We regulate banks and brokerages for the same reason ; when we deregulated them in the 1920s and the late 1990s the result was huge rip-offs that produced the Republican Great Depression and the Bush Crash of 2008 .
We regulate automobile manufacturers because they have a history of putting profits over the lives of their customers ( Ford Pinto 900 dead , GM trucks 2000 dead , etc .); refineries because their emissions cause cancer and asthma ; drugs because unscrupulous manufacturers killed people in previous eras ; workplace safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women ; voting because corrupt politicians rigged elections .
We regulate traffic with signs and stoplights to keep order and reduce accidents ; we regulate police to prevent them from abusing innocent people ; we regulate building codes so peoples ’ homes don ’ t collapse or catch on fire from faulty cheap wiring .
And there was a time in America when we regulated money in politics and guaranteed the right to vote .
Those two types of regulations were passed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after multiple scandals , like in 1899 when William Clark — then the nation ’ s secondrichest man — openly bribed Montana legislators by standing outside the legislative chamber passing out brand new $ 1000 bills to the men who voted his way . Or when state after state — most all former Confederate states — repeatedly refused to allow Black people to vote .
We passed regulations guaranteeing a minimum wage , unemployment insurance , and the right to unionize to create the world ’ s first large-scale middle class . And we regulated the morbidly rich with a 90 % income tax rate to prevent them from amassing so much wealth that their financial power could become a threat to our democratic republic .
And , of course , it ’ s those regulations — money in politics , the right to vote , and preventing the accumulation of dangerous levels of wealth — to which today ’ s broligarchs most strenuously object .
In each case , it was five Republicans on the US Supreme Court who gutted our protective regulations and put America on a direct collision course with today ’ s oligarchic neofascist takeover .
• They ruled that billionaires can buy politicians because giving money in exchange for votes isn ’ t bribery , but merely an expression of First Amendment-protected “ free speech .”
• They claimed that corporations aren ’ t soulless creations of the law but are “ persons ” with the same right to share their “ free speech ” with politicians who do their bidding .
• And they ruled that voting is not a right in America — in open defiance of US law — but a mere privilege , giving the green light to Republicans to purge or refuse to count over 4 million votes in the 2024 election .
The result of all this Republican corruption is that the will of the majority of American voters hasn ’ t been fulfilled in two generations . The last time our political system was truly responsive to the voters was in the 1960s , when Medicare , Medicaid , and food stamps were created , and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed . And in the early 1970s , when we outlawed big money in politics .
Then , in 1978 , five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in the Bellotti decision ( written by Lewis Powell himself ) that corporations are persons and money is merely free speech . Two years later , Reagan floated into the White House on a river of oil money and systematically began gutting the protective regulations that had built the largest and most successful middle class the world had ever seen .
Since then , big money has frozen us like a mosquito in amber . Even Obama ’ s big effort to establish a national healthcare system with an option for Medicare had to kneel before the throne of rightwing billionaires and the insurance industry .
Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system , and free or even subsidized higher education . In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis , nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick , and jobs pay well enough ( and have union pensions ) so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives .
But not in America . Since the Reagan Revolution , rightwing billionaires have blocked any of those things from happening because they ’ d be paid for with taxes , and there ’ s nothing rightwing billionaires hate more than paying taxes .
• Dark money has destroyed the notion of one-personone-vote .
• Monopoly — allowed because corporations can now buy politicians — has destroyed the small businesses that once filled America ’ s malls and downtowns .
• And voter suppression and voter list purges handed the 2024 election to Trump , as reporter Greg Palast documented in a recent , shocking report .
So , yeah , let ’ s do away with all the regulations like wannabe Kings Elon and Donald say . And make the United States look and operate more like Syria and its failed-state relatives than anything Americans would recognize .
74 The Trial Lawyer