The American Oligarchy

 For years, Oxfam—along with advocates and activists around the world—has argued that extreme concentration of wealth is leading to extreme concentration of power, allowing an ultra-rich few to tighten their grip on governments, economies, and media.

What is oligarchy?

Oligarchy is about the ability of an ultra-wealthy elite to shape political decision-making in ways that increase their wealth. Oligarchic power is ultimately rooted in wealth. The power of oligarchs is enabled by huge concentrations of wealth.

Given the massive amount of wealth and power that the ultra-rich have amassed, coupled with the way too many U.S. politicians have embraced them, it’s only fitting to use the term for the direction that America is headed.........

What about the electoral process? Don’t we all have equal power in that system? Not quite. We’ve seen 150 billionaire families spend a total of $1.9 billion in support of presidential and congressional candidates in 2024.

Right now, we’re getting a view into just how the ultra-rich have bought themselves a seat—if not a couch—in the Oval Office.  Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are a few examples of the wealthy elite who have not only cozied up to president-elect Trump to influence policy, but also benefitted under previous administrations. So far, Trump has 13 billionaires—and counting—in his proposed administration whose total wealth is more than $450 billion. And even without Musk, Trump’s cabinet would be the richest in history..............

Trump’s blueprint for new oligarchy: three things to watch

First is a massive upward redistribution of wealth from everyday people, chiefly through a massive tax giveaway to the ultra-rich and to corporations.

Second is cutting away the public programs that we all rely upon and to take it a step further, privatizing programs to give them to profit-making corporations.

And third is taking a sledgehammer to the rules and referees that protect ordinary people from excessive corporate and monopoly power.

See https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/is-the-us-witnessing-the-rise-of-oligarchy/

It seems to me that this has already been accomplished in just a few short weeks the only question remaining at this point being can the U.S. ….and indeed the rest of the world …... ever recover from this attack on our democracy and if so how many years will that take?

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Oh Canada, best Stand on Guard

I have not commented much here on the political climate anymore but the current total cluster fk both provincial and federal can hardly be let go by without sharing my disgust for most, if not all of both the incumbent and aspiring lot. The honest candidate who  speaks the truth and does not promise all kinds of things that he cannot deliver has little chance of getting elected and even less in having any real impact upon upon decisions made on our behalf.

The most egregious of the lot is Doug Fraud who decided to call an unneeded election when he already held a majority in the middle of the worst winter Ontario has seen in some years and so many folks have difficulty getting out of their driveways let alone to the voting location. Unfortunately it matters little who you vote for locally but what party they support, for it seems that a few at the top of whatever party gets in run the show..... its not as bad as the  new dictatorship emerging south of the border just yet but beware those that once they are elected think they are god!

Moving on, across Canada we have a change in the current leader and ultimately in all probability a general election where it will once again be more about the party and leader thereof than the local candidate. For a while there we had a minority government with two parties at least trying to work together for the good of the country but that collaboration recently crashed, again at the worst possible time, we may never know what lead to the break up but it sure was not the right time to add more turmoil to our governance.

It was good to see our leaders across the country all largely singing the same tune in support of our economy even though one premier was more interesting in selling her oil than showing a common front to he of the slash and burn regime next door. Given our close relationship with the U.S. of Eh and the massive changes already taking place down there by executive decree its going to be a tough few years both here, there and indeed world wide.

Buckle up folks, we are not quite to the point of building our bomb shelters just yet but it might be a good idea to stock up the pantry..... 

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Who do you believe?

 The BBC issued a February report that found “significant inaccuracies” with news summaries generated from artificial intelligence (AI) engines including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity AI.

“The answers produced by the AI assistants contained significant inaccuracies and distorted content from the BBC,” the outlet wrote in their report.

Their findings found 51 percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues, including a failure to differentiate between fact and opinion. 

Nineteen percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates, while 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5138279-bbc-report-ai-summaries-inaccurate/

But don't worry you can always rely on King Trumph to give you a accurate synopsis!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump

Democracy is indeed Under Fire …... from all directions!

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