"It’s time to push our oligarchs off their pedestals."

Mike Sabo writes at American Greatness,

...As elections pundit Larry Sabato has observed, “House seats are hereditary peerages nowadays.” George P. Bush, call your office.

But it’s even worse than Sabato imagines. If Trump hadn’t won in 2016, from 1989 to 2021 either a Bush or a Clinton would have held the presidency for 24 of those intervening 32 years. And the Supreme Court’s Ivy-League bigotry, which Justice Clarence Thomas has pointed out for decades, helps to cement the bias against opinions that contravene the oligarchs’ consensus.

In his masterful 2016 essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” John Marini noted that our society is overseen by an increasingly small group of politicians, media pundits, and professional elites who are defined not so much by wealth as they are by a shared knowledge and similar background in schooling and networks of influence. Our modern oligarchs understand “their offices in terms of global and administrative rule, rather than political rule on behalf of the American people and the sovereignty of the American nation.” This explains their penchant for increasing low skilled immigration, shifting the economy towards financialization and away from production, and trusting transnational bodies rather than sovereign nations.

The entrenched bureaucracy of the administrative state and the intelligence bureaucracy is the oligarchs’ personal Praetorian Guard. Robert Mueller’s “investigation,” which is a pretext ultimately to remove Trump from office, shows that any perceived threat must be isolated, attacked, and destroyed. Rather than uncovering “collusion” between Trump’s campaign team and Russia, however, the moral rot at the center of the intelligence bureaucracy has been exposed.

We’ve learned that Peter Strzok, a top FBI official who served on Mueller’s investigatory team, was removed over the summer for sending anti-Trump texts to a colleague, with whom he was also having an affair. Strzok also changed James Comey’s description of Hillary’s email scandal from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” This change is significant because under federal law, penalties can be assessed when an individual’s actions are described as “grossly negligent.” And this is the same man to whom Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills lied during their interviews without being charged for any crime—unlike Michael Flynn.

...It’s time to push our oligarchs off their pedestals and return control of the government back to the ones to whom it was originally entrusted: the people.

Read more here.

When will we see a political prairie fire?

Is it the Age of Obama, or the Age of Oligarchy? Joel Kotkin says it is the latter.

Despite this administration’s occasional rhetorical flourishes against oligarchy, we have seen a rapid concentration of wealth and depressed conditions for the middle class under Obama. The stimulus, with its emphasis on public sector jobs, did little for Main Street. And under the banner of environmentalism, green cronyism has helped fatten the bank accounts of investment bankers and tech moguls at great public expense.

In this, both political parties are to blame. Republican fealty to the interests of the investor class has been long-standing. But Obama and the Democrats are also increasingly backed in their “progressive” causes by the very people -- Wall Street traders, venture capitalists and tech executives -- who benefit most from the federal bailouts, cheap money, low interest rates, and low capital gains tax rates.

Large financial institutions also have benefited greatly from regulations that guaranteed their survival while allowing for increased concentration of financial assets. Indeed in the first five years of the Obama Administration the share of financial assets held by the top six “too big to fail” banks soared 37%, and now account for two-thirds of all bank assets.

“Quantitative easing,” the government’s purchase of financial assets from commercial banks, essentially constituted a “too big to fail” windfall to the largest Wall Street firms, notes one former high-level official. By 2011, pay for executives at the largest banking firms hit new records, just three years after the financial “wizards” left the world economy on the brink of economic catastrophe. Meanwhile, as “too big to fail” banks received huge bailouts, the ranks of community banks continues dropping to the lowest number since the 1930s, hurting, in particular, small businesspeople that depend on loans from these institutions.

If Obama has proven a god-send for the oligarchs, he has been less solicitous of small business. Long a key source of new jobs, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth from 50 percent in the early 1980s to 35% in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report, revealed small business “dynamism,” measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century.

There are many explanations for this decline, including the impact of offshoring, globalization and technology. But much can be traced to the expansion of regulatory power. Small firms, according to a 2010 report by the Small Business Administration, spend one-third more per employee than larger firms on staff who can help them meet with federal dictats. The biggest hit to small business comes from environmental regulations, which cost 364% per employee more for small firms than large ones. Small business owners and self-employed professionals also have also been among those most impacted, through the cancellations of their health care policies, by the Affordable Care Act.

The oligarchs should not rest too comfortably. An observer of gilded age America may have also assumed that the oligarchic power of the robber barons and industrial magnates would continue to wax inexorably. Yet, there comes a time -- as occurred in the early years of the last century and again in the 1930s -- when the political economy so poorly serves the vast majority that it ignites a political prairie fire. We are not there yet, in either party, but if the corrupt bargain between the oligarchs and the political class goes unbroken, the wait may not be long.

Please read more here.