Sunday, April 06, 2014 10:59:38 PM
and the others .. :) .. yours sounds a start, then if there were others as you, able and willing to do the same to others as the Kochs, Adelson et al, .. all of whom would, because of the success of your campaign!!! .. lol .. no doubt step up their donations, the Kochs would .. you never know there could be change with minimal violence .. hmm, one trouble is that most of the extreme violence today comes from those who vote for the ones who most likely support the candidates the Kochs and the others support .. that's right isn't it? .. :) .. mass poverty in large proportion a result of the concentration of exorbitant wealth of a few .. we all know it's a real problem ..
Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich
Feb 17th 2011, 20:58 by R.A. | WASHINGTON
KEVIN DRUM draws our attention .. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/02/secret-weapon-rich-money .. to an intriguing paper .. http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epiirs/events/PU%20Comparative%20Conf%20May%202007%20Gilens.pdf .. Martin Gilens, on the responsiveness of policy to preferences across income groups. Here are the key charts:
At left, we see that as people at the bottom of the income spectrum care more about an issue, the probability of action on that issue scarcely budges. At right we see that policy responds a little more to median preferences. But what's clear in both is that the rich are much more successful at getting their issues on the docket. That's not really that surprising, but why should it be the case? Mr Drum writes:
"Gilens' guess is that "the most obvious source of influence over policy that distinguishes high-income Americans is money." This sounds like a pretty good guess to me."
Specifically, Mr Gilens looks at a range of potential causal and non-causal explanations of the connection, eliminates some that don't seem to correspond with available data, and concludes that the striking responsiveness of policy to the preferences of the rich is probably due to the one characteristic in which the rich are strikingly unique, namely, their richness.
Matt Yglesias .. http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/02/government-by-the-rich/ .. offers a different view:
"I would say the most obvious mechanism here is socialization. The president, the senior White House staff, the cabinet secretaries, the senators, the House members, the senior congressional staff, and the lobbyists, association heads, business executives, governors, mayors, foreign officials, and media celebrities who they interact with are all personally pretty high income...
What's more, political elites tend to have college roommates, siblings, in-laws, etc. who are also prosperous. Obviously the fact that rich people have money to spend on politics doesn't hurt either. But I would never underestimate the human desire to believe that one is doing the right thing, and thus the importance of socialization to determining bias."
The idea here is that elected officials care about the rich because they and their friends are all rich. There's nothing particularly pernicious here; the people who matter simply look at what the people they know care about and conclude that that's what people, generally, care about.
Mr Gilens actually proposes and dismisses this explanation:
"[W]ithin any economic stratum there exist individuals with a wide range of policy preferences and this would appear to be true among federal policymakers as well as the public at large. That is, although every Senator and Representative is well-off, the range of policy preferences represented appears to be quite wide. Affluent liberal Democrats as well as affluent conservative Republicans battle over federal policy. In terms of understanding responsiveness of government policy to public opinion, the key question is not what the preferences of elected representatives are, but why a particular set of affluent lawmakers, with a particular set of policy preferences, was elected. Given the range of policy views represented in congress, it seems unlikely that any coincidence of preferences that exists between lawmakers and well-off Americans is the result of the economic status of lawmakers themselves rather than the electoral system that produced a given set of lawmakers."
In other words, rich Democrats and rich Republicans elect politicians with a diverse range of views, but all of which ultimately respond to the policy preferences of the rich. To put this slightly differently, we all know rich people on the left side of the political spectrum who care passionately about the poor and have no problem supporting policies that aren't necessarily in their own direct interest. These people exist. But the Democrats who end up in Congress tend not to be these people; they're the kind of people who respond to the preferences of the rich. Who knows what their motivations for doing so are; perhaps they view concessions to rich priorities as necessary in order to survive in Washington to fight for other priorities some other day. And it should be noted that the priorities of middle and low income voters are occasionally heard and addressed.
But the asymmetry here shapes the policy that emerges from Washington. Legislators worried about the poor often [ALWAYS?] have to cut deals to satisfy the rich people who support their campaigns and other critical institutions. Legislators worried about the rich basically never have to make these kinds of concessions. Money, by creating this asymmetry, gets what it wants much more often. As Mr Gilens notes, this is a feature of very nearly every political system in very nearly every historical era. What I would suggest is that it is therefore not a tremendous threat to democracy, except in cases when mobility levels across incomes fall dramatically. In that case, you create a permanent class of politically disenfranchised people. And that can be a very destabilising thing.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/02/political_economy
.. and we know about changes in mobility in America ..
STIGLITZ writing once again in The Great Divide Series ~
Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth .. excerpt ..
Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish — and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other — and contribute to economic weakness, as Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has emphasized. Americans are coming to realize that their cherished narrative of social and economic mobility is a myth. Grand deceptions of this magnitude are hard to maintain for long — and the country has already been through a couple of decades of self-deception. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84743814 .. more .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95944431
.. the dung of it is the position which seems to exist now ..
The Top of the World .. large excerpt ..
But the major frustration of the book is political. Piketty clearly shows that short of depression and war, the only possible way to tame the beast of endless concentration is concerted political action. The high upper-bracket tax rates of the immediate postwar decades couldn’t have happened without serious fears among elites—fresh memories of the Depression, threats from strong domestic unions, competition on a global scale with the USSR, which, for all its problems, was living proof that an alternative economic system was possible. As those things waned, upper-bracket taxes were lowered, wages and benefits were cut, and capital’s increased mobility led to increased competition among jurisdictions to offer a “favorable investment climate”—meaning weak regulations, low wages, and minimal taxes. All these trends have contributed to the concentration of capital over the last thirty years, as wealth and power have shifted upward on an enormous scale. None of these features will be reversed spontaneously. Nor will they be altered through “democratic deliberation”—several times Piketty notes the hefty political power of the owning class—or improved educational access, as Piketty actually urges at one unfortunate point. Brushing up the working class’s skill set is no match for the power of r > g.
Starting with the title, the eternally recurrent specter of Marx hangs over this book. Early into the first page of the introduction, Piketty asks, “Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century?” Phrasing the question as something grounded in the past is a nice distancing technique, as the psychoanalysts say, but the answer is clearly yes. Several times, Piketty disavows Marx—just a few lines later he credits “economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge” for allowing us to avoid “the Marxist apocalypse”—but he also concedes that those prophylactics have not changed capitalism’s deep structures and the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It seems, in other words, that Piketty’s own research shows that the old nineteenth-century gloomster had a point.
Unlike most modern economists, Piketty at least credits Marx’s ambition and profundity. But for Piketty, the main problem with Marx is his unequivocal call for political confrontation. Having described a process of inexorable material polarization—and with it, increasing plutocratic power over the state—Piketty remains distressingly moderate as he sounds out some of the political implications of his analysis. A major reason for his posture of socialist skepticism, he declares, is that he came of age as Soviet-style Communism was falling apart, which left him “vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.”
Anticapitalist rhetoric need not be lazy—and for all the empirical sophistication of Piketty’s work, his political thinking is hardly a model of complexity or effort. He mostly aspires to contribute to rational democratic deliberation about “the best way to organize society.”
Still, while such deliberation is clearly necessary, political action cannot be factored out of that process just because we happen to have lived through the Cold War’s unmourned collapse. It’s energizing to see that a younger generation of political intellectuals, who were in grade school when the Berlin Wall came down, missed the anticapitalist vaccination. They might be able to take Piketty’s data and cause some genuine trouble with it. Because serious trouble—demonstrations, strikes, insurgent political movements—is what it will take to derail capitalism’s inevitable tendency toward concentration. Short of that, it looks like we’ll be continuing our journey along the road to a new serfdom. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=99806876
Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich
Feb 17th 2011, 20:58 by R.A. | WASHINGTON
KEVIN DRUM draws our attention .. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/02/secret-weapon-rich-money .. to an intriguing paper .. http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epiirs/events/PU%20Comparative%20Conf%20May%202007%20Gilens.pdf .. Martin Gilens, on the responsiveness of policy to preferences across income groups. Here are the key charts:
At left, we see that as people at the bottom of the income spectrum care more about an issue, the probability of action on that issue scarcely budges. At right we see that policy responds a little more to median preferences. But what's clear in both is that the rich are much more successful at getting their issues on the docket. That's not really that surprising, but why should it be the case? Mr Drum writes:
"Gilens' guess is that "the most obvious source of influence over policy that distinguishes high-income Americans is money." This sounds like a pretty good guess to me."
Specifically, Mr Gilens looks at a range of potential causal and non-causal explanations of the connection, eliminates some that don't seem to correspond with available data, and concludes that the striking responsiveness of policy to the preferences of the rich is probably due to the one characteristic in which the rich are strikingly unique, namely, their richness.
Matt Yglesias .. http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/02/government-by-the-rich/ .. offers a different view:
"I would say the most obvious mechanism here is socialization. The president, the senior White House staff, the cabinet secretaries, the senators, the House members, the senior congressional staff, and the lobbyists, association heads, business executives, governors, mayors, foreign officials, and media celebrities who they interact with are all personally pretty high income...
What's more, political elites tend to have college roommates, siblings, in-laws, etc. who are also prosperous. Obviously the fact that rich people have money to spend on politics doesn't hurt either. But I would never underestimate the human desire to believe that one is doing the right thing, and thus the importance of socialization to determining bias."
The idea here is that elected officials care about the rich because they and their friends are all rich. There's nothing particularly pernicious here; the people who matter simply look at what the people they know care about and conclude that that's what people, generally, care about.
Mr Gilens actually proposes and dismisses this explanation:
"[W]ithin any economic stratum there exist individuals with a wide range of policy preferences and this would appear to be true among federal policymakers as well as the public at large. That is, although every Senator and Representative is well-off, the range of policy preferences represented appears to be quite wide. Affluent liberal Democrats as well as affluent conservative Republicans battle over federal policy. In terms of understanding responsiveness of government policy to public opinion, the key question is not what the preferences of elected representatives are, but why a particular set of affluent lawmakers, with a particular set of policy preferences, was elected. Given the range of policy views represented in congress, it seems unlikely that any coincidence of preferences that exists between lawmakers and well-off Americans is the result of the economic status of lawmakers themselves rather than the electoral system that produced a given set of lawmakers."
In other words, rich Democrats and rich Republicans elect politicians with a diverse range of views, but all of which ultimately respond to the policy preferences of the rich. To put this slightly differently, we all know rich people on the left side of the political spectrum who care passionately about the poor and have no problem supporting policies that aren't necessarily in their own direct interest. These people exist. But the Democrats who end up in Congress tend not to be these people; they're the kind of people who respond to the preferences of the rich. Who knows what their motivations for doing so are; perhaps they view concessions to rich priorities as necessary in order to survive in Washington to fight for other priorities some other day. And it should be noted that the priorities of middle and low income voters are occasionally heard and addressed.
But the asymmetry here shapes the policy that emerges from Washington. Legislators worried about the poor often [ALWAYS?] have to cut deals to satisfy the rich people who support their campaigns and other critical institutions. Legislators worried about the rich basically never have to make these kinds of concessions. Money, by creating this asymmetry, gets what it wants much more often. As Mr Gilens notes, this is a feature of very nearly every political system in very nearly every historical era. What I would suggest is that it is therefore not a tremendous threat to democracy, except in cases when mobility levels across incomes fall dramatically. In that case, you create a permanent class of politically disenfranchised people. And that can be a very destabilising thing.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/02/political_economy
.. and we know about changes in mobility in America ..
STIGLITZ writing once again in The Great Divide Series ~
Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth .. excerpt ..
Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish — and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other — and contribute to economic weakness, as Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has emphasized. Americans are coming to realize that their cherished narrative of social and economic mobility is a myth. Grand deceptions of this magnitude are hard to maintain for long — and the country has already been through a couple of decades of self-deception. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84743814 .. more .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95944431
.. the dung of it is the position which seems to exist now ..
The Top of the World .. large excerpt ..
But the major frustration of the book is political. Piketty clearly shows that short of depression and war, the only possible way to tame the beast of endless concentration is concerted political action. The high upper-bracket tax rates of the immediate postwar decades couldn’t have happened without serious fears among elites—fresh memories of the Depression, threats from strong domestic unions, competition on a global scale with the USSR, which, for all its problems, was living proof that an alternative economic system was possible. As those things waned, upper-bracket taxes were lowered, wages and benefits were cut, and capital’s increased mobility led to increased competition among jurisdictions to offer a “favorable investment climate”—meaning weak regulations, low wages, and minimal taxes. All these trends have contributed to the concentration of capital over the last thirty years, as wealth and power have shifted upward on an enormous scale. None of these features will be reversed spontaneously. Nor will they be altered through “democratic deliberation”—several times Piketty notes the hefty political power of the owning class—or improved educational access, as Piketty actually urges at one unfortunate point. Brushing up the working class’s skill set is no match for the power of r > g.
Starting with the title, the eternally recurrent specter of Marx hangs over this book. Early into the first page of the introduction, Piketty asks, “Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century?” Phrasing the question as something grounded in the past is a nice distancing technique, as the psychoanalysts say, but the answer is clearly yes. Several times, Piketty disavows Marx—just a few lines later he credits “economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge” for allowing us to avoid “the Marxist apocalypse”—but he also concedes that those prophylactics have not changed capitalism’s deep structures and the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It seems, in other words, that Piketty’s own research shows that the old nineteenth-century gloomster had a point.
Unlike most modern economists, Piketty at least credits Marx’s ambition and profundity. But for Piketty, the main problem with Marx is his unequivocal call for political confrontation. Having described a process of inexorable material polarization—and with it, increasing plutocratic power over the state—Piketty remains distressingly moderate as he sounds out some of the political implications of his analysis. A major reason for his posture of socialist skepticism, he declares, is that he came of age as Soviet-style Communism was falling apart, which left him “vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.”
Anticapitalist rhetoric need not be lazy—and for all the empirical sophistication of Piketty’s work, his political thinking is hardly a model of complexity or effort. He mostly aspires to contribute to rational democratic deliberation about “the best way to organize society.”
Still, while such deliberation is clearly necessary, political action cannot be factored out of that process just because we happen to have lived through the Cold War’s unmourned collapse. It’s energizing to see that a younger generation of political intellectuals, who were in grade school when the Berlin Wall came down, missed the anticapitalist vaccination. They might be able to take Piketty’s data and cause some genuine trouble with it. Because serious trouble—demonstrations, strikes, insurgent political movements—is what it will take to derail capitalism’s inevitable tendency toward concentration. Short of that, it looks like we’ll be continuing our journey along the road to a new serfdom. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=99806876
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
