Wednesday, December 10, 2025
1978 Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel
1981 El Salvador army killed 900
1984 South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu was presented with his Nobel Peace Prize
1994 Nobel Peace Prize was presented to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat
In bed at 9, awake at 5:25, up at 6. I lay in bed with bait bucket thoughts, among them wondering whether I will survive this winter. 30°, w/c 8°, temps falling to an overnight low of 13°. Rain, sleet, snow.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 7:40 a.m.
The disappearance of America's Imagine Democracy. There are a lot of mysteries in my life. like those about my parents' relationship before, during, and after his conscription into the Marine Corps in 1944. Another less significant one is how I was designated to represent my freshman class in Leo High School's annual oratory competition in 1955 or 1956. I was chosen for this honor by my homeroom teacher, Mr. Bly. I didn't volunteer for it and didn't want it. I didn't compete for it, for there was no competition. However it happened, I was picked out of a class of 30 or 40 14-year-old boys to stand on an auditorium stage before the entire student body and deliver a memorized speech. I chose Lincoln's Gettysburg Address because it was so short, 271 words, 10 sentences in 3 paragraphs. On the day of the competition, I stood up in front of every other student in the school and every faculty member, with my wildly palpitating heart and my mouth as dry as the Gobi Desert, and repeated the speech, all of it that is, except for the middle sentences of the speech, which I forgot. I don't remember now how many sentences I skipped, but it was more than two, and I was duly mortified. But this is a discursion: what I want to focus on is the concluding sentence of Lincoln's great speech.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Have these words not become one of the "grand narratives" that now are seen as ridiculous, 'happy horseshit' used to disguise the real power dynamics of American government? Even at the time of Lincoln's speech, women couldn't vote, and of course, the millions of enslaved Black people couldn't vote. Many free Blacks could not vote. Some states had rule limiting the right to vote to property holders or taxpayers. More broadly, however, the right of 'the people' to vote means the right to select from among those who appear on a ballot, and the crucial issue is what rule or forces determine who appears on our ballots. I don't know the answer to that question in 1863, but we know the answer in 2025, and for many decades before now. The answer is who has the money or can attract the money it takes to run a political campaign. In our era of primary elections, it means who has or can attract the money to win a party primary. No money = no ballot access.
Fifty years ago, Gore Vidal has an essay in The Nation, "State of the Union," in which he wrote: “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party…and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.” Noam Chomsky has accurately argued:
There’s ample evidence that most of the population, at the lower end of the income spectrum, is effectively disenfranchised – their representatives pay no attention to their opinions. Moving up the income ladder, influence increases slowly, but it’s only at the very top that it has real impact. Plutocracy masquerading as formal democracy.” Noam Chomsky: America is a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy' by Sincere T. Kirabo, SINCERE T. KIRABO in Salon, October 6, 2015.
Here is a part of Wikipedia's entry under "Plutocracy:"
In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests. According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."
Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society:
You don't do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.
In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as "The Donor Class" (list of top (political party) donors)and defined the class, for the first time,as "a tiny group – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access."
When the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote the 2011 Vanity Fair magazine article entitled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", the title and content supported Stiglitz's claim that the U.S. is increasingly ruled by the wealthiest 1%. Some researchers have said the U.S. may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy. In the U.S. Congress itself, more than half of all members are millionaires.
A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, which was released in April 2014, stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts". Gilens and Page do not characterize the U.S. as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters with respect to the U.S.
The investor, billionaire, and philanthropist Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world, voiced in 2005 and once more in 2006 his view that his class, the "rich class", is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005, Buffet said to CNN: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." In a November 2006 interview in The New York Times, Buffett stated that "[t]here's class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
So it has long been in the United States. Many of the Founding Fathers were wealthy men, including the most dominant Southerners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Some were'self-made' prosperous men, like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, but money was always to ticket to power. I suspect it is as bad now as it's ever been, and perhaps worse, though I don't know how to compare today's economic and political world with the era of Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Fricks. In any event, I refuse to fool myself by thinking of America as a real democracy rather than as an oligarchic plutocracy. I endorse Emma Goldman's supposed saying that "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." It's a variation on an old theme, witness the remark attributed to Mark Twain: "If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” Joseph Stieglitz titled his 2011 Vanity Fair article "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%." I could substitute "capitalists" for "the 1%", and add H. L. Mencken's thought: "Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both."
We are foolish to think that the government works for us. Trump and his cronies are the culmination of a long history of the government working for the benefit of the wealthy few over the many. The Roberts' Supreme Court has hastened the process with decisions like
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), which allowed corporations and billionaires to spend unlimited money on political advertising and led directly to the explosion of Super PACs and outside spending, and
McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), which struck down aggregate limits on how much one person can give to federal candidates and parties so that mega-donors can now give millions of dollars per election cycle, and
Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (2021), which struck down California’s donor-disclosure requirement for major nonprofits, thereby increasing donor anonymity, benefiting wealthy political spenders.
and many others, not the least of which was Trump v. United States, creating out of whole cloth presidential immunity for crimes committed while in office.
I started thinking about this stuff the other day when I saw a headline about Jared Kushner being a principal participant in the Russia/Ukraine peace negotiations, as he was in the negotiations leading to to Abraham Accords, along with stories about America's newly-issued National Security Strategy. The latter document makes clear the administration's main goal is wealth-creation, the rich getting richer. It expresses what has long been known to be true, though it was never expressly endorsed by our government, that great powers, i.e., the U.S., Russia, and China, have 'zones of interest' where they act as hegemons, and it revives the Monroe Doctrine, i.e., that the entire Western Hemisphere is America's zone of interest. To my eyes, the document essentially throws Ukraine, Europe, the EU, and NATO under the bus, in deference to better economic relations with Russia. How fitting it seems for Jared Kushner, international money manager and deal maker, and son-in-law of the American president, should be right in the middle of the negotiations over the future of Ukraine and Europe. Whose interests come first for Mr. Kushner? Whose interests come first for his father-in-law? $$$$$$$
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