“Yes and through this life I’ve wandered, I’ve seen lots of funny men. Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
- Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” 1939.
It’s ironic that 40 years ago, when Earth First! was being vilified for sabotaging development projects, a small group of wealthy people were getting to work on sabotaging our government on an infinitely grander scale.
The media seized on the tree spikers, and mostly turned a blind eye to the monkey-wrenching of government agencies, laws and institutions that once supported working Americans.
As a lifetime news reporter, I get some of the reasons this happened. It’s easy to report on tree spiking. It’s much more difficult to research and understand and explain the complexities of proposed changes in the tax code, business law, or the operation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Reporters are paid little and overworked. They gravitate toward easy stories and superficial explanations. I’ve been guilty of that myself.
But there are some trends and tactics that can be seen in stark relief over time, like crop circles whose patterns become visible at a distance.
The most obvious of these is the attack on government by the wealthy starting in the mid-1970s, resulting in what is today a virtual oligarchy in America. “Get the government off our backs,” was how this soap was sold, with the promise that we would all grow rich when the bulls were allowed to run free. As we know, our nation turned out quite differently.
There were red flags along the way we should have noticed, and they had names: The S&L scandal, Enron, corporate raiding and downsizing, the decline of manufacturing, the 2008 financial crisis. These crises did not occur naturally. They were set in motion by changes in federal laws and policies that opened the castle gates to swindlers.
America did not go broke. America was robbed.
So here we are today, the ruling class now rich enough to own the presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court. They own most of the media, too, so they also get to shape what the majority of us think about them and their doings.
If you have a friend who has a small company building bicycles or brewing beer, that’s great. Entrepreneurialism isn’t dead in America. But major corporations and the wealthy make the big decisions in the Land of the Free, and if you’re having a hard time finding a decent-paying job or a good school for your kids, it’s most likely the rich you should blame.
The attack on government is nowhere more evident than in “government shutdowns” engineered by the GOP since the 1990s, first by a Republican Congress and most recently by a Republican president, Donald Trump.
Government shutdowns work for the Republicans – the party of the rich and for the rich – because they reinforce a key message of the GOP strategy: that government doesn’t work, that it is fundamentally broken, and that we could replace it entirely with some well-run private firms.
Shutdowns are intended to show voters that closing the government is no big deal and that a skeleton crew can provide essential services, which are few.
And that’s the truth for the rich, from their perspective. They can do well enough without social security checks, student loans, public health care, or national parks. The rich have what they need, and because the world’s wealth is finite, the things that you need can only cost them money.
Here in Alaska, we’re getting more of the same from our new Republican governor, who is working to strip away basic government services including public education, public transportation, public health and public safety. Austerity is needed, he cries, in a state that levies no taxes.
It would be nice to say this is all a policy debate, that we’re having a civil discussion about how best to administer our state and federal governments. The wealthy would like you to believe that, but the truth is much larger.
Whether you choose to fight back or not, there’s a war being waged against the rest of us by the rich.
If we don’t wake up to that realization soon, we’ll lose what few tools for reform are still at hand.