Back when men were men and women knew their place, when a white sheet was a badge of honor, there was a region of this country that was ruled, brutally, by a minority--after slavery had been abolished--and after the 14th and 15th Amendments gave all men (not women) the right to vote. Flaming crosses and worse enabled the white minority to rule over 'the colored.' Meanwhile, monopolies overworked white workers in other parts of the country.
The post-Civil War period experienced an explosion of riches--in a few hands, especially the most ruthless. Black people were re-enslaved, through sharecropping, Jim Crow and the prison system.
The post-Civil War period must be the model for the Tea Party, whose activists famously shouted "We Want Our Country Back!" No wonder they see Obama as an abomination: he's like one of those ex-slave, black Senators or Congressmen, run by corrupt carpetbaggers exploiting the South during cursed Reconstruction. Worse, he's better educated than they are.
Post-Reconstruction is the model for the new society they'd like to construct--post-Reconstruction, pre-Progressive Era. It's the reforms and expansions of the franchise beginning with Progressive era that the radical Republicans want to excise.
Before Progressivism, there was no regulation of business: trusts proliferated, monopolies became the industrial norm, and wealth shot upward into fewer and fewer hands.
The great Hudson Valley estates are evidence of their extremes of wealth. Now, our new Roman Senators are more visible on screen than on great estates, but their fortunes dwarf the Gilded Age.
A minority is attempting to rule the rest of us: the Republican majority in the House, elected by fewer votes than the minority Democrats, is holding the rest of government hostage, demanding it "negotiate" with them, i.e. give in to their demands.
If Republicans succeed, if Obama blinks, and uses the occasion to negotiate a "grand bargain" that cuts taxes for the wealthy, cuts Social Security and other earned benefits, as well as further shredding the safety net, then we'll be hurtling back to the 19th century.
We already have monopolies like Monsanto and oligopolies like Wall Street, all of them enabled by government. Unions are almost as helpless as they were before the New Deal. We already have inequalities of wealth as great or greater than in 1900.
Can a determined minority, with money and media, overcome the rights, safeguards and programs Americans won through terrible struggles, starting with the wars on strikers, followed by the sit-downs at factories and later in buses and lunch counters, and despite white terror, won at the ballot box? Will we really let ourselves be poisoned, our land and water despoiled, our labor devalued? Will we allow them to impoverish us?
It happened in Fifth Century Rome; it happened again in the 1870's; it could happen here--with consequences far worse than Romulus Augustulas's defeat, Rome's depopulation, or brutal Jim Crow: think planetary destruction.
Showing posts with label New Deal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Deal. Show all posts
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Extreme Wealth Corrodes Democracy
The United States was, for a short time, a democracy, if only of white male property owners--much like early Athens. Counterrevolution began with the Constitutional Convention.
Democratic forces were predominant in other eras in the US, but they didn't last. There was the Democracy of Andrew Jackson and brash new western men. There was the early radical Republicanism of the Civil War. There was the Progressive era: the overweening power of the trusts was busted, at least temporarily. There was the New Deal, extending through the Great Society, in which government made it its business to extend equality and its benefits.
But each democratic era has been followed by a period of reaction and hardening elite rule. However, up until now, America has always had an upwardly mobile society: the son of the worker, farmer, or clerk becoming the new rich. And always before, the elite made way for them, even if they hated "upstarts" and "new money."
Today, class mobility in America is lower than in class-bound Britain; American society is becoming rigid and stratified--though no one will admit they are anything but "middle class." The difference between the new financial wealthy and everyone else has never been greater; CEO's are paid 100's or 1000+ times more than their workers, a greater margin of difference than other developed nations. Inequality increased even more rapidly after the so-called Great Recession and subsequent "recovery" under Obama's leadership. More than 90% of the gains since 2009 have gone into the pockets of the extremely wealthy, while unemployment hovers around an official 7.8% and is nearly twice that when counting workers who have given up looking for work.
The intransigence of conservative Republicans is not surprising, nor the timidity of Democrats: they both reflect the changing balance of power in the US. Unions have declined to single digits of the private sector workforce, and Republicans have sharpened their knives to eliminate the power of public sector unions, as well.
Meanwhile, state legislatures and Congress promote austerity, and cut programs benefiting the less affluent, while attempting to lower taxes and eliminate regulations that irritate the resurgent wealthy.
Why not? Politicians easily accumulate wealth from their connections. Anyone in government, even idealistic Obama staff, can legally line his/her nest by cooperating with the moneyed, our Roman Senators. None live in ghettos, or working-class neighborhoods. None see or hear the people who are hurt by the wealthy bias in media and politics.
And the media, largely owned by our Roman Senators, naturally reflects their bias; so even the poor tend to accept the agenda of the wealthy, insisting that austerity is necessary and even Social Security benefits must be cut.
This isn't just the swing of the pendulum; this smells like "takeover" by the very wealthy, like the Roman Senators' monopoly of power in Fifth Century Rome--before its fall.
Democratic forces were predominant in other eras in the US, but they didn't last. There was the Democracy of Andrew Jackson and brash new western men. There was the early radical Republicanism of the Civil War. There was the Progressive era: the overweening power of the trusts was busted, at least temporarily. There was the New Deal, extending through the Great Society, in which government made it its business to extend equality and its benefits.
But each democratic era has been followed by a period of reaction and hardening elite rule. However, up until now, America has always had an upwardly mobile society: the son of the worker, farmer, or clerk becoming the new rich. And always before, the elite made way for them, even if they hated "upstarts" and "new money."
Today, class mobility in America is lower than in class-bound Britain; American society is becoming rigid and stratified--though no one will admit they are anything but "middle class." The difference between the new financial wealthy and everyone else has never been greater; CEO's are paid 100's or 1000+ times more than their workers, a greater margin of difference than other developed nations. Inequality increased even more rapidly after the so-called Great Recession and subsequent "recovery" under Obama's leadership. More than 90% of the gains since 2009 have gone into the pockets of the extremely wealthy, while unemployment hovers around an official 7.8% and is nearly twice that when counting workers who have given up looking for work.
The intransigence of conservative Republicans is not surprising, nor the timidity of Democrats: they both reflect the changing balance of power in the US. Unions have declined to single digits of the private sector workforce, and Republicans have sharpened their knives to eliminate the power of public sector unions, as well.
Meanwhile, state legislatures and Congress promote austerity, and cut programs benefiting the less affluent, while attempting to lower taxes and eliminate regulations that irritate the resurgent wealthy.
Why not? Politicians easily accumulate wealth from their connections. Anyone in government, even idealistic Obama staff, can legally line his/her nest by cooperating with the moneyed, our Roman Senators. None live in ghettos, or working-class neighborhoods. None see or hear the people who are hurt by the wealthy bias in media and politics.
And the media, largely owned by our Roman Senators, naturally reflects their bias; so even the poor tend to accept the agenda of the wealthy, insisting that austerity is necessary and even Social Security benefits must be cut.
This isn't just the swing of the pendulum; this smells like "takeover" by the very wealthy, like the Roman Senators' monopoly of power in Fifth Century Rome--before its fall.
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