They’re Here

Created
Sat, 16/03/2024 - 00:00
Updated
Sat, 16/03/2024 - 00:00
Fight back. We did it before. “There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy,” Teddy Roosevelt insisted in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1907. Roosevelt saw the harms of the first Gilded Age and sought, with public support, to end them: The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods…. National sovereignty is to be upheld in so far as it means the sovereignty of the people used for the real and ultimate good of the people; and state’s rights are to be upheld in so far as they mean the people’s rights. Especially is this true in dealing with the relations of the people as a whole to the great corporations which are the distinguishing feature of modern business conditions. One hunded plus years later, we are in a second Gilded Age. Or haven’t you noticed? Robert Reich has: Billions in campaign contributions. Jim Crow 2.0.Workers exploited.Child labor has returned.Staggering inequality. Oh, and facsism. We beat back the first five at the beginning of the 20th century. Reich believes we can do it again. (I wish I had his confidence.) Teddy Roosevelt did not hesitate to go after the masters of passive income. Many men of large wealth have been guilty of conduct which from the moral standpoint is criminal, and their misdeeds are to a peculiar degree reprehensible, because those committing them have no excuse of want, of poverty, of weakness and ignorance to…