The Pitchforks Are Here

Inequality is a trap - for rich people and their enablers as well as the rest of us

One night, in the summer of 2011, I was at a backyard party at a friend’s house in Flossmoor Illinois.

I remember that night for a few reasons. First, Flossmoor, a suburb south of Chicago, was built on the greenest space I have ever seen. Growing up in a desert, then living in urban spaces, moving to Flossmoor was like moving into a fairytale. A fairytale that was a multi-racial version of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry.

Summer nights, when it wasn’t raining, were glorious.

Who am I kidding, even the rain was glorious.

I also remember that the friends who hosted the party were both attorneys. Most of the people at the party were also attorneys, with a sprinkling, no doubt, of academics from the University of Chicago, with the occasional single mother journalist desperately trying to support her children.

OK, there was only one of those. And that’s a good thing for the universe.

The other thing I remember - really will never forget till the day I die - was a conversation I had with a lawyer I had never met before. And never saw again. He told me a story of a friend he had in law school, who had to take a year-long sabbatical. The reason was that it was his turn to head back to his country to guard his house.

You see, his family was wealthy. His country was not. The people who were not wealthy were angry, and had resorted to kidnapping and extortion to make the wealthy pay.

It was so bad, they couldn’t hire people to guard the house or, likely, estate. They couldn’t trust that the guards would not turn kidnappers/extortionists. So the law school student and his brothers - none of whom lived in their home country anymore - would trade off heading back to keep watch over the homestead.

The law school student explained to the man telling me this story that his childhood home had become a ball-and-chain, his wealth a burden. They couldn’t sell their house. Few in their country could afford it, and no one outside of their country would buy it with the inherent dangers. Their parents were still alive, and wouldn’t leave. Growing up, his parents had disdained the “rabble” that comprised most of the population. And, even though the law school student saw inequality as a trap for both rich and poor, his family didn’t have the kind of money and power to turn around an entire, corrupt, government system.

I mean, just look at all the Russian oligarchs who have mysteriously died over the last few years. More since they criticized the war in Ukraine.

And here were are, in the good old U.S. of A., after 40 years of growing economic inequality, as billionaire oligarchs are about to be installed in the president’s cabinet.

And another oligarch was gunned down on the streets of New York.

Now every CEO in the country is increasing security, fortifying their homes. It will only be a matter of time before they can’t even trust the security personnel, and will have to rotate out home protection within their families.

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The Pitchforks are Coming

It’s not like people weren’t warning that the introduction of trickle-down economics in the 1980s was the road to our destruction.

George H. W. Bush, running against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary, called it “voodoo economics.” The idea that if you give the rich a tax break, the poor and middle class will benefit was absurd then and is even more absurd now, as we witness its failure.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out around the same time that “free trade” was only free for some, and the rest of us would be in debt servitude.

Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel in economics before becoming a New York Times columnist, argued vehemently during the 2008 financial crisis that more government stimulus was needed, rather than the austerity economics Obama was overseeing.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has been sounding the alarm on “free markets” for decades, actually warned about United Healthcare in a Facebook post in 2016.

A couple of years before, billionaire Nick Hanauer publicly joined the anti-neoliberal chorus.

Hanauer runs an organization in Seattle called Civic Ventures, which produces media that argues for Keynesian, middle-out economic policies. He’s a bona fide billionaire because, he says, he had the good sense to invest in his friend Jeff Bezos’ start-up online bookselling company a few decades ago.

Civic Ventures has a weekly podcast, and also publishes a weekly SubStack written by Zach Silk that I find essential reading.

Back in 2014, Hanauer wrote a long piece for Politico that warned his fellow billionaires that if they didn’t change their ways, inequality would become so bad, people would be coming for them with pitchforks.

I guess he couldn’t envision 3D-printed guns with silencers.

Here’s a snippet of what Hanauer predicted 10 years ago:

Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.

What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.

Sadly, no Republicans and few Democrats get this. President Obama doesn’t seem to either, though his heart is in the right place. In his State of the Union speech this year, he mentioned the need for a higher minimum wage but failed to make the case that less inequality and a renewed middle class would promote faster economic growth. Instead, the arguments we hear from most Democrats are the same old social-justice claims. The only reason to help workers is because we feel sorry for them. These fairness arguments feed right into every stereotype… of the Democrats as bleeding hearts. Republicans say growth. Democrats say fairness—and lose every time.

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Fearful, Short-Sighted Journalism

Our national press, who were taught to accept neoliberalism as the only economic reality, rarely talked about this, rarely centered their stories on growing inequality, or the anger of people experiencing it. Which is why they all went out to Midwest diners AFTER the 2016 election.

And still didn’t learn anything.

The national press mostly refused to write about Joe Biden’s embrace of exactly the kind of middle-out economics Hanauer has been talking about. When journalists did write about it, it was in contrast to what their neoliberal economist sources were telling them, so they framed it as, “economists disagree.”

Hey, we’re just stenographers. No one expects us to THINK! People might call us liberal!

Which is why it was so humorous to watch legacy media squirming under the existential threat to the billionaire class after social media erupted with outrage over the exploitive practices of health insurance companies, rather than gun violence, in the aftermath of Brian Thompson’s murder.

It’s especially satisfying when I note all the journalists over the last few decades who have been jettisoned by media consolation and budget cuts, taking with them their collective memory of what the U.S. was like when we were striving to be our best and lift up all people.

As many commenters to this Washington Post editorial noted, legacy media have helped create the inequities in the system.

And, as Hanauer noted, so have Democrats.

For most of my life, I feel as if I have been screaming into a void, watching the train of our democratic system race toward a steep cliff.

The air traffic controllers union was busted by the president of the United States, and the cliff came into view.

The Glass-Steagall Act came tumbling down, and I tensed as the cliff got closer, as the train sped up. It took 11 years until the first car tumbled over, and we got the Great Recession.

Then the Supreme Court decided corporations are people, and that money in elections couldn’t be limited, and I felt the caboose rattle violently, pulled by the cars before it that had already gone over.

I’d hoped that someone would figure out how to unlink them, like the hero in action films. Just in time.

Alas, now that caboose is tipping over the cliff, and there is no bringing it back. At the bottom we’ll find pitchforks, home-made guns, and very scared oligarchs who, because of their greed, will be facing people who have nothing more to lose.

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Carrie Kaufman is a veteran print and radio journalist who has always been more interested in what people are avoiding than what they are talking about. She founded and published PerformInk, a Chicago theatre and film industry trade paper, which covered economics, jobs, politics, racism, sexism, power, real estate - all through the lens of the artist. She then moved on to public radio, where she hosted talk shows in Vegas and Wisconsin, which is when she realized she was too old to do bad journalism.

Check out past and present work on Muckrack.

Follow on Notes, BlueSky and Threads.

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Reading Recommendations

A couple of pieces caught my eye this week. One of them is linked to the last line of this piece. Michele Hornish brilliantly and astonishingly turns the whole Frankenstein’s Monster myth on its head, as she considers the motives of Luigi Mangione and of Brian Thompson, and other CEOs. Definitely worth a read.

Frankenstein, Not Robin Hood: Luigi Mangione

This one, from Judd Legum at Popular Information, is one to bookmark. It’s about a teacher who is suing her school district for violating her “sincerely and morally held religious belief that all children — including LGBTQ children — should be treated with dignity and respect.” In other words, she is actually making a Christian argument, as opposed to a fake, Christian nationalist argument. About time someone started doing this. Can’t wait till this gets to the Supreme Court. If we still have a Supreme Court.

Ohio teacher suspended for including four books with LGBTQ characters in her classroom library