit; and now billionaires promise us they are the solution.
I wrote @WinnersTakeAll for all who ask why we're here and how we set ourselves free. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas/9780451493248/ …
Anand Giridharadas Retweeted
A great deal has been written in the last few weeks about the efforts of a small group of historians to say the #1619project has glaring factual error that must be corrected. Others have tried to discredit the project all together. Now historians are pushing back. A THREAD.
I predict Donald Trump will tweet about this rule change soon. Why? Because it gives him back the 2016 narrative that helped elect him.
That he's running against a corrupt party that rigged things, etc., etc. You know the story.
Now the DNC is choosing to give him that story.
The DNC apparently stuck to the rules when they were helping to eliminate candidates of color. Having eliminated them, the rules are being scrapped to give a billionaire a chance to buy the election and not have to compete against the eliminated ones.
If it is altering the rules to allow a billionaire to purchase a shot at the presidency, it is basically framing the Democrats as: Also the party of plutocrats, with less racism.
But not so much less that the oligarch in question didn't do Stop and Frisk.
On the eve of Iowa, in a year defined by surging populism, the @DNC is about to suck the air out of the Democratic side by defining the party as the side of kinder, gentler, woker oligarchy.
Anand Giridharadas Retweeted
We were never going to be saved by Lisa Murkowski. Nor by Jeff Flake. Nor by Robert Mueller.
But there are 1,140,249 other Lisas in America. There are 3,116,016 other Jeffs in America. There are 11,330,492 other Roberts in America.
Let's organize them to vote against this hell.
Anand Giridharadas Retweeted
This video captures what mainstream culture has been learning of late: That old line about “We should expand the pie, not slice it up differently” is hogwash.
At this moment, given these facts, it is essential to redistribute #AmericasEconomicPie.
CBS This Morning
Anand Giridharadas Retweeted
You have to figure out what that means for you. But summon all the optimism you can as this process launches, because there is light on the other side of this dark. On the other side is an America in which we all thrive.
This is what it always smells like right before change.
And so go vote with all the hope you can muster. Because what the culture is telling us and what the polls are telling us is that now, in a way that may have once seemed unimaginable, it is within your grasp to make America work for Americans rather than for money.
We hear these terms like neoliberalism and capitalism and socialism, etc.
But here's what the last four decades have boiled down to:
Virtually every time there has been a major choice between what's good for money and what's good for Americans, what's good for money has won.
And, as you vote, consider this question. Do you want merely to pass the ball to the other side of the field? Or do you want to tear down the ideological stadium of market fundamentalism in which we’ve been trapped for the last 40 years?
Anand Giridharadas
There was the age of slavery, and then of Lincoln.
There was the age of robber barons, and then the progressive era.
There was the time of the crash, and then the New Deal.
There was the time of Jim Crow, and then of civil rights.
Voting changes the world.
Next week the 2020 election begins.
It is a historic chance to save America from tyranny.
For all the darkness, we should feel hope. Voters are more aware than ever that fundamental power equations must be changed.
Let us end the age of capital and launch the age of reform.
This is also a nice, elegant reminder that protecting oligarchy and branding people un-American didn't start with Donald Trump's incarnation of the GOP.
This week George W. Bush adviser Karl Zinsmeister lamented my use of the word "plutes."
He suggested the term makes it "easier to discard" people.
Then he, um, implied I'm not American.
Which should alarm everyone born in Ohio.
PLUTES GONNA PLUTE.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/24/no_giver_is_safe_how_the_left_is_poisoning_philanthropy_142222.html …
Anand Giridharadas Retweeted
WEALTH INEQUALITY: The richest 1% controls more wealth now than at any time in more than 50 years. But what does wealth inequality really look like?
@TonyDokoupil turned America’s economic pie into a real one and asked people a simple question: Who gets what?
Anand Giridharadas Retweeted
Some important takeaways from this well-done video.
1. People at first shy away from this topic, even though by discussing it we might be able to transform their lives.
2. People have no idea how much the plutes monopolize, even after all this debate in recent years.
Watch this immediately.
@CBSThisMorning’s @tonydokoupil using an epic pie analogy to show how the plutes own everything.
Plutocrats do all kinds of things to duck their taxes. But give credit to @MikeBloomberg. Running for president is one of the boldest tax-avoidance schemes ever.
