How We Became A Throw-Away Society
This article appeared in a slightly altered version at https://robertvanwey.substack.com/p/our-throw-away-society.
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They Don’t Make Things Like They Used To
It’s a trope you hear all too often these days, but it is true. From a subjective view, anecdotes surround us. A program you used for months or years suddenly ‘updates’ into an inferior or harder-to-use version. A modern refrigerator peters out while its 50-year old counterpart continues steadily churning out cold air in your basement. A simple disfunction in your car costs thousands of dollars in repairs and hours at the dealership rather than a few dozen dollars and an hour in the driveway on a jack — all to achieve the same result.
Objectively, ample evidence exists that material things are lousier today, such that experts have a name for it: planned obsolescence. Adam Hadhazy lists the general features of this kind of strategized inferiority:
contrived durability, where brittle parts give out, to having repairs cost more than replacement products, to aesthetic upgrades that frame older product versions as less stylish — goods makers have no shortage of ruses to keep opening customers’ wallets.
Aside from quality-based obsolescence, companies also engage in forced obsolescence. For example, many printers on the market shut down their functionality even before the ink runs out, thereby compelling the user to buy new ink or else their printer becomes useless. Service companies, most recently Adobe, arbitrarily change their terms and conditions. Consumers must “agree” to this coercion or lose whatever content or ongoing projects they have that use the program. Still others outright prohibit one’s ability to fix problems at all, forcing them to undertake over-priced repairs at authorized outlets, buy newer and more expensive versions, or switch products altogether causing chaos and possibly further lost income.
Returning to Hadhazy for a moment, whose article appeared on the BBC, he himself defends these practices to some degree and notes the many ways the business world does as well. He cheerily writes, “the rapid turnover of goods powers growth and creates reams of jobs — just think of the money people earn by manufacturing and selling, for instance, millions of smartphone cases.” Giles Slade, author of the book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, employs the “quality of life” defense, albeit balanced with some critique:
There’s no doubt about it, more people have had a better quality of life as a result of our consumer model than at any other time in history. Unfortunately, it’s also responsible for global warming and toxic waste.
Another person quoted in Hadhazy’s article, Judith Chevalier, a professor of finance and economics at Yale University, makes the economically privileged argument. She says, “Who buys super durable clothes for their kids?” Then Hadhazy attempts to contextualize it:
Depending on their age, children might grow out of their clothes sometimes in mere months. It’s not so bad, then, that the clothes might relatively easily stain, tear, or go out of style, so long as they’re inexpensive.
Following this elitist nonsense, Slade shines a light on the elephant in the room. He notes that “luxury” goods are more an investment than a consumable commodity. “If you buy a Rolex, you know it’s going to last you and you expect to be able to drive a truck over it. Luxury goods are socially coded.” Let’s be clear about what he means: cheaply made shit is for the masses. The ‘elites’ deserve well-made products with ample resale value, even if they accidentally back over them with their carbon-spewing overpriced truck.
This is capitalism in a nutshell. But it is more perverse than that.
Narratives: Reordering Society to Keep You in Your Place
There has been an inclination of humans throughout our history to segregate people by “haves” and “have-nots.” Kings, pharaohs, nobility, popes — these and a plethora of other titles signify who was allowed to live most comfortably, with all the best stuff. Few of them deserved such material comforts anymore than anyone else by any objective standard, so they routinely employed carefully construed narratives to justify their unequal consumption and prodigious pampering. Some situated themselves as chosen by god or heaven; others gained prominence on their purported — if contrived — achievements or intellect. The worst inherited their place from the fiction-weavers who came before them. Nearly all remain hoisted in history by virtue of the loyalties of the author. “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein.”
Capitalism as the supposedly best system for promoting the advent of creature comforts for all people necessarily requires its own fanciful narrative because it is an inherently flawed system dependent upon segregation and exploitation. It cannot exist without environmental destruction, built upon an epochal swindle that has convinced generations of people that the obsessive collection and cycling of junk is better than engaging in an intellectually or morally fruitful life. This system has persuaded the masses to identify by the nature of their subservience, while simultaneously despising their daily role. Like all false narratives tend to require, to prop up the illusion of ideological good its proponents concurrently propagate and vociferously demonize a nemesis; lately, socialism.
What is Profit?
Many people use the word ‘socialism’ like a pejorative. People hurling the term this way think doing so is some kind of flex — a presumed de facto win in a political argument — but one they unwittingly base on a distorted view of history, spoon-fed to them by politicians and media and propagandists that they proclaim not to trust. Most attempting this form of weaponization have little idea what the word was originally meant to describe. This arises from an education system that has failed generations of children-turned-adults, itself no accident. Its Industrial Revolution-era use derived from a French term. Back then, socialism referred to “theories or systems that substitute cooperative action and community possession of means of production in place of competition based on individual effort.” The word itself enjoys a far older etymological history, deriving from the Latin socialis: “of companionship, of allies; united, living with others; of marriage, conjugal,” and the Norse seggr: “companion.” Hardly a social ill.
A YouGov survey in 2020 found that 47% held an unfavorable view of socialism, with another 23% either unsure or admitting they did not know the meaning of the term. Many, maybe most, associate the concept with the Soviet Union, whose historical understanding twisted under the weight of Cold War propaganda. Soviet imperialism and a swift shift to centralized control in opposition to the ideals of Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution meant that Russia (and, thus, the USSR) really never had a socialist state. Thus, to look for it in the post-Bolsehvik era, especially during Stalin’s reign of terror, is to see socialism where it did not meaningfully exist.
The same lot that elucidated their disdain for socialism in the YouGov survey also offered their approval of capitalism, 55%. Interestingly, these same survey-takers uniformly disapproved of ‘totalitarianism’ (94%), ‘fascism’ (93%) and ‘authoritarianism’ (92%), terms that directly correlate with and serve as functions of modern capitalism. Interchange the ‘state’ with ‘corporation’ and the relationship becomes clear. Totalitarianism as used in the correlative sense means a state with absolute authority. Fascism is similar, but where power centralizes within a single person, not the ‘state’ as a whole. Authoritarianism is a political system that rejects democracy and political plurality. Note that the survey defined none of these terms, leaving the respondents to imagine their own.
The evolution of capitalism from at least the robber baron days to the venture capitalists of the present provides an abundance of evidence for why it is a failure. As an ideology, it fosters unfairness, theft, ecological destruction, and it obstructs scientific and intellectual progress. To ensure that the subsequent discussion is clear, let’s start with the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition with which I think most would agree:
An economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit.
As a social construct, capitalism sounds like a reasonably fair, sensible way to promote progress and to reward those who put the forth the most effort or ingenuity toward achieving goals. The reality, however, is quite different. The definition’s concluding phrase signifies the fundamental flaw in this philosophy: “with the purpose of making a profit.” Few these days debate the meaning of profit. It does not seem an untoward presumption to say that nearly all people first think ‘money’ or ‘wealth’ when they hear the term. Indeed, I would hesitate to proffer any noun that deviates very far from those. But the Latin term from which the word profit derives held a rather different connotation. Profectus meant “growth, advance, increase, success, progress.”
The word assumed its more nefarious sense as early as the 14th century when it became associated with “use” or “usefulness” in the context of gains acquired above expenses. During that time, the Bubonic ‘Black’ Plague was ravaging Europe killing some 40 percent of the population in a relatively short period. Like during the COVID pandemic, though far more severely, the European supply chain ground to a halt, a result of collapsed production caused by a sick and dying labor force. Poverty soared for quite some time, though wages actually grew following the end of the pandemic because manpower was in such short supply that laborers could demand higher wages. In the hundred or so years before the plague, but especially in the centuries following, international trade grew considerably. With it came favoritism and profiteering, controlled by middlemen who had little to do with either manufacturing or selling, but who procured as much as 75% of the revenue. Over the coming era, eventually named the industrial age, profiteering and exploiting workers became so prevalent that critics coined the term robber baron in the 1800s to describe company executives who exploited everyone else. Even today, some of these villains remarkably still hold reputable reputations among many, such as the Rockefellers.
The Golden Age of Capitalism
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, workers pushed back against their abusive overlords. Although the first labor strike seems to have occurred all the way back in 1768, unionization really took off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This did not proceed nicely; many labor disputes led to violence and death. For example, when the union and US Steel clashed over violations of their agreement of 1901, 198 people were killed and 1,966 were injured over the next three years or so. The American government eventually recognized the need to protect workers, passing the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
For about the next four decades, labor enjoyed an escalation of power in what became known as the “golden age of capitalism.” The two primary factors heralding this age according to most economists were “increased trade union strength and government spending on social insurance.” Relatedly, income inequality during this period was decidedly low compared to the first half of the industrial age and the period beginning in 1980 to the present. Beneath the glare of that golden age, however, was a terribly maltreated underclass, itself just one of a plethora of targets for exploitation.
During this so-called golden age, corporations boosted profits by dumping incredible amounts of toxins into the air and water; circumventing unions by — among other things — importing African American workers who already suffered rampant poverty and would accept far lower wages than union workers; and artificially convulsing markets outside of the U.S. to sustain the mirage of domestic prosperity. Much of the successes in the American economy depended on the abuse of labor or resources elsewhere, so when disruptions occurred in those faraway places the U.S. government needed to take drastic measures. Initiatives falling under the ideals of the Washington Consensus depressed development in a large number of countries who were coerced into agreeing to many long-lasting unfair deals. While not a policy itself, the Washington Consensus enabled its “ideologically motivated misuse” by private interests following the lead of American and global financial system ideals.
In America in the 1970s, things grew complicated by a highly unpopular Vietnam War, and President Nixon’s efforts to tie economic incentives with what he viewed as socially acceptable behavior. By then, constituents of both parties fiercely opposed the war, so Nixon heavily focused his efforts at escaping it by the time of his re-election in 1972. Domestically, he hoped to associate government assistance with Republicans to gain favor amidst declining polls. At that time, government-supplied benefits were well-aligned with the needs of society, and people viewed such programs positively. As American GIs left Vietnam in growing numbers, and the social safety net continued working well, Nixon won re-election in 1972 with a landslide electoral victory atop one of the lowest voter turnouts in decades. Voters seemed to think things were looking up.
The optimism didn’t last long. Not all of Nixon’s ideas about government assistance programs were bad or nakedly partisan, and he seemed serious about gracefully wrapping up the war. How things might have progressed under his second term, however, will never be known. He scurried out of office on the heels of a criminal indictment related to the Watergate scandal only midway through his second term in 1974. That incident involved burglars associated with the president who were caught wiretapping phones and stealing documents to help Nixon’s 1972 reelection. Just two years after his big victory, this revelation and his resignation caused a major upheaval in the U.S. political system. It already trembled under the stress of oil shortages and rising inflation, and would soon suffer the reverberations from an epic military defeat symbolized by the fall of Saigon in 1975.
While many American families did in fact prosper throughout the decades between the end of the second world war and Nixon’s departure, extreme perturbances in the global economy pulled the veil off this illusory triumph heading into the 1980s. The decades following saw a drastic decline in the overall social safety net and median wealth as legislators sought to cut domestic budgets, leading to increasing poverty and a widening income gap. The inexorable death of the golden age of the middle class had begun.
The Decline of the Middle Class
The 1980s saw the first full-scale assault against the middle class, led by former actor and governor, and now-president Ronald Reagan. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Great Depression had turned the United States on its head. In response, government took an extraordinarily proactive role in regulation and stabilization. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal included legislation related to banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. Corporate and wealth taxes were kept comparatively high. These actions led to a wholesale reform in government’s role in protecting and providing for its citizens, and only grew in scope and influence over the next half century. But by the beginning of the 1980s, Republicans no longer approved of these social programs or business regulations, so when former actor Ronald Reagan entered office on the Republican ticket, his agenda was to start gutting them.
Among the first areas upon which he focused his deregulation agenda was the banking sector. From the Great Depression until Reagan’s election, the sector was considered very stable, but mostly non-competitive. Inflation in the 1970s, caused by external disturbances in the global economy — partly the result of American foreign policy and internal tomfoolery — provided the propounded justification for deregulation. What emerged from the actions of Reagan and his Republican supporters was a financial system that largely disfavored all but the rich. Banks consolidated, from 14,000 to just 4,600, wiping out most community-level ones. This led to the “too-big-to-fail” attitude that required taxpayers to bail out banks engaged in malfeasance that nearly triggered their collapse in 2008. Virtually none of the perpetrators of that crash faced consequences, but many made billions in profits. Meanwhile, much of the middle class still has not recovered.
Banks were not the only ones who benefitted from the Reagan-era attack on regulation and citizen protections. Anti-regulatory groups of all kinds fed his administration a litany of misinformation to justify eroding worker protections and laws meant to secure society. Reagan dutifully complied by reducing the budgets of several agencies such as the EPA, Department of Energy, and OSHA, among others.
Perhaps the most pernicious proposal to become policy that came from this disastrous presidency is what came to be called “trickle down economics,” a fundamental feature of “Reaganomics.” This all but obliterated the middle class, but its tortured legacy remains the economic ideology of Republicans and even some Democrats today. Top earners have seen a continuous decline of their tax rates since, foisting society’s bills upon everyone else with none of the alleged benefits ever trickling down. Higher taxes on the rich lead to more stable employment and society’s financial health. Lower taxes lead to higher rates of income inequality and poverty, as indicated by this graph. In years with the lowest high-end tax rates, total payrolls grow the slowest. Today, many corporations and the wealthiest individuals pay virtually nothing in taxes.
Reagan’s favoriting the wealthy also effectively converted education into a plaything of the rich. He never hid his disdain for widespread education. His advisor, Roger A. Freeman, once stated “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go through higher education].” Reagan’s issue was ideological; he opposed transportation programs meant to foster desegregation and he hated teachers’ unions. As governor, he referred to students — especially ones who protested — as “brats,” “freaks,” and “cowardly fascists.” To quell protests when they arose, he infamously stated “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!” Four days after this remark, itself eerily reminiscent of certain modern rhetoric, the Ohio National Guard engaged in one of the earliest mass shootings of a school at Kent State University, killing 4 and injuring 9.
As President, Reagan allowed corporate interests to meddle in education, much like Trump would later, appointing businessmen as secretaries of education and other important roles. Some argue that this commenced the notion that it was “far more important for schools to turn out good employees than to produce good citizens or decent human beings.” At the same time, Reagan cut federal funding for education by as much as one-third. When confronted with the issue that such cuts would further limit educational opportunities for the impoverished, his education secretary called such criticisms “sociological flimflammery.” Reagan’s lasting legacy, then, led to increasing privatization of schools, which enhanced segregation by economic class and race. Under this education paradigm, American scores in reading and mathematics have lagged behind most other countries of comparable per-capita education spending over the decades since. This political flimflammery paralleled his objectively failed economic policies.
Approaching the Present
Presidential administrations following Reagan did not veer much from favoring the rich and drowning the middle and lower economic classes. George H.W. Bush ran on a banal platform of keeping the status quo. His presidency was limited to one term primarily for this reason. Domestically, most voters viewed him as a failure. By not changing the disastrous economic policies under Reagan, Bush was saddled with a relatively lousy economy at re-election time. As such, Bill Clinton took over. His administration is credited with “one of the most impressive economic turnarounds in modern history.” Over eight years, the United States saw the creation of 22.7 million new jobs, unemployment dropped to a 30-year low, and gross domestic product grew by 35 percent. Despite these advancements, he also signed into law The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which put disbursements of federal benefits in control of the states. This resulted in disaster, especially for children. Moreover, he continued the Reagan regime’s deregulation of the banking industry, among other acts eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act, which was designed to protect depositors from potential losses through stock speculation.
Facing a minor recession early in his tenure, George W. Bush advocated the passage of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA). Legislators passed this law on the continued fantasy that ‘trickle down’ economics somehow benefits anyone but the highest earners. The law reduced the top four marginal income tax rates, as well as the tax rate on capital gains and dividends. The Center on Budget Policy and Priorities explained the end result:
Evidence suggests that the tax cuts — particularly those for high-income households — did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.
The Brookings Institute found that the tax cuts did not generate any growth whatsoever, and actually cost the economy in the years following. Expiration of these tax cuts in 2012 led to no “substantial negative impacts on economic growth.”
Bush’s administration also passed the inaptly named Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCP). It made healthcare the primary cause of bankruptcy by 2007 because people could not manage devastating medical costs without either putting their homes up as collateral or by filing bankruptcy. For non-medical debt, the Act “forced homeowners to take equity out of their homes to pay back their debts. As a result, prime and subprime mortgage defaults rose to 23% and 14%, respectively.” Subprime mortgage defaults almost unilaterally caused the Great Recession of 2008.
When the 2008 financial collapse happened, economists were quick to lay the blame everywhere, except on the people who primarily caused it. In an article tellingly without a byline, The Economist asserted that home buyers “took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.” Curiously, that article blandly stated that “billionaire villains played a role,” but when it came to specifics it had little to say about them and plenty of detailed criticism of middle class homeowners, buyers, and sellers. It also did not seem to find a great deal of culpability in George W. Bush’s tax cuts or his insertion of the US into military conflicts that would last decades and siphon trillions of dollars from the economy. Conveniently, the article also ignored the economic recession that was already occurring while Bush was still in office. In any event, like Reagan, his father, and Clinton before him, Bush simply perpetuated the stranglehold the wealthiest held over everyone else.
Like during the Clinton administration, and in contrast to the three Republican administrations going back to Reagan, the middle and lower classes largely did better under Obama. During his tenure, the country added 11.6 million jobs, numbers of uninsured plummeted, and average weekly earnings for employees were up 4.2 percent after inflation. However, like all those predecessors, Obama continued the propping of corporations and further strengthened the power imbalance and economic divide. First, he bailed out the banks from the 2008 financial catastrophe, whose own malfeasance and the “too big to fail” ideology led to their near collapse in the first place. Corporate champions credit him with “prevent[ing] untold hardship on the American people and a worldwide economic meltdown” including another Great Depression. But as already noted, the middle and lower classes paid dearly for this episode while wealthy elites profited billions of dollars and faced no punishment for their risky behavior that caused the crash.
Obama favored corporations primarily to keep the stock market up. As a result, stock market gains during his administration exceeded those made during Trump’s by substantial margins (despite Trump’s repeated claims otherwise). Nevertheless, a good stock market does not equate to a good economy for the masses. In fact, high stock market gains should be a criticism for presidents. More than 80% of all U.S. stocks are owned by the richest 10% of U.S. households, according to Edward N. Wolff. Despite substantial growth of the market during the Obama administration, between 2007 and 2016 American median household income decreased from $119,000 to $78,000. During the same period the top 2% household income saw a rise from about $366,000 to $434,000. Since 1990, gains in the stock market far outpaced the average income of American workers. Blair Fix carefully laid out what this really means for the average American:
[F]or the bottom 87% of people, this correlation [between stock and income] is negative. That means stock-market gains came with a declining share of income… Switching from income to wealth makes the story even more scandalous… When the stock market rises, a whopping 96% of Americans see their share of wealth decline… In the United States, the stock market takes wealth (and income) from the many and hands it to the few.
To his credit, Obama decried the noxious Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010, which essentially “open[ed] the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Complaining about that decision, however, hardly mitigates the damage he perpetuated by allowing corporations to continue wresting control of the economy entirely in their favor and to the detriment of society. And he did little in response to this giveaway by an increasingly corrupted Supreme Court.
The Trump administration was an unbridled “giveaway” to corporations, while the Biden administration has attempted to claw back some corporate power, however feebly. For a more detailed look at those differences, click here. There are two items worth pointing out, though:
Trump’s administration saw the passing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), a similar giveaway to the wealthy as Bush’s EGTRRA and its 2003 supplement, but with far greater vigor:
Under the 2017 law, the highest household incomes received a reduction of 2.9% to their tax burden, which is about three times the reduction received by the lowest income earners. Moreover, it lowered the corporate tax from 35% to an astonishing 21%, all while these companies continue to gouge American consumers under the guise of inflation. The University of California, Berkeley, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), in a joint study, found that none of those corporate earnings went to the bottom 90% of the American earning population…
The law also provided a 20% pass-through income tax reduction. This benefitted companies organized as partnerships, LLCs, and S-corps, over half of which are owned by households with $1 million or more in annual income. Economists at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve found “no evidence that the deduction provided any boost in economic activity in the two years following the deduction’s enactment — no additional investment, jobs, or higher wages for employees of pass-through businesses.”
The Biden administration has shown the most concerted effort of any administration in decades to challenge the corporate oligarchy:
[The administration] is suing (or has sued and won) numerous companies for monopolistic, price gouging, or price-fixing activities. These suits target(ed) Agri Stats (meat industry), Amazon, Jet Blue, Google, Illumina Inc. (cancer technology), Penguin Random House, Sanofi (Pompe disease treatment), United Health Group, and dozens more. This is at last double the number of lawsuits of this kind launched by the federal government in any of the previous 20 years. In March, the administration requested an additional $100 million to fund the anti-trust division, presumably to ramp up these investigations and lawsuits.
To that I added the following caveat:
My issue with this, however, is that the administration has not taken a strong enough stance to push more severe legislation to prevent price gouging, given the large number of relative monopolies that already exist. Moreover, the DOJ could pursue breaking apart more of these behemoths that already exist, using the abundance of evidence of price gouging, price fixing, and market manipulation as evidence of violations of anti-trust laws.
Becoming the Government
A broad trend is glaringly apparent. No matter the party, every administration coddled corporations to some degree or another since at least Nixon, and the consequences have built up over decades to the point of catastrophe for everyone else. The key takeaways here are several. First, the “golden age of capitalism” worked the only way capitalism can successfully work. It requires the exploitation of the powerless to build up the mechanisms that make others comfortable, even though the majority of its profits extend to a vanishingly small number. In America, exploiting people in the developing world and the underclasses here maintained the illusion of a stable middle class that could prosper under the auspices of the ‘American Dream,’ a rhetorical flair that contended that by working just hard enough, the acquisition of any amount of wealth is possible for anyone. This of course applies only to a select population, and even for most of them the odds are considerably low.
Second, with the advocacy of some administrations, legislation to protect workers and provide social safety nets for the less fortunate did pass. This allowed a portion of America to enjoy three pretty strong decades of growth between World War II and the Nixon resignation. Later, it helped keep large numbers from falling into complete, abject poverty. Nevertheless, nefarious actors — the immoral descendants of the robber barons of yore — bristled with contempt at the idea that anyone exists without contributing to the mechanisms of their misbegotten wealth. Even for those that do contribute — i.e., their workers — these tycoons want only scraps left for them.
By picking their battles and, more importantly, their candidates, the bandits routinely seek to undermine any effort to improve the lot of the masses. By the 2000s, the term ‘conservative’ earned the equivalency of corporate stooge. So-called ‘progressives’ still largely caved to corporate interests, they just failed to do so fast enough to the liking of the wealthy elitists. Policy disputes, then, primarily turned on whether legislators acted to forestall poverty and inequality at all, not upon matters of degree. Critics and those seeking to uphold this ridiculously unfair system label true progressives with terms like ‘extreme’ or ‘audacious.’ Thus, legislatively, they might as well not exist.
Corporate oligarchs regularly turn their unscrupulous attentions to rolling back any programs favorable to workers or the poor and attack any political figures who fall out of line. Both have been made easier by working to install handpicked puppets like Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, and Trump for president; Mitch McConnell, corporate money launder Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi, and Kevin Yoder in Congress; and many, many others. To ensure anything that did become law that contrasted with their interests failed, the most powerful of the wealthy — the billionaires — poured their riches into organizations whose sole purpose is to undermine anything threatening this hierarchy, like the Federalist Society or Heritage Foundation. This ensured they could eventually hijack America’s highest courts and through unelected hacks they could defeat any positive legislation. And they did just that by emplacing certain corrupt cronies like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, Aileen Cannon, Matthew Kacsmaryk, and many, many others.
To fool enough of the electorate into supporting policies that would eventually enslave it, this army of darkness couched their schemes under the guise of ‘limiting big government,’ tricking the fearful or ignorant into thinking they had their best interests in mind. Zeroing in on the fear argument, they kept in their pockets perennial bogeymen to distract the light thinkers from observing the erosion of their own lifestyles. They propped up Communists, terrorists, Muslims, homosexuals and, later, immigrants, Critical Race Theory, the transgendered, and the ‘woke’ as scarecrows in the killing fields of the culture war. They convinced people to shoot Bud Light cans over a commercial while they quietly stole their wages. They riled people up over imaginary ‘woke mind-viruses’ while selling them fraudulent garbage and polluting their skies. They showed old footage of brown people ‘invading’ the border via ‘immigrant caravans’ while they bought off judges. Meanwhile, the wealth and income gaps between classes widened precipitously.
While inequality is most certainly not an exclusively American phenomenon, it is especially prominent here.
Between 1979 and 2020, the average income of the richest 0.01 percent of households, a group that today represents about 12,000 households, grew 17 times as fast as the income of the bottom 20 percent of earners.
Modern day corporate thieves have returned the U.S. to the inequality levels of the days of the robber barons. This dizzying trend started with Reagan, but rapidly accelerated under George W. Bush. Democrat administrations did little to stem the tide, securing just a few victories in the last decades, but obediently complying the rest of the time. And why would they rock the boat? Democrats and Republicans alike benefit from this system now more than ever in the last century, trading on insider information, leading many of them to miraculously outperform the stock market year-in and year-out.
Legalized Bribery
In addition to fleecing the stock market, all politicians enormously benefit from and bow down to lobbyists — the American version of legalized bribery — to keep their hands in the public till by way of reelection. These corporate interests, no longer restrained by petty things like laws — thanks in no small part to the corrupt Supreme Court — donate to candidates out of their generous support not some quid pro quo. At least that is what they would like you to believe. Take the words of a former lobbyist who quit the industry allegedly to preserve his “conscience,” despite continuing to proclaim that he “support[s] lobbying and believe[s] it’s an essential part of our constitutional right ‘to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’” Here is what he told Vox:
A string of cases like Citizens United and others has opened the barn door to unlimited “dark money” campaign spending. Cases like Citizens gross me and most everyone else out because the result is the money in your politics becomes the voice in your politics. Americans’ right “to redress” comes at a cost, and if you don’t have the cash, chances are you’ll be ignored.
Bottom line: Those with the most money have the largest voices. Those with the least are rarely part of the process. That makes the legality of the practice of lobbying less relevant because it’s an uneven playing field.
In that context, he described how a “legal ‘bribe’ goes down in Congress [excerpt]:
When I was representing the wine and spirits distributors, I had scheduled a meeting with a member of the Nevada delegation. I had two of my Nevada clients with me, and we sat waiting patiently in the member’s reception area before I was summoned into his office.
When I entered his office, he stood up and shook my hand, and then asked me point blank: “Jimmy, we’ve called your PAC fundraiser on numerous occasions, and she hasn’t returned our calls. So why exactly are you here for a meeting?”
He held in front of me a call sheet with the times and dates both he and his fundraiser had called us for donations. They were highlighted in yellow. And my only response was, “I don’t know, Congressman, but I’ll take care of it.” He told me he hoped so and then said I could bring my clients into his office. They walked in, we sat down as if nothing had happened, he said he supported every one of our pertinent legislative issues, and then we all shook hands and walked out. Now this guy is no longer a member of Congress, but he supported my clients’ interest — and the legislation my clients wanted eventually passed the House and Senate and was signed into law.
This lobbyist nevertheless defended the practice as free speech, an ironic position given his critique. Calling it free speech is little more than a lexical contradiction — there’s nothing free about it. Consider this articulation at securities.io:
Lobbying is the act of attempting to influence public officials or government policy through various means, such as meetings, phone calls, emails, letters, or other forms of communication. Lobbyists are hired by interest groups, corporations, or individuals to advocate for their views on specific issues or policies. The goal of lobbying is to persuade lawmakers to support the interests of the lobbyist’s clients.
Bribery, conversely, is the act of offering or receiving something of value, such as money, gifts, or favors, in exchange for a specific action or decision. Bribery is illegal and unethical because it undermines the fairness and impartiality of the decision-making process.
The cognitive dissonance is appalling. Does author Gaurav Roy really not know that lobbying is precisely the act of offering something of value? Then again, this person is a self-described cryptocurrency trader. His notion of value is based on a Ponzi scam — one that is destroying the environment.
Nevertheless, to ignore the offer of something of value in lobbying, how does one explain this graph ?
The thing of value is painfully evident. Lest one think it unfair to only show the top 12, here is page 4 of the list:
It goes on for some distance.
Segue
While the evidence shows that one party exhibited some elementary attempt at leveling the playing field more than the other, you can’t make a silk purse of a sow’s eare. Both are part of the nefarious cult of profiteering; their political existence now entirely depends upon it; and back when it didn’t, even the idealists failed to perform. Capitalism as an ideology is a destructive, exploitative debacle, but has earned a reputation built on delusion and false narratives driven by those who have taken advantage of its most odious features to steal the vast majority of societal wealth. This is precisely the same methodology followed by billionaires to polish their images: execute one racket after another to sustain a fraudulent cosmology. It is weaponizing the proceeds of their crimes to victimize their victims over and again, repeatedly, endlessly.
The world has turned to complete shit under this paradigm. For us nothing has intrinsic value any longer — relationships, ethics, religion, the environment, products, services, logic, facts, or even existence itself. Each of these things — once fundamentals to a quality life — are now simply for sale to the highest bidder. If they cannot be monetized, they can be discarded. Life is now slogging through an Orwellian existence, but in such dystopian fashion that even he might blanch at what the world has become. We are the Boxers and Clovers living in a world of pigs.
Robert Vanwey was Senior Technical Analyst for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice, specializing in investigating public corruption, technology and financial crime. He also has a Juris Doctor and Master degree in history.
Be sure to check out Just Say We Won, his detailed narrative of Trump’s attempted soft coup to overthrow the United States of America, and According to Trump, Any President can do Anything, Including Kill You, a careful analysis of Trump’s immunity arguments made before the Supreme Court. Or check out the Evidence Files Substack for an exploration into technology, science, aviation, and the Himalayas, where Rob frequently lives and works.
