How the Rich Get Even Richer
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Now, they get tax cuts; they get corporate profits; they get free trade that enables them to cut US labor costs while corporate administrators get paid absurd amounts of money--millions of dollars per year: on average over 500 times their line workers, over 150 times the average wage (CEO's in Europe and Japan earn about 50 times the wages of a line worker). The rich would like to abolish the estate tax, so that they can be even more of an inherited wealthy class--like the Senators of the late Roman Empire. See Taxes. for more.
Even without abolishing the "death tax," (too many "wimps" were against just doing away with it for its repeal to pass so far) the economy is growing, and the rich net the lion's share of the growth. And they own the media that tells everyone how heroic they are. Could all this good fortune be because they also own the government?
What does this have to do with the Roman Empire? Back in the fifth century, the Senatorial class did very well, too--because it controlled not only the Senate (which had little power), but the bureaucracy and almost all the wealth. Back then, tax cuts were unnecessary, since the wealthy could avoid taxes--they collected taxes from others, or could depend on their friends and relatives in government to tell them when the tax-man was coming.
George W. is a rich man, and so is Cheney, Rumsfeld and leaders like Bill Frist in the Senate and Hastert in the House. And if they're not rich men themselves, most politicians shill for those who are. In fact, most national political leaders of either party would be accounted rich men back in their hometowns. And, understandably, most of them govern and legislate keeping the interests of other rich men in mind. Only a few (mostly Democrats) might concern themselves about the problems facing poor people; after all, few of them have ever been there--and most of those who have would like to forget it.
It wasn't always this way: during the New Deal era and after, there were significant political interests representing working people, especially labor unions. Later, minority groups were also beginning to gain political weight, but that led to problems for the New Deal coalition in the South. Beginning with Nixon's election in 1968, a revolutionary process, long unnoticed, has unfolded. It is the takeover of all the reins of power by those who are not only rich themselves, but are determined to govern for the interests of the rich, and their interests alone. For additional links and a radio program on class wars, click here.
In the Roman Empire Senators were rich, even by contemporary standards. Some of them earned the equivalent (in gold) of between $10 and $20 million a year from their far-flung estates; they were like our billionaires, or CEO's today. The only tax they paid consistently, the follis, amounted to about $7,500 at the highest level, and was only paid every five years. They didn't know what to do with all the gold they earned, so they decorated their ceilings with it, as well as their women, their slaves, their carriages and their doorposts. The common man rarely saw even a silver coin. The Senators' gold and other wealth would have revived the empire, if it had been taxed, but the only Emperor who made noises about taxing it (Majorian 457-461) was conveniently disposed of by a barbarian general.
Meanwhile, the Roman Empire, or at least its western half, was going bankrupt, which makes sense when you realize that the people who had virtually all the wealth (certainly all the wealth in excess of subsistence) were the ones who were not paying taxes, even though that meant that the famed Roman roads were falling into disrepair, harbors were silting in, bandits and pirates were bringing trade and travel to a standstill, and barbarians were moving into the empire.
The barbarian "invasions," were really population movements. They were often made easier by the government, so that barbarians could be hired as soldiers--mercenaries--to fight off other barbarians, and occasionally to round up bandits, as well. Those recruits were expensive, not just in wages and maintenance, but because they often broke free of imperial control to loot and pillage Roman citizens. Sometimes they were even commanded to do so by the Emperor, if a particular province or city proved rebellious. It would be like George W sending troops into Boston the way he sent them into Falluja.
Rich Senators controlled the government but not the military. By the late fourth century, the military was controlled by barbarians, but Senators held the purse-strings, ruling in the name of the impotent emperors (who reigned from 393 to 476, until Rome "fell"). The "fall" of Rome was actually a pay dispute between the ineffectual last Emperor (Romulus) and the head of the elite palace troops (Odoacer). The Senators opted for the barbarian general, conniving in the empire's overthrow, because the Emperor might have raised their taxes!
Which brings us back to the present. The rich are not just Americans, nor are our corporate leaders so wedded to the United States, any more than Senators were wedded to the Roman Empire. Our rich men advocate trade policies and foreign policies that facilitate globalization, which means sending jobs overseas, and wages south (because American workers have to compete with Mexican workers, Chinese workers, Indian workers, keeping their wages down). Profits to a corporation can come from anywhere, so it doesn't matter to the corporate owners whether a car, or TV, or software program is produced in this country, or not.
It does matter to workers, but workers don't matter. If production can be globalized, then workers can always be kept insecure; the corporation can always leave one venue, and go on to another, if wages rise too much, if wage costs can't be kept down by destroying unions and avoiding environmental controls. Corporations, after all, are amoral, even if they are "legal persons." Owners of corporations (overwhelmingly the rich) might have the greatest ethics in the world, but most don't control corporations, and any who do are legally bound to maximize the corporation's worth, regardless of moral values.
What matters to the corporate owners are that the rich earn profits, and more profits. It's best if they are not taxed for them. The whole tax system has changed in this revolutionary period: now work is taxed fully, but "investments" are taxed less and less, which is because the rich own capital and the poor do not. For more on taxes....
But if it were only for avoiding taxes, the rich would not be increasing their wealth so dramatically. Almost any program the Bush administration has promoted, including the Iraq war, has increased the wealth of the rich few, and contributed to growing inequality: the war has been a windfall for the few rich people who are well-connected, but so has privatization of prisons, and education and welfare and emergency services and…
For more on the wealthy and how they have carried out a (counter)revolution under our eyes, see The Rich
