Harvard study: America is an oligarchy
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, June 2, 2024 12:59
VIEWED: 19307
PAGE 1 of 6
April 9, 2014
Testing Theories of American Politics:Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens
%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf
Even if 80% of citizens want a program, it's instituted only 43% of the time.
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I read the first five pages so far, and it's pretty thorough stuff...
Last line on page 6 says it pretty straight out.
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Liberty University study: "Sun rises in East."
Sorry, couldn't resist the snark. Of course Harvard is correct, but it's pretty obvious. And extremely irritating.
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The summation on page 24 is very... kind.
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Quote:Want to understand our market-crazed era? Rediscover the 20th century’s most prophetic critic of capitalism. http://prospect.org/article/karl-polanyi-explains-it-all
Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
Liberty University study: "Sun rises in East."
Sorry, couldn't resist the snark. Of course Harvard is correct, but it's pretty obvious. And extremely irritating.
Quote:
The middle class is beleaguered. A global reserve army of the unemployed batters wages and marginalizes labor’s political power. Even elite professions are becoming proletarianized. Ideologically, the view that markets are good and states are bad is close to hegemonic. With finance still supreme despite the 2008 collapse, it is no longer risible to use “capital” as a collective noun. The two leading treasury secretaries during the run-up to the 2008 financial crash, Democrat Robert Rubin and Republican Henry Paulson, were both former CEOs of Goldman Sachs. If the state is not quite the executive committee of the ruling class, it is doing a pretty fair imitation.
Yet Marx, for all of his stubbornly apt insights about capitalism, is an unreliable guide to its remediation. Polanyi, with the benefit of nearly a century’s worth more evidence, has a surer sense of how markets interact with society. More humanist than materialist, Polanyi did not believe in iron laws. His hope was that democratic leaders might learn from history and not repeat the calamitous mistakes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Polanyi lived long enough to see his wish fulfilled for a few decades. In hindsight, however, the brief period between the book’s publication and Polanyi’s demise is looking like a respite in the socially destructive tendencies of rampant markets. In seeking to understand the dynamics of our own time, we can do no better than to revisit Polanyi.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Sounds like fine reading, SECOND.
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Indeed, thanx, Second. I'm gonna hafta hunt the guy down and read his theory. SOunds very interesting.
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Quote:The book mentioned in the article is The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers (Mar 31, 2014)
Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
Indeed, thanx, Second. I'm gonna hafta hunt the guy down and read his theory. SOunds very interesting.
www.amazon.com/Power-Market-Fundamentalism-Fred-Block-ebook/dp/B00JR17
6H8/
Book Blurb: “What is it about free-market ideas that gives them staying power in the face of such failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and financial crises? The Power of Market Fundamentalism extends economist Karl Polanyi's work to explain why these dangerous utopian ideas have become the dominant economic ideology of our time.”
Another article to read is Why We’re in a New Gilded Age
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilde
d-age/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I saw it expressed this way: they are predators and all they think of us is as prey.
And I think that's true.
To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. - Thomas Paine The American Crisis
OONJERAH - We are too dumb to live and smart enough to wipe ourselves out.
"You, who live in any kind of comfort or convenience, do not know how these people can survive these things, do you? They will endure because there is no immediate escape from endurance. Some will die, the rest must live."
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Quote:I got a different point and it is in the last paragraph.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I saw it expressed this way: they are predators and all they think of us is as prey.
And I think that's true.
In the 1830s, the British state served the interests of the rising merchant class. The result was the hatred of public relief, the distrust of state action, the insistence on respectability and self-reliance on the part of the English working class. That describes members of today's Tea Party and the tendency of citizens throughout the West to give up on governments in the pockets of the rich, doing the bidding of private capital rather than providing a democratic counterweight.
The European Union’s austerity follies are recapitulating the perverse policies of the 1920s and inviting the same brand of know-nothing backlash. In the upcoming elections to the European Parliament, voters disgusted with the failure of politics to remedy the prolonged recession are poised to deliver big gains to nationalist far-right parties. In Hungary, the right already governs.
In the 1920s, as in the 1830s, the intellectual dominance of free-market economists gave pseudo-scientific cover to elites pursuing brutal and perverse policies, with a studied myopia about real-world consequences. In our own time, market fundamentalism is again the dominant ideology. The latest great transformation, from a balanced social market economy to a dictatorship of the invisible hand, has weakened the power of the polity to restore balance and undermined the confidence of the working and middle classes in the use of the democratic state to counter market excess. One must hope, with the optimistic Polanyi, that capitalism can be fixed. - http://prospect.org/article/karl-polanyi-explains-it-all
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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