There hasn’t been a better time in memory to be an oligarch. In America, it’s Springtime for Oligarchs.
Consider a journal article by Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, Oligarchy in the United States? And the answer is, Yes! It’s a highly nuanced article so consult it as well as Winters’ book Oligarchy. In short, America has an oligarchy (the authors think the top tenth of our 1%) but our oligarchy coexists with democracy (a matter for another day). In essence the oligarchy has sufficient power to have its way where it’s real interest resides – defense of its own wealth.
The Wealth Defense Industry produces results. Consider this from The American Prospect on the 2017 tax bill’s effect on the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, The Koch Brothers’ Best Investment:
Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that the Kochs and their conglomerate Koch Industries will likely save between $840 million and $1.4 billion in income taxes each year. That’s a return on investment of at least 4,100 percent on the $20 million they spent to pass the law.
Meanwhile a report issued over the weekend finds that real wages fell in the second quarter by 1.8% – that’s after the tax cut.
And favors for the top 1% is not just a sometime thing as the New York Times David Leonhardt wrote recently:
The top-earning 1 percent of households — those earning more than $607,000 a year — will pay a combined $111 billion less this year in federal taxes than they would have if the laws had remained unchanged since 2000. That’s an enormous windfall. It’s more, in total dollars, than the tax cut received over the same period by the entire bottom 60 percent of earners, according to an analysis being published today.
True the Congress failed to repeal Obamacare, which has extended healthcare insurance to about twenty million Americans and thus dangerously spiked Charles Koch’s blood pressure. The tax bill and Obamacare repeal are both wildly unpopular with the American public, which means that we political scientists can mothball median voter theory.
As the public reaction suggests income defense can be a thankless slog so Congress and President Trump must be grateful they don’t have to go it alone – they have the Supreme Court to backstop them. Just this past term the Court attacked unions by reversing its own forty year old precedent to find agency fees unconstitutional, in Janus v. AFSCME. In Epic Systems v. Lewis the court found that corporations can force workers to sign away their rights to collective action lawsuits against their employers. The Court also punted on partisan gerrymandering, one of the contributors to the undemocratic nature of our elected House of Representatives. A tie is a win for the oligarchy here. As Nancy MacLean explains in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the less democracy we have in this country, the more security for oligarchy.
Comic timing is important but tragic timing is better for oligarchs, who depend on dark money. So as controversy swirled last week over Russian influence in our elections including millions of dollars of secret contributions to the National Rifle Association, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced that the Internal Revenue Service would no long require IRC 501 dark money organizations to report their contributors to the IRS. It’s a terrific gift to the Koch Brothers. Closer to home the groups celebrating include dark money Income Defense Industry fronts Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, Stand for Children, and Massachusetts Parents United.
Remember 2016’s Ballot Question 1 on a new slots parlor for Revere? Foreign money. Yes Massachusetts, it happens here.
Life hasn’t been this good since the Gilded Age!
The American political system has become “an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors . . . .” – Former President Jimmy Carter.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things). I don’t write about education policy.]