Barons of the Gluttonous Age
Who we’re actually fighting and why and a smattering of how
As they say, good things don’t last. Technically, it’s “all good things come to an end” but who has the patience these days to be exact when you can just paraphrase.
[Sidenote #1: I know it’s way too early for a sidenote, but y’all know I’m a rhetorical rulebreaker, an expository expressionist, a compositional contrarian. SO! Sidenote: I have what some would call an awful memory. Which is to say it is NOT exacting. I remember mood and feeling more than detail and particularity. This makes it hard to appear smart and I put some amount of pressure on myself to appear smart because I was raised in a family that valued intelligence more than most things. (Subsidenote: I also have a father who has an incredible memory for detail so my sense of inadequacy runs deep.) That said, I’m quite convinced that my mood and feeling memory is quite accurate, that my emotional intelligence leans into the higher half of the scale, and that the gist of a thing is a perfectly fine stand in for the thing itself (I’m not talking mathematics or physics here.) Basically, I’m arguing for the spirit of accuracy. This is different from Colbert’s “truthiness,” by the way, because “the spirit of accuracy” is objective rather than subjective - the accuracy references the world rather than my internal feelings about the world which is the definition of “truthiness”. But, obviously, this aside has gone on far too long and my feeble attempt to pretend that a smudged memory is a good memory is pretty weak to begin with. It’s one reason I enjoy writing as a mode for expressing myself because I have the time and space to look things up and ensure accuracy. Blah blah. Sorry. Therapy session complete.]
Jesus, that got away from me. Sorry, as I was saying: Good things don’t last. And that’s true of America right now. I know, I know America is too complicated to be good. But I’d argue, all things considered, we’re living in the freest, richest, most informed, and powerful culture that’s ever existed in human history and prehistory. I mean that’s true globally to a large degree and other wealthy countries do many things better than we do. But truthfully, we’re all blessed to be alive at this time in history, if for no other reason than vaccines, antibiotics, surgical prowess and broadly protected civil rights (even if they aren’t distributed as fairly as they should be.)
All that said, we’re also living in a dangerous time where the richest, most powerful, and diabolically uninformed (we could say short-sighted, were I to be charitable, but I’m well past charitable at this point) are the ones in charge. And that’s freaking a lot of us out right now. It’s stressful, anxiety inducing, and, to me at least, feels like I’m huffing a miasma of impotence.
So let’s focus on who’s behind this and the perspective that might actually enable us to beat it.
Who’s ruining shit? Billionaires.
Why are they doing it? Because they fear us.
What can we do? Prove their fear is justified.
Bit O’ Background
For 8+ years, the center and left, in response to the Make America Great Again slogan, have been asking “when exactly was America great?”
We now have enough data to know the answer: Post Civil War and Pre WWII America.
Trump clarified this himself when tweet-touting his plans for wanton tariffs: “The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our Country. Then we switched over to Income Tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!”
[Sidenote #2: Please note that America is ALREADY wealthy. Incredibly so. The reason we don’t feel wealthy is that the wealth we have has been distributed unequally. We have the money, it’s just in the pockets a tiny portion of our society.]
For those who aren’t American history buffs and/or need a short refresher, the time of the tariffs Trump is referring to was post Civil War America, known commonly as the Gilded Age (roughly 1870s-1910s). It was a period in which America moved from a disjointed agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse. This was largely due to technological innovations that had the reciprocal benefits of the newly built factories producing more goods and those goods to be dispersed more efficiently on newly built railroads. More stuff faster – an economist’s wet dream.
Our people did prosper. Real wage growth from 1860 to 1890 was 40% and spread across the increasing labor force. The average annual wage for industrial workers (including children notably) rose from $380 in 1880 to $584 in 1890, a gain of 59%. Sounds pretty good.
[Sidenote #3: What is not factored into that income growth is the stark difference between agrarian poverty and urban poverty. While both are brutal, the rural poor can eke out a living off the land outside the monetary system. The urban poor, on the other hand, are dependent on money to survive and thus dependent on employers, i.e. industrialists, i.e. proto-billionaires.]
During this time, things were particularly good for the ultra wealthy. The names that adorn many of our civic landmarks – parks, arts halls, universities, etc. – come from this era: Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, Guggenheim, etc. These folk came to be collectively known as the Robber Barons and they amassed personal wealth of unfathomable scale. For instance, in 1913, John D. Rockefeller’s personal wealth was estimated at almost 3% of US GDP.
Lipstick on Coal Miner
But a peak behind the curtain shows that despite rising wages, life was still short and brutal during the Gilded Age. It was a time of unfettered capitalism which is to say lots of money was made on the backs of labor. You don’t really need to look much further for proof of the rampant inequality than that it was in this era that Karl Marx invented Marxism - the revolutionary notion that the people should control the “means of production.” Why? Because the Robber Barons controlled the means of production and treated people like replaceable cogs in a human gristmill. There were no child labor laws, no OSHA regulations, no worker’s comp, no 40 hour work week, no minimum wage, no environmental protection laws, no workplace discrimination laws. It was a brutal time to be a worker and a lovely time to be an unethical capitalist.
You will also have noticed from that Trump quote above that he calls out the income tax. The first income tax was implemented in 1913 with a highest marginal rate (HMR) of 7%. So those Robber Barons from the 1870s on were paying zero income taxes and the US government was primarily funded by tariffs (which, of course, were paid by consumers). The wealthiest were the least troubled by government revenue collection methods (see regressive taxation). Things changed when the US entered WWI. To fund the war effort the HMR rose to 77% in 1918. By 1929, it was back down to 24%. Enter the Roosevelt New Deal and World War II and, between 1941 and 1963, the HMR hovered between 81%-91%. (For reference, our current HMR is 37%.)
MAGA Disagrees with Trump
So now we have an itty-bitty better understanding of the era in which Trump thought America was great.
[Sidenote #4: I’m going to ignore that it was also an era in which women, LGBTQ+ folk and folk of color were not granted equal rights under the law. Not the subject of today’s screed. It is noted. It is understood.]
Let’s take a step back and try to get a gander of the big picture that constitutes our current crisis.
In the late 1800s, America industrialized under a capitalist model. This did a lot of good for a lot of people by providing more opportunity and more avenues for income. It also made a handful of people stupendously wealthy. And it also engendered a new version of sharecropping in which the working class were horribly abused in the pursuit of profit and had almost no protection against the capitalist class (please see the bloody labor movement in US history.)
Then, during the greatest run of American economic force (roughly 1940s-1960s) – the era that put our nation on the map as a global leader in innovation, wealth, military prowess, and influence – we taxed the living fuck out of our wealthiest citizens. This is the period when boomers were young and full of gusto and faith in the American experiment (sans its white supremacist and patriarchal underpinnings). Home ownership boomed, the middle class boomed, access to college boomed, standards of living boomed. Economically speaking, it was a great time to be an American by almost all standards. Oh and we still had rich people. The rich never really go away; they have enough money to stick around.
Here’s the thing: I believe most Trump voters want to go back to the 1950s economically when the middle class was profoundly supported and everyone had a shot at a decent standard of living. Meanwhile, Trump’s donor class wants to go back to the 1900s when wealth and governmental power worked in lockstep to keep the hoi polloi in their place – grist in the capitalist mill.
Filthy Rich / Filthy Politics
It’s my contention that our current oligarchs are not doing this just to stay rich. They’re doing it to lock in their status as untouchable. What happened to Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, shot to death in the street by (purportedly) Luis Mangione is a sign of the times. Billionaires can justify their wealth however they want - hard work, brilliance, acumen, blah blah - but deep down they know that their wealth is obscene and deep deep in their guts they know their position is unearned and unjust and little tendrils of guilt flit about their brain stems and they do what humans do when they feel threatened: They seek protection. Currently, Trump is their access that to protection. Dismantling the regulatory state and the tax burden helps them entrench their power so they have enough time to build spacecraft that can take them to Mars. All to say, they are terrified of the worker class so they are putting their fingers ever more heavily on the scales so that the monopoly on violence that our government has can protect their monopoly on the money supply.
Conflagration
Why is this coming to a head now? Well, according to the Visual Capitalist, “The richest 0.1% and 1% were the only two (groups) to see their share [of household wealth] increase since 1990.” Add inflation and the housing crisis to that fact, and what you have is an American population who is poorer today than thirty years ago. Put another way, since Capitalism beat Marxism in the cold war in the early 90s, the American worker has been losing money, wealth, power and influence.
It should also be noted that the American worker has been telling our politicians about this problem since 2008. We elected Obama because he promised change (from Bush Jr.’s Reagan-esque notion of small government and military might). Obama failed. We elected Trump because he promised to “fix it” as in what Obama had failed to fix. Trump didn’t. We elected Biden because Trump’s “fixes” were ineffective and we hoped he would get it right. Biden didn’t. So we gave Trump another chance (so dumb). And Trump is currently doing exactly the opposite of what the American public has asked him to do. He’s handing the government over to the 0.1% so they can reign over us with impunity.
Next Steps
So where does that leave us? Well, you, my fair reader, may be disgusted by the average MAGA voter for their willingness to ignore sexual predation, lies, racism, fraud, venality, and insurrection. I don’t disagree with you on that. But here’s the thing – you likely agree with the average MAGA voter about wanting our government to help Americans by providing viable access to opportunity and reducing the cost of living. You agree with them that the wealthy have captured our institutions and the game is unfair. Lean into your economic populist notions, join arms with other workers who mostly just want to provide for their families and feel a sense of security, and take these overly rich bastards down a notch.
Having more money than you does not make the wealthy better than you. They have more money than you, but not more worth than you. Forget about the divisions sewn by both the far left and the far right (nazis and antifa et al). Those are mere phantoms in comparison to the hard reality of our current wealth disparity and its clear consequences - growing inequality and rising misery, despondency, and anger.
Pointing fingers at other working folk for holding suspect opinions is fruitless. We, all of us, feel overwhelmed by the pressure of surviving in this capitalist nightmare. That’s partly why so many of us hold suspect opinions. Meanwhile, the real culprits are working extra hard right now to protect themselves from the inevitable tipping point when we collectively turn our fingers on them. And they’re winning.
[Sidenote #5: I’m not arguing for revolution or violence or hate. I’m simply suggesting that our system has generated enough wealth that we do indeed have the money to help our citizens and build systems that benefit the greater good. The problem is most of that money is in the pockets of a tiny few who don’t want us to have access to it and they fear us taking it. So let’s take it.]
A Touch of Resistance
Okay. As ever I’m better at pointing at the problem than offering solutions. Here are some quick solutions:
Read up on the Working Families Party. They have a better plan than the Democrats. Get involved.
Do whatever you can to tank Tesla’s stock. Sell your Tesla if you have one. Deface Cybertrucks or flip off their drivers. Get off Twitter/X. Bad mouth Musk every single chance you get. Talk to your tech bro friends and call them fascists. Write bad reviews of Teslas. Boo Tesla drivers. Laugh at them. Make art.
Limit your reliance on big tech. Never ever accept all cookies on a website. Shut down everything on any app that doesn’t affect functionality. Cull all apps you don’t need from your phone. Pick a single social media site and get off the others or get off all of them if you can. Subscribe to at least one newspaper. Get a VPN. Use security-first, privacy protected email and chat apps. However you can, stop feeding the beast your data. Become human again.
Contact your local, regional, state, and federal representatives on the regular. Doesn’t have to be much effort, just regular effort. Once a week let ‘em know you’re actually paying attention.
Check your investment portfolio to see if any of the index funds or mutual funds you hold invest in troubling industries like private prisons or fossil fuels or big tech.
Find common ground with people whose politics you hate. There are obvious limits to this, but most folk want similar stuff. Stability, security, opportunity, fairness. Look for the places where you can agree to agree. Become human to them…fight the propagandists who want to other you.
Support your local economy. Pay in cash. Get to know your neighbors.
If you own and can afford it, invest in solar and water collection systems. Reduce your footprint on all fronts. Plant vegetables.
Don’t engage in all the little bullshit horrors. Pick a subject you’re passionate about and invest energy, money, time in making that space better.
Be kind to yourself and others. Always. Practice compassion. Recognize that Trump is mentally ill and suffering and while he’ll never acknowledge it or change it, he is clearly a miserable person living a miserable life. Take pleasure in his misery then practice compassion and when that fails take pleasure in his misery again. Keep trying.
Internets of the Day
Quote of the Week:
“Tax wealth, not work.” – Gary Stevenson
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good
– Gary Stevenson: Just discovered this dude on YouTube from a bunch of clips of his appearance on the Piers Morgan show. If you don’t know Piers Morgan, well god bless you and stay ignorant. If you do know who this establishment apologist who feigns everyman credentials is then you might enjoy this clip. Short story: Stevenson grew up working class in England, but like a certain Will Hunting, it turned out he was a bit of a math savant. He was able to turn that skill set into a job as a trader in London and became wealthy making market bets that the rich would continue to impoverish the poor. He was right. Now, he’s out there explaining why his investment worked and it’s blowing the minds of the capitalist rightwing. Lovely stuff. If you’re interested in discovering his secrets to getting mad money watch his How To Get Rich video. This dude G.E.T.S it! Go follow him.
The Bad:
– Limp: My dog woke up with a limp. I think she’ll be fine. I won’t run her today. But pet injuries are just the worst because you can’t ask them where it hurts, when it started, how it happened, etc. You just have to monitor the new symptom and decide whether or not it’s worth spending potentially thousands of dollars on. I’m sure there’s a lesson here, but I’m too dumb to grasp it. Or perhaps the lesson is what the alien master species in the new James S.A. Corey book (author of the fantastic The Expanse series) uses as its credo: What is, is.
The Ugly:
– Constitutional Crisis II: I named the same “ugly” last newsletter. Consider this an addendum. I don’t have any doubt that Trump is going to attack the weakest aspect of our governing system which is that the Judiciary has no enforcement power. Was just listening to George Conway explain this and I’ll paraphrase (using my “gist” methodology). Let’s say the supreme court says DOGE can’t cut funds to programs the legislature has allocated funding for. If the Trump administration calls the court’s bluff, then the court can hold folk in the administration (including the president) in “civil contempt” punishable with fines or jail time. But to get payment on the fines the court would have to ask the IRS to levy wages and to put people in jail they’d have to send out the US Marshals to arrest the perp. But the Executive branch controls the IRS and the Marshals. You see the problem. This is coming folks. And this will literally be a coup and when it does come, we have to take to the streets and call every politician we know and even boycott paying taxes. No taxation without representation, no representation without checks and balances.
Finally:
