America Needs to Hold the Billionaire Class Accountable

In the recent 2022 midterm elections, political contributions from billionaires topped the previous all-time highs reached during the 2018 midterms, clocking in at over $881 million. Looking at the graph of billionaire contributions since the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision in 2010, each election cycle looks like a stair step to the next, with each seeing notable increases over the previous election cycle. With the majority of American media owned by billionaires or groups of them, politics increasingly becoming inundated with their money, and industry-dominating companies owned by the wealthy often seeing record profits while the American people struggle with inflation and supply-chain disruptions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the thoughts, opinions and will of the billionaire class in this country surrounds and permeates our public discourse as never before. If the United States wants any chance of creating and maintaining a more equal and fair democracy and economy, these ascendant oligarchs need to be brought to account and stripped of their corrupting levels of power.

For decades now, Neoliberal policies allowing for lower taxes on the wealthy, a much greater rate of corporate mergers and acquisitions, free-trade agreements that disproportionately favor the wealthy over workers alongside a concerted effort to dismantle and weaken unions has produced one of the most prolific monied classes in world history. The current batch of multibillionaires operating as near-oligarchs constitute the wealthiest upper-class in not only American history, but human history. They have more assets, influence and capital as a percentage of the American economy than at any other point in our country's existence, and they've been using this unbridled flow of money to turn wealth into political power as quickly as able. We've been living through nearly half a century of this economic surplus turning into political power, and it's been an unmitigated disaster for the working and middle classes of America.

Billionaires and corporate boards largely composed of them now control roughly 75% of American industry by revenue, and take the lion's share of the profits in return. The wealthy own the vast majority of the stock market, have been making huge gains in real estate investments since the Great Recession of '08 (helping price many ordinary Americans out of the housing market), and they reap most of the benefits from automating jobs at home or outsourcing jobs to places like China. Through sheer force of will, the billionaire class has created a system wherein most productivity gains go straight to them, where wealth is siphoned from the working and middle classes to the top, and when technological improvements and dual-income households create the illusion of improvement for average Americans, they try to convince the rest of us through the media companies they own that everyone has been doing better under their system.

The reality of modern American life is average wages have stagnated as unions have declined and jobs have been automated or offshored, average families often require two wage earners to attain a similar standard of living one wage earner was capable of securing in the 50s and 60s, several necessary industries such as healthcare, housing and higher education have all seen price increases drastically outpacing wages and inflation, and the real buying power of regular families today is only slightly improved from their standing in 1978. Accounting for the minor gains made by families in the 80s and 90s, the average American family has actually seen their inflation-adjusted buying power decline since the mid-2000s. Throughout the country homelessness is increasing, drug abuse has remained stubbornly high, alcoholism and suicide rates have remained higher than the average in other advanced economies, and violent crime remains a scourge even as other advanced nations see their per capita rates dropping consistently. There are a variety of reasons for these issues, yet one consistent thread remains: America's political priority is the further enrichment of its wealthy, business-owning class, not the wellbeing of the People as a whole. If we want our statistics and quality of life to change, we must change the way we think about our government and economy.

First off, Neoliberalism, the idea that unbridled globalism works for everyone, government regulation is bad and businesses should be given free reign to consolidate while openly influencing politics, needs to be understood and fully rejected by the American People. Political contributions must be properly regulated, with caps on personal amounts given and stricter requirements for campaigns reporting who donated a given amount. Corporations, unions and political action committees should all be banned from financially contributing to political campaigns at all, and tax incentives should be applied to incentivize regular Americans to actively donate to campaigns they support. Trust-busting and greater regulation of US industries is needed to slowly unwind anti-competitive markets brought about by record-setting acquisitions and mergers over the last several decades. Collective bargaining organizations should be universal and sector-based, and several worker representatives should be required on the boards of all public companies. Capital gains taxes need to be notably higher, corporate minimum tax rates should be universally applied and estate taxes should be reapplied and raised to prevent such entrenched wealth carrying on from one generation to another.

The Fairness Doctrine should be reinstituted and strengthened for the modern media landscape, requiring fact-based reporting, greatly reduced opinion pieces and different points of view being represented and explained. Social media should face greater regulation, notably as it pertains to identifying and labeling misinformation and foreign disinformation. Co-ops and employee-owned media companies, independent journalism and local news operations should be legislatively protected and invested in, shielding them from billionaire-backed corporate raiders with millions to throw at buying up and dismantling the industry like we've seen since the 80s. Additionally, major investment at all levels of government should be given to reduce homelessness, drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, violent crime and address our incredibly lackluster mental health infrastructure. We need to begin seeing many of our social ills as public health and safety concerns being directly exacerbated by the billionaire class and increasingly thrown at the feet of law enforcement who lack the proper tools to handle such large-scale societal problems. America needs to reinvest in itself at all levels, and the first step to getting there is depriving the wealthy of the ridiculous privilege they currently enjoy. 

American is a great nation, and that greatness was built on democratic and egalitarian principles. As much as the Neoliberal regime in power today tries to convince us everyone in the US 'pulled themselves up by their bootstraps', the notion is nonsensical and patently false. No person is an island, we built this nation together, and now we're stagnating together as well. We need to change our political discourse to improve America's collective standard of living. That process starts by holding the wealthiest among us accountable for the selfish, corrupt and destructive policies they've been pushing onto our nation for decades. It's time the American People wake up and take their power back.


References:

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrRDWCPbRfU&ab_channel=RobertReich

2) https://www.americanprogress.org/article/addressing-tax-system-failings-favor-billionaires-corporations/

3) https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/tax-billionaires-like-the-rest-of-us/

4) https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaire-politics/

5) https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/03/billionaires-extra-power-media-ownership-elon-musk

6) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/magazine/billionaire-politics.html

7) https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/reform-money-politics/influence-big-money

8) https://thedemlabs.org/2022/06/17/billionaire-union-busters-exploit-workers-with-the-help-of-the-gop-and-business-roundtable-lobbying/

9) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/15/valuing-corporations-over-workers-has-led-to-americas-income-inequality-problem

10) https://www.seiu.org/blog/2018/6/america-needs-unions-now-more-than-ever-as-supreme-court-sides-with-corporate-billionaires-rigging-economy-against-workers

11) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/

12) https://www.tfah.org/report-details/pain-in-the-nation-2022/

13) https://www.salon.com/2015/06/11/americas_billionaires_are_officially_playing_god_with_the_fate_of_the_planet/

Location: California, USA

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