Who makes up the oligarchy?

Commenter Jeff, in response to an earlier post, posed the question: Who or what constitutes the oligarchy and when did they come into being? Another commenter to that same post, named simply G, asked: What needs to be done to change things? I’ll address the first question here and keep the next for a subsequent post.

There are occasional attempts to portray the oligarchy as some secretive group of unidentified individuals such as the Masons or the Illuminati (or the Inebriati), meeting in secret with passwords and the like. They are not because that is not how things work. The modern transglobal oligarchy consists of figures in the government and private sector working largely in the open. They meet regularly at big public functions where a substantial time is spent in open meetings. But these gatherings also allow for private meetings such as dinners and parties and other social events where the spotlight is off and where a lot of the consensus is built up.
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Tackiness in Arizona

I have written before that people tend to go overboard in their public expressions of grief. Ted Rall thinks that as a nation we are descending into tackiness when it comes dealing with the aftermath of tragic events. He cites the memorial service in Arizona as an example of our tendency to turn even solemn moments into kitsch and suggests some Basic Etiquette Following a Massacre:

(1) When interviewed on television never say that your “heart goes out to the victims and their families.” We have heard that hoary chestnut a million too many times. Keep your heart where it belongs, inside your ribcage.

(2) If you are a public official holding a press conference about a school shooting/workplace shooting/terrorist attack, refrain from thanking a long list of local and state officials for their help. This isn’t the Oscars. You haven’t won anything. You are not going to meet Joan Rivers.

(3) Whether attending a memorial service or actual funeral, leave your hoodies, baggy pants and tanktops at home. No baseball caps. No T-shirts. Don’t wear anything with a team logo. Appropriate clothing is formal, black or very dark blue. Men wear suits with ties. Women wear long dresses. Don’t got ’em? Stay home. You don’t get to be on CNN.

(4) If you know one or more of the victims, ask their surviving relatives whether they would prefer flowers or a donation to a preferred charity. Otherwise simply choose an appropriate charity and make a donation in their name. Do not waste money on flowers and stupid stuffed animals.

(5) Unless the victims include at least one politician, no politician should speak at the service. If there is at least one dead or wounded politician, politicians who do speak should refrain from political rhetoric.

(6) No. Applause. Ever.

Good advice.

When cracks appear in the oligarchic system

Knowledge seeks to be free.

While oligarchic suppression of unauthorized messages can be very thorough, it can never be complete. There will always be people who have a strong urge to know the truth and disseminate it and they will find ways to do so. We have seen in the past that even under tightly-controlled state media systems, an underground press and radio and other low-cost news systems such as pamphlets and wall posters emerge to provide an outlet for those who challenge the system.

In relatively open societies in the US, the challenge for non-oligarchic alternative voices is both harder and easier. It is easier because there is (usually) no overt suppression of other voices by direct censorship. Instead the focus is on marginalizing them, by making them seem extreme so that these voices do not reach a mass audience.

It is harder because the seeming openness of the system makes it harder for ordinary people to see the control of the oligarchy and thus less likely to see the need for alternative views. I am sure that many people in the US think that we are exposed to the full range of news and opinions on TV, in newspapers, and in magazines because we have Fox News and MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the National Review and The Nation.

People tend to be not aware of what they are missing. It takes a great deal of media and political sophistication to be aware of what you are not hearing. A good example is Noam Chomsky. He is well known worldwide as an important political analyst and public intellectual and yet you will never see him anymore in the US mainstream media. To read his work or hear him, you will have to actively seek him out or read alternative media on a regular basis. The same is true for a whole host of people. If you do not appear in the major media venues, you and your views may as well not exist. The non-stop cacophony of voices that surround us in the media serves the purpose of creating that non-awareness. In fact, a good way to become better informed is to not watch TV or read the mainstream press but read only the headlines and the bare bones facts of a story and start just thinking for yourself about what it means.

This is why the internet has been so unsettling for the oligarchy. It lowered the cost of admission to the media club to almost zero and so one has had an explosion of voices, most of whom are free to say what they want. The government does not have to worry about the New York Times or CNN ‘going rogue’ because their dependence on advertisers and stockholders is sufficient to keep them in check and to even support government efforts to suppress dissenting voices.

The internet’s openness was tolerable as long as those new voices were scattered and diffuse and uncoordinated, each commanding just a small audience. But the emergence of outfits like WikiLeaks that are able to command widespread attention has really thrown a wrench into the media propaganda model which is why we should expect to see attempts to ‘regulate’ the internet to prevent ‘irresponsible’ (translation: anti-oligarchic) voices form gaining a foothold or by making the cost of business higher by governments using their vast resources to take legal action against smaller entities, thus driving up their costs and putting them out of business.

The WikiLeaks episode has opened a window on the oligarchic structure in the US. The US media likes to portray itself as independent of, and even adversarial to, the government. But when a true challenge to the government emerged, they quickly reverted to their true role of government ally. For example, see how the US media has disowned WikiLeaks and refused to fight or even speak out on their free speech rights, leaving it up to international media to call upon them to protect the First Amendment. It is the US media that fights the idea that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise just like them and thus deserving of all First Amendment protections.

It is important to understand that this abandonment of WikiLeaks is not due to normal business competition. They are not doing this because of business reasons, because they fear that their subscribers and advertisers will shift away from them to WIkiLeaks because the latter is not that kind of operation and does not present that kind of danger. After all, they are giving away their information free to the mainstream media. Those mainstream media organizations that are distancing themselves from WikiLeaks are clearly doing this for ideological reasons, because they are opposed to what WikiLeaks represents which is a source of information that is outside oligarchic control. They act this way because the US media is part of the oligarchy and thus unconsciously picks up the cues that tell it what to do. The US government does not need to do anything. What better propaganda system is there?

WikiLeaks poses a challenge to the oligarchy because even those journalists that have passed through the filters and risen within the system realize that at some basic level, attempts to shut down WikiLeaks is wrong and this is creating cracks in the system. We need to widen those cracks by driving home the message that this is an important First Amendment issue and that what WikiLeaks does is no different from what Bob Woodward does except that he serves the interests of the oligarchy and WikiLeaks does not.

Next: Who makes up the oligarchy and what can we do about it?

How the US treats its citizens/Glenn Greenwald fundraiser

Glenn Greenwald continues to highlight the plight of US citizen Gulet Mohammed in Kuwait, which I wrote about before.

The Kuwaiti government was willing to release him provided he had a ticket for a direct flight to the US. His family provided it and he was taken to the airport where he was denied boarding with no reasons given, presumably because the government has put him on a no-fly list. If you leave the US, they put you on the list so you cannot return. Since the list is secret, you do not know why you were put on it and how to get off it.

Gulet Mohammed is a Muslim so the government assumes that no one will make a fuss. For others, they use different methods, such as harassing you at the port of entry with lengthy questioning and taking away your computer and any electronic devices each and every time you return, as is happening to WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum

This is what the US government under that great Democratic constitutional scholar Barack Obama does to people it does not like.

Glenn Greenwald is holding a fundraiser to enable him to continue his work. As readers would know from the many, many times I link to him and quote him, I consider him to be one of the most important political commentators and defender of civil liberties in the US right now. If I had to identify one blogger whom I consider to be essential, it is Greenwald.

You can see that he is very uncomfortable asking for this support. Please support him if you can.

China flexes its muscles

On the eve of his visit to the US, Chinese leader Hu Jintao has basically called for the replacement of the US dollar by the Chinese Yuan as the reserve currency, at least initially for China. He also sharply criticized the Fed’s quantitative easing policy. I discussed both topics last week.

When this is coupled with China’s test flight of its new stealth fighter while US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was visiting them, these are indications by China of its intention to challenge the US as the world’s leading power.

The media as a model of how a modern oligarchy operates

A well-functioning oligarchic system usually operates smoothly and largely openly and without a hierarchical structure. It achieves its goals by setting up filters that weed out those who do not support its agenda and rarely requires overt intervention to achieve its goals.

I discussed earlier how the major filter was the high cost of entry in the modern media world that meant only rich people or organizations could create a big megaphone for their views. Only someone like Rupert Murdoch, for example, could create a new major network like Fox News. The high cost of entry came into being over a century ago and was a result of market forces and technological advances and the adoption of a business plan that depended largely on advertising for revenues.
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Huck Finn and the n-word

A new version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released on February 15, 2011 with all 219 instances of the n-word replaced by ‘slave’. The book also changes ‘injun’ to ‘Indian’. These changes were made in order to make it more acceptable for use in schools that have shied away from assigning this American classic to students because of fears that students and parents would find it offensive. Proponents of the change have argued that the book’s anti-racist message is largely unaffected by these changes and that what is lost by toning down the language this way is more than compensated for by having more people read this work.
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The pernicious influence of Rupert Murdoch

Although the problems with the media that I have described are largely structural, it is possible to identify particularly insidious influences that are epitomize its decline and Rupert Murdoch is the undoubted leader.

In this 1994 clip British television writer Dennis Potter describes how Murdoch played a large role is destroying the quality of British media, a process that he is continuing in the US.

(Thanks to Harry Kroto.)

A model for how the oligarchy works

To understand who constitutes the new national and transglobal oligarchies and how they work, it is helpful to examine a subsystem of the oligarchy that has been studied extensively and provides a good model or template for understanding it. One fact that quickly emerges is that the best propaganda systems are those that operate seemingly transparently.

Those countries that have tightly controlled state media have a much less effective propaganda system than countries like the US. Not only are people in those countries aware that the media is a propaganda organ, which makes them skeptical of what it says, there is always the danger that somebody in the media is going to blurt out things that contradict the party line.
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Chaotic and dangerous situations

Arizona is a state that allows people to carry guns. Joe Zamudio carries one and was in a store when he heard the shooting and he came out with his gun to see if he could help. What happened then shows that when a gun carrier comes across a confused and fast-moving situations like the shootings last weekend, if they are not very careful they could make matters a lot worse, either by misjudging who is responsible for what and shooting the wrong person or being mistaken as the gunman by police.

This episode suggests that people who carry guns should get at least some of the kind of training that police officers get where you learn caution and never to fire at someone unless you are sure and get some experience in being put into chaotic situations.