It happens every few generations. It’s
what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to
conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to
murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great
Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have
been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the
Reagan Revolution.
What I’m talking about here is the
rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness,
what’s either a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or a defect in
impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.
Because most hoarders never invite
people into their homes, it’s an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy
Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things:
“Recent studies of hoarding put the
prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That
means that six million to fifteen million Americans suffer from hoarding that
causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.”
That’s tough enough; people afflicted
with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially
embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential
social situations. They’re functionally invisible. But, from a societal point
of view, they’re generally only harming themselves: hoarding syndrome is
considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself.
With one giant exception: morbidly
rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or
even close to poverty.
When people with hoarding syndrome are
born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal,
psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society.
Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics
fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and
balls of string they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts,
and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.
And then, driven to continuously hoard
more and more money — that now being the object of their addiction — they reach
out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into
their greedy hands.
As historian and political scientist
Michael Parenti notes: “Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune
whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of
money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra
fames, the cursed hunger for gold.
“So, the money addicts grab more and
more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of
limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional
pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.”
It blots out their concern for their
fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science
seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their
own country and its democratic institutions.
Ultimately, they don’t care about the
damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their
obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even
die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying
everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!
We defeated Confederate oligarchs with
this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the
Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We
thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to
around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.
But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author
Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that
money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated
Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five
other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010
with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of
corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that are
called SuperPACs.
As a result, today these
morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of
captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving
deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the
impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in
the Reagan Revolution has been dramatic.
While every other developed country in
the world offers free or nearly-free healthcare to its citizens, free or
nearly-free education including college, and almost universal unionization and
a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have
forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more,
more money:
— Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of
Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing
them more than $1000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.
— Almost 12 percent of Americans, over
37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60% of us live in poverty, 201
million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians
and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “For the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a minimal
quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have
free healthcare and college.)
— More than one-in-five Americans
— 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a
mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade
level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long
attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for
billionaires.
— Fully a quarter of Americans (26
percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given
year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of
cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get
help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11
years.
— Every day in America an average
of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the
leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the
children of any other country in the world.
And these are just the tip of the
iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s forty-year-long
GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the
nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.
— Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden
virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world
(dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).
— Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than
citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for
healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and
$7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).
And we don’t get better health or a
longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of
rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of
billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. “Dollar Bill”
McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation.
— The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3,
Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.
— Our public schools are an
underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While
every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we
still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running
even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.
In the forty-two years since the start
of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code
that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and
savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich
money hoarders.
As a result, America today is
the most unequal developed nation in the world and the
situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any
pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that
could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people
working full-time to maintain today.
In the years since the Court first
began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this
handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.
As a result, Republican politicians
refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of
war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing
to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes
every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.
All because our courts and
politicians, now well-captured by rightwing billionaires, refuse to do anything
about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.
Solving this problem won’t be easy but
also isn’t complicated. Just like we did with the Robber Barons, the first step
is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the
morbidly rich having seized control of our political system.
We did this before.
As President Grover Cleveland — the
only Democrat elected during that post-Civil War period — proclaimed in his
1887 State of the Union address: “As we view the achievements of
aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and
monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to
death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully
restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast
becoming the people’s masters.”
And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the
Republican Great Depression: “For out of this modern civilization
economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon
concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps
human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting
for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”
FDR took on those “economic royalists”
and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party
renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia: “These economic royalists complain
that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said. “What
they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” He paused for a moment, then
thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the
overthrow of this kind of power!”
The crowd roared, delighted that he’d
turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while
undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter
agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to plant millions of trees
across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy
back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the
government fascist.
“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek
to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget
what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for
democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship
by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”
Cleveland’s and Roosevelt’s work now
falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding Robber Barons
have emerged from Reagan’s tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions.
It’s thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness
that’s frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy.
Our task in this time of crisis is to
create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these
wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary
to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up
monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s
debt and rebuild the middle class.
It’ll take a few years, in all
probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.
Tag, we’re it! Spread the word…
-Thom Hartmann
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