What’s at stake this election
year? Let me put as directly as I can.
America has succumbed to a
vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which
generates even more wealth, and even more power.
This spiral is most apparent is declining
tax rates on corporations and on top personal incomes (much in the form of wider tax loopholes), along with
a profusion of government bailouts and subsidies (to Wall Street bankers,
hedge-fund partners, oil companies, casino tycoons, and giant agribusiness
owners, among others).
The vicious cycle of wealth and power is less apparent, but even more
significant, in economic rules that now favor the wealthy.
Billionaires like Donald Trump
can use bankruptcy to escape debts but average people can’t get relief from
burdensome mortgage or student debt payments.
Giant corporations can amass
market power without facing antitrust lawsuits (think Internet cable companies,
Monsanto, Big Pharma, consolidations of health insurers and of health care
corporations, Dow and DuPont, and the growing dominance of Amazon, Apple, and
Google, for example).
But average workers have lost the market power that came
from joining together in unions.
It’s now easier for Wall Street
insiders to profit from confidential information unavailable to small investors.
It’s also easier for giant firms to
extend the length of patents and copyrights, thereby pushing up prices on everything
from pharmaceuticals to Walt Disney merchandise.
And easier for big corporations to
wangle trade treaties that protect their foreign assets but not the jobs or incomes
of American workers.
It’s easier for giant military
contractors to secure huge appropriations for unnecessary weapons, and to keep
the war machine going.
The result of this vicious cycle is
a disenfranchisement of most Americans, and a giant upward distribution of
income from the middle class and poor to the wealthy and powerful.
Another consequence is growing
anger and frustration felt by people who are working harder than ever but
getting nowhere, accompanied by deepening cynicism about our democracy.
The way to end this vicious cycle
is to reduce the huge accumulations of wealth that fuel it, and get big money
out of politics.
But it’s chicken-and-egg problem.
How can this be accomplished when wealth and power are compounding at the top?
Only through a political movement
such as America had a century ago when progressives reclaimed our economy and
democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.
That was when Wisconsin’s
“fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s
first minimum wage law; presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant
banks, and insurance companies; and President Teddy Roosevelt busted up the giant trusts.
When suffragettes like Susan B.
Anthony secured women the right to vote, reformers like Jane Addams got laws
protecting children and the public’s health, and organizers like Mary Harris
“Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.
America enacted a progressive
income tax, limited corporate campaign contributions, ensured the safety and
purity of food and drugs, and even invented the public high school.
The progressive era welled up in
the last decade of the nineteenth century because millions of Americans saw
that wealth and power at the top were undermining American democracy and stacking
the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to
mobilize.
We may have reached that tipping point
again.
Both the Occupy Movement and
the Tea Party grew out of revulsion at the Wall Street bailout. Consider, more recently, the fight for a higher minimum wage (“Fight for 15”).
Bernie Sander’s
presidential campaign is part of this mobilization. (Donald Trump bastardized version draws on the same
anger and frustration but has descended into bigotry and xenophobia.)
Surely 2016 is a critical year.
But, as the reformers of the Progressive Era understood more than a century ago, no single president
or any other politician can accomplish what’s needed because a system caught in the
spiral of wealth and power cannot be reformed from within. It can be changed only
by a mass movement of citizens pushing from the outside.
So regardless of who wins the
presidency in November and which party dominates the next Congress, it is up to
the rest of us to continue to organize and mobilize. Real reform will require
many years of hard work from millions of us.
As we learned in the last progressive era, this
is the only way the vicious cycle of wealth and power can be reversed.
