The executive director of Oligarchy USA, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, won’t say publicly if the country is an oligarchy because she doesn’t want to get into “labels.”
When pressed by Col., er, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) about income inequality and its trend toward oligarchy, Yellen dodged the question in recent testimony while offering Col. Sanders rhetorical support for his position that the U.S. is an oligarchy of the rich versus everyone else.
“I prefer not to give labels, but there’s no question we’ve had the trend toward growing inequality, and I personally find it very worrisome trend that deserves the attention of policy makers,” Yellen said deftly.
As our friends at ZeroHedge observed about her answer: At least she didn’t flat out lie.
More worrisome, as ZH affirmed, is that the question had to be asked at all.
Most worrisome, however, is that neither Yellen nor Sanders really understand what they are talking about.
Sanders looks at the concession to oligarchy as a gottcha question that supports his notion that all we have to do is tax the rich even more to make the oligarchy crumble.
Yellen isn’t as clear. Her answer is more one of a diplomat trying to obscure her views than that of an oligarch trying to soak people whose views are different than her own.
Because it’s not rich versus poor that makes an oligarchy—not in the old Soviet Union or in the New Soviet Union.
Ask Mikhail Khodorkovsky, billionaire oil tycoon, and oligarch, who nonetheless served time in Russian prison for crossing swords with Vladimir Putin, if money makes the oligarch.
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Or ask any of the 6,000 other “white collar” criminals who, according to Forbes, served time in Russia in prisons because they “ran afoul of the Putin administration”, if somehow simply being rich were enough to save them.
The United States has always had its share of very wealthy people, yet somehow remained free of the corruption of oligarchy, for the most part.
But not today.
And the reason is clear.
A government with the ability to create $5-$6 trillion dollars out of thin air—almost half our yearly GDP-- and distribute it to its backers, is by its very definition an oligarchy.
A small group of people-- say central bankers combined with go-getters in a presidential administration-- decide who shall be successful and who shall not be successful.
And if you cross them, you shall pay.
And if that's not oligarchy, here's what is.
Louis Lerner of the IRS targeting scheme, and oligarch, will skate even contempt of Congress charges. I’m assuming that she isn’t a millionaire…yet.
The Koch Brothers on the other hand, richer than Lerner, will be made scapegoats in the 2014 elections for having the temerity to engage in the same type of activities Warren Buffett and George Soros are lauded for.
Buffett, you’ll remember, got a presidential medal of freedom.
Free to plunder; free to rape; free to steal, apparently.
The Koch Brothers are just the GOP control of the House of Representatives away from going to jail.
And, by the way, so are you.
Don’t believe me?
A federal judge sentenced Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to one year in prison for supposed violations of parole, citing his work demeaning the prophet Mohammed, in which actors were tricked into thinking they were working on a different picture, not depicting the prophet Mohammed.
This was the notorious video that the White House and State Department said was responsible for the terror attack in Benghazi and assassination of four Americans.
Ostensibly, the authorities were mad because he was enjoined from not using the internet without permission or from using an alias “Sam Bacile.”
We now know however, that the video made by Nakoula, Innocence of Muslims, played no role whatsoever in the Benghazi attacks and that the narrative that advanced it was fabricated.
Yet, still Nakoula went to jail.
He was sent there by an oligarchy that would send you there too if you cross them.
Cross them. Try it. You’ll see.
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