Yves here. I must confess to being a bit puzzled by this post. If I read Tom Neuburger correctly, his assumption seems to be that America’s form of government will need to end for oligarchs to maintain their privileged status. In fact, in the not-all-that distant past, when using the word “elite” to describe the existence of an overclass would get the user branded as a nutter, it was already well established that popular policies among ordinary Americans were not being enacted. Policies depicted as “progressive” meaning presumed to be well to the left of center, like higher minimum wages, strengthening Social Security, cutting our military spending, and (gasp!) taxing the rich have long gotten substantial majority or at least top plurality support (the reasons in variation are often a function of how the questions were stated and ordered).
So oligarchs are getting their way just fine under our nominally democratic system.
The question is whether oligarchs have much to fear as the Jackpot progresses. Probably to their health and quality of life, but not necessarily to their relative status. Recall that even during the Dark Ages, the nobility still enjoyed the trappings of high living, like fine china, luxury fabrics, and goods imported from the Orient.
Our rich overlords are so removed from ordinary people that they are unlikely to be targets. Consider a more mundane and grim example, a shooting in Tulsa. From the New Republic:
Last Wednesday, an aggrieved Oklahoma man bought an AR-15-style assault rifle. He paired the weapon with a semiautomatic pistol he had purchased from a pawn shop three days before and drove to Saint Francis Hospital, in Tulsa, where he killed Dr. Preston Phillips, a spine surgeon who had operated on him two weeks earlier. He also killed Dr. Stephanie Husen, a sports medicine physician; Amanda Glenn, a receptionist; and William Love, a former Army sergeant who was shot while holding the door to an exam room closed, trying to shield his wife from the killer.
Other stories stated that the shooter went to the second floor of the hospital, as in he bypassed other employees.
IM Doc knew Dr. Philips a bit and named him in an e-mail as a victim before the press reported it. From IM Doc:
That is the exact hospital I worked at while living in Tulsa taking care of a family member.
The name of the doctor killed is Preston Phillips. An excellent spine surgeon.
It appears to have been a disgruntled patient, although nothing for sure is known. I do not know who the other dead are.
He was an amazing guy and took wonderful care of the patients.
This led GM to discuss rampant health care corruption in another country, to the degree that patients have started attacking doctors….but the victims are most often ER doctors, who actually are not part of the grifting but are readily targets. GM added:
…why is it that in the US, where everyone is armed, the rampage shootings happen in schools, but you don’t hear about people going into a health insurance company office building or at the top floors of some of the major hospitals and gunning down everyone there? There are actual grounds for resentment and truly guilty people here (whether you are for or against the death penalty, the US has it, and the various execs in the healthcare industry have been quite deliberately committing mass murder on a grand scale for decades).
Why the mention of these executives? Because they are members of the 1%, not the 0.1%. Someone who is facing bankruptcy from surprise billing might indeed track down the C-level types who devised and implemented those policies…but they’d still be removed from the private equity kingpins who were the ultimate and biggest beneficiaries and almost certainly turbocharged their growth.
So that’s a long-winded way of saying I don’t see how the oligarchs face any real need to revamp the political order to preserve their privileges. And that sort of change runs the risk of precipitating unnecessary fights within the very top ranks.
By Tom Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
“The alternative to democracy is oligarchy. As Aristotle noted already in the 4th century BC, oligarchies turn themselves into hereditary aristocracies. This is the path to serfdom.”
—Michael Hudson
Consider the following from the blurb for economist Michael Hudson’s latest book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism:
The book explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems – not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels. Professor Hudson endeavors to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution.
In an interview with the German magazine ViER (quoted here), Hudson was asked to expand on these ideas. He’s asked: What is the conflict between financialized and de-industrialized countries like United States and the mixed-economies of China and Russia really about? And why does he say the world’s at a unique “point of fracture”?
Hudson’s response to this is worth quoting in full. He starts with information that contains few surprises:
Today’s global fracture is dividing the world between two different economic philosophies: In the US/NATO West, finance capitalism is de-industrializing economies and has shifted manufacturing to Eurasian leadership, above all China, India and other Asian countries in conjunction with Russia providing basic raw materials and arms.
These countries are a basic extension of industrial capitalism evolving into socialism, that is, into a mixed economy with strong government infrastructure investment to provide education, health care, transportation and other basic needs by treating them as public utilities with subsidized or free services for these needs.
In the neoliberal US/NATO West, by contrast, this basic infrastructure is privatized as a rent-extracting natural monopoly.
But his continuation contains a seldom-asked question, at least in mainstream circles (emphasis mine):
The result is that the US/NATO West is left as a high-cost economy, with its housing, education and medical expenses increasingly debt financed, leaving less and less personal and business income to be invested in new means of production (capital formation). This poses an existential problem for Western finance capitalism: How can it maintain living standards in the face of de-industrialization, debt deflation and financialized rent-seeking impoverishing the 99% to enrich the One Percent?
Hudson’s answer to his own rhetorical question?
The first U.S. aim is to deter Europe and Japan from seeking a more prosperous future [by preventing] closer trade and investment ties with Eurasia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, a more helpful way of thinking about the global fracture from the BRICS). To keep Europe and Japan as satellite economies, U.S. diplomats are insisting on a new economic Berlin Wall of sanctions to block trade between East and West.
For many decades U.S. diplomacy has meddled in European and Japanese internal politics, sponsoring pro-neoliberal officials into government leadership. These officials feel that their destiny (and also their personal political fortunes) is closely allied with U.S. leadership. Meanwhile, European politics has now become basically NATO politics run from the United States.
The problem is how to hold the Global South – Latin America, Africa and many Asian countries – in the US/NATO orbit. Sanctions against Russia have the effect of hurting the trade balance of these countries by sharply raising oil, gas and food prices (as well as prices for many metals) that they must import. Meanwhile, rising U.S. interest rates are drawing financial savings and bank credit into U.S.-dollar-denominated securities. This has raised the dollar’s exchange rate, making it much harder for SCO and Global South countries to pay their dollarized debt service falling due this year.
This forces a choice on these countries: either go without energy and food in order to pay foreign creditors – thereby putting international financial interests before their domestic economic survival – or [default] on their debts, as occurred in the 1980s after Mexico announced in 1982 that it could not pay foreign bondholders.
This choice for the Global South — to go without energy and food or default on debt — is little commented on in the West, partly because the choice is so new, an outgrowth of Ukraine War sanctions. But the problem is still real.
The rest of the interview deals with these problems, the one faced by Europe and the one faced by the Global South. There’s also this stark but true reminder that “national parliaments are now subservient to NATO, whose policies are run from Washington.”
How Will U.S. Oligarchs Win in the U.S.?
But note in the first quote above the even larger problem Hudson identifies: How can the West maintain living standards while also de-industrializing and impoverishing the 99%?
He answers it, indirectly, by talking about how the inflow of money from Europe and other U.S.-dominated countries like Japan keeps the rich in cash:
European economic shortages are a huge benefit to the United States, which is making enormous profits on more expensive oil (which is controlled largely by U.S. companies, followed by British and French oil companies). Europe’s replenishment of the arms that it donated to Ukraine also is a boon to the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose profits are soaring.
But the United States is not recycling these economic gains to Europe, which is looking like the big loser.
None of those profits is going to the people. Only the living standards of the “One Percent” are propped up. (By “One Percent” I mean the upper 10%, a group that comprises our actual oligarchs, plus all those well-paid souls who keep that ship afloat and its engines running.)
Which leaves us with the original question: How will our wealthy keep control if they keep impoverish voters? Hudson’s answer, implicit in a piece written earlier is stark:
“The alternative to democracy is oligarchy. As Aristotle noted already in the 4th century BC, oligarchies turn themselves into hereditary aristocracies. This is the path to serfdom.”
In the same piece he adds, “All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC.”
People make facile comparisons of modern America to the end of the Roman Republic — without fully realizing that at the end of the Roman Republic, the Republic did end.
So how will our oligarchs do it — maintain control while impoverishing the governed? There’s really only one answer — by ending the republic, both its fact and pretense.
There may be other ways, but I can’t think of them.
i woke up this morning at 1am to help wife pee…and while i’m standing around looking at the wall…it hit me that this whole mess is like a global peasant revolt…2nd and 3rd worlds(showing my age) are revolting against the 1st world…”take this jawb and shove it…”…”i ain’t gonna work on maggie’s farm no more…”)
akin to this, but on a grand scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_the_Orders
and you’re right…i can’t think of anything the Elite can do, either…
(well, they could start being nice, and do some kind of Global New Deal…but that’s crazy talk)
so Oligarchy/neofeudalism/chaos down in steerage, it is.
along with severe repression, oppression and surveillance all the way down to our very cells…to make sure we take our medicine…
the real question is, are they able to pull that off to any meaningful degree?
i think they’re perfectly capable of sowing chaos and disorder and disease and famine and even nuclear fire….but controlling it in order to maintain their lifestyle and accompanying delusions of godhood?
no.
all the recent apokalyptii(rending the veil) from the Davos people…who have discovered how liberating it is to not hide who they are any more…
they won’t let it go…and they won’t (and likely don’t) understand why the 90% want no part of it.
so they’ll go balls to the wall in trying to shore up their ruin….”to serve mankind…”
so we lose even if we “win”.
peasant revolts usually fail…in fact, almost always.
the Conflict of the Orders was pretty successful, imo, given that gloomy later history of such actions.
the New Deal Era was, too.
both involved either outright General Strike…or the believable threat of one.
but for a general strike to actually work, today, it would have to be massive…even including the lower rungs of the pmc, if not higher.
but those are the most propagandised True Believers i’ve ever seen, aside from Righty Superpatriots(esp. korean war vets, for some reason).
how do “we”(such as we are a “we”) reach “them”(ibid)?
how bad does it have to get before teh scales fall from their eyes?
“Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown[.]”
—Paul Craig Roberts, quoted here
they came to power in 1993 under the one who shall not be named. so if those criminal policies are not reversed, and the people who implemented them are left free, ROBERTS IS CORRECT.
same thing for the author of the inflation piece yesterday. lots of good information and policy, except, none of it will ever happen till we take roberts advice.
Since when has President William Jefferson Clinton become the ” one who shall not be named”? Is this a referrence to Harry Potter, none of which I have ever seen nor read?
If we don’t want to name President NAFTA anymore, how about we call him President Jeffrey Epstein’s Friend?
i got pummeled for using his name. yes, its NAFTA BILLY CLINTON and his people. should we be surprised that after 30 plus years of his freedom, and hundreds of millions of dollars in bribe money, that his people have infiltrated just about every level of government, every educational institution, and NGO’S.
so roberts is right. if they are left free, what ever we try, we will fail.
are you absolutely sure they didn’t come in 1963? in 1974? in 1980? are you saying the oligarchy was not in power when Papa Bush, former head of CIA and former VP during Reagan’s years of dotage?
the oligarchy has always been in power here. they wrote the constitution to maintain their control and have never really relinquished it.
this is in response to lance ringquist. don’t know why it is threading strangely.
Amforta’s I pretty well agree with you, I expect the 1033 program to continue expanding and the drive to disarm the rabble ( Demonizing the AR15 is a fine example of how this works) accelerate along with even more surveillance and censorship.
What “Our” elites and some here fail to understand is just how complex and fragile the underpinnings of our society are.
It takes the active cooperation of most people to make it work and when you make it brutally clear to the 90% that society has no use for them, they stop having any use for “Society” and its norms.
At which point the wheels come off and chaos ensues.
You can liken the treatment of average Americans to the way we have treated wildfires, you suppress each one and the fuel builds up and when it catches nothing can control or stop it except time.
why would “They” take away the guns?
and, for that matter, how?
i know lots of right wingers who are expecting justr that..”govthugs comin to my house and taking my guns”
they have been steeled…over more than 50 years…toi resist that very thing.
aint gon happen.
“They”, rather, want the frelling guns among us’n’s.
the better to thin ourselves with.
so, one could think of all these mass murdering lunatics as a bunch of Judas Goats, really.
not something i’d aspire to, if i quit smoking cigs and became thereby murderous.
As bad as things get, ultimately in a democracy the voters have the power to change the government. This is the one, ultimate brake on overreaching oligarchy which remains and as such it remains an instinctual dread for the (now rotten class) of 1%ers.
Indeed, the voters are already kicking. Trump is the best example, so is Brexit. But so too the implosion of ‘center'(i.e. neoliberal) parties across the democratic world and the rise of radical parties on both the left and right. The voters are somewhat desperately seeking a political alternative — increasingly any alternative — to the neoliberal consensus which is eating their futures whole.
In turn, these voter rebellions are denounced as ‘populism’ by the ascendancy. Censorship has risen, chiefly in the ‘private’ domain, not because of the ostensible issues with extremism, but because our leaders are genuinely afraid of emerging political alternatives. We are seeing propaganda now being used to justify a new culture of censorship, political conformity, and deplatforming, because it is the only way for the present regime to survive if the system remains ostensibly democratic. So, the oligarchs are already reacting to the voters rebelling.
Ultimately, I think something will have to give. The parlor tricks and spin will not work on voters forever, and indeed are not working anymore. The next stage is ever more draconian crackdowns on dissent, leading inexorably to some awful bloody coup or purge. Look to Latin American, or indeed to Ukraine to see what real oligarchical seizure of power looks like. Note that the US government as a whole is well versed in such strategies, and those thinking they will never be applied at home, even as the system is rattling apart are being too optimistic.
Well, re Brexit, sadly the oligarchs (Murdoch and Co.) skilfully used it to strengthen their grip on British politics. These guys are really smart. If you are going to kick against them you have to be really smart too, otherwise they will use your strength against you.
A decayed democracy, which is what the UK is at present, seems most likely to descend ever further into oligarchy (already there to a great degree). After that the next step is likely dictatorship. I know some who think that is definitely the future.
The UK has solved the problem of unrule proles. The new police powers bill essentially outlaws protest, and the proposed National Security Bill outlaws journalism.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/national-security-bill-priti-patel-journalists/
The US simply makes it very unpleasant for civilians to protest, with agressively violent policing, and deliberately conflates ‘reporter’ with ‘protester’.
Demonstrating in the US is like being a cyclist in the US: you can still do it in a lot of places, but there are few socially-funded provisions for it, making it a high-effort, high risk activity that is rendered as ineffective and marginal as possible.
In the US at least people expect that “revolutions” can be bloodless. There is no historical precedent for bloodless revolutions. For any real, meaningful, and lasting changes to occur in the United States blood must spill. And likely lots of it. Very few Americans are willing to put their lives on the line for anything. Americans are easy to control via brute force, propaganda, and social conditioning. The elites have nothing to fear.
the great thing about brexit is that its their own mess now to be addressed. you cannot address problems at home under free trade. just look to france as the example. i said they will never topple macron, because macrons support is global, that is the global oligarchs under free trade support him.
under sovereignty, the reach of the global oligarchs can be limited.
In theory perhaps, but the realities of power are quite different in practice. Global oligarchs control the UK media and through that control the world view of a significant section of the population. Before Brexit, UK politicians were able to use the EU as a countervailing power to the oligarchs. Now the UK is on its own and therefore weaker.
Brainwashing works and those who control the media in the UK know how to use it. I am sorry but that is how it is.
but its their own mess now. we see how well the E.U. works with greece, italy, spain, portugal etc.
so the u.k. does have a advantage, they have the ability to clean things up including the reach of the global oligarchs. if you are in the E.U., you have no chance at all.
But if you are controlled by the oligarchs, as the UK is, you cannot get rid of them, because they control you.
One of the results of Brexit is a government which is now going to restrict the right to vote in a way which will discourage the young and the poor from voting. The UK is in the process of ceasing to be a functioning democracy in any real sense of the word.
You think the UK is going to get a left wing government when many of the voters likely to vote for that type of government are effectively being disenfranchised? Sorry, it is not going to happen.
You need to distinguish between sovereignty, which is a legal concept which may not have relevance in reality, and power, which is what always ultimately determines political outcomes.
I won’t go into detail on the EU other than to say that it is a many headed beast with many differences between member states, some with much bigger state sectors than others. As for France, I wish, as a Briton. that we had anything like as generous a welfare state as the French do. Whatever its faults -and they do complain a lot- the French get a lot of things right.
but the french are in the e.u., and their welfare state will be slashed. that is whats macrons job is, the global oligarchs put him in there just for that.
when you are sovereign you can clean up messes like this. in the e.u. you cannot.
so under sovereignty you can over come them, it might not be in a conventional way, but at least you do not have over lords like in the e.u., just ask greece, italy portugal and spain are not far behind.
the only way to liberty is sovereignty, protectionism, and nationalism.
It took a Democrat to say it: “I don’t care who people vote for as long as I can select the candidates” (Boss Tweed)… That’s the state of the current “democracy” with a narrowly limited set of options–shoot yourself in your left foot…or your right.
he who counts the vote, controls the vote. right now, oligarchs manufacture machines. they “count” the vote.
not to mention primaries. the shadow app in iowa, the media blackout and smearing of bernie, the party uniting to kill his rising campaign. did anyone else attract 25k to a rally? polls closing and of course, machines.
― Confucius
Russia has oligarchs, Ukraine has oligarchs, and others have oligarchs; all bad.
But the US has financiers, entrepreneurs and most importantly: philanthropists; all good?
So perhaps it is significant just to call them what they are: oligarchs.
And where the US started with John Jay:
Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, had a similar take at the end of the Roman Republic, in which he had a hand.
In the West our oligarchs are styled as “the sainted job creators.”
I for one welcome any bonfire upon which they might burn …
Are you willing to ignite a bonfire, or do you prefer that others do the dirty work?
That is what they, and their proxies say, and what the bamboozled are led to believe, but the jobs they create are mostly offshore at the lowest labor cost countries, with the least environmental protection possible.
They do create local high paid jobs for their managerial underlings. But only a few.
I think that John Jay had it wrong. Just because you are good at running a business does not cross over into the skills in running a government. Same with Marcus Licinius Crassus. He was good at business so he thought that he would be brilliant as a military general. It did not end well-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Syrian_governorship_and_death
I thought the republic had ended. The evidence is in just about every political discussion here, that what we’re seeing in Washington is farce. Neither party is respected, no politician is trusted, the economy is going to implode… what followed the end of the Roman Republic was the Dark Ages. Okay, it was a slow winding down but then the lights went out and stayed out for hundreds of years. I’ve been stockpiling beeswax. The best preppers become our new overlords; whoever has the most toys wins. The turning of the wheel comes round again?
As for your question, I kinda like ‘with large private armies’. Heirs are flesh and blood and delicious with sriracha.
Looks like the USA has traded one tyrant 3000 miles away for 3000 one percenters one mile away. The American Dream has come true!!!
Funny you should say that. In later years George Washington did not like to be touched by people and this really came out in the first inauguration when he became America’s first President of the United (Thirteen) States. A participant turned to a friend and quipped ‘I fear that we have exchanged George the Third for George the First.’ True story that.
With US Federal Legislature committee memberships/chairmanships based on campaign donations (rules of both major parties) and the 60-vote rule in the senate to close debate, the republic has already ended. It’s just that most people are not aware of the real situation.
It should be noted that the Romans kept the trappings of the Republic long after the Republic ceased to exist. Appeals to “Republican” virtues were often invoked by the Caesars. Plus, there was the retension of the ostensibly “democratic” Senate (that usually rubber stamped the Emperor’s policies). Things seem to move faster these days – the Western Roman empire, from the ascension of Augustus to the abdication of the last “puppet” emperor Romulus in 476CE lasted around 500 years. The Eastern half of the Empire endured another 1000 years after the fall of the West!
The USA has been doing a similar thing, IMO. It retains and exalts the trappings of the old Republic while slowly moving to the oligarchic model. A military coup will be the likely formal end of the Republic in the USA (after a tRump re-election?). A disintegration into several regional powers is also possible, as there will be resistance to any consolidation of power by a military junta in Washington D.C. How the Armed forces break up and are distributed will determine the form of the regional powers. In my mind, it will mirror somewhat the breakup of the Soviet Union, but could be much bloodier, given the blood-lust built into American culture. We’ll see if Dmitri Orlov is correct. https://web.archive.org/web/20191029143546/https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-12-04/closing-collapse-gap-ussr-was-better-prepared-collapse-us/
the playbook of usa foreign policy for at least 80 years has been to overthrow or otherwise manipulate into dependency the smaller countries…and to bust up the larger ones into more digestible chunks.
the latter was the goal behind using Ukraine as a stick to poke the Bear…not just regime change(get rid of putin), but bust it up into many smaller, and therefore weaker, statelets, and begin the feast.
given that so many of the tactics of that more or less covert FP have come home(see:US Army field manuals on COIN), why wouldn’t a “controlled” balkinisation of USA, itself, be on the table…perhaps as a last resort…perhaps not?
it occurs to me that one of the less talked about reasons for the ongoing hostility towards Cuba, is not only the example of some form of successful(ish) socialism 90 miles from Miami…but also a definitely successful example of 200 guys overthrowing a government, in spite of the Mighty El Norte’s opposition.
(see: War of the Flea)
Some of the nuances are — engrossing.
USA didn’t break up the large countries of Europe, rather manoeuvred them into the larger European Union. So they are smaller proportionally while being absolutely the same size as before.
The European Union is subservient to NATO which the US controls. All NATO countries are vassals of the United States. That is by design.
That is also by their own choice. With a bigger collective economy and a bigger population, EUrope could abrogate NATO any time it likes. Clearly they don’t want to do that just yet.
What’s often overlooked is that the Roman Republic’s oligarchy–far from being omniscient and omnipotent–was in constant danger of self-destructing through internal conflicts and inability to handle affairs overseas. It was this chronically unstable state of affairs which made military strongmen indispensable to begin with, starting with Marius in the late 2nd century BC.
There’s a parallel here with “Bonapartism” as described by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. When France’s elite was unable to govern itself or the nation it turned to what amounted to the 19th century equivalent of the Roman military strongman.
It’s highly questionable whether the Caesarist or Bonapartist precedents have any applicability to the 21st century US, which is why dissolution/partition scenarios seem to make more sense.
There were three wings of the Jullii. The only ones left were the hillbillly cousins who are still hillbillies. I guess it’s a valley.
I agree and would say any republic the US had is long gone. The so-called “bad’ emperors like Domitian were considered so not because they were any more terrible than Augustus or Tiberius, but because they refused to play the game any more that earlier emperors had in pretending they weren’t really dictators, and instead made it clear to the PMC of the day, the Roman Senate, who was really in charge, ie. not the Senate.
Turns out paying lip service to the upper classes is actually really useful if you don’t want to be murdered. That’s why the US oligarchs really in charge don’t just abolish Congress – they purchase it instead and allow the elected court jesters to fight among themselves for the amusement, and to the detriment, of the modern day plebes.
We already had a military/intelligence coup in this country on Nov. 22, 1963, just that most people don’t want to or can’t recognize that fact!
The establishment hasn’t been disrupted at all.
More gang like wars in the US? It will be considered “state’s issues.”
The coup happened already.
we’re already in serfdom, just the even worse kind where you don’t even have any right to subsistence nor true means to get it.
the “middle class”, though dwindling, gets to keep fooling themselves about all of this because they have a suburban home and a 401K.
‘…serfdom, just the even worse kind …”
that also remains more or less invisible/incomprehensible to the majority of said serfs.
people i interact with/eavesdrop upon in public are, in the main, aware that something’s wrong…but the Mindf^ck has been extremely adept…providing myriad contradictory and rather idiotic and reactionary/revanchist frameworks that misdirect the anger and ultimately neuter any nascent opposition.
I don’t think Aristotle said anything about oligarchies turning themselves into hereditary aristocracies. He distinguished between rule by one (tyranny) rule by several (oligarchy) and rule by the many (democracy) but he was clear that the important distinctions were really between the objectives that governments pursued on the one hand, and the character of the rulers on the other.
I’ve long argued that if you want to see the future of the US you should look to Africa, with formal democratic systems largely controlled by moneyed interests and a political system that exists largely to loot the economy. If you consider Chinese investment to be the equivalent of donor aid to Africa, the parallels are quite exact.
“Future” of the US, David? Sounds descriptive of the present regime. Controlled by moneyed interests and existing to loot the economy, the ‘economy’ being the the people and the natural resources.
I personally think the USA look more like the Spanish empire in the 18th century and that the likelihood with Rome (republican or imperial) is inappropriate, but all those historical or geographical comparisons are debatable anyway (and sometimes fun).
The US is an oligarchy.
Consider the structure and powers of the Senate.
It controls the courts through the selection of supreme court member, who are unaccountable for their actions.
It control other policies by blocking most legislation.
It is a bastion of the rich, run by the rich for the rich. Basically it is a house of lords.
I suspect that any system of rule must become a rule by the wealthy. A description of this is Orewell’s Animal Farm.
I’ve come to believe that this was the intent of the constitution. It was written by the rich, for the rich, to be administered by those same rich. Property was always its reason for being, and the governments that followed were certain to provide the rich every means to acquire more property. They wrote the laws, they said what’s fair. The ‘Founders’ of this nation were some of the richest capitalists of their day, determined to create a country that would make possible the pursuit of their private interests. The measure of their success is the widespread respect, even veneration, the constitution receives among nearly all americans, even those who can scarcely breathe under its weight.
Where will the public’s anger be expressed when push>meets<shove and they're mad as hell and then some?
As recently as say 30 years ago if you didn't exist in the phone book, well-you didn't exist essentially.
Look at what happened with Kavanaugh the other day, everybody can figure out where the elites live, heck a good many of them were so excited to tell the world about their 48,525 sq foot house they bought for $65 million, with all kinds of photos and such.
They've left quite a trail…
“They’ve left quite a trail…”
Anything on the internet can go “poof” (disappear).
The Orlov piece is well worth the read. Thanks for the link. I am thinking backyard chickens today.
Orlov, yes.
But chickens? Vegan, I’m afraid; couldn’t wring their sweet necks.
Re: backyard chickens for vegans. Chickens (and ducks) don’t have to be eaten to be integrated into a sustainable lifestyle (sorry, about using ‘that’ word, but can’t think of another one at this point.)
They eat slugs, which can wreak havoc on a veggie garden, and other bugs. And, produce excellent poop, the Veuve Clicquot of fertilizer.
Also, eggs. You might not eat them, but they can be used to barter with neighbors for goods and services. After a pleasant lifetime of wandering about the yard, they can die a natural death and be returned to the earth, more fertilizer.
The problem with vegan chickens, is half of the babies are males, and nobody wants two roosters, many don’t want one. So they are chucked into a grinder, literally.
The “oligarchs” need to pour all of their money and know-how into the global warming/pollution crisis. By repairing the planet in some big international mobilization they will be restoring value. That’s industrialization at its finest, imo. The danger is their penchant for ROI. They really do need an entirely different protocol because they’ll need to delay their gratification and insure the steps they are taking are good long term solutions. I don’t know why they can’t get it all together and do this. If they don’t we’re all dead. If they do we will all learn how to survive. If they leave it to the politicians to nitpick it will be too late. So maybe a velvet revolution is in order. That could be interesting – the Oligarch Revolution.
What’s a lord without serfs?
The robots aren’t coming online fast enough, IMO.
We will without a doubt cross a thresh hold where the easiest way to get robots is just declare that bunch of humans over there as not human.
Or if you want to see it in action, look at how prisoners are making products for American companies in America’s for profit prison system.
America is a society which is completely focused on making billionaires, yet for every billionaire we create, our society must be creating 100,000 or more potential mass shooters. I am a simpleton, and purposely try to keep things simple. Maybe by getting rid of the former, we can quit producing so many of the latter.
The oligarchs still control the military/police and all of the hardware that comes with them. They will just start imposing stricter and stricter austerity measures on the peasantry as things destabilize, and if there is ever sort of any uprising, they will probably launch a missile or two from a drone at the offending serfs to punish and make an example of them.
There might be a few dissenters in the military at first, but the MIC would deal with them easily enough, and eventually the military will become so accustomed to being used as a domestic deathsquad it will be thought of as part of the job. This will be much like how torture from the W. Bush presidency and onward has become normalized.
I think what we witnessed in Uvalde was what we will be seeing on a large scale as police quit on the job en masse as things get stranger and stranger, whats in it for them now?… especially the coppers who craved power, which would be most of them.
What’s in it for them? Why, their pensions, of course.
The morning news broadcast a short segment from Los Angles where the Summit of The Americas is taking place. A middle aged woman holding a sign approached the Biden motorcade. She was slammed hard to the ground by a security agent and beaten. A young man holding a skateboard approached the scene (presumably to voice protest against the woman’s beating) and he himself was beaten by another agent. This is the real America. Dissent and protests are not tolerated in “our democracy”.
Add in Gilens and Page 2014 study to Orlov, Hudson, and Aaron Good’s American Exception book and its clear that we are right in the middle of this transition.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
Not only does Hudson’s thesis explain the current foreign policy morass, surveillance state, propaganda-media cancellation culture, and the massive uncertainty in the financial markets as unipolarity transition, war potential, but also the poor institutional responses to a pandemic, which all point to greater control for the deep state.
Might already be too late.
Then again, Vonnegut reminds us that “the best way out, is always through”. We cannot avoid these conflicts with the specter of climate catastrophes, food crises, and massive reliance upon violence to solve the most basic of problems.
Frankly the US system is a carbon copy of the British one, only replacing lords with senators and king with president.
And the system seems to have been designed from day one to be subject to deadlocks, if there is any attempt by the hoi poloi at bringing the “elite” to task by legislative means.
This article reminds me of the line from Keyser Soze in the film “Usual Suspects”: The greatest trick the devil (American oligarchs) ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
The Guardian article right after the Trump inaugural was my favorite: “the wave of authoritarianism that has overcome our nation since January.”
I had to laugh at it, but the propaganda skill at avoiding mention of the surveillance , policing, and presidential emergency powers that accumulated during the Cold War and GWOT showed what they want to use on us. So it is all here now.
My hunch is that control will be exerted using least-cost methods, made to appear continuous with “normal,” like Covid policy in the US. How much chaos the upper circles are willing to accept, and still maintain control, will be a limiter. They have been leaning out the fiscal mix for decades now, and they did not enjoy it when the engine missed, as in the Trump election, or the Sanders candidacy. Russiagate and the Election Fraud propaganda campaigns suggest some degree of desperation among our political handlers, but the fix is holding so far.
As usual, the biggest opportunity for popular forces will come from incompetence or conflict amongst and between ruling groups. Look at the Vietnam War: overreach caused mobilization of antiwar forces before the establishment realized how strong they were. How the US’s owners will manage the Russia and China conflict without enough energy or manufacturing is the big one on the horizon, with climate change right behind it — I keep watching for what they will do on those fronts, and it appears the Ukraine war has forced their hand. Their response looks more like an extrusion of short-term interest, not a strategy.
The protests during the Vietnam War really only took off when the draft was instituted. Prior to the draft public support for the war was high. The protests that there were had little influence over American policy. Now that the military is all-volunteer there are very few protests of the Forever Wars. Most of the big name Vietnam war protesters morphed into establishment capitalists. A bunch of phonies for the most part.
Recall, the draft preexisted the beginning of the war — it began with WWII. The inequities of the deferment system got so bad that a draft lottery began at the end of 1969 — but war support went below 50% sometime in 1967, before the lottery began.
According to, IIRC, Kissinger’s memoirs, but also national security documents, the prospect of antiwar demonstrations dissuaded Nixon from using atomic weapons in Vietnam. (If you want a policy impact, that’s good enough for me.) Similar points could be made about the Johnson administration’s war policy. But the movement did have a big impact on policy — and I still remember Cold War propagandist James Reston calling it the greatest political crisis in the US since the Civil War. That’s an impact.
But if the antiwar movement won, the larger New Left failed. And responses to the failure went all over the map, including selling out. It was vile to see the former 1960s SDS Chairman Paul Booth shilling for Clinton in 2016 and working against Sanders, but that is what happens in politics. But many other veterans of the antiwar movement of the time did not.
This whole discussion is weird. I agree with Yves. Our democracy works just fine for the elite right now as a government. They continue to select and influence those voted into power to defend their interests. Mission accomplished indefinitely.
Once that really and truly breaks down things will change, but no sign of it yet. If anything, they continue to tighten their grip with Citizen’s United ruling and other new means of campaign funding.
Representative government still exists in this country. I got my US Senator to reopen a road essential to running our ranch that had been closed by an overzealous public lands risk management department. My sister was elected to a small town city council as part of a slate (which ran from fundamentalist Christian military vets to anarchist psychics politically) to rebuild the tiny town’s crumbling water system (and they succeeded). So it exists.
But that is not the whole political water column, so I would not call the nation a democracy. We are similar to Russia — a system of limited popular representation capped by a hybrid oligarchy/national security stratum. We are not quantitatively as bad Russia yet, but the difference does not appear to me as a difference in kind.
While the elections go on as they have, everything around them changes. The Federal government can now torture people and get away with it. There are industrial scale Fourth Amendment search violations — Congress even retroactively immunized Bush and his officials for their felonies. And we have the current Section 702 violations, right now. We have a de facto national pass with the Real ID Act. US citizens can be killed without due process. There is no effective budgetary oversight of the national security sector, as the Constitution requires.
These are the normal extra-constitutional operations of the government at present. That’s why I don’t call it a democracy.
Step just a little out of line politically, and you will personally begin to encounter limits. Don’t buy an Irish language dictionary from the wrong online political party bookstore, or you are going to find your bank has placed restrictions on how much you can spend when you travel to Ireland, and they won’t deny it or apologize (though they will reimburse telephone expenses you incurred trying to figure it out). Get arrested for a peaceful protest against nuclear weapons, and if the Feds are interested in your case, the County will suddenly decide to revoke their bail policy the day of your arrest, and you have to spend another day in jail while they keep you off the street. Don’t have a peaceful antiwar march at an important port, or you will get wooden dowels fired at you before you are thrown in jail — all because anonymous goons at the local Counterterrrorism Center decided you were a threat (as happened at the Port of Oakland during the Iraq War). Your political freedom will not be constrained as long as you just vote, and only for the main party candidates, but otherwise, my experience is, get ready for a learning experience.
So I am halfway there with you,. We have significant popular political leverage, and we have the power to run some things, and we can create political management crises (like the Medicare For All pressure), but there are controls on us under our post-Constitutuional system. So it cannot meaningfully be called a democracy at present.
Thank you, Michael Hudson, for your analysis of the empire. We must be “on guard” for what comes next, maybe as early as 2024.
Maybe a bit old fashioned, and certainly (over) optimistic in the American tradition, but for what it’s worth here is Lewis Lapham on the problem: “what had been intended as an enlightened oligarchy in 1787 is now a stupefied plutocracy”. When asked whether it can change, he replies, “one hopes”. . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCj2TxAqck&t=606s
It is not yet stupefied. It still controls the US Government with an iron grip forever pursuing its interests and completely devoid of any desire to even listen to hoi polloi.
Predicting United States Policy Outcomes with Random Forests
In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning.
Two decades of U.S. government legislative outcomes, as well as the policy preferences of high- income people, the general population, and diverse interest groups, were captured in a detailed dataset curated and analyzed by Gilens, Page et al. (2014). They found that the preferences of high-income earners correlated strongly with policy outcomes, while the preferences of the general population did not, except via a linkage with the preferences of high earners. Their analysis applied the tools of classical statistical inference, in particular logistic regression. In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning.
We present two primary findings, concerning respectively prediction and inference: (i) Holdout test sets can be predicted with approximately 70% balanced accuracy by models that consult only the preferences of those in the 90th income percentile and a small number of powerful interest groups, as well as policy area labels. These results include retrodiction, where models trained on pre-1997 cases predicted “future” (post-1997) cases. The 20% gain in accuracy over baseline (chance), in this detailed but noisy dataset, indicates the high importance of a few distinct players in U.S. policy outcomes, and aligns with a body of research indicating that the U.S. government has significant plutocratic tendencies.
(ii) The feature selection methods of RF models identify especially salient subsets of interest groups (economic players). These can be used to further investigate the dynamics of governmental policy making, and also offer an example of the potential value of RF feature selection methods for inference on datasets such as this one.
“So that’s a long-winded way of saying I don’t see how the oligarchs face any real need to revamp the political order to preserve their privileges. And that sort of change runs the risk of precipitating unnecessary fights within the very top ranks”. -Yves
I agree that they would have no immediate impetus for change.
But they rule with a grouping of under-bosses below them. Someone noted the military, but there are other groups broad and small. As Peter Turchin has noted, it is when the elites fight between themselves that it all falls apart. In the case of the Arab Spring in Egypt, the populous was squeezed by high prices. But the military was also upset with the ruling regime. As the big-skim got to small to spread to all the power groups, the military had been one of the groups squeezed. Maybe not much, but they had the guns. Given both Hillary’s and Trumps’s “election-steal” escapades, it doesn’t seem much of a reach to get a collapse compelled by the other-bosses of the .01%.
The plan seems pretty straight forward: destroy wealth, even that of a significant portion of the “one percent” in order to further concentrate the consumptive power of our economy in fewer hands(the .0001% ?). Since the US can only “sell” dollars, it must be able to at once produce these (QE) and make them scarce and desirable (high rates). In order for ordinary Americans to access these scarce dollars necessary for survival, they will have to debase themselves further. Of course in a culture where perversity is seen as empowerment (see things like onlyfans) this further debasement will be accepted as “hustling”.
Here is a discussion of this matter a bit closer to home. Despite living 3,000 miles away I found this piece – from a sports blog no less – very compelling.
https://defector.com/it-all-came-together-against-chesa-boudin/
Of course the connection to the not-so-long-ago Weathermen was irresistible. Perhaps some of the locals can spin off the article.
The Boudin recall just shows what phonies most San Francisco “progressives” are. Some residents know this and questioned their own progressive notions where the rubber meets the road. When push comes to shove most people are law & order types, including self described liberals and progressives. Let’s also not forget that Nancy Pelosi owns San Francisco. There is even a city street named after her. There is little truly progressive about San Francisco. The city exists for people to get rich, exploit public subsidies, and to enjoy inherited wealth.
Here are my thoughts about this subject in no particular order:
The Tytler Cycle of Democracy seems to be working as laid out. 1976 was the 200 year mark when the prosperity of the general public dropped off as being a priority. The groundwork was all laid out for government money to be diverted to fewer and fewer entities, this now works very well (example: privatization). I see the Tytler Cycle as a general guideline as far as dates are concerned but the shoe seems to fit so far.
Also, I think about Jospeh Tainter and what he says about the collapse of complex societies. To sum it up he says societies fall apart because the energy costs are too high. With the pandemic (historically those can really wreck havoc on the status quo governmentally speaking) and now the sudden spike in the price of one of our most consumed forms of energy (let’s face it, we are oil addicts- I’m as guilty as anyone) look where we are now. I feel like there is a very real possibility that in the next 20 years things will change so drastically we won’t really recognize ourselves as a nation. Doesn’t the fact that there is nothing at all changing about weapons being used on innocent people who are merely going about their business point to this already?
Then there’s this: oligarchies are followed by dictatorships. It’s been an oligarchy for awhile now (think about Citizens United v. FEC).
So oligarchies followed by dictators makes perfect sense, no one is listening to Joe and Jane Normalfolk (who provide the labor that keeps everything going) and they are disgruntled (especially in rural areas and the working class). What is the Great Resignation other than a bunch of people who to want to get off the underpaid/undervalued labor bus.
The occasional bone is thrown out by whoever is in charge for the moment to appease the masses but it’s not enough, what people really want is hope. Hope for change, hope for opportunities, hope for real work and a better tomorrow (or at least for their children if they have them).
That hope everyone is longing for makes it so easy to believe the PR campaign. So easy to jump on the dictator driven wagon and that’s where I think we are headed to fast. We’ve had a taste of it and I’m scared we are going to see a repeat. I’m actually rather certain that we will see this come to pass.
I enjoyed, and concurred with Yves’ prologue with its contributions from GM and IMDoc more than the article itself. I have asked myself the same questions as GM. And further, I don’t think American will be able to dispense with oligarchy until people start getting at the real enemies of society. After the Uvalde shooting, with all the predictable nonsense from politicians, I thought to myself something along the lines of: “they’ll never ban AR-15’s unless people started using them to kill the people who actually inflict harm from above”
The basic answer to “How Will American Oligarchs Keep Control?” is that they shouldn’t, in the long run they can’t, and if they are smart, they won’t. I like Lyn Alden’s discussion in her page on debt jubilees – which actually covers much more than debt jubilees.
Solon’s reforms worked for a few generations, until external events (disasters) created enough disruption to interfere both with his laws, and also with the natural tendency towards inequality.
Venice, though, is a longer-term example. It was an oligarchy lasting just over a thousand years, from say 729 to 1797. It almost always remained aware both of the need to distribute wealth on the one hand, and vehemently reject autocracy on the other (tried only once, ended in decapitation). Perhaps part of the success of this was because the oligarch families were hereditary, and as happens over a millennium, some ran into finanancial trouble, but still kept their votes.
Whether in today’s world the oligarchs are as smart as those of 2800 or 1400 years ago is an open question.
Contrary to opinions often expressed in NC, I am somewhat optimistic, but, hey, who knows? In my own small way I am working towards making society smarter, starting with my kids….
My response to NC
To the question GM asked re why the executives are not gunned down, I have a few opinions:
Straight up, having worked in hospitals in US and now Canada, the execs are behind and way above the access points, carded entries. In the US, guards posted – even as an emplyee in the largest heath system in the Detroit area, I could not enter the Admin bldg without a ten minute check by a guard including phone calks, id flashing and confirmation just trying to go HR for routine activity.
They are in separate, undisclosed locations, separate bldgs, hard to fathum depts, with lockable private doors. They are in the castle.
We who do the work are told; “go into this room and fiddle with the door, that is your safe space if needed.” Rooms that do not have normal locks but instead have the kind you open the door and peer along its latch at an unintuitive metal rocker – not apparent when in lock or not…while someone is after you?
Another reason is that I equate the general perception of laypeople and pts as status-based: people pump us front line with all manner of informal chatter, urgent sneaking-a-question-before-the-doc-comes-in kinds of questions. But as soon as the doctor or radiologist comes in they go passive nice and never ask “will it hurt?”, “I’m affraid”, ” can I …?”.
And, the bullies and abusive ones never try to push around the rad, never, passive nice.
Many times they steadfastly won’t ask important questions of important people. They don’t want to interrupt, irritate, disurb, but, us they relish doing these things.
Or maybe, like the man who beats his wife to work out his feelings about his boss and his status at work: he doesn’t feel strong enough to challenge that.
A lot like “going postal” or wartime turning the guns on their fellows or themselves. The internalized oppression is deeply embedded. It takes a lot to rock a revolution.
It might be deep brain wiring, part of the social status wiring beneath consciousness.
But the execs are safe for a while, unless a lethal democratic disease comes along, no revolution yet.
I wonder at what point some disgruntled commoners would keep the security guard occupied and focused on them . . . one way or another . . . long enough for some other disgruntled commoners to apply superglue to all the locks, hinges, etc. to seal the executives up inside their safe spaces, so that they could not come out.
to what end? to making local locksmiths have temporary revenue increases?
Fair point . . .