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President Joe Biden has warned Americans in his outgoing speech about the dangers of the oligarchies in America today and the parallels with the Gilded Age and their Robber Barons. President Hoover was in charge back then and his administration was about to usher in the Great Depression. Lessons from the Gilded Age and what it can teach us today. Early in the 20C, a number of great things were built in America and the Gilded Age is often remembered for them.  Interestingly, it was a high tech time back then too with the telephone, typewriter, gramophone, and Kodak camera coming into being. It was gilded by the gold trim on the mega mansions being built for the oligarchs of the day. Steel and railway oligarchs with vast fortunes directing the American economy via their wheeling and dealing.

Technological Innovation & The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age was a time of great technological invention and that can be rightly celebrated. However, we have to ask ourselves is the end result always worth the butcher’s bill in human suffering that these great things cost? The Pyramids of Giza, the American railways, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the hundreds of mansions constructed to house the super wealthy – all of these things cost lives and were built by those earning little or less than they should have in a fairer world. Our superficial appreciation of these edifices today barely mentions the sacrifices made by the ordinary folk who toiled in their construction. Interestingly, human culture invariably celebrates the technological marvel above and over the human lives which laboured to build them. It is a constant theme still occurring today.

The federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour.

“The 2007 amendments increased the minimum wage to $5.85 per hour effective July 24, 2007; $6.55 per hour effective July 24, 2008; and $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. A separate provision of the bill brings about phased increases to the minimum wages in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands and in American Samoa, with the goal of bringing the minimum wages in those locations up to the general federal minimum wage over a number of years.”

Immediately, the quote above tells us that there has been no increase to that for some 15 years. America is founded on the exploitation of its own vulnerable people. Some will say that the businesses paying the minimum wage are giving these folk an opportunity. You can spin things any way you want but a business predicated on paying such low wages should not be in business, in my view. You might build the Great Pyramid but if it was done on the back of human misery and exploitation of labour is that a worthy thing? Lessons from the Gilded Age and what it can teach us today.

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The Economics Of The Gilded Age

Neoliberalism, the economic and political movement that ended the last gasps of the New Deal, was implemented and founded by Ronald Reagan and the Chicago School of Economics’ Milton Friedman. Interestingly, the economics of the Gilded Age was the classical model that neoliberalism or neoclassical economics seeks to return to. We have had some 40 years of neoliberal economics running the show around the globe. It has overseen the largest and most extreme growing divide between the super wealthy and the rest of us that the world has ever seen. It made many of the current oligarchs by selling off publicly owned assets into private hands. It was the biggest transfer of public wealth to private interests ever. It continues to this day.

“You’ve probably heard about the “great wealth transfer.” It’s the $72 trillion stack of assets that baby boomers are sitting on and going to pass onto millennials someday, thereby solving many of the economically beleaguered younger generation’s problems. But there was another, even more “massive” wealth transfer from the government to the baby boomers over the last 40 years, according to Bank of America Research.”

  • (Hillary Hoffower, October 28, 2023)

Everyone was assured that there would be a trickledown effect. Sure, a few would become very wealthy and powerful but the overall net effect would be good for the majority of us. This has not proven to be the case. I do not hear any mea culpas from the proponents of neoliberalism still alive today. Too busy counting their money and feathering the nests of the future generations of their families. Americans famously go around warning about the dangers of socialism and how it will lead to totalitarian regimes. Meanwhile, in the real world mass macro corruption has transferred the wealth of nations into the pockets of the few. Billionaires holding the puppet strings of politicians and making them dance to their tune. Mega corporations control the lives and lifestyles of tens of millions of Americans. Think about it.

President Trump Meets with Mark - lessons from the Gilded Age
President Trump Meets with Mark by National Archives and Records Administration is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Privatization, Corporatization & Financialization

Healthcare, that vital fail safe that should be in place to support human beings when they get sick. The privatization of health insurance, hospitals and medical centres. The corporatization of doctors, with around 78% of all US physicians working for corporations now. Private equity running the show in brutal fashion in hospitals and healthcare more generally. Shareholders are seen as way more important than patients – how is that a good thing for the American people?

Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down in New York. People are angry and they are not going to take it anymore.

American capitalism has been manipulated and distorted to the detriment of the ordinary people. Working Americans are being economically shafted by corporations hell bent on one thing – increasing profitability and returns to investors. Consumers and workers have been shunted to the back of the queue. They are now second class citizens. These companies, if they cannot squeeze American workers enough, they take their plants offshore to Mexico, China and other places where wages are dirt cheap. Big business in the US stinks, it takes no care or responsibility for those who have toiled to make these businesses successful in the first place. CEOs are paid outrageously high salaries in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

You sell your soul via careerism in this exclusive capitalist world. Everything is about profitability and this is a very narrow vision to have when one has so much power. Lessons from the Gilded Age and what it can teach us today.

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The Gilded Age set off a competition between Robber Barons to see who could build the most ornate palatial mansion. This excess of wealth flaunted in the face of the mass poverty in the slums of New York and other cities became very American. Many wealthy Americans enjoy this kind of extreme disparity and bemoan the equalization policies of liberal governments like Biden’s. Showing off is a big part of the celebrity culture of the United States. Materialism must have its altars and red carpets upon which to exhibit gaudy riches. Today, we have Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos comparing rocket sizes, as they launch and explode in the skies above us. It is no coincidence that the Big Tech bros are crowding around Trump as he enters government for the second time. A new Gilded Age may be upon us and the working poor can’t wait for what is just around the corner.

Blow hard Trump, with his fist full of lies, will be shaking them at every opportunity like a rambling great uncle at Christmas. All that glitters may not be gold and embezzlement is a word we will be hearing muchas veces.

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.

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