Political And Socioeconomic Inequality In The U.s.: Who Governs?

And who rules the Alpha?

 

There are an estimated 1,700 international conglomerates that run the world economy with the support of the US military. The Alpha's job is to bring order to chaos and if he can't do his job he is replaced. The Roman senators killed Julius Caesar on the steps of their own legislature because he demanded that at least a quarter of the population still have a vote. That's one of the reasons why the emperor had their own Germanic guards from that day forward, but it merely delayed the inevitable as they were constantly killing one another. The life of these Alphas tends to be extremely short and, so far, the US has kept it short by limiting a president to two terms at most while, in recent decades, both parties have been actively seeking to impeach the other's presidents. Trump now being associated with the Russians hacking the election may set a new precedent or cause all hell to break loose.

 

So, money rules the Alpha . . .

 

Your money is worthless without the guns to back it up. Its cutthroat poker where my enemy's enemy is my best friend and friends become enemies with each new hand that is dealt. Who is ruling just depends on who is winning at any given time.

 

You mean that the U.S. dollar is not backed by anything but force?

 

Some 90% of the entire world economy is based on speculation. Everything you see around you including all the toys, roads, houses, food, clothing, people, factories, etc. represent less than 10% of the world economy which is why Wall Street is about to achieve a new high of 20,000 points because those with money are investing in the fact that they will soon be able to eat all the little fish investors they want. When the economy collapsed the bankers that caused the collapse by committing fraud never saw a single day in jail and continue to this very day to commit the same fraud. The only way they can get away with that is by owning the people holding the guns. Similarly, when the billionaire mayor of NYC arrested 26 reporters in one day he merely received a slap on the wrist. Even the mass media saw no point in attempting to sue the man because we have the best justice that money can buy and he has all the money. The cops he sent to arrest the reporters are the guns backing up the money which is why we now have people rioting in the streets and executing cops in broad daylight.

 

The execution of cops is not about money, it's about perceived hatred/racism. If the money was really going to be the trigger doesn't it seem like we'd see more bankers and the like getting murdered instead of random cops? Quixotic to be sure since few on the street would even know which ones to murder.

 

Money is what drives racism. One of my favorite examples is the movie, "The Hotel Rwanda". When the German's and Belgians took over the country they divided the local tribes into two categories according to arbitrary features such as how wide their noses where. They literally invented their own brand of racism that persists to this day because it was to their advantage. Executing cops and rioting in the streets makes promoting extremes in racism more expensive for those benefiting. White collar crime is almost never prosecuted because we have the best justice that money can buy.

 

There have always been theories that the world is run by a network of secret societies—the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg group, the Bohemian club, Skull and Bones, the Illuminati, the Masons, etc. There is no hard evidence supporting these theories—possibly because they’re such good conspirators. There are, however, a number of studies. that are better grounded empirically, confirming the notion that power and wealth are disproportionally concentrated in a relatively small percentage of individuals. Concern about this problem made headlines in the fifties, when President Eisenhower warned us of the growing danger of the “military industrial complex” giving the U.S. a stake in war. Yes, the President was warning us that his so-called “puppet masters” were getting out of control. Yet the elite today seems to be divided on the subject of defense spending, Republicans but not Democrats tending to favor it.

The idea of a ruling minority was developed in C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite in 1956, which became gospel for the New Left in the sixties. According to Mills, the ruling “power elite” consisted of a trinity of leaders who occupy the command positions in three major institutions of our society: CEOs and board chairs of large corporations (essentially the Fortune 500), the armed forces, and the government bureaucracy. One need only look at Trump’s cabinet picks to realize that the theory may still have validity.

Critics of Mills’ theory raised two main objections: (1) he didn’t take sufficient account of divisions within the elite; and (2) he didn’t look for evidence that members of the elite were actively involved in exercising power on particular issues. His analysis stressed the unity brought to the elite by the common backgrounds and elite school ties that most members share. But he minimizes the differences resulting from different economic interests. Part of the problem stems from Mills’ definition of power as being about “the arrangements under which men live”—i.e., the big decisions. There is broad consensus among elites that the United States should remain a capitalist society and should safeguard the institutions that make them powerful and wealthy. Yet other social scientists who focus on who actually participates in everyday public policy decisions that are less fundamental conclude that there is lots of competition among different elite segments and that “sub-elites” from other institutions than the big three and single-issue interest groups can be important in controversies that are peripheral to the main interests of the dominant elite—e.g., the NRA. Even Marxists acknowledge that the capitalist class has "fractions" or segments which can lead to differences on important matters. And elite theorists admit that there are interdependencies of interest between elites and non-elites that limit what each can do to each other. For example, the military-industrial complex included local communities and unions with a stake in the defense industry. And even then, defense spending was cut back under Clinton and Obama.

For more recent expositions of the power elite theory, see the latest edition of G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? and Dye and Ziegler, The Irony fo Democracy. For an exposition of the plural elite theory, see the latest edition of Robert Dahl, Polyarchy.: Participation and Opposition Note: None of these authors is talking about the simplistic idea the people rule.

 

That sounds about right.

 

When Iceland recently prosecuted their bankers and threw them in jail both the US and EU protested. More countries would have followed their example, but they would risk being attacked or sanctioned in some way. Iceland isn't even worth attacking and there's almost no way to sanction them because their only real export is aluminum which they use cheap geothermal energy to produce. They are largely self-sufficient and located in no-man's land nobody wants.

 

The idea that racism is merely driven by hate is extremely profitable. Angry hateful people don't think for themselves and promoting racism promotes classicism. My own father is Irish Catholic and they were considered another race altogether by the British. When the potato famine hit due to the extreme exploitation of British landlords Johnathan Swift wrote a sarcastic editorial in the paper suggesting the solution to the "Irish problem" as it was euphemistically called was for the British to consider it patriotic to eat Irish babies. For his efforts he received thousands of letters asking where they could buy their Irish babies and find recipes.

According to geneticists humans are so inbred it isn't funny and we don't have different races.

 

Does anyone think it won't happen again, especially since the Trumpies propose to remove the regulatory breaks that were put on after the crisis? Hillary was criticized for giving speeches to Goldman-Sachs, but now it is all over the Trump Administration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/business/dealbook/goldman-sachs-no-2-seen-as-a-top-economic-adviser-to-trump.html
http://www.wnyc.org/story/trump-administration-welcomes-goldman-sachs/

 

So, did any of this answer your question concerning whether or not only children would continue mindlessly believing that presidents are something more than figureheads owned by money?

 

Absolutely, I have a condition that's common only to a limited swath of Asian people. Which means I probably have conquering Mongol hordes in my lineage. But in today's America, I'm just a generic honkey. I think it really sucks the way the race issue has seen this macabre "revival". It's like all the old grudges are now being showered onto a new generation, but ignoring the actual changes that came about and the laws that were passed as a result. It's easy to interpret too much of the media's story as if we have made zero progress since the 60s. And that is just not true.

 

I feel honored to have been included as a soundbite in OPs original post. I guess everyone knows how I feel. I agree with myself, for the most part. I think as much as money and violence controls everything, though, a general attitude that comes to be normalized is controlling everything. It's sort of a chicken and egg question: Which came first, the violence or the sociopathy.

It has become the case that, in our mass media, the "successful" man or woman just lives in their own shallow self-absorbed world of self-satisfaction. This is becoming normalized for all people. It's what our beloved leader, Donald Trump, stands for. Self-satisfied is the thing to be. It is its own justification and reward.

This portrayal of what is desirable in a human sort of supports itself. The people at the top need violence a little bit, but for the most part the oppressed themselves maintain the status quo and keep it thriving. There are enough impressionable fools that try to emulate the "successful" that the rest of us conform to some degree, each person trying to become self-satisfied in the most generic of terms, which means acquiring material wealth. We can't blame those at the top for having what we want for ourselves. If we condemned them, we could never expect to have that perfect self-satisfaction for ourselves.

And people like Donald Trump become sort of like a dirty joke. Every time he says something selfish and hateful there is a little man nudging us with his elbow and grinning, like we're all expected to acknowledge that, deep down inside, we know he's just the best. Sad.

 

Maybe deep down inside you think he is the best, but I am sorry, we are all not born sociopathic borderline , if not completely psychopathic monsters. Even, if I had all the money in the world like he does....it would be more than my self satisfying interests....as my interests include more than just myself and those just on the top.... It includes others and wild life and the environment, and this planet as a whole..as it always has.

 

Hitler came to power when Germany was the most enlightened, advanced, and integrated country in the developed world. We've made some progress, but psychologists suggest it might require up to seven generations for real change to take place and so long as money and the gun are still doing most of the driving the US may require its own Hitler in order to face the error of its evil ways.