The Reason Why The Power Elite Want One Party Republican Rule

[Yavin4]

I have always thought that the power elite always wanted a split government between two parties if only to keep up the illusion of political choice. So, going all the way back to 2000, why has the power elite insisted on one party rule? Why have they risked a backlash from the public by shutting one party completely out of power? Why have they propped up such an obvious dolt to be the party's national leader? Why have they purposely put extremist judges on the federal bench? Why?

The answer is in one word: pensions

Corporate America is trying to shed ALL of its pension liabilities over the next decade, and they need a completely loyal political party (Republicans) and an extreme business-friendly judiciary to do this. They want out from under their pension contracts. The Democrats cannot be trusted to do this kind of dirty work. There are still too many Democrats who have strong ties to labor for them to go ahead with killing off the pensions.

I know what you're thinking. If people lose their pensions, won't they start demanding answers from their politicians? That's where the propaganda comes in. They'll pit old workers against young workers. They'll cry about jobs being lost because of pension liabilities, etc. Besides, what good can a backlash do when you control all of the levers of the government?

[blm]

1. I agree. It's all about the fascism, and the media is leading the way

down that path. Just as intended.

[FreedomAngel82]

4. Yep

The GOP does the work for the corporations and is always in their favor and makes them rich. In return they support keeping them in power for that reason. It's all about being filthy rich.

[Yollam]

2. Yes and no.

The motivations you describe are there, but calling them "the power elite" gives a mistaken impression of a bunch of sinister fat cats meeting secretly in boardrooms. The reality is that it's upper and middle-class investors who set the agenda for our corporations, we're talking about millions of people, many of them ostensibly "democrats", not a shadowy elite.

Until the law requires corporations to act in an ethical manner, or strips them of their personhood, this will continue to be the case. The entire investor class is responsible for this, and to a lesser degree, so is the American consumer who participates in the race to the bottom and puts this pressure to lower costs on corporations by shopping for mass-quantity junk at Wal-Mart, rather than choosing high-quality, union-label, made in USA products from local stores.

[Yavin4]

5. Um, No, They Don't

upper and middle-class investors who set the agenda for our corporations,

The avg investors is nothing but a gnat on the ass of these corporations. It's the people that sit on the Board of Directors. It's the people who own a majority of the corporate debt. It's the families that have the controlling shares of the corporations that set the agenda, not the insignificant investor who watches CNBC and owns a few hundred shares here and there.

[Yollam]

7. Really?

None of them have ANY say in choosing the board? None of them have any choice about which companies to invest with? "The insignificant investor who watches CNBC" own a lot of stock when you put them all together. Isn't that a bit of a cop-out?

[Yavin4]

8. Individual Stock Holders Are Bottom Feeders

They are insignificant to the power elites.

[orwell]

9. Of course they have a say...

...but it is, in effect, highly diluted.

Power tends to concentrate because it is far easier for a small group of powerful investors to achieve consensus over an even larger group of disparate interests.

Let's say for example that 10 investors control 30% of the stock of a corporation. Let us also assume that 200 investors own varying proportions of the other 70%. It is far easier to reach consensus among 10 than 200. This is always how power effectively concentrates.

Parenthetically, this is also what is behind the move toward the "unitary executive" in the recent blathering propaganda by the RW over the President's unique authority during times of war. It is inconvenient for elite moneyed interests to have to buy a majority of Congress. There are too many uncertainties to control. It is far easier to concentrate power in the executive branch and rule by cabal.

It is the same in the boardroom. Unless there is a catastrophic event, the majority of shareholders check the box to back the board’s recommendations. Enron is a case in point. I have been a shareholder/stock market trader analyst for over 20 years and I can assure you this is true. In far too many cases, the corporate boards are a self-serving, self-rewarding fiefdom whose main interest is to fill their pockets with cash. Recent management compensation studies clearly show this alarming trend. There is also a longstanding effort to hide this extraordinary level of compensation from being clearly spelled out in the financial reports. So the shareholders frequently don't even know what the CEO and top executives are making. The Jack Welch fiasco is a case in point.

The problem is structural. The fact of the matter is that power always concentrates unless it is carefully and deliberately regulated. The unregulated market does not descend into social darwinism, but rather economic slavery.

This is not to say I agree with Yavin's theory, but I'm sure the coming pension tsunamis are part and parcel of the desire for the moneyed elites to consolodate power. The larger picture is that they are grabbing power because they can. In other words, the proof of my assertions on the natural proclivity for power to concentrate and enslave, is right in front of your eyes.

[Cleita]

3. That's a good point.

I think people should concentrate on pension plans that they can move from job to job. My husband invested in an IRA, since his company, a small one, didn't offer pensions. It came out of our salaries, but we did get the tax break on it, which gave us an incentive to save. When we retired we had enough to have a supplemental income to our SS and none of the younger workers could whine about it. They do whine about SS though.

[raccoon]

6. You may have something there. It certainly makes sense. nt

[MsAnthropy]

10. And they're not even shy about admitting it now

Good riddance to pensions
Corporate pensions are an unstable, unfair and economically perverse means of paying for retirement.
By Justin Fox, FORTUNE editor-at-large
January 12, 2006: 5:56 AM EST



NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - It really is over for the corporate pension. Now that IBM has opted out, telling employees last week that their pension benefits will be frozen in 2008, it's hard to see what's to stop every last American corporation from preparing its eventual exit from the pension business. Lots of reasonably healthy companies -- Verizon, NCR, Lockheed Martin and Motorola, to name a few -- already have.

This phenomenon, along with the more dramatic cases of companies going bankrupt and defaulting on existing pension commitments (think United Airlines), has gotten tons of press, most of it of the "ain't it a shame" variety. But the real shame may be that we ever put so much faith in such an inherently unstable, unfair and economically perverse means of providing for retirement.

The corporate pension has been around since the 19th century, but really came into its own in the United States in the years just after World War II. General Motors president Charles Wilson was its most visible champion, creating a company-run pension plan in 1950 over the initial objections of the United Auto Workers union because he believed it would improve employee relations.

But there were problems with Wilson's approach that, while they didn't seem like a big deal in 1950, were to loom large decades later. For one thing, the Wilson way assumed that lifetime jobs with big, pension-granting corporations were the American norm -- which ceased to be the case decades ago.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/12/news/economy/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes