American oligarchy: The fight for democracy is just the first step

Historians have been having a field day setting the records straight, thanks to the likes of Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley. Most recently, at a Berlin, New Hampshire town hall, Nikki Haley’s holiday-season gaffe or more accurately her attempt at whitewashing slavery when asked by an audience member about the origins of the Civil War, is a case in point. Not wanting to offend the white racist base of the GOP, the former governor of South Carolina, while omitting slavery as part of her answer, had this to say about the first state to secede from the Union in 1860. basically it was about “how the government was going to run” and “freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” This was not the first time Haley omitted slavery as part of her explanation.

On the campaign trail for governor in 2010 she maintained the Civil War was about “tradition vs. the future.” [1] This allowed Thom Hartmann, radio and television commentator, businessman, and prolific author to trot out one of his recent titles, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, where he has argued that the South had ceased to be a democracy by the 1830s primarily due to the invention of the cotton gin and mass production by Eli Whitney. Moreover, at the time the Civil War broke out the South was already “a full-blown police state run by a few thousand morbidly rich families who lived and acted like the feudal lords of ancient Europe.” And when the pro-slavery South seceded from the anti-slavery Union and the Civil War began it was because the former wanted a nation comprised only of slave owning states.[2]

As Hartmann wrote in a Raw Story commentary on January 2, 2024: “The simple reality is that the pro-slavery South is still very much with us, and is still–after 163 years–trying to make the case that democracy should be replaced with a strongman white supremacist oligarchy.”[3] He continues, “Just as the agricultural revolution birthed humanity’s first documented oligarchies, the invention of the cotton gin and its widespread use by 1820 birthed the first American oligarchy, one that eventually rose up and challenged democracy itself in a bloody Civil War.” Flash forward to the present.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper about his latest book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (2023), Senator Bernie Sanders informs us that “oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? Oligarchs run the United States as well.” [4]

Sanders also claims that oligarchs run Europe, the UK, and the rest of the world where “we’re seeing a small number of incredibly wealthy people running things in their favor. A global oligarchy.” Under “uber” capitalism, governmental rule by the rich (plutocrats) or rule by the few (oligarchs) has become one and the same. Nowadays, those richest few that are ruling – the governments whether democratic or autocratic – are simply referred to as the oligarchy of the rich.

Uber-capitalism, laissez-faire markets, unfettered and unregulated capitalists, and regressive tax systems are epitomized by oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com, Inc in the United States. Though there are plenty of other examples from the Kochs to Walmart to Starbucks to Elon Musk. The issues are always the same: unlimited greed, opposing the rights of workers to organize, and abusing power that hurts people and injures nations.

In 2017 and 2018, Amazon paid no taxes. In 2021, Amazon had revenues of almost £470 billion and made a record-breaking £36 billion–a 453 percent increase from where it was before the pandemic. While some Amazon essential workers were literally catching COVID and dying during the first year of the pandemic, Bezos became £65 billion richer or a 57 percent increase in his fortune. his net worth of£170 billion made him the second wealthiest human being on the planet behind Musk who had a net worth of £186.9 billion as of March 2023.

Known on Wall Street as the Big Three, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street investment asset managers controlled more than £20 trillion or the equivalent GDP of the USA at the beginning of 2023. Their portfolio consists of banks, transportation, health care, media, and real estate. Taken together these investment firms are the largest shareholders in the biggest banks in America, such as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citibank.

They are among the top owners of the four major airlines in the US–American, Southwest, Delta, and United. They are also among the largest stockholders in Comcast, Disney, and Warner Brothers. On average they own 20 percent of the major US drug companies, and about one-third of the homes purchased in the nation in 2022.

In short, these oligarchs control the U.S. democracy as they “spend tens of billions of dollars on campaign contributions to both major political parties” for the purposes of buying “politicians who will do their bidding. They spend billions more on lobbying firms to influence governmental decisions at the federal, state, and local levels.”[5] Modern day oligarchies are associated with the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s, the destruction of the Communist Party and the KGB networks, and the rise of competitive politics and post-Soviet market economies came the formation of the national states of Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia under the strong influence of oligarchic groups.

At the beginning of the 21st- century governments of post-soviet nations tried to end oligarchies in one of two ways: democratically or by systems of pyramid-like power. In the former, oligarchical corruption was fought in the public sector by strengthening the rule of law and calling for a clear division between the public and private sectors. In the latter, pyramid-like power systems were of two kinds: single-pyramid autocracies or multi-pyramid hybrid regimes with both democratic and nondemocratic political elements.

For example, the success of the single-pyramid model in Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Russia gave birth to the current autocratic regimes in those countries. Multiple attempts, on the other hand, to “fight corruption have kept Georgia and Ukraine as hybrid regimes interpolated by many oligarchic groups and repeatedly oscillating between more and fewer political and economic freedoms.”[6] After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, sanctions from the U.S., Switzerland, and the U.K were imposed on “businessmen and officials believed to be in Mr. Putin’s inner circle.” The U.S. expanded its “sanctions in 2018 to Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election, and several other oligarchs and officials the U.S. government allegedly had been involved in various forms of ‘worldwide malign activity’.”[7] When Russia invaded Ukraine again in early 2022 the U.S., the U.K. and the European Union ratcheted up their sanctions on several of Russia’s richest and most politically connected elites: “Western governments are chasing down the yachts, jets, and bank accounts of an expanding list of Russian billionaires and Kremlin elites, hoping to use them to pressure Russian Vladimir Putin to pull back from his country’s invasion of Ukraine.”

As it turned out, those sanctions were not enough to make Putin rethink his course of warfare with his much smaller neighbor. Similarly, federal prosecutors had been quietly issuing a series of subpoenas to seize U.S. assets held by Russian oligarchs pretty much to no avail. So the Justice Department in late November “asked Congress for a new law that would streamline the process after delaying tactics by defense attorneys” were stymying their efforts.[8]

Oligarchies are not necessarily good or bad, however, where “rule is by the few,” they tend to rule in favor of themselves. The term oligarchy varies or is amorphous and somewhat subjective. Globally, people argue about which countries should be listed as oligarchic and which should not. The World Population Review has recently identified China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe as oligarchic. [9]

The USA constitutes a multi-pyramid hybrid regime as Americans traditionally enjoy many features of a democratic government. However, over the past two decades powerful corporations and affluent individuals have had a significantly larger influence on policymaking than ordinary citizens due to changes in the campaign finance laws. Oligarchs, as well as kleptocrats who use their power and money to buy or bribe politicians or to corrupt and/or steal from governments, come from many other countries besides the ones listed.

These may include African despots as well as someone like Jean-Claude Duvalier, better known as Baby Doc, from the Caribbean nation of Haiti. In 1983, Baby Doc became Trump’s first landed kleptocrat but not his last by any means. Twelve years earlier, Baby Doc at just 20 years of age had ascended to the presidency of Haiti, following the death of his autocratic father.

After smothering talk of reform and democratization, he spiraled into crimes against humanity. For example, he housed “political prisoners in jails dubbed the ‘triangle of death’ where many suffered unspeakably painful deaths.” At the same time, his “regime supporters made sure any critical journalists were tortured or exiled for their reporting.” [10] Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter[11], Crash Course.

After looting state coffers, pillaging local populations, and pocketing Haiti’s national wealth to the tune of upwards of £800 million, Baby Doc, with the help of a few friends, opened an American bank account. Soon becoming, on a smaller scale, like the great kleptocratic American client of that era, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, whose looted wealth had been estimated to be worth between £5-10 billion. Back in those days, folks in Washington, DC happily embraced dictators like Duvalier and Marcos because of their strong stances against communism.

Back then, banks did not have to concern themselves over matters of servicing dictators’ monies dripping in blood in places like Saudi Arabia like they allegedly do today. Today, as Casey Michel lays out in a special edition of Mother Jones, the United States is “one of the world capitals of kleptocratic cash.” Michel tells the story of Kingdom Trust, a small company headquartered in South Dakota servicing individual retirement accounts (IRAs) with a focus on maintaining slow and steady growth.

Then in the mid-2010s, the firm began soliciting a much different class of clientele–“shadowy companies based in notorious offshore heavens that were having trouble opening US accounts.” While there is nothing technically illegal in this strategic shift, what drove Kingdom Trust, which now goes by Choice, into the crosshairs of federal regulators was not any crime per se, but the egregious lack of due diligence. In the words announced last spring by Himamauli Das, acting director of the Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (Fincen), Kingdom Trust “had virtually no process to identify and report suspicious transactions.” The investigation not only spotlighted the lapses of Kingdom Trust but also how anonymous shell companies and secret trusts are money-laundering enablers.

This is American oligarchy.

References

1. ^ the first state to secede from the Union in 1860 (abcnews.go.com)
2. ^ The Hidden History of American Oligarchy (www.amazon.com)
3. ^ Raw Story commentary on January 2, 2024 (www.rawstory.com)
4. ^ The Guardian newspaper (www.theguardian.com)
5. ^ these oligarchs control the U.S. democracy (www.penguinrandomhouse.com)
6. ^ fight corruption have kept Georgia and Ukraine as hybrid regimes (www.wilsoncenter.org)
7. ^ businessmen and officials believed to be in Mr.

   Putin’s inner circle. (www.wsj.com)

8. ^ asked Congress for a new law that would streamline the process after delaying tactics by defense attorneys (mail.yahoo.com)
9. ^ The World Population Review (worldpopulationreview.com)
10. ^ political prisoners in jails dubbed the ‘triangle of death’ where many suffered unspeakably painful deaths (www.amazon.com)
11. ^ Subscribe to our morning newsletter (www.salon.com)