If you live in a gated community with a house listed at over $1 million, this isn’t for you — and maybe, just maybe the coming decades will be more for the average American, and less about you.Not that anyone wants to punish you for success; it’s just that you are detached from the problems of ordinary people: the cost of medical care, a job or pension that might disappear, drug-related crime.
We may be about to turn sharply on socio-political hinges to the urgent concerns of the average citizen, much like a similar swing in the decade and a half following the turn of the last century.
From the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1900, steel-ribbed railways stitched the continent together, igniting such dynamic growth that our industrial muscle grew equal or superior to older Europeans.
With adolescent exuberance — not unlike the idealistic ineptitude of George W. Bush in Iraq — we started a foolish war with Spain and inherited a nationalist Philippine insurgency along the way. It turned into an atrocious bloodletting fought for 14 years, and finally calmed into an uneasy occupation of nearly 50 years.
The dynamism of America’s economic expansion was a marvel of the 19th century, but steroids of ruthless, competition-stifling excess from Big Oil and the railroads stimulated much of it.
Middle-class Americans today tighten their belts, hope they don’t get laid off by merger or outsourcing and shake their heads in resignation as ExxonMobil swims in profits of $36.1 billion and awaits a share of $7 billion in tax breaks.
Small-town merchants, the core of Main Street values, watch with the resigned calm of men facing a firing squad as Godzilla-Mart approaches to swallow them, starving local radio stations and newspapers dependent on locally owned advertisers.
The corporate giantism, fraud and excess of today cannot be blamed completely on the reign of the Republican Party from 1994 to 2006, but the one-party Congress and chief executive haven’t focused on Main Street woes. The GOP has instead concentrated on such cosmic question as when life begins or who can marry whom, intervened urgently in the family tragedy of Terri Schiavo and blocked any investigation of how the Bush administration used prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Enron is just one example of corporate malfeasance in our time that goes beyond the bounds of socially and morally acceptable behavior. Imagine a conversation between former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, and it will take you back to the days of John D. Rockefeller.
Follow Rockefeller through the investigative magazine journalist Ida Tarbell’s 1902 account of how Standard Oil ruthlessly shut down almost every oil refinery in Cleveland.
He had made a deal with the railroads who gave him rates so low that other refineries couldn’t compete. He’d buy them out in exchange for shares of Standard Oil stock.
A family refinery owned by a Robert Hanna didn’t want to sell. Rockefeller gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. "You can never make any more money, in my judgment," said Rockefeller. "You can’t compete with Standard. We have all the large refineries now. If you refuse to sell, it will end in your being crushed."
Eventually, farmers, Main Street merchants and wage earners, treated like serfs by the giant trusts, rebelled. A happy, 15-year period of reform called the Progressive Movement changed America for the better.
A historian of the period, Richard Hofstadter described the movement "as an attempt to develop the moral will, the intellectual insight, and the political and administrative agencies to remedy the accumulated evils and negligence of a period of industrial growth."
Hofstadter, almost as if writing about the blind spots of a party and Congress dominated by the religious right wing, said the "promise of social progress was not to be realized by sitting and praying, but by using the active powers — by the exposure of evils through the spreading of information and the exhortation of the citizenry."
It must have been an exhilarating time to be alive, dominated by optimism, by the belief that anything was possible for our young nation. It was a time when people could imagine that:
• Tenements would be eliminated.
• Spoiled meat and phony drugs would be outlawed.
• Monopolies would be collared.
• Sweat labor of women and children would be eliminated.
• The black struggle would be noticed.
• And wage-earners would be protected against industrial hazards.
It is tempting to believe that the weight of the war and the real-world, street-level worries of working and middle-income citizens could be resolved in a burst of reform brought on by a new Congress and president.
Modern life, however, is more complicated. The old monopoly trusts could be broken up, freeing competitors and adding jobs, but we don’t know how to regulate the global marketplace of our time or how to find a productive place for its victims.
Our homes, our neighborhoods and especially clerks in gas station grub marts — combat soldiers of the retail world — are under constant threat by what seems a permanent black male underclass drawn to crime and drugs. Even such eminent black scholars as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson think there may be a cultural reason for so many young black criminals, but the point is that no one knows.
The current leadership doesn’t seem to care about the victims of the global economy or the pathology of young black males. It is fixed on war, vaporous "family values" and tax breaks for Big Oil and the rich.
If popular resignation turns to anger, as polls suggest, we may soon see the end of the era of the rich man.
H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Anniston Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.
