cmaukonen's picture

    Government Social Circles - They're what makes things work in Washington.

    By cmaukonen on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 8:25pm |

    I was turned on to this particular analysis from another blog and thought it deserved wider exposure.  One explanation of why congress and the president seem to be ignoring a large part of America.  Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum seem to think it is money and their social circle that influence congress and the president the most. Though not necessarily in that order. They govern and listen to those with whom they socialize. Those in their economic and intellectual circle, as it were. But as one observer and commenter pointed out - isn't that what the founders intended all along? I especially like Kevin's concluding remarks:

    Full confession: I think there's a lot to this, though I'd emphasize the raw power of money a bit more than Matt. It's just that I liked that quote so much that I felt obligated to share it with everyone. But whatever the reason, here's the takeaway: if you don't have a six-figure income, Congress doesn't much care about you. Sad but true.


    Like I have said over and over and over. If you are not one of those in the top tier, you ain't worth spit to our government except as someone to piss on.

    Comments


    by Donal on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 8:32pm

    From the link, Matt Y:

    Nobody in Washington seems to know that the public is clamoring for higher Social Security benefits and more federal spending on health and education...

    If this is what the public is 'clamoring for' then I missed it, and the public missed it on the last election. Anyone with more brains than a newt knows the Republicans, who swept the election, have always wanted to:

    (1) privatize Social Security so the thieves and fraudsters on Wall Street can skim 1%-2% off every year (or leverage it all to hell, crash the system and raid the Treasury...again) and then feedback some of the dough to the politicians they support.

    (2) the GOP also wants to cut federal involvement in health spending, they have even voted to deny funds for poor kids under CHIPS.

    (3) the GOP nationwide is cutting education spending and firing teachers in lieu of raising taxes on those with all the money, in DC some GOP members want to abolish the Dept. of Education. It is easier to dupe uneducated voters who believe anything and know nothing.

    All in all, the US system of democracy runs on money, money to buy fallacious fact free,scary or 'hot-button' abortion/gay bashing/racist attack ads for the 30 days before an election, and other big expenses.  Until the voters are no longer swayed by lies and propaganda money will rule, and those with it will be heard in the halls of government.


    by NCD on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 9:37pm

    Pertinent is Morris Berman, in his essay "conspiracy vs. Conspiracy" in his 2010 A Question of Values:
     
    Elite theory, then, holds that the people (or masses) are under the illusion that through their vote they control the direction of the ship of state, whereas the real captains of the ship--the heads of industry, the eminences grises--are not themselves on the ballot.  The public does not get to vote for them, but rather for their paid representatives.  Thus the post-election euphoria in the United States over Barack Obama was nothing more than a bubble, an illusion, because the lion's share of the $750 million he collected in campaign contributions (according to the Australian journalist John Pilger) came from Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group...it is also the case that having invested in a president, they expected a return on that investment once he took office.  It is for this reason that what we have in the United States, according to Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel, is a "procedural democracy": the form, the appearance, is democratic, but the actual content, the result, is not. 
    Referring to the sociologist C. Wright Mills, Berman notes that it was Mills in particular who pointed out that for the most part it is not that "the rich or super-rich get together in some corporate boardroom and ask themselves 'Now how can we best screw the workers and the middle class?'  Berman continues:
     
        No, said Mills, what in fact happens is that they socialize together, in an informal sort of way, and recognize their class affiliations (here quoting Mills--the locations and activities of choice have in some respects changed, but the point is the same): 
    Members of the several higher circles know one another as personal friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the golf course, in the gentlemen's clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental airplances, and on ocean liners.  They meet at the estates of mutual friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one another's path in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafes from which many of these columns originate...The conception of the power elite, accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history...must be understood as a secret plot, or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite.  The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds. 
    The effect, Berman opines, is the same.  He cites David Rothkopf's Superclass, which identifies a global elite of roughly 6,000 individuals who are running the show, worldwide, and the top fifty financial institutions that control nearly $50 trillion in assets. 
    The policy outcomes I observe seem to me to be largely consistent with this view, on economic, regulatory and tax policies.  So, believing largely what I have believed for decades--in what at one time was an entirely mainstream version of regulated capitalism with 1950s/1960s levels of economic inequality, I and people who believe as I do appear to move farther and farther "left" according to the conventions of this day.  As the great class war intensifies and public policy continues to scamper farther and farther to the right.  
    I do not in any way see all kinds of political and social conservatism in a negative light.  Old-fashioned Burkean conservatism at times looks darned good on some issues.  I believe, for example, in JK Galbraith's notion of "countervailing power" and institutions--right now, we just don't have many of them opposing the dominant actors and trends, and they are, relative to the forces they are up against, hard-pressed to generate traction.  This is a fundamentally conservative notion, in my opinion, and is an idea our Founders, using different language, embraced in their thinking and in the institutional design of the US Constitution, grounded in checks and balances of governmental power as well as federalism. 
    What happens when a reasonable and healthy balance between governmental and private power disappears?  There is nothing remotely conservative that I see in the modern-day GOP's reckless sacrificing of communities, families, children, our environmental future, and future generations, all for the sake of a one-sided, hyper-destructive, shortsighted and grossly inequitable version of runaway capitalism. 
    Such is the nature of this onetime moderate liberal's growing in-many-ways conservative sense of alarm and loss of faith in our existing governmental mechanisms to right the ship--absent organizing and the building of institutional power that can provide some real balance and an urgently needed corrective to the destructive developments of our day.     
    At one time there was an Establishment that merited respect in this country.  It operated with an internalized set of norms that accepted the need for restraint in the exercise of power, and for constraints to keep what they saw as a generally good system from running off the rails. 
    I won't say that is entirely gone in our day because there are still some individuals and organizations which act in accordance with such an ethic.  But they are a minority, they rarely speak out publicly, and their worldview has for the time being been vanquished in the tsunami of dominant elite behavior, which betrays an utter lack of confidence in our ability to create a viable future for our country and our world, one worth working towards.  That is a huge cultural change in this country.  It must be countered with the only thing that works, which is peaceful but insistent organizing and mobilization.  When the professionally educated son of an upstate New York dentist who once had, for example, something of the dominant upper middle-class "too cool for unions" private condescension, comes to that change of consciousness, I know things have changed a lot in this country, and that we are in serious trouble.

    by AmericanDreamer on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 11:03am

    Well, I'd call this comment-of-the-day, but that would be reinforcing our competitive spirit.


    by Donal on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 11:08am

    Yeah, someone shoot this comment. It is making me feel intellectually inferior.


    by Obey on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 11:16am

    If you don't see anything 'remotely conservative' in the Republican strategy you won't be the only one, maybe you can see what Robert Reich sees, divide, sprinkle hate and envy, obfuscate and rule, all in his latest post:

    The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

    By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans hope to deflect attention from the big story. That’s the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

    Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to generate further tax cuts for the rich – making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.......

    Turn the inmates against each other and it makes the job of the rich overseer that much easier. As these goals of stoking division, envy, greed and hate are accomplished, the GOP hopes to have  the money and the power necessary to receive enough votes at election time to never have to support any 'conservative' policy again.


    by NCD on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 12:14pm

    Sure.  Divide and conquer has been around forever.  In Wisconsin and other places, the effort is to divide the public sector from the private sector unions.  Also to divide public sector unions from one another.  I had heard, contrary to a comment here at dag that I saw, that the police union in Wisconsin was bought off and was not supporting the other public employees on this. 

    The people pursuing this strategy are betting that the citizens of our country are so fragmented, so insular in their perspective on these matters, that the attempt to induce cannibalization will work.  Based on what's happened for a long time now in this country, one could make far worse bets. 

    It's only when a critical mass of individuals realizes that their only viable, or least bad, option is collective action and mobilization that things could conceivably turn around.  This will have to include many individuals who so far in their lives have no experience that has left them attuned to the potential efficacy of collective action, and really don't think in those terms, in fact, may even be inclined to fear collective action with a sort of preconception that doesn't distinguish it from mob action.


    by AmericanDreamer on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 12:40pm

    I think it really turned in the 80's, AmD. In Canada, the shift from the old "Red Tories" - who actually thought about communities, families, farms, that sort of thing - to "Bay Street" finance and business "conservatives." Who never really had anything they wanted to conserve, other than their cash-on-hand. Same pretty much across the West I believe. 


    by quinn esq on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 8:11pm

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