Issue of the Week: Economic Opportunity, Hunger, Disease, Human Rights, War, Population, Environment, Personal Growth
Stela of Sirenenutet (c) 2016-2018 Lisa Blume & Keith Blume
Updated: The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Five.
Back to London, 2016, before the deluge.
On a visit to the British Museum, the writers here, among many remarkable displays, came upon “Stela of Sirenenutet” from the 12th Dynasty in ancient Egypt, the reign of Amenemhat II, which dates to “about 1922-1878 BC”.
“Stela” in this case means a limestone slab. As the explanation at the museum reads, “Sirenenutet was an administrator of food supplies used in temple rituals”. He “sits in front of a table piled high with food” in the rendering.
The uses of such “stelae” were numerous. The point here is the centrality, in survival and in ritual, of food.
We’ll skip the ritualistic explanations, except to note that many of the basic religious rituals of the Egyptians have been passed down to religions since and rituals practiced today. It’s a useful reminder that the concept of gods, God and eternity are universal and not the creation of any one religion with a fundamentalist monopoly.
But the food—bread, fruit, fish and foul. There’s basic survival.
A scene from four millenniums ago.
A scene from in many ways the first great civilization of this scale, conquered by the Romans in no small part for the food it produced, displayed in a museum where it had been stolen by a more recent great empire, and purveyor of some of the worst and best of Western civilization as it evolved.
So, what is the first instinct of all living things?
To survive.
There is no shortage of commentary ranging from our certain demise as a species to our inexorable progress. The truth lies not only between these two poles, but includes both, in process and in possibility. Pulling out any facts presented as proving that life on earth is either certain to end momentarily or certain to thrive is beyond arrogant. And yet these things are said or implied by people all the time. We’re human in an uncertain situation, with all the unknowns attached.
What is certain is what will happen if—then fill in the blanks.
So, we start at the start, of any rationale analysis.
What is the first instinct of all living things?
To survive.
And food is as central a component and symbol of the basics of survival as it gets.
We’ve already explained often why hunger was the initial linchpin of our work, as the worst ongoing killer in history and the best gateway to achieving understanding and commitment on dealing with all the other issues of survival.
But let’s go back to a basic.
Millions of people, mostly infants and children, die every year from hunger and disease. Many millions less who did decades ago. But still millions, still killing more people, especially children, than anything, every year.
There’s far more food than needed produced every year to provide excellent nutrition for everyone.
So, when we pull back from all the complicated intellectual and practical explanations for why this terrible thing happens, as we wring our hands and shake our heads and shout all manner of exhortations for why this must end—what is actually occurring when the forest is separated from the trees?
What would an only barely more advanced lifeform from another galaxy see, as the saying goes?
A species that murders it’s offspring for no rational reason.
Which has resulted not in less of us, but more, at hyper-speed suddenly after millions of years, at the same point more millions are killed than ever before.
And all of this linked, not in a necessary or Darwinian determined or rationale way, but in a self-destructive way, including by those who are most enriched by the systems that have encapsulated this behavior through the ages.
So, we don’t really care that millions of children suffer and die every year. That’s not our priority, or even close, or we’d end it. We’ve overcome all the reasons why we don’t many times—on this and many issues, when survival requires a unity even of enemies.
And survival is the key word. Because fear of not surviving is also at the core of this. Even greed starts here. There’s not enough for everyone, we need to get whatever we can for ourselves and ours. Enough becomes corrupted into too much and then converges with all the other worst demons of our natures into the increasingly out of control impulse to power. And increased vulnerability for those with less power to divide and conquer strategies by the powerful that fuel racism and sexism and other horrors–because, since there’s not enough for everyone and no guarantee of basic needs for everyone, the “others” can be perceived as a threat. It adds up to the few with power and the many without, whether absolute or to degrees, throughout history. Of course, those who have always end up getting slaughtered by those who don’t and are repeatedly too delusional to see that their own survival depends on everyone having the basics. Then progress, then regress–you’ve heard it all before.
All based on fear, which has had moments in human evolution and experience of an actual basis, but for eons now has been based overall on a demonstrable lie. There is enough for everyone. More than enough if we live on the planet in a shared and sustainable manner.
Everyone having the basics, without fear of ever not having the basics, is the bottom line imperative for the survival of us all. Conflict and catastrophe have always been guaranteed otherwise. Which themselves have been the pre-requisites for progress in equality, until it goes the other way, and then, etc. But as we repetitively remind, now we can blow it all up in minutes, etc. So there really is no time left. We’re on borrowed time. And the only solution starts with the basic survival needs of everyone guaranteed. It also requires the basic human rights of everyone guaranteed, which means some form of democracy. One has never been accomplished without the other and cannot be sustainably.
The idea of getting to this globally seems farther away than ever and always an idealist’s needle in the arm fantasy anyway, right? Wrong, as explained at length before. Except the first part is a split decision as we write, hence the title of our series of reflections. In the forest from the trees view we’ve only gone one way on the historical graph—closer and closer to operating as one people on one planet. But with huge gaps, horrible costs, being paid every second, with no guarantee that we would not have already finished ourselves off. So, will it take a few nukes going off, or biological wmds, or global pandemics more hideous than ever, or dying from the air and climate and so on, by the millions, maybe billions, everywhere, to take the final step to mutual survival? The facts say probably. Then will it be too late or not?
We choose the latter, even choose to believe in the possibility in seeing our eminent hanging before too many more of us do, as the only useful modus operandi.
Which brings us back to the basics of living being guaranteed for everyone.
We were arguably on a global path to this after World War Two, even if in most of the world it would hardly have seemed so, when the Cold War more than interfered. But it’s worth looking at some facts as to what has worked and what is needed.
First, let’s dispense with the intellectual warfare which immediately translates into all the emotional chemicals that overwhelm the brain when limiting everything to this “ism” or that, as cause, solution, or definition thereof.
It’s really interesting to revisit all the arguments of various so-called socialists, capitalists, democratic socialists, democratic capitalists, conservatives, liberals, neo this and neo that. But these are just words applied to reality, which are words with different meanings in different contexts.
When we wrote about the historical significance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in our June 30 post, it was not because she identifies as a democratic socialist. It was because of what she represented about guaranteeing basic needs for everyone. That’s consistent with many aspects of democratic socialism. But it can be with democratic capitalism, depending on how defined. The term social democracy is often used as a hybrid. It doesn’t matter. None of us knows for certain the best way to implement the guarantee of the basics of a good life for everyone and the implementation will evolve as with all things.
We do know it starts with a guarantee. And we know how the basics work.
Another reminder. Don’t measure anything by how well those with a similar view as Ocasio-Cortez do politically at this point. The Democratic Party has obviously been pulled left, as commentators currently define it, and most people running in that party are backing basics such as universal health care. Whether they win in November or not may have a lot to do with survival in terms of time, risk and so on, to the extent they are truly separated from just being one of the two parties of the rich. But there are many factors at work, including all the factors that brought Brexit and Trump and so on to begin with.
Ocasio-Cortez herself is hopefully not a one-dimensional ideologue (she certainly doesn’t appear to be), because otherwise she has much to offer. She will make mistakes and say things that don’t add up like all politicians, and humans, but the key is acknowledging mistakes and sticking to basic values while always evolving. Seeing a 28-year old elected as the almost certain to be youngest woman in the history of the US House (and a Latina) is an inspiring testimony to the next generation, both in reflecting the best aspects of generations past–when you’re 28 you’re far past beginning adulthood (World Campaign co-founders, Lisa Blume and Keith Blume, at 28, had both had the privilege of making history in contributing to saving lives and providing basic needs, and the people who have most changed history often began to do so at such an age)—and in the next generation leading us to the next steps we need to take.
An article after our June 30 post, which deals insightfully and informatively with many of the above issues, appeared in The New Yorker in the July 23, 2018 issue: “The Left of the Possible”, by David Remnick. The online version is titled, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win And The Future Of The Democratic Party.” It’s a need to read.
In our June 30 post, we noted that providing the basic needs of all people “will not be able to be fully or sustainably implemented except globally–the full reckoning of this global process is not something this candidate has addressed–but that would hardly be expected at this point.” At the same time, no candidate is addressing it. No political voice or force is really addressing these issues in a way that cuts through the noise. And this void has been enhanced by, and is one of the hallmarks of, the end of civilization as we knew it moment and events leading to it and since. The rage at the very things above not beeing addressed, the toxic mix of cultural narcissm and nihilism, the crossing into unthinkable lows in civilized discourse, the increased attacks on and increased absence of journalism unfettered by corporate interests, the abandonment in some ways of the global role of the US and the West since World War Two (the positive multilateral, democratic values part, not the corporate greed influenced part). All, in no small part, because of the reaction to the inequality associated with a globalism that in too many ways was driven by and led to increased economic inequality, even with some successes. Because the system of economic equality in the driver nations such as the US was dismantled over the past few decades instead of expanded.
The point here is that while change in the US is needed in and of itself and can help lead the way, full global engagement to bring about the original aims of the United Nations with rights for all and rules for all is the end game. That will not happen without the leadership of a US that represents equality itself, asserts the need for it globally, and puts the resources into accomplishing this. The US can’t do it alone, and not nearly to the degree it could have a few decades ago. But it is still the strongest global economic, political, cultural and military presence in the world. The current US role has been incoherent to put it mildly.
By the way, of course the US became a next version of empire after World War Two in many ways. It did and does wonderful and terrible things. The power of money and politics have always been combined. But it hasn’t always been to the same degree and events occur on multiple levels at once from different, often competing and often at odds in values, centers of power. And the US was not alone. A mass-murdering communist dictarship of the Soviet empire was the other half of the equation that took more lives than Hitler depending on the measure. And Mao in China may have topped them all in mass murder. At the same time, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly but surely, the European colonies were dismantled, but too often became Cold War battlegrounds between local oppressors of right and left with the superpowers backing them. As we said, the Cold War got in the way of the momentum to a better world. And by the time it was over, the victory of democracy was increasingly becoming a victory of monied interests over economic equality, not recognized by most until later.
The challenging and complex subject of the imperative to get to global equality and governance will be returned to.
Now, to past generations for some reminders.
Forty years ago, Hubert Humphrey died. A few months before, when he was in the last stages of the cancer that killed him, he was still working hard as a US senator, and Keith Blume interviewed him on film at length on hunger and related issues, as noted before. Humphrey was a dedicated and courageous human being, bursting with his characteristic energy even as he wasted away. It was time to end hunger on earth and provide basic needs for all.
“As somebody once said, if you can split an atom and if you can put a man on the moon, you ought to be able to a meal on the table!”
Had he not been associated with LBJ’s Vietnam policy, Humphrey would have been elected president in 1968. Even after the tumult of the Democratic convention 50 years ago in the wake of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and everything else we have revisited about that year, Humphrey almost beat Nixon, as noted before. If the election had been another two weeks away, maybe just days, the momentum says he would have won. Many of us young activists at the time, and many people period, were coming around after Humphrey reasserted his buried views as Vice-President on how the war should be wound down, to reconnecting to the man who had been in many ways the most accomplished liberal and working class hero in the senate.
Twenty years earlier, at the Democratic convention in 1948, Humphrey had stared down the racism in the Democratic coalition no one had ever done. He said, overtly to the southern segregationists in the hall, it was time to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
And of course in that same year, the United Nations unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which defined basic needs as human rights along with all other recognized human rights.
Humphrey was a champion of the New Deal and the Great Society and of bringing basic human needs as a guarantee to all, the second bill of rights of FDR and the stated aim of the allies in World War Two, which the US was on the path toward.
So much on the path that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had fully embraced it as the norm.
The norm was that after the great depression, strict regulation was put in place on banks and Wall Street. The top tax bracket was 91 percent. The rich could still be rich, but in today’s terms the richest would have to manage on a few hundred million or so instead of billions. Still plenty of incentive to be an entrepreneur. The largest and most prosperous middle class—the great majority of people—in history, was created. As noted before, delivering on ending the deprivations of poverty and racism and sexism and delivering equality to all would have been much easier to do in terms of resources up to 1968, and for a while after, than since.
The economic inequality that began to widen then and has ever since, and the reason why, is the reason that the extraordinary White House initiative outlined on June 11, 1977 to end hunger and provide basic needs for all didn’t happen on anywhere near the scale it could have.
The US matters as an example because of its weight. But the imperative to basic needs with democracy went further still in the UK and Nordic nations. Churchill won the war, but Clement Attlee and a Labour Party that was a democratic socialist party, among other things, created free health care for all in 1948. And the Nordic countries have varying forms of democratic socialism or social democracy still, even with some backsliding, combining basic needs guaranteed for all with market economies regulated and taxed to create a working balance.
Examples in the developing world are a longer story. Many happened, in sectors or nationwide. One of the problems however is that while poverty has been reduced significantly in China (which still has a huge poverty problem, and in the soon to be largest nation, India much worse, another important story)—the manner of doing so, like in the West now, is no longer sustainable. But the future economy of sustainability still has to begin with equality, and that’s the focus here. And the definition of coming out of extreme poverty, while having some significance, is still at such a low rate of income as to be more academic soma than having real-life meaning. We’ll come back to all this soon.
The bottom line is that getting from starving to barely making it doesn’t cut it. Everyone needs to have the basics of a decent life guaranteed, or humanity and the planet don’t make it.
If you want to get moral, then explain to any child anywhere why they have to suffer and die because of the failures of adults, regardless of your views of what those failures are. We can create systems with jobs, including work on social projects and various ways of giving meaningful work and a good life to all.
“As somebody once said, if you can split an atom and if you can put a man on the moon, you ought to be able to a meal on the table!”
To end for now, let’s leap from seventy and fifty and forty years ago, to ten years ago. Another of those years ending in eight.
2008.
The financial crisis of 2008 was the result of four decades of building inequality and the policies that allowed it. Republicans and Democrats alike, destroyed the system of regulation, taxation and expanding social programs supported by the great majority of Americans, who went to sleep for many reasons, while the oligarchs took over the world again, with more inequality of wealth than ever, and have nearly destroyed it. As we’ve said before, it’s not the individuals or corporations per se that are the problem in the end. Although history will always hold them accountable when the dam breaks. But the system is the point. If a system isn’t in place to check the excess—it will happen.
We leave you with a magnificently written article by Frank Rich in New York Magazine on what 2008 was about and what it did to us.
“In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream”
By Frank Rich, August 6, 2018
“If you were standing in the smoldering ashes of 9/11 trying to peer into the future, you might have been overjoyed to discover this happy snapshot of 2018: There has been no subsequent major terrorist attack on America from Al Qaeda or its heirs. American troops are not committed en masse to any ground war. American workers are enjoying a blissful 4 percent unemployment rate. The investment class and humble 401(k) holders alike are beneficiaries of a rising GDP and booming stock market that, as measured by the Dow, is up some 250 percent since its September 10, 2001, close. The most admired person in America, according to Gallup, is the nation’s first African-American president, a man no one had heard of and a phenomenon no one could have imagined at the century’s dawn. Comedy, the one art whose currency is laughter, is the culture’s greatest growth industry. What’s not to like?
Plenty, as it turns out. The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous. In the aftermath of 9/11, the initial shock and horror soon gave way to a semblance of national unity in support of a president whose electoral legitimacy had been bitterly contested only a year earlier. Today’s America is instead marked by fear and despair more akin to what followed the crash of 1929, when unprecedented millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes after the implosion of businesses ranging in scale from big banks to family farms.
It’s not hard to pinpoint the dawn of this deep gloom: It arrived in September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier. The shadow it would cast is so dark that a decade later, even our current run of ostensible prosperity and peace does not mitigate the one conviction that still unites all Americans: Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap, it seems, except Peak TV (for those who can afford it).
That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. When that tide pulled back in 2008 to reveal the ruins underneath, the country got an indelible picture of just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken, and how many central American institutions, whether governmental, financial, or corporate, had betrayed the trust the public had placed in them. And when we went down, we took much of the West with us. The American Kool-Aid we’d exported since the Marshall Plan, that limitless faith in progress and profits, had been exposed as a cruel illusion.
Unlike 9/11, which prompted an orgy of recriminations and investigations, the Great Recession never yielded a reckoning that might have helped restore that faith. The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. Millennials, crippled by debt and bereft of Horatio Alger paths out of it, mock the traditional American tenet that each generation will be better off than the one before. At the other end of the actuarial spectrum, boomers have little confidence that they can scrape together the wherewithal needed to negotiate old age. The American workers in the middle have seen their wages remain stagnant as necessities like health care become unaffordable.
In the Digital Century, unlike the preceding American Century, the largest corporations are not admired as sources of jobs, can-do-ism, and tangible goods that might enrich and empower all. They’re seen instead as impenetrable black boxes where our most intimate personal secrets are bought and sold to further fatten a shadowy Über-class of obscene wealth and privilege trading behind velvet ropes in elite cryptocurrencies. Though only a tiny percentage of Americans are coal miners, many more Americans feel like coal miners in terms of their beleaguered financial status and future prospects. It’s a small imaginative leap to think of yourself as a serf in a society where Facebook owns and markets your face and Alphabet does the same with your language (the alphabet, literally) while paying bogus respects to the dying right to privacy.
It would be easy to blame the national mood all on Donald J. Trump, but that would be underrating its severity and overrating Trump’s role in creating it (as opposed to exacerbating it). Trump’s genius has been to exploit and weaponize the discontent that has been brewing over decades of globalization and technological upheaval. He did so in part by discarding the bedrock axiom of post–World War II American politics that anyone running for president must sparkle with the FDR-patented, chin-jutting optimism that helped propel John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to the White House. Trump ran instead on the idea that America was, as his lingo would have it, a shithole country in desperate need of being made great again. “Sadly, the American Dream is dead,” he declared, glowering, on that fateful day in 2015 when he came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his candidacy. He saw a market in merchandising pessimism as patriotism and cornered it. His diagnosis that the system was “rigged” was not wrong, but his ruse of “fixing” it has been to enrich himself, his family, and his coterie of grifters with the full collaboration of his party’s cynical and avaricious Establishment.
It’s hard to recall now how upbeat the American mood had been just a decade ago. The worst financial crisis since 1929 notwithstanding, the election of Barack Obama offered genuine hope, not just the branded version on his campaign poster. He would hire smart people to dig us out of the Wall Street greed and criminality that had victimized so many Americans. (Never mind that some of those smart people on the Obama financial team had cashed in their own chips in a private back room before the casino went bust.) He vowed to downsize the two wasteful wars on which his predecessor had squandered so much blood and treasure. His personal qualities as a committed husband and father, not to mention his unlikely rise from obscurity, would make him a role model to the young. The mere fact of his election would also suggest to many, my naïve white self included, that the country might somehow at long last be capable of rising above its original sin of slavery. Time summed up the national sentiment best in its cover story crowning him 2008 Person of the Year. Obama was “infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation” and “showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.” As he took office, polling found that “a strong majority of Americans believe he will accomplish most of what he aims to do.”
Boundless opportunity! A government that would accomplish its aims! What were we thinking? We all know what happened next: The opposition party, once again pandering to the racist base it has cultivated ever since Barry Goldwater ran against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, vowed to defeat the new president’s governance no matter what he did. Even so — and despite being thwarted by that partisan resistance, by the stubbornness of the downturn he had to reverse, and by his own unforced errors — Obama did succeed at leading America out of its economic crisis and largely extricating it from war. But he had to scale back his other aspirations, including immigration and financial reform. History will surely bless him for preventing a second Great Depression, among other achievements, including presiding over the most scandal-free White House in memory. But in real time, his presidency was still fairly young when some contemporaneous voters started moving on from Yes, We Can to No, We Can’t and/or No, We Won’t.
Obama didn’t cause that broken spirit any more than Trump did. It had been building all along — or can be seen to have been, depending on the lens through which you view modern American history. In the more salutary version of that story, the nation triumphed over the back-to-back cataclysms of depression and world war to flourish in a post-victory boom. In 1964, the perennial poll question measuring trust in “government in Washington to do what is right” reached a peak 76 percent. That number would decline as Americans were battered by the Vietnam quagmire, the political violence and assassinations of 1968, and Watergate. But eventually Reagan would “win” the Cold War and his salesmanship of the “shining city upon a hill” would vanquish memories of the Nixon White House’s criminality. The awesome record of LBJ’s civil-rights legislation would mask the less encouraging on-the-ground story of intractable racial conflict and second-class African-American citizenship in both the South and North.
But it’s an alternative narrative of this history — the less splashy and more insidious economic narrative of widening inequality, rather than the epic headline events of a History Channel documentary — that may have mattered most in landing us where we are now. As the historian Elaine Tyler May, a scholar of postwar America, has written, the Cold War boom solidified and projected to the world a “vision of middle-class affluence” that testified to “the benefits of the American capitalist system” over the Soviet alternative. Central to that vision was “the belief that free-market capitalism would benefit everyone” and that its fruits would be distributed equitably, “providing the good life to an ever-expanding middle class.” Even at this boom’s height, this egalitarianism was a myth as far as black Americans were concerned, but the white majority bought it: This bedrock belief in economic fairness “motivated white working-class and middle-class Americans to play by the rules.” The assumption was that the ownership class would play by them too.
In truth, that assumption had been an open question from the moment massive American fortunes started being built in the late-19th century’s Gilded Age. In Behold, America, a fascinating new look at “the entangled history” of “America First” and “the American Dream,” out this fall, Sarah Churchwell unearths a 1900 editorial in the New York Post fretting about how multimillionaires “are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality.” The paper hypothesized that “the American dream,” a term not yet in common parlance, could be ended by their greed. A similar 1908 editorial in the Leavenworth, Kansas, Times, again invoking “American dreams,” championed “the equitable distribution of wealth” while making pointed note of the vast discrepancy between the pay of an insurance-company executive and a headmaster: “Why do we accord highest place to money mongers and lowest place to teachers of ideals?”
Populist movements would ask similar questions through each American cycle of boom-and-bust, but to no lasting avail. While the Gilded Age tycoon J. P. Morgan posited that the ratio between a boss’s income and that of workers should be 20-1, today that ratio often exceeds 150-1. Yet, as May points out, in the postwar era, it was not until the free fall of 2008 that a wide public fully focused on the gap between the top one percent and everyone else. “Unlike the 9/11 attacks,” she writes, the catastrophic crash “was homegrown and had been brewing for many years.” But it took the Great Recession’s destruction “of what had been the markers of citizenship for more than half a century” — a secure job and home ownership — to make unmistakable to all “the end of the era of widespread prosperity that had characterized the United States in the early years of the Cold War.”
It was during the Great Recession that it also became clear how oblivious — or complicit — both major parties’ Establishments were when it came to heists by those at the top. To take just one example of this culture at work: In 2011, with much fanfare, President Obama convened a new jobs council, which, in a bipartisan gesture, he put in the charge of a prominent Republican CEO, Jeffrey Immelt of GE. No one in the Obama White House seemed to know or care, as the New York Times would soon report, that GE had laid off a fifth of its American workers since 2002 and, in 2010, had paid almost no federal taxes on $14.2 billion of profit. Immelt remained in place at the jobs council nonetheless. Unlike such frauds as Enron and its current copycat, Theranos, or the robber-baron enterprises of the more distant past, GE was one of the most widely admired American corporations, if not the most widely admired, for decades. Founded by Thomas Edison, it was one of the original dozen components of the Dow Jones industrial average at its inception in 1896. In the 1950s and early ’60s, GE’s image and Reagan’s were burnished in tandem when the future president hosted General Electric Theater on CBS. In the 1980s and ’90s, Immelt’s immediate predecessor, Jack Welch, was lionized as America’s wisest economic guru. Today, GE’s shareholders have been financially shafted along with its workers, and in June it was booted off the Dow. The record Immelt left behind as Obama’s job czar, it should be noted, is no more impressive than that as GE’s CEO: He accomplished nothing, at one point going for a full year without convening the council at all. But there has been no accountability for his failures in either the private or public spheres, let alone reparations.
Perhaps the sole upside to the 2008 crash was that it discredited the Establishment of both parties by exposing its decades-long collusion with a kleptocratic economic order. If the corporation that introduced the lightbulb was a sham ripping off its employees, shareholders, and consumers, not to mention America’s taxpayers, you had to wonder who at the top was not. The moral abdication of would-be liberal reformers, who failed to police such powerful economic actors, only added to the national disgust with elites. It’s that vacuum that created the opening for a master con man. Once in the White House, of course, Trump conducted the biggest spree of grand larceny ever carried out by the wealthiest sliver of the country in the name of “tax reform.” Everyone knows he is doing it except those among his base who dismiss all unwanted news as “fake news.” But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.
Trump’s nationalistic right-wing populism, which scapegoats immigrants and minorities to deflect rage from Cohn and his fellow profiteers, is nothing new. As Churchwell tracks in Behold, America, the original America First movement of the 1920s and ’30s grew in tandem with the widening economic discrepancies of the time. She reminds us that the plutocratic villain of The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, is a white supremacist prone to observations like “if we don’t look out the white race will be … utterly submerged” and “It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Up against such powerful one-percenters, the vision of limitless human potential implicit in Jay Gatsby’s innocent American Dream didn’t stand a chance. As Churchwell writes, “Between 1923 and 1929, 93 percent of the country experienced a drop in per capita income,” even as a rise in monopolies and mergers left “only two hundred large corporations in control of over half of American industry” and one percent of the population owning 40 percent of America’s wealth.
That hastening concentration of American economic power wasn’t fully understood by most Americans then, and neither was Gatsby, which was published to disappointing sales and reviews in 1925. It’s almost too exquisite an irony that just two years later, the budding real-estate developer Fred Trump would be arrested at a Ku Klux Klan riot in Queens, not far from Tom Buchanan’s home in Fitzgerald’s fictional Long Island enclave of East Egg. The rest is history inexorably leading America to this dark place where, nearly a century later, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is so distant it just may be in China.”
To Be Continued.