All of you have seen and heard endless reports and news about the current financial crisis. Most of it lately has been about the relatively insignificant but maddening AIG bonuses. But—do you really know what is going on? Do you have any real idea just how huge this problem is, and how it is going to affect you personally and permanently in the near future? Believe me, this crisis is a game changer the likes of which this country has never EVER seen. And boy oh boy are you (and me) gonna pay.

Well, now that I’ve just told you you’re in for the ass-phucking of a lifetime, you might decide you want to learn what has really happened. I have the fix: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine is one of the best journalists in the country, and he has researched, written, and explained the issue incredibly well, and in an easy to understand way. I HIGHLY recommend reading this article. It makes this whole crisis very easy to understand, even for us non-finance-degreed rubes.

The above article and discussion is a primer for today’s main entre–my assertion that the US is, for all practical purposes, no longer a representative democracy. With this latest financial crisis, the gov’t and those on Wall St. who’ve perpetrated the raping of the US Treasury appear to be in the final stages of implementing what can be called nothing less than a permanent political/corporate Oligarchy. In other words–Extreme gov’t control of virtually every significant financial lever of the economy, brought to you by vast campaign contributions and highly paid lobbying efforts of the financial and monied elite who’ve destroyed the existing system and extracted vast amounts of ill-gotten wealth from it.

Sound crazy you say? Let’s look at some definitions of those terms and see how things happening today as reported by top experts (see Update 2) fit into the formula.

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Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family, military influence or religious hegemony. The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for “few” (ὀλίγος olígos) and “rule” (ἀρχή arkhē). Such states are often controlled by politically powerful families whose children are heavily conditioned and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy. Fact|date=February 2009}} Oligarchies have been tyrannical throughout history, being completely reliant on public servitude to exist. Although Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group. Some city-states from Ancient Greece were oligarchies.

The concept of an “oligarchic democracy” is one which some scholars attribute to Ancient Rome and the United States. Marxist Ellen Meiksins Wood writes, that it “conveys a truth about U.S. politics every bit as telling as its application to ancient Rome. It is no accident that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. Republic looked to Roman models for inspiration in making the Federalist case, adopting Roman names as pseudonyms and conceiving of themselves as latterday Catos, forming a natural aristocracy of republican virtue. (Americans today still have a representative body called the Senate, and their republic is still watched over by the Roman eagle, albeit in its American form.) Faced with the distasteful specter of democracy, they sought ways to redefine that unpalatable concept to accommodate aristocratic rule, producing a hybrid, “representative democracy,” which was clearly meant to achieve an effect similar to the ancient Roman idea of the “mixed constitution,” in fact, an “oligarchic ‘democracy.”‘[1] However, the constitution and state laws have since been modified, with the removal of the original property requirements for voting, as well as giving the vote to women and blacks.[2]

A number of critics argue that the United States political system is, itself, an oligarchic structure. Third party candidates stand little chance of election to national office, due to the enormous monetary capital needed to purchase advertising time and to make other key connections in order to gain sufficient attention from the electorate. Since large donors fuel national political races, expecting due compensation in return for funding the winners’ campaigns, it is difficult to distinguish between the current situation and societies most commonly recognized as oligarchies. It is, many feel, a return to aristocratic rule, in which the common people have little control over their political fate; feelings of being “sold out” frequently lead to apathy, now recognized as the most common problem in American politics.

Some authors, such as Zulma Riley, Keith Riley, Mathew Marquess, and Robert Michels, believe that any political system eventually evolves into an oligarchy. This theory is called the “iron law of oligarchy”. According to this school of thought, modern democracies should be considered as elected oligarchies. In these systems, actual differences between viable political rivals are small, the oligarchic elite impose strict limits on what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ and ‘respectable’ political position, and politicians’ careers depend heavily on unelected economic and media elites.

source article here

Any of this sound familiar? The real question is: What should be done about it? What do you think?

Update:

I SO shouldn’t do this, because the Rolling Stone article is an absolute must read, but if you want a highly condensed version of that article, Mark Fiore has an excellent video cartoon that boils it down to its barest elements, plus he always uses great cartooning and sound effects. It’s called: “Leverage Me Tender”

Update 2:

If you have the stomach for it, here is what the former Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and current MIT professor Simon Johnson is saying about this crisis:

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise. . . .

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” . . . The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large. . . .

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). . . .But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

One thing is for certain: you will NOT see Simon Johnson being interviewed and talking this way on ANY mainstream media program. Not in a million years. To acknowledge the truth about what is being done to our economy and to YOU, the wayward serf of the monied elite, is simply not permitted. However, we sure as HELL are going to have endless hours and hours and hours and hours of coverage of OctoMom, the Caylee Anthony case, and the latest American Idol guffaws. In the words of Sarah “It’s the media’s fault we lost” Palin, “You Betcha!”