Should Societal-Destroying Greed Be Outlawed? Sure, But Our Political Class Will Never Go For That

We Need To Change Them First— The Way The Dems Did In The '30s

During his interview with Chris Hayes on Friday, Bernie called out transactional billionaires motivated by greed to back Señor Trumpanzee. “At a time when we have so much greed out there, when the religion of the billionaire class is greed, they would rather give up democracy than take a hit… These guys are so greedy, so wedded to their wealth and their power that they will do anything, anything, to keep that position… Trump is just an outrageous example of selling out for money.”

“This guy, Trump, wants to deregulate the fossil fuel industry even more and destroy the planet. Why? All these guys are spending huge amounts of money… [In flooding the anti-Bowman campaign with millions of dollars] they’re making s statement to all of Congress: [If] you will have the guts to take on neocon foreign policy [and if] you want to take on the corporate interests that are so powerful, tell you what’s going to happen, you’re going to lose. And that message goes all over Congress: You stand up for working class people, hey, your days are numbered. This is oligarchy and it’s an issue that we have got to focus on and deal with.” 

“What do we have to do, he asked rhetorically. It goes without saying that we have got to deal with Citizens United. We’ve get rid of that. And second of all, we have got to do it like many other countries around the world who have public funding of elections: So, you want to run against me, that’s fine. But you don’t have the right to have 50 times more money coming from rich people in order to defeat me. We should be debating ideas… We are not going to do what we want to— deal with Climate Change, guarantee health care for all people, have a tax system which is fair, make sure that our kids do not have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any country on earth. We’re not going to be able to do any of that unless we take on a corrupt campaign finance system.”

“I think that greed is so incredibly ugly and pervasive that these guys want it. They want more and more. I think they could care less about what’s happening to the elderly, the children, the working class of this country. I believe that they will do anything that they can to enrich themselves and Trump is clearly their guy.

A day later, the NY Times ran an OpEd by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld claiming that America’s top CEOs are not nearly as enthusiastic about Trump as Bernie claims. “Trump,” he wrote, “continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party… If you want the most telling data point on corporate America’s lack of enthusiasm for Trump, look where they are investing their money. Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century, to the days of Taft, and stretching through Coolidge and the Bushes, all of whom had dozens of major company heads donating to their campaigns. Trump secured the White House partly by tapping into the anti-corporate, populist messaging of Bernie Sanders, who was then a candidate, a move that Trump discussed with me when I met him in 2015. The strategy may have won voters but did little to enhance Trump’s image with the business community. And while a number of chief executives tried to work with Trump as they would with any incumbent president, and many celebrated his move to cut the corporate tax rate, wariness persisted.”

[T]heir legitimate misgivings about Biden are overwhelmed by worries about Trump, version 2024. Trump’s primary conduits to the business community in his first term— more-reasonable voices like those of Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Steven Mnuchin— are gone, replaced by MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists.

The MAGA die-hard voices that have Trump’s ear often share more in common with the far left than with the traditional Republican Party. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian universal 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar— all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions share more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

With two or three prominent exceptions, most business voices now hanging around the hoop would normally rank in the minor leagues of Republican business supporters. The party must long for the days of President Dwight Eisenhower, when there were so many business leaders in support and fully 60 percent of Mr. Eisenhower’s cabinet were chief executives.

As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable earlier this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering”  remarks, and with Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.

That there are more Fortune 100 chief executives based in the smallest state in the nation, Rhode Island, than currently support Trump— and there’s exactly one Fortune 100 chief executive who is based there— tells you how truly isolated the Republican presidential candidate is from the halls of big business.

This isn’t a unique phenomena to this time period or just our country. The over-concentration of great wealth in teh hands of a few is hardly new. Badly-governed societies like our own have allowed the billionaire class throughout history to accumulate too much wealth at the expense of the working class, exacerbating economic inequality, shattering any illusions of equal opportunity and threatening social cohesion, especially as the wealth increasingly translates into disproportionate political influence allowing them to shape policies that favor their interests at the expense of the public good. There is no doubt that the billionaire class is and has always been a fundamental threat to democracy and societal well-being.

History provides lots of examples of societies that have been negatively impacted by this kind of concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. The economic disparity and extreme corruption during the late Roman Republic led to enough social unrest to seriously weaken the republic and prepare the populace for a rise of populism and dictatorship. Julius Caesar capitalized on the discontent of the masses to gain power, ultimately leading to the fall of the republic and the rise of imperial rule. 

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Venice eventually began to emerge as a powerful city-state governed by a merchant oligarchy. The Great Council, composed of wealthy families, held a monopoly on political power, a concentration of wealth and power that led to corruption, internal strife, a stifling of innovation, and an inability to adapt to new economic and political challenges. Venice lost its preeminence as an economic power and was eventually subjected to foreign rule. Ultimate failure.

You probably already know the story of pre-Revolutionary France, perhaps the ultimate in economic— and therefor political— inequality. The nobility and clergy were exempt from most taxes, placing a disproportionate burden on the common people, creating widespread discontent. The concentration of wealth and privilege among the aristocracy contributed to the conditions that sparked the Revolution and a period of radical social and political upheaval, fundamentally transforming French society.

Tsarist Russia’s feudal autocracy— right into the 1900s— was a similarly overly stratified society with a small elite class that controlled most of the land and wealth. The serfs, who made up the vast majority of the population, lived in poverty and had virtually no rights. This ultimately led to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the tsarist regime and led to the establishment of a communist government.

Closer to home a small elite class controlled significant portions of the economy, particularly in agriculture and industry in most Latin American countries, again extreme wealth concentration leading to political instability and social unrest. Cuba and Nicaragua are two examples of popular uprising against fascist dictatorships controlled by the oligarchs.

Even closer, the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. exemplifies the dangers of oligarchy— in this case leading right to the Great Depression. During the ‘20s economic growth ended in the coffers of a small group of billionaires. Industrial production surged and the stock market boomed, creating vast fortunes for a small number of families and corporations. Economic inequality widened dramatically. The richest 1% of Americans controlled a substantial portion of the nation's wealth, while  working-class Americans saw almost no gains in their income or lifestyle. It was the ultimate in Republican Party government and with the help of the ultra-rich, they controlled the White House and Congress— with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s administration (1913-1923) from 1897 ’til FDR’s election after the onset of the Republicans’ Great Depression. Their aggressively laissez-faire policies— minimal regulation and low taxes on the wealthy— was at the root of the economic collapse. Corporations and wealthy individuals completely controlled the government and dictated its policy agenda policies, further entrenching their economic power and creating an environment where their interests were prioritized over those of the broader population. This has utterly defined the GOP ever since.

While the Great Depression saw widespread bank failures, massive unemployment, bankruptcies, foreclosures and severe economic contraction, the GOP did nothing all. The lack of a social safety net and the concentration of wealth exacerbated the suffering of the working and middle classes and had FDR not come along, there may well have been a violent revolution— either on the left or the fascist right. In 1932, FDR beat incumbent Herbert Hoover 22,821,277 (57.4%) to 15,761,254 (39.6%). Roosevelt won 42 states to Hoover’s 6 and 472 electoral votes to Hoover’s 59. The Democrats flipped 101 seats in the House and 17 in the Senate. By 1936 there were only 17 Republicans in the Senate and 88 in the House. And America defeated the fascists at home and abroad and built a middle class by implementing policies the GOP labeled communism like Social Security, labor rights protections, and financial regulations to prevent the kind of extreme wealth concentration that had contributed to the economic collapse. The marginal tax rate on the billionaire class was just over 90%, just where it should be today.