September 20, 2012 Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, The Rule of Money
Here’s what the latest census data tell us: in 2011, the middle class shrank to “an all-time low” (as the Washington Post headline
had it), while the income of the wealthiest Americans continued to
climb. The poverty rate leveled off at a still shuddering 15%, with
more than one of every five
Americans under eighteen living in poverty. The Gini Index, a measure
of income inequality, rose by 1.6%, the “biggest one-year increase in
almost two decades.”
In a way, of course, this should be no news at all. Middle-class wealth has taken a staggering hit since the economic meltdown of 2007 (and African American and Hispanic wealth has gone through the floor). This disaster, linked to the Great Recession, has had a sideline effect. On the theory that what goes up must come down, money flooding out of American households and into the coffers of the incredibly wealthy and their corporate cronies has also been flowing back down in tidal amounts. It’s been pouring biblically into this season’s political campaign. The news out of the dog days of August, for example, was that the Obama and Romney campaigns had raised a total of more than $225 million dollars that month alone. (In the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, the two candidates raised a “mere” $202 million during that whole election season!) And, of course, those figures don’t even include the dollars filling Super PACs to the bursting point and the “dark money” going into the 501(c)(4)s that don’t have to disclose where their contributions even come from. (Eight of the top 10 Super PACs are “conservative,” reports the Daily Beast, and 77% of all contributions this campaign season will come from “business interests,” according to the invaluable Open Secrets website.) We now know as well that the 2012 presidential campaign is going to cost in the somewhere-over-the-rainbow range of $2.5 billion, and the total election season a record near-$6 billion, with startling amounts of that money going into attack ads. (You can practically hear TV and radio station owners popping the champagne corks.) This time around, the Obama campaign is relying heavily not on its famed base of small donors but on the staggeringly wealthy; and Mitt Romney is betting on the money pouring into his campaign war chest from the financial sector and oil and gas types (who are also running a gusher of anti-Obama TV ads). Both candidates are spending unheard of amounts of time not on the campaign trail but raising money from the obscenely wealthy. In other words, the 1% (or less) are using money vacuumed out of our world to invest in “democratic” politics -- and as with any other investment, they naturally expect a return, whichever party ends up in the White House. Isn’t it time, under the circumstances, to bring back a few of those choice words like “plutocrat” and “monied interests” from the late nineteenth century, that previous moment when a Gilded Age fused with a round of recessions and depressions? Or as Lewis Lapham suggests today, how about “oligarchy” as the new form of American democracy? The famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine now edits Lapham’s Quarterly, which, four times a year, brilliantly unites some of the most provocative and original voices in history around a single topic. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) TomDispatch thanks the editors of that journal for allowing us to offer an exclusive online look at his fierce take on American electoral politics in 2012, the introduction to the magazine’s fall issue. Tom Feast of Fools |
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