News Kiosk

#Requiem for America

Propublica

Mother Jones

Citizen Works

Public Citizen

Electronic Frontiere Foundation

Reduce democracy.
The government limits democracy in order to protect the wealthy from backlash born of inequality. Some states now require government issued voter IDs and counties regularly purge voter registration rolls without voters knowledge.

Civil Rights Groups Challenge Trump’s “Racially Discriminatory Scheme” to Skew Redistricting. A new lawsuit attacks a plan to harness citizenship data and take power away from Democrats and Latinos.

Reshape ideology.
The egalitarian movements of the 1960s scared many in the American political establishment that “an excess of democracy” was developing and had to be curtailed.

The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement erupted across US cities in September, 2011, pitting “(we) (who) are the 99%” against the insanely-rich 1% who manipulate public policy with impunity,

The Chamber of Commerce, a major business lobby group, feared that business was losing “control” over society and something needed to be done to counter" these forces. They have lobbied congress with bags of hush money, bought elections, and staff the executive branch with people who represent their interest.

The masters and over lords of public education are pushing policies that suppress the free flow of ideas.They created a new college architecture to avoid places where students can congregate and protest. They rise tuition to ridiculous levels to deprive large parts of the population of the option of higher education. If a student comes out of college with $100,000 in debt, they become indenture servant to financial institutions.

K-12 education has been reduced to mechanical skills, undermining creativity and independence. That's what “teaching to the test” is. This is regarded as methods of indoctrination and control.

The rise of the private charter school system is a an attempt to destroy the public school system. Private charter schools divert public funds into private institutions, which undermine the public school system.

In schools across Illinois, children are routinely locked in tiny rooms, alone, sometimes for hours. It’s called “isolated timeout" and it's supposed to keep children safe. Instead, they're often traumatized. It happens every day — with no state oversight.

Redesign the economy.
The masters of economic policy have increase the role financial institutions in the economy and reduce the role production. They've restricted the flow labor from one employment to another with the Statue of Apprenticeship. Allow the free flow capital with banking deregulation. Create worker insecurity by shifting production to other places when they demand higher wages.

Low income neighborhoods are being coloniized with high-in coffee shops and grocery stores like Star Buck and Whole Foods. The collateral effect is gentrification. Rent and property taxes go through the roof, driving out the low income class to make room for the more affluent middle-class.

Joe Biden helped build a financial system that's great for Delaware banks and terrible for everyone else.

Cities across the country have adopted crime-free housing programs. But the side effects of this are keeping them white not safe.

Shifting the burden.
In the 1950s and 60s taxes on the wealthy were much higher. Corporate taxes were much higher-taxes on dividends were higher. Now, the master of the tax system have redesigned the tax code so that the wealthy pay less and the rest of the population pay more. This shift is toward keeping taxes on wages and consumption but not on dividends and corporate profits.

From the point of view of policy makers, the long-term future of the country doesn't matter. What matters is just those sectors of society that sustain concentrated wealth and privilege. Since the 1980s policy makers have promoted a plutocracy that enriched the wealthy and let everyone else suffer.

Now we have a plutonomy for those who have substantial wealth. It has become the main driver of our economy. In this new economy the working class has become precarious-proletariats, trapped in a debt peonage system of credit cards and check-cashing store-front financed by banks

Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation, PoTP has exposed over $138,000 in Department of Defense payments to Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties, over $1,700 in General Services Administration payments to the Trump International Hotel in D.C. and other Trump properties, and thousands of dollars of National Security Council and U.S. Embassy payments to Mar-a-Lago other Trump properties.

Attack solidarity.
Solidarity is dangerous to the masters of wealth and privilege. You're only suppose to care about yourself, not others. We see this in policy formations that attack social security and public education.

Social security and public education are the principles of solidarity: caring for others. The masters of public policy believe Medicare and education should be a privilege, not a right. The public education system, from Kindergarten to college, is under severe attack.

States and the federal government have reduced funding for colleges, now most funding come from tuition. This means most students, who don't come from wealthy families, will leave college with crushing debt. Wealthy families can opt-out of funding K-12 public schools when they send their children to private charter schools.

The masters of health care policy are pushing proposals that will destroy the Medicare system and replace it with a health care market. With the Medicare system patients come first, with a health care market (private health insurance, Plan B,C and D) profits come first. Medicare is not allow to negotiate drug prices or insurance premiums for Medicare patients.

Run the regulators.
Enormous growth in lobbying; today it is routine for oligarchies who want to control the regulators.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is considering adopting new rules that would effectively insulate landlords, banks, and insurance companies that use algorithmic models from lawsuits that claim their practices have an unjustified discriminatory effect. HUD’s proposal is flawed, and suggests that the agency doesn’t understand how machine learning and other algorithmic tools work in practice. Algorithmic tools are increasingly relied upon to make assessments of tenants’ creditworthiness and risk, and HUD’s proposed rules will make it all but impossible to enforce the Fair Housing Act into the future. 

Engineer elections.
This deals with corporate personhood and the legal equation of money with free speech under the Citizens United decision. This Supreme Court ruling is essentially a manipulative reading of the 14th Amendment to define corporations as persons and grant them those same rights. Corporations are state-created legal fictions, Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad, but to call them persons is outrageous.

Keep the protesters in line.
Facebook talks a good game about connecting us, but it's tearing us and our democracy apart. As a social media platform, its power is over the currency of information. Most Americans get their news from social media. In the past, all institution distributing news had verification standard of some kind, no matter how thin, before publication. Facebook has none. It has become a propaganda tool for governments and corporations to control what we do and think.

Manufacture consent.
The mainstream media is aging and collapsing under the weight of its own hubris and arrogance. Now entirely formulaic in presentation and predictable in substance, the ‘major’ outlets of news, which are monopolized under only a small handful of corporations, serve the purpose of misleading the public on important issues and manufacturing consent for government and the oligarchs.

The public is still largely numb to this reality, and in a wicked catch-22 for modern man, many people are still addicted to the very media that serves as the primary weapon of social control against them.

OxyContin’s makers delayed the reckoning for their role in the opioid crisis by funding think tanks, placing friendly experts on leading outlets, and deterring or challenging negative coverage.

Marginalize the population.
What the public wants does not typically impact what the government does because the US goverment is a corporate oligarchy.

Data from an EPA model indicates that communities along the lower Mississippi River corridor already face severely elevated cancer risks from industrial activity. Massive new chemical plants are slated to be built there anyway.