My contention has been that this nation has been ruled by an oligarchy
since its inception. The Constitution was drawn up by men who held
land and wealth, which they did not wish to have taxed without
representation, by the British. So the Colonies declared themselves
to be independent. In so doing, the Land Owners involved all of the
people living in the Colonies, regardless of their personal feelings.
With the defeat of the British, the American Oligarchy was
established. And to this day that Oligarchy continues to hold
control, despite many changes and some major concessions.
We have never been a true Republic, and certainly there has been very
little democracy, except at the very lowest of political levels.
And yet, all of our major candidates refuse to face this fact.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/25/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Sopa)
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Sopa)
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Corporate Media and 'Moderate' Democrats Are Defending the Oligarchy
Against
Bernie Sanders
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
24 December 19
For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant - and donkey - in the
room.
Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.
Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last
Thursday
night, the word "oligarchy" was heard once. "We are living in a nation
increasingly becoming an oligarchy," Bernie Sanders said, "where you have a
handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying
elections and politicians."
Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is
upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic
contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy - defined as "a government
in
which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish
purposes" - can't really be a democracy.
The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest
U.S. media outlets don't want actual democracy. It would curb their profits
and their power.
Over the weekend, The Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren "probably would fail at the polls and, if not,
would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them." The editorial
went on to praise "the relative moderates in the race" - Joe Biden, Pete
Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar - for "offering a more positive future."
But "a more positive future" for whom? Those "moderates" are certainly
offering a more positive future for the newspaper's owner, Jeff Bezos, who
usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even
more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.
The Washington Post's routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became
notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what
afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign - from editorial pages
and front pages to commercial TV news and "public" outlets like the "PBS
NewsHour" and NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition."
The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it
doesn't require complete uniformity - only dominant messaging, worldviews
and assumptions.
Prevailing in news media's political content is the central, tacit
assumption that oligarchy isn't a reality in the United States. So, there's
scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA "now
have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined." As
for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania
Trump's wardrobe.
Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there's a renewed pattern of
mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign's progress.
Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not
surprising.
In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence - with no ceiling on the
often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth - defenders of oligarchy
see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing
hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.
For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity
with the "moderate" orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is
clear.
Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against
what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.
While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance
of
oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to
preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is
offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the
eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for
president this year by Bezos.
During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive
class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In
just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all
such
spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has
already
hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who'll be deployed in 21 states.
If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg won the Democratic presidential
nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising
grassroots opposition.
Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain
corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive
director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago,
"Almost every problem facing our country - from runaway greed on Wall
Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private
detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis -
can
be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete
Buttigieg
and Joe Biden's campaigns for president."
While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and
corporations "pay their fair share," you won't hear Buttigieg or Biden use
the word "oligarchy." That's because, to serve the oligarchy, they must
pretend it doesn't exist.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org.
He
was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic
National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched
independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen
books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us
to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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