Debunking Myths About The Koch Brothers

These myths, documented at billmoyers.com by two well-respected Harvard scholars on government and policy, reveal five common fallacies or misunderstandings prevalent among left-leaning and Democratic writers, fallacies which could put our democracy in peril of literal takeover by wealthy but ideologically driven oligarchs. Conspiracy theory? maybe, but I suspect we ignore multibillionaire right-wing crazies at our peril. YMMV.

NOTE: the original draft of this post was written on a smartphone, composed using the Google keyboard with its auto-completion feature. When I saved the original draft, Google keyboard silently changed one word I typed manually, "multibillionaire", to "multimillionaire". The mistake is understandable, but it must have been a lower-level Google developer who saw fit to make the silent change: a Google CEO (or some such) would never have made that mistake.

PoliticusUSA Features Excellent Article On Inequality, Anti‑Union Activity, Driving Down Wages

Tim Libretti at PoliticusUSA offers "Trickle-Down to Keep-the-Worker-Down: It’s Not the 'Skills Gap' Driving Down Wages," a worthy post on exactly what its title suggests.

For most of my life, certainly all of the working part of it, there has been an ongoing and effective attempt to sabotage unions and the kind of contracts they negotiate on behalf of workers. Most of the sabotage is either by outright oligarchs who own huge corporations... or by Republicans on behalf of those fat cats. (Recently a few Democrats have gotten aboard that train; keep your eyes open!)

(Admittedly, not that last one yet...)

Take it from a lifelong worker recently retired: we don't appreciate what the bastards have done.

(H/T Avedon.)

President Carter On American Government Today

Interviewed by Thom Hartmann (YouTube), the venerable former President Jimmy Carter has something to say about the nature of American government today:

... It [the extreme role of money in politics since the Citizens United ruling - SB] violates the essence of what makes America a great country, in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or elected president. And the same thing applies to governors and US senators and Congressmembers. So now we've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get, uh, favors for themselves after the election's over. ...

Please, readers, be sure to listen to the entire interview. And to Mr. Carter: you go, Mr. President! (We all should exhibit such crystal clarity at age 90. Carter was not the greatest president, but he was probably the most honest one since Honest Abe...)

(H/T Sara Jerde at TPM.)

Big Surprise! [/irony] America Is An Oligarchy – Princeton Study

Via pajoly at Kos, a quote from the Princeton study [.pdf]:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

So we're now an oligarchy. Sounds about right to me. Were we ever a representative democracy? You tell me...

Firestone On Inequality, Plutocracy, Oligarchy

Joe Firestone at New Economic Perspectives (home of the Modern Monetary Theory folks), who apparently is also letsgetitdone at Firedoglake, asks the question, Is the MSM Blackout on Inequality, Plutocracy, and Oligarchy Ending? His answer is one of the most insightful examinations of the causes and consequences of the dramatic inequality in wealth in America today that I have ever read, and I've read a few recently. If we are lucky, perhaps the overall answer is Yes, and if we are even luckier, perhaps TPTB will at last see inequality as the core flaw in our economy that it actually is, and begin to rearrange things so we can all enjoy greater prosperity.