An interesting article, which I only post for discussion.
Carl Jarvis
*****
How America Became an Oligarchy
Posted on April 6, 2015 by Ellen Brown
block quote
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have
freedom of choice. You don't. . . . You have owners.
— George Carlin,
The American Dream
block quote end
According to
a new study from Princeton University,
American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy
initiatives from 1981 to 2002,
researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded
that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now
steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against –
the will of the
majority of voters. America's political system has transformed from a
democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.
"Making the world safe for democracy" was President Woodrow Wilson's
rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American
military intervention
ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to
spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?
The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western
world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the
doctrine that
"all men are created equal" – that all people have "certain
inalienable rights," including "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness" – is an American
original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights,
have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but
the voters' collective
will no longer prevails.
In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party
came out of nowhere
to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the
populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a
century, no third-party
candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We
have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is
between two candidates,
both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just
to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election
involving 240 million
people of voting age.
In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes
won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the
vote by going door
to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local
presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national
election, those efforts
are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are
beholden to big money.
When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a
position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece,
where the
populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the
anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by
the moneylenders who have
the government in a chokehold.
How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in
leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten
too big to be governed
by majority vote?
Democracy's Rise and Fall
The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a
paper called "The Collapse of Democratic Nation States" by theologian
and environmentalist
Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of
private banking, which usurped the power to create money from
governments:
block quote
The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of
private banking. The banks are able to create money and so to lend
amounts far in excess
of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation . . . has
given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the United
States, Wall Street
makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly
attributed to Washington.
block quote end
Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is
created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17th
century, when the
privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks,
negotiated the right to print England's money after Parliament
stripped that power from
the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to
borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.
In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and
issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George
forbade that practice,
the colonists rebelled.
They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money
supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their
official means of
exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the
bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing
multiple banknotes against
a limited supply of gold.
This was the system euphemistically called "fractional reserve"
banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the
banks' privately-issued
notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at
interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who
created the notes
with a printing press. It was something the government could have done
itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great
success until England
went to war to stop them.
President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists' paper money system
when he issued the Treasury notes called "Greenbacks" that helped the
Union win the
Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were
discontinued.
In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a
third national party running on a platform of financial reform.
Typically organized under
the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of
the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party,
the Greenback
and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the
Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated
expanding the national currency
to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and
democratic control of the financial system.
The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious
challenge to the bankers' monopoly over the right to create the
nation's money.
According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard,
politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two
competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The
parties sometimes
changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one
of these two big-money players.
In
All the Presidents' Bankers,
Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families
that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third
party candidates
have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with
two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street
banks.
Democracy Succumbs to Globalization
In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to
control democracies by restricting government participation to the
propertied class.
When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections
by other means:
block quote
First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek
office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden.
Second, the great majority
of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they
vote or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are,
accordingly, dependent
on what they learn from the mass media. These media, in turn, are
controlled by moneyed interests.
block quote end
Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials
then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including
high barriers to
ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from
presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions,
identification laws, voter
roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.
The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was "globalization" – an
expanding global market that overrides national interests:
block quote
[T]oday's global economy is fully transnational. The money power is
not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works
to reduce their
influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational
corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they
are democratic or
not.
block quote end
The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade
agreement called the
Trans-Pacific Partnership.
If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of
multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge
and supersede domestic
laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.
Looking at Alternatives
Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass
popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most
effective way of governing
on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist
Eric Li makes a compelling case
for the system of "meritocracy" that has been quite successful in China.
In America Beyond Capitalism,
Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate
as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia,
which have large
empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all
the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for
Economic Cooperation
and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls "
The Pluralist Commonwealth
": a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the
democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and
common ownership
beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of
regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair
along with James Gustav
Speth of an initiative called
The Next System Project,
which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move
beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left
and Right..
Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:
block quote
What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous
size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal
tradition to justify
states' and local communities' recalling, out of their own
sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.
block quote end
Taking Back Our Power
If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start
with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests
while the
people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not
allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all
depository
banks create money when they make loans, as
the Bank of England recently acknowledged.
The federal government could take back the power to create the
national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham
Lincoln did. Alternatively,
it
could issue some very large denomination coins
as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the
central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure,
education, job creation,
and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than
the banks.
The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom –
the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care
and a decent
retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an
Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not
beholden to the moneylenders,
they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the
money to fund it.
_________
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the
Public Banking Institute,
and author of twelve books including the best-selling
Web of Debt.
Her latest book,
The Public Bank Solution,
explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
Her 300+ blog articles are at
EllenBrown.com.
Listen to "
It's Our Money with Ellen Brown
" on PRN.fm.
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