Below we’ve embedded the new video, along with the text of the video.
Your life could get a lot more dangerous. Republican appointees on the Supreme Court seem poised to strip away basic safety standards for our workplaces, our food, our air and water.
Congress gives federal agencies the authority to enact regulations that protect us in our daily lives. Congress defines the goals, but leaves it up to the health and safety experts in those agencies to craft and enforce regulations. I know regulations don’t sound very exciting, but they’re how our government keeps us safe.
Remember when lots of romaine lettuce was recalled because it was causing E.coli outbreaks? That was the Food and Drug Administration protecting us from getting sick. Working in a warehouse? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets standards to ensure you don’t breathe in dangerous chemicals like asbestos. Enjoying the fresh air on a clear, sunny day? Thank the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting the amount of pollution that can go into our air.
These agencies save lives. Since OSHA was established a half-century ago, its workplace safety regulations have saved more than 618,000 workers’ lives.
Republicans have been trying to gut these agencies for decades. Now, with the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority solidly in place, they have their best chance yet.
The Court claimed that Covid isn’t an “occupational hazard” because people can become infected outside of work, and that allowing OSHA to regulate in this manner “would significantly expand” its authority without clear Congressional authorization.
This is absurd on its face. Section 2 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 clearly spells out OSHA’s authority to enact and enforce regulations that protect workers from illness, injury, and death in the workplace. Congress doesn’t need to list every specific workplace hazard before OSHA can protect workers.
What this ruling tells us is that the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court are intent on gutting the power of agencies to issue regulations.
This term, the Court will also hear a case regarding the EPA’s authority to enforce the Clean Water Act. If the Court undermines the EPA’s authority, it will put our environment – and our health – at risk. Remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because it was brimming with oil, acid, and factory chemicals? That’s what we may be returning to.
And what’s next? Will they gut the Federal Trade Commission and put us all at risk of being defrauded? Target the Securities and Exchange Commission and deregulate the financial sector, sparking another financial crisis?
Beware. If Republican appointees on the Supreme Court succeed in gutting regulatory agencies, we all lose. This agenda is anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-environment. The only thing it’s good for is corporate profits.
Some democracies fall apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, but most are taken down by their own own greedy oligarchs.
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / CC
It’s important now, in light of both world events and the way the Republican party has been captured by a small group of rightwing billionaires and white supremacists, to introduce Americans to an 18th century word that is new to most people alive today, at least in the context of partisan politics.
That word is: faction.
The crises caused by faction were a big deal at the founding of our republic. Faction was a matter of conversation among average people.
Prior to Reagan’s deregulation and tax-cutting binge, America didn’t have a single billionaire and the average income of American CEOs—restrained as they were by a top income tax rate of 74 percent—was only around 30 times that of the average worker.
It was the same when the South was seized by an oligarchic faction of plantation owners and turned from a whites-only democracy into a neofascist oligarchy in the 1840s and 1850s.
Factions are destroyers of democracies.
It was a faction of oligarchs led by Vladimir Putin that took over Russia after that country adopted Milton Friedman’s neoliberal policies of privatization, low taxes, and deregulation, producing an explosion of billionaires who weakened the new Russian democracy by pouring outsized chunks of their money into Russia’s politics.
Russian President Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine was caused by a deficiency of democracy in Russia; whenever a country is taken over by a single person or a small group of people, such terrible decisions are inevitable. History is littered with them.
And it all starts with a faction of wealthy people corrupting politics.
Faction always leads to the “doom loop” of democracy, which is why Aristotle warned about faction as much as does Bernie Sanders. It happens pretty much the same way all over the world, all across the centuries.
Here in America, it’s something the Founding generation, Lincoln’s generation, and FDR’s generation each had to deal with. FDR called the faction of his day the “Economic Royalists.”
Today, we’re again facing the doom loop caused by what the Founders called faction.
The faction-caused Doom Loop goes like this:
Government makes the rules that regulate taxes and corporations, and uses those rules to prevent wealthy people or businesses from corrupting the government itself.
These “guardrails of democracy” include taxation that’s high enough that oligarchy doesn’t emerge, along with tight regulation of money in politics.
Those corporations and individuals who mostly own/control the marketplace want to “throw off the shackles of government.”
So they get together and pour money into the political process, essentially buying all the politicians and judges they need.
Then their wholly-owned legislators and judges remove laws or change their interpretation to weaken or even eliminate those guardrails of taxation and regulation that protect democracy.
Removing the taxation and regulation guardrails increases the profits of the corporations and the wealth of the morbidly rich oligarchs.
They then recycle a small portion of that “new” money back to the politicians to either maintain the status quo or deteriorate the guardrails even further.
Eventually the guardrails become so weak that the government’s ability to control the excesses of the faction breaks down and the oligarchs take over, transitioning the democracy into oligarchy.
Oligarchic government then, typically within a decade or so, turns into a strongman autocracy, as we see with today’s Russia and almost saw with Trump’s presidency.
This analysis is not, by the way, a radical position or one do you need a college degree to understand.
President Jimmy Carter explained it to me on the radio seven years ago, and any reading of history finds it scattered through the accounts of the Revolutionary, Civil War, and New Deal eras.
And with a billionaire in the White House for four years, with several billionaires in his cabinet, signing billionaire-friendly executive orders and corruptly devastating the EPA, IRS, and several other federal agencies, we approached the brink.
To put it in straightforward terms:
Powerful rich people motivated primarily by a desire to increase their own wealth and power—when they act together as a faction to accomplish that goal, like Lewis Powell suggested to America’s business leaders and wealthiest men in 1971—will always try to change a democracy into an oligarchy.
Investing in politicians and think-tanks, it turns out, is the single most effective investment a faction of oligarchs can make in a republic once its guardrails are sufficiently weakened to allow it to happen on a large scale.
Consider how, prior to Reagan’s deregulation and tax-cutting binge, America didn’t have a single billionaire and the average income of American CEOs—restrained as they were by a top income tax rate of 74 percent—was only around 30 times that of the average worker.
Congress routinely passed laws that were widely popular, like Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, because back then politicians were more responsive to the people than to the morbidly rich.
Today, after Reagan’s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts, we have hundreds of billionaires, and CEO pay in some industries runs a thousand times that of their workers. And legislation with approval rates as high as 80 percent—like funding education and healthcare—are blocked in the Senate.
Democracies were growing and strengthening around the world from the time of the American Civil War until the 1980s. But, around that time, country after country began to consider Reagan/Thatcher style neoliberalism.
Some countries, like China, explicitly rejected neoliberalism and trickle down economics, and instead adopted Alexander Hamilton’s “American Plan.” As a result, their economies and their middle-classes grew. China’s middle class today, for example, is larger than the population of the entire United States.
But far too many others, encouraged by their elites, took the plunge and drastically cut taxes on the morbidly rich, cut business oversight and regulation, and loosened their laws regulating money in politics.
By 2005, as Reagan’s neoliberalism spread around the world, countries that were losing their middle classes (like America has over the last 40 years) began to flip into oligarchies and then autocracies.
Democracies around the world began to backslide.
Like the USA, country after country has followed Reaganism/neoliberalism to set aside limits on corporate and oligarch participation in politics, with predictable results. As Freedom House noted in their most recent annual report:
“The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. A total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 25 improved.”
America, they note, is one of the countries in a “decline” of democracy.
While a few of those democracies in decline fell apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, most are being taken down by their own internal factions, typically the nation’s own oligarchs.
In 1776 the United States was the first major experiment in democracy in the past several thousand years and, although it was badly flawed by both slavery and a lack of rights for women, the idea of even the minority of white men deciding the future of their country was a revolutionary departure from thousands of years of kings, popes and brutal warlords.
The era of the Enlightenment, particularly throughout the 1700s, brought vigorous discussions of whether democracy was even possible, or if it would always be doomed to collapse back into oligarchy and autocracy.
The recurrent concern of the people of that era was that wealthy factions would arise and corrupt any democracy back into something resembling a kingdom with wealthy lords and autocratic rulers.
As Lord Bolingbroke wrote in his Memoirs, published in 1752 (the year after Bolingbroke died and James Madison—who would later midwife our Constitution—was born):
“A Party then is, as I take it, a set of men connected together … pretending to have the same private opinion with respect to public concerns; … but when it proceeds further, and influences men’s conduct in any considerable degree, it becomes Faction.”
And what are factions that have seized control of political parties almost always all about? Bolingbroke laid it out with a clarity that still resonates today:
“In all such cases there are revealed reasons, and a reserved Motive. By revealed reasons, I mean a set of plausible doctrines, which may be styled [called] the creed of the party; but the reserved motive belongs to Faction only, and is the THIRST OF POWER. [emphasis Bolingbroke’s]
When greedy people rise up as a faction to try to seize a government, Bolingbroke wrote, they always claim to be acting in the best interests of the people.
Consider today’s Republican Party, backed by billionaires and openly opposed to union rights while reaching out to blue-collar voters, as you read Bolingbroke’s words:
“The creeds of parties vary like those of sects; but all Factions have the same motive, which never implies more or less than a lust of dominion, though they … generally are covered with the specious pretenses of … zeal for the public, which flows, in fact, from Avarice, Self-Interest, Resentment and other private views.”
Bolingbroke was widely read among the Founding generation, and Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” echoed his sentiments in Federalist 10, in which he warns us of the dangers of faction.
First, he defines the term “faction,” to separate it from the notion of just being a political party or a special interest group:
“By a faction,” Madison writes in Federalist 10, “I understand a number of citizens … who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse [opposed] to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, factions aren’t political parties or advocates for the public good. They are, pure and simple, politically active wealthy people opposed to the public good and thus a poison in the bloodstream of a democracy.
Madison devotes the entirety of Federalist 10 to warning both his colleagues and future generations of Americans against them. Controlling faction, he wrote, was the most important function of the Constitution:
“To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”
Even the most famous British historian of that era, author of The History of England David Hume, wrote in his essay Of Parties in General (1741) about the dangers of wealthy people getting together to form a faction that could take over and corrupt a government, all to increase their own profits and wealth:
“As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws.”
By “contrary to that of laws,” Hume meant that a faction—a group of wealthy and powerful people—would do everything they could to corrupt the political process and weaken or destroy laws that might restrain their greed:
“Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other.”
Hume, being a conservative of that era, was skeptical that any democracy could ever survive the assault of political parties that had been taken over by factions of the rich:
“And what should render the founders of parties more odious is, the difficulty of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root in any state. They naturally propagate themselves for many centuries, and seldom end but by the total dissolution of that government, in which they are sown.”
And, wrote Hume, once they’ve taken over a “free” government, they’re even harder to get rid of than weeds. Eventually, if not stopped, they’ll consume the only thing that could restrain them, the government itself:
“They are, besides, plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and … they rise more easily, and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishments, to eradicate them.”
As President Jimmy Carter told me seven years ago when we were discussing the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision:
“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
We’re quite far down the road to wealthy factions so corrupting our government that it has ceased to operate as a functioning republican democracy.
Our best hope for stopping a further slide into oligarchy and ultimately strongman autocracy is to pass legislation that will regulate money in politics.
Tragically, every Republican in the US Senate except Lisa Murkowski voted against strengthening our voting rights and removing some of the power of money in politics.
Hopefully such legislation can be revived this year, although with both Manchin and Sinema now openly taking money from the same billionaire faction that funds the GOP, it’s going to be a hell of a lift.
Nonetheless, reversing the core of Reaganism’s oligarchic agenda is the only way to stop the ongoing faction-driven collapse of American democracy. If we are to break out of the doom loop of democracies that consumed Russia 20 years ago, we must:
Regulate great wealth by raising personal and corporate taxes back to where they were before Reagan.
Restore the hundreds of good-government-protecting regulations on money in politics Congress passed and were signed into law by Presidents Ford and Carter (and in almost every state legislature) but overturned in 2010 by the Supreme Court in their corrupt 5:4 Citizens United decision.
We must continue to work and speak out against faction and do everything we can to make America “a more perfect union.” Otherwise, our nation will be consumed by what Bolingbroke called the “THIRST of POWER.”
This article was first published on The Hartmann Report and published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
In a new video from Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and accomplished author, the phenomena we are all experiencing on a daily basis, such as incredible high gas prices, crazy energy prices, more out-of-pocket at the grocery store, and what sure looks like price gouging and price hikes on almost everything, he takes on the root of it all, in other words: Inflation.
Naturally, with all of this being so obvious to you and me there’s no shortage of folks to explain the purported causes, from media outlets like The Washington Post, to Biden administration officials and pundits from left, right and center.
One explanation you will seldom hear, however, is that much of the pain we are experiencing is due to monopoly power, the inequality growing out of the economic concentration of the American economy and the ever increasing concentration of financial and market power to a relative handful of big corporations.
This perspective is not only refreshingly direct, but it actually has a remedy attached, unlike the usual reasons given, such as economic policy, government spending, irresponsible actions by the federal government and federal reserve and so on. While all of these are certainly good candidates for finger pointing, they generally have only one response attached that is suggested as a remedy: higher interest rates.
“How can this structural problem be fixed? Fighting corporate concentration with more aggressive antitrust enforcement. Biden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil companies, and he’s appointed experienced antitrust lawyers to both the FTC and the Justice Department.”
– Robert Reich
The idea that corporate greed, massive corporate profits that keep rising, in spite of supply chain disruptions and other issues, could be at the root of the problems, and that aggressive use of antitrust law might just be an appropriate response to the deeper structural issue is spot on.
A real change via antitrust might help to reinstate tough competition, weed out greedy businesses and even slow down the increasing consolidation of the economy, and the concept comes across as a welcome revelation, or at least beats a job and economy crushing series of Paul Volcker-style (huge) interest rate hikes.
There’s an even bigger challenge on the horizon, however, which is the sheer size of the biggest tech firms, who make the companies mentioned in the video, such as Coke, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, meat conglomerates and the pharmaceutical industry seem tiny by comparison. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, during the pandemic the behemoths such as Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have surged.
This is evidence of even less competition than in the sectors mention and presented in the video, and yes, the energy sector, consumer goods, food prices are all showing little competition and that situation is getting worse.
At least we have Mark Zuckerberg, from a recent YouTube interview with Lex Fridman, with his sunny personality shining through, saying that “what if playing with your friends is the point [of life]?, and further “I think over time, as we get more technology, the physical world is becoming less of a percent of the real world, and I think that opens up a lot of opportunities for people because you can you can work in different places you can stay closer to people who are in different places removing barriers of geography”. At least, then, there’s that. Thanks Mark.
The video text reads well also on the page. Charts, graphics and the charismatic voice of Robert Reich are worth the watch, but here is the full text, in case you prefer:
Inflation! Inflation! Everyone’s talking about it, but ignoring one of its biggest causes: corporate concentration.
Now, prices are undeniably rising. In response, the Fed is about to slow the economy — even though we’re still at least 4 million jobs short of where we were before the pandemic, and millions of American workers won’t get the raises they deserve. Republicans haven’t wasted any time hammering Biden and Democratic lawmakers about inflation. Don’t fall for their fear mongering.
Everybody’s ignoring the deeper structural reason for price increases: the concentration of the American economy into the hands of a few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.
If the market were actually competitive, corporations would keep their prices as low as possible as they competed for customers. Even if some of their costs increased, they would do everything they could to avoid passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices, for fear of losing business to competitors.
But that’s the opposite of what we’re seeing. Corporations are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. Corporate profit margins hit record highs last year. You see, these corporations have so much market power they can raise prices with impunity.
So the underlying problem isn’t inflation per se. It’s a lack of competition. Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits.
Take the energy sector. Only a few entities have access to the land and pipelines that control the oil and gas powering most of the world. They took a hit during the pandemic as most people stayed home. But they are more than making up for it now, limiting supply and ratcheting up prices.
Or look at consumer goods. In April 2021, Procter & Gamble raised prices on staples like diapers and toilet paper, citing increased costs in raw materials and transportation. But P&G has been making huge profits. After some of its price increases went into effect, it reported an almost 25% profit margin. Looking to buy your diapers elsewhere? Good luck. The market is dominated by P&G and Kimberly-Clark, which—NOT entirely coincidentally—raised its prices at the same time.
Another example: in April 2021, PepsiCo raised prices, blaming higher costs for ingredients, freight, and labor. It then recorded $3 billion in operating profits through September. How did it get away with this without losing customers? Pepsi has only one major competitor, Coca-Cola, which promptly raised its own prices. Coca-Cola recorded $10 billion in revenues in the third quarter of 2021, up 16% from the previous year.
Food prices are soaring, but half of that is from meat, which costs 15% more than last year. There are only four major meat processing companies in America, which are all raising their prices and enjoying record profits. Get the picture?
The underlying problem is not inflation. It’s corporate power. Since the 1980s, when the U.S. government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated. Most are now dominated by a handful of corporations that coordinate prices and production. This is true of: banks, broadband, pharmaceutical companies, airlines, meatpackers, and yes, soda.
Corporations in all these industries could easily absorb higher costs — including long overdue wage increases — without passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But they aren’t. Instead, they’re using their massive profits to line the pockets of major investors and executives — while both consumers and workers get shafted.
How can this structural problem be fixed? Fighting corporate concentration with more aggressive antitrust enforcement. Biden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil companies, and he’s appointed experienced antitrust lawyers to both the FTC and the Justice Department.
So don’t fall for Republicans’ fear mongering about inflation. The real culprit here is corporate power.
Comparing the Wealth of Jeff Bezos to those with less than $10,000 is like comparing Jupiter to a Golf Ball… Graphic by Lynxotic / Adobe
Income Divides So Vast We Cannot See The Forest For The Money Trees…
Income inequality has been talked about a lot over the past couple decades. The vast inequities between those who make the most and those who make the least amount of money have caused a noticeable change in the American populace. Class divides have become a significant topic of debate; socioeconomic status can dictate one’s entire wellbeing; and Socialism, once considered a quasi-dirty word in America, is now an ideology championed by several politicians and an enormous number of young voters.
As it turns out, our anxieties over the concept are well grounded, and class divides may even be worse than our minds are able to comprehend.
The Incomprehensible Disparity and Absurdity of Income Inequality:
According to data from the 2018 Sussie Global Wealth Report and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the number of people worldwide who have less than $10,000 total 3.2 billion. The bulk of those people fall in the $1,000-$10,000 range. Staggeringly, though, 1.5 billion of them have under $1,000. This is an enormous base, showing that the massive majority of people in the world are living on strained finances.
Bottom Net Worth of each bracket
How Many Adults
Who
$100
1,500,000,000
Subsistence Farmer
$1,000
1,700,000,000
Median U.S. Renter
$10,000
1,300.000,000
Median U.S. Family with no College
$100,000
436,000,000
A.O.C. after a few years in Congress
$1 million
40,000,000
UK’s current P.M.
$100 million
49,000
Exxon CEO
$1 billion
2,700
Berlusconi
$10 billion
150
Musk, etc.
$100 billion
2
Bezos and Gates
**Data: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2018, Bloomberg, Federal Reserve
The difference between the billions of people at the bottom of this income pyramid, and the handful of people at the top is almost too much to truly conceptualize. To visualize it is to compare golf balls to planets. The number of people holding the majority of wealth is infinitesimal, hardly perceptible compared to those who live in fiscal straits.
Of course, there are certain variables that this global data may not take into account. For example, countries that do not have monetary economies or egalitarian societies that place less emphasis on individual earnings may fall into lower brackets, but they may measure their wealth in different ways.
Systemic Problems Rooted in Politicians’ Undeniable Marriage to Capitalism Portends a Bleak Future
However, from the Western perspective of a developed nation, this data is quite shocking. In the United States alone, income equality is alarming, almost too much to really wrap one’s head around. As aforementioned, the numbers are impossible to visualize in their entirety. While we can see people living in poverty and signs of inequity, the true extent of the issue is borderline unfathomable. We cannot imagine billions of people compared to figures in the single digits. The problem is evidently systemic at this point, the result of nearly 250 years of capitalism and hundreds of choices made by politicians, businessmen, and everyday citizens along the way.
Furthermore, while there has been increased awareness and conversation about this issue in recent years, the immediate future does not look promising of any reformation. In 2018, the first time ever in America, billionaires paid lower tax rates than the working class. This is in no small part due to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a cornerstone of President Trump’s trickledown economics plan.
Thus, the lower class citizens of our country are not just earning less than our billionaires, but they are also forking over a larger slice of their paycheck to the government. It all adds significant insult to the injury that is our persistent income inequality issue.
Although we cannot visualize or even really even begin to understand income inequality all together, what we can see is that there is a form of unfairness at hand, that resources are distributed unevenly, and that many people are getting the short end of the stick that falls from the almighty money tree.
