Paul Krugman — Challenging the Oligarchy [Review of Robert Reich's Saving Capitalism]

Paul Krugman reviews Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by Robert B. Reich

The New York Review of Books
Challenging the Oligarchy
Paul Krugman

Michael Kirkwood — The End of Communism in Russia Meant the End of Democracy in the West – Alexander Zinoviev

Alexander Zinoviev, along with Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, was one of the three great intellectual giants who became dissidents during the late Soviet period.

This remarkable and prophetic interview was originally published in 1999 in the French Figaro Magazine. Its original title was: ”The West and Russia - A Controlled Catastrophe”

An annual conference attended by Russian and foreign luminaries and Zinoviev fans in memory of Zinoviev's work will be held in Moscow on October 27.

Translated from Russian especially for RI by Sergei Malygin and Andrey Medvedev
Alexander Zinoviev was exiled from the Soviet Union with his wife and daughter on 6th August 1978, principally on account of his writings on the nature of Soviet communism.

They spent the next twenty years based in Munich. On 30th July 1999 they returned to Moscow, principally on account of his writings on the West. Zinoviev died in 2006 and his remains are buried in the Novodeviche convent.

These few lines suggest that he must have been a remarkable man. He was. Born in 1922 to a Russian peasant family, he was the sixth of eleven children who became an international phenomenon in a variety of fields: philosophy (particularly in the field of many-valued logic), literature (novels, novellas, poetry), politics, sociology, and painting. The two books which, for me, best illustrate the reasons for his exile and rehabilitation are, respectively, The Reality of Communism and The West.

This, Zinoviev’s last interview before returning to Russia provides an excellent example of his unmatched forensic gifts as a sociologist.

I look forward to sharing with friends of RI further details of the life and work of Aleksander Aleksandrovich in future columns.

Michael Kirkwood | Leading specialist on Zinoviev, professor emeritus, University of Glasgow.

Zinoviev was quite prescient in his day, but his conclusion that neoliberal globalization is the new totalitarian future may be overly pessimistic in light of recent pushback. Good read anyway, and a warning of the danger to be averted — the illiberalism of "liberalism."

Russia Insider
The End of Communism in Russia Meant the End of Democracy in the West – Alexander Zinoviev

Michael Kirkwood

Peter Radford — Plutocracy?

The 2012 Page, Bartels, and Seawright paper makes interesting reading. I came across it via the Krugman blog and recommend it to you all.

The key is that this is a first small attempt to quantify the difference in perspective between the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘general public’. The paper is thus an important step along the way towards understanding why it is that so much of our political discourse seems totally blind to the reality as experienced by the vast majority of our citizens.
If, like me, you have come to believe that our policy makers have a narrow focus and that their focus overlaps more with that of the wealthy and/or big business than it does with ordinary folk, then this paper is a start to getting empirical support for that feeling.
The paper’s concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full:

“Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their political preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy.”

This is the point: the ability of wealth to affect policy, substantially increased by recent trends and legal decisions, is subverting the very foundation of America’s self-image and self-justification. It is no longer a democracy, or is nearly so, and is rapidly declining into plutocracy.….

The Radford Free Press
Plutocracy?Peter Radford

Also Market Truths Or Obscured Views?

Trump Cast as Perfect Ringleader of Corporate Media Circus — Jessica Desvarieux interviews Robert W. McChesney

Despite outspending the world in elections, U.S. voter turnout is historically low because of media's focus on the interest of the elite, says University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney

Video and transcript

Real New Newsnetwork
Trump Cast as Perfect Ringleader of Corporate Media Circus
Jessica Desvarieux interviews Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

John Helmer — New Cat’s Paw Award – Financial Times Makes Igor Zyuzin Hero For Standing Up To Vladimir Putin

In publishing on Russia, there comes a time when a writer, journalist, bank analyst, television presenter, or academic produces something so lacking in truthfulness, so replete with fawning and meretriciousness, that this website must kill and skin another goat; dry out the vellum; and have a fresh scroll inscribed with the Cat’s Paw – that’s the Personal Abasement Award (PAW).

This award is designed to encourage accountability and ethical reporting on Russia. The PAW committee decided to suspend the Cat’s Paw awards when the start of the Ukraine civil war threatened to overwhelm the supply of vellum and the goat population on which it depends. The goats who have earned the Cat’s PAW scroll have also multiplied exponentially.

At the Financial Times’ Moscow Bureau there has been a tradition of viewing Russian business figures as agents of regime change, making them appear the harbingers of democracy, and pitting them against the Kremlin; that is, once Boris Yeltsin’s destruction of the Russian parliament in 1993, and his election steal in 1996, failed to do the Russian reform trick. For FT reporters this has meant advertorial promotion of the oligarchs applying to the City of London to raise debt and equity finance; buying London and country real estate; promoting themselves with British public relations and deterring investigation of their business with British libel law firms.

The FT reporters have been closely pressed by rivals at The Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, and other print and broadcast media....

TPTB have never forgiven Putin for taming the oligarchs to whom Yeltsin and the Harvard Boyz turned Russia over to. This is what regime change in Russia is really all about — reinstalling the rule of the oligarchs in an oligarchic democracy modeled on the developed countries of the West. This their model for neoliberal globalization, and they will do whatever it takes to impose it.

Dances with Bears

New Cat’s Paw Award – Financial Times Makes Igor Zyuzin Hero For Standing Up To Vladimir Putin

John Helmer

Don Quijones — New TTIP Leak Confirms EU Proposal Is Covert Attack Against Basic Democratic Values

According to a leaked European Commission proposal in the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, EU member state legislative initiatives will have to be vetted for potential impacts on private business interests.

The proposal forms part of a wider plan for so-called “regulatory cooperation”. Civil society groups have already denounced earlier iterations of this plan as being a tool to stop or roll back regulation intended to protect the public interest. The new elements in the leaked proposal expand the problem, according to civil society organisations.

Civil society groups have condemned the “regulatory exchange” plan as an affront to parliamentary democracy. “This is an insult to citizens, elected politicians and democracy itself”, says Max Bank of Lobby Control.

The “regulatory exchange” proposal will force laws drafted by democratically-elected politicians through an extensive screening process. This process will occur throughout the 78 States (50 U.S. states and 28 EU ones), not just in Brussels and Washington DC. Laws will be evaluated on whether or not they are compatible with the economic interests of major companies. Responsibility for this screening will lie with the Regulatory Cooperation Body, a permanent, undemocratic, and unaccountable conclave of European and American technocrats.

What's that about democracy and capitalism being joined at the hip as mutually necessary? Oh, right. More BS to dupe the rubes and scam the "the little people," you know, those that pay the taxes.

Aristotle observed that the only way to implement true democracy in a lasting way is through random selection among citizens, e.g., using a lottery. Anything short of this will inevitably degrade into oligarchy.

Raging Bull-Shit
New TTIP Leak Confirms EU Proposal Is Covert Attack Against Basic Democratic Values
Don Quijones

Money in politics - links

And they call this democracy?

AlterNet
Koch Brothers Endorse Scott Walker For President
Stephen Rosenfeld

The Richest 0.01 Percent of Americans Gave 42 Percent of Political Donations in 2012
Stephen Wolf, Daily Kos

Vox
Report: The Koch brothers want Scott Walker to be president

Andrew Propkop

Bill Moyers & Co.
Money in Politics Is Darkening the Future for Millennials

Katie Rose Quandt

The following is a whole page of links to money in politics.

Morning Reads: Big Money Emerges as Rising 2016 Issue, Cruz on Constant Fundraising

Glenn Greenwald — Political Ignorance of Americans is Stunning - Glenn Greenwald. Thanks Corporate Media!

Why the US has oligarchic "democracy." Most people in the US are not politically engaged and many of those that do are brainwashed by corporate media.

The title of the post says "stunning." "Shocking would be a better term.

Given this level of ignorance, disinterest, non-participation, and media control, there isn't much hope for the American experiment. It's already failed.

Many  of us already concluded this back in the Seventies and got busy building an alternative.

The Intercept
Political Ignorance of Americans is Stunning - Glenn Greenwald. Thanks Corporate Media!

Glenn Greenwald

Ellen Brown — How America Became an Oligarchy

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners. — George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?....

Making the world safe for neoliberal globalization aka neo-feudalism under a Western elite under the aegis of the world's sole superpower. What could go wrong?

How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?....

Financiers.

The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments....

I guess you can see where this is headed. Ellen wanders off track and out of paradigm with MMT.

Web of Debt
How America Became an Oligarchy
Ellen Brown

Mike Krieger — Peter Thiel Blasts: The American Political System Is "Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic"

Libertarians coming to the conclusion that it may not be just government that's the problem but government capture by large firms and oligarchs — a conclusion that left libertarians came to some time ago.

Zero Hedge
Peter Thiel Blasts: The American Political System Is "Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic"

Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog

Steve M. — America's Oligarchs Want It All, And They Want It Now

Oligarchic "democracy" and the 2016 presidential. Picking the "right" candidate (pun intended). Plutocracy going for full plutonomy.

Crooks and Liars
America's Oligarchs Want It All, And They Want It Now
Steve M.

Read with the above for the associated relevance of the clandestine services and the deep state in influencing democracy.

Skip down to Valentine's interview of Kiriakou.

Counterpunch
A Conversation With CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou

Douglas Valentine

Significantly, the authors of both articles don't see democracy in the US anytime soon. Vested interests are too powerful and the deep state is too entrenched.

Tomgram — Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?

This is not only a symptomatic piece. It is being reposted around the net on left, right and center blogs. It seems to have touched a vital point.

TomDispatch.com
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?

Tom Engelhardt

Bill Allison and Sarah Harkins — Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions

Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. A year-long analysis by the Sunlight Foundation suggests, however, that what they gave pales compared to what those same corporations got: $4.4 trillion in federal business and support. 

That figure, more than the $4.3 trillion the federal government paid the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients over the same period, is the result of an unprecedented effort to quantify the less-examined side of the campaign finance equation: Do political donors get something in return for what they give? 

Four years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested the answer to that question was no. Corporate spending to influence federal elections would not “give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” the majority wrote in the landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. 

Sunlight decided to test that premise....

In its Citizens United decision, the court took for granted that “favoritism and influence” are inherent in electoral democracy and that “democracy is premised on responsiveness” of politicians to those who support them. We found ample evidence of that.

“The appearance of influence or access,” the court said, “will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

It appears that the electorate — who stayed away from the polls this year in droves — might not agree.

Banana republic.

Sunlight Foundation
Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions
Bill Allison and Sarah Harkins

Andrew Prokop — Jeb Bush, to donors: Stop giving me so much money so quickly

Money certainly won't be sufficient to hand Bush the nomination — questions about his appeal to the conservative base and actual voters remain — but this fundraising will certainly allow Bush to get his message out, and seems to position him as the man to beat.

Vox
Jeb Bush, to donors: Stop giving me so much money so quickly
Andrew Prokop

Sam McElwee — The rich own our democracy, new evidence suggests

Two new studies by political scientists offer compelling evidence that the rich use their wealth to control the political system and that the U.S. is a democratic republic in name only. 

In a study of Senate voting patterns, Michael Jay Barber found that “senators’ preferences reflect the preferences of the average donor better than any other group.” In a similar study of the House of Representatives, Jesse H. Rhodes and Brian F. Schaffner found that, “millionaires receive about twice as much representation when they comprise about 5 percent of the district’s population than the poorest wealth group does when it makes up 50 percent of the district.” In fact, the increasing influence of the rich over Congress is the leading driver of polarization in modern politics, with the rich using the political system to entrench wealth by pushing for tax breaks and blocking redistributive policies.…

At the turn of the decade, political scientists Larry Bartels, Jacob Hacker and Martin Gilens wrote several incredibly influential important books arguing, persuasively, that the preferences of the rich were better represented in Congress than the poor. After the books were published, there was a flurry of research arguing that they had overstated their case.… 

Recent research offers compelling answers to these criticisms. The new evidence adds credence to the Bartels-Gilens-Hacker view that money is corrupting American politics…

More studies confirm what we already knew. The Citgroup plutonomy report told us. Cronyism and corruption are bipartisan.

Well not completely bipartisan.

By using a massive database of ideology that includes the super wealthy, Schaffner and Rhodes found that “members of Congress are much more responsive to the wealthy than to their poor constituents.” However, this difference is not equal between both parties; rather, Democrats are far more responsive to the poor than Republicans. (This is not surprising; other research supports this claim.) They find that both parties strongly favor the upper-middle class, those with $100,000 to $300,000 in wealth. But Republicans are not only more responsive to the rich, but particularly to rich donors. Schaffner and Rhodes argue that, “campaign donations, but not voter registration or participation in primary or general election, may help explain the disproportionate influence of the wealthy among Republican representatives.”

There is no fix in an environment of campaign cycles that get shorter and increasingly expensive. Money talks and politicians walk.

Political scientists Walter J. Stone and Elizabeth N. Simas have found that challengers raise more money when they take extreme positions, which helps explain why incumbent representatives tend to be more partisan than departing representatives. It certainly explains the intransigence of the last two Congresses: Republicans, who are responding to their rich donor base, are incentivized to oppose any action, particularly those supporting Obama, lest they lose funding. Since Senators have to raise approximately $3,300 a day every year for six years to remain viable, they will inevitably have to succumb to the power of money if they wish to be reelected.

The only lasting fix is thorough-going campaign finance reform and closing the revolving door.

Al Jazeera America
The rich own our democracy, new evidence suggests
Sam McElwee

"Turn of the century." That's half the life of a thirty year old.

Phil Butler — The New Militarism: Basking in the Arms of a New Arms Race

A recent report issued by the Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in Britain, it virtually assures us we’ll see a brand spanking new arms race. Now we see the main reasoning behind the west-east divide of the last months.

Sanctions and sword rattling, dirty tricks and death dealing over the geography of Europe and the Middle East, it’s all about weapons and money, as if we didn’t know.…

The trident

The dogma, ideals, and failed strategies of such men are telling if we consider peace in our time a goal of nations. Gates, a protégé of President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, he’s advised every administration since the Carter presidency. If you’re looking for a least common denominator in US and western policy, then these two and their colleagues like Henry Kissinger are your policy ring leaders. 

If these men are one point of a US hegemony trident, then corporate owned media is a second one.… 

People like Barack Obama or David Cameron, they possess very little real power actually. Consider them media celebrities, or the connective tissue in between the thinkers, talkers, and instigators. 

Our third pointy facet is the latter of these, those that provide the funding, give the orders, and who build the weapons and washing machines. The industrialists who’ve always played at world domination, they’re the ones doing us all in. In the United States, in particular, the grease that runs Washington comes from Corporations now, more than ever.

I would sum the trident up as 1) the deep state, 2) the corporate media, and 3) the ruling elite that have captured the apparatus of the state through oligarchic "democracy". It's about establishing the neoliberal oligarchic world order as a fait accompli because "freedom and democracy".

Their argument is that there is no alternative to liberalism, and liberalism equates to neoliberalism, or at least ordoliberalism, but not the social liberalism of social democracy, which is economically inefficient and therefore wasteful short term and unworkable in the long run, threatening a descent into socialism.

Russia Insider | Opinion

The New Militarism: Basking in the Arms of a New Arms Race

Phil Butler

Phil Butler (born 1955) is an American journalist, editor, and analyst. He is a partner at Pamil Visions, a leading digital PR firm, and is the former managing editor of Everything PR News, Europe's leading public relations news portal. He contributes to such online publications as The Epoch Times, the Huffington Post, Japan Today, and RT, as well as dozens of others.… 

Phil holds a Masters in Political Science, and was formerly an engineering professional for a number of Fortune 500 companies including Nucor Steel, Ameristeel, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and Tenneco Automotive. Phil's first professional writing experience came as a member of the crew of the USS Iowa, one of the World War II battleships modernizer for Ronald Reagan's 600 ship navy. Phil was a technical writer then, on a team creating all the ship's new technical and training manuals. He transferred this engineering experience into a career in industry until being sought out for covering Web 2.0 technology innovations.

He blogs at http://www.phillip-butler.com/

Paul Buchheit — Democrat Rahm Emanuel Puts Chicago Up for Sale

Chicago is being privatized. Assets are being sold off, Wall Street debt is mounting, and the mayor conducts business with multi-millionaire donors who often reap benefits from their connections to City Hall. The people of Chicago, who will be electing their next mayor on February 24, need to know the facts about their city's financial problems. Some of these facts won't be found in the mainstream media.

Like Detroit in 2013, Chicago is becoming a symbol of a divided nation, of a society crippled by a 35-year-old notion that the "public good" is somehow un-American. Other U.S. cities have learned that their people and their public services are not products to be bought and sold. Chicago, under Rahm Emanuel and Richie Daley and an assortment of Illinois Governors, has been headed in the other direction.…

And Rahm is an up-and-coming Democratic insider with ambitions for higher office. TINA takes on new meaning. There is no alternative to two faction-one party rule in American oligarchic "democracy".

Buzz flash
​Democrat Rahm Emanuel Puts Chicago Up for Sale

Paul Buchheit For Buzzflash At Truthout

Michael Hiltzik — Five Years After Citizens United Ruling, Big Money Reigns

A new study by the public policy think tank Demos and the public interest group U.S. PIRG calculates that U.S. Senate candidates will have to raise an average $3,300 every day for six years to match the campaign chests of the median 2014 winner. As an unsuccessful challenger for a New York congressional seat told the authors, "You find out very quickly that this is not about who has the best ideas; this is about who has the most money."

Demos
Five Years After Citizens United Ruling, Big Money Reigns

Michael Hiltzik | Los Angeles Times

Keane Bhatt — Progressive Policies Are Popular - So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?

A HuffPost/YouGov poll (6/20/13) found that 74 percent of the US public supports requiring companies to offer paid sick leave to their employees; paid maternity leave garnered 61 percent approval. In a number of recent polls, the idea of free community college received majority support (The Hill, 1/20/15)–one poll found that more Republicans favored the measure than opposed it, rather remarkable given that the idea was only recently popularized by President Obama himself.

So it's not voters' preferences that, in Blitzer's words, "could hurt Democrats" facing elections. A likelier reason is election funding. Political scientists Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson observed that politicians largely depended on financing from economic elites (AlterNet, 12/18/14) in what were probably the most expensive midterms in history (Washington Post, 10/22/14)

This is entirely consistent with first Chief Justice John Jay's view that the people who own the country should govern the country, making a lie of Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people and for the people." So much for the left in the United States. There is in effect one party, the party of the ruling elite, which fields two candidates for each office to create a façade of democracy.

Citi called this result "plutonomy." It is aptly characterized as "oligarchic democracy," as Aristotle foresaw in Politics. Wealth and power skew the selection process. Aristotle thought that true democracy could be best achieved by random selection using choice by lot, thereby eliminating class bias.

Truth out

Progressive Policies Are Popular - So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?

Keane Bhatt, FAIR | Op-Ed    

DSWright — Taken For Granted At Davos That US Government Run On ‘Legalized Corruption’

In an interview at Davos with Bloomberg News related to growing concerns about rising wealth inequality and its corruption influence on American politics economist and NYU business professor Nouriel Roubinistated as a matter of fact that it would be hard for the US to overcome wealth inequality because the US political system was based on “legalized corruption” which meant rich people – having more resources to bribe politicians with – would generally prevail.

It's called "stability," you know, versus "rabble rule."

Firedog lake
Taken For Granted At Davos That US Government Run On ‘Legalized Corruption’
DSWright