I wouldn’t have put it so politely, but yeah.
MIAMI — Louis D. Brandeis, the American jurist, famously warned: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Brandeis’s cri de coeur was inspired by an indignant observation of the shenanigans of America’s robber barons during the Gilded Age. Today, we live in a data-driven age, and some careful students of the connection between money and politics have now amassed a powerful body of evidence to support Brandeis’s moral claim. A lot of it is assembled in a report by the progressive research organization Demos, published this week.
One of the most striking findings is the extent to which economic power translates into political power.
Institutionally, this is an era of unprecedented democracy — one of the triumphs of the 20th century has been the extension of voting rights to all adults in a lot of the world.
But even in the United States, the country that thinks of itself as being the world’s leading democracy, it turns out that those rights do not translate into much actual political power. David Callahan, co-author of “Stacked Deck,” the Demos report, describes the superrich as “supercitizens, with an outsized footprint in the public square.”
“I think most Americans believe in the idea of political equality,” Dr. Callahan told me. “That idea is obviously corrupted when in 2012, one guy, Sheldon Adelson, can make more political donations than the residents of 12 states put together.”
Political power and wealth equality are two sides of the same coin. The Golden Rule is, “He who owns the gold makes the rules.” Or “The more wealth you have the bigger your voice.” When the top 1% owns 40% of all the wealth, their voices drown out the bottom 99%. Especially after the 1% spends enough money to split the 99% 50/50 politically. It’s (Capitalism) even worse than you thought.
And the Big Money/Corporatists have, it appears, 5 dependable seats on the US Supreme Court, with the remaining four sometimes bamboozled into voting along with them. (Obama’s appointees seem to have a soft spot for Big Bidness.)
Read this post by Hugh over at Corrente on how the Supreme Five have gifted financial grifters with ever more protection from oversight. The Five are creating the legal foundation for Big Money to remain free to cheat. Just in case there are some actual enforcements by regulators and criminal actions from the DOJ, this is now in place to aid their Big Money, Big Crime friends.
White collar criminals RULE!
Lots of good posts over there, so rummage around while you’re there.
The Brandeis quote is so pertinent today, along with the Upton Sinclair quote which should be readily at hand for so many topics.
Louis D. Brandeis, American jurist: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”