During that era from the 1930s to the 1980s, employers paid their employees well and offered generous benefit packages, largely because the oligarchs were under control and a third of American workers were union members.
For example, the nation's largest employer in the 1950s and 1960s, Sears, had a generous stock program for its employees that guaranteed a comfortable retirement. As The New York Times noted in 2018:
"Half a century ago, a typical Sears salesman could walk out of the store at retirement with a nest egg worth well over a million in today's dollars, feathered with company stock. " If Amazon's 575,000 total employees owned the same proportion of their employer's stock as the Sears workers did in the 1950s, they would each own shares worth $381,000."
America's middle class in the 1960s and 1970s -- created by FDR out of the wreckage of the Republican Great Depression -- was wealthy by today's standards. With a high school diploma and a good union job, you could buy a home, a new car every two years, take a vacation every year, put your kids through college, and in many cases even buy a small vacation home.
The Reagan presidency, however, put an end to that, welcoming massive contributions from America's oligarchs as they took over the GOP. He lowed the top income tax rate on billionaires from 74% to the 30% range and so extensively shot the tax code through with loopholes that the average American billionaire pays just 3.1 percent in income taxes today.
Reagan begin the process that, over the past 42 years, has seen over $51 trillion transferred from America's working class into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
The number of Americans in the middle class has, as a result of Reagan's embrace of America's oligarchs, collapsed: before Reagan it was over 60 percent of working people; today's it's under 45 percent. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare of debt and homelessness.
America's oligarchs, in other words, have purchased our political system and then used it to further enrich themselves at the expense of working-class people and the poor. The once-middle-class are now the working poor; the once-merely-poor are now the homeless.
Which brings us full circle to Zelenskyy's anti-oligarch law and the need for America to do something like it. As Teddy Roosevelt famously noted:
"Neither the people nor any other free people will permanently tolerate the use of the vast power conferred by vast wealth " without lodging somewhere in the government the still higher power of seeing that this power " is also used for and not against the interests of the people as a whole."
America's oligarchs have never, ever been as rich or politically powerful as now. Three American oligarchs own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans, and oligarchs across the nation are using that money to influence politics to their own advantage.
Over at The New Yorker, investigative reporter Jane Mayer tracks how rightwing billionaires -- America's oligarchs -- have helped fund overt efforts to overthrow or significantly alter the very nature of American democracy itself, exposing the threat of great wealth that nation after nation has struggled with in the past and present.
One single American billionaire appears to have essentially purchased the deciding vote for Citizens United, while others proudly own thousands of American politicians.
The biggest obstacle to a Zelenskyy-like de-oligarchization of America is the Supreme Court's doctrine, laid out in the 5-4 Citizens United decision with Clarence Thomas the tie-breaking vote: that money is the same thing as "free speech" and that corporations have the same rights under the Bill of Rights as do human beings.
Congress is not without options, however, as I've discussed here at length in the past. First, though, Democrats who are not in the thrall of the morbidly rich will have to seize a large enough majority to pass such laws out of the House and get them past an oligarch-owned Republican filibuster in the Senate.
When they tried this in 2022 with the For The People Act, every Republican joined in a filibuster that Joe Manchin and Kirstin Sinema -- both enthusiastic recipients of oligarch dollars -- refused to help senate Democrats set aside.
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