The Predator Class and the Predator State

[Time for change]

When the top 1% of individuals in a nation own 38% of its wealth and the bottom 40% own just 1% – when the average individual in the top 1% owns 1500 times as much wealth as the average individual in the bottom 40% – it is worth asking the question: Why? Do these people own so much more wealth than other people because they earn it by contributing to society in some way? Or are they predators? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between?

James K. Galbraith, in his book “The Predator State”, notes that the concept of a predator class is not new, and he introduces the concept by first discussing Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class”, published in 1899:

The leisure classes do not work. Rather, they hold offices. They perform rituals. They enact deeds of honor…The leisure class is predatory as a matter of course… The relation of overlords to underlings is that of predator to prey. Vested interests… live off the work of others by right and tradition, and not by their functional contribution to the productivity of the system… Predators rely on prey for their sustenance, but they also require and must motivate their assistance…

Some perspectives on today’s predator class

There are many economists and others who have written about the phenomenon of predation – with or without using that word. Here are some examples:

Jared Bernstein
In his book “Crunch – Why Do I Feel So Squeezed”, Jared Bernstein discusses the apparent paradox of why the financial situation of so many Americans during the Bush/Cheney years could be so poor in the presence of such healthy “economic indicators”:

Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families’ real incomes are down…. By 2007, 44% said they lacked the money they needed “to make ends meet”…

If you feel squeezed, chances are it’s because you are squeezed. Most of the indicators that matter most to us in our everyday lives… are coming in at stress inducing levels, but GDP… keeps on truckin’. Something’s wrong, something fundamental…

The name of the problem is economic inequality… It’s a sign that something important is broken: the set of economic mechanisms and forces that used to broadly and fairly distribute the benefits of growth… unions, minimum wages… full employment… quality jobs, safety nets, and social insurance…

James Petras
In his book “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire”, James Petras also discusses the disconnect between rising productivity of the American worker and our economic health:

Within the ruling class, the financial elite is the most parasitical component… One measure of the enormous influence of the financial ruling class in heightening the exploitation of labor is found in the enormous disparity between productivity and wages. Between 2000 and 2005, the US economy grew 12 percent, and productivity (measured by output per hour worked) rose 17 percent while hourly wages rose only 3 percent. Real family income fell during the same period… Three quarters of Americans say they are either worse off or no better off than they were six years ago…. The growth of vast inequalities between the yearly payment of the financial ruling class and the medium salary of workers has reached unprecedented levels….

Petras explains the process that has led to that disconnect:

A vast army of workers, peasants and salary employees produce value which becomes the basis for… speculative financial instruments. The transfer of value from the productive activities of labor up through the trunk and branches of financial instruments is carried out through various vehicles… credit, debt leveraging, buyouts and mergers… The financial sector acts as combined intermediary, manager, proxy-purchaser and consultant, capturing substantial fees, expanding their economic empires…. Finance capital has moved from exacting a larger and larger ‘tribute’ (commission or fee) on each large-scale financial transaction, toward penetrating and controlling an enormous array of economic activities…

Or, to summarize it in my unsophisticated economic language, producers produce goods and services and the financial elite, through a variety of complex financial mechanisms, find a way to have the money transferred to themselves.

Petras explains that the political basis for this process is rooted in the fact that the financial elites:

are linked to the judicial and regulatory authorities, through political appointments and contributions…. They organize and fund both major parties… They pressure, negotiate and draw up the most comprehensive and favorable legislation… They pressure the government to bail out bankrupt and failed speculative firms and to balance the budget by lowering social expenditures instead of raising taxes on speculative ‘windfall’ profits… Finance capital and its associated conglomerates wield uncontested political power in the US in comparison to their counterparts in any country in Europe…

Joseph Stiglitz
Joseph Stiglitz explains how predation has been at work in the bailout of Wall Street by the American taxpayer:

The TARP bailout has so far been a dismal failure. Unbelievably expensive, it has failed to rekindle lending. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave the banks a big handout…The taxpayers put out $350 billion and didn't even get the right to find out what the money was being spent on, let alone have a say in what the banks did with it.

TARP's failure comes as no surprise: incentives matter. Bankers won't restart lending unless they have a reason to do so or are forced. Receiving billions of dollars in bonus pay for racking up record losses is a peculiar "incentive" structure….

And yet, they’re still trying to get more:

The financial wizards are turning to tried and true gimmicks – the same ones that got us into the mess. One strategy is to hide the costs in nontransparent accounting… The other combines this trickery with the magic of leveraging and pretends that leveraging carries no risk… Long experience has taught us that when banks are at risk of failure, their managers engage in behaviors that risk losing even more taxpayer money. They may, for instance, undertake big bets: if they win, they keep the proceeds; if they lose, so what?--they would have died anyway…. Because the government is on the hook for so much money, it has to take an active role in managing the restructuring…

James Galbraith
Galbraith describes the takeover of our country by predators, the process that made it into a predator state:

In the late 1970s and 1980s… business leadership saw the possibility of something far more satisfactory from their point of view: complete control of the apparatus of the state. In particular, reactionary business leadership, in those sectors most affected by public regulation, saw this possibility and directed their lobbies – the K Street corridor – toward this goal. The Republican Party… became the instrument of this form of corporate control. The administration… of George W. Bush became little more than an alliance of representatives from the regulated sectors seeking to bring the regulatory system entirely to heel. And to this group was added… those who saw the economic activities of government not in ideological terms but merely as opportunities for private profit on a continental scale…

This is the predator state. It is a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends, with enterprises whose major lines of business compete with or encroach on the principal public functions of the enduring New Deal. It is a coalition, in other words, that seeks to control the state partly in order to prevent the assertion of public purpose… They are firms that have no intrinsic loyalty to any country… They assuredly do not adopt any of society’s goals as their own, and that includes the goals that may be decided on by their country of origin, the United States. As an ideological matter, it is fair to say that the very concept of public purpose is alien to, and denied by, the leaders and the operatives of this coalition… In the predator state, the organization exists principally to master the state structure itself.

None of these enterprises has an interest in diminishing the size of the state, and this is what separates them from the principled conservatives. For without the state and its economic interventions, they… could not enjoy the market power that they have come to wield. Their reason for being, rather, is to make money off the state – so long as they control it. And this requires the marriage of an economic and a political organization…

Some specific examples of predation

Health care
A major reason for the sorry state of health care in the United States today is the activities of predators. There is simply no reason for private health care insurance. Their sole purpose is to make a profit. In their attempt to do that, they spend vast amounts of money to screen prospective clients for pre-existing diseases, so that they are able to offer their services only to relatively healthy people, on whom they are likely to profit. Many of them are also are predisposed to deny benefits to their clients whenever they think they can get away with it. Yet, to dissuade Americans from supporting a program of government sponsored health insurance, the predators try to scare us by calling it “socialism” at every chance they get. James Galbraith explains the situation:

A major liberal goal is to extend the coverage of health insurance, particularly to children. The private insurance companies are opposed to this. Why? Because they stand to lose part of their existing clientele… Their economic function is uncomplicated: it consists in marketing to people who are relatively unlikely to need health care, while also not selling it to those most likely to get sick…

Does the country benefit in any way from… having any families under private insurance? No. To insure the whole population without screening would be economically efficient. It would save the resources now devoted to screening… More resources could then go to actual health care… Medical economists… estimated the bureaucratic waste from private medical insurance to be around $350 billion per year…

George Bush’s Medicare prescription drug law is another good example. There is only one conceivable reason for the specification in that law that our government may not negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies: It was a gift to the pharmaceutical industry, paid for by the American taxpayer, and delivered by George W.

Education
The Bush administration’s attempt to push the idea of school vouchers was just one more attempt to funnel public money into private hands, taking money from the public school system and channeling it to vouchers for private schools. Galbraith explains the tactics Bush used when that didn’t work:

The Bush team switched its emphasis to No Child Left Behind, a program that expanded federal spending on public schools while imposing an intense testing regimen on them. Forms of predatory free enterprise in which certain Bush family members participated quickly emerged. But the larger effect of NCLB was to foment middle-class flight from the system, for three reasons. First, the testing regimes cut deeply into the flexibility and creativity in the classroom, discouraging creative professionals from becoming teachers and demoralizing many who remained. Second, the emphasis on teaching to the test undermined educators’ attention to and the resources available for untestable programs… And third, the harsh evaluation regime behind the tests themselves worked to label, and therefore to stigmatize, certain schools as failing… A bad test result could have serious, even catastrophic effects on reputation and funding, precipitating middle-class flight from the system…

The Bush administration also funneled money from public student loan programs into the hands of predators:

At the university level, what had been a low cost, publicly administered student loan program was devolved onto private companies, whose marketing programs quickly assimilated imaginative elements of bribery (i.e. bribery to student loan officers to persuade them to choose their company).

Were the companies necessary at all? Was any efficiency gained? Was anything except private profit served by moving the provision of guaranteed student loans from the public to the private sector? Of course not.

Social Security
The destruction of Social Security would serve two goals for the predators: By privatizing the program it would create lucrative economic opportunities for them; and, by taking money out of the system, it would lower their taxes. Galbraith explains the predators’ goals and their strategies:

Social Security presents a target for predators on a far larger scale… Sharp private financial operators with good political connections have long seen the opportunity inherent in diverting the payroll tax into private investment accounts. Such accounts would create, overnight, millions of inexperienced investors, needing advice and other services that could be sold to them for a fee. A new group of players – expensive private providers of what had been a cheap public service – would be cut in on the deal. Correspondingly, a group of currently protected players would be cut out of the relatively stable retirement incomes that they can now rely on…

Efforts to cut benefits to the impending baby boom retirees are a way, simply put, of taking back the 1983 bargain (which included a major increase in payroll tax rates). If they were enacted, the very same people who overpaid their payroll taxes to “prefinance” their Social Security benefits would find that they had been given a dishonest bargain. Having paid a lifetime of higher payroll taxes, subsidizing the income tax cuts enjoyed by the investor classes of the 1980s and 1990s, they would come to the end of the rainbow and find the pot of gold empty… If that doesn’t sound fair, well – it isn’t. The issue however has nothing to do with any intrinsic crisis, except the ever-vigilant efforts of the influential to keep tax rates on themselves as low as possible.

Why then the talk of an “impending Social Security crisis”? Because… it is a means to an end: toward the privatization of the Social Security system. It is perfectly predictable that once deep benefit cuts are on the table, the “alternative” of private investment accounts will then resurface… to “ease the pain of the adjustment”…Social Security offers perhaps the clearest, simplest, and most transparent large-scale example of the Predator State at work on a long-term project.

The home foreclosure crisis
Galbraith describes the scams that brought on the home foreclosure crisis:

Here we see today, in pure and unalloyed form, the consequences… leading to rampant predation against both a public system and the public itself, and on a colossal scale. The housing finance system had been from the 1930s a protected sector offering low rate, long term mortgages to the middle class…

In the early years of the new century, a new type of home lending took hold, eventually exploding … This was the subprime sector, adjustable rate mortgages made to borrowers who would never under previous standards have qualified for a mortgage loan. Subprime loans were abusive, if not fraudulent, on their face, for they typically involved a low teaser rate that would reset after two or three years… Lenders knew, as borrowers did not, that in the wake of 9/11, short term rates were unprecedentedly low, and these conditions would not endure. They therefore deliberately substituted adjustable rate mortgages for fixed rate mortgages – with the endorsement of then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, to reassure the naïve public that the exercise was sound. Interest rates then rose, the mortgages started to reset, and hundreds of thousands of borrowers found themselves unable to meet the required payments.

When state governments stepped in to try to protect consumers against this fraud, the Bush administration jumped in to tie their hands. Eliot Spitzer was one of our country’s most vocal critics of this practice. He wrote in an editorial titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers”:

For the first time in its history, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) was used as a tool against consumers. In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government’s actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 states… actively fought the new rules.

Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration exposed Spitzer’s relationship with a prostitute. William Engdahl explains, in an article titled “Why the Bush Administration ‘Watergated’ Eliot Spitzer”:

Curiously, Spitzer… has been not charged in any crime…. Prostitution is illegal in most US states, but clients of prostitutes are almost never charged, nor are their names usually leaked in a case in process…. underscoring the clear political nature of the Spitzer "Watergate."

Galbraith characterizes the Bush/Cheney predator state in a nutshell

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a better concise description of the Bush administration than the one that James Galbraith wrote in his book. Here are some excerpts:

The second Bush administration simply and systematically nominated the most aggressive anti-environment, anti-safety, anti-consumer protection advocates it could find – business lobbyists in most cases – to every regulatory position that it could not afford to leave unfilled… The result was an empowerment not of business in general, but of the reactionary wing – the predatory wing – within each branch of business…

Under George W. Bush, a narrow coalition of the high plutocracy would rule, mainly from the resource industries… combined with big media, insurance, and the pharmaceuticals. For popular support, this alliance found itself entirely dependent on noneconomic issues: national security and the social issues directed at low-income working Americans through the one social institution that effectively reached most of them: their churches…

Today we live in a corporate republic, where the methods, norms, culture, and corruption of government have become those of the corporation… Republican (small r) government, with its checks and balances, exists to limit the abuse of power… Modern corporate decision structures exist, on the contrary, to permit senior executives to do what they want. This is the culture that Richard Cheney brought back into government from Halliburton, and that George Bush imbibed… The operational result is a government by cliques operating in secret, indeed with their very membership unknown outside…

The corporate propaganda machine

In the corporate republic, external review is suppressed. We have instead a governmental public relations apparatus whose purpose is not to persuade but to deflect, deter, and frustrate inquiry into the operations of government. These are the distinct characteristics of a corporate propaganda machine… easily identified by the inability, or studied unwillingness, to tell a truthful story that is consistent from one day to the next…

Elections in a corporate republic

In the corporate republic, elections likewise converge to their corporate counterpart… The outcome is predetermined… A common thread runs through the policies of voter intimidations, voter machine rationing, phony voter fraud investigations, purging of voter lists, caging of African American voters, ex-felon disenfranchisement… The common thread is to maintain political control for as long as possible… The rebellion of 2006 may possibly have signaled the defeat of this strategy, but time will tell. In any event, the work was done: without it, Al Gore would have become President in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004…

The purpose of the corporate predator state

The predator state is an economic system wherein entire sectors have been built up to feast on public systems built originally for public purposes… The corporate republic simply administers the spoils system… The business of its leadership is to deliver favors to their clients. These range from coal companies to sweatshops operators to military contractors. They include the misanthropes who led the campaign to destroy the estate tax… the “Benedict Arnold” companies that move their taxable income to Bermuda… They include the privatizers of Social Security… Everywhere you look, regulatory functions have been turned over to lobbyists. Everywhere you look, public decisions yield gains to specific private persons…. This is not an accident: it is a system. In the corporate republic that presides over the predator state, nothing is done for the common good… The concept of competence has no relevance: to be incompetent, you must at least be trying. But the men in charge are not trying… We are their prey. Hurricane Katrina illustrated this perfectly, as Bush gave contracts to Halliburton and at the same time tied up efforts to restore the city…

A variant of class war?

Is this class war? No. In a strict sense it is not, for not everyone who is successful under capitalism is a fan of the predator state… Many rich and successful people came to hate the Bush administration… Predation is the enemy of honest and independent and especially of sustainable business, of businesses that simply want to sell to the public and make a decent living over the long run. In a world where the winners are all connected, it is not only the prey who lose out. It is everyone who has not licked the appropriate boots. Predatory regimes are, more or less exactly, like protection rackets… They cannot reward everyone, and therefore they do not enjoy a broad political base…

The end result of the predator state

It is reasonably obvious that to tolerate the predator state is a formula for eventual national economic failure. It will lead, over time, to the crowding out of advanced, innovative, and useful businesses… by their reactionary and backward counterparts. Where the reactionary branches of business – the worst polluters, the flagrant monopolists... – are given control over the system and capital markets reward them, their more progressive counterparts will eventually give up, disappear, or move away. Bad business practices will drive out good… It is the race to the bottom, driven forward by government itself.

The “incompetence” label as a distraction from the real problem

Predators do not mind being thought incompetent: the accusation helps to obscure their actual agenda. But if the government is predatory, then it too will fail in every substantial way. Government will not cope with global warming, or Hurricane Katrina, or the occupation of Iraq, or Election Day chaos, or avian influenza, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Nothing will work, and nothing will be done about the fact that nothing works. Failure on that scale is not due to incompetence. Rather, it is intended…. Inside government, no one cares. The attention of the people in charge is focused on other goals.

Are we done yet?

It’s tempting to believe, now that we’ve elected a new President with infinitely more integrity than his predecessor, that he will simply kick the predators out and we will be free of them. But there are so many questions on that score. How much courage will it take to do that, when much of our news media is controlled by the predators? How much political skill will be required? What risks will be involved? Will it even be possible to accomplish in a mere four or even eight years? I can’t answer those questions.

A recent article by Robert Reich, titled “The Real Scandal of AIG”, highlights these questions. Reich notes that the real scandal is that “Even in a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently, Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money”.

That poses an obvious question: WHY? Reich partially answers that question:

To whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, AIG and other behemoths should be accountable to taxpayers. When our very own Secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken.

So, if AIG, as well as so many of our other financial institutions, is accountable to no one, then what is our government for, and why is it pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of our money into their coffers?

[madfloridian]

1. Another thoughtful post.

Recommended.

[Time for change]

57. Thank you

[MedleyMisty]

2. I finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed today

I highly recommend it. May we find our inner Odos. :)

[Time for change]

67. What is it about?

[MedleyMisty]

71. Socialism versus capitalism

Odo is the woman who started the socialist movement on the planet in the book and the socialist society on the moon is based on her writings. At the time of the book it's been around for 150 or so years. It's not presented in an ideal way - the original subtitle of the book was "An Ambiguous Utopia". They go through a famine and conformity and bowing to the authority of the centralized power in the bureaucracy are starting to settle in.

A physicist from the socialist society goes to the home planet and visits a country very like the US - don't want to spoil any more than that. :) It was written in the early to mid 70s but I think it's way more timely now.

[Time for change]

74. That sounds interesting -- thank you.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. Read the Dr. Ravi Batra interview at Truthout.

He talks about the wage-productivity gap.

[Time for change]

51. Do you mean this one?

http://www.truthout.org/031609A

Thank you.

His thoughts seem very similar to the other economists whom I've quoted here.

[leftstreet]

4. K&R

[wiggs]

5. The Matrix. Sucking the life out of the people for the gain of a few. Concentration of

wealth and power has been talked about on DU for ages as the motivating factor behind all kinds of mysteries...such as dems voting for Bush policies.

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

6. K&R

[Wilms]

7. Made a chart

[Quantess]

9. I would like to see the income distribution of the top 10% wealthiest Americans

Of that top 10%, how much richer is the top 1 or 2% than the 98 or 99% of that bracket, that holds 71% of all the wealth?

[Wilms]

10. Wealth, Income, and Power by G. William Domhoff

Wealth, Income, and Power

by G. William Domhoff

September 2005 (updated December 2006)

This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators.

Some of the information might be a surprise to many people. The most amazing numbers come last, showing the change in the ratio of the average CEO's paycheck to that of the average factory worker over the past 40 years.

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

[Greyhound]

15. Not as easy to find, they know the game is almost up here and they are

prepping the gatekeepers to take the fall for them.

The higher you go up the chain, the greater the disparity, one graphic example is http://www.lcurve.org/">the "L curve". The data is old now, but the graphic is a good demonstration.

ETA this bit; In March 2006 Forbes reported 793 billionaires in the US with combined net worth of $2.6 trillion. In March 2007 Forbes reported 946 billionaires in the US with combined net worth of $3.5 trillion. That is a 1-year increase of 19% in the number of billionaires and an increase of $35% in their net worth during a time of increasing poverty. Severe poverty is at its highest point in three decades.

[Time for change]

58. What a terrible shame

When you have 793 people who are worth $3.5 trillion, right alongside of all the poverty we have in this country, that should tell us that there is something badly wrong with our system.

[JHB]

18. Some URLs you might want to check on that subject:

http://www.lcurve.org/
http://geocities.com/gordonite32/philo/incomes.htm
http://www.cbpp.org/3-29-07inc.htm

[Time for change]

59. Interesting graphs

Thank you.

Those L curves really flatten out quite a bit when they're put on a log scale.

[Time for change]

32. I would be very unequal

As noted in the first sentence of this OP, as of recently the top 1% held 38% of the wealth. Going by this chart, if the top 10% holds 71% of the wealth, that means that the bottom 90% (or 9% of the total) of the top 10% holds only 33 percent of the wealth. That means that the average person in the top 1% holds more than 10 times the wealth as the next 9% -- and it gets much more skewed the higher you go.

[JJ]

52. apples and oranges

the pie chart shows income, not wealth. Sounds similar but two different things.

An interesting aside, the chart shows data from 2001, wonder what it looks like today?

[Time for change]

54. Oops

I should have noticed that.

Anyhow, income and wealth inequality do tend to parallel each other. And they have both gotten a lot worse since 2001.

[Time for change]

66. Nice chart -- thank you

[ConsAreLiars]

8. Rec'd. Yet another brilliant and concise summary of "How Things Work."

The way things work is something the corporate media will never let be stated clearly, but the facts of thew matter are really not that hard to see or understand once put out there. You do a great job of pulling open the curtain.

[Time for change]

61. Thank you

I quoted a great bunch of economists, who know how to and make the effort to explain the things that really matter, in a way that ordinary people can understand.

[L. Coyote]

11. How did Rome arrive at 3/4ths slaves? Might makes right. Brute power.

[AverageJoe]

12. K & R

I'm up in the middle of the night with acute pain from sinus and throat surgery I had this past Thursday. For some reason--I suspect it was because I wasn't sleeping upright--my pain meds quit working an hour and a half before they were supposed to and this really sucks. So, to take my mind away from this very unpleasant situation, I bopped on over to DU. I figured I could occupy myself for a while until it was safe to take another dose.

Then I read this amazing post. It's amazing, from my point of view, because I think a lot of us felt most of this in our guts for a long time, but didn't have a way to voice it so cogently. Now I'm in pain, mad as hell, and scared shitless.

I wish there were a way to actually get this information consumed by every citizen of the world, particularly those who identify themselves as Americans. Unless people know this shit and understand it, they will never be able to act on it and there will never be a change. And the people almost certainly won't know. CNN, FOX and their vile but oh-so-effective brethren will see to that.

Okay, 45 minutes until I can take more medicine for the nasty pain in my nose and throat. How long till we rid ourselves of the pain inflicted by these predators?

(And I'm not kidding about my surgery pain. This hurts.)

[Time for change]

24. Hope you feel better soon

One of the biggest problems with medical care in the United States today is that they don't give patients enough pain medication when they need it. Doctors have it drummed into them during their training to be wary of giving too much narcotics. They're overly worried about patients becoming addicted, and not worried enough about controlling the pain. What they don't understand is that when narcotics are used to control pain, their addicting effects are minimal.

[Demeter]

13. Too Painful To Read

But I will try.

[Greyhound]

14. Auto K&R. More parasite than predator IMO. n/t

[geckosfeet]

16. You all miss the point. The rich work harder, are smarter, know more and smell better.

They deserve to be rich.
:sarcasm:

[Baby Snooks]

26. Actually they are simply more predatory than others...

And they buy their wealth through manipulation of the legal system as we are seeing in the case of AIG - they are above the law and worse they must be supported by the state which must be supported by the "worker class" which is what the middle-class in this country has become. Merely the worker class. Classic oligarchy. And oligarchy is a form of fascism. The few are supported by the many. Protected by the state.

It is the opposite of the democracy based on "Judeo-Christian" principles and values so many of them claim us to be in order to give the impression that we are.

They become our "pillars of society" which further establishes them as above the law. In reality their philanthropy is merely a ploy. They help the poor while ripping the poor off. They are our modern versions of Robin Hood. Except that they steal from the poor to give to the rich.

They are the Republicrats. They are both Republican and Democrat. Politics is the new tool with which to control the worker class.

The only real Republicans and Democrats in this country are the fools who believe there are Republicans and Democrats on the ballot.

With some exception they are all Republicrats. Party affiliation is merely a matter of demographics. Not principles.

Until everyone realizes the reality the reality will only become worse.

The next American Revolution must come at the polls but the Democrats won't do it any more than the Republicans will.

Congress is corrupt. It throws $1,000 bills at Wall Street while tossing pennies at the poor. While threatening to call the police and have the poor arrested for being a public nuisance.

The reality is Nancy Pelosi doesn't serve the American people any more than Tom De Lay did. She serves the oligarchy. Not the democracy.

Maybe Barack Obama will finally see it. Maybe he won't.

[zonmoy]

40. Problem is that Barak serves the same oligarchy as Nancy.

thus unless the people dump both major parties en mass we have to pick every election between two puppets of the oligarchy.

[wuvuj]

17. Civilians lack control....

...of both the military...defense ind...the justice system and Wall Street.

It all adds up to Fascism.

[Joe Fields]

19. They call us the "great unwashed." we should use the term "predator class"

at every opportunity. This OP puts things into very succinct perspective. Great job.

[Jambalaya]

25. Cosmic Irony

Isn't it just too synchronistic that predator sounds a whole lot like creditor?

[Time for change]

60. Thank you -- I agree that the term should be used a lot

In view of what's been going on lately, it makes intuitive sense to a lot of people, and it wouldn't hurt to push the point home.

[closeupready]

20. K&R

n/t

[Laelth]

21. Very informative. k&r n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[blindpig]

22. Predator analogy

Predators, like any other animal, can only thrive in a habitat to which they are suited. The capitalist's economic model is their ideal habitat, in which they not only thrive but are justified, exalted and artificially supported.

These predators cannot be defeated on their home ground, it is their turf, they hold all the cards. The best we can do is change the habitat, the economic model, to one in which they cannot thrive, cannot survive.

It's Socialism or Barbarism

It's Capitalism or Nature

Which side are you on?

[Baby Snooks]

27. Capitalism is not the problem...

The problem is the predatory capitalism that results when our system of "checks and balances" no longer is allowed to regulate our economic system which as we are seeing is the economic system.

We are a nation founded on the principle of the rule of law and the reality is the rule of law no longer applies to some.

The crimes of Bernie Madoff pale in comparison to the crimes of Congress which has deregulated our entire economic system and chosen oligarchy as the preferred form of government rather than democracy.

Bernie Madoff stole the financial security of thousands. Congress is stealing the the financial security of millions.

Larry Summers claims the bonuses to the AIG executives are a matter of contractual obligation none of which would be honored by a banktrupcy court which is where AIG belongs - Congress chooses to honor that contractual obligation. What about its contractual obligation to the American people? The stimulus does nothing to create jobs. It does nothing to keep people in their homes. It does nothing to help those already homeless. It does nothing but serve the oligarchy.

Does anyone know how to count? We keep adding a trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there to the deficit. Who will pay for it all?

[blindpig]

29. Yes, it is.

There is no regulating capitalism, it's necessity of 'growth' insures that enough is never enough, ways will be found to maximize growth. Restraints may be temporally accepted as a political reality but will be thrown off at the nearest opportunity. That is the story of the New Deal.

Predatory capitalism, corporatism, these terms seek to pretend that what we are experiencing now are some sort of aberration but that is not the case, rather what is going on now is a culmination of capitalism. Capital has taken over the State, imperialism is simply a method of advancing capital.

There will be no respite for the people of the world until this hideous and obsolete economic arrangement is left in the dust.

[Octafish]

23. Catherine Austin Fitts provides more fuel for the fire...

Thank you for an excellent analysis of the economic reality, Time for change. Trickle-down, laissez-faire, free market whatever they call it, the conservatives just like to see the money (work) trickle-up to benefit one class.

James K. Galbraith, like his father, pegged the "Corporate Republic" and understood the Big Picture and the role good government plays in keeping the game, such as it is, fair.

When the crooks become the government, look out America! Look out world! So modern! So brilliant! It's slavery without the expense of having to feed and house the labor.

To your important work, I'd like to add Catherine Austin Fitts, a former government official and Wall Street big shot who has chronicled the impact and influence of the illicit drug trade on the global political economy.

Fitts coined the term "Solari Index" to describe quality of life, essentially a percentage of mothers who feel it is safe to send their kids to the neighborhood store. When she grew up in urban Philadelphia it was 100-percent ad the Dow Jones was at 500. Today in the same neighborhood, it is near-zero percent and the Dow is over 7,000.

Eye opening. Straightforward. Insightful. Like your work, Time for change.

[omega minimo]

30. and the Leisure Class and their Dittoheads call themselves the "Producers"

[Time for change]

46. Thank you Octafish -- We certainly do need independent thinking economists

who are able to think in terms of things like quality of life and, in general, analyze things to see who benefits, how much, and why. It appears that traditional economics is tilted towards finding answers that benefit a certain class of people without considering the rest of us.

I've enjoyed reading Galbraith's book. It's refreshing, even though some of it is a little too complex for a non-economist like me.

Thank you for the links. I'll have to look into that some more.

[The Wizard]

28. Another piece of outstanding journalism

The corporate media buffoons would do well to stop by here and see how it used to be done when journalism was an honorable profession.
Very informative and reasoned.
Thanks for your hard work and dedication to the reality based community.

[Time for change]

63. Thank you -- Unfortunately the corporate media boffoons are the enablers that help to make all this

possible.

[GregD]

31. Hartmann just read from this on air

[Time for change]

47. What do you mean?

[GregD]

68. Sorry I didn't reply earlier.

Hartmann called out this article and your name, expressing great appreciation for the thread. He was very impressed.

[Time for change]

73. That's fantastic

I thought you were just kidding. Thanks for letting me know.

[rucky]

33. Just don't call it Class Warfare

or somethin somethin

[JJ]

53. I like the term "Class Warfare"

I think it should be used often. I like the word guillotine too. Makes the predators nervous.

[Raksha]

34. K & R - bookmarked...as usual!!!

[Overseas]

35. K&R !!

Many thanks for this and "U.S. Democracy in Crisis" . You've done a brilliant job in summarizing these issues very poignantly.

[Time for change]

64. Thank you

[DemReadingDU]

36. Why is our government pouring billions of dollars of our money into their coffers?

Because that is their plan (IMO) to take all of our money. The select few want it all, and none for us. They won't stop until they have all the gains from the stock market whereby it falls to zero, until our 401Ks/IRAs are worthless, until pensions are gone, until there is no more social security/medicare/medicaid.

There is no one stopping them from taking our money. Our Representatives and Senators aren't stopping them. We aren't stopping them either...How many of us are storming Washington with our pitchforks demanding accountability!

Nothing is going to change, until We the People, millions of us, visibly protest Congress. Probably won't happen until so many are jobless, homeless, penniless, hungry, and nothing else to lose.

[LuckyLib]

37. And why is there so much resistance to taxing them? Tax their asses off!

[Larry Ogg]

38. Another absolutely incredible list of politically damming evidence!

Evidence that Predators control many if not all of the major institutions of this country!

Isn’t it ironic how one author (Galbraith) pointed out that:
“For popular support, this alliance found itself entirely dependent on noneconomic issues: national security and the social issues directed at low-income working Americans through the one social institution that effectively reached most of them: their churches…

Now ware have we heard that before? It seems they leave no influential base untouched and there is no limit as to how low they will go! Who would have ever thought that they would use peoples own religion as a weapon against them? Of course once you know how Authoritarian Right Wing fundamentalist think it’s a no brainer, their predator magnets, and I would go so far as to say that it would be impossible for these Predators to rise to any influential status - let alone that of Tyrant - without the unquestionable loyalty of Authoritarians; and what’s worse than your typical Authoritarian? It’s a religious fundamentalist because they are cursed with a double dose of Authoritarianism.

Note: If you’re not sure about what an Authoritarian is and want to understand the modus operandi of blind followers, and what an important role they play in putting Predators and tyrants in position of great power you might want to read this free e-book by research psychologist and Professor Bob Altemeyer called the http://www.electricpolitics.com/media/docs/authoritarians.pdf">The Authoritarians

I find the word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy"> Kleptocracy one of many appropriate words to describe the evidence you present in your OP, and to what our country has become. But many people look at such things and deny it all, believing that it would take such an unimaginably huge syndicate of conspirators networking from one end of the country to the other, making it virtually impossible to pull something like this off, besides our favorite political leaders would simply not allow such an evil thing to exist. The fact is that the only conspirators they believe do exist are those dubbed as left wing liberal extremist conspiracy theorist nut jobs like you, me and anyone else who believes the kind of right there in your face - if it was a poisonous snake you would be dead evidence. Of course this argument can and does get reversed. If I was a right winger I would be making the same claims against the left, except I would have the greatest advantage because I wouldn’t need any facts to support my argument, because I as an Authoritarian would know that I was “right” simple on the bases of – those who agree with me say I am.

The point is do you know why so many people of conscience allow these predators to exist in positions of influential power, and why do they defend them with unquestionable loyalty and hostility towards naysayers, why do they fervently resist those who seek nothing more than accountability, why do they keep reelecting them? Is this a problem primarily found amongst Republicans as the Democrats will claim or is it vise versa? Isn’t it ironic that the same small group of Predators benefit minute by minute and day by day as the voters from both left and right play the blame game perpetuated by (you got it) the same small group of predators that are robbing us all blind while sending our children of war. Fact is, they simple could not accomplish any of this without the help of Authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum…

Oh and by the way Dr. Dale, I think you OP’s and essay’s are amongst the very best to be found on the internet, so before you write your book, please do read “The Authoritarians.” It makes understanding the things you write about much easier, but most importantly it helps one to understand how and why good people allow these predators to get away with it. After all understanding the “WHY” behind all the evidence of what is going on is but one cure for what ails humanity, the other is extinction…

[Time for change]

44. Thank you very much Larry -- I like your picking out of the Galbraith quote

That idea is key to how the predators manage to pick up enough votes to maintain their power. He could have devoted a whole chapter to that alone (or a book), but that isn't what his book was mainly about.

You've recommended "The Authoritarians" before. I had looked into it, was somewhat intimidated by the price, and I neglected to get back to it. But it's probably well worth reading regardless of the price -- and anyhow, now that you provided the e-book, that's mostly irrelevant. You're right. It's very important (to me anyhow) to understand the reasons for these things. We're much better prepared to solve problems when we understand the reasons behind them. It sounds like I'll learn a lot from Altemeyer's book.

[happygoluckytoyou]

39. there will ALWAYS be WOLVES and SHEEP..... but clever sheep ORGANIZE... class warfare is ON ! !

[specimenfred1984]

41. So what, I'm buying a new Camaro

It's, like, so cool man and I can get one so too bad for all the whiners who can't.

[Mme. Defarge]

42. K&R!

First bookmark since the election.

[Larry Ogg]

43. You’ll love what Einstein had to say about this subject

The article is six pages long so I won’t post it here, I just wanted say it is very much along the lines of you OP. Here’s a little teaser from the middle of the first paragraph.

For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior

And the link http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php

[Time for change]

62. Yes, I do

Einstein was really something! If he wasn't such a great physicist he would have made a great political scientist.

[Larry Ogg]

65. Funny thing is

the job of physical science is to try and convince people that the world is round.

Ware as the job of political science is to try and convince them that the world is flat…

[Raster]

45. Carnivore capitalism as mandated by the predator class and hosted by the predator state.

It's far beyond just regular ol' class warfare. The last eight years have made it appallingly clear that we have been strip mined.

[valerief]

48. Excellent post!!!! Thank you. nt

[Fly by night]

49. K&R. Oh, and while I'm at it, EAT THE RICH

[antimatter98]

50. Pray with eachother on Sunday, prey ON eachother on Monday.

America = scammer nation

We've let the crooks take over the country, and this past November, we thought
we were turning the corner, but I'm sorry to say that Obama is just a Democratic Party
version of Bush.

May I suggest Andrew Cuomo for president in 2012. Obama is a complete failure in my
opinion. I lived through Vietnam, Watergate and the Bush dynasty and Clinton. Obama
is no friend of the American citizen, and I voted for him.

[JJ]

55. Oh no, now you've got me CONCERNED!

[Time for change]

56. I think that there's another interpretation

Obama may want to do some things differently than he has done, but feels great political pressure to move to the right somewhat. Maybe he feels that if he goes slowly in attacking the predators he's more likely to get away with it. I don't really know, and I haven't made up my mind yet.

Certainly we're in a lot better shape than if McCain had been elected, don't you think?

[inna]

69. just AWESOME. thank you so much for this post, i'm bookmarking it. nt

[Name removed]

70. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Greyhound]

72. Kick. AIG is not the problem, but a symptom. n/t