Paul Street — Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship

In a telephone survey of more than 1100 randomly selected U.S. adults last Spring, the New York Times reported, the paper and CBS found that the U.S. citizenry stands to the progressive and populist left on numerous key political-economic issues. Pollsters working for the two corporate media giants learned that:

*Two-thirds (66%) of Americans think that the distribution of money and wealth should be more evenly distributed among more people in the U.S.

*61% of Americans believe that in today’s economy it’s mainly just a few people at the top who have a chance to get ahead.

*83% of Americans think the gap between the rich and the poor is a problem.

*67% of Americans think the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be addressed immediately, not as some point in the future.

*57% of Americans think the U.S. government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S.

*“Almost three-quarters [74%] of respondents say that large corporations have too much influence in the county, about the double the amount that said the same of unions.”

*68% of Americans favor raising taxes on people “earning” – the pollsters’ term (a better one would be “taking”) – more than $1 million per year.

*50% of Americans support limits on money “earned” by top executives at large corporations.

*“Americans [are] skeptical of [so-called] free trade. Nearly two-thirds [63%] favored some form of trade restrictions, and more than half opposed giving the president [fast-track] authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress could only vote up or down without amendments.”

So why don't they have it? Plutocracy.

“Plutocracy” seems almost mild to describe the rotten, dollar-drenched deep state of affairs. I am reminded of Marx’s phrase “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” of Edward Herman and David Peterson’s notion that America is ruled by “an unelected dictatorship of money,” and of the late Sheldon Wolin’s notion that the United States was a “corporate-managed democracy” advancing a populace-demobilizing “inverted totalitarianism” of concentrated capitalist and imperial power. Also relevant is former Republican Congressional staffer Mark Lofgren’s suggestion that Wall Street is “the ultimate owner” of the “Deep State” that rules America beneath the more “visible” surface state and “marionette theater” of parliamentary politics and campaigns. This is because “it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice— certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee…. The corridor between lower Manhattan and Washington,” Lofgren observes, “is a well-trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and many others.” Examples are not limited to top government staff “connected with the purely financial operations of the government.” Take former leading and legendary U.S. General David Patraeus, whose perceived skills at peddling Deep State influence garnered him a highly rewarding position at a giant Wall Street private equity firm (KKR) after he left “public service” in disgrace. As Lofgren notes, “the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable.” The pay grade is much, much higher in “industry,” or, more commonly, in finance.

The only thing new is the faces.

Eighty-four years ago, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey significantly observed that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.”

Counterpunch
Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship

Paul Street