What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness: what’s either a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a defect in impulse control called “hoarding syndrome.”
Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to fifteen million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.
With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or even close to poverty.
Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string, they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.
As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:
So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.
Ultimately, they don’t care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!
But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that is called a SuperPAC.
While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free health care to its citizens; free or nearly free education, including college; and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:
—Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60 percent of us live in poverty: 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “for the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free health care and college.)
—Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: Over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s 40-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.
—Americans spend more than twice as much for health care and pharmaceuticals as citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for health care; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).
—The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada’s is 82.3, Australia’s is 82.9, Japan’s is 84.4, France’s is 83.0, and Germany’s is 81.3.
In the 42 years since the start of the Reagan revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working-class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders.
In the years since the Supreme Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.
All because our courts and politicians, now well captured by right-wing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.
We did this before.
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.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things.… It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”
“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”
Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s debt and rebuild the middle class.
It’ll take a few years, in all probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.
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