The New Robber Barons!

We recently took a trip out to Asheville, North Carolina to view the home of the Vanderbilt clan. Known as Biltmore, this palace is generally regarded as the largest house under one roof in America. It was completed in 1895 under the auspices of George Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the original robber barons of the second half on the nineteenth century. We do not really know if George Vanderbilt could be considered a robber baron but he lived toward the end of their age in a time when there was little worker or industrial regulation in this nation. John D. Rockefeller was considered by many to be the archetype robber baron of that age but it is interesting to note that his children did many beneficial things including creating the colonial Williamsburg area in the Virginia triangle area that includes Jamestown and Yorktown. When we were a child growing up, we frequently visited a Carnegie library in our home town of Vienna, Illinois where we learned the love of books reading, and later, writing. We mention this because Andrew Carnegie was also one of the robber barons of his age who later turned to philanthropy, perhaps as a way to redeem himself from some of the actions that had been taken against those who had toiled under his gritty employment in America’s steel mills.

The age in which the original robber barons lived and economically ruled was a rough time for the working class in this nation. The country had transitioned, to some degree, from a simpler time when employers and their employees were closer together both physically and economically to a time when people like George Vanderbilt and his peers lived far away from their workers who toiled in a corporate world in which there was no regulation, little pay, and frequently horrific working conditions in which the death rate from occupational diseases that we do not even think of any more, prevailed. There were no unions in place at the time and child labor was prevalent in some of the larger cities along the east coast. Most workers of the day worked and lived amidst what we would consider squallier and the life expectancy was not very long at all. Large factories such as Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills belched out thick black mostly coal fired smoke and the entire populations of cities suffered major respiratory inflections and cancer deaths were wide spread.

Then came the birth of the labor movement and, across the twentieth century, things began to dramatically improve. Although the Great Depression was initially a bad thing for all but many of the very rich, it did bring government regulation into the mix of things and that greatly improved the health and welfare of the general population that worked in the larger cities. One must remember that America was still predominantly agricultural at that time with seventy percent of the population living at or near a farm. But, excesses were not good even in the agricultural area. Over cultivation had occurred out on the great plains and a great dust bowl had gripped the nation through most of the late twenties and the nineteen thirties. It was said that Franklin D. Roosevelt could draw dust figures on his desk in the White house from the calamity occurring in the Midwest! So, few were immune from the excesses that had gone on across the nation leading up to the Great Depression.

As we fast forward to the latter half of the twentieth century we find a nation well regulated with a thriving middle class built, to a large degree, on the back of what a liberal and very progressive majority that had included labor unions had provided for them since the Great Depression and the subsequent entry into World War Two. The rise and success of labor unions had paralleled the rise of the middle class, and, by the nineteen seventies things were humming along. Two things happened in the seventies that began to change all of that positive trajectory. One was the increasing dependence on foreign oil that led to the first gas crisis when the sheiks of the middle east began to extract a greater and greater price for their product. And, the second thing was the over reach by the labor unions that culminated in the later seventies by their proposals to unionize things that were not practical to unionize. The most ridiculous of these proposals was the union idea to organize the United States armed forces.

Amidst all of this bee hive of activity after nineteen sixty came the first evidence of the arrival of radicalism in what had become a fairly balanced American political system. The ultra rich were still in place in America and they had prospered under the ideas and theories put in place after the depression began and with United States entry into World War Two. However, they had never been happy with what Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal had initiated and they had tried unsuccessfully to destroy that in Roosevelt’s first re-election campaign in 1936. After that failure, they waited patiently in their gathering places and their clubs and organizations such as the John Birch Society until they could give it another shot, which they did in the election of 1960. Again, they were unsuccessful but they had begun the feeble beginnings of what would come out of the debacle of the 1964 presidential elections which ushered in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. There were many excesses in Johnson’s programs and what the radical right called the Nanny State came into full flower, at least from their point of view.

Things proceeded on from 1964 but this group of what would become the New Robber Barons had their organization in place and they patiently awaited their chance to implement the changes that they wanted to make to an always dynamic and ever changing American society. They hated the unions and the progress that had been made on behalf of the average American and they wanted to return to a time of the rugged individualism that they felt had gone missing from the American social and economic fabric. And then there were the natural abuses that had come from the zenith of the labor movement. Their big chance came with the election of Jimmy Carter when his incompetence led to things like the Iranian hostage crisis and the explosion of inflation that occurred at the end of his presidency. The election of nineteen eighty brought a conjunction of the things just mentioned and the perfect candidate from the more rugged western part of the nation--California-in the craggy face of one Ronald Wilson Reagan appeared. Reagan had almost won the Republican nomination in nineteen seventy six and it had worked out fortunately for the about to emerge new radical right robber barons that Reagan had not won because that allowed Jimmy Carter to work his devastating magic on a system that would be ready for an older but still politically viable Reagan in 1980.

Reagan won in a landslide and began to do the things which he had already practiced on in California when he was its two term governor. Reagan had begun, among other things out in California, the release of mentally ill people from mental institutions where many of them began the formation of what we now know as street people. The homeless! This nation had not seen much of that since the heights of the Great Depression and Reagan did the same thing on a national scale when he began to change the way that the federal government funded programs of this type. When the Air Traffic Controllers Union went out on strike in the early part of nineteen eighty one it gave Reagan the perfect chance to implement his war on labor unions when he fired all of them and began a replacement campaign with non union workers. This campaign also featured the decertification of their union which meant that, for the first time, a public employees union was destroyed. It was the signal that the radical right had been waiting for to begin their own war on the labor union movement in the United States. Reagan had given them the backbone and the cover to do what they could only dream of before. At this same time, Reagan also began to issue a series of executive orders that began to curb what he considered excesses by the Environmental Protection Agency and a multitude of other government agencies, particularly those overseeing labor rights such as the Department of Labor.

Reagan was a personable and charismatic individual but he was being steered by the New Robber Barons in the directions that they wanted him to go. Reagan had started out as a New Dealer and had even been the president of the Screen Actors Guild, a Hollywood union for performers back in the late forties and the early fifties. However, by the nineteen seventies, his conversion to radical conservatism was complete. He hung out with and admired people such as John Wayne and Charlton Heston, who was the president of the National Rifle Association which was a group that was abandoning its traditional gun safety programs in favor of a much more radical approach that included a heavy dose of politics. Right wing politics! The radical right needed some issues to fuel their campaigns and the idea that the left was going to take your guns away was one of their chief causes. As we look at the modern day, forty nine states now have concealed carry laws while twenty six or so now even allow something called the stand your ground law which allows the average person to fire on someone else who is threatening them, whether it be real or imagined with little fear of recourse against them in the law afterwards.

At about the same time as the union movement was at its zenith, another trend was emerging that would give the new Robber Barons a firmer hold on America’s economy and on its dependent social fabric. It was in the form of one Sam Walton who began the idea of cheaper consumer goods purchased as larger stores that did not allow the American Federation of Retail Workers union anywhere near their doors. What Wal-mart would do over the next forty years would revolutionize the American economy and begin the great cleavage between the pay and net worth of the average middle class American and the billionaires who were not so slowly beginning to try to dominate American life. Discounting had come to America! Small to medium sized American cities saw their retail establishments and their business districts destroyed as Wal-mart transformed the way that the average American shopped. They began the concept of the big box store where everything could be found under one roof. Sears Roebuck and company had perfected this concept and expanded it after the Second World War but they treated their workers with kindness and provided many benefits which had helped to expand the middle class. Many ordinary Sears employees became millionaires from the company’s pension and stock plans but Wal-mart was nothing like that! Again, the worker began to drift away from any contact from those who controlled their fate as the New Robber Barons became more and more isolated from them and began to make more and more decisions based strictly on the bottom line and not on the workers best interests. To make a long story short, now Wal-mart employ’s over one million workers and pays them an average of about eighten thousand dollars a year with over seventy thousand of them living below the poverty level while many more draw food stamps as they work in mainly thirty hour or less part time jobs. Where a company like the grocer Kroger paid its union employees such as cashiers a wage commensurate with their responsibilities, Wal-mart saw no need to do that sort of thing and began to put in grocery departments to undercut the more traditional grocery outlets.

Gone were the days when a benevolent employer worked side by side with his employees and gave them Christmas bonuses every December for a job well done. Now, one did the job under the watchful eye of a security camera and was fired if anything went wrong, or, if any type of labor unrest or protest broke out.

It has been reported in the year of 2012 that the Walton family now has a net combined worth equal to the bottom forty percent of the United States population combined. No one really knows how much the old Robber Barons net worth was compared to the rest of the population due to the lack of adequate government records at the time, however, we are, as a nation, certainly heading away from a society where there is some sense of equality in the distribution of wealth! It is once again accumulating at the top while the rest of the nation suffers under its oppressions. The radical right New Robber Barons main theme is and always has been to minimize and destroy the government that is the only thing standing in the way of what can simply be described as their greed!

Who are the New Robber Barons? They are exemplified by the Koch brothers and people like Shelton
Adelson and some one known mostly by the name Papa John, a minimum wage paying pizza chain king, who has built a mansion out in Louisville, Kentucky that supposedly rivals anything else in the nation. Do these people give a lot of money away for philanthropic causes? Not that we can tell, at least in proportion to their net worth, anyway. Billionaires like Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates are giving much of their worth away to better this nation and this world, and, Buffet in particular is trying to get other billionaires to agree to give away at least half of their net worth either by the time they die or thereafter. It has been a slow go in that regard! Of the thousands of very rich, only about two hundred have signed onto Buffet’s pledge from the last report that we heard. An important issue to the radical New Robber Barons is estate taxes as they feel that they need to pass as much of their wealth on to their offspring without incumberance as they possibly can. This has created a class of individuals who have not had to work for anything and who feel no need to help those who do have to work for a living because they have been isolated from them and their experience for their entire lifetimes! They have never wanted for anything and do not think anyone else has either. They are the type that Mitt Romney addressed down in Boca Raton, Florida as he described the forty seven percent who are takers, not makers, in our society.

If we look back to the beginnings of the new radical Robber Barons start in the ashes of the nineteen sixty four presidential elections, they have been a multigenerational group with many of the founders now dead. And, one of their great hallmarks has been their patience in achieving their goals. One would think that out of the ashes of the 2012 presidential election might come a new direction for an America who has been on the wrong path for a very long time now. The New Robber Barons were going to complete their takeover of American government and American life with the election of Mitt Romney--one of their own--but it did not work out that way. But, we need to understand that the patience of these people has lasted, in some cases, since the nineteen thirties, and they will not give up their quest to, in reality, destroy America’s way of life for the further benefit and expansion of their own. We saw that nearly come to fruition before the 2008 presidential campaign when the Great Recession took its toll on the American way of life. And, that recession was the direct result of the lack of regulation that is the great hallmark of the New Robber Barons way of thinking! They will be back again and one day, if we are not diligent and careful, they will again fully implement their plans for a law of the jungle America in which only the strongest and the richest survive! We are so close to it now that it is frightening to behold! Labor unions were successful to a great degree in their activities in this last election, but, their backs were to the wall with activities now underway to decertify them going on all across this nation in so many of the states. If America is truly to be the nation where the Horatio Alger’s of the old Robber Baron era could rise from poverty and be great successes, we must first break the grip that the New Robber Barons have on our economy and on our ever changing lives. It is best remembered that there was only one Horatio Alger and that he was nothing more than a piece of fiction.

This battle against the New Robber Barons is probably the most important battle that this nation might have to fight since the American Revolution or the American Civil War. And, with the election of 2012 we have, to use an old cliché, just begun to fight. Whether we have the will to carry this struggle through is yet to be seen and is still so much in doubt. And, so much of that will rest on the shoulders of a thin tall black man and what he will do over the next few months. Perhaps it is appropriate that it might be that way! If Barack Obama caves in to these people and their will they will have won both the battle and the war without ever firing a shot

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe