UNITED STATES OF OLIGARCHY

In which the rich get richer—and ever more powerful.

There was a time when the bottom 90 percent of American earners held more wealth than the richest 1 percent. That time, investigative journalist and policy analyst Michel writes, ran from 1946 to 2005. It’s been the other way around ever since, even as (and because) the tax rates on the rich have been steadily lowered. Naturally, that’s been at the behest of the rich themselves, who, by his account, command the government just as they do the economy. “If you live in a nation ruled by the wealthiest,” he bluntly observes, “then you live in an oligarchy, full stop.” Under such a system, that rule need not be overt or even formal, but it hinges on several premises, including the fact that the richest Americans, if threatened with higher taxes, “would have no problem seizing a country’s democracy by the throat, strangling it until it goes their way.” So it is in this new Gilded Age—the old one, Michel writes pointedly, having been marked by far less inequality than its current incarnation. For all that, his narrative gathers steam in that earlier era, when robber barons, such as Sanford Dole, engineered the American conquest of Hawaii and Andrew Carnegie summoned the military to break strikes at his factories. Some of those excesses were curbed when Theodore Roosevelt instituted anti-oligarchical measures, including raising income and inheritance taxes that eventually reached rates of 60 percent. Ronald Reagan undid all that, and, from there on, as Michel chronicles, the wealthiest have captured ever greater wealth while normalizing dark money in politics, relaxing regulations on commerce, and rewarding themselves with numerous other political and economic privileges that they no longer bother to conceal. We can put an end to that inequality, Michel concludes, by instituting a wealth tax, which “would be as American as apple pie or baseball.”

A damning account of an unaccountable caste.