If you ever thought that the ones that rule in the U.S. is interested in freedom and democrazy – or peace and human rights for that matter – then think again – if they were they would have implemented such matters for long time ago in the U.S…
A plutocracy (Greek: outos, ‘wealth’ + kratos, ‘power’) or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition.
The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy.
Plutocracy is linked to the term dynastic wealth. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion since the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.
One modern, formal example of a plutocracy, according to some critics, is the City of London. The City (also called the Square Mile of ancient London, corresponding to the modern financial district) has a unique electoral system for its local administration, separate from London proper.
According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the modern day U.S. resembles a plutocracy, though with democratic forms. Former Chairman of the federal reserve, Paul Volcker, also believes the US is developing into a plutocracy.
Some modern historians, politicians, and economists argue that the U.S. was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods between the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the Great Depression.
President Theodore Roosevelt became known as the “trust-buster” for his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company.
In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, TR recounted: «…we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.»
The U.S. instituted progressive taxation in 1913, but according to Shamus Khan, in the 1970s, elites used their increasing political power to lower their taxes, and today successfully employ what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls “the income defense industry” to greatly reduce their taxes.
In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as “The Donor Class” (list of top donors) and defined the class, for the first time, as “a tiny group – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access.”
When the Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote the 2011 Vanity Fair magazine article entitled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%”, the title and content supported Stiglitz’s claim that the U.S. is increasingly ruled by the wealthiest 1%.
According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a “fusion of money and government.”
Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society.
According to Freeland: «You don’t do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else.
So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn’t go up.
And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.»
Some contemporary authors have characterized current conditions in the U.S. as oligarchic in nature. Some researchers have said the US may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy.
Oligarchy (from Greek oligarkhía); from olígos (few) and arkho (to rule or to command) is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people may be distinguished by nobility, wealth, education or corporate, religious, political, or military control.
Such states are often controlled by families who typically pass their influence from one generation to the next, but inheritance is not a necessary condition for the application of this term.
Throughout history, oligarchies have often been tyrannical, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as meaning rule by the rich, for which another term commonly used today is plutocracy.
In the early 20th century Robert Michels developed the theory that democracies, as all large organizations, have a tendency to turn into oligarchies. In his “Iron law of oligarchy” he suggests that the necessary division of labor in large organizations leads to the establishment of a ruling class mostly concerned with protecting their own power.
This was already recognized by the Athenians in the fourth century BCE: After the restoration of democracy from oligarchical coups, they used the drawing of lots for selecting government officers to counteract that tendency toward oligarchy in government.
They drew lots from large groups of adult volunteers to pick civil servants performing judicial, executive, and administrative functions. They even used lots for posts, such as judges and jurors in the political courts (nomothetai), which had the power to overrule the Assembly.
A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University), which was released in April 2014, stated that their “analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts”.
Gilens says that average citizens only get what they want if wealthy Americans and business-oriented interest groups also want it; and that when a policy favored by the majority of the American public is implemented, it is usually because the economic elites did not oppose it. Other studies have questioned the Page and Gilens study.
Gilens and Page do not characterize the U. S. as an “oligarchy” or “plutocracy” per se; however, they do apply the concept of “civil oligarchy” as used by Jeffrey A. Winters with respect to the US.
Winters has posited a comparative theory of “oligarchy” in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a “civil oligarchy” like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection.
Simon Johnson wrote that “the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent”, a structure which he delineated as being the “most advanced” in the world. Jeffrey A. Winters wrote that “oligarchy and democracy operate within a single system, and American politics is a daily display of their interplay.”
French economist Thomas Piketty states in his 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that “the risk of a drift towards oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed.”
The top 1% of the U.S. population by wealth in 2007 had a larger share of total income than at any time since 1928. In 2011, according to PolitiFact and others, the top 400 wealthiest Americans “have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.”
In a 2015 interview, former President Jimmy Carter stated that the United States is now “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” due to the Citizens United ruling which effectively removed limits on donations to political candidates.
The US has made us all live in perpetuate war even if we want it or not – all because of its permanent war economy which continuously draws resources into the military sector at the expense of the private economy, even in times of peace, and because of war profiteers who makes profits from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war.
Perpetual war, endless war, or a forever war, is a lasting state of war with no clear conditions that would lead to its conclusion. These wars are situations of ongoing tension that may escalate at any moment, similar to the Cold War. Poor military planning is one of the major reasons that a forever war can occur.
A very large defense budget may also be a factor in the transpiration of a forever war. This allows a country to fight several forever wars. As of 2018, the United States has a high military budget that is larger than their budget for World War II, allowing for inflation, which enables them to fight wars forever in Iraq and other countries.
Politically, forever wars can occur in order to keep money flowing into institutions, such as the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC). The term military-industrial complex was first used by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961.
Eisenhower warned that “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” had emerged as a hidden force in US politics and that Americans “must not fail to comprehend its grave implications”.
He warned that the United States must “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex,” that could lead to a state of perpetual war as the big armament industry will continue to profit from warfare.
This complex consists of members of Congress from districts dependent on military industries, the Department of Defense (along with the military services), and privately owned military contractors (e.g., Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman).
Eisenhower believed that the military-industrial complex tended to promote policies that might not be in the country’s best interest (such as participation in the nuclear arms race), and he feared that its growing influence, if left unchecked, could undermine American democracy.
The concept of a military-industrial complex was first suggested by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the idea that military action can be seen as a form of market-creation goes back at least as far as speeches beginning in 1930 prior to the publication of War Is a Racket in 1935.
While recognizing the boom in economic growth after the war, he reminded the people of U.S. that this was a way of profiting off warfare and that if not regulated enough it could lead to the “grave” expansion of the armaments industry.
For his warning of the thirst to profit from warfare through weapon production, Eisenhower coined the term “military industrial complex”. He said, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Although Eisenhower is credited with the phrase and many scholars regarded the phenomenon as new, elements of the domestic and international military-industrial complex predate his landmark address.
From the late 20th century, the concepts have been used to critique the U.S. Armed Forces interventions in foreign nations and the military–industrial complex, or wars with ambiguous enemies such as the War on Terror, War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.
Fifty years and some later, Americans find themselves in what seems like perpetual war. No sooner do we draw down on operations in Iraq than leaders demand an intervention in Libya or Syria or Iran.
While perpetual war constitutes perpetual losses for families, and ever expanding budgets, it also represents perpetual profits for a new and larger complex of business and government interests.
A war economy or wartime economy is the set of contingencies undertaken by a modern state to mobilize its economy for war production. In short it is a system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain the violence.
War is often used as a last ditch effort to prevent deteriorating economic conditions or currency crises, particularly by expanding services and employment in the military, and by simultaneously depopulating segments of the population to free up resources and restore the economic and social order.
During the century and more of the development of modern capitalism, since the first industrial crisis of 1825, the capitalist sought his profit in the marketplace through the production of consumer goods and services.
Some capitalists, of course, made a profit through the production of means of production (fixed capital) but such machinery was intended for the use of other capitalists who, in turn, would employ the machines to produce consumer commodities more profitably than could otherwise be done.
This was the typical modus operandi of capitalism up to and into the period of its decline, except in wartime, until the beginning of the Permanent War Economy. It governed all phases of the business cycle.
A war economy exists whenever the government’s expenditures for war (or ‘national defense’) become a legitimate and significant end-purpose of economic activity. The dominant characteristic of the Permanent War Economy is that war output becomes a legitimate end-purpose of economic activity.
The Permanent War Economy of the United States has endured since the end of World War II in 1945. The New Deal did not end the Depression; World War II did, and the memory of that fact has had a profound effect on postwar politics.
The U.S. has been involved in numerous military endeavours within the Middle East and Latin America since the 1960s and have been in a continuous state of war since the September 11 Attacks.
Since then the U.S. has been at war–somewhere–every year, in Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan–all this to the accompaniment of shorter military forays in Africa, Chile, Grenada, Panama.
Critics of the enormous military establishment have pointed out the evil things it can cause (Asian war, nuclear annihilation) and the noble things it prevents from doing (housing for the poor, etc.), but the critics have not managed to shake the unspoken public belief that large‐scale, even profligate military spending is a cornerstone of American prosperity.
Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, every major aspect of American life is being shaped by our Permanent War Economy. Civilian manufacturing industries are being swept away as a war-focused White House and a compliant Congress sponsor deindustrialization of the U.S.
As production of both consumer goods and capital goods is moved out of the U.S., unions and whole communities are decimated. Ghost towns are created across the country at the samt time as shortages of housing have caused a swelling of the homeless population in every major city.
State and city governments across the country have become trained to bend to the needs of the military–giving automatic approvals to its spending without limit. The same officials cannot find money for affordable housing.
There is no public “space” for dialogue on how to improve the quality of the living standard. Such topics are subordinate to “how to make war”. Congress under both Republican and Democratic control has voted the same war priorities into the federal budget.
Military forces have been funded overwhelmingly by national governments, which historically have been the target of lobbying efforts by bureaucrats in military-related ministries, by legislators from districts containing military bases or major military manufacturing plants, and by representatives of private firms involved in the production of weapons and munitions.
Because the goals and interests of these various actors broadly coincide, they tend to support each other’s activities and to form mutually beneficial relationships—what some critics have called an “iron triangle” between government officials, legislators, and military-industrial firms.
For example, legislators who receive campaign contributions from military firms may vote to award funding to projects in which the firms are involved, and military firms may hire former defense-ministry officials as lobbyists.
While few politicians are willing to admit it, we don’t just endure wars we seem to need war – at least for some people. A study showed that roughly 75 percent of the fallen in these wars come from working class families. They do not need war. They pay the cost of the war.
Eisenhower would likely be appalled by the size of the industrial and governmental workforce committed to war or counter-terrorism activities. Military and homeland budgets now support millions of people in an otherwise declining economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow each year from the public coffers to agencies and contractors who have an incentive to keep the country on a war-footing – and footing the bill for war.
Across the country, the war-based economy can be seen in an industry which includes everything from Homeland Security educational degrees to counter-terrorism consultants to private-run preferred traveller programmes for airport security gates.
Recently, the “black budget” of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn for 2013. That is only the secret programmes, not the much larger intelligence and counterintelligence budgets.
There are 16 spy agencies that employ 107,035 employees. This is separate from the over one million people employed by the military and national security law enforcement agencies. The core of this expanding complex is an axis of influence of corporations, lobbyists, and agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry.
The economic war-dependence is matched by political war-dependence. Many members represent districts with contractors that supply homeland security needs and on-going wars.
Even with polls showing that the majority of Americans are opposed to continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new military-industrial complex continues to easily muster the necessary support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
It is a testament to the influence of this alliance that hundreds of billions are being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq while Congress is planning to cut billions from core social programmes, including a rollback on Medicare due to lack of money. None of that matters.
The military budget is the portion of the discretionary United States federal budget allocated to the Department of Defense, or more broadly, the portion of the budget that goes to any military-related expenditures.
The United States spends more on their defense budget than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined. The 2018 U.S. military budget accounts for approximately 36% of global arms spending (for comparison, U.S. GDP is only 24% of global GDP).
The US also maintains the largest number of military bases on foreign soil across the world. While there are no freestanding foreign bases permanently located in the United States, there are now around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries.
Military spending makes up nearly 16% of entire federal spending and approximately half of discretionary spending. In a general sense discretionary spending (defense and non-defense spending) makes up one-third of the annual federal budget.
For 2019 the Department of Defense’ budget authority is approximately $693,058,000,000. Approximately $684,985,000,000 is discretionary, approximately $8,081,000,000 is mandatory. The Department of Defense estimates that $652,225,000,000 will actually be spent (outlays).
Beside death and destruction, mental illness and suffering, military activity has significant impacts on the environment. Indeed, the US military is also considered to be the number one fossil fuel consumer and one of the largest generators of pollution in the world.
Not only can war be destructive to the socioenvironment, but military activities produce extensive amounts of greenhouse gases (that contribute to anthropogenic climate change), pollution, and cause resource depletion, among other environmental impacts.
Military pollution is a worldwide occurrence. Armed forces from around the world were responsible for the emission of two thirds of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were banned in the 1987 Montreal Protocol for causing damage to the ozone layer.
It is what Eisenhower described as the “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex – power that makes public opposition and even thousands of dead soldiers immaterial. War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others in a war-dependent economy.