Soc crtq 2 - lab report example

Soc crtq 2

Article Critique WHO RULES AMERICA By G. William Domhoff In the article, the has taken a commanding tone right from the start while describing how power is being controlled by the rich minority group in United States. According to the author, there are generally four categories of stakeholders in the US who have influence over the political decisions taken. One is the corporate community which comprises the large income producing property owners who control the national scenario. The growth coalition comprises the subcategories of corporations and they control the local government. The third category is defined in the ‘pluralism’ theory that the general public controls the government through the voting and electing of governmental candidates. The last category is describes power to be controlled by a collection of interest groups that care for the economic and social welfare of the people.
The author argues that the people running the corporate community and the growth coalition are the actual power dominators and describes them as the social elite. They account for only 1% of the total population yet their hold 15. 7% of the total income.
The focus of this article dangles around the identification of the people who control the ‘superficial democracy’ in United States. The author cites several studies done to investigate whether the power elites hold influential governmental offices. The results clearly show that these ‘top level’ people not only hold such offices, they also influence the policies to be made in the corporate world’s welfare. People have the right to go against these practices and interest groups have tried to protect their rights, however, the top class maintains such terms that the lower class has to operate under them.
The author further argues that the general public in the past has been able to extort the corporate world into giving them their rights by forming trade unions, observing strikes, staging sit-ins etc., nonetheless the corporations caved-in not because of the public pressure but mostly either due to inner conflicts between power groups or due to personal reasons to support the labor community. The author completely rejects the pluralists’ theory and concludes that power is dominated only by the rich.
Throughout the article, the author has maintained a negative outlook by continually calling the democracy in US as a ‘fake’, although not without justification. It is indeed true that the wealthy are getting increasingly wealthy, while the policies have no or little effect on the poor class. This is because the policy makers are the rich themselves; hence they dominate the nation and its people. This negativity is openly condemned by the author by pointing specifically the flaws in the system. However the author fails to mention any solutions or advice to the unaware public to solve this problem. Power sharing is the solution, but how to implement it, how to design and instill it into the system, and how to remove the rich from the dominating positions they hold, are all questions left unanswered by the author. Yet hope is given in the fact that changes occur over a period of time. Hopefully with time and perseverance of the general public, current power and political frameworks would be brought down and a true democracy can be practiced unhindered by the corporate rich.
Article
” Who Rules America” Power and Politics in the year 2000, by G, William Domhoff, pp. 241, 246-249, 286-289, McGraw-Hill