Oligarchy Blues

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This article by Michael Ventura, on the degeneration of representative process in the US and the rise of oligarchy, calls for new terminology and frameworks in order to describe our current political and economic conditions accurately, which Ventura contends is a necessary condition for action. I imagine many NC readers will agree with him on that, since many of you engage in precisely this sort of debate in the comments section daily. This piece is a quick sketch, but nevertheless hits some key issues. (Readers might also protest that Ventura isn’t as hard on the Democrats as he ought to be, but they still get some serious whacks in his piece).

Yet one could cynically argue that what Ventura describes is more the path to how we got where we are than our current location. He describes the power of oligarchy, but focuses almost entirely on the political part of the equation. Yet as Tom Ferguson has described in his work on elections, such as his classic book, The Golden Rule, American politics has long been money driven. So the key questions might be: how did a system that has always favored the wealthy and corporate interests nevertheless come to deliver decent outcomes for ordinary citizens for a protracted period?