The Great American Heist You’re Paying For 

On the Fourth of July President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that constitutes one of the largest transfers of wealth in history taking money away from working people and giving it to the nation s elite The bill is the culmination of years of giveaways that have allowed corporations and billionaires to tighten their grip on the leadership The law triples the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement slashes taxes for the majority of wealthy and pays for it all by cutting healthcare care for as countless as million people and gutting funding for constituents guidance and meals for school children The reconciliation process goes hand-in-hand with all the executive orders that we ve been seeing says Rep Summer Lee D-Pa It goes hand-in-hand with all of the different things that DOGE was pretending to uncover It goes hand-in-hand with so much of Project So this is all just one kind of super villain packed into this what they call this one big bill that s like thousands of pages This week on The Intercept Briefing Lee speaks to host Akela Lacy about what Democrats are doing to meet the moment and how they can break through Republican messaging on the bill Democrats are screaming into a void Lee says The reality is that we have been talking about Medicaid and it s very hard to break through in a -hour news cycle and this big bubble where we are in a sea of red coverage conservative media conservative narratives disinformation misinformation And to break through in that moment takes more than just us At the heart of it all is one core matter the power of money in politics Lee says She introduced a bill to ban super PACs the kind of groups that helped elect Trump and have pushed Democrats to the right You cannot have a democracy and super PACs Lee says If you are able to influence and shape the politics shape information what information gets out which information doesn t because you have more money then we don t have a level playing field Lee knows the power of super PACs firsthand She was first elected in even after the super PAC for the American Israel General Affairs Committee or AIPAC spent millions of dollars against her We have to decide Do we want a democracy or do we want a system where if somebody gets on our nerves we can just unleash the super PAC and have plausible deniability It s not just the Israel lobby Lee says Money in politics is at the root of intractable fights against the biggest issues of our time Why can t people be housed in the communities that they call home without spending over half of their salary Why can t we raise the minimum wage Why can t we correct unit on the atmosphere emergency Why can t we do any of those things If you go back and peel even just one layer back on all of those questions the answer is the same each time It is money in politics Lee says So if money in politics is not your number one issue it ought to be You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen The post The Great American Heist You re Paying For appeared first on The Intercept