How did we get so greedy?
By
Thom Hartmann for the
.webp)
Ralph
Waldo Emerson noted that “we become what we think about all day long.” It’s as
true of nations as it is of individuals.
As
recently as 25 years ago, most of us valued patriotism and religion first and
foremost, 70 and 62 percent respectively. Today only 38 percent of
Americans cite patriotism as a core value and religion has collapsed to 39
percent.
According
to a new Wall Street Journal poll (that they’ve been compiling since
1998), what’s replaced love of nation and spirit, tragically, is the desire for
money.
It
shouldn’t surprise us. Patriotism and religion are essentially luxuries. When you
can’t pay the rent or feed your family, when you’re pestered daily by bill
collectors and can’t afford your medications, it’s hard to think of anything
other than money.
Every
decade since 1980, the Reagan Revolution has bit deeper and deeper into the lives
of average working people, throwing at least 15 percent of Americans out of the
middle class and into poverty while increasing economic insecurity for
everybody except the morbidly rich, who have taken $50 trillion from the
working class since 1980 to further fill their bulging money bins.
Reagan
(and Republican presidents since) gutted aid to education, so student debt —
which pretty much didn’t even exist when he came into office in 1981 — is a
towering $1.8 trillion, trapping millions of young people in a lifetime of
servitude to the banks.
Reagan (and Republican governors since) fought government aid programs and stopped enforcing our antitrust laws so the pharma, insurance, and hospital sectors became essentially monopolies, draining cash from working people while making industry executives into billionaires. Medical debt is now a crisis for working class people on par with student debt.
But
the Reagan Revolution didn’t just reorder our economy, according to the Journal’s
survey. It reset our values away from loving our nation and each other and
toward loving — and needing — money. Almost half of Americans put money at the
top of their pyramid of values today, as opposed to fewer than a third almost
three decades ago.
Michael
Douglas summarized the mantra of the Reagan Revolution in his 1987 movie Wall
Street: “Greed is good!”
And
greed, of course, is satisfied by jumping into the corporate marketplace, not
by getting a job in government service. As Reagan told us in his first
inaugural, government was not the solution to our problems, but instead was
the problem itself.
He
ridiculed the formerly noble idea of service to one’s country and joked
that there are really no good people left in government because if they were
smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more
money.
He
told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m
from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Throughout
the 1970s and 1980s, billionaires associated with the Republicans built a
massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify
this message.
It
so completely altered the values system of America that by the 1990s even
President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is
over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.”
The
logical endpoint was electing a flashy gold-plated grifter billionaire as
president: the obsession with wealth Reagan planted in the American psyche
became a parody of itself with the Trump presidency.
It’s
easy to glibly argue that people should just reject Reagan’s values and embrace
patriotism and the compassionate and loving values of religion, but for most
Americans today that’s now a luxury. Particularly in states run by Republicans.
Hustling
for money has literally become a life-and-death issue for many of us. Life
expectancy has collapsed in Red states, as you can see from this map, and even in Blue
states debt is at record levels.
Finland,
the nation ranked the happiest in the world for six years in a row (the latest
rankings by the UN came out last week), gives its citizens the space
necessary to explore the values Emerson and his Transcendentalists spoke of
back in the day.
Both
healthcare and education are essentially free there (students are actually paid
to go to college). Housing and public transportation are subsidized.
Three-quarters of all Finnish workers are represented
by a union and thus earn a solid wage.
And
they don’t have the problem of morbidly rich billionaires buying politicians
and rigging the economy because 5 Republicans on their Supreme Court never
legalized political bribery. As a result, the rich actually pay their taxes and
that money is used to support the Finnish middle class.
Astonishingly,
America stands almost alone among developed countries in having adopted
Reagan’s value system (the UK was infected at the same time with Thatcherism,
but at least they still have a national health service and affordable state
colleges).
By
the 1970s, we were on course to join the rest of the developed world when it
came to providing a decent life to most working people. A third of workers had
a union, and college was free or nearly free in most of America. Healthcare and
insurance were affordable.
And
then Richard Nixon, after stealing the 1968 election by sabotaging LBJ’s
Vietnam peace negotiations, put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972.
The
year before, Powell had written his infamous “Powell Memo” to the US Chamber of
Commerce, laying out a detailed plan for the morbidly rich to take over every
aspect of American life and politics, including universities and the courts.
To
speed the process along, he voted in 1976 to legalize political bribery by
billionaires (Buckley v Valeo) and in 1978 he wrote the decision itself
that recognized corporations as persons and gave them the supposed First
Amendment right to pour cash down the throats of our politicians (First
National Bank v Bellotti).
Thus,
a wave of billionaire and corporate cash floated Reagan into the White House
with the 1980 election, aided by his traitorous deal with the Ayatollah to hold
the American hostages until the day he was sworn into office on January 20,
1981.
As
I lay out in my new book, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How
Reaganism Gutted America, this cancer of political control by the
morbidly rich that Reagan engineered has devastated our nation.
Billionaires
fund politicians and judges who’ll promote their value system
of greed while cutting their taxes and pitting average Americans against each
other, so we won’t see the real source of our crises.
If
America is to regain our moral compass, to return to the values of patriotism,
family, and spirit, we must root out the poison of money in our political
system. To do that, we must elect officials like members of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus who are not beholden to wealthy or corporate interests and
refuse corporate PAC money.
Otherwise,
the billionaire class will continue to grow while the collapse of the middle
class continues apace, as billionaire-funded Republicans tell us who to fear
and hate. And happiness, like other non-greed values, continues to escape us as
a nation.
A
better America is possible: it just requires we all get politically active.
Tag, you’re it!
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.