This has been a week of extraordinary celebration for those of us devoted to a radical transformation of US-Cuba relations. Twice this week I've watched our president, near mesmerized by his eloquence and truth-telling, like the Obama of old (2008), fulfilling the promises he and we felt - and feel - so deeply.
Yet in last month's mid-term elections, and even more dramatically in the omnibus spending bill just adopted, there is evidence of a darker reality. I could as well speak of American war-making, but instead my emphasis is a second gilded age with its own set of robber barons, but with a signal difference from the first gilded age: the absence of powerful movements acting in opposition to the inequities and suffering at the heart of our plutocratic society.
So I suggest that you read or watch, if you haven't already, Bill Moyers's interview this week with Steve Fraser, historian and author of a powerful forthcoming book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. The program is available here, and I would tempt you with a paragraph from Fraser's introduction to his new book:
"Gilded ages are, by definition, hiding something; what sparkles like gold is not. But what they’re hiding may differ, fundamentally. Industrial capitalism constituted the understructure of the first Gilded Age. The second rested on finance capitalism. Late-nineteenth-century American capitalism gave birth to the 'trust' and other forms of corporate consolidation at the expense of smaller businesses. Late-twentieth- century capitalism, notwithstanding its mania for mergers and acquisitions, is known for its 'flexibility,' meaning its penchant for off-loading corporate functions to a world of freelancers, contractors, subcontractors, and numberless petty enterprises. The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion."
While you're waiting for Fraser's book to appear, read Paul Krugman's masterly review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, "Why We're in a New Gilded Age, New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014.