Op Ed: Gilded Age Impacts
Again Forcing Changes
As Economic Cycle Recurs

Corporate Perversions Building A Real Middle Class Revolt

Newspaper cartoon depicts 1874 police attack of New York City workers and the unemployed who gathered to demand public jobs programs. Such police violence against working people was common in the Gilded Age. Courtesy: American Social History Project

(BEND, Ore.) - Famed philosopher-historian George Santayana reported, flat and forcefully that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Observers of culture, common political and economic realities, and our national life --just beginning the 21st Century-- are painfully aware of first convulsive continuances reflecting rapid return to ANOTHER mass revolt of our American "democratic middle class".

Penetrating studies of our past history indicate the overweening natural collapses, brought on by overwhelming greed and dollar-driven attitudes, encountered in past "Gilded Age" eras, are inevitably about to reoccur.

Those same studies now equate "globalization" and "new worldwide economics", forcing onrushing "downgrading", deportation and dissipation of American jobs, to "economic Darwinism" of earlier days; with the descending spiral of low-pay labor sought worldwide impacting as strongly as that Darwinian "competition kills the weakest" concept.

We're already well-overdue, authorities report, for massive impacts of still-another U.S.-typical political/economic confrontation, as has been repeated over three centuries.

This one will undoubtedly strongly reshape fundamentals of our further definition of democracy, leading on to more-solid foundations; OR produce inescapable, inevitable, extremely damaging and deep departures from what our Founders intended --and our Constitution has provided, until now.

"The Revolution" began this cycle; demolishing then-economic monarchic-monopoly confrontations and substituting "liberty and equality for all" as an attainable goal.

Closely-parallel circumstances have been forcing eventual revolution-again ever since, in recurring cycle, as greed and corporate cupidities again overwhelmed conscience and community commitment. The term "gilded age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to describe the concentration of wealth in late nineteenth-century American society. During this period, industrial kingpins such as Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller amassed unprecedented fortunes, which translated into miserable working conditions in factories, coal mines, and oil fields, and violent strikes broke out throughout the country. The similarities to today are also striking.

Any American history will trace out the triple, quadruple or quintessential additional "revolutions" of that cycle for you: After 1776 it continues: to include "Southern superiority" built on massive slavery-profits, finally forcing the Civil War in which America changed the world forever on that issue.

Note that not only cotton and the steam/driven cotton gin, but also tobacco --still a deadly profit-making crop-- was at the root of that greed-driven era.

Then came early economic nation-forming rapidities, rivaled anywhere else, ravishing and replenishing our country for an admirable 100 years, through land-rushes, railroad networking and industrial-multiplying economic mastery; and then, inevitably: The original "Gilded Age" with the historic TR-triumph over "the malefactors of great wealth" created by that century.

The FDR-New Deal was thus clearly inevitable, followed by "the Fair Deal", festooned with infamous war-driven desperations; followed by still-further historic documentation of "what happens and why" in that sill-revolutionary, ongoing experiment in complex human associations: OUR "democracy".

Truly fascinating, that history is now "in depth-warning/status for what will naturally occur" in our next democratic development.

That allows us to plan and pursue an early and positive further progression --if we prove wise and conscientious enough to meet that challenge --and have learned ANYthing at all from our checkered past.

Common in those cyclical "corrections" is the ongoing "struggle of labor to hold its own for all"; against constant, dollar-driven desperate attack by most industry --and especially corporate combinations--to overwhelm and suppress union cooperative strength.

When that cycle-movement finally again occurs - authoritative sources now declare its inevitability-- it will surely mean demise for the deeply painful and injurious "$10 corporate minimum tax" in Oregon. Solidly in place for SEVENTY YEARS, that reflects "highly assertive attitudinal impacts of campaign contribution dollar-power", as also now obvious at national and Congressional levels and in every other Legislatures.

"Campaign contributions" --perverted into powerful lavish-lobbying money-power in every state-- exemplify previous conditions forcing far too many to pay personally an unfair share of tax revenues. Those revenues are necessarily demanded from all stakeholders nationwide because corporations escape carrying their fair share of the burden, via long-built legal and lobby-supported spin and manipulation.

Latest revelatory studies indicate parallel tax shares have been achieved by corporate interests in every state --very quietly and covertly-- impacting on the "middle class" masses as in Oregon. They also --everywhere-- are now becoming painfully aware, too.

Facts and figures rapidly becoming familiar to deeply concerned citizens, by widespread publication "in the media" and by Internet channels, "do not lie any longer about the desperate plight faced by far too many 'in the middle' now".

Through major-magazine articles, numerous new academic research reports, many new books, and --most telling of all, in a disintegrating print-media world-- in many editions of major daily newspapers, the facts are becoming indelibly clear and deeply unsettling: The 1-to-2 percent top-layer of our society creams off by far the largest share of our renewing and multiplying prosperities; while "the working stiff" segment of our population is getting less-and-less, for the middle two-thirds of true American democracy.

The reality of middle class economics today is that families are barely holding-their-own; while working longer hours with less time-off for any reason.

Most families must "depend on Mom's job to make it to the end-of-the-month."

A "better day" surely must come, soon; or "the revolution" will outrun that "cyclical-change" now promised.

Many further removed from wealth believe it is obtained by more realistic --if unfair-- means than "simply hard-work and luck."

Most members of "the massive middle" now "look long-and-hard at every further sign of corporate and business corruption and undue political influence". They are beginning to understand it is "bought-and-paid/for by the monstrous judicial error of 'political free speech' accorded to the soul-less and body-less corporation; in reality only a legal form for cooperative capitalization of societal demand-satisfaction, as its entire history doth clearly show.

Worldwide social-economic trends are at work, it is true.

But the larger share of this unearned and democracy-threatening economic disaster traces --truly and unmistakably-- to the covert and uncovert activities of an instigating and actuating group intent solely on their own dollar-gains manipulated by paid-for political advantages.

Their main attitude is: "I'll get mine and the hell with anyone else"; as widely published statements make increasingly clear, some right in "Comments" of this very channel.

Neo-conservative and "supply-side" patterns for producing and controlling the nation's outputs and resulting rich incomes --read "voodoo economics" -- have been creating worldwide conditions just as desperate and despair-making as in the historic "Gilded Age", the deepest Real Depression days, and the debacles and despair-months of the mid- and later 70s and 80s.

This time that historic cycle has taken a little longer --but now events and onrushing realities are poised for perhaps the most resounding, resultful "new revolution" we may ever encounter.

Just in time, too, for many, many of that middle-class mass: Reluctantly receiving "more bad news" nearly every day in steadily-declining home equity, more working-time demands; tighter and more expensive credit conditions; and, always, inflation driven by desperate, despoiling wartime waste; generating sooner or later the inevitable "new depression days" which are so fearful a threat to the whole class.

Then, too, there's that new "terminator threat" --rapidly rising health care costs tumultuously darkening the economic sky even for the best-placed within the middle-mass.

SO the authoritative declaration that "the cycle will renew, repair and regenerate" becomes the only bright part of a dark and still threatening American public-opinion message-image; in this the Seventh Year of our 21st Century.