Search for a developing-world kleptocracy in which the leading few gather more than 97% of the earnings from capital. There aren’t any that top the USA, the world’s most extreme kleptocracy. We’re Number 1.
Imagine a town of 1,000 grownups and their dependents in which one person holds the huge bulk of wealth and political impact. Would that qualify as a democracy? Now think of that 100 of the 1,000 adults own 90% of all the wealth, collect 97% of all the earnings from capital and have virtually all the political power. How can a society in which 90% of the people is decapitalized, disenfranchised and demoralized by political powerlessness be a democracy?
This is America: a kleptocratic autocracy that serves the few at the cost of the numerous, stripmining the bottom 90% under the guise of a deceitful “democracy” in which just the couple of wield real power. Remember Smith’s Neofeudalism Principle # 1: If the citizenry can not replace a kleptocratic government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the tally box, the country is a democracy in name just.
That our chosen government responds just to the super-wealthy and corporations has actually been reputable: Evaluating Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average People.
It’s also a truth that the leading 10% get essentially all the gains from the nation’s capital, and this wealth is focused in the leading 0.1%: Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age
Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the nation. Almost half of the brand-new income generated given that the international financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the most affluent one percent of U.S. citizens. The wealthiest 3 Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.
Precisely how can a system of governance that is absolutely nothing but an invitation-only auction of political favors in which the leading 0.1% own more than the bottom 80% be a practical democracy? The answer is it can not. Politics and federal government have actually been minimized to safeguarding and enriching a neofeudal autocracy while claiming to serve the stripmined public.
This extreme concentration of wealth and power is not accidental; the government’s policies have generated this concentration of wealth which has actually hollowed out democracy. The super-wealthy didn’t siphon $50 trillion from those earning their living from labor on their own; federal government policies helped and abetted this large transfer of wealth.
Patterns in Income From 1975 to 2018: $50 trillion in earnings has actually been moved to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the previous 45 years.
The disastrous consequences of this systemic concentration of wealth and power are likewise well documented. For example, Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Designing inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Extreme inequality brings down societies, and America is now a society controlled by severe inequality.
America is absolutely nothing but a large ethical cesspool that the general public is told is a beautiful pond of “democracy”. Self-enrichment is cloaked as “doing God’s work,” profiteering is offered as “worth,” scams is packaged as “finance” and rapacious monopolies are marketed as “business.”
Organizations have ended up being little more than rackets enriching insiders and the wealthiest few; they have actually lost ethical legitimacy which is the basic structure of democracy and a market-based economy.
As I explain in my new book Worldwide Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Method for the United States, moral authenticity is the foundation of social cohesion. As soon as moral legitimacy has actually been lost, social cohesion unravels and the country falls.
It wasn’t simply misfortune that financialization and globalization hollowed out America’s economy and democracy and turned the bottom 90% into debt-serfs and tax donkeys; it was government policies carried out by elected officials and the designated handmaidens of the super-wealthy. Essentially every major policy executed by either celebration served the interests of the super-wealthy and corporations: tax cuts had minor effect on the bottom 90% while greatly increasing the wealth of the super-wealthy; the Supreme Court’s judgments in favor of corporate “personhood” and “totally free speech” (a.k.a. the best government we can purchase), and the evisceration of the rule of law for business fraud, collusion and embezzlement (“too huge to fail, too big to prison”).
The Federal Reserve’s free cash for financiers distributes gains on the order of 20-to-1 in favor of the super-wealthy: $2 trillion in gains for the bottom 90%, $40 trillion for the top tier.
The list is long and agonizing evidence that the chosen government of the United States serves the interests of the top few— a reality masked by expert PR and partisanship.
Partisanship reflects a core structural dynamic: America is now a two-tier society and economy. If you’re an executive at a huge Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets and embezzle billions and you’ll never ever deal with any personal legal repercussions such as being indicted, founded guilty and locked up. (Bernie Madoff’s conviction was a timeless Soviet-style program trial to mask the truth that countless other white-collar lawbreakers kept their ill-gotten gains and faced no effects.)
But attempt being an employee at a regional credit union and embezzle $5,000– a jail sentence is extremely foreseeable.
If a spoiled-rotten abundant kid gets captured with drugs, Mommy and Daddy’s lawyer kicks into gear and gets a suspended sentence plea deal. The kid from the bottom 90% gets a tenner in the Drug War Gulag. And so on.
America is likewise a local two-tier economy/society. When a society kneels down and worships financialization and globalization, it gives all the political and monetary power to the already-super-wealthy and corporations who get 97% of the gains from financialization and globalization.
Since most of already-super-wealthy and business supervisors live in coastal metropolitan areas, the tide of brand-new wealth flooding into the hands of the few boosts the economies of these choose regions. The Brookings chart listed below might appear like a chart of political polarization, and superficially that’s apparent: the 500 counties Biden won hold 70% of the nation’s GDP while the 2,500 counties Trump won hold 30% of the nation’s GDP.
The real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America and there’s really little commonness in the 2 economies. One benefited greatly from financialization and globalization, and the other was hollowed out and gave its knees by financialization and globalization.
Given that income and political power circulation to capital, the disparity/ inequality far go beyond the 70/30 split portrayed in this chart. The chart showing the skyrocketing wealth of billionaires is a more accurate reflection of inequality in America.
What’s missing from the 70/30 map is the shocking portion of citizens in the wealthiest 500 counties who are precariats living income to paycheck, the ALICE Americans: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
Is there any marvel that stripmined Americans who sense their powerlessness are drawn in to virulent partisanship? The more severe the pendulum swing of wealth-power inequality, the more extreme the political blowback.
America’s political class has no plan to reverse this damaging tide. Our leadership’s “plan” is something they understand well first-hand: bribery and complicity: simply send out a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized families, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not trouble the elites’ successful pillaging of America and the planet.
The insurrection and coup took place long ago, when financialization and globalization hollowed out the real economy and disempowered the bottom 90%. When the whole rotten palace of corruption collapses in a putrid stack, look no further for the cause than the extremes of wealth-power inequality that rendered “democracy” a convenient exterior for the stripmining of the bottom 90%.
Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the leading few gather more than 97% of the earnings from capital. There aren’t any that top the U.S.A., the world’s most severe kleptocracy. We’re Number 1.
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