The BigEye Blog

Cogitations from the Home Front

November 7, 2007

The New Gilded Age

In today's economic crisis we are witnessing predations identical to those made by "Robber Barons" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A small number of very wealthy and like-minded individuals are doing things that directly affect entire economies. Lest anyone question this "Gilded Age" analogy, consider the following quotation from the Introduction to David Harvey's, ‘The Limits of Capital’:

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then [in the the 1990s] to be found to be ‘equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the world’s population ­ 2.3 billion people.’ The world’s 200 richest people ‘more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion,’ so that ‘the assets of the world’s top three billionaires were more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people.’ These trends have accelerated, albeit unevenly. The share of the national income taken by the top 1 per cent of income earners in the US more than doubled between 1980 and 2000 while that of the top 0.1 per cent more than tripled. ‘The income of the 99th percentile rose 87 percent’ between 1972 and 2001 while that of ‘the 99.9th percentile rose 497 percent.’ In 1985 the combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest people in the US ‘was $238 billion’ with ‘an average net worth of $600 million,’ adjusted for inflation. By 2005, their average net worth was $2.8 billion and their collective assets amounted to $1.13 trillion - more than the gross domestic product of Canada.’ (Verso edition, 2006, p. xi).

Unfettered capitalism produces, along with its benefits, damaging social impacts due to fundamental human inequality. A century ago, the saving remnant, by means of the written word, spearheaded political forces that ameliorated damages wrought by the super-rich. Readership during the birth and growth of the magazine industry in New York City consisted of a relatively small, literate, well-educated, commercially and socially active segment of the populace. Investigative journalism (T. Roosevelt put a stop to it with the pejorative term, "muckraking") had no TV with which to compete. Popular media of the time (Hearst's and Pulitzer's newspaper empires) were controlled by capitalist entrepreneurs, not by the State.

Today the segment of the populace that best fits the description of "a relatively small, literate, well-educated, commercially and socially active segment of the populace" can be found using certain parts of the internet, frequenting web sites such as BigEye.com . Reform, which seems dim today, might only serve to perpetuate a bad system anyway, as muckrakers, such as Lincoln Stephens, cynically concluded as they turned toward communism.

Whatever the outcome, we know one thing clearly: The times they are a-changing!*

* Bob Dylan

---

Mar. 19, 2009: Preparing for Civil Unrest in America
Is it over for the USA? - Can this be true?