https://doctorow.medium.com/countervaling-power-8ed5b04f79a0
"It’s hard not to feel powerless. The rich are getting richer, the middle class
is disappearing, and poor people are evermore exposed to labor abuses,
predatory finance, police violence, and food-, fuel- and housing-insecurity.
Our cities are increasingly segregated into the haves and have-nots, and the
haves hoard the parks, schools and clean air:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/us/economic-segregation-income.html
The rich don’t just own all the good stuff, they also own the political
process. The now-classic 2014 paper “Testing Theories of American Politics:
Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” finds that “ordinary citizens…
get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be
preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
How do material wealth and political power relate to each other? Well, on the
one hand, it’s obvious that if you have more wealth, you have more to spend on
lobbying, both to the public and to lawmakers. As the leaks in Propublica’s IRS
Files show, just having a lot of money can scare off regulators and legal
enforcers, who know you’ll be able to hire more lawyers than they can.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent
But the secret to oligarchy isn’t (just) outspending the rest of us. Oligarchs
wield a far more important weapon: class solidarity. There is so
much
solidarity among billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires and even
ordinary millionaires, who may jockey with one another for the right to
financialize your rent and suppress your wages, but come together with
admirable discipline when their collective interests are at stake."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
