My View

BY DON SORCHYCH  |  March 16, 2016



don sorchychPresidential Election and the Oligarchy

The Republican primary is maddening! Donald Trump is the man of the hour without doubt and it scares the snot out of the “establishment.”

The establishment’s identity is becoming more clear. Mitt Romney, loser of the last presidential election in 2012, has gone public trashing Donald Trump on the Internet, in newspapers, social media and who knows where else. Oh, he has also sent robo-calls to an unknown group of people. Trump has called him a loser and he was and still is. Why would anyone listen to this has been? I held my nose and voted for him as I would for anyone who was running against Obama.

The other entries for the establishment are scary.  Washington lobbyist activists have siphoned off Silicon Valley billionaires; they held a private meeting at Sea Island, a private resort off Georgia. The event was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute World Forum.

The meeting was about how to stop front-runner Donald Trump. The meeting included Silicon Valley executives such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator, Facebook investor Sean Parker and Tesla Motors and Space X executive Elon Musk.
Top GOP officials attended too. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan as well as five GOP senators.

Other House members were represented too. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rogers of Washington and Budget Committee Chairman Fred Rice of Georgia.

Then there were business leaders. On hand was billionaire Republican Phillip Anschutz, The Weekly Standard Editor neo-con Bill Kristol and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of the left wing New York Times.

Karl Rove, who calls himself a Republican Political Analyst was there allegedly with focus group findings. He stated focus group findings showed Trump as erratic and not appearing presidential.

Kristol wrote in his magazine, “A specter was haunting the World Forum-the specter on Donald Trump. There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he has done so well and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated. The key task now, to paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him. In general, there’s a little too much hand-wringing, brow furrowing, and fatalism out there and not quite enough resolving to save the party from nominating or the country electing someone who simply shouldn’t be president.”

How dare these oligarchs choose our President?

Read this summary of studies by Princeton and Northwestern:
 
“The US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded.

The report, entitled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, used extensive policy data collected from between the years of 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the US political system.

“After sifting through nearly 1,800 US policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile) and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the United States is dominated by its economic elite.

“The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
“Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favor special interests and lobbying organizations: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get their way.

“The positions of powerful interest groups are “not substantially correlated with the preferences of average citizens,” but the politics of average Americans and affluent Americans sometimes does overlap. This is merely a coincidence, the report says, with the interests of the average American being served almost exclusively when it also serves those of the richest 10 per cent.
“The theory of “biased pluralism” that the Princeton and Northwestern researchers believe the US system fits holds that policy outcomes “tend to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.”

“The study comes in the wake of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a controversial Supreme Court decision which allows wealthy donors to contribute to an unlimited number of political campaigns.”

I wrote about the first meeting of Oligarchs and I am sure it won’t be the last. You now know some of them, but there are more. They think the American public is stupid and Donald Trump is exposing them. Keep that in mind and vote for Trump!