The Handbasket to Hell

Going to Hell in a Handbasket is an old saying typically used to describe a situation heading for disaster. That seems to be the current situation in the United States. In many ways, the States reached its zenith during World War II because everyone—at least nearly everyone—worked together for the common good. This is not to say that everything was wonderful during that time. We unjustly imprisoned Japanese Americans and excessively rewarded those whose companies produced munitions we needed for the war effort. In doing so, we created what has become the military-industrial complex.

President Eisenhower, who had been the commander of the allied forces during WWII, warned us against the military-industrial complex in his Farewell Address. We should have paid closer attention. It was, of course, not just the corporations involved in the Nation’s defense that were expanding their political influence. Corporations in general were doing everything they could to increase their wealth. The unions were also doing everything possible to increase their power and influence. When I worked construction crew as a teenager, I had to pay—in cash—a fee to the local union rep to be able to work. At that time, the Teamsters were busy making a name for themselves for their willingness to resort to violence against those they considered scabs. The unions helped a lot of people earn a living, of course, making it possible for plumbers and carpenters to earn enough money to buy homes in the ever-increasing subdivisions.

The real money, however, was being made in business, and especially in banking and finance. Unions may have been expanding, but corporations were expanding faster. Corporations seized the opportunity for growth, and that led to corporate greed. The rich were definitely getting richer in ways reminiscent of the The Great Depression of the 1930s. Military spending for WWII greatly enhanced our industrial base, which provided the technologies and manufacturing base to fuel a booming postwar economy. Everyone was making money, but some were making more of it faster than others. Investing in the boom increased wealth faster than union wages. That led to an increase in greed, reminiscent of the robber barons of the early industrial age.

Greed and the “robber baron” mentality never goes away, however. The movie “Wall Street” focused on corporate greed, with Michael Douglas playing a character named Gordon Gekko making an impassioned defense of greed as a social good. Greed is good, of course, only for the greedy—and only for the greedy who have good attorneys. A subsequent movie has Gordon Gekko going to prison, and that does happen occasionally to those who commit the most egregious violations of financial laws.

One of the good things to come out of the Trump presidency is our increasing awareness of how the laws have been designed to help those who are already wealthy increase their wealth exponentially. In the old days, a butcher putting his thumb on the scale to increase the weight of a cut of meat was the symbol of tipping the scales. These days, very few of us buy our meat from a butcher. Instead, we buy cuts of meat that have been packaged and weighed before we get to the store. The scales are tipped in more subtle ways. The tax code approved by congress, for example, has been written to favor the wealthy. Those with enough money to live off their investments, for example, enjoy a tax code that favors “investors” over “workers.” Unless you pay very close attention, you don’t see that the code has been written to favor those who are already wealthy. Not all of the wealthy are “Gordon Gekkos,” but quite a few of them are. It’s always a case of follow the money, and who gets what is buried in the tax code. More of us need to learn to follow the money.

History tends to repeat itself. We have seen what happened to previous cultures when too much wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few and the rest were left to suffer with too little. In relatively recent history, we know what happened in late eighteenth-century France, when poor people had had enough. The same basic thing happened in Russia, which became the Soviet Union. China, too, had an equivalent revolution for similar reasons.

In the States, we’ve been relatively lucky. We had the Civil War in the nineteen century, caused more by the moral repugnance of slavery than by the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. Our financial “comeuppance” was the financial collapse in the late 1920s, which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The increase in manufacturing during WWII put us back on the path to economic prosperity, but it is looking as though we haven’t been paying attention to the economic history lessons of the past. We have elected the moral equivalent of Gordon Gekko to the office of President of the US. As conservative intellectuals bail from the Republican Party, you have to wonder—at least I wonder—what’s likely to happen next.