“In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.” – Aristotle

Not a Democracy

Aristotle’s words should ring true throughout time. Unfortunately, that simple concept has been perverted beyond recognition.

Before we begin, here, have this cookie. It is warm and full of chocolate chips. You’ll like it.

Howard Zinn, Enemy to the Plutocracy, Hero to the People

If you haven’t read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, you do not know the history of the United States. It is an exhaustive narrative of the story of America told from the viewpoint of the common people of the nation. It is a gritty tale of the systematic establishment of a ruling ultra rich class that has manipulated the body politic and used the very means of democracy to ensure that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Zinn passed away earlier this year, but his words will echo through eternity. Recently his close friend and peer, Bill Moyers of PBS, addressed Boston University as part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series and laid his claim at immortality with a stirring remembrance and frightening reality check for the future of America.

Moyers Carries on the Legacy

In his speech Moyers rails against the concept of Plutocracy – that in simplistic terms the rich control the government and ensure that the people of the country work to their own benefits via takeover of legislative and executive power. Anyone paying attention to this mid-term election knows that we are living in a plutocracy. Although it is nothing new, as Howard Zinn poetically and brutally described in his greatest works, the separation between the ultra rich and the rest of the nation is now at an all time high, and is only increasing. And that is the recipe for disaster and national collapse. History is the greatest evidence of this fact, yet the destruction of the middle class continues unabated and is enhanced with every passing year.

AlterNet.org has the full transcript of the prepared remarks at their site and they are worth reading in their entirety. To quote some of the finer aspects of the lecture:

You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from reading history. Ultimately gross inequality can be fatal to civilization. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment is one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forest disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare further exhausted dwindling resources. Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, they became casualties of their own privilege. Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions, separated from the common life of the country.

The Gilded Age of the late 1800′s was bereft with corruption and disregard for the working class to the benefit of the ultra rich. Not much has changed. Only the details and a dash of modern equivalency have altered. Again, Moyers lays this out:

The Gilded Age returned with a vengeance in our time. . It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a “massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich.” As Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10 percent captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush – those huge tax cuts for the rich, remember, which are now about to be extended because both parties have been bought off by the wealthy — and by 2007 the wealthiest 10% of Americans were taking in 50% of the national income. Today, a fraction of people at the top today earn more than the bottom 120 million Americans.

Let that settle for just a bit.

Money Kills Democracy

The old adage, ‘The two most important things in politics are money, and I forget the second one’, has never been more apt. The Citizens United case solidified the future of election buying, and the worst is yet to come. There is no election ‘cycle’ anymore, just a round the clock campaign to mollify the masses and make them believe the lies of corporate America so that they vote based on their ignorance and prejudices. The single most terrifying concept to the ruling class is truth, and they have now managed to change the mere definition of the word.

Bill Moyers and the legacy of Howard Zinn are the bright lights in the wilderness. But the darkness is engulfing their life efforts. It is only a matter of time before the inequities of the American economic system lead to our destruction as a functioning society. As more and more of the nations’ wealth is consolidated by the extreme upper class, as more and more of middle and low paying jobs are shipped overseas and these actions are protected by our government, poverty will continue to rise and what was once a cutting edge society capable of such great accomplishments will continue on ever into the abyss.

In the coming years, as Republicans continue their obstructionism in favor of the corporate elite at the expense of the common citizenry, will the ‘grassroots’ proponents of the Tea Party come to terms with the reality that what they have helped usher in is more of the same economic and class warfare they claimed to be fighting against? Will it be too late?

President Reagan famously claimed in the early 1980s that it was ‘morning in America’. We’ve seen what the day has turned out to be, and the night is now falling. And for a greater majority of Americans than ever before, nightmares await.

Have You Finished the Cookie?

By the time you are done, you’ll feel right as rain. You’ll forget what you have read above. You’ll remember that reality has no basis in this world, and you can go back to Farmville. You can do the dishes. You can get ready to watch Glee. It is what they want you to do. That was a good cookie.