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From:	Jaq (204.180.197.177)
Subject:	I think it's also called an Oligarchy.........
Date:	December 7, 2005 at 5:53 pm PST

In Reply to: Iraq Transforms American Democracy Into American Eliteocracy posted by Bart on December 5, 2005 at 8:43 pm:

"What would be better for America: to let one man have five million a year, and keep ten thousand men on the edge of want; or let the one man have one million a year and divide the four millions among ten thousand families?"

William Randolph Hearst

In yet another age of oligarchy, corporate predation, and gross disparities of wealth (much of which has accrued over time from enclosure-driven exploitations of labor) we still have no limits to corporate salaries, no excess profits tax, no limits to land ownership, wealth, or corporate franchise.

Concentration continues despite the fact both liberal and conservative economists (John Kenneth Galbraith and Peter Drucker) agreed the highest paid employee/CEO should not be paid more than 15-25 times the lowest. In today's rapacious plutocracy, we see ratios that are 100-500 times.

In addition, our ruling powers now seek to end virtually all estate taxes on the mega-rich, and so capture forever the spoils of a good deal of corporate crime, exploitation, enclosure, and oligopoly. Meanwhile, wage earners face job export, job loss, retirement funds decimated, and 24% credit card rates as predation and usury emerge big time.

While so many face financial ruin and loss of health insurance (triggering stress, heart attacks, divorce, family disintegration, and forced moves) the mega-rich use their increasing wealth and power to expand control over our lives, economy, and "democratic" system. The time has come to explore limits to wealth and oligopoly. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the 1930's "We can have a democratic society or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

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