Democracy cultivates the collective wisdom of all of us to steer us away from disaster and towards a sustainable future. That is, unless it has been hijacked by the selfish/wealthy/greedy and power-hungry. They mislead us with false information--Fox News and countless other disinformation campaigns--and corrupt our government and democracy through bribery and appealing to our basest and most fear-based instincts. Sounds like the GOP to me.

Part 2
The Danger of the Rich & Powerful Man-Bubble

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-danger-of-the-rich-and-powerful?publication_id=302288&post_id=88639994&isFreemail=true
#CitizensUnited
#TogetherWeStand
#GOPDividesUs
#InsecurityResponses

"...When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now) and then dictatorships (where Trump just proposed to take us).

When the US Supreme Court ruled in a series of decisions between 1976 and 2013 that it is mere “free speech“ protected by the First Amendment when wealthy people or corporations nakedly buy and bribe political figures to alter the rules in a way that benefits themselves, they placed a cancer at the heart of our democracy that has now significantly metastasized.

The great challenge of our day is going to be to excise that disease, to wrest control of our economic and political systems away from the small group of billionaires and politically active corporations that have seized it.

These men (mostly) and CEOs have, like Trump and Putin, come to “believe their own BS,” as the old expression goes. It blinds them to the larger impact of their political machinations on all of society, all of humanity, all life on planet Earth.

Instead, they welcome the corruption the Supreme Court put into place with Citizens United, which gives the tiny slice of morbidly rich people such massive power. They welcome it because they think — being “secret geniuses,” as Brian Klaas wrote about last week — that they’re deserving of it and uniquely know best how to use it.

To the extent that the United States is still a democracy — and lacking a legislature or court system willing to challenge America’s oligarchs — the only option left to Americans to save our nation and the world from these “secret geniuses” is to soundly reject them and their bought-off shills at the ballot box.

It won’t be easy, but if this is not accomplished soon our current marginally democratic oligarchy will become a dictatorship with a thin façade of democracy, much like modern-day Hungary or Russia.

And that’s not just a threat to Americans: it’s a threat to all life on Earth."

Democracy cultivates the collective wisdom of all of us to steer us away from disaster and towards a sustainable future. That is, unless it has been hijacked by the selfish/wealthy/greedy and power-hungry. They mislead us with false information--Fox News and countless other disinformation campaigns--and corrupt our government and democracy through bribery and appealing to our basest and most fear-based instincts. Sounds like the GOP to me.

Part 1
The Danger of the Rich & Powerful Man-Bubble

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-danger-of-the-rich-and-powerful?publication_id=302288&post_id=88639994&isFreemail=true
#CitizensUnited
#TogetherWeStand
#GOPDividesUs
#InsecurityResponses

It was a mistake a flock of geese wouldn’t make. It was a mistake nature and evolution have designed against in all animal life. But a small group of humans keep making it over and over again, and our Supreme Court has made the situation far, far worse.
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Trump has now made the same mistake Napoleon made, the same mistake Hitler made, the same mistake Putin made when he invaded Ukraine. It’s the mistake the business press says Elon Musk is making, as did Sam Bankman-Fried, and Mike Lindell.

It’s the mistake Xi Jinping is making right now governing China.

All these rich and powerful men had/have the same thing in common: they believed their brilliance or success in one area meant they were brilliant and would be successful in all endeavors.

As a result of this false belief, each surrounded themselves with yes-men and lived in a bubble, disconnecting them from their business or political constituents…leading to bad, poorly informed decision-making processes.

In other words, each rejected democracy.

A threat like this to democracy is also a threat to all life on Earth. Because, at its simplest, democracy can be described as the ultimate human survival behavior.
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A massive body of scientific literature, most accumulated over the past century, shows that group decision-making is almost always superior to decision-making by charismatic individuals or small groups of people who’ve managed to ringfence resources that give them great wealth and power over others.
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Democracies are most robust when the people lead politicians who are responsive to popular opinion; they’re most fragile when politicians can ignore public opinion because they’ve seized the power to choose their voters and dictate the terms of governance.
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Thus, we find that democracy — a system of decision making and rulemaking that most efficiently encompasses the collective wisdom of the group — is a survival system every bit as important as technology, from stone tools to weapons of war to rocket ships.
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This use of voting democracy is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.
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His deist friends like George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Ben Franklin knew what he meant: nature and god were the same thing, interpenetrating each other.

And they operate by certain rules of nature that are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But was he right? Is nature actually democratic?
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But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, that we’ve just never noticed because we weren’t looking for it.
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Conradt and Roper discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs, wrong decisions would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.
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“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish. With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.
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Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in the animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper."