Sometimes it feels as if I'm writing the same story with the same theme. I mean, it was about money in 1978 when, writing for the Santa Monica Ocean Park Perspective, I wrote about the budget cuts to the AL transit system. There wasn't enough money then for making the lives of the people better, and there isn't any money now. "Budget" cuts then and just plain old ordinary cuts to throw money to war corporations and to Amazon, Apple, Meta, and other tech giants. And let's not forget, the American taxpayer!
1934 Cartoon: Junk the constitution...declare a dictatorship
(Image by Serfs UP ! Roger Sayles from flickr) Details DMCA
As Mother Jones reports, "19 politically influential billionaires" hold "in excess of $ 3 trillion." That's today. The US has 1,000 billionaires. Today. And, yet, money for the people to live in the world's richest nation still isn't feasible.
And why is that?
"Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man," writes W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Four million Blacks, he continues, "used and degraded," gave rise to "an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today" because, "erected on cheap colored labor," the manufacturing industry rose in the South as well as in the North. With this rise in manufacturing, rose an oligarchy self-absorbed with me, myself, and I, and insatiable for making a profit, by any means necessary.
Political rhetoric scholar Luke Winslow defines oligarchy as "exclusive," in that it "represents a form of governance focused on preserving the political and economic influence of the wealthy by securing the approval of the rest of the population" (Baylor University, Media and Public Relations).
It's not surprising that former enslaved Blacks recognized their labor was "indispensable," and they rejected the notion of accepting an anti-democratic structure that permitted such a class as the oligarchy. As Du Bois notes, Blacks recognized the "dictatorship of capital" in the North, a dictatorship that rejected a union of "democratic forces." Instead, Du Bois adds, the Northern industrial oligarchy linked forces with "the representatives f the former Southern oligarchy."
Black America saw it then, and Du Bois, writing in 1935, reminds America of what has always been a contradiction when it comes to the idea of democracy in America. Money, amassed by the few, hasn't served this country well. In fact, with Andrew Jackson as president, writes Du Bois, Black Americans couldn't be included "in any conceivable democracy." The presence of free Blacks made economically poor whites direct their anger at Blacks, thus establishing a rivalry between white and Black workers, further pleasing the capitalists in the manufacturing industry.
Is liberal America expecting the immigrant from apartheid South Africa, the Nazi-saluting Elon Musk, to sympathize with the plight of the economically poor, the working class, or the Black Americans?
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