Hal Singer

In 1938, FDR warned the Nation that “a concentration of private power without equal in history” was growing in our midst. Today, I discovered that the concentration of private power he faced was NOTHING compared to the concentration we face today. In 1930, the largest 0.1% of American business firms controlled 47% of the country’s business assets. In 2013, the largest 0.1% of firms controlled 88% of business assets. That is bonkers. There is no way we can maintain anything resembling political democracy — let alone free enterprise — with such few hands gripping essentially all of the economic power in the country. In 1938, FDR predicted that “the liberty of a democracy will not be safe as long as the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic government itself.” “That, in its essence,” he said, “is Fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” A few years later, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conducted its own investigation into the concentration of economic power and found that the “dead hand of corporate control” had displaced free, private enterprise in most of the Nation’s basic industries. As a result, the FTC issued a stark warning to the country: “[A] definite choice has to be made,” the FTC said. “Either this country is going down the road to collectivism” and fascism, “or it must stand and fight for competition as the protector of all that is embodied in free enterprise.” That generation of Americans — the Greatest Generation that rose from the ashes of the Depression to beat Hitler, end Jim Crow, and bring about the most prosperous era in the Nation’s economic history — chose to fight. And they won. If American democracy is going to survive the critical moment we’re going through today, we need to relearn the wisdom of that New Deal generation — and act on it — fast. Like the Greatest Generation did in their time, we have to find “practical controls” over the “blind economic forces” and the “blindly selfish men” of our time. Like our forbears did on the eve of the Second World War, our task is nothing less than to rebuild “a way of living in which political democracy and free private enterprise serve and protect each other — to ensure a maximum of human liberty not for a few but for all.”