Must-read essay about oligarchic rule and why it must be destroyed: "Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget."

Seldom have I seen the gist of the matter explained as accurately and clearly as in the following essay by Chris Hedges.

Of course, today was eventful. If you're gleeful at this seeming power move on the eve of Super Tuesday -- Pete and Amy out for president, but very much with the "in crowd", Bloomberg's money still theoretically available to bankroll the nominee Biden, and Sanders at last deposed -- your satisfaction is fully shared by the ruling power structure.

The oligarchy will find nothing disturbing in a center-right "democratic" platform stripped of meaningful content, one that excludes any mention of correcting (read: attacking) inequality. Even if this "GOP Light" capitulation were enough to defeat Trump, nothing much would change with the fundamental issues, would it? The tinkle-down would continue, as it has since RayGun was in charge.

Until you grasp this basic fact, center-right moderation borne of fear is just more of the same oligarchy fluffing. You'll be sorry; but then again, that's usually the way it plays out. We'll have ineffectively treated the symptoms yet again, while allowing the disease to rage on.

Click through and read the whole damn thing. Get off those personality cult fetishes, and FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget (Common Dreams)

The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. Open, nonviolent revolt against the oligarchic state is our only hope.

Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity—the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests — are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life.

Oligarchic rule must be destroyed. If we fail, our democracy, and finally our species, will become extinct.

The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution.

The United States stood on the cusp of revolution—a fact President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence — amid the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s. Roosevelt responded by aggressively curbing the power of the oligarchs. The federal government dealt with massive unemployment by creating 12 million jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), making the government the largest employer in the country. It legalized unions, many of which had been outlawed, and through the National Labor Relations Act empowered organizing. It approved banking regulations, including the Emergency Banking Act, the Banking Act and the Securities Act, all in 1933, to prevent another stock market crash. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided the equivalent in today’s money of $9.88 billion for relief operations in cities and states. The Democratic president heavily taxed the rich and corporations. (The Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was still taxing the highest earners at 91%.) Roosevelt’s administration instituted programs such as Social Security and a public pension program. It provided financial assistance to tenant farmers and migrant workers. It funded arts and culture. It created the United States Housing Authority and instituted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the minimum wage and set a limit on mandatory work hours. This heavy government intervention lifted the country out of the Great Depression. It also made Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented fourth term, and the Democratic Party wildly popular among working and middle-class families. The Democratic Party, should it resurrect such policies, would win every election in a landslide.

But the New Deal was the bête noire of the oligarchs. They began to undo Roosevelt’s New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic — class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate.

The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious and undemocratic, to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination ...

If you identify as "Democrat" and are enamored with Bloomberg, you're just running scared -- and you're not a "democrat."

"Swapping kakistocracy for oligarchy will not undo the damage of the Trump presidency. It will merely calcify the rot."

Kakistocracy via Trump: "government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state."

Oligarchy via Bloomberg: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."

ABAT: "As bad as Trump."

It isn't only that moderates identifying as "liberal" really aren't liberal. Apparently they're also clueless and terrified, positing that "liberalism" is devoid of meaning, and something to be discarded because after all, it isn't as if there exists reasons to be "for" something instead of merely "against" something else.

Inequality borne of capital accumulation is the problem. There are far more withouts than withs. Pitchfork lube?

Now you're talking.

Michael Bloomberg Isn’t a Smug Technocratic Centrist. He’s Something Far Worse, by Ross Barkan (Jacobin)

An admirer of dictators, a lowbrow misogynist, an unfiltered bigot — Michael Bloomberg is the only Democratic contender who might actually be worse than Trump.

... Oligarchy Personified

The best way to understand Bloomberg is to study his twelve years leading America’s largest city. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: there were things to like about Bloomberg’s New York, particularly if you were white and carried a degree of wealth. He was, to his credit, an early supporter of same-sex marriage. He cared about protecting the environment. It was a good thing when smoking was banned from restaurants and bars. Bloomberg stuck up for pedestrians and cyclists. The 311 system simplified the process of lodging complaints.

All of this is easily negated by the pain and terror he wrought. If you were a Muslim in Bloomberg’s New York, the NYPD was deployed to spy, without cause, on your mosque. Bloomberg’s police infiltrated Muslim student groups and put informants in mosques. The blanket surveillance, the NYPD would later admit, didn’t produce any tangible leads. Three lawsuits were eventually settled after Bloomberg left office.

Around the time Bloomberg announced his presidential campaign, he cynically ventured to a church in a black Brooklyn neighborhood to apologize for his police department’s maniacal abuse of stop-and-frisk tactics. Under Bloomberg, police stops — which overwhelmingly targeted black and Latino men — increased from 97,296 in 2002 to a peak of 685,724 in 2011. The stops, for these young men, were traumatizing, as heavily armed police officers stalked and then aggressively searched their bodies for no justifiable cause. In 2013, a federal judge ruled the practice unconstitutional.

Rather than accept responsibility, Bloomberg fought back, appealing the ruling. “There is just no question that stop-and-frisk has saved countless lives,” Bloomberg thundered in 2013. “I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids.”

Bloomberg was unrepentant. Police power could do no wrong. In 2011, armed police stormed Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night to forcefully break up Occupy Wall Street, a movement that kicked off a public reckoning with America’s surging income inequality. The protest ultimately offended his sensibilities. “I don’t appreciate the bashing of all the hard-working people who live and work here and pay the taxes that support our city,” Bloomberg said at the time.

Bloomberg’s total lack of interest in staunching his own city’s spiraling inequality fueled homelessness and displacement. Rezonings in formerly working-class neighborhoods spurred luxury development and increasingly unsustainable rent hikes. His lavish donations to Republicans in the State Senate ensured New York’s laws protecting tenants would remain in a weakened state as long as he remained in office. Public housing further crumbled under his watch. And in 2011, Bloomberg killed a housing subsidy program for homeless families, directly triggering the homelessness crisis New York is still grappling with today ...

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

(I'm on vacation, and this is a repeat from November 23, 2017)

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.

"David Koch was a rich man who used his fortune to influence our politics with an eye toward further enriching himself."

One malign influencer has gone, and of course that's for the greater good, but Koch's passing does nothing to alter the rot because his money remains right here, undoubtedly to be used for the same nefarious ends as before. 

David Koch Got What He Paid For, by John Nichols (The Nation)

The late Koch brother bought influence using PACs and other proxies. A prank call to Scott Walker revealed the truth about how the Kochs had their way with Republican politicians.

 ... Enter Scott Walker, a struggling Wisconsin politician who was angling for a governorship. The Kochs threw their support behind Walker, with David Koch declaring: “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.” According to The Palm Beach Post, where the quote originally appeared, Koch used “we” to refer to Americans for Prosperity, the group that he and his brother used as one of their vehicles for manipulating our politics.

Even before he knew the Kochs personally, Walker recognized what the brothers had done for him, and for ambitious young men like him. Spending by the Kochs, via direct donations and independent expenditures, played a definitional role in generating the “Republican wave” of 2010, the year Walker was elected.

Walker’s understanding of this debt led to an incident that revealed much of what Americans will remember about David Koch, even though he was not an actual participant. In February 2011, as tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, librarians, and their allies marched in opposition to Walker’s attack on unions and collective-bargaining rights for public employees, the phone rang in the governor’s office. The caller identified himself as David Koch and was put through to Walker.

The caller—a brilliant prankster (the late Ian Murphy) who was pretending to be Koch—was soon trading notes with the governor about the “vested interest” that Koch Industries had in Walker’s assault on unions. The 20-minute conversation revealed the obsequious deference of an elected Republican governor to the benefactors of his 2010 race—and, as it would turn out, of the campaigns that followed for Walker, who faced a citizen-demanded recall and tough reelection fights before he was finally defeated in 2018.

Here’s the critical exchange from 2011:

Koch caller: “Well, I tell you what, Scott: once you crush these bastards I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time.”

Walker: “All right, that would be outstanding. Thanks for all the support in helping us move the cause forward…”

Koch caller: “Absolutely. And, you know, we have a little bit of a vested interest as well. ”

Walker: “Well, that’s just it.”

Yes, that is just it.

The manipulations of democracy that David Koch and his brother funded—extreme gerrymandering, defenses of an Electoral College that has prevented popular-vote winners from becoming president, voter suppression schemes, and assaults on unions—did much to elect Republicans like Walker. But the most recent Republican president has turned the movement David and Charles Koch envisioned toward extremes that more closely mirror the fever dreams of their father. And if Democrats ever get their act together, they will, for the sake of not just their party but the future of society and the planet, be required to upend what the Kochs have done.

So the full measure of David Koch’s influence has yet to be made.

"The ultra-rich are benefitting from disaster capitalism as institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode."

My birthday went well, and renewed thanks to all expressing good wishes, but to be honest any thoughts of my fine day Saturday are tempered with sadness and frustration over the two mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

As such it's important to understand what too few of us care to consider, that this American system we blindly tout as "best ever, blah blah" is functioning exactly as designed, albeit not as we delude ourselves into believing it is designed, because the point of capitalism at this amok stage of its development is for violence to be fed into the machine and compounded violence to come gushing right back out the other side.

Follow the money, people.

Oligarchic government for the sake of obscene capital accumulation among the few can persist only by dividing and conquering the many, so that we fight each other and not the cancer itself, and accordingly, most of what I read on a daily basis represents little more than nitpicking over symptoms, dividing us even further.

Capitalism is diseased, and the disease mocks us as we kill time by debating the plot lines of the most recent comic book film.

#EatTheRich

From Trump to Johnson, nationalists are on the rise – backed by billionaire oligarchs, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

The ultra-rich are benefitting from disaster capitalism as institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode

... the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words of their favoured theorist, Steve Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.

Followed by advice for the "centrist" Democrats; in the UK, as in the USA.

Being Anti-Boris Is Not Enough, by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobite)

Attacks on character and legal issues didn’t stop Berlusconi and Trump, and they won’t stop Boris Johnson. Sticking to Corbyn’s strong democratic socialist message is the way to beat him.

... Compare his barren offering with Labour’s: introducing a real living wage, nationalizing rail, mail, energy, and water, building 100,000 council houses per year, banning zero-hour contracts, introducing free childcare, abolishing tuition fees, ending punitive benefit sanctions, stopping the privatization of the National Health Service, a transition to green energy producing thousands of jobs. No wonder the Tories want a culture war.

Boris Johnson will soon face a defining moment of his premiership. On October 31, he will either have to abandon a substantial portion of his base or drag the country into an unpopular no-deal Brexit. No amount of “Churchillian” spirit — and his attempts to invoke this during his speech were almost comically weak — will overcome this political reality.

But for Labour the coming weeks are also important. There will be considerable pressure to join an anti-Boris campaign, abandoning the party’s transformational program to coalesce with whatever establishment ghoul finds the Prime Minister’s latest scandal too unseemly.

The price of such an alliance has already been made clear by Jo Swinson, newly elected leader of the Lib Dems: ditch Jeremy Corbyn. Take Boris on not with a plan to improve millions of people’s lives but with vagaries about “progressive values,” outrage over his transgressions against established politics, and a nostalgia for the recent past.

It’s easy to see the appeal of uniting all those who oppose Boris Johnson. But diluting Labour’s politics is exactly the wrong way to beat him. The only way to stop the political and moral void Johnson brings to Downing Street consuming the entire political horizon is to make it confront day-to-day hardships. Hardships his party and his class have forced on so many for so long.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.