http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-03/jimmy-carter-rages-what-us-has-become-just-oligarchy-unlimited-political-bribery
Submitted by Eric Zeusse,
On July 28th, Thom
Hartmann interviewed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and, at the
very end of his show (as if this massive question were merely an
aftethought), asked him his opinion of the 2010 Citizens United decision
and the 2014McCutcheon decision, both decisions by the five Republican
judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. These two historic decisions
enable unlimited secret money (including foreign money) now to pour into
U.S. political and judicial campaigns. Carter answered:
“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for President or being elected President. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. …He was then cut off by the program, though that statement by Carter should have been the start of the program, not its end. (And the program didn’t end with an invitation for him to return to discuss this crucial matter in depth — something for which he’s qualified.)
At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.”
So: was this former President’s provocative allegation merely
his opinion? Or was it actually lots more than that? It was lotsmore
than that.
Only a single empirical study has actually been done in the social
sciences regarding whether the historical record shows that the United
States has been, during the survey’s period, which in that case was
between 1981 and 2002, a democracy (a nation whose leaders represent the
public-at-large), or instead an aristocracy (or ‘oligarchy’) — a nation
in which only the desires of the richest citizens end up being
reflected in governmental actions. This study was titled “Testing Theories of American Politics,” and
it was published by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page in the
journal Perspectives on Politics, issued by the American Political
Science Association in September 2014. I had summarized it earlier, on
14 April 2014, while the article was still awaiting its publication.
The headline of my summary-article was “U.S. Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy Says Scientific Study.” I reported:
"The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, no democratic
country, at all. 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).” I then quoted the authors’ own
summary: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a
minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public
policy.”
The scientific study closed by saying: “In the United States, our
findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal
sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” A few other tolerably
clear sentences managed to make their ways into this well-researched,
but, sadly, atrociously written, paper, such as: “The preferences of
economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of
‘affluent’ citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change
than the preferences of average citizens do.” In other words, they found: The rich rule the U.S.
Their study investigated specifically “1,779 instances between 1981
and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a
favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change,” and then the
policy-follow-ups, of whether or not the polled public preferences had
been turned into polices, or, alternatively, whether the relevant
corporate-lobbied positions had instead become public policy on the
given matter, irrespective of what the public had wanted concerning it.
The study period, 1981-2002, covered the wake of the landmark 1976
U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which had started the
aristocratic assault on American democracy, and which seminal (and
bipartisan) pro-aristocratic court decision is described as follows by wikipedia:
It “struck down on First Amendment grounds several provisions in the
1974 Amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. The most prominent
portions of the case struck down limits on spending in campaigns, but
upheld the provision limiting the size of individual contributions to
campaigns. The Court also narrowed, and then upheld, the Act's
disclosure provisions, and struck down (on separation of powers grounds)
the make-up of the Federal Election Commission, which as written
allowed Congress to directly appoint members of the Commission, an
executive agency.”
Basically, the Buckley decision, and subsequent (increasingly
partisan Republican) Supreme Court decisions, have allowed aristocrats
to buy and control politicians.
Already, the major ‘news’ media were owned and controlled by the
aristocracy, and ‘freedom of the press’ was really just freedom of
aristocrats to control the ‘news’ — to frame public issues in the ways
the owners want. The media managers who are appointed by those owners
select, in turn, the editors who, in their turn, hire only reporters who
produce the propaganda that’s within the acceptable range for the
owners, to be ‘the news’ as the public comes to know it.
But, now, in the post-Buckley-v.-Valeo world, from Reagan on
(and the resulting study-period of 1981-2002), aristocrats became almost
totally free to buy also the political candidates they wanted.
The ‘right’ candidates, plus the ‘right’ ‘news’-reporting about them,
has thus bought the ‘right’ people to ‘represent’ the public, in the new
American ‘democracy,’ which Jimmy Carter now aptly calls “subversion of
our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
Carter — who had entered office in 1976, at the very start of that
entire era of transition into an aristocratically controlled United
States (and he left office in 1981, just as the study-period was
starting) — expressed his opinion that, in the wake now of the two most
extreme pro-aristocratic U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever (which
are Citizens United in 2010, andMcCutcheon in 2014), American democracy
is really only past tense, not present tense at all — no longer a
reality.
He is saying, in effect, that, no matter how much the U.S. was a dictatorship by the rich during 1981-2002 (the Gilens-Page study era), it’s far worse now.
Apparently, Carter is correct: The New York Times front page on Sunday 2 August 2015 bannered, "Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving,” and reported that:
"A New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission reports and Internal Revenue Service records shows that the fund-raising arms race has made most of the presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small pool of the richest Americans. The concentration of donors is greatest on the Republican side, according to the Times analysis, where consultants and lawyers have pushed more aggressively to exploit the looser fund-raising rules that have fueled the rise of super PACs. Just 130 or so families and their businesses provided more than half the money raised through June by Republican candidates and their super PACs.”The Times study shows that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly advantaged by the recent unleashing of big-corporate money power. All of the evidence suggests that though different aristocrats compete against each other for the biggest chunks of whatever the given nation has to offer, they all compete on the same side against the public, in order to lower the wages of their workers, and to lower the standards for consumers’ safety and welfare so as to increase their own profits (transfer their costs and investment-losses onto others); and, so, now, the U.S. is soaring again toward Gilded Age economic inequality, perhaps to surpass the earlier era of unrestrained robber barons. And, the Times study shows: even in the Democratic Party, the mega-donations are going to only the most conservative (pro-corporate, anti-public) Democrats. Grass-roots politics could be vestigial, or even dead, in the new America.
The question has become whether the unrestrained power of the
aristocracy is locked in this time even more permanently than it was in
that earlier era. Or: will there be yet another FDR (Franklin Delano
Roosevelt) to restore a democracy that once was? Or: is a President like
that any longer even possible in America?
As for today’s political incumbents: they now have their careers for
as long as they want and are willing to do the biddings of their
masters. And, then, they retire to become, themselves, new members of
the aristocracy, such as the Clintons have done, and such as the Obamas
will do. (Of course, the Bushes have been aristocrats since early in the
last century.)
Furthermore, the new age of aristocratic control is not merely national but international in scope; so, the global aristocracy have probably found the formula that will keep them in control until they destroy the entire world. What’s
especially interesting is that, with all of the many tax-exempt,
‘non-profit’ ‘charities,’ which aristocrats have established, none of
them is warring to defeat the aristocracy itself — to defeat the
aristocrats’ system of exploitation of the public. It’s the one thing
they won’t create a ‘charity’ for; none of them will go to war against the expoitative interests of themselves and of their own exploitative peers. They’re all in this together,
even though they do compete amongst themselves for dominance, as to
which ones of them will lead against the public. And the public seem to
accept this modern form of debt-bondage, perhaps because of the ‘news’ they see, and because of the news they don’t see (such as this).
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