The Rich Got Richer As the Biden Administration's Agenda Shrank
Business Groups Are Working in Overdrive
By Jim Miller
Things have never been better for the very rich. While millions of Americans have suffered economically throughout the pandemic and levels of mental illness, anxiety, and depression are soaring nationwide as we try to drag our way out of the crisis, the Robber Barons of our new gilded age have been cleaning up.
As the Guardian reported just last week:
The 400 richest Americans added $4.5tn to their wealth last year, a 40% rise, even as the pandemic shuttered large parts of the US, according to Forbes magazine’s latest tally of the country’s richest people.
The Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, retained top spot for a fourth consecutive year with a net worth of $201bn, followed by Elon Musk of Tesla and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, with net worths of $190.5bn and $134.5bn respectively.
The ranks of the super rich were swollen by 44 newcomers, the highest number since 2007, among them Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bitcoin billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of the Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna.
One might think that with this obscenely good fortune the American elite might feel some sense to obligation to serve the public good, but such is not the case. Unfortunately, the very corporate interests that have helped make the rich even richer are fighting tooth and nail to undermine the President’s agenda and deny the American public much-needed relief on multiple fronts.
As the New York Times noted of the current frenzy in the halls of Congress:
Business groups are working in overdrive to fight large swaths of it, such as raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations; expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision services; and proposed taxes and fees to cut down on carbon emissions . . . More than 4,000 lobbyists are working on budget and spending issues, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks money in politics. Ten major industries have spent nearly $700 million this year on lobbying, the group said.
Recently, on this soapbox, I pointed out how Big Pharma and fossil fuel companies were not just funding the campaigns of Democrats Scott Peters and Joe Manchin respectively, but that these legislators’ personal wealth was directly tied to the interests of their corporate allies.
And their partner in political malpractice, Kyrsten Sinema, is on the road to joining them as she has spent her time of late rubbing shoulders with and fundraising from business interests rather than working to pass legislation that will serve ordinary Americans’ needs and help avert climate catastrophe.
The result of all this is that the President, despite having 97% of his party with him, is already cutting the size of his $3.5 trillion package down closer to $2 trillion in a concession to Manchin and company.
What remains to be seen is whether he and his fellow Democrats will allow the Senator from West Virginia to gut the climate action portion of the package to the point where it is ineffectual and/or impose means tests to the social and educational programs in a way that significantly blunts their impact. One also wonders whether Sinema will stop any new taxes on the rich or corporations.
If this happens, the failure or effective evisceration of the Biden agenda will serve not the interests of the American people but of the corporations and the billionaire class. Astute political observers of American democracy have long noted that our government rarely serves the interests of the majority, but rather brings home the goods for moneyed interests on a regular basis. This has never been more obvious than at present.
Say all you want about razor thin margins for the Democrats in Congress and the threat of the right at this historic turning point, but the bottom line here is that American plutocracy is working exactly as the elites imagine it should.