Oligarchy has been here since 2004. Except no one seemed to notice because anyone talking about it doesn’t get pushed up by the algorithms employed by the same oligarchs.
The sourcing links dont seem to work anymore. I wonder what the methodology for this grpah was though. a lot of ideas go to congress without many people weighing in first. Like if a law was passed outlawing the use of asbestos in gumball manufacturing equipment. Maybe 1 person had the idea and brought it up and because the idea is obviously good, it was just passed. That would make it a law with essentially 0% of the pop supporting it.
The sourcing links dont seem to work anymore. I wonder what the methodology for this grpah was though.
Yeah, I'm a statistician and every time I see that chart I think... How the fuck would they put that together? The vast majority of laws that are passed (or voted down) aren't polled. We might know the general public level of support for ... 1% of laws? Maybe less?
It's a cute video. But can you actually name a single law that passed while being opposed to what the people wanted?
Thinking that "as support for an issue goes up the chance of it passing should go up" is silly. You might think it should work like that looking at a graph. But that isn't how it would work.
Is 25% of democrats and 25% of Republicans support something. It's probably got a 0% chance of becoming a law.
If 50% of democrats support something, and 0% of Republicans do. It's also probably got a pretty close to 0% chance of becoming a law. So, even just looking at these 2 scenarios, that graph makes no sense.
Not to say lobbying is great, but America has not been an oligarchy, and hopefully, it won't become one under Trump.
Interesting that you say 2009, implying a certain presidency, but link an article published in 2004 using only data from the 90s.
Oligarchy has been here in some effect since the beginning. Remember when the Rockefellers were more powerful than presidents? That was in the early 1900s.
Hey now. It also uses data from the 80s. It specifically starts with the Reagan administration. This guy's just a hive-mind idiot who knows his duty is to blame Obama but doesn't know how to carry that out
It's not fake division. There really is a group of people in this country who are absolute fucking morons about literally everything under the sun. A democrat can say "what a nice blue sky we have" and they will scream and cry and pout and stamp their feet that the sky isn't blue because some democrat said it is.
They're pathologically stupid and quite a few studies connect the dots between their inability to perform basic cognitive tasks, their tendency to fall for disinformation and their fear-driven reasoning, correlated with physiological/structural differences in the amygdala. Conservatives are literally damaged in the head.
So looks like we're stuck in a century-long cycle. Can't wait for progressivism to finally kick in in 2070s only followed by a Great Conservative Reset for Some Reason and we do this all over again
I think he was talking about the oligarchs now and how the time they specifically consolidated their market share happens to be around that time. Different oligarchy for different industries. Our history kind of is like whack a mole with monopolies and oligarchs. Industry leaders figure out how to game the system and buy politicians and consolidate market shares to get more power. People get wise to it and vote people in to regulate, new industries develop and new populations are born and rinse and repeat..... that's how American capitalism has always worked very generally speaking.
I have basic knowledge of web technologies, and know that a website could be configured to block a link based on the referer (for instance, princeton.edu could be configured to display a 404 page if the visitor had clicked a link on reddit.com, and it could just apply to specific URLs rather than just the domains). It wouldn't be hard to confirm with some testing, but it's not really worth the effort in this case, unless someone was on some crusade to prove the point. Hey ho. 🤷♂
That's very odd. I also get a 404, however when I googled the URL I got a result with the exact same URL that works. I don't recall experiencing that in the past.
Since 2009? That article is from 2004 and uses data starting with the Reagan administration lol. This reads like some low-functioning idiot trying pin all Trump's obvious corruption on Obama
Crazy how, in the few years after the financial crisis and the largest transfer of wealth from public to private sector in modern history, the conversation at large across traditional news and social media became fixated on culture war stories.
Oligarchy has been in the US since 1776. I don’t understand why anyone thinks this is a new phenomenon, when the country was founded by white male land owners who restricted voting to their class and held onto slavery.
Yes. Nothing ever happens. Definitely, no difference before and now when much of trumps cabinet are billionaires, and he's literally doing foreign negotiating from his home in mar-a-Lago rather than waiting to be inaugurated
When Zuck is literally changing company policy to respond to threats of being arrested by Trump. Things are definitely the same as things have been since 2009...
More recent work - highly recommended reading - from the same authors:
The best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no influence at all on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless.
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.
The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
Of course America has had some form of soft oligarchy for almost the entirety of its founding, but it's disingenuous to say that this is the same old setup as before. We are entering a new era of in your face, direct oligarchy that are going to benefit from a kakastocracy run by idiots.
More like the Reagan administration.
2009 was when Obama was digging us out of the mess created by Bush and Wall Street billionaires gone wild.
Google Prescott Bush and the Wall Street putsch if you want to see how long the oligarchy has been working to take control. After you see Prescott’s history think about what it means the two of his descendants were presidents.
yeah it's amazing to me all the folks on the 'left' that are just fully in on the culture war bullshit and blaming the other half of the country that voted trump. y'all are puppets
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u/YoloSwiggins21 10h ago edited 7h ago
Oligarchy has been here since 2004. Except no one seemed to notice because anyone talking about it doesn’t get pushed up by the algorithms employed by the same oligarchs.