Would this be the same Michael Ignatieff that was an advisor to George
Bush senior???
On 11/14/2010 7:13 AM, Ed Weick wrote:
Odd glimpses, like the item from the NYTimes I posted yesterday on
members of the Republican Party vying for big donations to help them
get elected make you wonder where our democracy is going.
I have a couple of books, one I'm reading and the other I've read,
that argue that it already has gone.The book I'm reading is Chris
Hedges' "Death of the Liberal Class".As usual, Hedges swamps you with
information and gets some things wrong.For example, we find the
Michael Ignatieff is leader of the Canada's Labor Party. Hmmm...
As far as I've read, Hedges quite strongly makes the point that the
political forces that made a strong case for the little man, for the
working class and unionization, and for widespread participatory
democracy in the US, are gone.The liberal class has been co-opted by
the wealthy and powerful who really don't care what state the US is in
as long as their power and wealth grows.So we still have people like
Obama who say nice things intended to make people compliant and happy,
but who can no longer do those nice things.And it gets worse.Big
business has intruded itself into a lot of things government
does.Hedges argues that a large part of the US military procedure in
Afghanistan or other theatres of hostility or war is carried out by
private companies that need and therefore promote continuous large
military and security expenditures to grow their wealth.Hence the
lobbyists; hence the Dick Cheneys and Halliburtons.
In reading Hedges, you soon find that you are reading an argument and
not a conclusion that is found after posing a question and undertaking
careful research.Another book I've been reading recently tends to do
the latter.It's "Winner-Take-All Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul
Pierson, two political scientists. Hacker and Pierson examine the
period from the 1970s to the present and find a very large shift
wealth from the bottom and middle classes of American society to the
uppermost classes.While all classes gained some income between 1979
and 2006, the incomes of the top one percent of all recipients
increased by 256%!By 2007, the richest one percent received some 23%
of all of the income earned or accruing to Americans.
Along with this upward redistribution, the power of unions diminished,
unemployment rose and the political clout of the middle class faded away.
We Canadians like to look upon our neighbors to the south with a
little disdain.Hey, we're not like that, we tell ourselves.Well,
perhaps we are, at least a little.Hacker and Pierson have a chart that
shows that Canada's top income recipients were not very far behind
their US counterparts between 1973 and 2000.During that period, the
share of income held by the US top one percent rose from about 7% to
about 16%, whereas in Canada it rose from over 8% to over 12%.
So, what's all this mean?There's a lot of verbiage out there about the
US declining economically while the BRICs, especially China, are
rising. Historically and even today, America is considered the world's
principal democracy, "the shining city on the hill".China is not a
democracy.It's an outstanding example of state capitalism in which the
state counts, not the citizen.Does it matter that democracy is
sinking, that the common man's power is fading?Well, to ever so many
people who have lost jobs, who cannot pay their bills, and who cannot
save for retirement, it matters a great deal. It also matters to the
idealist who believes in the shining city. But to the few, the top one
percent or so, it really can't matter very much.The economy, whether
national or global, is moving in their direction.And, like Obama, they
can say the right things without really meaning what they say.
Ed
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