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plutocracy
From Taxing the Rich to Defending Unions, the Best Defense Against Trump Will Be Offense
The super rich who backed the Republican president-elect must think they have us exactly where they want us. Now is the best time to turn the tables.
Nov 15, 2024
With Donald Trump about to re-enter the White House and his sidekicks about to assume control over Congress, America’s progressives are once again shifting — to playing defense. But the best defense, as one old football adage suggests, almost always turns out to be a good offense.
In the coming Trump redux, can we progressives take that adage to heart? Dare we go on offense and maybe even snatch a victory or two? We certainly can — if we start pushing for what the vast majority of Americans so want to see: an America where the really rich don’t run the show.
How much our richest run that show has never been more obvious. Campaign spending figures help tell that story.
Back at the beginning of our 21st century, out-of-state contributions to House and Senate races, be they from political action committees or individuals, funneled about the same amount of cash to candidates as in-state donors. These PACs and individuals faced strict limits on how much they could contribute politically. PACs, for their part, could accept no more than $5,000 from individuals each year and give no more than $5,000 directly to a candidate in each election cycle.
Enter the Super PAC. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision essentially gave America’s wealthiest and the corporations they run free rein to spend as much as they want to boost the candidates they find most appealing. This green light for what became known as “Super PACs” gave America’s richest the legal capacity to cement in place a new and “improved” plutocracy.
Dare we go on offense and maybe even snatch a victory or two? We certainly can — if we start pushing for what the vast majority of Americans so want to see: an America where the really rich don’t run the show.
In the 2024 election cycle alone, former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer points out, Super PACs and related groups have spent seven times more on the candidates they support than those candidates have raised “from individuals in their own states.”
And that spending is coming overwhelmingly from the richest of America’s rich. In this year’s presidential race, according to the latest pre-election stats available, some 60 percent of all outlays on Donald Trump’s behalf were coming from the Super PAC universe, and 90 percent of that universe’s spending, Michael Podhorzer adds, was coming from the top donor 1 percent.
Just who from the ranks of our super rich are doing all this spending? We don’t exactly know for sure. Spending by outside contributors this election cycle, researchers from the campaign funding watchdog OpenSecrets reported on Election Day, hit an all-time record $4.5 billion, “with more than half of that spending coming from groups that do not fully disclose the source of their funding.”
America’s wealthiest “have always weighed in on politics,” as the business journal Forbes understatedly noted the day after Election Day, but their capacity to make a difference has significantly “ramped up.” These wealthy “can now make unlimited donations,” and those donations without limits have been making each election “more expensive than the last.”
And billionaires like things that way. Exulted crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss just after Trump’s triumph: “We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance.”
But billionaires today have an electoral influence that goes far beyond their hefty campaign contributions. In today’s social media environment, these rich can speak directly to potential voters. Between October 1 and Election Day, a Forbes analysis shows, America’s 200 richest billionaires posted over 2,000 comments on this year’s elections. Those comments gained over 10 billion reads.
And where did we end up, after all this billionaire spending and speaking out? We ended up with an exasperated electorate. Voter turnout in 2024, the political scientist Peter Dreier points out, ended up down more than 16 million votes, with Trump pulling over 2 million fewer ballots than in 2020 and Kamala Harris collecting over 14 million fewer than Joe Biden pocketed in 2020.
That turnout for the Democrats, Dreier argues, reflects the continuing weakness of America’s labor movement, despite the isolated labor organizing triumphs of recent years. Back in the mid-20th century, unions represented over a third of all U.S. private-sector workers. Last year, only 6 percent of private sector workers carried union cards.
If today’s union membership rate stood at a mere 20 percent of all workers, Dreier contends, “Harris would have won” because unions would have been able to reach more working people directly — including those “who might be gun owners or evangelical Christians” — “about why to vote” for pro-worker candidates.
Three generations ago, in mid-20th century America, high unionization rates kept in place World War II’s high federal tax rates on the nation’s highest incomes, rates that would run over 90 percent on top-bracket income throughout the 1950s. That twofer of a strong labor movement and high taxes on our nation’s richest would go on to nurture a political climate open to greater equality in every sphere.
Today’s richest, by contrast, pay taxes at rates that amount to a tiny fraction of what they pocket, and vast swatches of the American economy have essentially no union presence at all. Trump and his deep-pocketed pals can flourish and thrive in this environment. The task for the rest of us: to change it.
Can we win that fight? We can. Just look at the numbers.
Earlier this year, polling found that 71 percent of all likely voters — and even 53 percent of self-described Republicans — think billionaires should be paying more in taxes. Over two-thirds of the American people, Gallup reports, see themselves as union supporters. Even more Americans — 80 percent — favor higher taxes on corporations with CEOs who make over 50 times what their workers make. Top CEOs today averagehundreds of times what their workers earn.
Our super rich are now celebrating what they see as a glorious future. Let’s put them on the defensive.
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Did Plutocrats Like Mark Cuban and Tony West Help Sink Harris?
"We could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in," said one critic. "They'll be fine though."
Nov 07, 2024
While much ink has been spilled on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's relationship with the world's richest person, tech billionaire Elon Musk, the Republican's electoral victory this week has also provoked conversations about how the very wealthy plutocrats behind Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris may have contributed to her loss.
After Trump's win, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reached out to folks in the inner circle of President Joe Biden—who passed the torch to Harris after a disastrous debate this summer—for their postmortem. The staff writer reported Thursday that although Biden advisers "were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign."
According to Foer:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump's oligarchical allegiances. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, "We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends."
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Responding on social media, Drop Site News' Ryan Grim said: "Reporters always heard that Tony West was functionally one of Kamala's most important advisers. Still galling to read this. I wonder who West even voted for."
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, declared that "we could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in. They'll be fine though. They're already onto their next contracts, or their next vacation home. And that should piss you off."
Progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg argued that "if we want to get out of this wilderness we need to purge every one of the Tony West crony corporatists in this party. Democrats need to be able to point to and talk about villains. Tony West is one of those villains."
Revolving Door Project founder and executive director Jeff Hauser put out a lengthy statement in response to the reporting that, as he summarized, "West convinced Vice President Harris to ratchet down her populist messaging lest it upset the Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites he was courting on her behalf."
Hauser highlighted that Foer's article also came after Cuban last month "bragged about his role in exiling a Harris surrogate" and former staffer of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) "for the sin of supporting a wealth tax during a television appearance."
Harris on Tuesday "ran far stronger in the states that she saturated with television ads than the ones she did not. Those TV ads were, as Semafor's David Weigel observed, 'grinding on this economic message (anti-price gouging, Medicare covering home care, etc),'" he noted. "It's impossible to know whether the additional two points or less needed by Harris in the pivotal states would have been secured by basing her public 'earned media' and social media messaging on the same populist economic platform which informed her television ads."
"However, it is clear that the more successful paid media message was more populist and less informed by plutocrats like Cuban and West," Hauser continued. "Further, it seems exceedingly likely that downballot Democrats outside the swing states would have benefited from an ecosystem featuring the type of messaging we heard at the Democratic Convention."
"In a populist moment in which the candidates were battling for the mantle of change, the sitting vice president had to be identified as clearly against some powerful institutions," he added. "Her campaign showed early signs of an aggressive message, arguing that her record as California attorney general included taking on crooked big banks and shady student loan servicers."
"While VP Harris stuck to a comparably anti-plutocratic message in her television ads, she did not in her interviews and public appearances. This divergence appears to have been based on the advice of plutocrats," Hauser concluded. "Hopefully future candidates will learn from this, and oppose plutocrats consistently."
Appearing on CNN this week, Kate Bedingfield, Biden's former White House communications director, suggested the issue is not confined to Harris.
"I think Democrats across the board clearly have a challenge connecting with working-class voters. This is not unique to Vice President Harris' campaign," she said. "This is a demographic shift, a realignment in this country that's happened over the course of the last 10 years."
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020 but spent this cycle campaigning for Harris—said Wednesday that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Sanders also asserted that "the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control" the party are unlikely to "learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign" or "understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing."
Proving his point, Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for giant companies who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, claimed Thursday that Sanders' analysis was "straight up BS" and listed achievements of the Biden-Harris administration.
Responding to Harrison on social media, Michael Sainato, a labor reporter with The Guardian, said that "being pro-worker means being clear about who and what is anti-worker and the Democratic Party has failed miserably at that."
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America—Democracy or Plutocracy?
What happened to the middle class in the United States? The rich ate it.
May 09, 2024
Almost 90 percent of us think of ourselves as being “middle class,” but we’re way off. In 1970, 62 percent of Americans did qualify; but by 2021, our shrinking middle class was down to 42 percent. By 2022, the value of our minimum wage has fallen by 40 percent since the late 60s.
And our poverty rate? Today, at 12.4 percent, it’s the highest among almost all 38 OECD nations. Only the newest member, Costa Rica, suffers a higher poverty rate.
So, how did our view of ourselves become so distorted?
We were once indeed primarily middle class because we had stepped up to tackle poverty. In the late 1950s, our official poverty rate was about 22 percent, but Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty cut that rate in half, hitting a low of 11 percent in 1973. Then Reaganism struck, and by 1983 poverty had spread to nearly 15 percent.
And now?
While our official rate is indeed lower, it is still high and misses millions struggling to meet essential needs.
Our path to this sad outcome began in the 1980s. Reversing the War on Poverty, Reagan began dismantling welfare protections while slashing taxes on the ultrarich. Capturing the tenor of the time, in the 1987 film “Wall Street”, Gordon Gekko declared “greed is good.”
Reaganomics paved the way for today’s shocking inequality.
In 1978, the top 0.1 percent held roughly 7 percent of wealth. By 2018, this tiny group enjoyed about 18 percent. Most shocking: By 2019, America’s three richest families held more wealth than the bottom half of us.
Hardly a middle-class nation, today’s concentration of wealth ought to make a Russian oligarch blush. Out of 178 countries the CIA ranks by income inequality, the U.S. lands between Micronesia and Morocco—at 56th. No industrial democracy is near us. The closest—New Zealand—is 31 places less extreme, at 86th.
An additional injustice?
While workers’ share of national wealth has been shrinking, their productivity has soared. Between 1979 and 2017, worker productivity grew by 70 percent, while hourly compensation rose by a meager 11 percent.
And who benefited?
As earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose by just over a fifth, the wealth of the top 0.1 percent grew by 343 percent. That's 17 times more!
Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that in 2019 the bottom half of us held only 2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Moreover, while American workers had to take on more hours to boost their relatively stagnant earnings and as healthcare and housing costs climbed, the wealthy increased their gains and used it to further warp our nation’s democratic institutions: By funding candidates and hiring lobbyists to ensure their interests were heard at the expense of ours. From 1998 to 2023 alone, dollars spent paying Washington lobbyists grew almost three-fold, from $1.5 billion to $4.1 billion.
Thus, when our rules are set to bring the highest return to those with the most, a market economy not only selectively rewards the already wealthy; it undercuts democracy.
The pain of Reaganomics should have taught us one clear lesson. A market economy can only work for the common good within rules set democratically—free from private control—to ensure opportunity for all. The beginning of these rules would be basics such as an enforced, livable minimum wage, as well as strong and enforced anti-trust laws.
Such steps could move us toward a market serving the most basic freedom of all—the freedom to thrive.Keep ReadingShow Less
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