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Simon Johnson and James Kwak in their fabulous, and fabulously honest, "13 Bankers" note that "The basic principle behind any oligarchy is that economic power yields political power."
While this is an essential element of diagnosing America's current problem after the "Shock-Doctrine" shock of "financial crisis', it is not sufficient to fully understand that this latest "financial crisis' is merely masking a much more profound, hidden, and seminal "democracy crisis'.
Non-democratic oligarchy is merely one of the more polite names used to describe Empire --- and all the other forms of government conceived by "empire-thinking' rather than "democracy-thinking'.
Yes, in oligarchy or Empire "economic power yields political power".
Von Clauswitz famously noted that, "war is politics by other means", while Johnson and Kwak's truth surely suggests that in a non-democratic oligarchy "politics is economics by other means' --- and by the transitive property, "war is economics by other means".
Johnson and Kwak also note that in 1953 "Engine Charlie" Wilson famously claimed, "What's good for General Motors is good for America", and they go on to satirically describe the generic claim, "what's good for (fill-in the industry) is good for America" --- and note that this claim was used by the financial oligarchy (or empire) to convince Americans that "what's good for Wall Street is good for America".
Johnson and Kwak begin "13 Bankers" by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby" (which is recognized as; the greatest American novel of the 20th century, a prescient view of the coming Great Depression, and the best eulogy of the American Dream. They quote Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy, like today's Wall Streeters, "smashing things" and being careless, which comports with Fitzgerald's suggestion to Hemingway that "the rich are different than us", but the most important observation of "Gatsby" is its conclusion:
Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
[Source, eBooks@Adelaide]
But this new world, which promised so much including democracy, while already behind us when Fitzgerald wrote that it was, "somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night" is today lost to the dark fields of an Empire that rolls on under the night.
Old Ben Franklin would sadly concur, "Yes, Madam, if we can keep it from Empire but we didn't".
The real American Dream was more than money, status, and the market segmentation of car brands, which Alfred P. Sloan envisioned narrowly for GM's advantage, but which spread beyond his intended "innovation' and monetized the whole dream.
And so, as we try to do the one thing that is supposed to be impossible in America and try to go back and "write a second act', perhaps the one thing which is most important for average "democratic-thinking" and empathetic thinking Americans to do is to expose and confront this oligarchic Empire and to prevent that "economic power which yields political power" from using its "political power' to carry-out "politics by other means" on other people.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
