Fight back. We did it before.
“There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy,” Teddy Roosevelt insisted in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1907. Roosevelt saw the harms of the first Gilded Age and sought, with public support, to end them:
The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods…. National sovereignty is to be upheld in so far as it means the sovereignty of the people used for the real and ultimate good of the people; and state’s rights are to be upheld in so far as they mean the people’s rights. Especially is this true in dealing with the relations of the people as a whole to the great corporations which are the distinguishing feature of modern business conditions.
One hunded plus years later, we are in a second Gilded Age. Or haven’t you noticed?
Robert Reich has:
Billions in campaign contributions.
Jim Crow 2.0.
Workers exploited.
Child labor has returned.
Staggering inequality.
Oh, and facsism.
We beat back the first five at the beginning of the 20th century. Reich believes we can do it again. (I wish I had his confidence.)
Teddy Roosevelt did not hesitate to go after the masters of passive income.
Many men of large wealth have been guilty of conduct which from the moral standpoint is criminal, and their misdeeds are to a peculiar degree reprehensible, because those committing them have no excuse of want, of poverty, of weakness and ignorance to offer as partial atonement. When in addition to moral responsibility these men have a legal responsibility which can be proved so as to impress a judge and jury, then the Department will strain every nerve to reach them criminally. Where this is impossible, then it will take whatever action will be most effective under the actual conditions.
In the last six years we have shown that there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows; and we are strengthening the hands of those who propose fearlessly to defend property against all unjust attacks. No individual, no corporation, obeying the law has anything to fear from this Administration.
But for “malefactors of great wealth” Roosevelt promised to bring the law to bear.
The rich man who with hard arrogance declines to consider the rights and the needs of those who are less well off, and the poor man who excites or indulges in envy and hatred of those who are better off, are alike alien to the spirit of our national life…. There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy, for there is a peculiar unwholesomeness in a social and governmental ideal where wealth by and of itself is held up as the greatest good. The life of a man who accumulates a vast fortune in ways that are repugnant to every instinct of generosity and of fair dealing… [and] the vapidly useless and self-indulgent life of the inheritor of that fortune… [are] contemptible in the eyes of all….
The UAW President Shawn Fain agrees 117 years after TR’s speech.
Where the power of the law can be wisely used to prevent or to minimize the acquisition or business employment of such wealth and to make it pay by income or inheritance tax its proper share of the burden of government, I would invoke that power without a moment’s hesitation….
Choose your future. Or let someone else choose it for you.
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