Monopoly: for real...

Since I was very young I have always been fascinated by the game Monopoly. I grew up playing marathon games with my brother and sister and anyone who would play against me and even to this day I maintain a collection of vintage and unusual sets, as well as sets from around the world, and enjoy playing when I can find a few spare hours for a game and someone willing to play. I learned that there were certain strategies that were nearly sure-fire winners in the game and that if you wanted to win it never paid to be anything but ruthless. The whole point of Monopoly after all is to acquire everything on the board and to drive each of your opponents into financial ruin and ultimately out of the game.

There are a couple of ways one might look at this game. One might view it as a way to show how careful investment and management of one's money and holdings can multiply wealth and how by making foolish decisions or just from a run of bad luck one can fall through the cracks. One might also consider this game as an object lesson of how barely regulated capitalism tends ultimately to enrich the few at the expense of all others -- even when there are governmental mechanisms in place to provide for a minimal safety net for those without any other resources (if only we could all pass Go once in a while and collect $200 from the mythical magical bank). The land of Monopoly is one where ultimately one or two players will be very very rich and everyone else will be dirt poor or bankrupt.

We are witnessing in the United States what is amounting, in this writer's opinion, to the mid- to end-stages of a very brutal Monopoly game. Coming out on top are large multinational corporations, their boards of directors, upper management ranks, and large shareholders. Finding themselves being drained of everything they have and their means to compete are smaller businesses and individuals. The individual's ability to achieve (celebrities, accidental celebrities, and sports figures notwithstanding -- but how many of them are there really -- and how fleeting can their success be?) in this country is a factor of how useful that individual is perceived to be to a corporation, which in turn comes from a combination of factors including education, experience, age, mobility, race (yes I said it -- if anyone thinks racism in this country is dead, go spend some time in Alabama or Mississippi) and other intangibles. If an individual, any individual, does not fit a given corporation's profitability profile for a given job description, that individual finds himself out of work, replaced (or not) by another.

Multinational corporations in the US view people as fungible, disposable assets and have no loyalty to their workforces or even to the US as a country. If a corporation feels it is to its immediate benefit to offshore jobs, those jobs move out of the country without regard to what happens to the displaced workers in the US. Corporations buy out their competition -- witness for example how many fewer banks, airlines, car brands, etc. there are now than there were just 15 years ago. Corporations consolidate and standardize (ever notice how one town in the US looks largely like another -- same stores, same restaurants, same movie theaters, for example). It is common knowledge that nearly nothing is manufactured in the US anymore and what is assembled here is generally assembled from parts made abroad and even those assembly jobs are disappearing. A 45 year old factory worker in the US with no more than a high school education and 20 years of experience has as much chance of landing a decent job in his field with benefits and a salary equivalent to what he was making at his previous job as a snow cone in Phoenix in the middle of July has of seeing 10 minutes into the future.

It's not by accident though that the multinational corporations are winning the game. They are doing what any skilled Monopoly player does: they are using every technicality in the rule book to win. In the real world of the US, those technicalities include the ability to change the rules in the middle of the game. There was (and continues to be) some regulation on capitalism in the USA. In the early 1900s in response to the growing influence of powerful national (not yet international) industrial monopolies, the federal government passed the Sherman Anti Trust Act. Additional legislation such as Glass-Steagall, which regulated (at least until its repeal in 1989) the types of businesses into which banks could enter and how banks operated over state lines came into being during FDR’s run in office. The US had import tariffs in place to protect its manufacturing base, and a very high (90%! -- lowered during the Kennedy administration to 70%) marginal tax rate for individual income over $3 million annually. These regulations (among others) put some brakes on corporate power and influence and allowed the US from the post WWII era through the late 1970s to build up the highest standard of living the world had ever known before for the largest number of people. Effectively it was that rare Monopoly game where two players own about half the board each and just go round and round seemingly endlessly just trading rents and occasionally getting infusions of cash from Free Parking jackpots (if you play with that rule -- which is actually not part of the rules if you're a purist). Then things changed.

Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981. With Reagan came the advent of supply-side economics, also known as "trickle down" economics. Effectively the idea here is that by easing the tax and regulatory burdens on businesses and wealthy individuals that they would invest the money they weren't paying in taxes into job-creating activities which would then boost the overall tax receipts for the government. Multinational corporations loved this idea. Rich people loved this idea. They put a great deal of money into selling this idea to the US public and it worked. 

The results of trickle-down economics are legend and we are still living with them. Businesses and wealthy people did not, however, use their government-provided savings to create jobs -- the country went into recession. Stock market and commodity bubbles started happening where they had not happened since the 1920s because all that extra money went into speculative investments that drove prices up and down like a roller coaster culminating with a dramatic stock market crash in 1987. 

Bush the Elder continued these policies and ultimately had to renege on his pledge never to raise taxes, which cost him the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. Clinton did little to change supply side economics although with the imposition of pay-go rules as well as other reforms in the mid 90s the economy did begin to improve. Clinton, however, negotiated and signed NAFTA -- which made it extremely easy for US companies to move their manufacturing to Mexico. Reagan, Bush, and Clinton all participated in the dropping of US import tariffs, which had the result of flooding our markets with low cost imported goods at the cost of millions of US manufacturing jobs. Bush the Second signed CAFTA in 2005, which dropped even more import barriers to other Latin American countries, further decimating our manufacturing base. Simultaneously the multinationals and wealthy have managed to reap enormous profits from the globalization of trade and have continued to funnel this money into speculative investments, which have continued to create huge bursting bubbles in the US and world economies -- the spike in oil prices in 2007, the real estate boom and bust, and the near collapse of the US Banking system from bad derivative investments to name but a few that spring to mind.

To date, despite some watered down attempts at minimal financial regulation, President Obama has not addressed any of the root causes of these problems, perhaps because he and his people have been doing their best since taking office to stem the economic bleeding caused by the past 30 years of bad policy, perhaps because they have no intention of addressing the root causes -- it is too early to call this one. He certainly has not done anything to address the travesty of supply-side economics or the conundrum of global trade and its pernicious effect on the US worker. It is certain, however, that the multinationals are not stopping. With the entrenched idea of corporate personhood, first put forth in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case in 1886 and most recently with the Citizens United decision out of the Supreme Court last January, corporations opened the door to buy even more influence over the rules and the rule-making process than ever. The 2010 elections were an example of what corporate money can do to fool the US public into believing what its masters want it to believe. Further, as multinational corporations continue to consolidate their grip on print and broadcast media, their job will become even less difficult as they will control largely what information people will see and hear unless they make the effort to inform themselves through other channels.

So is there any hope to take back the Monopoly board from the multinationals and have the individuals and small businesses win the game? On its face, it would appear not. It is certainly beyond the ability of any single individual or small business to change anything acting alone. It is only through collective action that change can come about. People must demand that their elected representatives serve their interests and not the interests of the corporations; that corporate personhood end; and that corporate money have no influence in elections. People must band together and demand this loudly and forcefully and must not take anything but complete cooperation from the government. In the US, we have the power of the ballot box. We also have the power of protest and civil disobedience. The power of protest brought changes to this country no less significant than the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 50s and 60s. People can do this. People must do this. If people do not, while we may have a representative democracy in name, we will be living forever afraid of the next roll of the dice.