Looting Season in America

The oligarchy blooms.

Inauguration day approacheth. (Image: Getty)

Let’s say you have a pet beaver. You love the beaver. You put him in the little river that runs next to your house. The beaver, as beavers do, immediately begins working to build a dam. When he gets that dam built, it floods your house. You clear away the dam and put the beaver back in the river. He starts to build another dam. You scold him. “Don’t build that dam!” You try to compromise. “Why don’t you build just a little dam, but not big enough to destroy my house?” No. That is not what beavers do. He builds another dam, and your house floods again.

As you’re cleaning up, your friends say: Hey, maybe you should get a different pet. No. You will not do that. After all, you love the beaver. You’re sure he will act better next time.

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The beaver, in this goofy metaphor, is American capitalism. The homeowner is all of us. Over time, you can bet your ass, that capitalism is going to build monopolies and capture the government and create an oligarchy. That is its nature. Maybe we should try a different system? “No!” say America’s leaders, Democrat and Republican alike. “We love the capitalism. We’re sure it will be nicer to us next time around.”

In his farewell address to the nation last night, Joe Biden said, “I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” We have, he noted, been in this position before. “More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.”

Of course, hearing this, the initial impulse is to scoff— Hey man, didn’t you just give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a private equity billionaire? Hey, didn’t you throw away all of your moral credibility by funding a genocide, thereby robbing yourself of the ability to pursue these noble domestic goals? This scoffing is completely justified. But it is also worth taking a minute to talk about the underlying issue—the dark and undeniable rise of a new oligarchy—that is, right now, gleefully getting ready to reap the fruits of its political maneuvering. It is absolutely true that corporate interests do not see red or blue; that the profound influence of money in politics infests and poisons both parties; and that the Democratic Party’s long, sweet embrace of neoliberalism has supercharged the wealth of the rich while simultaneously sapping the strength of organized labor, which was, ironically, the Democrats’ own base of populist power. It is also true, though, that a federal government where Lina Khan runs the FTC and Jennifer Abruzzo runs the NLRB is qualitatively different, and more hostile to oligarchy, than a federal government run by any Republican. The bad times are coming. Even more than before.

All of the oligarchs will assemble in Washington this weekend, welcoming in their bright future. The tech billionaires who have captured the largest part of America’s wealth in the past two decades will be right up on stage, the American equivalent of the Russian oligarchs bowing before Putin. Mark Zuckerberg will host a party for Trump. Elon Musk will have an office in the White House. Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos will be sitting on the dais as Trump is sworn in. The crypto billionaires are hosting celebratory balls. Do not allow yourself to be confused by the trifling things these companies did just a few seconds ago to drape themselves in concern for racial equality or whatever else their PR consultants told them was advantageous, in the moment. This is simply the logic of capitalism at work. The strongman president demands the loyalty of the oligarchs, and the oligarchs in turn are granted the blessing of the state to loot an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth. Why would you assume that America is any different from the many nations around the world that already practice this political method in earnest? This is the system most conducive to the perpetuation of the oligarchs’ interests. They financially support the political revenge and repression that will flow forth from the strongman, and they themselves are insulated from its consequences, and granted license to get as rich as they want, however they want. The arrangement works for both sides. This is gangster capitalism in full flower. This is the beaver finishing his dam. It’s the least surprising thing in the world.

We’ve been here before.

In the days of European empires, the crown would grant entrepreneurs the right to build fleets of ships to go out and plunder foreign lands, in exchange for a share of the plunder. Now, the US government will grant private equity firms the right to skim fees off of trillions of dollars of 401(k) retirement savings of regular people, and grant crypto founders the right to sell their worthless tokens to the maximum number of suckers with the minimum amount of oversight. These things are all the same. The miscalculation of the sincere center-left Democrats was to imagine that they could find a middle path that would not lead to this outcome. They were the ones trying to feed the beaver treats and urge it to find another hobby. Those of them who were not getting rich from the grift were, at best, deluded. They should have been looking for a different pet while they still had the chance.

The different pet is called socialism. Still a dirty word in American politics, after all these years. Ah, well. Now we will all suffer the flood.

What is the source of power that can fight the considerable combined power of oligarchs and a political strongman? That would be the power of the people. A less cute way to say this is: The power of organized labor. That is it. That is our path. There is not another one that will appear magically. The logic of capitalism will not change, the oligarchs will not spontaneously decide to act in the public interest, the political system that has been scrupulously arranged to be responsive to money above all will not switch back towards People Power without being pushed by some organized force. The longer the Democratic Party takes to grasp the gravity of this situation—the longer they fuck around in The Mythical Land of Compromise—the longer they will languish. They need to put labor at their center and declare that they’re taking the other side in the class war that is underway. Faiz Shakir is running for head of the DNC. They should pick him. But they probably won’t.

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Last week, the SEIU, one of America’s largest unions, rejoined the AFL-CIO, making America’s biggest labor coalition that much bigger and stronger. This is a good thing. We need all of the solidarity we can get. The SEIU left the AFL-CIO 20 years ago, because they were frustrated that the AFL-CIO did not embrace organizing. Whether this will help rally the AFL-CIO—which has many of the same flaws as the Democratic Party—to lean into the task of organizing the next ten million union members remains to be seen. (I have heard from SEIU veterans who are skeptical that anything useful will come from this, but time will tell. I have put in multiple requests in recent months to interview SEIU president April Verrett, but the union has blown me off, so I don’t have a ton of insight here into how excited or not we should all be.) In the same way that the Democrats’s need to wake the fuck up and center labor, the AFL-CIO needs to wake the fuck up and pour a lot more money into new organizing. Still, as a basic structural matter, a bigger AFL-CIO is better than a smaller one.

If you’re interested in the long history of inequality, Walter Scheidel is a useful scholar to read. I’ve interviewed him a couple of times over the years, as I was thinking about how we escape this cycle. One of his findings is that, historically, the only things that have wiped away great inequality are enormous disasters. “Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics,” he writes. “I call these the Four Horsemen of Leveling.” It was the Great Depression that gave us the New Deal. It was World War Two that gave us the golden age of union power and shared prosperity. You don’t need to be a prophet of doom to make the observation that nations that have gotten to the position that we are in do not usually work themselves out of it in a healthy and peaceful way. Wallowing in doom, though, is not very helpful. Look at it like this: If disaster is the likely end of the path we are on, we should be willing to take extraordinary measures—politically and economically—to avoid that. We should all get more radical. It’s just common sense.

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• Related reading: You Can’t Rebrand a Class War; How a Strongman Gets Stronger; Speaking Plainly About Who Is Robbing You. I also wrote about the labor movement, and how it can save us from all of this. It’s called “The Hammer,” and you can order it wherever books are sold. I will be covering the inauguration for In These Times—you can read my dispatches from DC there.

• A few more union-centric suggestions for donating to help the victims of the fires in Los Angeles: Here is the Writers Guild’s page on showing support to fire victims; Here is the National Day Laborer Organizing Network’s immigrant fire relief fund; and here is Unite Here Local 11’s hardship fund for hospitality workers who have lost their homes. Please feel free to drop other good places to donate in the comment section below.

• Thank you, all of you, for reading How Things Work. It is both a blessing and a necessity to be a part of independent media, at a time when the traditional media is succumbing to the predations of the same billionaires who will be partying in DC this weekend. This publication is 100% supported by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. It is their support that allows me to do this work, and to keep this site paywall-free, so that anyone can read it, regardless of income. If you have been reading How Things Work for a while and you would like to help it continue to exist, take a second right now and become a paid subscriber yourself. It’s good karma, it’s affordable, and it gives you something to read on the toilet. Together we will make it, my friends.