Obscenity
When people hear the word obscenity, they usually think of pornography or something disgusting like that "2 Girls, 1 Cup" thing that I am not going to link to. But I'd like to talk about what the word obscenity really means and what I think is obscene.
Wiki defines obscenity this way:
any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time, is a profanity, or is otherwise taboo, indecent, abhorrent, or disgusting, or is especially inauspicious.
I think that's a pretty good definition myself so we'll go with it here.
For some time now I have considered wealth inequality to be the most obscene aspect of American society today. As a "speechless" Laura Clawson pointed out the other day in her post about the Walton heirs,
Six people. As much wealth as 30 percent of people. In 2007, the population of the United States was 302.2 million people. Six people had as much wealth as 90.7 million of those people. Or, to put it in another way, we're not talking about the top 1 percent. We're talking about the top .00000002 percent.
The question is, why did obscene wealth become acceptable in the U.S.? Or did it?
Back in the Gilded Age, people began to realize that laissez-faire capitalism ultimately resulted in monopoly, and, led by progressive Teddy Roosevelt, the people busted the trusts and monopolies. Excessive wealth was morally unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans. But in the Roaring 20's, under three successive Republican regimes, one-percenters realized that controlling industry was not the correct vehicle for controlling capital anyway. Banking and investment were the places where the 1% could scam the country less visibly. And they did until their house of cards margin buying collapsed in 1929, and the people realized they were being raped by the obscenely wealthy once again. So, led by another Roosevelt, Franklin, the people attempted to regulate the moneychangers and to tax them progressively in order to provide a rudimentary safety net for the 99%. They also embraced labor unions as a result of their experience in the Great Depression.
Along came WWII, the single most unifying event in American history after the Revolution itself, and Americans nearly achieved e pluribus unum for about five years. After the death of Roosevelt and the end of WWII, things began to return to their natural state of contentiousness, but it took awhile to completely polarize the country. Meanwhile, Roosevelt's notion that government, when properly applied, could solve the people's problems was accepted as truth by the vast majority of Americans.
Eventually, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Red Scare, the Civil Rights Act, the Vietnam War, and the Sexual Revolution polarized the nation. The Republicans never failed to encourage that polarization by exploiting these issues, and by the 1980's they were able to divide working people over issues like race, abortion, and homosexuality. Instructed by the likes of Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, and Karl Rove, the Republicans demonized the poor as lazy brown or black cheaters and thugs who wanted something for nothing (the mythical welfare queen) or who wanted to kill or rape you (Willie Horton). And they learned the language of polarization, thanks in large part to a young Congressman named Newt Gingrich and a pollster named Frank Luntz.
I don't think Americans ever stopped believing that extreme wealth was obscene, but they allowed themselves to be divided and distracted. The GOP radically curtailed the progressive tax system that had held greed relatively in check for 40 years and began a steady assault on the other two underpinnings of wealth equality, regulation and unions. The most insidious and important result of deregulation was the concentration and propagandizing of the media with repeal of Glass-Steagall a close second. And unions were assaulted head-on by Reagan's firing of the PATCO workers which allowed the meme that unions are "bad" to gain footing. Combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, union membership plummeted, except in the public sector. That's why public sector unions are currently under assault.
The first recession that resulted from trickle-down economics (which had been sold to the people using the big lie that "government is the problem, not a solution") combined with Ross Perot, was enough to sink Bush I and put Clinton in office. Even a mild tax increase on the 1% solved the nation's money woes, but the false "government is bad" meme persisted.
It has taken Bush II's Great Recession to get people to reexamine the false Reagan meme. It has taken near total economic collapse for working people to realize the true effects of trickle-down economics. It has taken near double-digit jobless rates for people to realize once again that, after a certain point, wealth becomes obscene.
Republicans who applaud a misapplied death penalty, who cheer the death of uninsured Americans, and who mock gay soldiers are guilty of obscene behavior. I think those values offend "the prevalent morality of the time." I think they are a minority.
We need to call wealth inequality the obscenity it is. As long as the 1% control 20 times as much of our country's wealth as the bottom 50%, it's obscene. It's immoral. And it needs to be called out. We need to call for a return to real American morality--a morality that recognizes, as we did in WWII and for 35 years following, that we're all in this together and that when we let six people who never did anything to earn it control as much wealth as the poorest 90 million Americans do, it's obscene.
What is the greatest obscenity in American society to you?
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