The American Rich: Blessed or ?????

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus scorches the rich with blistering condemnation, especially the religion-politico-economic elite who ran the Temple as a religiously legitimated system of oppression.  "Woe to the rich" versus "good news to the poor" summarizes Jesus' perspective.  See these Scriptures from Luke: 1:51; 3:7-14; 4:18-19; 6:24; 8:14; 12:13-21; 12:22-34; 16:13-31; 18:18-30; 19:1-10; 19:45-46.

While no Scripture is quoted by Kevin Phillips, his two books, The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990) and Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002) expose and condemn the greed and corruption of most of the American rich.  They are greedy and corrupt not only in economics but also in politics.  The primary villain is corporate capitalism.

According to Phillips, Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were all presidential prophets who warned about the excesses of corporate capitalism.  Lincoln in 1864:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.  As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow . . . until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.  I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war."

This amazing statement reflects a more accurate judgment by Lincoln than his more famous "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people."  Even our founding fathers were and represented a white, rich, male elite; for them, the poor didn't count, women didn't count; Native Americans and Afro Americans were second class citizens, if that.

Most readers will find Wealth and Democracy excellent but heavy reading.  If you just read and reread the Preface, the Introduction, and the Afterword, you will understand the gist of the Book.

According to Phillips, though President Nixon disgraced himself through Watergate, he was more fair-minded to the masses than Presidents Reagan and Bush I:

"Nixon himself supported national health insurance, income maintenance for the poor, and higher taxation of unearned income than earned income.  The 1972 Republican platform actually criticized multinational corporations for building plants overseas to take advantage of cheap labor."

Phillips began as a conservative Republican but he was profoundly disillusioned by the excesses of the Reagan era; so he left the Republican party in the 1990s and became an independent.

Some excerpts from Wealth and Democracy:

"The terrorist attack on New York City in September 2001 came only a year after serious candidates in America's millennial presidential election had described how money and wealth in the United States were crippling democracy.  Politics, they had said, was being corrupted as the role of wealth grew.  Other critics had found a reemergent plutocracy---defined as government by or in the interest of the rich---. . . . like that of the earlier Gilded Age.

"None of these circumstances were changed by the destruction of the World Trade Center. . . .  The United States remained what comparisons had clearly shown:  the most polarized and inequality-ridden of the major Western nations."

"The last two decades of the twentieth century, by contrast, echoed the zeniths of corruption and excess---the Gilded Age and the 1920s---when the rich slipped their usual political constraints."

Former senator Bill Bradley: "When politics becomes hostage to money, . . . people suffer."

Political scientist Samuel Huntington:  "money becomes  evil not when it is used to buy goods but when it is used to buy power . . . economic inequalities become [especially] evil when they are translated into political inequalities."

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr.:  "America had become a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations."