Tag: America oligarchy
Most Americans support Medicare for All, higher taxes on the rich, a Green New Deal, and other major items on the progressive agenda—so why has Congress failed to enact them? The reason, Columbia University Law School professor Tim Wu argued, is that the influence of corporations and the donor class on the American political system has drowned out the policy desires of the public.
In a recent interview, Elizabeth Warren said she agrees with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that too many Democrats lack the “guts” to take on Wall Street and argued that her party will keep suffering electoral losses until all of its members are “willing to take on the billionaire class… Until we have all of the Democrats who are willing to fight for the American people and not for a handful of billionaires and giant corporations, then it’s going to stay an uphill fight.”
“We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask: who owns America, and who has the political power? Why, in the richest country in the history of the world are so many Americans living in poverty? What are the forces that have caused the American middle class, once the envy of the world, to decline precipitously?” Sanders writes. “We need to hear from struggling Americans whose stories are rarely told in newspapers or television.”
While stocks doubled, 18% more kids fell into poverty. The U.S. has taken nearly half of the world’s new wealth since the 2008 recession, and the stock market more than doubled from 2008 to 2014, but the number of children living below the federal poverty threshold increased by 18 percent during that same timeframe.
The game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in her new book A Fighting Chance . It’s rigged because the rich and their lobbyists have rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules are reflected in a tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history. The result? America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail are falling apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke.
A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy.
Senator Bernie Sanders discusses wealth inequality and how America has become an oligarchy during a Senate floor speech.
