Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues for almost 20 years.
BRATTLEBORO-It's déjà vu all over again.
The robber barons are back. The wealthy have their cottages by the sea in the Hamptons, in international mansions, and at Mar-a-Lago instead of Newport. Their yachts are shining and staffed while rivers of money flow from the coffers of billionaires who escape paying taxes and offer their obscene wealth in exchange for political favor and power.
Clearly, we are once again a nation of prospering oligarchs and exploited paupers.
The glittering Gilded Age, which reached its apex between 1880 and 1920, was a golden era of opulent architecture, extravagant fashion, expensive art, and expansive parties. Built on the economic growth that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction, businessmen and bankers made out like bandits by investing in railroads, factories, and various industries that produced raw materials for the development of inventions that enabled mass production.
While some in the monied class applied their wealth to building libraries and museums and to public improvements in large cities (often prodded to do so by their wives), they overlooked the needs of those on the other end of the social and economic spectrum.
Child labor, dangerous working conditions, and the exploitation of immigrant workers did not matter to the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Carnegies, who looked the other way, ignoring life in the tenements of New York City and factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where the 1911 fire killed 146 trapped young women workers as well as 23 men.
Journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis brought the reality of these travesties to light in stark photographs of slums, schools, factories, threats to public health, and more in his collection, How the Other Half Lives, housed at the Library of Congress.
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who dubbed the era the "Gilded Age," were among other critics troubled by the growing disparity between social classes.
This backlash to these excesses - "conspicuous consumption," a term coined by a social critic at the time - eventually sparked social movements that swung the pendulum away from the excesses of the Gilded Age and ushered in workers' rights, unions, and child labor laws.
But now we're back.
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Among today's most recognized magnates and robber barons are three of the wealthiest and most morally corrupt men in the United States. Their enormous wealth and lack of social conscience makes their predecessors seem tame.
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, is heavily invested in Uber, Airbnb, and X. He has a net worth of $247.6 billion, according to Forbes, which tracks this kind of thing, while Amazon employees earn about $15 per hour despite the physical demands of the job and expectations about productivity.
Amazon also continues to ban unions and illegally fires workers for trying to organize them. He also has had workplaces patrolled for signs of unionizing activity. It's positively Dickensian.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., is heavily invested in SpaceX and owns X (formerly Twitter). He has Bezos beat in terms of net worth. Musk is worth over $420 billion, Forbes reports.
Mark Zuckerberg is the third-wealthiest man in the U.S., with a net worth of nearly $223 billion. He became a billionaire at the age of 23. The cofounder, CEO, and controlling stockholder of Meta, formerly Facebook, his latest travesty is ending fact checking on his social media platforms and that's not the worst of it.
No libraries or museums for them. Just space capsules, AI, and a seat at high tables.
Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk
"By donating limited amounts of immense wealth, their public relations people argue they are changing the world for the better," write Norah Hussaini and Wintyr Rice in their editorial for a Texas youth newspaper, the Liberator. "Or, at least, that's what their public relations teams would like you to believe.
"While this philanthropy may seem generous from the outside, it is more often than not a ploy for the world's wealthiest to dodge taxes, [or a way to] boost their public image, and increase their net worth, all while rarely doing that much actual good along the way."
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These newly anointed oligarchs, and others like them, are wedded to power, prestige, and political influence. They will do anything to curry favor. That makes them dangerous in ways that their forerunners were not, especially in a time of autocracy, patronage, and a good deal of pathology.
In this new Gilded Age we are led into a different kind of conspicuous consumption. It's one that consumes lies and clings to false narratives while ignoring history, facts, and good governance.
It overlooks social justice issues like child labor - which has made a comeback - as well as exploitive and unsafe working conditions, especially for immigrants who manage not to be deported.
It burns the budgets that could help provide adequate housing, better schools, accessible health care and vital safety nets. It allows food and water to be contaminated because the ruling class doesn't have to eat or drink what the lower classes do. It returns women to the Victorian age of silence and servitude.
Today's robber barons and their elite political allies not only steal dignity and hope, they put us at great risk and conspire against anything that is fair and forward-thinking while serving their own selfish purposes.
"We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough," wrote Eugene Debs - a labor organizer and five-time Socialist Party candidate for U.S. president - in 1897, during the last Gilded Age.
"Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization," he wrote. "The time has come to regenerate society [while] we are on the eve of a universal change."
This Voices column was submitted to The Commons.
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