Just kidding. The title is misleading. None of the wealthy people or executives from large corporations are going to read any of this.
For those of you who are not wealthy, let me explain something that the mainstream media avoids talking about. Campaign finance is a matter of degrees. Every time elections become more expensive, this increases the influence campaign donors have over politicians relative to the influence voters have over the politicians. Every time campaign finance laws are relaxed (such as with the Citizens United vs FEC ruling by the US Supreme Court), the influence of donors goes up relative to the influence of voters.
On top of that, everything that increases the income inequality gap further amplifies the relative political power of the economic elites relative to the political power of the masses because they have more money to throw at politicians, which further increases their influence relative to the influence of mere voters. For many decades now, power has been transferring from voters to donors in a slow, incremental process.
The mainstream media doesn't want to talk about this because they benefit from this transfer of power. You see, most of the things that can happen that make campaigns more expensive result in media outlets getting more money. If the campaign season gets longer, politicians have to buy more advertising, which means more money in the pockets of newspapers and TV stations. If the campaign season gets longer, they sell more newspapers, which allows them to charge more for advertising. As political advertising becomes more and more critical to winning elections, your local TV station can charge more money for ads during campaign season. The influence of money is just that: influence. Giving money to someone doesn't automatically make a politician completely obedient to you, but with each passing generation, elected politicians listen a little more carefully to donors and a little less carefully to voters. This has been going on for decades.
History Lesson
So little by little, the political power of the masses has decreased while the political power of a few economic elites has been increasing. In essence, wealthy people and large corporations have been taking power from the masses through campaign finance.
The economic elites have clearly been enjoying the spoils of all the power they've been taking from the masses, and somehow, they forgot the most basic lessons of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc.
If you gain power over the masses, you have to use it to make life better for the masses, or else it is in their best interest to separate you from your power by any means necessary.
This same basic lesson can be learned from nearly every revolution from the 18th century on, and this is the lesson modern economic elites seem to have forgotten. We got rid of the aristocracy because they failed to grasp the above lesson. Those old aristocratic titles still exist, but those titles are mere decoration without any real power throughout the industrialized world.
The problem is that we have a new economic elite who is slowly transferring wealth and political power to itself. This new aristocracy is completely ignoring the lessons of history and furiously stuffing their own pockets regardless of how much suffering is caused to the masses when they do so.
Back in, say, the 1970s, a man with a high school diploma could buy a house, raise a family, put his kids through college, and have a comfortable retirement. Now couples with two college degrees in which both spouses work struggle to have those same things. America has a growing number of homeless people with full time jobs. Working class people are getting desperate and voting for lie-spewing demagogues like Trump. On the left, a growing number of people are talking about communism/socialism and are getting disgusted with capitalism. On the right, there is a growing fascination with fascist ideas. The last time this happened was in the Great Depression when FDR took charge.
Things are getting ripe for another revolution. For any economic elites reading this, here are your 4 choices for the future:
Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Soviet-style Marxism. You lose all your worldly possessions. If you are lucky, you won't be executed like the Tzar's family.
French Revolution: You get to watch angry mobs kill your family amid the burning rubble of your mansion.
Fascism: For a short time, the government gets really chummy with you and helps you take even more wealth and power from those dirty commoners, until the top dictator starts to see you as a threat to his power and you and your family quietly disappear in the night.
FDR: Bring America back to the way things were before Reagan's Trickle-On economic policies. If you return power to the people, they can't possibly blame you for how things turn out.
I'm not wealthy. I don't really have the power to choose which of the four above paths America follows. Rich people and large corporations have the power to decide which path America takes.
I'm guessing most of the economic elites will decide that I don't know what I'm talking about, and will just keep things the way they are, slowly squeezing the masses so that the elites can become wealthier and wealthier, which I'm pretty sure will result in one of the first two options above.
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