Spring Break
Greed and corporate power created American plutocracy
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 5/23/08 Section: Ed-Op
What would America have looked like in 1980 had there been no resistance to corporate aggrandizement? One only has to look at America in 2008. Blue- and white-collar jobs have vanished overseas, while private sector unionization stands at barely 7 percent of the workforce. The average American has a lower standard of living while working longer hours than 30 years ago; less health care at higher cost; less pension security.
The lifetime job at the plant or the office has disappeared, except for civil service bureaucrats or the vanishing breed of tenured academics your present author belongs to. The learned professions - law, medicine and teaching - have lost their autonomy, and much of their self-respect, as corporate imperatives have tightened the noose around them.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration no longer guarantees the safety of the food and drug supply, but openly abets big agriculture and big pharmaceutical companies. The Environmental Protection Agency no longer protects our air, water and wildlife, but turns a blind eye to polluters and extends a helping hand to developers. The Securities and Exchange Commission no longer polices our capital markets but blesses merger, monopoly and speculation. And, all the while, the appallingly rich become unspeakably richer: 550 percent richer in inflation-adjusted gross income alone since 1970.
Americans once prided themselves on being a can-do people, a nation of inventors, mechanics, tinkerers, fixers. Now we are defined by what we can't do, even though most other mature Western economies have found solutions to the problems we find intractable. We can't control violence because we have a gun culture. We can't have cost-effective, energy-efficient transit because we have a car culture. We can't have a rational, single-payer health care system because that would be socialist.
We didn't find ourselves in a daze by accident. For every unsolveable problem we face, there's an interest or an industry that prospers by keeping things the way they are. Our economy has enshrined a gospel of greed. Our society has become fearful and embittered. Our politics are ritualistic and symbolic, a mechanism for feeding antagonism and manipulating discontent, and accustoming us to worse and worse.
Democracies die, like every other kind of animal. It's not too late to rescue ours, but time is wasting, and our bad habits are increasingly set.
Robert Zaller is a professor of history. He can be reached at ed-op@thetriangle.org.
The lifetime job at the plant or the office has disappeared, except for civil service bureaucrats or the vanishing breed of tenured academics your present author belongs to. The learned professions - law, medicine and teaching - have lost their autonomy, and much of their self-respect, as corporate imperatives have tightened the noose around them.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration no longer guarantees the safety of the food and drug supply, but openly abets big agriculture and big pharmaceutical companies. The Environmental Protection Agency no longer protects our air, water and wildlife, but turns a blind eye to polluters and extends a helping hand to developers. The Securities and Exchange Commission no longer polices our capital markets but blesses merger, monopoly and speculation. And, all the while, the appallingly rich become unspeakably richer: 550 percent richer in inflation-adjusted gross income alone since 1970.
Americans once prided themselves on being a can-do people, a nation of inventors, mechanics, tinkerers, fixers. Now we are defined by what we can't do, even though most other mature Western economies have found solutions to the problems we find intractable. We can't control violence because we have a gun culture. We can't have cost-effective, energy-efficient transit because we have a car culture. We can't have a rational, single-payer health care system because that would be socialist.
We didn't find ourselves in a daze by accident. For every unsolveable problem we face, there's an interest or an industry that prospers by keeping things the way they are. Our economy has enshrined a gospel of greed. Our society has become fearful and embittered. Our politics are ritualistic and symbolic, a mechanism for feeding antagonism and manipulating discontent, and accustoming us to worse and worse.
Democracies die, like every other kind of animal. It's not too late to rescue ours, but time is wasting, and our bad habits are increasingly set.
Robert Zaller is a professor of history. He can be reached at ed-op@thetriangle.org.
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