Reply #13: Why the heck wouldn't it be? [View All]

[dpibel]

It was founded as a plutocracy, so it shouldn't be too surprising if it still is one.

That great document of democracy, the Constitution? Check it out some time. Slavery; votes by white, landed males only; electoral college; no election of senators. All that stuff.

The part we learn about, and are told is the meat of it, is the Bill of Rights, tacked on in order to keep the rabble in the game.

Note that the body of the Constitution is devoted to a nice, slow moving, easily deadlocked government under the control of the wise, wealthy and white.

The Bill of Rights is not about the power of the rabble; it's a flimsy (as we recently see more and more) bit of protecting the rabble from the unchecked power of the plutocrats.

Granted, there was about 50 years of actual progress toward something resembling the dreamy democracy we all learned about in school. And a big chunk of that was because, in the '30s, the plutocrats got the shit scared out of them because the rabble started to rumble and there was some credible talk of a revolution. The flower of the labor movement, from the 30s-50s was bracketed by female sufferage (in this, the world's greatest democracy, it only took 150 years to decide chicks could vote (term as used by the founding fathers, or the then equivalent)) and by the Civil Rights movement.

All of which worried the plutocrats right fierce, because you can't have the people starting to understand the meaning of things like the power of mass movements, and things like that.

So the plutocrats have been working very hard for 25 years, to undo all of the progress of the 75 years before that.

Which is a verrrrrry long way of saying:

Of course it's a plutocracy. We tried to change it, but we lost.

So far.