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By Tom Sullivan
Campaign for America's Future
May 18th, 2009 - 12:59am ET
The rich and powerful live in a different world from average men. They consider themselves privileged. Entitled. Untouchable. Better than the rest of us.
Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez drew a 50-game suspension for using a banned substance. He failed his drug test. Listen to the play-by-play on the Manny Ramirez suspension. Sports columnists and commentators wonder why a marquee player like Ramirez would risk taking any medication not pre-approved beforehand. They concoct explanations for Ramirez’s positive test that no one believes. Seattle radio personality “New York” Vinnie Richie on Air America radio’s The Ron Reagan Show took a more jaundiced view [timestamp 3:08]:
Athletes. Vinnie was speaking of athletes.
Elsewhere, high officials in the Bush administration authorized a regime of torture for suspected terrorists in prisons spread across the globe. They and their “enhanced interrogation” defenders are circling the wagons trying to stave off investigations and criminal charges. Wall Street crashed after creating the largest Ponzi scheme the world has ever known. Now President Obama is looking to crack down on their offshore tax havens. The health insurance industry is cozying up to his administration. They hope to crowd out the single-payer option preferred by six in ten Americans.
What Vinnie said of Ramirez is true of many celebrities, elected officials, and Wall Street and corporate moguls. We are dumbfounded that any of them think no one will notice their misdeeds, much less demand accountability for them. But there’s a reason they thought that: Money means power and power means impunity.
The rules don’t apply to our 21st century Gatsbys because they’re better than us. Rules are for commoners, not royals. Welcome to feudalism with a smiling face.
Money has always meant privilege and, sometimes, the kind of privileged recklessness that precipitated the crash of 1929. In response, Franklin Roosevelt's administration enacted banking regulations to keep 1929 from recurring, striking back at "privileged princes" who had "reached out for control over Government itself." In the wake of Roosevelt and WWII, the United States built the world’s largest middle class on a foundation of universal education, a thriving industrial economy, a strong labor movement and a social safety net. It was the fulfillment of the American Dream for a large swath of U.S. citizens. It narrowed the income gap between the oligarchs and the poorest Americans.
During the Reagan years, however, the oligarchs struck back, deregulating industry after industry, attacking organized labor and attempting to dismantle the social safety net put in place by the New Deal. With globalization came pressure to keep stock prices up by keeping wages low, a decline in organized labor and an explosion in health care costs. The income gap widened again into a yawning gap, the largest since the 1920s.
The new crop of Gatsbys, from pundits to politician to power hitters, is even more entitled and otherworldly than the last. Money, celebrity and notoriety are now nearly interchangeable, and goals in and of themselves. All bring with them power, privilege and, often, a self-righteous sense of entitlement. Success has become disconnected from contribution to society, as Wall Street’s collapsed house of cards and the tantrums of its bonused princes make clear.
They are better than the rest of us.
The ideology behind this sybaritic view says the oligarchs’ success is no accident of birth, but earned solely through individual hard work and discipline. From Ken Lay to Jim Bakker, the attainment of wealth and power signify God’s approbation – a state of grace. How dare we, as lesser men, stand in their way, much less form a jury of “peers” to judge them for any malfeasance?
There is no more stunning recent example of this Randian world view than the April 30 fit of pique by Fox Business’ Stuart Varney.
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