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Topic: America is an oligarchy-You need a new game plan

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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

From the Dept. of Academics Confirming Something You Already Suspected comes a new study concluding that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government …
The New Yorker · ByJohn Cassidy · 19 hours ago.

Study proves: US an oligarchy, not a democracy; the wealthy rule, control the US





The U.S. oligarchy study completed by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities is showing that the United States is an oligarchy rather than a democracy. In an oligarchy, the wealthiest citizens …
Examiner · ByTina Burgess · 9 hours ago.

US is an oligarchy not a democracy, says scientific study





A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the US is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s …
Pakistan Defence · 4/17/2014
Post Sat Apr 19, 2014 1:30 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Study proves: US an oligarchy, not a democracy; the wealthy rule, control the US





The U.S. oligarchy study completed by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities is showing that the United States is an oligarchy rather than a democracy. In an oligarchy, the wealthiest citizens …
Examiner · ByTina Burgess · 9 hours ago

April 17, 2014


The U.S. oligarchy study completed by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities is showing that the United States is an oligarchy rather than a democracy. In an oligarchy, the wealthiest citizens dominate policies concerning crucial issues, not voters. According to an April 16 The Telegraph report, “the US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful.”

The 42-page U.S. oligarchy study is titled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens and was published by the universities on April 9, 2014. The study was reviewed by several researchers and is scheduled to be taught at the universities in the fall semester.

After examining 1,800 U.S. policies which were enacted between the years 1981 to 2002, the researchers found that wealthy Americans and large special lobbying interest groups controlled U.S. government policies. The policies and interests of the dominating economic elite in the United States was found to be against the preferences of the average American.

While the report places the wealthy at the 90th percentile of income and the average American in the 50th percentile of income, it is almost safe to say that after 2008, those numbers have changed quite a bit. The gap between the rich and the former “average” has increased -- with the rich getting richer and the once average-income citizens getting poorer.

Even though the report analyzed the years 1981 to 2002, it explains why the rich were and are continuing to get richer. The study distinguishes between Economic Elite Domination (wealthy individuals) and Biased Pluralism (interest groups that represent the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations).

The reality is (the study notes) that public policy in the United States is controlled by individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites). Being wealthy alone is not as effective as being wealthy and influential. Being rich and living a luxurious lifestyle is one thing. But being rich and using one's money to affect policies, guarantees that one can continue to get richer.

“An important feature of interest group influence is that it is often deployed against proposed policy changes. On the 1,357 proposed policy changes for which at least one interest group was coded as favoring or opposing change, in only 36% of the cases did most groups favor change, while in 55% of the cases most groups opposed change,” states the report on page 19. “Interest groups as a whole do not seek the same policies as average citizens do.”

In regard to the idea of democracy in America, the report states that “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.” Why would anyone want to change anything if it works perfectly -- for the rich?

The U.S. oligarchy study points out that the interest of the average American does appear to be represented if it correlates with the interest of the wealthy. “To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often 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.”
Post Sat Apr 19, 2014 1:35 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

THE NEW YORKER

Rational Irrationality
April 18, 2014

Is America an Oligarchy?
Posted by John Cassidy

From the Dept. of Academics Confirming Something You Already Suspected comes a new study concluding that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.

“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:


Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

That’s a big claim. In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

It is hardly surprising that the new study is generating alarmist headlines, such as “STUDY: US IS AN OLIGARCHY, NOT A DEMOCRACY,” from, of all places, the BBC. Gilens and Page do not use the term “oligarchy” in describing their conclusions, which would imply that a small ruling class dominates the political system to the exclusion of all others. They prefer the phrase “economic élite domination,” which is a bit less pejorative.

The evidence that Gilens and Page present needs careful intepretation. For example, the opinion surveys they rely on suggest that, on many issues, people of different incomes share similar opinions. To quote the paper: “Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for economic elites) want the same things from government.” This does get reflected in policy outcomes. Proposals that are supported up and down the income spectrum have a better chance of being enacted than policies that do not have such support. To that extent, democracy is working.

The issue is what happens when some income groups, particularly the rich, support or oppose certain things, and other groups in society don’t share their views. To tackle this issue, Gilens and Page constructed a multivariate statistical model, which includes three causal variables: the views of Americans in the ninetieth percentile of the income distribution (the rich), the views of Americans in the fiftieth percentile (the middle class), and the opinions of various interest groups, such as business lobbies and trade unions. In setting up their analysis this way, the two political scientists were able to measure the impact that the groups have independent of each other.

This is what the data shows: when the economic élites support a given policy change, it has about a one-in-two chance of being enacted. (The exact estimated probability is forty-five per cent.) When the élites oppose a given measure, its chances of becoming law are less than one in five. (The exact estimate is eighteen per cent.) The fact that both figures are both below fifty per cent reflects a status-quo bias: in the divided American system of government, getting anything at all passed is tricky.

The study suggests that, on many issues, the rich exercise an effective veto. If they are against something, it is unlikely to happen. This is obviously inconsistent with the median-voter theorem—which holds that policy outcomes reflect the preferences of voters who represent the ideological center—but I don’t think that it is a particularly controversial claim. A recent example is the failure to eliminate the “carried interest” deduction, which allows hedge-fund managers and leveraged-buyout tycoons to pay an artificially low tax rate on much of their income. In 2012, there was widespread outrage at the revelation that Mitt Romney, who made his fortune at the leveraged-buyout firm Bain Capital, paid less than fifteen per cent in federal income taxes. But the deduction hasn’t been eliminated.

One of the study’s other interesting findings is that, beyond a certain level, the opinions of the public at large have little impact on the chances a proposal has of being enacted. As I said, policy proposals that have the support of the majority fare better than proposals which are favored only by a minority. But, in the words of Gilens and Page, “The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”

The paper is a provocative one, and there’s sure to be a lot of debate among political scientists about whether it wholly supports the authors’ claims. One issue is that their survey data is pretty old: it covers the period from 1982 to 2002. (On the other hand, it hardly seems likely that the influence of the affluent has declined in the past decade.) Another issue is that, in a statistical sense, the explanatory power of some of the equations that Gilens and Page use is weak. For example, the three-variable probability model that I referred to above explains less than ten per cent of the variation in the data. (For you statistical wonks, R-squared = 0.074.)

Even in this sort of study, that’s a pretty low figure. Gilens and Page, to their credit, draw attention to it in their discussion, and suggest various reasons for why it’s not a big issue. They also acknowledge another possible objection to their conclusions:

Average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support… But we tend to doubt it.

Me, too. There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort policy in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the majority: the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.

The New Yorker
Post Sat Apr 19, 2014 1:39 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

PAKISTAN DEFENCE



US is an oligarchy not a democracy, says scientific study

Discussion in 'World Affairs' started by Hasbara Buster, Thursday at 7:04 AM.
.

Thursday at 7:04 AM #1


US is an oligarchy not a democracy, says scientific study

[​IMG]
A new study suggests that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies that the US government adopts.

Eric Zuesse, Common Dreams

A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the US is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, "Who governs? Who really rules?" in this country, is:

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, ..." and then they go on to say, it's not true, and that, "America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened" by the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy.

The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled "Testing Theories of American Politics." The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the US by the super-rich:

Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans – though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases – is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.

Nonetheless, this is the first-ever scientific study of the question of whether the US is a democracy. "Until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions [that US policymaking operates as a democracy, versus as an oligarchy, versus as some mixture of the two] against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues." That’s an enormous number of policy-issues studied.

What the authors are able to find, despite the deficiencies of the data, is important: the first-ever scientific analysis of whether the US is a democracy, or is instead an oligarchy, or some combination of the two. The clear finding is that the US is an oligarchy, no democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media). The US, in other words, is basically similar to other dubious "electoral" "democratic" countries. We weren't formerly, but we clearly are now. Today, after this exhaustive analysis of the data, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” That's it, in a nutshell.




PressTV - US is an oligarchy not a democracy, says scientific study .
Post Sat Apr 19, 2014 1:42 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

SALON


Tuesday, Apr 22, 2014 08:30 AM EDT

America’s mad dash to oligarchy: How government became a protection racket for the 1 percent

New research confirms what we've long suspected -- the Senate is responsive to the policy preferences of the rich
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, BillMoyers.com


America's mad dash to oligarchy: How government became a protection racket for the 1 percent
)


The evidence of income inequality just keeps mounting. According to “Working for the Few,” a recent briefing paper from Oxfam, “In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.”

Pew

Our now infamous one percent own more than 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom forty percent of the country is in debt. Just this past Tuesday, the 15th of April — Tax Day — the AFL-CIO reported that last year the chief executive officers of 350 top American corporations were paid 331 times more money than the average US worker. Those executives made an average of $11.7 million dollars compared to the average worker who earned $35,239 dollars.

As that analysis circulated on Tax Day, the economic analyst Robert Reich reminded us that in addition to getting the largest percent of total national income in nearly a century, many in the one percent are paying a lower federal tax rate than a lot of people in the middle-class. You may remember that an obliging Congress, of both parties, allows high rollers of finance the privilege of “carried interest,” a tax rate below that of their secretaries and clerks.

And at state and local levels, while the poorest fifth of Americans pay an average tax rate of over 11 percent, the richest one percent of the country pay — are you ready for this? — half that rate. Now, neither Nature nor Nature’s God drew up our tax codes; that’s the work of legislators — politicians — and it’s one way they have, as Chief Justice John Roberts might put it, of expressing gratitude to their donors: “Oh, Mr. Adelson, we so appreciate your generosity that we cut your estate taxes so you can give $8 billion as a tax-free payment to your heirs, even though down the road the public will have to put up $2.8 billion to compensate for the loss in tax revenue.”

All of which makes truly repugnant the argument, heard so often from courtiers of the rich, that inequality doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. Inequality is what has turned Washington into a protection racket for the one percent. It buys all those goodies from government: Tax breaks. Tax havens (which allow corporations and the rich to park their money in a no-tax zone). Loopholes. Favors like carried interest. And so on. As Paul Krugman writes in his New York Review of Books essay on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “We now know both that the United States has a much more unequal distribution of income than other advanced countries and that much of this difference in outcomes can be attributed directly to government action.”

Recently, researchers at the University of Connecticut ploughed through the data and concluded that the US Senate is responsive to the policy preferences of the rich, ignoring the poor. And now there’s that big study coming out in the fall from scholars at Princeton and Northwestern universities, based on data collected between 1981 and 2002. Their conclusion: “America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened… The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Instead, policy tends “to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.”

Recently Matea Gold of The Washington Post reported on a pair of political science graduate students who released a study confirming that money doesequal access in Washington. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman drafted two form letters asking 191 members of Congress for a meeting to discuss a certain piece of legislation. One email said “active political donors” would be present; the second email said only that a group of “local constituents” would be at the meeting.

One guess as to which emails got the most response. Yes, more than five times as many legislators or their chiefs of staff offered to set up meetings with active donors than with local constituents. Why is it not corruption when the selling of access to our public officials upends the very core of representative government? When money talks and you have none, how can you believe in democracy?

Sad that it’s come to this. The drift toward oligarchy that Thomas Piketty describes in his formidable new book on capital has become a mad dash. It will overrun us, unless we stop it.


Bill Moyers is managing editor of the new weekly public affairs program, "Moyers & Company," airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.


Michael Winship is senior writing fellow at Demos and a senior writer of the new series, Moyers & Company, airing on public television.
Post Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:20 am 
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