Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
On July 28th,<\/a><\/span>\u00a0Thom Hartmann interviewed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and, at the very end of his show (as if this massive question were merely an aftethought), asked him his opinion of the 2010 Citizens United<\/i> decision and the 2014 McCutcheon<\/i> decision, both decisions by the five Republican judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. These two historic decisions enable unlimited secret money (including foreign money) now to pour into U.S. political and judicial campaigns. Carter answered:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it\u2019s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for President or being elected President. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we\u2019ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. \u2026 At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n He was then cut off by the program, though that statement by Carter should have been the start<\/i> of the program, not its end<\/i>. (And the program didn\u2019t end with an invitation for him to return to discuss this crucial matter in depth \u2013 something for which he\u2019s qualified.)<\/span><\/p>\n So: was this former President\u2019s provocative allegation merely his opinion? Or was it actually lots more than that? It was lots<\/i> more than that.<\/span><\/p>\n Only a single empirical study has actually been done in the social sciences regarding whether the historical record shows that the United States has been, during the survey\u2019s period, which in that case was between 1981 and 2002, a democracy (a nation whose leaders represent the public-at-large), or instead an aristocracy (or \u2018oligarchy\u2019) \u2013 a nation in which only the desires of the richest citizens end up being reflected in governmental actions. This study was titled\u00a0\u201cTesting Theories of American Politics,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and it was published by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page in the journal Perspectives on Politics<\/i>, issued by the American Political Science Association in September 2014. I had summarized it earlier, on 14 April 2014, while the article was still awaiting its publication.<\/span><\/p>\n The headline of my summary-article was\u00a0\u201cU.S. Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy Says Scientific Study.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0I reported: “The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, no democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham,\u00a0no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation’s ‘news’\u00a0media).\u201d I then quoted the authors\u2019 own summary: \u201cThe preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The scientific study closed by saying: \u201cIn the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule\u2013at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.\u201d A few other tolerably clear sentences managed to make their ways into this well-researched, but, sadly, atrociously written, paper, such as: \u201cThe preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of \u2018affluent\u2019 citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.\u201d In other words, they found: The rich rule the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n Their study investigated specifically \u201c1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which\u00a0<\/span>a national survey of the general public asked a favor\/oppose question about a proposed policy change,\u201d and then the policy-follow-ups, of whether or not the polled public preferences had been turned into polices, or, alternatively, whether the relevant corporate-lobbied positions had instead become public policy on the given matter, irrespective of what the public had wanted concerning it.<\/span><\/p>\n The study period, 1981-2002, covered the wake of the landmark 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo<\/i>, which had started the aristocratic assault on American democracy, and which seminal (and bipartisan) pro-aristocratic court decision is described as follows by wikipedia<\/span><\/a>: It \u201cstruck down on First Amendment grounds several provisions in the 1974 Amendments to the\u00a0Federal Election Campaign Act.\u00a0The most prominent portions\u00a0of the case struck down limits on spending\u00a0in campaigns, but upheld the provision limiting the size of individual\u00a0contributions to campaigns. The Court also\u00a0narrowed, and then upheld,\u00a0the Act’s disclosure provisions, and struck down (on separation of\u00a0powers grounds) the make-up of the Federal Election\u00a0Commission, which as\u00a0written allowed Congress to directly appoint members of the Commission,\u00a0an executive agency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Basically, the Buckley<\/i> decision, and subsequent (increasingly partisan Republican) Supreme Court decisions, have allowed aristocrats to buy and control politicians. <\/span><\/p>\n Already, the major \u2018news\u2019 media were owned and controlled by the aristocracy, and \u2018freedom of the press\u2019 was really just freedom of aristocrats to control the \u2018news\u2019 \u2013 to frame public issues in the ways the owners want. The media managers who are appointed by those owners select, in turn, the editors who, in their turn, hire only reporters who produce the propaganda that\u2019s within the acceptable range for the owners, to be \u2018the news\u2019 as the public comes to know it.<\/span><\/p>\n But, now, in the post-Buckley-v.-Valeo<\/i> world, from Reagan on (and the resulting study-period of 1981-2002), aristocrats became almost totally free to buy also the political candidates they wanted. The \u2018right\u2019 candidates, plus the \u2018right\u2019 \u2018news\u2019-reporting about them, has thus bought the \u2018right\u2019 people to \u2018represent\u2019 the public, in the new American \u2018democracy,\u2019 which Jimmy Carter now aptly calls \u201csubversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Carter \u2013 who had entered office in 1976, at the very start of that entire era of transition into an aristocratically controlled United States (and he left office in 1981, just as the study-period was starting) \u2013 expressed his opinion that, in the wake now of the two most extreme pro-aristocratic U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever (which are Citizens United<\/i>\u00a0in 2010, and McCutcheon<\/i>\u00a0in 2014), American democracy is really only past tense, not present tense at all \u2013 no longer a reality.<\/span><\/p>\n He is saying, in effect, that, no matter how much the U.S. was a dictatorship by the rich<\/span><\/a> during 1981-2002 (the Gilens-Page study era), it\u2019s far worse now.<\/span><\/p>\n Apparently, Carter is correct: The New York Times<\/i>\u00a0front page on Sunday 2 August 2015 bannered,\u00a0“Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported that:<\/span><\/p>\n “A New York Times analysis of\u00a0Federal Election\u00a0Commission\u00a0reports and Internal Revenue Service records\u00a0shows that the fund-raising arms race has made most of the\u00a0presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small pool of\u00a0the richest Americans. The concentration of donors is\u00a0greatest on the Republican side, according to the Times\u00a0analysis, where consultants and lawyers have pushed more\u00a0aggressively to exploit the looser fund-raising rules that\u00a0have fueled the rise of\u00a0super PACs. Just 130 or so families\u00a0and their businesses provided more than half the money\u00a0raised through June by Republican candidates and their\u00a0super PACs.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The Times<\/i> study shows that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly advantaged by the recent unleashing of big-corporate money power. All of the evidence suggests that though different aristocrats compete against each other for the biggest chunks of whatever the given nation has to offer, they all compete on the same side against the public<\/span><\/a>, in order to lower the wages of their workers, and to lower the standards for consumers\u2019 safety and welfare so as to increase their own profits (transfer their costs and investment-losses onto others); and, so, now, the U.S. is soaring again toward Gilded Age economic inequality<\/span><\/a>, perhaps to surpass the earlier era of unrestrained robber barons.\u00a0And, the Times<\/i> study shows: even in the Democratic Party, the mega-donations are going to only the most conservative (pro-corporate, anti-public) Democrats. Grass-roots politics could be vestigial, or even dead, in the new America.<\/span><\/p>\n The question has become whether the unrestrained power of the aristocracy is locked in this time even more permanently than it was in that earlier era. Or: will there be yet another FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) to restore a democracy that once was? Or: is a President like that any longer even possible in America?<\/span><\/p>\n As for today\u2019s political incumbents: they now have their careers for as long as they want and are willing to do the biddings of their masters. And, then, they retire to become, themselves, new members of the aristocracy, such as the Clintons have done, and such as the Obamas will do. (Of course, the Bushes have been aristocrats since early in the last century.)<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, the new age of aristocratic control is not merely national but international in scope<\/span><\/a>; so, the global aristocracy<\/span><\/a> have probably found the formula that will keep them in control until they destroy the entire world<\/span><\/a>. What\u2019s especially interesting is that, with all of the many tax-exempt, \u2018non-profit\u2019 \u2018charities,\u2019 which aristocrats have established, none of them is warring to defeat the aristocracy itself \u2013 to defeat the aristocrats\u2019 system of exploitation of the public. It\u2019s the one thing they won\u2019t create a \u2018charity\u2019 for; none of them will go to war against the expoitative interests of themselves and of their own exploitative peers. They\u2019re all in this together<\/span><\/a>, even though they do compete amongst themselves for dominance, as to which ones of them will lead against the public. And the public seem to accept this modern form of debt-bondage<\/span><\/a>, perhaps because of the \u2018news\u2019 they see, and because of the news they don\u2019t see (such as this).<\/span><\/p>\n ———-<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse On July 28th,\u00a0Thom Hartmann interviewed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and, at the very end of his show (as if this massive question were merely an aftethought), asked him his opinion of the 2010 Citizens United decision and the 2014 McCutcheon decision, both decisions by the five Republican judges on the U.S. Supreme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":170233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,551,535,4453,49,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-170232","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-corruption","11":"tag-global-news","12":"tag-jimmy-carter","13":"tag-usa-news","14":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}