{"id":14581,"date":"2015-11-20T07:53:44","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T12:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14581"},"modified":"2015-11-20T07:53:44","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T12:53:44","slug":"verging-on-plutocracy-getting-real-about-the-unelected-dictatorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14581","title":{"rendered":"Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/11\/20\/verging-on-plutocracy-getting-real-about-the-unelected-dictatorship\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-77031\" src=\"http:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2015\/11\/plutocrat-510x477.jpg\" alt=\"plutocrat\" width=\"510\" height=\"477\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In politics as in medicine, excessively mild remedies are typically based on overly placid diagnoses. Look, for example, at the highly esteemed Columbia University historian Eric Foner\u2019s recent letter of congratulations and advice to Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/how-bernie-sanders-should-talk-about-democratic-socialism\/\">The Nation<\/a>. As I have argued in a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/11\/06\/defending-socialism-foner-and-sanders-v-eugene-debs\/\">previous\u00a0<em>CounterPunch<\/em>\u00a0essay<\/a>, Foner\u2019s missive failed to correct Sanders on the candidate\u2019s incredibly tepid and watered-down definition of democratic socialism as little more than a Scandinavian welfare state. It sent Eugene Debs spinning in his grave when it argued that \u201csocialism today\u201d is about \u201cthe need to rein in the excesses of capitalism.\u201d Those were the exact same words used by Hillary Clinton in the first Democratic Party presidential\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/the-fix\/wp\/2015\/10\/13\/the-oct-13-democratic-debate-who-said-what-and-what-it-means\/\">debate<\/a>,\u00a0<em>reflecting on what she feels is occasionally necessary to preserve the profits system and what she felt should never be confused with socialism<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s one part of Foner\u2019s letter that I forgot to mention in my previous essay even though it is intimately related to his alignment with milquetoast radicalism and Hillary\u2019s fake-progressive corporatism. It comes at the beginning of the letter\u2019s sixth paragraph, when he says that contemporary socialism seeks \u201cto empower ordinary people in\u00a0<em>a political system verging on plutocracy<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m all for and indeed about empowering ordinary people, but I had to stop and read that statement a second time and ask myself: did the nation\u2019s leading left-liberal historian really just describe contemporary U.S. politics as merely\u00a0<em>verging\u00a0<\/em>on plutocracy? You don\u2019t have to be a radical Marxist to think that\u2019s pussyfooting around the matter. Over the past three plus decades, liberal mainstream political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) reported\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/journals.cambridge.org\/action\/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;aid=9354310&amp;fileId=S1537592714001595\">last year<\/a>, the U.S. political system has become \u201can oligarchy,\u201d where wealthy elites and their corporations \u201crule.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship In politics as in medicine, excessively mild remedies are typically based on overly placid diagnoses. Look, for example, at the highly esteemed Columbia University historian Eric Foner\u2019s recent letter of congratulations and advice to Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in\u00a0The Nation. As I have argued [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5434,5493,7934,10672,1092,2238,4345,2799,827,2525],"class_list":["post-14581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-bernie-sanders","tag-counterpunch","tag-dictatorship","tag-eric-foner","tag-oligarchy","tag-plutocracy","tag-political-system","tag-socialism","tag-united-states","tag-welfare-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14582,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions\/14582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}