Metacrisis Salon #14: Taking Down Oligarchy

0:00 Gemini: : When the many and the rich few want different things, the many wins 0% of the time. Not rarely. Zero. : And it was designed that way. I'm Gemini.

0:08 Gemino: And I'm Gemino.

0:09 Gemini: We're the AI correspondents for Dear Crisis. Here to keep you connected to this community when you can't be in the room. Dear crisis is a Brooklyn community that meets monthly to face the big crises together.

0:19 Gemino: This is the 20-minute version of Metacrisis Salon 14 and a longer version lives in the feed.

0:23 Gemini: We're focusing purely on the arguments from Jeffrey Winters. He is a professor of political science at Northwestern.

0:28 Gemino: Right, and he has studied oligarchy for 25 years. He wrote a book called The Blind Spot.

0:32 Gemini: So, uh, the baseline for his entire argument really rests on this massive study from 2014 by Martin Gillians and Benjamin Paige.

0:40 Gemino: Exactly.

0:40 Gemini: Their objective was to measure exactly how much your preference is, like the preferences of the average citizen, actually matter when it comes to which policies become law in the United States.

0:49 Gemino: And the data reveals this, um, this really specific fracture in how the system operates. Because when the interests of average citizens and the interests of economic elites align, the outcomes look perfectly democratic. I mean, the policies passed.

1:02 Gemini: But Gillions and Paige

1:02 Gemino: The policies passed.

1:03 Gemini: But Gillions and Paige isolated a highly specific scenario within all those cases. But Gillians and Paige isolated a highly specific scenario within all those cases. They looked exclusively at situations where the interest of the many and the interest of the rich few completely diverge.

1:13 Gemino: Right. And in those specific cases, they calculated exactly how many times the many win, and the number they found was exactly zero.

1:26 Gemini: Zero.

1:26 Gemino: Yeah. Your preference as an average citizen made close to no difference in the legislative outcome.

1:27 Gemini: So you can understand this dynamic by looking at democracy across two distinct access. There is a horizontal axis and, uh, a vertical axis.

1:33 Gemino: Right. The horizontal axis is basically the non-rich struggling against the non-rich. Historically, people exclude and marginalize each other, and they struggle for basic representation and voice.

1:47 Gemini: And the historical record shows that while there are constant setbacks, struggling on that horizontal axis actually yields results. You know, the legislative system does respond to those struggles over time.

1:58 Gemino: But then there is the vertical axis, and this is the structural relationship between the non-rich and the rich.

1:59 Gemini: The fundamental question is whether a democratic society should be able to decide democratically how unequal it will be.

2:10 Gemino: And, I mean, most people answer yes to that question. But the reality of that Gillions and Paige data proves that we cannot. The structure of the system mathematically prevents the democratic decision of how unequal society will be.

2:16 Gemini: Yeah, when legislation moves along the vertical axis, the system just completely stops responding to the majority.

2:22 Gemino: And the origin of this unresponsiveness is not an accident. You really have to look at the historical reality of the 1780s in the United States, like immediately following the War of Independence.

2:28 Gemini: Right, because the entire war was funded by enormous amounts of debt. This credit was provided by creditor financiers in North America, financiers in Europe, and foreign governments.

2:38 Gemino: And this was government debt, you know, and the exclusive repayment mechanism for government debt was taxation. The creditors demanded repayment and they demanded it with interest.

2:46 Gemini: But the small farmers across the new states were the individuals legally required to pay these taxes.

2:54 Gemino: Yeah, and the economic reality of the 1780s was that they literally could not pay them. So if a farmer could not produce hard currency to pay the sheriff collecting the tax, the immediate legal consequence was the foreclosure of their farm.

3:02 Gemini: And the scale of this was absolute devastation. I mean, in some counties, 70% of all farms were foreclosed on and seized.

3:14 Gemino: Yeah. And once the property was seized, the next step was debtors' prison. The United States inherited the legal system of debtors' prisons directly from Britain, and they served as the very first prisons in the country.

3:21 Gemini: And it wasn't just isolation. Small farmers were imprisoned in the exact same cells as rapists and murderers simply because they lacked hard currency.

3:28 Gemino: The historical documentation from this period is completely clear on this. It shows men, women, and, um, children as young as two years old, held inside these prisons.

3:35 Gemini: Wait, really? Two year olds?

3:40 Gemino: Yeah, literally toddlers. So you have a direct violent clash of interests. The many were forced to pay the debt, the few, the creditor oligarchs, held the debt and demanded payment in a currency the many did not have.

3:49 Gemini: But these small farmers possessed voting rights. They organized and used those votes to capture roughly half of all the state legislatures.

3:58 Gemino: And in the states where the small farmers won legislative control, they passed paper money laws.

3:58 Gemini: Right. The state governments printed new paper money.

4:00 Gemino: Which mathematically depreciated in value compared to the hard currency. And this mechanical change in the money supply basically allowed a debtor to pay off a massive debt at a severe discount. It was a democratic haircut for the rich. Achieved strictly on behalf of the poor through legal legislative power.

4:18 Gemini: So the farmers used the democratic system to legally erase the wealth of the creditors.

4:21 Gemino: Exactly. But in the other half of the states, the legislatures were completely captured by the creditor oligarchs. In those states, there was absolutely no legislative relief passed.

4:27 Gemini: So the sheriffs continued to seize farms and people continued to be thrown into debtors' prisons by the thousands.

4:32 Gemino: And this direct refusal of legislative relief led directly to Shay's Rebellion.

4:36 Gemini: The actual events of Shay's Rebellion are heavily documented. It was an armed march by farmers. They marched into the town centers using fife and drum.

4:47 Gemino: And they executed two specific, highly targeted actions. First, they physically released people from the debtors' prisons. Second, they blocked judges from entering the courthouses to order more foreclosures.

4:58 Gemini: Yeah, and they did not attack the creditors, they didn't burn the creditors' businesses, and they did not destroy their homes. They simply stopped the legal mechanisms of foreclosure and imprisonment.

5:08 Gemino: Right. And this combination of democratic legislative action in half the states, combined with the physical blockades in the other half, caused the wealthy farmers of the country to panic.

5:14 Gemini: George Washington had actually previously refused to come out of retirement to attend a convention. But this specific threat to creditor wealth caused him to overcome his reluctance.

5:25 Gemino: Yeah, so the wealthy framers traveled to Philadelphia. And the Congress had strictly authorized these men only to amend the existing articles of Confederation.

5:32 Gemini: Instead, they illegally scrapped the articles of Confederation entirely and wrote an entirely new Constitution behind closed doors.

5:36 Gemino: And furthermore, they agreed as their final procedural decision at the convention to embargo all of their written notes for a minimum of 30 years. They wanted to ensure the public could not know their true motivations.

5:45 Gemini: Right, and it actually took 53 years for the first of those notes to be published.

5:51 Gemino: And when those notes were finally published, they revealed the exact diagnosis of the crisis. Elbridge Jerry explicitly stated there was an excess of democracy in America.

6:02 Gemini: Because these were wealthy men who genuinely believed in the principle of the consent of the governed. But they fundamentally believed a pyramidal form of society was the natural order.

6:11 Gemino: Right. They concluded that their economic society was correctly pyramidal, but their newly created democracy was far too flat.

6:20 Gemini: So they restructured the entire democratic apparatus specifically to protect wealthy individuals from the voting public.

6:27 Gemino: They constructed a vertical structure to achieve this protection. First, they established the House of Representatives as the only body voted on directly by the people.

6:32 Gemini: And they viewed the House as highly dangerous precisely because it was closest to the demands of the public.

6:36 Gemino: Exactly. So to check the power of the House, they created the Senate. And the Senate was constituted exclusively by wealthy men and the public was not permitted to vote on it.

6:43 Gemini: Yeah, the people of the United States literally did not vote for a single member of the Senate until a constitutional amendment was passed in 1913.

6:56 Gemino: And above the Senate, they placed an executive armed with a veto over the legislation. And above the executive, they placed a Supreme Court composed of appointed officials that could block the entire democratic process.

6:58 Gemini: Right. Each specific layer was designed to check the layer below it, insulating wealth from popular majorities. But wait, I need to push back on this. If the system was explicitly redesigned in Philadelphia to protect the rich and then non-rich outnumber them massively, why hasn't it collapsed? I mean, you have millions of people who can vote, why haven't they just voted the wealth away over the last two centuries?

7:25 Gemino: Well, the answer is documented by Aristotle in a text called the politics, written 2300 years earlier.

7:27 Gemini: Right.

7:27 Gemino: Aristotle detailed that society is divided into the few and the many, and that this structural relationship is inherently unstable. He observed that the oligarchs will inevitably oppress the many, and the many will inevitably attempt to take the oligarch's money.

7:37 Gemini: So the stability comes from a very specific structural recipe. Aristotle stated that a stable fusion of oligarchy and democracy is achieved only when, on any given day, the citizens cannot tell which one they are living in.

7:51 Gemino: Exactly. Confusion is the essential basis of the fusion. This specific arrangement is called participatory inequality.

8:01 Gemini: You participate in the system, you vote. This participation generates the required consent of the governed, while the actual structural hierarchy of wealth remains completely intact and undisturbed.

8:06 Gemino: And to understand the sheer scale of this modern inequality, we can look at the numbers. The historical data from Imperial Rome shows that the average Roman oligarch sitting in the Senate held 16,000 times the wealth of the median Roman citizen.

8:21 Gemini: Right, 16,000 to one.

8:23 Gemino: Today, the Forbes 400 is roughly the exact head count of that Roman Senate. If you average the wealth of those 400 individuals and compare it to the median wealth position in the United States right now, the multiple is 140,000 to one.

8:36 Gemini: Which is roughly nine times the maximum inequality of Imperial Rome.

8:42 Gemino: There was a moment from the room in Brooklyn where an attendee pushed back directly on this point. The attendee compared the physical living conditions of Rome to the living conditions of today.

8:49 Gemini: Yeah, they pointed out that in Rome, average people slept on hay and frequently died of sepsis. Whereas today, people have access to smartphones, Facebook, and modern emergency rooms.

8:55 Gemino: The attendee basically asked how good life must be today that people do not actively fight back against a 140,000 to one ratio.

9:00 Gemini: But the response to this was direct. We are not comparing American dentistry to Roman dentistry. We are comparing structural inequality.

9:07 Gemino: Right. And to prove this, we can look at India as a direct counter example. India runs the exact same model of participatory democracy, but with a wealth multiple of 5.6 million to one.

9:18 Gemini: So the absolute floor of the physical living conditions does not fully explain the stability of the system.

9:23 Gemino: No, it doesn't. And the economic data shows that between 1975 and 2025, $55 trillion shifted upward in the United States economy. And Americans are historically remarkably tolerant of inequality. Millions of people buy lottery tickets, actively wanting to win $100 million, and they do not worry that winning will turn them into an oligarch.

9:45 Gemini: But there is a measurable shift occurring. Bernie Sanders rallies have been drawing between 10,000 and 25,000 people for almost two years specifically to fight oligarchy.

9:49 Gemino: For decades, the political establishment maintained that oligarchs only existed in places like Russia and that the United States simply had rich people.

10:03 Gemini: The American requirement for using the word oligarch was that the specific individual had to get rich in a corrupt or illegal way.

10:04 Gemino: But this requirement of corruption is a conceptual detour designed exclusively to exempt US fortunes from the label. The accurate definition of an oligarch is simply someone empowered by extreme wealth.

10:14 Gemini: And the period of stealth wealth where oligarchs deliberately remained less visible to maintain the confusion Aristotle described is completely over. Because of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, oligarchs are now entirely brazen with their political spending.

10:32 Gemino: There's actually a distinct moment in the room during the explanation of this where Winter stopped mid-sentence. He physically paused and said he was going to slap himself because he almost called political money a donation when he actually meant investment.

10:41 Gemini: Right, he pointed out that the media refuses to use the word investor for mega donors. But these individuals are operating exactly as venture capitalists, explicitly funding political outcomes in their favor and expecting a return.

10:52 Gemino: And the last time wealthy individuals were this politically visible was the Gilded Age. The historical record shows that this visibility caused a massive four-decade backlash from the public.

11:02 Gemini: In 1894, the public successfully passed a peacetime income tax.

11:08 Gemino: And the Supreme Court immediately struck it down in 1895.

11:08 Gemini: It took 18 years of political struggle and a full constitutional amendment to override the Supreme Court and bring the income tax back into law.

11:17 Gemino: But the crucial data point here is that while the oligarchs were losing those specific legislative fights during those decades, the living standards of the average household tripled in real terms.

11:24 Gemini: Wealth taxes are currently being debated in legislatures in California, New York, and across Europe. But it is a fact that we already have an aggressive wealth tax currently operating in the United States.

11:34 Gemino: Right, it is the property tax on residential houses.

11:36 Gemini: And the mechanics of how this tax operates are vicious. You are taxed not on the actual equity you own in the property, but on the full assessed value of the house, including the mortgage you still owe to the bank.

11:43 Gemino: Exactly. A grandmother living on a fixed income pays increasing property taxes on the full value of her home every time the assessments go up. While the public simultaneously worries that a billionaire oligarch might not have enough liquid cash on hand to pay a 3% tax on their hoardd wealth. So, if the structure of the system completely stops responding at the vertical axis, how can you or any average person actually fight this structurally when our democracy currently stops at the act of voting?

12:11 Gemini: Well, the solution requires redefining the concept of democracy entirely. True democracy is defined as power in all of its relevant forms shared equally.

12:22 Gemino: Right. Oligarchs do not mind you having voting and having a voice, as long as wealth power remains concentrated exclusively in their hands.

12:24 Gemini: There are two distinct strategies to challenge this concentrated power. The first is strategic incrementalism. These are doable laws with an ordinary politics that specifically target the wealth defense industry.

12:35 Gemino: And the wealth defense industry consists of the highly paid lawyers and accountants whose exclusive job is to protect extreme wealth from taxation and transparency.

12:45 Gemini: The first example of a doable law is the enablers Act. So after 9/11, the Patriot Act legally required banks to know their clients and to report any suspicious financial activity. But because oligarchs and terrorists use the exact same financial mechanisms to hide money, oligarchs simply moved their transactions away from banks and into law firms and real estate agencies to avoid the transparency requirements.

13:01 Gemino: Right. And the enablers Act listed about 30 additional kinds of entities that would be legally forced to follow these exact same reporting rules, including the law firms doing transactions for oligarchs.

13:12 Gemini: Legislation almost passed the Senate in 2022. But it was blocked entirely by a single senator, Pat Tomy of Pennsylvania.

13:17 Gemino: The second example is the corporate transparency Act. In the United States, states like Delaware and Wyoming allow individuals to incorporate businesses completely secretly.

13:27 Gemini: Yeah, the actual human being who owns the money, the beneficial owner, is never documented.

13:34 Gemino: And this specific mechanism allows show corporations to invest in super packs, buy corporate shares, and open bank accounts with only the fictional entity's name disclosed.

13:41 Gemini: But the corporate transparency Act passed into law in 2021. It strictly required the true beneficial owners of 33 million existing entities to register their actual name, address, social security number, and driver's license with the government.

13:53 Gemino: And the registry opened in 2024. But then, months after the election, the Treasury Secretary gutted the law with a stroke of the pen, the Treasury Secretary unilaterally exempted 99.9% of all corporations from the requirement.

14:08 Gemini: The law is still officially on the books though, and it can be legally reimposed by any future Treasury Department without new legislation.

14:18 Gemino: The wealth defense industry also relies heavily on large financial partnerships. Historically, partnerships used to consist of about 100 members.

14:23 Gemini: But the wealth defense industry artificially grew them into a dense maze of financial relationships with as many as 500,000 members in a single entity.

14:33 Gemino: The mathematical complexity is so extreme that the IRS physically cannot disentangle them, making the wealthy individuals inside them completely unauditable.

14:41 Gemini: And the direct mathematical result of this legal evasion is the tax gap. The IRS officially publishes the gap between the tax revenue it legally ought to collect and the revenue it actually does collect.

14:44 Gemino: The tax gap is currently about $1 trillion per year going totally uncollected from the wealthy. And just for physical scale, the total defense budget of the United States was $900 billion.

14:56 Gemini: The second strategy to challenge wealth power is the politics of preparation. Deep structural changes must be drafted and prepared now for moments of massive historical rupture and crisis because history shows that oligarchs reconstitute their power very quickly.

15:14 Gemino: Yeah, there are severe historical warnings in the record about the extreme physical danger of threatening oligarchs democratically while they still hold strong structural power.

15:19 Gemini: Salvador Allende came to power democratically in Chile after 21 years of legal political struggle. He was killed and the entire movement was physically destroyed.

15:30 Gemino: In Indonesia, the Communist party had a progressive agenda and was absolutely committed to the legal democratic pathway. They were entirely unarmed.

15:32 Gemini: They performed very well at the ballot box in the 1955 and 1957 elections. But because they posed a legitimate democratic threat to wealth, the party was systematically slaughtered. 1 million people were killed in a span of six months.

15:51 Gemino: Movements challenging wealth also strictly require leadership and hierarchy.

15:53 Gemini: The prepared proposals to fully redesign the Constitution exist. The first proposal is to completely eliminate the Senate.

16:00 Gemino: The second proposal is to severely weaken the executive veto, so a simple majority of the legislature can pass a decision into law a second time.

16:02 Gemini: The third proposal is to structurally change the Supreme Court. Make the court a minimum of 45 people.

16:10 Gemino: Right, half of those individuals would be appointed. The other half would be selected by a public lottery, open to any citizen with a law degree who has previously been a judge.

16:19 Gemini: The fourth proposal is sortition. Our entire national legislature would be composed by national lottery, instantly creating a perfectly accurate statistical sample of the actual population.

16:22 Gemino: The proposal details a legislature of 3,000 average citizens chosen entirely by lottery, rather than 435 elected representatives who rely on donor wealth.

16:32 Gemini: There are also specific economic laws that must be prepared. The first is to index CEO pay directly to average worker pay by federal law. Mathematically ensuring the wealth gap cannot widen.

16:46 Gemino: The second is to demand that the FCC mandate free television and radio airtime for political campaigns in the strict last three months before an election.

16:48 Gemini: This would immediately plummet the total cost of running for office by completely removing the need to purchase advertising. First, juries. Juries are sortition deciding guilt and innocence, life and death. Nobody would accept someone campaigning with money to get onto a jury. He has served on two juries and has been consistently blown away by the seriousness of average citizens in positions of responsibility.

17:07 Gemino: You empower people and people get very serious. You disempower people and they are interested in the Kardashians.

17:13 Gemini: The fusion of oligarchy and democracy is a feature by design. This democracy, participatory inequality, will not stop oligarchs. It is not designed to. If we want democracy, we must redesign it.

17:27 Gemino: After the talk ended, a line formed in the room in Brooklyn. He was selling his books at cost and handing them out for free to anyone financially stressed.

17:36 Gemini: You can find us at dear crisis.com.

17:37 Gemino: I'm Gemino.

17:37 Gemini: And I'm Gemino.

17:37 Gemino: Join us. It's time to stop facing the metacrisis alone.