"What else could that buy?" (A military can only get so powerful.) What's been happening is that wealth concentration keeps pushing the Democratic party further to the right and the Republicans react accordingly. The U.S. has always been a plutocracy but the hard shift to the right really began during the Clinton administration. See: See also: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Lawmakers Call For Reinstatement of Glass-Steagall In 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed by President Clinton at the urging his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words - and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds. Rubin then left the treasury department and became a director of Citigroup, which benefited from his efforts by expanding and becoming a "financial supermarket" as they called it. In 2010, President Obama appointed Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both Clinton treasury secretaries, as his top economic advisers. During the Clinton years, Summers worked to prevent Congress from regulating derivatives and other exotic instruments. As economist Dean Baker pointed out, Obama selecting Rubin and Summers to deal with the financial crisis was "a bit like turning to Osama Bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism." In December 2014, Obama himself helped whip House votes in favor of the "cromnibus" spending bill, which included a provision that gutted the already weak 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Law.
