Christopher Lasch was not the only author to warn of America’s coming abandonment by its privileged classes
Another was Robert Payne, the distinguished British historian.
Payne authored more than 110 books. Many of these were biographies. Among his subjects were Adolf Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare, Leon Trotsky and Leonardo da Vinci.
In 1975, he published The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America. It proved a summary of many of his previous works.
Among the epochs it covered were the civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome and China; Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union; and Watergate-era America.
In his chapter, “A View of the Uncorrupted Society,” Payne warned: Power and wealth are the main sources of corruption.
“The rich, simply by being rich, are infected with corruption. Their overwhelming desire is to grow richer, but they can do this only at the expense of those who are poorer than themselves.”
Their interests conflict with those of the overall society. They live sheltered from the constant anxieties of the poor, and thus cannot understand them. Nor do they try to.
They see the poor ad alien from themselves, and thus come to fear and despise them. And their wealth and influence enables them to buy politicians–who, in turn, write legislation that protects the rich from the poor.
But Payne foresaw an even greater danger from the rich and powerful than their mere isolation from the rest of society:
“The mere presence of the rich is corrupting. Their habits, their moral codes, their delight in conspicuous consumption are permanent affronts to the rest of humanity. Vast inequalities of wealth are intolerable in any decent society.”
Writing in 1975, Payne noted that a third of the private wealth was possessed by less than 5% of the population–while about a fifth of the populace lived at the poverty level.
By 2000, about five percent of the population would possess two-thirds of America’s wealth. And more than half the population would be near or below the starvation level. The result could only be catastrophe. The only way to halt this this increasing concentration of wealth by fewer people would be through law or violent revolution.
Payne has proven to be an uncanny prophet.
On November 1, 2011, Forbes magazine reported that, in 2007, the richest 1% of the American population owned 34.6% of the country’s total wealth, and the next 19% owned 50.5%.
Thus, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country’s wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%.
In its May 13Op-Ed column, Forbes magazine declared: “For De-Friending The U.S., Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin Is An American Hero.”
The editors could have been more accurately entitled it: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Traitors.”
From the editorial:
Those who demand “smaller government” should view Saverin as a “hero” for renouncing his American citizenship
Those who seek “smaller government” include mega-corporations that seek to pollute, avoid paying any taxes, market unsafe goods, gouge customers, and exploit their employees. But, by more than coincidence, this brutal truth is deftly omitted from the editorial.
The Federal Government would have almost certainly wasted the monies that Saverin would have paid in taxes.
It is the legal responsibility of government–not private robber barons–to determine what lies in the national interest. During the Vietnam War, many anti-war protesters refused to pay taxes, claiming they wouldn’t “finance” an “immoral” conflict. But that didn’t stop the IRS from going after the monies that were legally owed.
Saverin’s decision would force Congress to create a new and fair tax code that rewards “income and investment success.” The current one punishes both.
If it’s true, as Mitt Romney claims, that corporations are people, then they are exceptionally greedy and selfish people.
A December, 2011 report by Public Campaign makes this all too clear.
Public Campaign is a national nonpartisan organization dedicated to reforming campaign finance laws and holding elected officials accountable.
The report–which highlighted corporate abuses of the tax laws–offered the following revelations:
- The thirty big corporations analyzed in this report paid more to lobby Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, despite being profitable.
- Despite making combined profits totaling $164 billion in that three-year period, the 30 companies combined received tax rebates totaling nearly $11 billion.
- Altogether, these companies spent nearly half a billion dollars ($476 million) over three years to lobby Congress. That’s about $400,000 each day, including weekends.
- In the three-year period beginning in 2009 through most of 2011, these large firms spent over $22 million altogether on federal campaigns.
- These corporations have also spent lavishly on compensating their top executives ($706 million altogether in 2010).
And according to an analysis by the Associated Press, the head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011.
That was up more than 6% from 2010, and was the second year in a row of increases.
