Oligarchy in America

medicineman · #1 02-05-2008, 10:14 AM

Oligarchy in America

"Thus the majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy."
—Robert Michels, "The Iron Law of Oligarchy"
Imagine popular rule as a continuum, moving from left to right, of fading democracy. Direct democracy—the New England town meeting—sits at the left end. Representative government occupies the middle. To its right the impress of the people's will weakens as the continuum nears oligarchy. Plato thought the causal sequence ran from right to left, from oligarchy to democracy, with the anger of the many at the excesses of rule by the few igniting civil war. But before anger comes knowledge. That begins with calling things by their right names. For example, what should we call the Republican Senate? Where does it fit on our continuum? In the same week that it vetoed an increase in the minimum wage beneficial to millions, and it passed a bankruptcy bill potentially damaging to millions and beneficial only to banks and credit-card companies. If the Senate is a representative assembly, whom does it represent?
And whom does the Republican House of Representatives represent? A 147-page report released earlier this month by the Democratic minority on the House Rules Committee marshalls evidence to support these assertions:
—That "Special interests, not U.S. Representatives, wrote the major bills in the 198th Congress."
—That "The House GOP took unprecedented steps last year to make the House a democracy-free zone."
—That because of "closed rules" limiting amendment and debate, bills passed without members knowing what they contained; what they contained was pork (the 3,407 undebated "projects" added to last year's budget) and scandalous provisions like a subsidy for a Hooter's restaurant and language allowing Republican congressional staffers to review citizens' tax returns.
—That members had 40 seconds to read each page of a 299-page conference committee report on the dividend tax-cut bill and six and a half hours to review the 1,186-page Omnibus Appropriation Bill.
—That the GOP leadership of the House effectively shuttered debate by limiting its real business to two days a week and staying in session fewer days than any Congress in decades.
Some Republican lawmakers decry their leadership's Supreme Soviet tactics. "I will tell you, this is a scandal," Jim Leach, the moderate, respected Iowan, declared from the House floor after last-minute machinations had stripped from a banking bill an amendment imposing tougher federal oversight of so-called "industrial loan companies." "The fix was in," Leach continued. "The power groupings did not want this to happen." And whatever the power groupings want, they get from the Republican House.
The Senate has mostly escaped the astringent commentary provoked by "the middle-finger approach to governing," in the congressional scholar Norman Ornstein's phrase, favored in Tom Delay's House. Perhaps that will change. For in just the last month the Senate has passed three bills that served no discernible public interest, for which there was no broad public demand, and which rewarded heavy contributors to Republican campaigns in the insurance, manufacturing, banking, and energy industries. Previously, these bills had either been voted down by Senate Democrats or vetoed by President Bill Clinton. But the loss of four seats in November weakened the Democrats, and George W. Bush is President.
We now have one-party government in Washington. The American electorate has favored divided government—until the Bush years. In the 2002 and 2004 elections, for the first time in forty years, the voters increased the congressional majorities enjoyed by the party of the incumbent President. If the GOP maintains its monopoly on power through the 2006 elections, it may mean that the electorate has embraced one-party government out of a preference for GOP policies. Alternatively, it may indicate that the GOP has perfected the techniques of oligarchical rule so far as to stop the alternation in power of "ins" and "outs" that preserved self-rule in the past. These techniques include a congressional redistricting process by which the parties select the voters and the use of unprecedented quantities of cash from grateful special interests to mount propaganda campaigns after Aristotle's ancient heart: "True Oligarchs should affect to be advocates of the people's cause, Alas they are not!"
Oligarchy in America

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Oligarchy, fact or fiction	medicineman	Politics	0	02-09-2008 10:50 AM
What is oligarchy	medicineman	Politics	0	02-05-2008 10:22 AM
Hello All from middle America	Goldenboy812	Introduce Yourself	0	01-09-2008 11:07 AM
america	jsbfootball	Politics	32	12-30-2007 07:30 PM
God Bless America	Garden Knowm	Spirituality & Sexuality & Philosophy	26	10-15-2007 05:56 PM

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