The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Nine Mile Road

    By Red Planet on Sat, 07/16/2011 - 3:06pm |

    There's Wall Street. There's Main Street. And there is Nine Mile Road. Even the folks on Main Street don't know much about Nine Mile Road.

    Today, Paul Krugman (who has mentioned it before) quotes Mike Konczal channeling Jeffrey Winters's book, Oligarchy.

    "...there's been a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of the oligarchs: wealth and income defense."

    Out here on Nine Mile Road this has been very obvious for a very long time, even among those who didn't make it all the way through four years at Yale, Harvard or the University of Chicago.

    In fact, it's obvious out here that the oligarchs have taken the reins of the government: oligarchy spilling into plutocracy.

    This IS the class struggle.

    Republican, Democrat, that division is insignificant.

    I wonder when Main Street and Nine Mile Road will realize that they are in this together.

     

    Comments

    I would posit that a key reason they can't see that they're in this together - or that see things through the class war prism - is that Americans are still struggling with the individualism / collectivism binary.  Barth's blog today touches on this, as well as I would say cmaukonen's.  I would also toss out there the idea that there has never been a time when the oligarchs have not had the reins of government.  The only thing that has changed from time to time is the extent to which they were willing to give an inch here or there in order to maintain their grip on the reins (knowing it is easier to rule through the perception of legitimacy than through coercion).


    by Elusive Trope on Sat, 07/16/2011 - 3:32pm