DC 's Conservative Consensus Has Us On The Road To Patrimonial Capitalism

Paul Krugman to Bill Moyers: "We’re seeing inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagined we’re nothing like." Wednesday was my sister's birthday. In her honor, we ran a post, Oligarchy, It's Never Too Late For Americans To Recapture Democracy. But maybe it is.

Yesterday, Marianne Williamson, one of the leading candidates running for Henry Waxman's old congressional seat (CA-33) tweeted that this was the reason she is running. What she was pointing to was part of the BBC's "Today's Must-Read," a study of the replacement of U.S. democracy with an oligarchy. It's very much what I wrote about in the host for my sister and very much what Krugman was discussing with Bill Moyers. It's more important for the American public-- if not the Clintons and Mezvinskys-- than this:

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.

So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

The two professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organised interest groups saw their policy preferences enacted.

"A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time."

On the other hand:

When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.

They conclude:

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 organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

Eric Zuess, writing in Counterpunch, isn't surprised by the survey's results.

"American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media)," he writes. "The US, in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious 'electoral' 'democratic' countries. We weren't formerly, but we clearly are now."

This is the "Duh Report", says Death and Taxes magazine's Robyn Pennacchia. Maybe, she writes, Americans should just accept their fate.

"Perhaps we ought to suck it up, admit we have a classist society and do like England where we have a House of Lords and a House of Commoners," she writes, "instead of pretending as though we all have some kind of equal opportunity here."

Watch the full Moyers interview with Krugman below-- and forget your preconceptions when you go to the polls next November… which you should do even if you only want to write in "none of the above."