Some excerpts from the document "Revisiting Plutonomy"
"Asset booms, a rising profit share and
favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to
prosper and take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20
years." (Whoopdie do.)
"The top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the United
States -- the plutonomists in our parlance -- have
benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US and
from globalization and the productivity boom -- at the expense of labor." (Hallelujah.)
"And they are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years, because the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact." (Glory be.)
That bears repitition: "The dynamics of plutonomy are still intact." That was the case before the Great Collapse of 2008, and it's the case today, two years after the catastrophe. But the plutonomists are doing just fine, thank you very much. Better than ever in some cases, thanks to our very generous bailout of their big banks.
As for the rest of the country, listen to this summary in The Economist -- no Marxist journal that -- of a study by Pew Research:
More than half of all workers today have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household. Nearly six in ten Americans have canceled or cut back on holidays. About a fifth say their mortgages are underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have moved back in with their parents. Fewer than half of all adults expect their children to have a higher standard of living than theirs, and more than a quarter say it will be lower. For many Americans the great recession has been the sharpest trauma since The Second World War, wiping out jobs, wealth and hope itself.
Let that sink in. For millions of garden-variety Americans the audacity of hope has been replaced by the paucity of hope.
The legendary correspondent Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here's mine: Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
Socrates said that to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what's happening to our political system is corruption -- a deep, systemic corruption. For more on this, I urge you to seek out the recent edition of Harper's Magazine. The former editor Roger D. Hodge brilliantly dissects how democracy has gone on sale in America. Ideally, he writes, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our alleged representatives. But voting is the beginning of civil virtue, not its end, and the focus of real power is elsewhere. Voters still "matter" of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the real power behind political influence -- money.
The article is excerpted from Hodge's new book, The Mendacity of Hope. In it he describes how America's founding generation especially feared the kind of corruption that occurs when the private ends of a narrow faction succeed in capturing the engines of government. James Madison and many of his contemporaries knew this kind of corruption could consume the republic. They knew that the life cycle of previous republics -- their degeneration into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy had been inescapable, which prompted them to heroically erect, in our Constitution, safeguards against such degeneration. This time, private and narrow personal interests would be prevented from overriding those of the general public. Or so they thought.
In fact, their efforts failed. Hardly a century passed after the ringing propositions of 1776 than America was engulfed in the gross materialism and political corruption of the First Gilded Age, when Big Money bought the government right out from under the voters. In their magisterial work on The Growth of the American Republic, the historians Morrison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg describe how in that era "privilege controlled politics," and "the purchase of votes, the corruption of election officials, the bribing of legislatures, the lobbying of special bills, and the flagrant disregard of laws" threatened the very foundations of the country.
And now the Gilded Age has returned with a vengeance
It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a "massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich." As author Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10% captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush, with those huge tax cuts for the rich, which are now about to be extended -- because both parties have by now been bought off by the wealthy. By 2007 the wealthiest 10% of Americans were taking in 50% of the national income. And today, a small fraction of the 1% of us at the top take more money out of our system than the bottom 120 million of us.
You will hear it said, "Come on, this is the way the world works." But no, it's the way the world is made to work. This vast inequality is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand; it did not just happen; it was no accident. As Hodge drives home, it is the result of a long series of policy decisions "about industry and trade, taxation and military spending -- decisions by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in concrete-and-steel buildings." And those policy decisions were paid for by the less than one percent who make the lion's share of our capitalist democracy political contributions. Over the past 30 years, with the complicity of Republicans and Democrats alike, the plutocrats, or plutonomists, have once again used their vastly increased wealth to assure that government does their bidding.
Remember that grateful Citigroup reference to "market-friendly governments" on the side of plutonomy? To see just how our system was rigged by the financial, political, and university elites, run, don't walk, to the theater nearest you showing Charles Ferguson's new film, "Inside Job." Take a handkerchief because you'll weep for the republic.
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