The House Financial Services Committee is a furnace in which legislation affecting Wall Street is forged. It's also a hotbed of money from individuals and political committee committees connected to the financial sector.The data in this article illustrates how capitalist style "democracy" works to serve a tiny rich minority of people who essentially "own" the US economy. Of course, true democracy has very little relationship with how our government actually functions. The ruling class have transformed the meaning of this concept through constant repetition throughout all institutions of society. The concept of democracy now means something which is quite the opposite of its original meaning. It no longer means rule by the people; instead, it means rule by the rich, a "plutocracy". It is an archetypical Orwellian term.
The perversion of the concept of democracy, I think, has to do with the revolutions in the US and France against the rule of the landed aristocracy. The rising bourgeois class at that time needed the support of ordinary people--artisans, peasants, and other laborers in order to overthrow the aristocrats. They allowed the long suppressed dreams of a classless, people oriented rule to be expressed in order to garner the support of ordinary people.
Dreams of real democracy and social justice were articulated by people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine.
...Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people...the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. ...Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly. The kind of republican government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva, was a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau's principles. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau)And Paine wrote:
It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice)However, once the aristocracy was defeated, the new capitalist class took over and imposed their rights of property and their appropriation of wealth produced by working people. In place of real democracy, they imposed a pseudo form of representation by elections. Originally, only male people of property could vote, but over the years this class has gradually relented to pressure from below to extend the suffrage to working people and women as they learned how to effectively manage the election process and the control of information through their ownership of the media.
Unfortunately for them, they have been saddled with the "democratic" ideological legacy which they used hypocritically to gain power. Their solution was to redefine the concept to mean something other than its original definition and to disguise it behind the facade of carefully managed elections.
