Robert Reich: Venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who recently compared fights against inequality to the Nazi’s ‘Kristallnacht,” suggested a few days ago that voting rights should be proportional to taxes paid: “It should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes.” Perkins is a crackpot whose rants aren’t worth repeating except for the ironic fact that right-wing billionaires like him already have outsized voting power, and are doing everything possible to maintain it. Fearful of demographic shifts (we’ll soon be a majority of minorities, especially Latinos and African-Americans) and the increasing economic and political power of women and young people, all of whom lean left, the rightwing wealthy created “Citizen’s United” (the organization and the Supreme Court case it spawned); faux “social welfare” organizations to disguise their mounting donations to political campaigns; and a state-by-state campaign to suppress votes of likely Democratic voters, including gerrymandered districts. Moreover, they’re already well-represented in Congress (millionaires are just 3 percent of the U.S. population, but make up more than half of all the members of Congress and the Senate), and maintain well-oiled revolving doors between the White House and Wall Street, Capitol Hill and K Street. In short, Perkins bizarre idea is uncomfortably close to present-day reality. We must do what we can to restore democracy and take it out of the clutches of people like him and the Koch brothers.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 22:00:01 +0000
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