Bernie Sanders Asks Fed Chair Whether the US Is an Oligarchy | The Nation

If the US Senate really is the world’s greatest deliberative body, it ought to consider consequential questions. That does not happen often in a Senate where trivia tends too frequently to triumph over issues of substance. But Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, raised what might just be the most substantial issue of all Wednesday, at a Joint Economic Committee hearing where Federal Reserve board chair Janet Yellen was testifying.

The senator began with the facts: “In the US today, the top 1 percent own about 38 percent of the financial wealth of America. The bottom 60 percent own 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family, is worth over $140 billion; that’s more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. In recent years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires, while we continue to have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. Despite, as many of my Republican friends talk about ‘the oppressive Obama economic policies,’ in the last year Charles and David Koch struggled under these policies and their wealth increased by $12 billion in one year. In terms of income, 95 percent of new income generated in this country in the last year went to the top 1 percent.“

Sanders then introduced an academic study, by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, that concludes, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

That sounds like an oligarchy.

So Sanders asked Yellen: “In your judgment, given the enormous power held by the billionaire class and their political representatives, are we still a capitalist democracy or have we gone over to an oligarchic form of society in which incredible enormous economic and political power now rests with the billionaire class?”

Bernie Sanders Asks Fed Chair Whether the US Is an Oligarchy | The Nation

Fox’s Eric Bolling suggests ditching minimum wage and labor laws because China works hard

What Bolling fails to realize in espousing this view, he has shown the true colors of the Reich. The political model of the Chinese government is an oligarchy which enhances the wealth of the few (the elite, ie the Reich) while enslaving the rest of the people. He is therefore supporting a tyrannical form of government, relying on the oppression of the masses.
__

Fox News host Eric Bolling and most of his colleagues on The Five dismissed seemingly the whole idea of a balance between life and work on Tuesday, with Bolling suggesting that the U.S. look to China, and not Europe, for inspiration.

“Some of the economies that are starting to kick our butt, those people work hard,” Bolling said. “There aren’t labor laws, there aren’t minimum wages, they’re working harder than we are.”

“That’s what we should have — no labor law and no minimum wage,” co-host Bob Beckel countered. “They work for a dollar a week.”


Fox’s Eric Bolling suggests ditching minimum wage and labor laws because China works hard



Note: 

Some may argue we are already there, Bernie Sanders for example, an

,,,upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economicand political life of our country.

Or, as reported by Common Dreams, a new study not yet published gives this sober analysis,

,,,When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average Americanappear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically
non-significant impact upon public policy,,,The United States is nodemocracy, but actually an oligarchy."

Cliven Bundy, John Birch Society, And Koch Industries

Cliven Bundy, John Birch Society, And Koch Industries (via http://crooksandliars.com)

The John Birch Society is promising more uprisings like the one staged by Cliven Bundy and associated militias last weekend. They use typical paranoid rhetoric about sovereignty, the federal government, and E. Wayne Hage's decades-long court battle…

---