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Taxpayer subsidies to the big banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs -- are estimated at $64 billion a year, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits.
In 1980, freight trains were deregulated. The number of Class I railroads shrank from 40 to seven. Four account for 90% of the industry's revenue. Nearly one-third of all shippers have access to only one railroad.
President Bill Clinton's Telecommunications Act of 1996 was touted as a way to open the cable industry to competition. Instead, it saw a massive consolidation of the industry into the hands of about half a dozen corporations that control what 90% of Americans watch or hear on the airwaves.
The airline industry, freed from regulation, was rapidly consolidated. Four airlines control 85% of the domestic market. They have divided the country into regional hubs where they extort fees, fix prices, cancel flights at will, leaving passengers stranded without compensation, and provide shoddy service.
The pharmaceutical and insurance corporations that manage our for-profit health care industry extracted $812 billion from Americans in 2017. This represents more than one-third (34.2%) of total expenditures for doctor visits, hospitals, long-term care and health insurance. If we had a public health system, such as in Canada, it would save us $600 billion in costs in a single year, according to a report by Physicians for a National Health Plan. Health administration costs in 2017 were more than fourfold higher per capita in the U.S. than in Canada ($2,479 versus $551 per person), the group notes. Canada implemented a single-payer "Medicare for All" system in 1962. In 2017, Americans spent $844 per person on insurers' overhead. Canadians spent $146.
Neoliberalism cannot be defended as more innovative or more efficient. It has not spread democracy, and by orchestrating unprecedented levels of income inequality and political stagnation has vomited up demagogues and authoritarian regimes that falsely promise vengeance against ruling elites who betrayed the people. Our democracy under this assault has been replaced with meaningless political theater.
As the academics Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens detailed in their exhaustive 2017 study "Democracy in America?":
"...the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans [have] little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups -- especially business corporations -- have ... much more political clout. ... [T]he general public [is] ... virtually powerless. ... The will of majorities is ... thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves. ... Majorities of Americans favor specific policies designed to deal with such problems as climate change, gun violence, an untenable immigration system, inadequate public schools, and crumbling bridges and highways. ... Large majorities of America favor various programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut 'corporate welfare.' Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies."
There should be no debate about how to effect change. Piecemeal and incremental reform is always preferable to the inevitable anarchy any power vacuum creates. The problem is that our utopian engineers in their giddy dismantling of an economic and democratic system, as well as their draining of state resources in the wars they prosecute overseas, have dynamited the tools that could save us. They have left us no option but to revolt and remove them from power.
We will carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience to bring down these corporate oligarchs or live in an Orwellian tyranny, at least until the climate emergency renders the human species extinct. Regulations, laws, planning and control are not the enemies of freedom. They keep capitalists from extinguishing freedom, denying justice and abolishing the common good. The freedom of the capitalist class to exploit human beings and the natural world without restraint transforms the freedom for the many into freedom for the few. That was always the point.
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