A new study reveals how the wealthy engage in ‘stealth politics’: quietly advancing unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative policies...
How can this be so? If it is true, why aren’t voters aware and angry about it?
The answer is simple: billionaires who favor unpopular, ultraconservative economic policies, and work actively to advance them (that is, most politically active billionaires) stay almost entirely silent about those issues in public. This is a deliberate choice. Billionaires have plenty of media access, but most of them choose not to say anything at all about the policy issues of the day. They deliberately pursue a strategy of what we call “stealth politics”.
We have come to this conclusion based on an exhaustive, web-based study of everything that the 100 wealthiest US billionaires have said or done, over a 10-year period, concerning several major issues of public policy....
Our findings help illuminate how the political network assembled by the Koch brothers could have become so powerful. The Kochs have had a fertile field of less-well-known conservative billionaires to cultivate for hundreds of millions of dollars in in secret, unreported contributions. The Kochs’ entrepreneurship and organizational skills, together with stealthy contributions by these little-known billionaires, have produced a political juggernaut.
Both as individuals and as contributors to Koch-type consortia, most US billionaires have given large amounts money – and many have engaged in intense activity – to advance unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative economic policies. But they have done so very quietly, saying little or nothing in public about what they are doing or why. They have avoided political accountability. We believe that this sort of stealth politics is harmful to democracy....
Benjamin I. Page, Fulcher professor of decision making; Jason Seawright, professor of political science, and Matthew J Lacombe, PhD candidate in political science, all at Northwestern University and co-authors of Billionaires and Stealth Politics (forthcoming 2018, University of Chicago Press)
See also
Le Monde — Le Blog de Thomas Piketty
Le Monde » and the billionaires
See also
Le Monde — Le Blog de Thomas Piketty
Le Monde » and the billionaires
Thomas Piketty
The irony is that they likely got filthy rich via Progressive policies such as government privileges for private credit creation, e.g. government-provided deposit insurance.
ReplyDeleteSo much then for pragmatism versus principle since Progressive pragmatism has destroyed even the one principle that Progressives believe in - that they shall always be in charge.
Ha, ha! Poetic justice.
I have a book on my kindle about how they managed to destroy the left. From think tanks to other organizations behind the scenes they controlled the narrative. The Koch Brothers even paid for copy of Atlas Shrugged to be put into every campus student room.
ReplyDeleteThis is the reason the right to seem win out, and in UK the Tories have been in power twice as long as Labour. So the right can go online and sprout their obnoxious views which is all backed by mountains of propaganda which the left can't match. They're are everywhere in the media doing it, and Jordan Peterson wouldn't do as well many debates without the billionaire propaganda machine.
I picked up a Sun newspaper in a fish and chip shop once and the Sun said Corbyn was a socialist. They didn't have to say much more: it meant communist, traitor, bad person, terrorist sympathizer, gulag, marxist, concentration camps, unpatriotic, wicked, and so on. The dumb people who read the Sun wouldn't realize they are being lied to.
@Andrew Anderson
ReplyDeleteSo much then for pragmatism versus principle since Progressive pragmatism has destroyed even the one principle that Progressives believe in - that they shall always be in charge.
That is one of the most perceptive comments I've seen in a long time.
Let me relate a internet discussion I witnessed shortly after John McCain's death, when there was a movement among American "progressives" to canonise him. It illustrates the point. For obvious reasons, I won't include the links.
One side could not go past McCain's imperialist stance. Let's call it, the anti-McCain party. The other party, the Saint McCain party, was doing its best to paint him in the best possible light. Soon enough things looked like a storm, leaves flying at random, up and down, left and right. Is not just that the discussion had developed more branches than a forest, is that it became convoluted, byzantine. Authors and philosophical criteria galore, ethics this, morality that, human nature. The works.
Frankly, I was getting really pissed off with that. I didn't realise others too -- for their own reasons -- were also growing tired of it.
That's when a Saint McCain party member intervened to settle the discussion. I won't quote him verbatim, but the gist of his intervention was that the whole discussion was irrelevant, because the slogan "McCain is the true Republican hero", opposed to the bad Repubs, worked for him, was politically expedient, it was convenient.
And, this guy added, until the "Left" (he didn't use the word "progressive" once, but you get the idea) learned the art of promoting convenient, expedient arguments, even if nobody really believed them, it was destined to lose.
What that bloke failed to realise is that he did not come up with that bit of wisdom. His advice came too late. The "progressives" learned that lesson long ago. One may call it sophistry, they call it "pragmatism", "realism". Indeed, they did a lot to write the lesson. It's time to reap what they sowed.