On November 24, 2019, Richard Enos writes on Popular Resistance:
The notion that citizens of the United States don’t actually live in a democracy has been picking up steam for decades, with scars from economic, social and political decay inflicting themselves ever more deeply into our psyches as the years move on.
You would think that, with the rise of science and technology, we would have been able to build a far more prosperous nation. Instead, we have seen a vast reduction in our standard of living, and are being forced to work longer and harder in increasingly menial and unfulfilling jobs across the board. We are ever more being subjected to the control-hungry vicissitudes of mega-corporations that are swallowing up American entrepreneurship and prosperous self-employment.
The notion that we as individuals are failing ourselves as a nation, and somehow have earned the massive and growing national debt as a result of our own poor decisions and ineptitude, is only valid if you still believe that we are living in a democracy, where the majority of individuals directly make policy. If in fact the United States ever fully operated this way, the least we can say is that our democracy is currently broken.
Of course, if you are in the small coterie of economic elites at the top of the pyramid, you don’t feel that anything is broken. In fact, in the back rooms where all the important meetings take place, you likely spend part of the time congratulating each other because things are going exactly according to plan.
Princeton Study
A study by two political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, analyzed 1,779 recent policy outcomes found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” while average citizens “have little or no independent influence.”
The research had two parts: First, they measured the amount of political influence various groups have in America. Then, they checked this against some technical definitions of democracy, oligarchy, and other forms of government.
In our latest episode of The Collective Evolution Show on CETV, Joe Martino and I discuss this study and the broader notion of whether the system itself is simply broken and can be fixed, or if we should start thinking about how we can move away from it altogether. The opening clip is below, and for the full episode and hundreds of other inspiring shows and interviews, you can start a free 7-day trial on CETV today.
The Wealthy Have More Influence
The chart below shows how much political influence different groups have in America today. Not only do the wealthy have the most influence, ordinary voters have basically none.
To have “political influence” in this case means that Congress responds to you by passing the laws and policies you like. Low influence means you’re ignored — Congress passes laws that have no relationship to what you want.
Special interest groups also have sway over public policy. The researchers divided them into two types. “Mass” interest groups, which represent large groups of organized citizens, have a small amount of power. Business groups, like trade associations, have a moderate amount, likely because they can afford to spend more on lobbying and political donations.
None of this means that ordinary people never get what they want from Congress. Sometimes public opinion data matched up with things Congress actually did. However the vast majority were also outcomes favored by the wealthy and business interests. Statistically speaking, the government doesn’t care what 90% of Americans think.
America Is An Oligarchy
The authors defined four possible systems we might have: (1) democracy, (2) oligarchy, or semi-democratic systems dominated by (3) interest groups generally or (4) business groups especially. You can look at the chart below and judge for yourself: America in 2014 matches mostly with the oligarchy model — an oligarchy of wealthy individuals. In fact, the general public has even less influence than it does in a typical oligarchy model.
The problem here isn’t the existence of wealth, or that wealthy Americans have political opinions. It’s that the government is representing only 10% of the American people. Everyone else is living with something less than democracy.
The authors make the following observations: Organized groups regularly lobby and fraternize with public officials; move through revolving doors between public and private employment; provide self-serving information to officials; draft legislation; and spend a great deal of money on election campaigns.
At its heart, this is a problem of corruption – caused by money in our political system. Such corruption is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of our republic because “the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own interests than any feasible alternative.”
The Takeaway
While some might argue that introducing new campaign finance laws as well as anti-corruption legislation is the answer, we have to remember that the foxes remain in charge of the hen house, and there is always resistance from lawmakers to introduce, implement, and enforce legislation that will reduce their power and ultimately find them guilty of having obtained their power through corrupt means. More than likely this problem will only get solved when we amass the collective will to walk away from this system, and create one that is more aligned with our values and aspirations.
Gary Reber Comments:
No suspense here. Political power always follows property ownership. The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. The core problem, as Albert Einstein identified, remains CONCENTRATE CAPITAL OWNERSHIP among the few.
Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to contribute productively to the economy as a capital owner as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income.
The greatest crisis facing our country today is the obscene level of wealth and income economic inequality we now see, which has come about due to concentrated ownership of the productive capital assets employed in the production of products and services in our economy. This is a moral issue, an economic issue, and a political issue.
The fact is money power rules. When money power is broadly distributed in the hands of the citizens, not the politicians or bankers, the people shall rule. That is why to reform the system, leaders and advocates for economic justice must focus on money, how it should be created and measured, how it should be controlled and why a more realistic and just money system is the key to universal and equal citizen access to future ownership opportunities as a fundamental human right. Then prosperity and economic democracy can serve as the basis for effective and non-corruptible political democracy, an ecologically sustainable environment, and global peace through justice.
On the basic issue of economic empowerment of each individual, the essential goal needs to be economic democracy, which will finally make political democracy a meaningful reality.
Unfortunately, pursuing economic democracy has been frustrated by the systemic concentration of economic power and exclusionary access to future capital credit to the advantage of the wealthiest Americans. The so-called 1 percent ownership rulers of corporations have rigged the financial system to enable this already rich ownership class to systematically further enrich themselves as capital formation occurs and technological industrialization spreads throughout the world, leaving behind the 99 percent to depend on income redistribution through make work “full employment” policies, government boondoggles, excessive military build-up and dependence on arms production and sales, and social welfare programs due to the lack of an alternative to full employment and the growing economic helplessness and dependency. The unsatisfied needs and wants of society are not in that 1 percent or for that matter the 5 percent; those people are not the ones who are hurting.
The goal into the future is for all Americans to be “capital” workers (applying the “tools” they OWN to produce) and not be labor workers dependent on labor earnings too much of our lives. We should all be productive and produce products and services in a way in which the current state of technology permits. Not only is our right to life denied if we don’t have effective access to the ownership of capital, our liberty is denied because without economic power our political power is useless. Thus, the national economic policy should be universal participation in the ownership of productive capital, alongside full employment of the labor workforce as a direct result of build a future economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen.
At present, there is a brewing power struggle going on in the United States between individual human beings (citizens) and the plutocratic powers who manipulate our government and the would-be plutocratic powers (top corporate executive managers and financial barons). What the 99 percent movement is really all about is returning America to economic democracy. If we do not achieve economic democracy, then plutocracy will lead to fascism –– the ownership of productive capital by the rich and by their institutions.
Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or wont use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor –– the equivalency of mass murder –– the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The emphasis on the systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to low-wage countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.
The solution is to abate all forms of CONCENTRATED CAPITAL OWNERSHIP and broaden personal capital asset formation simultaneously with the FUTURE growth of the economy. This can be accomplished by reforming monetary and tax policies to empower EVERY child, woman, and man to acquire personal capital asset OWNERSHIP in America’s FUTURE economy using INSURED, INTEREST-FREE capital credit, solely repayable out of the FUTURE earnings of the investments, without the requirement of past savings or ANY reduction in wages or earnings or benefits, should one be employed.
The result can be an unprecedented engine of responsible green, sustainable growth whereby EVERY CITIZEN would be productive and OWN wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets and see their OWNERSHIP portfolios grow simultaneously with the growth of the economy, resulting in a FUTURE economy that can support general affluence for EVERY child, woman, and man.
To achieve this FUTURE will require legislation as embodied in the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/.
We will also need to ensure Monetary Justice (see http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice).
These proposals are part of the greater Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
