American politics is owned by an oligarchy–the wealthy and their instrumentalities, the corporations. The oligarchy has two factions: Atoms and Bits.

Bits own the Democrat&tm; brand, and Atoms own the Republicans&tm;, with each making significant minority investments in the holdings of the other (these are oligarchs, you expected respect for the free market? Look up “hedge fund” some time.).

Bits are the information-based industries: Entertainment, finance, and “information technology”, notably Silicon Valley; they backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Atoms represent the older legacy industries concerned with material things: Energy-bearing minerals and other resource extraction; manufacturing; large retail. They’ve lately been backing losers in Presidential races, but winning in state and local elections.

Their partisanship is really just jockeying for control of the power of government, and the enhanced profits that flow from that power. Each fights to shift the tax burden, first, to the lower classes if possible; and to the other faction if that fails. Tax break, tariffs, exclusionary laws, no-bid contracts, and uber alles, profit, are their ideology.

If that’s what really concerns the powers-that-be, what are all these things that we the (little) people think we’re fighting about? Do you think maybe the real job function of corporate politicians these days is to distract us from what the new aristocrats are doing, with phony controversy and manufactured outrage?

Ask not what the corporations can do for you. Ask what you can do for the corporations.

Too bad the conservatives will write the history.

And Obama is a corporate lackey. One has to be to be elected these days. We live in an oligarchy, with many of the voices shouting the praises coming from under the bus.

Go figure.

Now Chomsky, HE’s a left-winger, a real left-winger. He’s as far to my left as TB is to my right. Too far left for me.

I know Chomsky calls himself a Libertarian Socialist, a term which may sound contradictory to modern conservatives, but which a century ago would have been instantly accepted as Classical Anarchist.

A Classical Anarchist is someone who is as opposed to Capitalism as he is to the State. He believes all forms of human organization should be democratic, that is, companies would be owned by the workers, who would own all the stock and vote on company policy and hire professional managers to actually run the firms. All organizations would be co-ops, like farm co-ops today, or the fabulously successful and efficient Cuban Social Club medical cooperatives that handled health insurance and even operated hospitals in early XXth century Tampa. It was a model imported from the Europe of the XIXth century.

We know this system works on a small scale, although whether it could totally replace the modern corporation is questionable, in my opinion.

Of course, it is hard to discuss the nuances of the political spectrum with modern American conservatives, who seem to think there are only two poles on the political axis, “freedom” and Communism, with nothing in between.