Plutocracy is to politics what cancer is to life. It’s malignant, invasive, pervasive, and a killer.
Such is the obvious banner one should use at the top of one’s thoughts, when reading:
https://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/04/12/3426152/wealthy-lobbyists-policy/
As said there: “When organized interest groups or economic elites want a particular policy passed, there’s a strongly likelihood their wishes will come true. But when average citizens support something, they have next to no influence.”
Representative politics is already, to start with, if not dictatorship, at least intrinsically oligarchic.
See:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/representative-politics-is-dictatorship/
What to do about it? Well, do what works. Other countries, from Japan to the EU, have tried to reduce the influence of money in politics, just as it was augmented in the USA. But one has to go much further.
A way out is to do what Switzerland has been increasingly doing in the last three decades; have We The People vote the laws (through “votations”, every three months), and let the parliament (= Congress; or the “Federal” as the Swiss put it) figure out the details of the laws We The People passed (Courts and the like also chip in to check the proposed laws are constitutional).
As a result, Switzerland has an increasingly mighty anti-plutocratic arsenal, including all sorts of caps and regulations on the wealthy and banks. And more are coming. Every three months. Income caps have even been proposed (Republican Rome had those, 23 centuries ago!). They were rejected, but more subtle caps are coming.
Being a professional politician in Switzerland is increasingly difficult, and of little interest. The People (demos) is increasingly ruling: People-power: Demos-kratos.
Another positive effect has been on wealth of the Demos and the economy. Switzerland’s unemployment rate has collapsed (in spite of colossal immigration, higher in percentage than the peaks ever experienced by the USA). The wealth per capita is now much higher than in the rest of Europe, or the USA (main source of wealth: pharmaceuticals, and high tech).
Nowadays, everybody who can, and know, wants to live in Switzerland: the population has augmented by 15% in ten years.
So We The People (of Switzerland) voted an obscure law that demands, within three years, to somehow constrict the migratory flux from the EU to Schweiz. The EU screamed a lot, in righteous indignation.
(The German president even allowed himself to suggest, several times, that total democracy went a bridge too far in Switzerland, in obvious allusion to Nazism. Thus demonstrating that he was not aware that Nazism was a plutocratic phenomenon masquerading as populism. Nazism had nothing to do with the democracy in Switzerland, and more to do with what Putin is doing: sending armed assassins.)
An obvious solution to Europe’s Swiss problem is to realize that it’s Europe that is the problem.
The solution? Make the rest of Europe more democratic, and thus wealthier, by imitating what is done in Suisse.
Lack of democracy is leading to the greatest evil of them all, the destruction of the biosphere. See how dramatic it is getting:
What’s the relationship between deterioration of the climate, and deterioration of the democracy? It’s not just that fossil fuels favor top heavy organizations. It’s also that evil is what evil does: Pluto, by definition, loves what’s bad, and even satanic.
The deterioration of the democratic climate implies that of the planet.
Patrice Ayme
