The Money Party

The Money Party

The Money Party is not a new concept. The negative influence of concentrated wealth on governance and society is manifest throughout history. Kevin Phillips offers a comprehensive review and indictment of corruption in the United States.

I first heard the term “the money party” when I wrote an article on 2006 Congressional candidate John Russell’s interview of Florida Democratic Party Chairperson Karen Thurman. Russell was trying to get Thurman to disavow a huge consulting contract she had with the state’s top Republican law firm at the same time she served as Chair of the Florida Democratic Party. Here’s the excerpt (Article)

John Russell…the concern is there is only one party in Florida, the money party, and you represent the Democratic side and Al Cardenas is representing the Republican side. Where do the ordinary people fit in? We only have so much time… (Until the 2008 general election)

Karen Thurman: John, excuse me. Let m ask you this, do you think port and airport security is important?

This real world example of blended parties in the service of The Money Party has far reaching results. The Republican presidential candidates are uniquely blood thirsty in advocating more war in the Middle East and an indefinite stay in Iraq. And here’s the latest form the top three Democratic candidates, September 26, 2007 presidential debate in Hanover, N.H.

In their debate Wednesday night in Hanover, N.H., none of the three top Democratic presidential candidates would promise to have the U.S. military out of Iraq by January 2013 -- more than five years from now.

"I think it would be irresponsible" to state that, said Sen. Barrack Obama (Ill.).

"I cannot make that commitment," added former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) put it simply when she outlined the dilemma that Democratic presidential aspirants face on Iraq. "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting," the party's front-runner said.

The parties respond to the donors. The donors will give to any viable candidate in amounts proportionate to the agreement of that candidate with the donor’s views. The war lobby has endless strength. A month ago, Obama and Clinton talked about a 12-24 month withdrawal period, now they won’t even commit to withdrawal in five years. Think somebody got to them. Edwards had tried to stand apart by attacking corporate Democrats but he won’t even deride the absurd five year commitment.

How much money will these three get? How much money will Dennis Kucinich get?

It’s The Money Party in action. MC

Partial List of Resources

These links go to some useful resources on the influence of concentrated wealth and the manipulation of everyone else’s wealth. There are excerpts from some of these sources below.

Wealth and Democracy: a political history of the American rich
Center for Public Integrity: Investigative Journalism in the Public Interest
The Multinational Monitor
Distribution of Wealth - Wikipedia
Income inequality in the U.S.A. - Wikipedia
The Accumulation of Wealth by Non Profits
Pulling Apart: a State by State Analysis of Income Trends (in the United States)

From Wealth and Democracy: a political history of the American rich

By Kevin Phillips Book e Book Excerpts

There are only two kinds of rich-the criminal rich and the foolish rich.

Theodore Roosevelt (293)

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify making their life a hell in this.

R D. Tawney, British historian p317

Wealth and politics have a long history of intense interaction in the United States. From the 1780s on, foreign visitors remarked about Americans being money-fixated. John Stuart Mill, the English political economist, suggested in 1860 that in America, "the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and the other to breeding dollar hunters." A generation earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed that, "Whenever the reverence which belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition, and profession no longer distinguish men, or scarcely distinguish them, hardly anything but money remains.... Among aristocratic nations, money reaches only to a few points on the vast circle of man's desires; in democracies, it seems to lead all." (293)

The Twelve Shared Characteristics of the "Capitalist Heyday" Periods-the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Bull Market of the 1980s and 1990s

1. Conservative politics and ideology, with mostly Republican presidents but even Democratic presidents in these eras - Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton-tend to be economically conservative.

2. Skepticism of government-from laissez-faire to program cuts and deregulation-and emphasis on markets and the private sector.

3. Exaltation of business, entrepreneurialism, and the achievements of free enterprise.

4. Replacement of public interest politics by private interest politics, with high levels of corruption.

5. Aspects of survival-of-the-fittest thinking-from social Darwinism to welfare reform and globalization.

6. Labor union weakness and/or membership decline.

7. Major economic and corporate restructuring-repeating merger waves and the rise of trusts, holding companies, leveraged buy-outs, spin-offs et al.

8. Obstruction, reduction or elimination of taxes, especially on corporations, personal incomes, or inheritance.

9. Pursuit of disinflation-supportive of creditors-in response to prior inflation (from the Civil War, World War I, and the Vietnam era).

10. A two-tier economy with stronger prosperity along the coasts and in the Great Lakes area, and greatest weakness in the commodity-producing interior.

11. Concentration of wealth, economic polarization, and rising levels of inequality.

12. Bull markets and rising, increasingly precarious levels of speculation, leverage, and debt. (297)

Corruption, like larceny, comes in many forms, some blatant, others more subtle. Booms, speculative heydays, and other periods of money worship bring the highest ratios of corruptions, the hard and the soft. It stands to reason that bribery, embezzlement, fraud, swindling, and other "hard"-criminal-forms of avarice rise with the heat of soaring stock indexes, market worship, and the glorification of consumption and gain. The 1980s and 1990s saw political and governmental corruption in the United States recapture the laxity of the Gilded Age and Roaring Twenties. In the late twentieth century, however, venality was also endemic among the other Group of Seven industrial nations-Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and Britain-a moral convergence to match the contagion of market-driven philosophy. p317

Kevin Phillips on Now with Bill Moyers

Excerpts from AMERICAN DYNASTY
ONLINE NEWSHOUR: Wealth and Democracy
The Cycles of a Financial Scandal

Kevin Phillips on NOW:

Resource to Capture the Basic Corruption of the Political System

(Click graphic for access)

Income inequality in the U.S.A. - Wikipedia

Pioneering Study Shows Richest Two Percent Own Half World Wealth

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).

The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.

The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club. Presentation PDF of Study

Distribution of wealth is a comparison of the wealth of various members or groups in a society, and is one aspect of the economy and social structure. Typically, various racial and ethnic groups possess differing amounts of wealth, and the same is true when people are grouped by age or education. Different jobs bring in greatly different wages; the pay for some jobs is thousands of times greater than the pay for other jobs.

The phrase "distribution of wealth" should not be confused with the phrase "redistribution of wealth". The statistical study of the distribution of wealth is designed to provide data, not recommend policy.

Wealth & Income - Multinational Monitor

MM: Why is it important to think about wealth, as opposed just to income?

Wolff: Wealth provides another dimension of well-being. Two people who have the same income may not be as well off if one person has more wealth. If one person owns his home, for example, and the other person doesn’t, then he is better off.

Wealth — strictly financial savings — provides security to individuals in the event of sickness, job loss or marital separation. Assets provide a kind of safety blanket that people can rely on in case their income gets interrupted.

Wealth is also more directly related to political power. People who have large amounts of wealth can make political contributions. In some cases, they can use that money to run for office themselves, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

MM: What are the best sources for information on wealth?

Wolff: The best way of measuring wealth is to use household surveys, where interviewers ask households, from a very detailed form, about the assets they own, and the kinds of debts and other liabilities they have run up. Household surveys provide the main source of information on wealth distribution.

Of these household surveys — there are now about five or six surveys that ask wealth questions in the United States — probably the best source is the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

They have a special supplement sample that they rely on to provide information about high income households. Wealth turns out to be highly skewed, so that a very small proportion of families own a very large share of total wealth. Most surveys miss these families. But the Survey of Consumer Finances uses information provided by the Internal Revenue Service …

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