12-13-2021, 05:42 AM
(03-29-2018, 12:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
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."
Much of the fault lies with media who know who butters their bread. The economic elites in America as reactionary here as elsewhere. They could accede to popular sentiment on LGBT rights which had nothing to do with profit, the only sacred entity to them. Abortion may be a different matter, as a high birth-rate means higher rents, lower wages, and the 'right' to harsher terms of work -- and most ominously, more cannon fodder for wars for profit. (The elites are pacifists if war isn't costly; otherwise the only fear that those elites have of war is that they might be overthrown in defeat or find that their assets are destroyed in war. Should war be profitable, then there will be war of some kind). Legalization of marijuana became acceptable when it. Many of the media know the need for advertising revenue, so media owners know well enough to not say anything derogatory about the merchandise offered or the economic agenda of the elites. Global warming is to be denied so that the powerful fossil-fuel companies can churn out carbon-rich fuels.
This was true with tobacco and leaded gasoline, too -- until it became well known that tobacco was killing off workers and that leaded motor fuels were causing street crime.
The surprises are that unions are not yet outlawed and that peonage contracts are still illegal. Or maybe unions are less troublesome than terrorists.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.