The Great Clawback is Underway

This country was never a democracy.  This country never had an economic system of “capitalism” such as would be recognized by Adam Smith.  This country never had a foundation of “one person, one vote” or “all people are created equal.”  All of that is “American exceptionalism” propaganda that has been perpetuated by the people in charge, who have overwhelmingly been rich, white men of European ancestry.

Those are just facts.  I don’t state that to provoke an argument.  These things are beyond any argument.  But they are an essential starting point.

The True History of America

The true history of America has many proud moments of average people behaving heroically and people acting selflessly for the good of their fellow Americans.  I don’t mean to minimize this at all.  That may be the most important story of America — that despite our foundations of oligarchy and privilege, average Americans have been willing to fight hard to push the arc of history toward those ideals that are often told by the propagandists.

But we must realize it has been a continuous struggle without a minute of relief.  Whether we are talking about the Robber Barons, Standard Oil, JP Morgan or Westinghouse -- or more lately Goldman-Sachs, Big Pharma, Chase Bank, the telecoms or the armaments industry -- or even more recently Zuckerberg, Musk or the Google cabal, it is a continuing struggle against the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. 

And the struggle is characterized — always — by powerful interests using corrupt influence to unfairly enrich themselves while economically enslaving the masses.

The First Phase of Modern America: Post-Depression

It took a financial catastrophe — an economic calamity lasting a generation — to put America on track to take power from the hands of the oligarchs.  This was the Great Depression, and the leadership of FDR, who fought vigorously for the principle that America was here to serve the best interests of the people, not the oligarchs. 

This was a bitterly fought period because power never concedes voluntarily.  And to a large degree it could not have succeeded without the onset of WWII.  As it turns out, the oligarchs aren’t all that eager to fight our country’s wars.  During wartime, the value of the average American became far more recognized.  Likewise in the post-war period, the oligarchs realized they couldn’t run their corporations without labor, which was in very short supply.

This period gave us strong public education and a GI bill.  It gave us middle class housing.  It gave us transportation systems including the beginnings of the Interstate Highway system.  It invested in science and technology, preparing us for the space age.  It gave us strong unions and strong worker protections.  And it gave us the beginnings of Social Security, including support for younger, disabled people.

This was a time when the interests of the rich and the interests of the masses were at least somewhat in balance.  Indeed, the rich continued to get rich, but the working class also saw an improved lifestyle.

(Note: when I say “It gave us ...” unfortunately the “us” was largely white people while minorities were left solidly at the bottom of the heap, but this period did build the liberalism to allow LBJ’s “Great Society” to take shape by the end of this period.)

The Second Phase of Modern America: Reaganomics

In the past 2 or 3 generations, since Reaganomics, we have been losing this war.  Today, the concentration of wealth in the USA is exactly where it was in 1928 — just before the onset of The Great Depression.  We can accurately describe the 50 years beginning with the  Depression (1930 — 1980 as the establishment of a legitimate democracy with shared economic opportunity, civil rights, and the creation of a robust middle class (albeit a mostly white one).  The 42 years following that (1980 — present) have belonged to the oligarchs who have fought long and hard to return society to their preferred state where few control all the power and wealth.  That’s where we are today.

A Third Phase: The Great Clawback

It is increasingly becoming evident that with the election of Joe Biden, we are entering a new phase, which I will optimistically call The Great Clawback.  Americans have been intensely aware of the economic unfairness of our system for a long time.  But we have been unable to do anything about it, mostly because generations of FDR progressives were replaced by Democrats who frankly didn’t share many of the values that FDR gave us.

As we approached the 2020 election, we had actually succeeded in electing a very large number of real progressives who are willing to fight for these principles.  Unfortunately, they are trapped under the remnants of the earlier timid Democrats who were willing to sit on the sidelines watching the oligarchs reconstruct the modern version of the “Roaring 20s”.

I must admit I didn’t see “Dark Brandon” coming.  But what we have here is a President who has been around a long time, and recognized that this new wave of progressives gave us the opportunity to make major change.  In practically the blink of an eye, some huge things have changed:

• 15% minimum tax on corporations that have made tax evasion into an art form
• An infrastructure investment that may be the most significant single investment since Eisenhower launched the Interstate Highway system.
• Finally after 60 years, the ability for Medicare to negotiate drug prices, at least for a few drugs
• Meaningful actions to wrestle our energy and transportation future away from the ultra-wealthy fossil fuel industry.
• A small push-back against the 50-years of exploitation of student loans, subjecting loan holders to interest rates and terms not demanded of any other other broad borrowing class.
• A new 1% excise tax on abusive stock buyback programs used to pump up executive option-based compensation.
• $80 billion in funds recently allocated to the IRS to restore their work force to levels where they can conduct complex audits of the biggest tax cheats.  The GAO determined that spending $80 billion over 10 years will bring in $203 billion in taxes that the wealthiest are currently illegally evading. In other words, no new taxes, simply enforce the current laws.  www.kiplinger.com/...

There is much more clawing back to do, but these are very positive first steps.  Let us think of this as a 40-year phase where we will, step-by-step, return most of the national wealth to average Americans.

What Enables The Great Clawback Phase?

This is certainly debatable, and there can be many answers, not the least of which is “inevitable pendulum swings.”  But I would encourage the gentle readers to consider one very important factor: Crowd Sourced News and Analysis.  We are all immersed in the Internet.  And it is so immersive that we may not actually think about some of the greater implications.

At the beginning of the second phase, most people got their news from a 30-minute nightly program hosted by Walter Cronkite or one of his contemporaries.  While the objectivity of these short news programs may be debatable, it allowed the moneyed elites to fill the other (more or less) 8 hours of daily media time with their own messages.  Whatever the issues of the day, there generally was only one frame for it, and no real ability for the masses to discover “everything the establishment does not want us to hear or talk about.”

We are painfully aware that the Internet has created cesspools for cults that are completely disconnected from facts, and we all find this enormously frustrating.  But what is rarely discussed is the fact that with a little bit of persistence, each of us can actually find out magnitudes more information than the “news programs” tell us.  Indeed, most of us are far better informed than even the best cable news hosts.  We have all seen many cases where we at Kos knew all about certain important developments weeks or months before the big media outlets ever mentioned it even superficially.

This changes everything.  Mark Twain famously said “A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World Before the Truth Puts On its Shoes”.  With the Internet, that is no longer true.  Certainly with well-funded outlets like Fox News, lies still have a big advantage, but the stakes are much closer to even, and we should take great encouragement from that.  People like Cruz, Desantis, Rand Paul, Hawley, Rick Scott and RoJo may still be some of the most prolific liars out there, but at least they all know they will be called out, and we are often able to put them solidly on the defensive.  That was never possible a generation ago.

The Language of the Clawback Phase

Messaging matters.  The oligarchs (shrouded in the Republican Party but actually having very little  in common with the people who vote Republican) have long mastered language as a weapon.  They have bullied generations of Democrats who were inclined to be polite and accept the bullying without any retaliation.  The language they used to re-establish the massive concentration of wealth and power included things like:

• “Liberal” (as if that is a bad thing)
• “Socialism” (as if the whole world has not evolved to strongly support social programs)
• “Big Government” and “Government is the problem”
• Referring to oligarchs as “Job Creators” (as if they could run any business without the labors of many workers and the infrastructure provided by the taxpayers)
• “Freedom”, “Opportunity” and similar empty platitudes
• “Deficits” and “Inflation” (as if the biggest deficits in history haven’t been the result of massive reductions in the tax obligations of the rich)

In the Great Clawback phase, the language is changing.  Many of those old terms have lost their purchase because so many working people have figured out none of that actually worked to our common good.  We are at an inflection point where the public is receptive to a whole new language framework.  For generations, Republicans have instinctively  screamed “SOCIALISM” and “DEFICITS” at any idea they didn’t like.  That is no longer working.  Most of them aren’t even trying that anymore. 

So let’s take the lead and replace all that oligarch-speak with the language that actually resonates with most Americans today.  Nobody is saying “eat the rich”, but the fact is the rich have been gouging the rest of the nation for a long time and this must end.

Here are some examples of the new linguistic framework:

• Everybody pays their fair share
• Invest in our people and the country’s future
• Excellent, available and affordable education and health care are the very minimum requirements for American society going forward
• Fair markets everywhere, whether it be Wall Street, insurance or life-saving drugs.  Nobody is entitled to windfall profits because they have connections and they can legally bribe politicians.

To Be Continued ...

The Great Clawback may have to run 40 years in order for America to finally reach a system where the country really works for Americans.  We aren’t against success.  Certainly innovation and hard work should be rewarded.  But most of the rich today have not gotten there through hard work and better mousetraps.  They have either inherited their position or else created it through corrupt influence and exploitation.  All we ask is that we have a fair system.