A LAND WHERE WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND PEOPLE DECAY --- Episode 1

           A LITTLE MORE HISTORY OF WEALTH & POLITICS 

   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 ---challenging popular sovereignty as it had in the late nineteenth century. Scholars also pointed out that the reigning theology of domestic and global markets bore disturbing resemblance to the survival-of-the-fittest canons of that earlier Gilded Age.
   None of these circumstances were changed by the destruction of the World Trade Center. The increasing reliance of the American economy on finance is an even more obvious vulnerability. If September's stock market decline briefly shaved another trillion dollars from U.S. financial assets, national politics continued to wear its "for sale" sign. The United States remained what comparisons had clearly shown : the most polarized and inequality-ridden of the major Western nations. 
   In 2002, as in 1999 and 2000, these predicaments did not represent the American political and economic norm, which has been for such developments to be restrained by suspicions of the rich. Deviations from such wariness mostly have come during optimal periods of broad-based prosperity in which economic opportunities far outweighed these qualms. The early nineteenth century, for example, in the frontier settlement decades, humming with bargain-priced government land sales ---"doing a land office business" became a common phrase in the 1830s---empowered millions of new small landowners. New World openness in acreage or jobs became a beacon, drawing millions of emigrants from European embarkation ports. Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor, America's richest men, were immigrants who had built fortunes WITH THE HELP OF JEFFERSONIAN POLITICS. Wealth in their hands symbolized opportunity. 
   The other great example came in the quarter century after World War II when the middle class pushed its share of national wealth and income to record levels. The skepticism of the rich imprinted by the Great Depression guided politics and public policy through the 1960s. 

   These were the two eras in which wealth and opportunity clearly nurtured democracy. Yes, the top 1 percent of Americans had a very large slice, but it was smaller than the aristocracy of Europe.