The Gadfly did not need an Ivy League commissioned "study" to tell him this:
The news: A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn't a democracy any more. And they've found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.
An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military.
For their study, Gilens and Page compiled data from roughly 1,800 different policy initiatives in the years between 1981 and 2002. They then compared those policy changes with the expressed opinion of the United State public. Comparing the preferences of the average American at the 50th percentile of income to what those Americans at the 90th percentile preferred, as well as the opinions of major lobbying or business groups, the researchers found out that the government followed the directives set forth by the latter two much more often.
It's beyond alarming. As Gilens and Page write, "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." In other words, their statistics say your opinion literally does not matter.http://www.policymic.com/articles/87719/princeton-concludes-what-kind-of-government-america-really-has-and-it-s-not-a-democracy
This shit all started under Saint Ronald Reagan who promised us with that phony, aww shucks!, Hollywood actor smile and sales pitch that America could only be saved if we just kept giving more and more and ever more to the wealthy while taking more and more and ever more from society's most disadvantaged and middle class.
We were promised that if we only let the multi-national corporations and the big utility and fossil fuel companies to regulate themselves that it would foster more competition and create more and better paying jobs and therefore a more equitable economy.
We were promised that as long as we kept shoving our military-industrial-complex noses in to all of these regional civil wars and foreign affairs of other countries around the world, that America would be saved from imminent, invading hordes of whatever brown-skinned people we were being told to be pants-wetting scared of at the given time.
We were promised that if we just let the Wall Street gamblers gamble with "their" money the way they want to, the wealth which they were sure to create would trickle down to all of us peasants.
Of course every single one of those promises was demonstrable bullshit, and many of us dirty fucking hippies have tried to warn Americans not to buy into the lies over the years, but it's beginning to look like it is too late for regrets, if any even exist, now.
One of the other promises they were making, which fortunately there existed barely enough politicians who still possess anything resembling a conscience, fought and blocked, was handing over the keys to the Social Security lockbox to the likes of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, JP Morgan and the rest of that Pirate crew on Wall Street.
The Gadfly does not exaggerate that if those fuckers ever get their grubby hands on Social Security, it is game over for the "American way of Life." We will all be relegated to the status of wholly owned, indentured chattel to the oligarchs at that point.
And all of that majestic talk in The Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal, and unalienable rights and the pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness -- will be come long forgotten words in a long forgotten document - a document that will be nothing more than a long forgotten relic of the history of a country that once had promise, but through stupidity, greed and selfishness, allowed itself to be fooled in to giving up everything good and noble about it's self for the impotent and hollow promises issued from the stale, cold lips of those whose ruthless pursuit of power and profit stood in clear contrast to the benevolent aspirations of a country and it's people -- a country and people who supposedly possessed exceptional, merciful and divine qualities.
----TFG
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