Well of course, sometimes people of all economic levels want the same thing.
But that's not Democracy. That's because people's opinions and value systems
have been manipulated by the elites.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2018 10:56 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Two Classes in America: the Have's and the rest of us
Of course there is bickering and sniping among, "The Rest of Us".
Such friction is to the advantage of the, "Have's". We are certainly easier to
manage when we spend much of our time at each others throats.
Do those differences we look at, which often keep us apart, do they really make
any difference when the bottom line is that we are all serving the American
Empire, the Republic that was never a Republic, but was established as an
Oligarchy. And that Oligarchy has continued to own us since it was set into
place by the original "Founding *Fathers", the White Male, over 21 years of
age, Land Holders or very wealthy.
Below is an article that may be somewhat lengthy, but is worth reading.
Carl Jarvis
****
Is America an Oligarchy?
By
John Cassidy
April 18, 2014
From the Dept. of Academics Confirming Something You Already Suspected comes a
new study concluding that rich people and organizations representing business
interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining
differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues,
the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of
Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger
impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor
Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups
that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.
“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have
little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page
write:
block quote
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as
regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still
contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by
powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then
America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
block quote end
That’s a big claim. In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further,
asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does
not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy
outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or
with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly
large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get
it.”
It is hardly surprising that the new study is generating alarmist headlines,
such as “
study: us is an oligarchy, not a democracy ,” from, of all places, the BBC.
Gilens and Page do not use the term “oligarchy” in describing their
conclusions, which would imply that a small ruling class dominates the
political system to the exclusion of all others.
They prefer the phrase “economic élite domination,” which is a bit less
pejorative.
The evidence that Gilens and Page present needs careful intepretation.
For example, the opinion surveys they rely on suggest that, on many issues,
people of different incomes share similar opinions. To quote the paper:
“Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for economic
elites) want the same things from government.” This does get reflected in
policy outcomes. Proposals that are supported up and down the income spectrum
have a better chance of being enacted than policies that do not have such
support. To that extent, democracy is working.
The issue is what happens when some income groups, particularly the rich,
support or oppose certain things, and other groups in society don’t share their
views. To tackle this issue, Gilens and Page constructed a multivariate
statistical model, which includes three causal variables:
the views of Americans
in the ninetieth percentile of the income distribution (the rich), the views of
Americans in the fiftieth percentile (the middle class), and the opinions of
various interest groups, such as business lobbies and trade unions.
In setting up their analysis this way, the two political scientists were able
to measure the impact that the groups have independent of each other.
This is what the data shows: when the economic élites support a given policy
change, it has about a one-in-two chance of being enacted. (The exact estimated
probability is forty-five per cent.) When the élites oppose a given measure,
its chances of becoming law are less than one in five. (The exact estimate is
eighteen per cent.) The fact that both figures are both below fifty per cent
reflects a status-quo bias: in the divided American system of government,
getting anything at all passed is tricky.
The study suggests that, on many issues, the rich exercise an effective veto.
If they are against something, it is unlikely to happen. This is obviously
inconsistent with the median-voter theorem —which holds that policy outcomes
reflect the preferences of voters who represent the ideological center—but I
don’t think that it is a particularly controversial claim. A recent example is
the failure to eliminate the “carried interest” deduction, which allows
hedge-fund managers and leveraged-buyout tycoons to pay an artificially low tax
rate on much of their income. In 2012, there was widespread outrage at the
revelation that Mitt Romney, who made his fortune at the leveraged-buyout firm
Bain Capital, paid less than fifteen per cent in federal income taxes. But the
deduction hasn’t been eliminated.tudy’s other interesting findings is that,
beyond a certain level, the opinions of the public at large have little impact
on the chances a proposal has of being enacted. As I said, policy proposals
that have the support of the majority fare better than proposals which are
favored only by a minority. But, in the words of Gilens and Page, “The
probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny
minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy
change.”
The paper is a provocative one, and there’s sure to be a lot of debate among
political scientists about whether it wholly supports the authors’ claims.
One issue is that their survey data is pretty old: it covers the period from
1982 to 2002. (On the other hand, it hardly seems likely that the influence of
the affluent has declined in the past decade.) Another issue is that, in a
statistical sense, the explanatory power of some of the equations that Gilens
and Page use is weak. For example, the three-variable probability model that I
referred to above explains less than ten per cent of the variation in the data.
(For you statistical wonks, R-squared = 0.074.)
Even in this sort of study, that’s a pretty low figure. Gilens and Page, to
their credit, draw attention to it in their discussion, and suggest various
reasons for why it’s not a big issue. They also acknowledge another possible
objection to their conclusions:
block quote
Average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy;
why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence
policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater
policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which
policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather
than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support… But we tend to
doubt it.
block quote end
Me, too. There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate
influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort policy in
ways that don’t necessarily benefit the majority: the politicians all know
this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has
gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.
Photograph: Ryan Heffernan
w_130\,c_limit/cassidy-john-2
list of 1 items
John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also
writes a column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com.
On 3/2/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
In case you haven't noticed, the "working class", as you choose to
call everyone who isn't a member of the power elites, is divided by
strongly held beliefs and prejudices, by education, experience, income
level, ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. If you were a young
leftist, active on twitter, or listened to some of the leftwing
podcasts on which the people talk about issues and what's going on,
you'd discover how truly divided and paranoid the Left is, how so much
of the discussion about issues becomes personal and sort of gossipy.
There isn't any "us". It kind of reminds me of the politics of the blindness
organizations, only even more so.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2018 8:35 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: my blog carl jarvis <carjar82.carls@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Liberals hail FBI witch hunt against
Trump, White House
If we remember only one thing from this article, it is: "...But there
is no “us. The spy agencies he applauds serve the propertied rulers
against the working class."
We, the working class People do not have an FBI or our own CIA. We
have no state militia, no National Guard, no Police or company Bully
Boys. All we have are Numbers. And Guts. And Determination. And
when we are pushed against the wall, as our Greed driven Corporate
Bosses must do to us, we will start pushing back, shouting "Enough is enough!"
Carl Jarvis
On 3/1/18, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2018/8209/820903.htmlIf we remember only one thing from this article, it is: But there is
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 82/No. 9 March 5, 2018
(front page)
Liberals hail FBI witch hunt against Trump
White House
BY TERRY EVANS
Liberals are singing the praises of the U.S. political police after
former FBI boss Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian individuals and
three Russian organizations for conspiracy to “defraud the United
States” by interfering in politics here.
The Feb. 16 indictments accuse the 13 Russians of participating in a
so-called troll operation on the internet beginning in 2014,
inventing U.S. identities, promoting a variety of political views to
roil viewers and staging rallies related to the 2016 campaign. They
make no allegation that Donald Trump’s campaign was involved in any
way, and they say there is no evidence this operation affected the
election outcome. Those charged worked for a company with close ties
to the Kremlin, Mueller claims. The evidence marshaled is similar to
previous press reports, including a 2015 New York Times magazine
piece called “The Agency.”
“Our FBI, CIA, NSA [National Security Agency], working with the
special counsel [Mueller], have done us amazingly proud,” columnist
Thomas Friedman gushes in the Times Feb. 18. But there is no “us.”
The spy agencies he applauds serve the propertied rulers against the
working class. The FBI is tasked by the bosses to spy on, disrupt and
frame up working-class militants, Black rights and Puerto Rican
independence fighters, and opponents of Washington’s wars. Examples
include framing up leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the
Teamsters union in Minneapolis for speaking out against the rulers’
drive to enter the second imperialist world war to decades of
Cointelpro attacks on the party and other political groups.
Like all the rulers’ frame-up grand juries and special prosecutors,
Mueller’s probe against the Trump presidency starts with a target and
then roots around for evidence. The charge that those indicted
conspired to “defraud the U.S.” is so broad it could be used to
target almost anyone for anything. Such laws are written that way to
make it easy for the cops and spy agencies to use them to go after
working-class fighters.
The liberals and middle-class left are determined to criminalize
their political differences with Trump to drive him out of office.
Democrats lined up in a frenzy to claim Mueller had found the “smoking gun”
against him. It went so far that Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler from New
York told MSNBC he thought Moscow’s interference in the election was
the equivalent of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — the pretext
used by Washington that it had been preparing for years to enter
World War II.
Underlying the liberals’ refusal to reconcile themselves to Trump’s
election is their scorn for the workers who elected him. In a Feb. 20
op-ed entitled “The Madness of American Crowds,” New York Times
columnist Roger Cohen claimed that working people are “dumb” and “can
be led by the nose into the gutter,” and were “easily manipulated” to
elect Trump.
In reality millions of workers, including many who had voted for
Barack Obama in previous elections, were angry over the blows
inflicted on them from capitalism’s political and moral crisis and
looking for a change.
They voted for Trump hoping he would do something and “drain the swamp”
in Washington. But Trump, like his predecessors from both parties,
governs to defend the interests of the propertied owners.
SWP members campaigning in working-class neighborhoods find
widespread interest in discussing how the rulers foist the costs of
today’s wars and social crises onto the backs of working people and
what this says about the values of their system. Many workers want to
discuss how past struggles — like the Cuban Revolution and the mighty
movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation — show we can organize
independently of the bosses, and through revolutionary struggle
develop the capacities to replace capitalist rule with workers power.
Such capabilities are completely discounted by those like Cohen who
think that workers need to be “learned” on what to do by meritocrats
like himself.
The alleged activities of the Internet Research Agency and its
manager, Yevgeny Prigozhin, itemized in the indictment, are a litany
of internet misinformation on a wide variety of political issues.
But the scale of the meddling in the 2016 elections by Moscow pales
in comparison to that engineered over decades by the U.S. rulers.
They have utilized their spy agencies — that liberals are falling
over themselves to shower with plaudits — to not only “affect”
elections, but to brutally overturn governments.
This includes the CIA-organized coup that overthrew the Iranian
government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced him with
the shah in 1953, establishing a key prop in U.S. domination across
the Middle East that lasted for 25 years. The U.S. rulers tried to
prevent the election of Salvador Allende as president of Chile, and,
when they failed, backed the 1973 coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet that
overthrew his government. The list goes on and on.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
no “us.”
The spy agencies he applauds serve the propertied rulers against the
working class.