Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, the always interesting gathering spot for Never Trumpers. He wrote that he has been stewing about the intervention of Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of The Washington Post, to stop the editorial board from endorsing Kamala. after Bezos locked the editorial, three of the 10-member editorial board stepped down.
He wrote:
ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.
Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.
Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.
But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.
My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runs the Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed,
America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here.
Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative.
The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.
And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.
Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
Yesterday, Timothy Snyder issued a call to Americans to not obey in advance. He is correct, of course. We should continue to resist fascism as best we can. The stakes have not changed.
If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.
But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.
The hour is later than we think.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve been saying “the hour is later than we think,” since the Insurrection. I loathe being a doomsayer but MAGAzis are already gearing up election fraud claims, already chiming in with “rigged,” supplemented with assistance from the Russians of misinformation.
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“Donald Trump has never had the moral compass to lead this country. But even his supporters cannot afford to ignore the signs that he may no longer have the mental faculties to lead it either. The stakes are simply too high.”
So concludes the Las Vegas Sun in an editorial…
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2024/oct/30/trumps-decline-has-been-alarming/
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The Putin puppet’s traitorous seditious corrosive mendacity has now metastasized to encompass the entirety of the Russia RepubliQan party. Putin’s Kompromat must be incendiary indeed.
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AMERICA IS ALREADY AN OLIGARCHY
HOW WE GOT THERE
The root cause of the emergence of today’s oligarchs is the failure to enforce our nation’s antitrust laws.
And the root cause of failure to enforce the antitrust laws is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that led to the creation of PACS and SuperPACS which have in turn created today’s bought-and-paid-for politicians.
In the previous Age of Oligarchs, also known as “The Golden Age” because of the lavishness of the oligarchs, the basis of the oligarchs’ wealth was that — as with today’s oligarchs — they controlled monopolies in the form of corporate conglomerates.
During the 1887’s, 1880s, and 1880s, a relatively small number of corporations gobbled up or destroyed their competitors, resulting in a relatively few corporate conglomerates having control over entire segments of the nation’s economy.
The structure of these corporate conglomerates funneled profits upward to oligarchs who held most of the stock.
In 1902, then-President Teddy Roosevelt began a crusade by successfully breaking up one of the largest of these monopolistic corporate conglomerates, using provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, the Act had seldomly and only weakly been enforced prior to Roosevelt.
TOdAY, as during The Gilded Age, today’s oligarchs derive their fortunes and their consequent political power from monopolistic enterprises that have gobbled up their former competitors. This is especially true of the online conglomerates, but also of major businesses of every genre.
So, where is a Teddy Roosevelt now that America really needs one again?
The only person who today approximates Teddy Roosevelt’s antitrust fervor is Senator Bernie Sanders, and he is unfortunately very unlikely to ever become President.
Because the 2010 Citizens United decision makes money the most important factor in politics, it is unlikely that anyone who promises to enforce the antitrust laws can be elected.
And that is not only because of the money the PACS and SuperPACs can bring to bear against such a candidate, it’s also because the typical American doesn’t know how monopolies undermine democracy. Most Americans think that “monopoly” is a board game for kids, and they never took a course in even basic economics.
ALREADY AN OLIGARCHY
After researching government laws passed since Citizens United, Princeton University researcher Martin Gilens and Northwestern University researcher Benjamin Page documented that the U.S. is no longer a representative republic because the government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by the rich and powerful. The researchers analyzed 1,800 U.S. policies enacted over a period of two decades and compared the laws and regulations that were passed to those favored by average Americans to those favored by wealthy Americans and corporations, and here’s what the research revealed: “EVEN WHEN A MAJORITY OF CITIZENS DISAGREES WITH ECONOMIC ELITES OR WITH ORGANIZED SPECIAL INTERESTS, ORDINARY CITIZENS GENERALLY LOSE.”
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Yep!
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If & when we survive the Traitor Trump era, once the dust settles, we must all fight to repeal Citizens United, break up monopolies, and implement campaign finance laws that take the crazy amounts of money out of the electoral process. These oligarchs have way too much power & influence & the masses need to work together to end their reign. After that, we must reform the Electoral College. Why shouldn’t every vote count, whether the coasts & cities are more heavily liberal than the middle of the country? Each person is an American, so too bad if California & New York are predominantly liberal. Those citizens shouldn’t be negated by a handful of low populated states like the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho which have 8 senators vs California & New York having only 4, despite having a ridiculous amount of population more than those states. Also, our elections should not come down to 5-7 “swing states” that determine who the president is.
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Should the Democrats take the White House and Congress, and that is a big if, this will be their biggest challenge. Can our government stand up to the abuse of Oligarchs who now control much of the courts and who have privatized much of our government from the Defense Department to Education? Musk’s control of much of our space program along with the Starlink satellite system is particularly alarming in context with his reported contacts with Putin and his illegal behavior regarding our election. We are watching a Bond flick play out in real time as we have allowed the decay of anti-trust enforcement that requires multiple players in any given industry. The coming global conflicts may become real fighting between corporate titans against weakening government institutions. Citizens are losing their influence around the world as billionaires buy up media and influence to misinform for their benefit. This corruption has been a bi-partisan project. True isn’t the only dangerous narcissist out there.
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