Plutocracy and Democracy Don't Mix

[Madeline]

Now, most people know what plutocracy is: the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy. Plutocracy is not an American word and wasn't meant to become an American phenomenon - some of our founders deplored what they called "the veneration of wealth." But plutocracy is here, and a pumped up Citigroup even boasted of coining a variation on the word- "plutonomy", which describes an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer and that government helps them do it. Five years ago Citigroup decided the time had come to "bang the drum on plutonomy."

And bang they did. Here are some excerpts from the document "Revisiting Plutonomy;"

"Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper... [and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years."

"...the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the United States - the plutonomists in our parlance - have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surged in the US... [and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor."
"... [and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. Because the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact."

I'll repeat that: "The dynamics of plutonomy are still intact." That was the case before the Great Collapse of 2008, and it's the case today, two years after the catastrophe. But the plutonomists are doing just fine. Even better in some cases, thanks to our bailout of the big banks.

As for the rest of the country: Listen to this summary in The Economist - no Marxist journal -- of a study by Pew Research:

More than half of all workers today have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household. Nearly six in ten Americans have canceled or cut back on holidays. About a fifth say their mortgages are underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have moved back in with their parents. Fewer than half of all adults expect their children to have a higher standard of living than theirs, and more than a quarter say it will be lower.

For many Americans the great recession has been the sharpest trauma since The Second World War, wiping out jobs, wealth and hope itself.

Let that sink in: For millions of garden-variety Americans, the audacity of hope has been replaced by a paucity of hope.

Time for a confession. The legendary correspondent Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. Here is mine: Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what's happening to our political system is corruption - a deep, systemic corruption. I urge you to seek out the recent edition of Harper's Magazine. The former editor Roger D. Hodge brilliantly dissects how democracy has gone on sale in America. Ideally, he writes, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our pretended representatives. But voting is the beginning of civil virtue, not its end, and the focus of real power is elsewhere. Voters still "matter" of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the actual form of political influence - money.

Shades of Howard Zinn: It's Okay If It's Impossible | CommonDreams.org

Your thoughts?

 

[topspin]

Plutocrats are people too!

 

[loosecannon]

I didn't read the OP because the font is incorrigible.

But the premise and Zinn's credibility as a historian are credible.

Democracy and plutocracy are definitely adverse. Democracy seeks to distribute political power evenly across the population: whereas plutocracy seeks to hoard political power in as few hands as possible.

It is poli power not votes that matters.

 

[Madeline]

When she heard the news, Connie Brasel cried like a baby.

For years she had worked at minimum-wage jobs, until 17 years ago, when she was hired by the Whirlpool refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana. She was making $ 18.44 an hour when Whirlpool announced earlier this year that it was closing the operation and moving it to Mexico. She wept. I’m sure many of the other eleven hundred workers who lost their jobs wept too; they had seen their ticket to the middle class snatched from their hands. The company defended its decision by claiming high costs, underused capacity, and the need to stay competitive. Those excuses didn’t console Connie Brasel. “I was becoming part of something bigger than me,” she told Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times. “Whirlpool was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She was not only sad, she was mad. “They didn’t get world-class quality because they had the best managers. They got world-class quality because of the United States and because of their workers.”

Among those workers were Natalie Ford, her husband and her son; all three lost their jobs. “It’s devastating,” she told the Times. Her father had worked at Whirlpool before them. Now, “There aren’t any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?”

And what about the country? Between 2001 and 2008, about 40,000 US manufacturing plants closed. Six million factory jobs have disappeared over the past dozen years, representing one in three manufacturing jobs. Natalie Ford said to the Times what many of us are wondering: “I don’t know how without any good-paying jobs here in the United States people are going to pay for their health care, put their children through school.”

Now, if Connie Brasel and Natalie Ford lived in South Carolina, they might have been lucky enough to get a job with the new BMW plant that recently opened there and advertised that the company would hire one thousand workers. Among the applicants? According to the Washington Post; “a former manager of a major distribution center for Target; a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four western states; a supervisor at a plastics recycling firm. Some held college degrees and resumes in other fields where they made more money.” They will be paid $15 an hour – about half of what BMW workers earn in Germany

In polite circles, among our political and financial classes, this is known as “the free market at work.” No, it’s “wage repression,” and it’s been happening in our country since around 1980. I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it’s the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.

That’s wage repression.

Another story in the Times caught my eye a few weeks after the one about Connie Brasel and Natalie Ford. The headline read: “Industries Find Surging Profits in Deeper Cuts.” Nelson Schwartz reported that despite falling motorcycle sales, Harley-Davidson profits are soaring – with a second quarter profit of $71 million, more than triple what it earned the previous year. Yet Harley-Davidson has announced plans to cut fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred more jobs by the end of next year; this on top of the 2000 job cut last year.

The story note: “This seeming contradiction – falling sales and rising profits – is one reason the mood on Wall Street is so much more buoyant than in households, where pessimism runs deep and unemployment shows few signs of easing.”

There you see the two Americas. A buoyant Wall Street; a doleful Main Street. The Connie Brasels and Natalie Fords – left to sink or swim on their own. There were no bailouts for them.

Meanwhile, Matt Krantz reports in USA TODAY that “Cash is gushing into company’s coffers as they report what’s shaping up to be a third-consecutive quarter of sharp earning increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money or stuffing it under their mattresses.” And what are their plans for this money? Again, the Washington Post:

“…. Sitting on these unprecedented levels of cash, U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in droves. So far this year, firms have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year… But the rise in buybacks signals that many companies are still hesitant to spend their cash on the job-generating activities that could produce economic growth.”

That’s how financial capitalism works today: Conserving cash rather than bolstering hiring and production; investing in their own shares to prop up their share prices and make their stock more attractive to Wall Street. To hell with everyone else.

Hear the chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Ethan Harris, who told the Times: “There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy. Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”

Or the chief economist for Credit Suisse in New York, Neal Soss: As companies have wrung more savings out of their work forces, causing wages and salaries barely to budge from recession lows, “profits have staged a vigorous recovery, jumping 40 percent between late 2008 and the first quarter of 2010.”

t r u t h o u t | Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!"

 

[Madeline]

I have been asking for some time now, why do so many ordinary Americans worship the rich?

I never a sensible reply.

 

[Trajan]

money is a tool. money is not finite.the populace is not stangant with the exception of the underclass, not money BUT politics and lust for power has created.

the 'greatest' conquerors in the world have never been driven by money, they are driven by power.

Zinn had an overly productive imagination, a beneficial totalitarian plutocracy based on moneyed principals may sound pat, but its not.

 

[Madeline]

money is a tool. money is not finite.the populace is not stangant with the exception of the underclass, not money BUT politics and lust for power has created.

the 'greatest' conquerors in the world have never been driven by money, they are driven by power.

Zinn had an overly productive imagination, a beneficial totalitarian plutocracy based on moneyed principals may sound pat, but its not.

No, but a malevolent plutocracy sure is.

 

[Si modo]

Common Dreams and Truthout...

 

[william the wie]

Status and economic output is supposed to reflect the actual survival rating of the participants and their descendants, plutocracy is the claim that this competition has been corrupted. Has it been?

The Fed bubbles going back to 1958 the last year in which the CPI actually declined argues that this has and probably to a lesser extent still is indeed the case.

I would argue that in a federation which the US purportedly is democracy is a plutocracy of political bosses and their economic agents who are usually the same thing.

Plutocracy requires either a static or at least a predictable model of the economic future.

Communications and logistics needed for defense or offense create the conditions that collapse plutocracy through internal and external competition and that is what is happening now but the process is not yet complete.

The reemergence of mate selective competition on a more level playing field is a normal activity. The standard political promises of: a chicken in every pot (Henry IV's campaign slogan in the war of the three Henries); Two girls for every boy (one of the GOP's unofficial slogans for their moneymen); money for nothing and your chicks for free (one of the unofficial Dem slogans for their union based ground game) are not sustainable. The costs of growing 365 chickens a year for every family in France in the late 1500s was prohibitive as the current dynasty in Argentina is demonstrating with the shrinkage of the nation's herds and flocks. As to the GOP and the Dems has anyone told these idiots that women vote or that the guys who end up out in the cold as a result of these policies are likely to get resentful? The beneficiaries of the plutocracy are getting kicked off the inflationary gravy train and are upset. That is all that I see happening.

 

[Madeline]

You see the masses revolting against the overlords, william? Seems to me just the oipposite it occurring...the Roves and Murdochs and Kockes are sweetly seductive these days, and many of the masses are enchanted.

 

[Madeline]

Common Dreams and Truthout...

Feel free to disregard anything you may read that is printed by a source you dislike, Si. I am sure this will streamline your descent into mental slavery and anyway, a dissenting opinion is O so much trouble to compose, whilst writing a two word bitch turd-post is so much more "efficient".

 

[Si modo]

Common Dreams and Truthout...

Feel free to disregard anything you may read that is printed by a source you dislike, Si. I am sure this will streamline your descent into mental slavery and anyway, a dissenting opinion is O so much trouble to compose, whilst writing a two word bitch turd-post is so much more "efficient".

Pig.

 

[Madeline]

What am I meant to divine from your one-word reply?

 

[editec]

A plutocracy is sort of inevitable since we live in a Democratic Republic that is also capitalist.


I mean seriously...how could a class of elite with power not develop given the political and economic systems we adhere to?

The USA have never NOT been dominated by a plutocracy.

The problem as I see it isn't that the plutocrats exist, but that they aren't doing a very good job for the REST OF US.

 

[Si modo]

What am I meant to divine from your one-word reply?

That you are a pig.

It's not rocket science.

 

[editec]

I have been asking for some time now, why do so many ordinary Americans worship the rich?

I never a sensible reply.

Stockholm syndrome.

 

[topspin]

being rich is easy if your not afraid of hard work and persistance, far too many are though.

 

[editec]

being rich is easy if your not afraid of hard work and persistance, far too many are though.

So everybody can be rich except they're too lazy?

Interesting theory.

 

[topspin]

being rich is easy if your not afraid of hard work and persistance, far too many are though.

So everybody can be rich except they're too lazy?

Interesting theory.

everybody with an IQ above room temperature, there is plenty evidence. Of course it offends the limosine liberals sensabilities non the less.

 

[Madeline]

being rich is easy if your not afraid of hard work and persistance, far too many are though.

This is so moronic I hardly know where to begin. So if I am born black, poor, mildly retarded and into an abusive household and *shockers* I dun grow up to be rich, it's my fault?