Money rules
Money rules. It makes the rules. That’s not exactly news. It has been true, to a greater or lesser extent, of most societies since the dawn of civilization. As far back as the 17th century Golden Age of Spanish literature, during the early stages of the transition from feudalism to capitalism when medieval nobles were being supplanted by commercial and financial elites, the great poet Francisco de Quevedo summed it all up brilliantly in a pithy, almost untranslatable verse: “Poderoso caballero es Don dinero,” or, approximately, “a powerful knight he is indeed, Lord Money.”
What is novel globally and, most especially, in the United States, is the intensity, pervasiveness, brazenness, and deep institutionalization of money’s sway. Capitalist absolutism is arguably every bit as tyrannical as was the monarchical kind. The laws of the market are seen as immutable as the divine right of kings.
In our own backyard, the Florida legislature is so influenced by business lobbyists and so beholden to corporate money it might as well put up a “for sale sign” in front of the Capitol. Those without money and lobbyists don’t have the power even to save their lives. The Florida legislature last year even refused to take a gift of free money from the federal government to provide health insurance to hundreds of thousands of people just a few rungs above the poverty line – a perverse choice many other Republican-run states also opted for.
And when Florida lawmakers decided to change the formula which determines how state money is allocated to local school districts, counties like Miami-Dade with a high proportion of poor students took the biggest hit. Coincidences sometimes occur. But as I wrote before in another context, this is not one of those times.
All this has a long and uneven history. Centuries ago, the rise of capitalism sharply increased the power of Lord Money and led to the impoverishment and even the annihilation of millions of people. Pure free market economics, for instance, turned the potato blight in Ireland from an agricultural setback to a human tragedy of mass starvation and emigration. Slavery and the slave trade were deeply implicated in the development of capitalism. Subsequently, many decades of struggle by workers, reformers, revolutionaries and romantics finally succeeded, in the years after WWII and exclusively in the West, in limiting the worst excesses to which unfettered capitalism is prone to. This new reality was expressed in its purest form in the welfare states of Scandinavia and in its most diluted version in the United States, with its New Deal and Great Society.
For the first time in history, there were many societies in which a majority of the common people could live with a modicum of economic dignity and security and with a lessened fear of the accidents and inevitable course of life – unemployment, injury, illness, widowhood, old age. This was a great accomplishment for humanity, despite all its flaws and limitations. It seemed to belie the dire predictions of Malthus concerning population growth dooming human well-being as well as the class polarization and pauperization of the masses that Marx foresaw as the inevitable future of capitalism.
In recent decades, however, capitalist absolutism has been busy turning much of what had seemed so humane, solid and irreversible – guaranteed pensions, unionization of the labor force, progressive taxation, expansion of the middle class, job security, a rising standard of living, all forms of aid to the poor and the vulnerable – to dust. Desperation and destitution have returned in a big way. Ironically, capitalist absolutists in the vein of Reagan, Thatcher, George W. Bush, and nearly the entirety of today’s Republican party seem hell-bent on proving Marx right.
The 2008 financial debacle presented some countries like Greece with seemingly no other choice but harsh austerity. But, as Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has pointed out, even a tiny country like Iceland could and did exercise the choice of not going along with program of the powerful, which overwhelmingly favored creditors over debtors, and attained better results than those that did.
In contrast, the United States, the nation with the greatest degrees of freedom in economic policymaking, given the size of its economy and the unique global role of its currency, opted to bail out the biggest creditors, the small elite of Wall Street financial titans most responsible for the whole mess, while leaving the rest to sink without a life-jacket. The image of millions of people with home mortgages “under water” as a result of government priorities evokes the disaster of Katrina.
And the capitalist absolutists are not satisfied yet. What is one of Gov. Rick Scott’s top priority for the coming Florida legislative session? To cut taxes more; this in a state with no income tax and a plethora of unmet needs. At the national level, the Eric Cantors and Marco Rubios continue to slash away at the tattered remains of the social safety net.
Capital absolutism has yet to run its course. Like the free market dogma that doomed so many Irish in the nineteenth century, the economy that absolutist capitalism has wrought in the twenty-first century is one that, in the damning words of Pope Francis, kills. For the absolutist capitalist wolves on Wall Street and Capitol Hill, the byword seems to be: “Let the carnage continue.”
