July 3, 2012 |
Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back
many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the
previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90
years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted
attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by
slashing services to the poor.
We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early
20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians,
using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During
the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded
tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to
help lift them out of hard times.
With Republicans more committed than ever to repealing every economic
gain the working-class has achieved in the last century and the
Democrats seemingly unable to resist, we need to understand the Gilded
Age to see what conservatives are trying to do to this nation. Here are 8
ways our corporations, politicians and courts are trying to recreate
the Gilded Age.
1. Unregulated Corporate Capitalism Creates Economic Collapse
In the late 19th century, corrupt railroad capitalists created the
Panic of 1873 and Panic of 1893 through lying about their business
activities, buying off politicians and siphoning off capital into their
own pockets. Railroad corporations set up phony corporations that
allowed them to embezzle money from the railroad into their bank
accounts. When exposed, the entire economy collapsed as banks failed
around the country. The Panic of 1893 lasted five years, created 25%
unemployment, and was the worst economic crisis in American history
before the Great Depression.
In the early 21st century, the poorly regulated financial industry
plunged the nation into the longest economic downturn since the
Depression. Like in the Gilded Age, none of the culprits have served a
day in prison.
2. Union Busting
In the Gilded Age, business used the power of the state to crush labor unions. President Hayes called in the Army to break the
Great Railroad Strike of 1877; President Cleveland
did the same against the Pullman strikers in 1894.
Today’s corporations don’t have to use such blunt force to destroy
unions, but like in the past, they convince the government to do their
bidding. Whether it is holding up FAA renewal in order to make it harder
for airline employees to unionize, Republican members of the National
Labor Relations Board leaking material on cases to Republican insiders,
or governors Scott Walker and John Kasich seeking to bust their states’
public sector unions, not since before the Great Depression has the
government attacked unions with such force.
3. Income Inequality
Today, we have the highest levels of income inequality since the 1920s
and the gap is widening to late 19th century levels with great speed. In
those days, individuals like John D. Rockefeller had more money than
the federal government, while the majority of Americans lived in
squalor, poverty and disease.
In the Progressive Era, we started creating laws like the federal
income tax, child labor laws and workers’ compensation to begin giving
workers a fair share of the pie. For decades, labor fought to increase
their share and by the 1970s, had turned much of the working class into
the middle class. Today, that middle class is under attack by a new
generation of plutocrats who wish to recreate the massive fortunes of
the Gilded Age.
4. Open Purchase of Elections
In 1890, copper magnate William Clark
paid Montana lawmakers $140,000 to elect him to the U.S. Senate.
While most plutocrats did not share Clark’s interest in being
politicians, they ensured their lackeys would serve in office, often by
offering corporate stock to politicians. Disgusted by this corruption,
America in the Progressive Era of the early 20th century created a
number of reforms, including the 17th Amendment that created direct
elections of senators, as well as a 1912 Montana state law limiting
corporate expenditures in politics.
Beginning with the
Citizens United decision and continuing with the recent overturning of
that 1912 law, the Supreme Court has allowed corporations and wealthy plutocrats to buy elections openly once again.
5. Supreme Court Partisanship
In the Gilded Age, the Supreme Court interpreted laws not as to the
intent of the lawmakers, but to promote business interests. It refused
to enforce the 14th Amendment to stop segregation, but it did create the
idea that a corporation was a person with rights. The Sherman
Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was intended to moderate monopolies; the Supreme
Court only enforced it against unions since organized labor “unfairly
restrained trade.”
Today’s Supreme Court has resorted to this aggressively partisan
stance. The Court is fine with the open flouting of the 4th Amendment,
allowing strip searches of middle-school girls if they’re suspected to
be carrying drugs, but creates a grotesque expansion of the 14th
Amendment in the
Citizens United decision. Meanwhile, Antonin
Scalia just took the opportunity in a Supreme Court dissent to lambast
his colleagues for striking down much of the Arizona anti-immigration
law by approvingly citing 19th-century laws in the South that limited
the movement of African Americans.
6. Violations of Civil Liberties
In the late 19th century, civil and military authorities looked down
upon protesting citizens. Widespread violations of civil liberties took
place when Americans protested for almost any reasons, whether it was
labor unions, political gatherings in Washington, D.C., or African
Americans organizing to protect themselves from white supremacists.
Police shot strikers and thugs and mobs murdered organizers.
Today we are seeing a growing recreation of this society with no
respect for civil liberties. The use of police violence against Occupy
protesters, like the pepper-spraying of nonviolent activists at the
University of California-Davis did spawn some outrage. But in the
aftermath of the PATRIOT Act, the authorities have tremendous power to
suppress protest and are not afraid to use it against peaceful citizens.
7. Voter Repression
The Gilded Age saw the rolling back of Reconstruction, with black
people unable to vote in the South due to the grandfather clause, poll
taxes, literacy tests, and threat of violence. Conservative extremists
have chafed at black people voting ever since the civil rights movement
ended segregation.
Today, voter ID laws and voter roll-purging seek to limit black voting
again. Florida Governor Rick Scott hopes to purge enough black people
from the voting rolls to swing the Sunshine State to Mitt Romney this
fall, while a lawmaker in Pennsylvania
openly said
the Keystone State’s recently passed voter ID law would do the same.
Even more shocking, the recently released Texas Republican Party
platform has a plank calling for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of
1965, passed in the wake of police beatings of civil rights protestors
in Selma, Alabama.
8. Anti-Immigration Fervor
In the Gilded Age, Americans feared the millions of people coming from
eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia to work in the
nation’s growing economy. Fearing these immigrants would never
assimilate, Americans looked to bar their entry. Beginning with the
Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and continuing through the Immigration Act
of 1924, the country slowly closed its doors to the world’s tired and
hungry.
Today’s immigrants face an increasingly militarized border, states like
Arizona trying to usurp federal immigration policy, and increased
numbers of deportations. Conservatives fear the changes Latinos could
bring to the United States and talk about English-only laws and the
evils of bilingual education. They also recognize the likelihood of
Latinos voting for the Democratic Party in coming decades and thus use
the same kind of voter repression strategies that target black voters.
The Gilded Age was a horrible time and I fear the nation slipping back
into this hell of poverty, violence and hate. I believe that young
people largely reject the extremist agenda that is hurtling us through a
time machine to the bad old days of the 1890s, but they don’t have the
power right now. Republicans know the demographics do not favor them and
are trying to fix the game through voter suppression, packing the
courts with extremists, and concentrating wealth and power so they can
control politicians and the media.
During the Gilded Age, people throughout society began organizing for
reform: labor unions, farmers, middle-class reformers. After 1900, this
organizing paid off as government began passing reforms to alleviate the
most extreme problems of the Gilded Age. Child labor laws, worker
compensation for injuries at work, government regulation of the
railroads, and the direct election of senators all took power away from
corporations and put it back in the hands of the people. It wasn’t
perfect, but it started the social reforms that created the American
middle-class.
Like in the late 19th century, we need to take back our country from
corporate control. We need to create well-paid jobs in the United
States, revitalize the labor movement, and pass legislation to respect
civil liberties, give undocumented immigrants legal status, and ensure
that voting rights laws are enforced. Like our ancestors, we can fix
these problems. First we need to recognize that the 1% has declared war
upon the middle class and then we can start organizing to create the
better tomorrow we crave.
Erik Loomis is a professor of labor and environmental history and a blogger at
Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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