Wisdom from the past and present – Can we learn from it?

By Thom Hartmann

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters. — President Grover Cleveland

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

America has experienced this crisis before. Every few generations, a class of greedy oligarchs rise to power who are so intoxicated by wealth, so determined to hoard more, more, more, that they become a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy itself.

— It happened in the 1850s when the plantation aristocracy rose up, destroyed democracy in the South, and then tried to conquer the entire nation.

— It happened again when the Robber Barons of the Roaring 20s crushed unions and helped trigger the Republican Great Depression.

— And it’s happening today in the aftermath of the Reagan/Bush/Trump Revolution, as billionaire fortunes have exploded over the past 44 years and the American middle class has collapsed.