Posted: October 21, 2015 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Economics, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Animation, Bernie Sanders, Class War, Democratic Party, IRS, Karl Marx, Marxism, Monarchy, Oligarchy, One Party Rule, propaganda, Redistribution, Socialism |
Posted: September 18, 2014 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Economics, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Coercion, corruption, Criminal Organization, Crony capitalism, Lobbying, Oligarchy, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Socialism, Taxation, Theft, Thomas Frank |
Posted: July 3, 2014 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Economics, Think Tank, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Business, Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin, Obama, Obama administration, Oligarchy, President, Wall Street |
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Thanks to their cozy relationship with the Obama administration, a new class of super-wealthy oligarchs keeps getting more powerful while the country’s middle class shrinks.
For The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin writes: When our current President was elected, many progressives saw the dawning of a new epoch, a more egalitarian and more just Age of Obama. Instead we have witnessed the emergence of the Age of Oligarchy. The outlines of this new epoch are clear in numerous ways. There is the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership
On a cultural level, there is a general malaise about the prospect for upward mobility for future generations.Not everyone is suffering in this new age. For the entitled few, these have been the best of times. With ever more concentration of key industries, ever greater advantage of capital over labor, and soaring real estate values in swanky places such as Manhattan or San Francisco which , as one journalists put it, constitute “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.” The top hundred firms on the Fortune 500 list has revenues, in adjusted dollars, eight times those during the supposed big-business heyday of the 1960s.
This shift towards oligarchy well precedes President Obama’s tenure. It was born from a confluence of forces: globalization, the financialization of the economy, and the shift towards digital technology. Obama is not entirely to blame, it is more than a bit ironic that these measurements have worsened under an Administration that has proclaimed income inequality abhorrent.
Despite this administration’s occasional rhetorical flourishes against oligarchy, we have seen a rapid concentration of wealth and depressed conditions for the middle class under Obama. The stimulus, with its emphasis on public sector jobs, did little for Main Street. And under the banner of environmentalism, green cronyism has helped fatten the bank accounts of investment bankers and tech moguls at great public expense.
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