Sunday, December 8, 2013

Video: Power Elite Analysis

 Charles Burris writes at LRC:
Although its appears as if filmed in a dank subterranean cloister in the early 1980s, check out this fascinating discussion of power elite analysis by sociologist G. William Domhoff, economist Murray N. Rothbard, and political scientist Williamson M. Evers on a wide range of topics from urban renewal, the origins of the Fed, to the corporate elite’s dominance of California. Bill Domhoff is a research professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Who Rules America? (1967), The Higher Circles (1971), Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness(1974), and other books. Murray Rothbard was the founder of the modern libertarian movement and a prolific authorBill Evers was the original editor of Inquiry magazine, a resident scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (and is currently a research fellow there). He also served as Assistant Secretary for the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development in the U.S. Department of Education from 2007-09. I especially loved the emphasis Domhoff, Rothbard, and Evers made on “naming names” and doing the grunt work investigative research in order to point the finger of accusation and indictment against the criminal elites plundering and ripping us off.


1 comment:

  1. I found this a fascinating video. It is easy to get caught up in global elite analysis – one world government and all of that. But the desires of using government as a tool of control in order to enable outsized returns is evident at every level – the discussion of this in the video regarding one state – California – offered a glimpse into this.

    In hindsight, this should have been quite obvious to me…and on some level perhaps it was. But what was previously seen as a shadow was shown to be real – the institutions, companies, banks, and legal firms, all interconnected and operating to influence and control every level of government are pervasive. They have countless thousands of people working every single day in the halls of every government office at every level of government – working against the market, hence against the majority of the population.

    I think about this in the context of the recent passionate discussions regarding bitcoin – prompted by the writing of Wenzel and North. Bitcoin or some version of it may “win” someday – and I am all in favor of market-derived money. But the forces arrayed against the market are everywhere. There is an entire elite analysis regarding just California that is only touched on in this video.

    These anti-market forces lose everything if ideas supporting decentralization and freedom “win.” They work every single day against the market, and they don’t play fair.

    Ideas have to win before the market wins. The forces arrayed against markets are pervasive.

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