‘Morning Joe’ Panel Spends Lengthy Segment Attacking Elon Musk & America’s ‘Plutocracy’

EXCERPT:

GEIST: “But the point is, we agree that you should have the rewards of that idea. You brought something that’s popular and people enjoy and it helps. But the guardrails need to be there. And again, just to go back to the original point, there doesn’t seem to be any compulsion in Congress, and not just from Republicans but from Democrats. Yes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but take the SALT deduction and — you know, there are all these things that come up where Democrats even have a chance to put some pressure on people who make a lot of money and maybe break up some of this plutocracy. And they don’t take the opportunity.”
GIRIDHARADAS: “I think that’s right. But I think the conversation we’re having around the table, which we may not have had five years ago, is reflected somewhat in Congress in the insurgent Progressive movement that has won a certain amount of things, had some leverage this year. I think if you look at Joe Biden — to Joe’s point about what Arthur Schlessinger has called ‘the cycles of American history,’ this kind of 40 or however long blocks — I think we are at a cusp of potentially another one, and you see that in Joe Biden, actually. Joe Biden comes into office 1981, votes for the Reagan government cuts and tax cuts that kind of were the seabed of this era. 40 years later — and we’ll see what happens with the Build Back Better, the third piece in his trilogy, but 40 years later he has ended up spending more money than President Obama and President Clinton, and kind of doing so less apologetically than either of them did under that Republican consensus you were talking about. And I don’t think that’s because Joe Biden had a religious conversion. I think Joe Biden lives in a conversation we’re having now, I think Joe Biden has lived long enough to see the plutocracy capture through those policies that at one point he thought was a good idea. So I think there is a turn that is happening. I this conversation reflects it, I think Joe Biden reflects it, I think some of the folks in Congress who have exerted leverage reflect it. But I think people watching this need to actually educate themselves about the choices we face. Because either it’s a plutocracy or it’s a democracy. You can’t have both.”