Excellent Documentation of How a Capitalist ‘Democracy’ Actually Works

1 August 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Here, from America’s National Public Radio (NPR, which is the 8th-largest news source to the American people, reaching 20% of Americans, versus the #1 Fox reaching 38%, #2 NBC reaching 35%, and #3 CNN reaching 33%), is an article that documents (but — of course — without announcing), that BOTH of America’s two billionaires-controlled political Parties (Republicans and Democrats) serve (as the scientific findings all confirm is the case) ONLY America’s billionaires, and not at all the U.S. public:

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https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/nx-s1-5870960/republican-ads-healthcare-medicaid-2026-midterms

https://web.archive.org/web/20260731154356/https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/nx-s1-5870960/republican-ads-healthcare-medicaid-2026-midterms

https://archive.is/NNdx2

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/X5d1H

“Ahead of midterms, Republicans run ads after cutting healthcare funds”

JULY 31, 20265:00 AM ET, Rahul Mukherjee

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In Nebraska, Americans begin to lose Medicaid under Trump’s work rules

With the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, there are now stiffer requirements for insurance and reduced funding for state programs. About 10 million fewer people are expected to have health insurance in 2034, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office.

There were about 3 million fewer people enrolled through the health insurance exchanges in early 2026 than when the bill passed, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.

Since then, Republicans have failed to recover on the issue, with only a third of total voters approving of the Trump administration’s handling of the cost of healthcare, according to KFF’s most recent poll on the issue from April.

Republican candidates are addressing the unpopular reforms early, according to Daniel Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Focusing on reform plays into a strength of the Republican Party. According to KFF, Republicans outperform Democrats on “addressing fraud and waste in government health care programs” when respondents rated which party they trust more in different areas of healthcare policy.

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“Democratic lawmakers were more trusted on healthcare, and Republican lawmakers were more trusted on the economy, so what happens when it’s an economic healthcare issue?” Kirzinger said. “There is an opportunity to gain that lane and be the party that people trust.”

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A report by the Urban Institute shows that ACA premiums have risen nationwide 21.7% between 2025 and 2026. Healthcare policy expert Jonathan Oberlander says this is linked to the Trump administration’s hands-off approach toward the healthcare industry.

“[Republican] policy, both on the One Big Beautiful Bill and not renewing the enhanced subsidies and rules and regulations, has been to make it harder for people to get health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act and through Medicaid,” he said. “When you take Medicaid away from people, when you take those enhanced subsidies away, it really increases the costs that they face.”

Looking forward

The majority of the changes and cuts enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill are expected to go into effect after the midterm elections. While some healthcare cuts have already gone into effect, such as the removal of ACA premium tax credits, many other requirements will begin next year, such as frequent redeterminations of eligibility and work requirements, according to Medicaid Matters’ Lara Kassel.

Key changes, like the reduction of Medicaid funding, don’t occur until after this year’s midterms, so candidates see this as an opportunity to emphasize other, popular parts of the law, like tax cuts. Still, Republican lawmakers are laying the groundwork for blame if the opposing party gains power in the future, according to political scientist Daniel Hopkins.

“Some of the key changes, for instance, [like] the reductions in Medicaid funding, are scheduled to kick in years down the road,” he said. “That time disconnect makes it really hard for voters to tangibly feel and react to changes that are in the future.”

That delay will likely set up healthcare to be a top issue for the 2028 election, where Democrats are expected to attack Republicans on the fallout and both parties will have open primaries for the presidency.

“That phasing provides a bit of a buffer for Republicans from the political pain of these cuts,” Oberlander predicted. “[The healthcare cuts will] be fully exposed in 2028.”

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That is the way the political game is actually played. The billionaires win; everybody else loses, constantly (it goes on decade after decade).

In other words: Congressional Republicans get re-elected by fooling voters that congressional Republicans fight against “waste, fraud, and abuse, by government,” while Democrats become re-elected by fooling voters that congressional Democrats care about the poor. Thus, voters always face lesser-or-two-evils false choices, since, actually, BOTH ‘sides’ represent ONLY billionaires, against the public.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, the billionaires’ net worths are almost entirely corporate stocks and bonds; so, since a billionaire rates him/her self by one’s own wealth (including tax-exempt ‘charitable’ donations) in the rankings (with some billionaires not even caring about including the ‘charitable’ donations in it), their performance is a constant wealth–competition against each other, which wealth depends almost entirely upon the values of the corporations that they are the most heavily invested in. They don’t care about human equality of rights (they don’t believe in it, don’t respect it) and they don’t care at all about the poor (who, if in debt, are negative net worth and so more bad than good in their view anyway — so, just get rid of them).

In short, an electoral ‘democracy’ degenerates inevitably into outright fascism, which is what we ever-increasingly have.

Barack Obama’s “Affordable Care Act” Obamacare was actuallly designed this way; he chose the conservative Democratic Senator Max Baucus (instead of the progressive Ted Kennedy)  to design it in league with the pharmaceutical companies, so as to maximize healthcare profits, and to fund this rip-off by taxing the rest of the public for Obamacare’s massive federal subsidies. So, the public still don’t know about President Obama’s having lied about his healthcare plan while running for office and then, once in office, after suckering his voters that way, he secretly and privately fought against including the features of it that would lower its prices and its costs (such as his promised “Public Option”) and he worked secretly with the Republicans to block those features of his plan so as to protect the healthcare-industry’s investors, as a result of which, both the plan’s prices to consumers and its costs to the federal Treasury have been far higher than he promised and that was passed into law and delivered to the public; and, so, congressional Democrats today have been refusing to accept the Republican Trump Administration’s eliminating the federal subsidies that keep Obamacare (the ‘Affordable Care Act’) going, and congressional Republicans have taken advantage of the opportunity to slash healthcare benefits to the poor. The Republicans have been trying to do this ever since 2010 — before the Act was even passed into law. And all the while, America continues having the highest per-person cost, and lowest-quality, healthcare of all industrialized countries, and so the healthcare corporations are very profitable but not only does the U.S. rank 50th on life-expectancy (longevity), but the public are being bankrupted by America’s uniquely high healthcare prices in order to be able to stay alive. So, Governmental shut-downs over the increasingly military-dominated federal budgets aren’t a result of the public or of what they want (which Obama had promised) but of the billionaires who fund the careers of the politicians (including both Parties) keeping their heist of the public going for high profits to investors. And that’s just one example of how this ‘democracy’ produces a very dissatisfied public.

And the billionaires-controlled ‘news’ (propaganda) media hide from the public that the billionaires (both Republican and Democratic) THEMSELVES did this to them.

At all levels, in national and local affairs, and in international affairs, there is thus increasing public concern about the failures of government, and the growing dangers of catastrophic results therefrom, such as increasing wars and possibility of a WW3, and uncontrolled global warming, as well as increasing public perceptions that one’s Government is (or else is descending into) a dictatorship. In many countries, the belief in global progress is becoming replaced by a fear of global decline into chaos and ultimately dictatorship. Nationally, and globally throughout the world, there is prevalent, in increasing numbers of nations, a belief that one’s Government is “on the wrong track”. How can the Government be a democracy if more of its citizens believe that it is “on the wrong track” than think it is “on the right track?” It cannot. Such a Government does not represent its people. Consequently, the very CONCEPT of “democracy” — how it ought to be defined (or RE-defined) — is rising to the fore. The questions now aren’t only practical, they are also theoretical; they are about fundamental assumptions, not merely about how those assumptions ‘ought’ to be applied. Because false assumptions ought NOT to be applied — they should instead be REPLACED. Here is how I propose that it be done.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.