A recent study by Princeton University Professor, Martin Gilens, and Northwestern University Professor, Benjamin I Page, has concluded that the US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
While we all knew this to be true, with yet another Bush being paraded out to contest the presidency against another Clinton; despite the tawdry history of their predecessors, both of the families are supported by the corporations and big banks. The two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion.
For those of you that want the ‘TL;DR version‘: Statistics prove that the wealthy minority affect policy, while the average American has little power of his own.
Here’s the full explanation, in detail:
“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized 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.”
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 organized interest groups saw their policy preferences enacted:
When it comes to the wealthy and elite: “A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favor) is adopted only about 18% of the time,” they write, adding, “while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favor) is adopted about 45% of the time.”
On the other hand: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized 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 favor 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 policy-making is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
Eric Zuess, writing for Counterpunch.org, 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, adding, “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, instead of pretending as though we all have some kind of equal opportunity here,” writes Robin. Yeah,we’ll just listen to you and give up… we do have to admit that we have a classist society, instead of wallowing in delusion. But we should never give up!
Instead of serving ‘them,’ the people should serve the people. The ‘elite’ would be nothing without the average person. Money and power are only useful as long as we can be bribed with it. We crave monetary equality, but that will never happen as long as they can bribe some of us to murder/detain/cheat/financial crisis the rest of us.
Without that influence over us though… without our consent… what do they have that can stop us?
Nothing. (Until they create a mostly-autonomous drone army; DARPA is on it.)
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