Wealth and Power

America has succumbed to a vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, and even more power.

This spiral is most apparent in declining tax rates on corporations and on top personal incomes (much in the form of wider tax loopholes), along with a profusion of government bailouts and subsidies (to Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund partners, oil companies, casino tycoons, and giant agribusiness owners, among others).

The vicious cycle of wealth and power is less apparent, but even more significant, in economic rules that now favor the wealthy.

Billionaires like Donald Trump can use bankruptcy to escape debts but average people can't get relief from burdensome mortgage or student debt payments.

Giant corporations can amass market power without facing antitrust lawsuits (think Internet cable companies, Monsanto, Big Pharma, consolidations of health insurers and of health care corporations, Dow and DuPont, and the growing dominance of Amazon, Apple, and Google, for example). 

But average workers have lost the market power that came from joining together in unions.

It's now easier for Wall Street insiders to profit from confidential information unavailable to small investors.

It's also easier for giant firms to extend the length of patents and copyrights, thereby pushing up prices on everything from pharmaceuticals to Walt Disney merchandise. 

And easier for big corporations to wrangle trade treaties that protect their foreign assets but not the jobs or incomes of American workers. 

It's easier for giant military contractors to secure huge appropriations for unnecessary weapons, and to keep the war machine going.

The result of this vicious cycle is a disenfranchisement of most Americans, and a giant upward distribution of income from the middle class and poor to the wealthy and powerful.

Another consequence is growing anger and frustration felt by people who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, accompanied by deepening cynicism about our democracy.

The way to end this vicious cycle is to reduce the huge accumulations of wealth that fuel it, and get big money out of politics. 

But it's chicken-and-egg problem. How can this be accomplished when wealth and power are compounding at the top? 

Only through a political movement such as America had a century ago when progressives reclaimed our economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.

That was when Wisconsin's "fighting Bob" La Follette instituted the nation's first minimum wage law; presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies; and President Teddy Roosevelt busted up the giant trusts.

Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign is part of this mobilization.

The Power of One

WASHINGTON -- The capital's dysfunction is leading some thinkers here to conclude that "power" no longer exists. In a tribal and digital world, the theory goes, top-down authority is dead.

Anyone who believes that -- and every other voter in America -- needs to see R.J. Cutler's calmly voiced yet disturbing new feature documentary called "The World According to Dick Cheney."

It's a cautionary tale of unchecked zealotry in action. "We need people of principle who have deep conviction," Cutler told me. "But deep conviction can also take down a democracy."

Watch the movie and see the risks. In a fast-moving 109 minutes, you will follow the rise of a man who, at his height, had virtually unchecked power to rain destruction on other nations and who drove the creation of the military-diplomatic world in which we still live on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the fiery "shock and awe" launch of the Iraq War.

Power wasn't dead when Cheney had it, and I doubt somehow the planet has changed that much since he was in his heyday.

Dick Cheny

Yes, the American "homeland" has not been attacked since 9/11. But the homeland we now inhabit is largely the product of Cheney's thinking.

Is that his fault -- or ours? As portrayed in Cutler's film, Cheney is a force of nature, a potent mix of ambition, aggression, insight and fear. He is a blunt instrument, in both senses of the adjective.

As such, he needed to be controlled. But by whom? The answer, for several crucial years, was no one: not the benighted and incurious president he served; not the cowed Congress and (most of) the mainstream media; not the American people, who in fact voted in 2000 in greater numbers for the Democratic ticket.

Cutler is well-known for the sunnier documentary he made 20 years ago, "The War Room," about Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. His Cheney movie was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and deserves to be one on CBS' Showtime, which will run it next week (9 p.m. on March 15).

Distilling interviews with journalists, biographers and central figures in Cheney's saga, including 20 hours with the former vice president himself, Cutler chronicles how Cheney -- zealously, relentlessly, single-mindedly -- accumulated the power he then wielded in the first term of President George W. Bush. We see Cheney shrewdly and patiently playing the inside game for decades -- attaching himself to rising stars in successive Republican administrations; becoming a leader in Congress; finally steering Bush to pick Cheney as his running mate and then insisting on unprecedented control of security matters.

The portrait is riveting because we know what Cheney's ascent led to: our seemingly irrevocable, full-blown security state, with all the attendant risks of constitutional and civil liberties abuses; wholesale destruction and civilian deaths in swaths of Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 6,500 dead and more than 50,000 wounded U.S. soldiers; the rise of remote-control warfare, now embodied by drones; and a relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds arguably more antagonistic than ever before. The film has the dreadful fascination of a road trip you know ends in a car wreck.

Since Cheney left the capital, President Barack Obama not only hasn't dismantled most of the "world according to Dick Cheney"; in many cases, he has either actively ratified it (drones and intrusive surveillance and monitoring of leaks). In other cases in which he has opted for rollback (Afghanistan), Obama has moved with extreme caution.

The documentary is about Cheney, but by indirection it is about Bush, too. In his first term, the president let Cheney be Cheney, often without even knowing he was doing so. As the years passed, Bush belatedly moved to rein in his vice president, siding with Justice Department lawyers on surveillance issues; firing Cheney's dearest friend, Donald Rumsfeld, from his Pentagon job; letting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice win the argument over whether to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor site (we didn't).

Boy...  can you imagine how close that idiot got?