Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
– Albert Camus
Juan Cole of Informed Comment not so recently wrote a piece on the worst things about the Bush decade and in the process described what he sees as the rise of american oligarchs. The picture he paints is one I’m rather familiar with because it’s the same picture that I’ve seen painted by anarchists and the more sensible libertarians. It’s a picture of politics as the, at best, bloodless sport of the elite. A picture of government as a haven for scoundrels and tyrants. A picture that envisions multinational C.E.O.s and Senators as little different from the medieval nobility. While I’m generally quite the eternal optimist and don’t take well to the kind of cynicism that one might associate with such a dim view I can’t help but see the truth of it again and again in political conflict.
Here are Juan Cole’s exact words:
I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless ‘Oligarchs’ in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established ‘think tanks’ like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq. Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of ‘our’ (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.