"The Great Secession of the Morbidly Rich Marks a Breaking Point for Democracy's Survival"

[Joinfortmill]

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-great-secession-of-the-morbidly-72d

The Hartmann Report

My words: Just a sample, folks. This is a MUST READ. Bold is mine.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Extreme Privacy,” reporter Arian Campo-Flores pulls back the curtain on a disturbing new reality: our country’s wealthiest citizens now inhabit a parallel America of private jets, members-only restaurants, “sky-garage” condos, and luxury wellness centers they can rent out entirely for themselves...

And that’s the real danger: once the richest begin living outside the civic sphere, they stop caring whether the rest of society works at all. A nation where the wealthy secede into a private realm is a nation confronting oligarchy...

America has experienced this crisis before. Every few generations, a class of greedy oligarchs rise to power who are so intoxicated by wealth, so determined to hoard more, more, more, that they become a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy itself."...

Historian Michael Parenti described this perfectly: wealth becomes an addictive, monomaniacal hunger that consumes every other human concern.They construct or acquire vast media properties solely to convince ordinary people that deregulating toxic businesses and cutting taxes on billionaires will somehow benefit them. They then invest millions in politicians who repay them with billions in tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies.

As a result, Americans suffer the consequences: collapsing wages, millions without healthcare, skyrocketing poverty, underfunded schools, rampant gun violence, crumbling infrastructure, deadly pollution, poisons and chemicals in our food and water, and a middle class that’s been gutted and left gasping...."

Now that responsibility falls to us...

This WSJ article isn’t just a window into their private world, it’s a warning flare. A democracy where the powerful live above and beyond the public realm is no democracy at all.

The path forward is the same one that saved us in the 1890s and 1940s:
name the crisis, confront the hoarders, break up monopolies, end billionaire-funded political corruption, restore progressive taxation to put the country back together, and rebuild the middle class....

We can do it. We’ve done it before. In future posts I’ll be detailing many of the steps that have worked in the past here in America and succeed today in other countries."

[multigraincracker]

1. Bust the Trust.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. Survival of democracy due to overwhelming wealth influencing every factor of our lives?

Already here...

We just need to actually start seriously watching how we spend our money and don't support the wrong sort of people hoarding that wealth.

[erronis]

3. Cory Doctorow argues that we can't effect the change by how we spend.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/

Let me start by saying that I do not attribute blame for enshittification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices aren't the arbiters of policy.

The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority. In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win.

The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable, bitter counsel of despair. You will not shop your way free of a monopoly, any more than you will recycle your way out of wildfires. Shop as hard as you like, you will not – cannot – end enshittification.

Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is whether the company can get away with treating you as the product.

[lostnfound]

6. Good point. And a conversion into a 'rental society' plus infrastructure privatization means avoidance is impossible

You can’t stop funding the 1% when they own the land, the water, the buildings, etc.

We are unable to opt out of the entirety of what they own, once they own everything as a concentrated mob.

[Linda ladeewolf]

4. Just vote against anything that is supported by billionaires.

If they support it, it probably hurts us.

[jmbar2]

5. Great framing of the issue

That's the first step to coming up with corrective measures - identify the problem. Some frames portray concerns about wealth to be due to envy, or fairness. This is too soft.

Toxic wealth, parasitic wealth, or even necrophilic wealth jeopardizes the very survival of the planet we live on. It is a sickness, and we are in a pandemic of sick wealth.