Excellent article: How America Returned to the Gilded Age

Many Americans still wonder how it happened, how did a country admired for its Great Middle Class, which sustained strong democratic institutions, end up with Third-World-style wealth inequality and a democracy to match?
Read more of The Winners Take Everything at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/29/the-winners-take-everything/

EXCERPT:  How It Happened

The authors of Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, have put together a thesis that tries to tell the great untold story of the last 30 odd years. That is, how did the redistribution of wealth in this country become so concentrated in the highest echelons, to the point that, in the wake of the collapse, the middle class — or what is left of it — simply does not have the purchasing power to recharge the economy?

Hacker and Pierson spend the first part of the book proving this is so. And they do that in a very convincing manner, through an array of statistical charts that show that the concentration of wealth today is at a point unsurpassed since the Gilded Age, the Age of the Robber Barons — like Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan and John Rockefeller Sr. — the days when there was no middle class and when these men essentially owned the government through outright bribery.

That was also a time when there were no strong unions to hold the Robber Barons in check. There also were no real laws regulating banking and the stock market. Because of all this, the Robber Barons were allowed to do as they wished with no regard to anyone else. According to Teddy Roosevelt, they even arranged economic downturns to hurt presidents who were opposed to their total dominion. There really was no democracy, since elections were bought and sold.

As notorious Republican campaign manager Mark Hanna once said, “The single most important thing about winning elections is money. I forgot the second thing.” Therefore in the key election of 1896, Hanna backed William McKinley against the full-throated populist William Jennings Bryan, who crisscrossed the country by train, hitting as many as four cities in a day. McKinley sat on his front porch with his mother and wife, while Hanna brought the media to him. Bryan got more votes than any previous candidate for president, but McKinley still won.

What Hacker and Pierson are arguing here is that, for all intents and purposes, the USA is now back in the Gilded Age. Even though we have a president who is a Democrat, and even though Democrats control the Senate, it does not matter. The intent of the book is to show why the top 1 percent really does not care about party affiliation.