JUAN COLE TOP TEN

I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs.
We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults,
It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth
we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda.
They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute
They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons.
It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives,
that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts
that allow them to use
essential public resources

infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.
top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth
It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society
10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it.
of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists').
hey are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation
is not restored
It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists').