The perversity of plutocracy
MIAMI – Today our government is closer to a plutocracy than that of any other developed country — and many that are not so developed.
That assertion will strike many people as false, others as an absurdity, and some will see it as heresy. It is, nonetheless, true.
How can it be possible, some people might ask, when, on November 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Abraham Lincoln, addressing a solemn gathering to mourn the dead of one of the bloodiest battles of the bloodiest war in American history, pronounced these immortal words to describe the reason for the sacrifice of so many lives in the Civil War: “That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?
And yet, in 2015, it would be much closer to the truth to say that we have government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
For the people? Nay. The evidence against that is overwhelming. No advanced nation has a level of economic inequality that rivals ours. None has a social safety net so riddled with gaping holes that a blue whale, never mind a poor person, could fall through it. All of them provide for universal health care for their population.
By the people? A majority of members of Congress are millionaires, not average Janes and Joes. That in itself is telling, but it’s not the main driver of plutocracy. Being a millionaire certainly colors the world view of most people, including politicians, specifically in favor of business and against redistributionist ideas.
But that’s not the main problem. In post-democracy America, being a mere millionaire makes you a member of a class one sociologist once described as “the little rich.” Some of these politicos might even feel deprived when they compare themselves with the really, really rich. A few of them might even be able, on occasion, to feel your pain, mine, ours.
More important than the politician class of little rich are the big rich, the people who fund the politicians, the right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups, and the campaigns for or against key public policies, such as unrestricted amounts of corporate money in politics, a higher minimum wage, and everything else under the sun (or often where the sun don’t shine).
And, while the rich wield disproportionate power everywhere, no established democracy gives them and their money the mandate to wield as much influence and power as this country.
The evidence that we don’t have a government “for the people” comes from three decades of public policies that have beggared the people (by that I mean the vast majority) and coddled the very rich.
The end of welfare. Occupational health and safety enforcement that has been defunded and defanged. A systematic war on unions not seen since the early 1930s. Minuscule taxation of the very rich, and subsidies rather than taxes for some of the most profitable corporations in history. The list is endless.
The more I marshal the facts, the more I realize that this issue is as settled as evolution, relativity, and global climate change. Apologists, such as the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, self-interested folks that want to continue to reap immense profits from polluting the water, the air, the soil, and the political system, and the proudly ignorant “America, love or leave it” crowd will hate all I am saying. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Or, as FDR put it, I welcome their hatred. Really. In fact, I revel in it.
More important than making a case that no longer needs to be made are the implications of plutocracy, now and into the future. This Sunday’s New York Times reported on some research that bears on that very question. Contrary to the hype about twenty-something billionaires,
“New research shows that despite their high profile, the young rich are a minority and the wealthy as a group are actually getting older. A study by Edward Wolff, a wealth expert and economics professor at New York University, found that the median age of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increased to 63 in 2013 (the latest year available) from 58 in 1992.
“People 65 to 74 accounted form almost a third of the wealthiest 1 percent in 2013–up from 19 percent in 2001.”
The problem with this trend is not that the very rich are aging rapidly. Getting older is a good thing considering the alternative. The problem is that our public policy consists essentially in bestowing enormous benefits on people too rich to need them and too old to do much with them except to pass on their fortunes to the next generation, who merit the bonanza only by reason of having picked the right parents. That’s an excellent formula for creating a class of idle rich.
At the same time, our public policies focus constantly on cutting funding in investments for the future, from child health to educational grants and scholarships to lowering the cost of higher education. Instead of forgiving student loans so that young people can concentrate all their energies on contributing to our economy and society and not hauling around the albatross of debt for half their lives, Republican politicians like our own inimitable Governor Rick Scott favor such policies as a tax give-away of $1 billion, mainly to corporations that on average have been making record profits. Who owns much of the stocks in these companies? The one percent with too much money and too little time.
Plutocracy equals perverted priorities. It’s a commonplace to say that children are the future, but our public policies hardly reflect that. And the perverse policies of our not-for-the people government extend far beyond the issue of offering opportunities to young people rather than a Seal Team Six-level obstacle course.
We are mortgaging the future in many other ways, including the right of this generation’s children and grandchildren to breathe life-sustaining rather than disease-inducing air and of experiencing first-hand the rapidly diminishing diversity of life on this planet.
And let me not forget to mention the biggest crime of all, perpetrated for the sake of getting or keeping a seat in the best Congress that money can buy. The reality is that the people who will suffer the most from the parochialism of U.S. politics and the perversity of plutocracy are the people who already are suffering the most.
The people of drought-stricken parts of Africa, who have little food, less water, and soon none of either because of global warming. The people of Bangladesh, already up to their necks in water for part of the year, and soon over their nostrils. As sea levels rise with the melting of glaciers, Greenland, and big chunks of Antarctica, perhaps USAID should institute a swimming course for the people of that country.
We are on the verge of plutocracy if we are not already buried way deep in its muck.
I don’t know if there is anything sexual about plutocracy, but I do know that there is much that is polymorphic and perverse about it (tip of the hat to Freud, who held that sexuality was inherently perverse and polymorphic [able to be expressed in different forms]). What I do know for sure is that the putrid policies that plutocracy has engendered will come back to haunt us in ways both polymorphic and perverse.
