By JOHN BOS
“It must be obvious to all that we are not about to reverse societal habits and mores which have been consistently part of mankind’s behavior since the advent of recorded history, specifically that the labors of many have always been used to the advantage of a few. The profit motive is to be found at the root of our modern-day malaise, as it has ever been.”
This quote is from a letter to the New York Times I wrote one year shy of 70 years ago published on April 18, 1972.
There are a few things I would change in that statement today. For one thing, I would use the word humankind in place of mankind. I would write “profit motive run amok.” And I would use shorter sentences, especially because of today’s shorter attention span seduced by Twitter’s limit of 280 characters in a Tweet and its spawn.
I would not, however, change the basic “message” I was attempting to convey back in the days of Watergate. I continue to stand by my next three 1972 statements:
“The one difference now is that we are running out of the resources consumed by profiteering. When the day comes that I can no longer live healthily in New York City, I can move with my family elsewhere and escape that problem for a while. The trouble is that most of the people I see every day don’t have that option.”
“Optimists are fond of saying that we can solve our problems by directing all of our vast energies toward finding the solutions. Like committing billions of war dollars to education and housing or focusing the total consciousness of Madison Avenue on influencing racial attitudes for the better. We fail to mobilize these energies in positive directions because there is no financial profit to be found there.” (Today I would write “racial discrimination.”)
“What is needed is a devaluation of the dollar in everyone’s value system which, of course, demands an inflation in our regard and concern for fellow beings.”
Today I would (and will) expand and articulate what I meant by “resources consumed by profiteering” with a memorable quote from the keynote address by Bill Moyers at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference in Brainerd, Minnesota on October 16, 2001 — six weeks after 9/11.
“This isn’t the speech I expected to give today,” Moyers said. “I intended something else. For the last several years I’ve been taking every possible opportunity to talk about the soul of democracy. ‘Something is deeply wrong with politics today,’ I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn’t referring to the partisan mudslinging, or the negative TV ads, the excessive polling or the empty campaigns. I was talking about something deeper, something troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy — the essence of the word itself — is government of, by, and for the people. And the soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of big money contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the faith of citizens in self-government.”
“But,” Moyers said, “I’m not the same man I was six weeks ago. And you’re not the same audience for whom I was preparing those remarks. We’ve all been changed by what happened on September 11.”
So it is again — with the fluctuating future of the COVID 10/Delta variant pandemic. We’ve all been changed again.
Moyer’s opening statement 20 years ago has been more than amplified in today’s political pandemic. Over the last 16 months, since the formal beginning of the pandemic lockdown, the combined wealth of 713 U.S. billionaires has surged by $1.8 trillion, a gain of almost 60 percent. The total combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased from $2.9 trillion on March 18, 2020 to $4.7 trillion on July 9, 2021.
Almost none of that income will ever be taxed under current rules. A more direct way to tax billionaire wealth is to tax the wealth itself instead of just its growth. If the wealth tax first proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren had been in effect in 2020, billionaires alone would have paid $114 billion for that year — and would pay an estimated combined total of $1.4 trillion over 10 years.
That would have made an enormous down payment on the Biden administration’s infrastructure proposal just reduced by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.7 trillion in ongoing negotiations with Republican lawmakers, down from the initial $2.25 trillion.
The “Connecting the Dots” column by Greenfield resident John Bos appears every other Saturday in the Recorder. Bos is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times and the editor of a new children’s book “After the Race” now available on Amazon. Comments and questions are invited at john01370@gmail.com.