In the US the term “informed electorate” is a joke. Big elections are advertising competitions. Or in the most recent case voting machine hacking.
THIS ARTICLE IS FROM 2015 A DECADE AGO IT HAS ONLY GOTTEN WORSE SINCE THEN
Whenever I see the 1% or 99% numbers when discussing wealth inequality, this fact is the first thing that comes to mind. We need to use decimal points to get to the real ones in power. 1% contains a lot of people who have money, but are still out of the loop as the rest of us, or as Carlin said, “not in the Club”. They are millionaires, but like they say, the difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.
And that’s US - many Americans are in the 1% in worldwide numbers, with rough income numbers being around half a million income. Again, they may or may not be comfortable depending on their expenses, but having money doesn’t mean you have power. It’s the .1 that is the beginning of that, and the .01 is moving the pieces for everyone.
(The numbers are just estimates, there’s gray areas everywhere, the point is the top people want us to be yelling at the top middle and ignore what they do.)
“mainly selfmade wealth”
That doesn’t exist, let’s stop fucking pretending it does.
They mean as opposed to inherited, not in the way you mean it.
What they really mean is that they didn’t inherit their immense wealth, which means there was a time in their lives when they weren’t obscenely wealthy.
they didn’t inherit their immense wealth
Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.
What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.
I get what they’re getting at, but selfmade has that connotation with it.
They could say not inherited vs inherited wealth
Not inherited is also wrong. Because more than 50% of americans live paycheck to paycheck, one can assume that private schools, elite universities, etc are also inherited wealth.
They dont spawn with billions but they started at the top and just built exploitation empires.
The is no such thing as self made wealth and an insane majprity of it is already being very comfortable and just going full bore.
I’m not saying financial success has nothing to do with capabilities and discipline but surprisingly little.
Or to quote jay gould, who said it before:
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
An oligarchy is what America has been for over a decade now officially. Every politician is bought and sold, told to vote on every bill by the companies lobbyists that line their pockets. Every vote is controlled by mass propaganda on every network and every corporate social media.
But we’re a democracy, right?
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Citizens United was the final straw in the downfall of America democracy.
It’s been inevitable since.
Unless it’s overturned it’s over, and I don’t think they can overturn it.
Citizens United
Corporations have been ‘people’ since the 1886 USSC decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
Yet somehow, unlike most people, they’ve escaped having to go to jail when they commit crimes. I’d call that an unfair advantage.
I’ll believe a corporation is a “person” when Texas (or Alabama, Florida, South Carolina etc) executes one of them
