Return of the Robber Barons

For all those who are concerned about the redistribution of wealth, not to worry, the president can only dance around the fringes of addressing this issue. All us little people at the bottom of the distribution chain only get to redistribute our wealth from government agency to government agency and from corporation to corporation, the real power and wealth of our country has already been redistributed into the hands of the few, and it began decades ago.

We have gone back to the gilded age when the robber barons were in control with the resurrection of Standard Oil, the model of corporate concentration of wealth as designed by robber baron John D. Rockefeller. Standard Oil, took over the entire country’s oil production by buying or destroying those who were unwilling to sell and ended up controlling eighty percent of the world’s oil production during the late 1800’s and early1900’s.

Citizens pushed back against Standard Oil resulting with the Supreme Court in 1911 ordering Standard dissolved, but that all changed with the “merge or die” mantra during Reagan’s presidency.

As a result of Reagan’s FTC lax rules against monopolies, his FTC allowed the resurrection of Standard Oil so that we now have Exxon Mobil the descendents of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, the largest and most profitable company ever in the history of the world. With globalization Exxon Mobil can do to the world what Standard Oil did to the country, take complete control while squeezing all others out, by whatever means necessary.

James Webb writes in his “A Time to Fight” “The take it all mentality of corporate America in these early years of the twenty first century has come to resemble in many ways the un-caring rapacity of a corporate America that Teddy Roosevelt chose to confront a hundred years ago.”

It remains to be seen if President Obama can live up to his promise of restoring equality of “economic opportunity”. To do that he needs to take on today’s global robber barons; until he does that, there will be no downwards redistribution of wealth.