The United States has been pushed back to 1921 over the past several administrations. The Republican administrations have done all they could to return to the Gilded Age, and the Democratic ones have said the right things, but been too timid to fight back.
As in the 1920s, a few dozen white men now own more wealth than all of the lower 70% of the population. Political power is dispensed by big donors and secretive organizations now called PACs rather than Tammany Hall style political machines. The Securities and Exchange Commission was put in place to continue the monopoly-busting work led by President Teddy Roosevelt, but corporations gobbling up other businesses is common these days, whether competitors or just more income streams.
Strikes of the 1930s brought the National Labor Relations Board and the eight-hour day, five-day week with overtime. Now we read about the workers at Amazon and elsewhere forced into 12-hour shifts, seven days per week, with no overtime. When those workers tried to join labor unions they were faced with propaganda and extortion from the corporations and their hired consultants. That is some improvement over the armed thugs that beat and killed labor organizers in the first labor wars, but even more effective.
Unsafe working conditions in those days led to the rise of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and safety advancements, but how many injuries and deaths have gone unpunished recently?
The Communications Act of 1934, as amended, severely limited the number of broadcast outlets that any corporation could operate. One owner could hold one AM and one FM radio station, one television license, and one newspaper in any one service market. They were limited to coverage of no more than 70% of the national population.
We now have corporations holding hundreds of broadcast licenses, plus unlimited cable and online outlets and buying newspapers by the hundred. To add to their influence, they have been closing newspapers on the excuse that ad revenues have evaporated as the online services have taken that over.
Since the 1930s the FBI has been touted as the world’s best investigative agency, but we now are faced with a seriously botched investigation into a Supreme Court nominee and its use as a political cudgel against Black Lives Matter and other peaceful demonstrations.
FBI investigations were advanced in those early days by coordination with the IRS and its auditors, but that agency has been drained of funds and personnel to the point where the only taxpayers investigated are those requiring little research. That works out conveniently to be the wage earners lacking the money to fight, the financial equivalent of traffic stops for broken taillights.
The snake oil sellers of the turn of the last century have been replaced by those dominant media voices advocating de-wormers or shots of cleanser to fight our current pandemic and declaring real medical knowledge to be lies and conspiracies. The FDA has no appointed permanent head, so who is to regulate what we put in our bodies?
Finally, to return to Teddy Roosevelt, we have been engaging in wars that have nothing to do with our national security just to make political points and feed red meat to the jingoists that are the worst of us. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were started on foundations of lies and carried on for the financial gains of the defense industries.
Is this a nation of which we can be proud?
Calvan North
Calvan North, Kearns, is a flaming liberal retired blue collar worker who wasted many years and 180 credits before completing an associate’s degree. His only claim to political knowledge is a lifetime of reading at least one newspaper everyday and several magazines over his lifetime.
