How did we get here?

Let's start envisioning a better country. We'll start with the megabillionaire problem.

Piles of quarters, Quinn Dombrowski

We’re all grieving the latest horrors. On another day, we’ll talk about those. But today we’re going to start envisioning a better future.

Building it won’t be easy, whether we win the country back in three years or thirty. We are never going to snap back to “normal,” or to a magical, mythical time before Trump when all was well with pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

The world has changed dramatically since whatever moment you imagine that the U.S. was fair, prosperous, and secure — the postwar American ascendancy, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or whatever it might be. Meanwhile, in the past year, the Trump administration has smashed America’s standing as a reliable superpower, our civil service, the rule of law, the scientific innovation engine that juiced our economy, for a start.

But most important, Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of this devastation. The orange demagogue could win the presidency — twice — because key portions of our democratic society have been rotting for decades.

To move forward, we need to revamp our society — and our Constitution — once again. And to think about what needs to change, we need to look clearly at what’s gone wrong. It will take more than one newsletter. So let’s get started.

The rise of the corporate Borg

For half a century, wealthy conservatives have invested in justifying, endorsing, and enabling extreme greed. They’ve done it through a vast infrastructure of think tanks, legal societies, training conferences, judicial appointments, and an entire media-entertainment complex of outrage, sneers, conspiracy theories, and big lies (now including CBS).

Since Reagan launched a counter-revolution against fairness, this movement has been removing New Deal protections against extreme inequality, one regulation and Supreme Court decision after another, like jenga blocks, until it all came smashing down.

Meanwhile, global economic and technological shifts have destroyed local companies and local economies. Corporate consolidation, mega-mergers, vampiric corporate takeovers, and globalization — all enabled by innovations in computer technology — swallowed up once-freestanding businesses that offered meaningful jobs that anchored towns, cities, and regions.

That’s very abstract, so let’s look at an example. Once upon a time, Dayton, Ohio’s employers included Huffy Bicycle, National Cash Register, Elder-Beerman’s department stores, Lofino’s groceries, and local banks and TV stations. These offered decently-paying middle-class jobs — and, just as important, a sense of meaning and purpose and belonging. You were a banker, or a union member, or a deli-counter manager, or whatever it might have been. Your work wove you into a community. The company president might have been a lot richer than you were, but you belonged to the same economy, the same civic ecosystem.

No more. Bank of America, WalMart, Krogers, Macy’s, Amazon, news media megachains, and all the rest vacuumed up all that commerce and civic knowledge, assimilating them into a corporate Borg. Local companies’ jobs were dismantled into tiny tasks and shipped around the world — accountants here, factories there, editorial decisions way over there.

Multiply Dayton’s story by thousands of cities and towns. That hollowed out the heartland — gutting those places as baldly as stripmining did to West Virginia, strip farming to Oklahoma, or any other extractive technology to the world (hello, AI, we see you coming!).

The CEOs of these mega-companies got mega-paychecks.

The human widgets staffing the desks, cash registers, and factories got mini-paychecks.

To avoid paying decent wages and benefits, many Borg corporations give workers unreliable, ever-changing schedules, designed by the kinds of computer programs that pack us into planes like sardines. As a result, those workers can’t quite make a living — or a life. Instead of insisting that jobs pay a living wage with benefits, the federal government has been subsidizing megacorporations by giving SNAP benefits to workers at Borg companies like Amazon, McDonald’s, Target, DoorDash, and hotel, grocery, and hospital chains.

None of this is inevitable. In theory, jobs at WalMart et al. could have been “good jobs.” After all, in Dickens’ time, manufacturing and mining made people work ceaselessly for starvation wages. Radical labor movements of fought for protections that FDR finally instituted, thus staving off fascism and communism.

But generational memories are weak. The ultraconservative movement mentioned above — of, by, and for the uberwealthy — has captured the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The jenga blocks have all fallen down: labor protections, anti-monopoly laws, limits on what risks banks could take, all of it smashed so that top executives could get ever-more-wealthy — even when that meant bankrupting everyone else, as in 2008’s Great Recession.

What was left behind? Opioid freeways and cities — like Dayton — that now put blue lights under their overpasses, so addicts can’t find their veins and use those areas as shooting galleries.

No wonder so many people are so pissed. No wonder they so furiously resent the college-educated slice of Americans — you and me, dear reader — who fled the heartland for cosmopolitan prosperity.

You and I came out well. They did not. And they’re blaming us for the shit that happens at the top.¹

Here come the megabillionaires

There’s another twist to this. In those post-New Deal, post-World War II companies, a CEO made about 20 times the salary of an average worker, partly out of a postwar sense of mutual obligation — they had fought side by side — and partly because of the moderate size of the companies after the New Deal cleaned away the monopolies. It’s harder to shaft people you see in the parking lot and at the grocery store.

Do you think global oligarchs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and kin make only 20 times what their average workers make?

Yeah, right.

Nicole Marti, “Money’s piling up.”

Today the median CEO makes about 200 times what their median worker makes. Musk and Bezos and Page and Ellison made waaay beyond what those median CEOs make. They can barely see our incomes from their private jets. You’ve heard the ridiculous figures: The world’s wealthiest 1% control more than the bottom 95% put together. Just 56,000 people own more than the bottom half.

And they have bought themselves a government that is selling off chunks of the economy at fire sale rates.² Economist Thomas Piketty has established that extreme economic inequality destroys democracy. Oligarchs are the enemy of freedom. As we’re seeing.

Some of this happens with each new technology — the printing press, the ships that launched European exploration, the spinning jenny, drilling for oil. Innovations upend the social order. The people who get in first try to capture all the gold, like dragons,³ and to keep the rest of us peasants laboring for them.

The peasants don’t like it. (←Monty Python break.) Eventually we revolt.

So what is to be done?

You’ll laugh. But hear me out.

We’re going to have to:

• Ban megabillionaires.

• Dismantle megacorporations.

Sound impossible? Well, sure. Who, during the Gilded Age, could have imagined the particulars of the New Deal? But people did imagine limiting the robber barons’ wealth, breaking up monopolies, overseeing finance, protecting small investors, and treating workers like human beings.

Then they made it happen.

We can too.

I do not oppose wealth. We want a society that rewards incredibly innovative, disciplined, and driven people — if their efforts make the world better (or at least, not worse). You should be rewarded for, say, creating the covid vaccine or streamlining the electric grid or bringing us Game of Thrones or [your choices here].

Megawealth is a different story. We need to block extractive wealth that comes from capturing public goods (like the climate, or the internet, or human attention, or news), undermining competition, stripping away human dignity, and tilting all the gold into one pot.

Sound like capitalist heresy? Despite neoconservative theory, markets are never “free.” As Adam Smith noted, every market is guided by some set of agreements, rules, or regulations. Otherwise, the strongest and cruelest rule over the rest. We get to decide what principles will guide those agreements.

So how do we get there?

Trick question! I don’t know. I can tell you that many, many institutes, publications, academics, public officials, and others are thinking through the infinitely devilish details, including how to win elections with this message (Mayor Mamdani!!!). I will channel some of their ideas in Small Bites issues to come.

While the policy folks think about how to do it, we need to make up our minds that it must be done. Hope is a practice, a decision we make about how we will act — and about our country can be better. Let’s start with an economic ceiling and a floor.

Doesn’t that sound American?

Here’s how to laugh

For a painfully funny and far more compact version of all the above, watch the fabulous Sarah Cooper’s “The History of Wealth Throughout History.”

1. Have you seen any of the Hunger Games movies? Katniss Everdeen is channeling MAGA rage at a system that sends the heartland’s children off to the big cities to battle to the death for meaningful work — thus amusing pink-haired metropolitans with incomprehensible values.

2. Check out the Washington Post’s detailed reporting on how billionaires took over U.S. politics. That should be a gift link; let me know if it doesn’t work.

3. When I looked for an image for this metaphor, I found an article that explored the same idea, but in more depth. Great minds, I suppose!