Prometheus Unbound: Populism, The Property Question and Social Invention

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the good society, vol. 21, no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Introduction

Human spontaneity and the power generated by cooperation should be exercised within the bounds of what Melville called “lasting institutions,” within a public space guarded by constitutional arrangements upheld by the public commitments of citizens.1 This is the foundational premise of a new populism.

This article begins with the history and culture that emerged by a radi-cal redistribution of productive real estate to millions of citizens, initiated and carried out by the newly emerging republican governments at all levels. This redistribution imprinted what I call a property-owning consciousness into the body politic which, in turn, helped to shape civic understandings of liberty, opportunity, freedom, and independence. It also explores the rupturing of this relationship to productive property brought about by the constellations of a new economic revolution. New inventions such as cor-porations and financial markets in the economic life of nineteenth century United States disrupted long term institutions, existing cultural patterns, power relationships, legal frameworks, and existing patterns of land hold-ings. Over time, these new organizational experiments congealed and dom-inated the economic and political landscape of the republic. This had the effect of separating a significant number of households from an ownership stake in productive property, which, in turn, changed the trajectory of the republic’s economic, cultural and political future.

Prometheus Unbound: Populism, The Property Question, and Social Invention

gerald taylor

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2 2 0 | t h e g o o d s o c i e t y | vol. 21, no. 2

This article then looks at the response of populist movements to this rupturing and the resulting dependency. These movements sought to free their members from the economic dependency engendered by this new reality, using multiple forms of collective agency to achieve this. I describe the struggles of white and African American farmers, share croppers, labor-ers, and artisans who sought to overcome, gain control of, reorganize, and create new social inventions to counter and influence growing entrenched power and economic structures at a particular moment in United States history. In particular I highlight the struggle of the post Reconstruction, independently-initiated black populist movements’ historic effort to free African Americans from the neo-slave regimes in the south and southwest.

Finally, this article explores the implications of these historical struggles for the present, in the midst of another revolutionizing of the economy. We are witnesses to and potential agents in the transformation of a new disruption of institutions: the penetration of market culture and patterns of its organization into all aspects of everyday life, the proletarianization of professions, the reintroduction of speculative boom and bust cycles in the economies of the Western world, and the loss of work, equity, and property by households. It is a time when many millions fear falling into crippling indebtedness and dependency.

I

“Power always follows property. Property widely distributed among the people holds the line against pernicious concentration of power.”2 Citizens in the new American republic developed primarily what I would describe as property-owning consciousness, contrasted to class-consciousness.

A property-owning consciousness is centered in an understanding by citi-zen workers, artisans, and farmers that in order to be free of employers, land-lords, creditors, and possibly the organs of state power, one must assemble and own enough productive assets to guarantee liberty and independence. The means by which citizens attempted to accomplish this freedom included both individual and collective acts and instruments. Thus, workers and farm-ers joined together to negotiate better terms with purchasing agents, and employers that could yield them enough income and resources to allow their individual households to assemble productive assets to become “free.”

A significant number of the founding fathers believed that the republic would suffer if land and property were not widely distributed.3 A central focus of the emerging governmental infrastructure was to divest significant

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taylor | Prometheus Unbound | 2 2 1

amounts of publicly held land through Homesteading Acts to citizens and enterprises alike. The scale of this redistribution was so large that by the early 1800’s it has been estimated that between 60 percent and 80 percent of free citizen households were landholding property owners.4 The period from the 1600’s to the middle of the nineteenth century thus constitutes the first imprinting of a property consciousness in free citizens, well before the introduction of significant land-poor wage labor in the United States.

Three hundred and seventy five land laws were passed during the first half-century after independence. These major land distribution enactments included ordinances and homestead acts that gave to millions of non-property landholding households the means to land ownership.5 These actions by the national, state, and local governments along with the building of new regional and national transportation networks through the subsidization of private enterprises including the railroad industry, which included transferring titles to millions of acres of public land to make possible the potential routes, cre-ated hundreds of new towns and communities, and hundreds of thousands of farms, artisan shops, businesses, and other institutions.6

Such legislative and governmental action attempted to disrupt and challenge the scale of the prevailing economic infrastructure with new economic enterprises that could organize farmers and artisans in new ways that would liberate millions of households from debt peonage, wage slavery, and dependence. Often times these strategic approaches overlapped with, changed, or were discarded in favor of new social inventions or controls initiated in response to their organizing, or as independently initiated new innovations came into being.

This dialectic of creating new social inventions and enterprises that challenged the older forms of organization triggered reactions, disrup-tions, boom and bust cycles that left millions of households insecure and burdened with debt, and provided a continuing rationale for citizens to seek protection through their own individual or collective efforts to secure ownership of productive property as a hedge against this uncertainty and dependency. This property owning consciousness was reinforced by reli-gious arguments. This consciousness, this drive to become independent, cut across all ethnic groups and collectives of workers, farmers, business people, and artisans. While this sense of property consciousness seems to have been pervasive among the different segments of US society, the means

Citizens in the

new American

republic developed

primarily what I

would describe as

property-owning

consciousness,

contrasted to class-

consciousness.

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by which this could be achieved by individuals’ households and groups dramatically varied even within ethnic and racial groups.

Ironically, this massive redistribution of public lands to citizens also went to newly emerging corporations and accelerated the creation of regional and national markets for goods and services. Along with this were a series of “social inventions” adopted by governments’ expanding the semi- autonomous economic sphere dramatically to organizational experiment-ing, innovations, and new ways of capital accumulation. One of the most significant was the passage of laws allowing the creation of new corpora-tions by registration only.7 A massive, new economic transition took place; one that would eventually lead to a civil war, divest millions of households of land ownership, and drive millions into debt peonage—including mil-lions of former slaves. Households that had known some measure of inde-pendence and many more that had not were now facing the prospect of cross- generational dependency and a state of propertylessness.8

II

Economic freedom meant, in the American creed, ownership of a small plot of land, “the freedom to grow enough food to feed a family, to sell enough cotton to pay the taxes and have a little left over.”9

At the center of the struggle of the populist movements of the late 1800’s, both Black and white, was an attempt to free themselves from debt peon-age, wage slavery, and the domination of the rising industrial constella-tion made up of manufacturing enterprises and joint stock corporations that organized significant combines of land, capital, and workers. With the invention of the telegraph and the building of the intercontinental railroad system the market economy penetrated every rural town, village, and city, undermining local artisan economies and the ability of farmers to survive, driving many of them into wage labor.10 By the late nineteenth century less than a third of white households owned significant free-holding property, a dramatic reversal from earlier decades.11

Farmers, allied with labor groups like the Knights of Labor, sought to build large networks of cooperatives called Farmers’ Alliances. The Alliances envisioned a cooperative commonwealth as an alternative to the usurious, exploitative systems of the credit lein, share cropping and agri-cultural laboring, patterns of economic life controlled by enterprises and landlords who were part of a larger capitalist market network of produc-tion, marketing and distribution, and selling.

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The Alliances attempted to circumvent the existing agricultural supply chain and create an independent system of warehouses, cooperative enter-prises that could compete with the existing system.12 If they succeeded, share-cropping would end, credit leins would end, and millions of farmers, artisans, and wage laborers would either hold onto their land, or have an opportunity to pursue land ownership unencumbered by debt peonage.

The black populist upsurge merits particular attention. By 1860, less than 11 percent of free blacks owned land and 97 percent of Africans remained property of someone else. At the end of the civil war and reconstruction, millions of ex-slaves were still without land or resources. It has been esti-mated that 8 percent of the freed slaves held property, 27 percent were sharecroppers, and 67 percent were agricultural laborers.13

Ex-slaves clearly understood that in a predominantly agrarian society, ownership of land (productive property) would be central to their struggle for independence from white domination. There was a deep property owning consciousness among the freed persons of color, who had long nurtured a vision of the “promised land,” predicated on independence. Thus freed slaves sought in a myriad of ways to gain ownership of land.14 Most venues to land ownership closed to them almost immediately after the Civil War. The fed-eral government abandoned the promises made to provide “forty acres and a mule” through the Freedman’s Bureau. Legal impediments, the ending of the homestead acts, and southern white mobilization against black property own-ers who made it through the gauntlet of obstacles meant that property owner-ship achieved by freedmen and women—with the exceptions of Virginia and North Carolina—may actually have declined in the South during this period.15

The black populist movement also amounted to a collective response to the re-imposition of a quasi-slave regime in the many locales of black rural life in the south and southwest. The elements of the movement var-ied over time but eventually coalesced and reached its pinnacle of orga-nizing in the formation of the Colored Farmers Alliance in 1886. At the peak of its organizing, it is estimated that between two hundred fifty thou-sand and one million African Americans were members of the Alliance. The Alliance proposed radical political and economic reforms, organized alternative enterprises, and launched boycotts and workers strikes. In addi-tion, working in a more equal fashion, they jointly organized campaigns for political and economic reforms with white populists that included promot-ing the radical sub-treasury plan developed by Charles W. Macune. Black populists also played a key role in the founding of the People's Party in the United States, and contributed significantly to some of the party’s most spectacular electoral accomplishments.16

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Yet banks, warehouse distributors, local governments and the railroad companies effectively boycotted efforts by the Alliances to create alternative economic enterprises and the farmers proved unable to organize enough capital from very poor farmers and laborers to create a parallel system that could be sustained.17 Their failure eventually pushed the Alliances into the decision to create their own political party to contest for governing legitimacy. While the Populists had dramatic electoral successes in mul-tiple states, the movement disintegrated after the controversial decision to support the Peoples Party-Democratic Party fusion ticket led by William Jennings Bryant in 1896. The fusion ticket went on to be defeated.18

Faced with an array of forces seeking to enforce white supremacy, and in the midst of growing tensions with a significant segment of the white popu-list movement, along with their own internal fissures, the Colored Farmers Alliance demise began in a flash of defiance. The Alliance attempted to organize a southern-wide general strike of black laborers. It failed.19

Yet the efforts of black citizens to become the owners of productive prop-erty and continue their struggle to end legal apartheid did not end with the collapse of the black populist movement. Through new individual and collective strategies and policies, some initiated during the black populist movement itself, black land ownership increased to over 13 million acres in the United States by the mid 1900’s. The new seeds of the next phase in the black freedom struggle were planted.20

III

With millions of property owners and artisans sinking into debt peonage, or being forced into wage labor, the populist movement was formed. The rising professions, what could be called collectives of “knowledge artisans,” offers a contrasting story of the search for independence among both whites and blacks, using a different set of strategies in an effort to consolidate control over productive property, work products, tools, and vocational training and accreditation. The professions bear some resemblance to the guilds of an ear-lier period. These intellectual artisans, accountants, doctors, lawyers, and engi-neers, among others, gained control over what we now call the professions.21

The professionalization of these groups provided the ability to negoti-ate contracts but retain control over their workplaces, their tools, and their schedules. They controlled decisions about the learning and application of their knowledge of these intellectual crafts, the formation centers that

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prepared them, and the terms by which they could enter the professions.22 The overwhelming majority of doctors and lawyers were self-employed. Others were employed by the formation centers. By the early twentieth century, these professional guilds had organized nationally, stabilized and expanded the income of their members, and wielded significant eco-nomic, political, and cultural influence.23 For example, the medical profes-sion’s “guild,” The American Medical Association, had an almost complete monopolization of patient care and the pipeline to the licensing required to practicing legal medicine.24 Over time, such control, coupled with the growth and transformation of hospitals and with that the control over med-ical technologies, drove up the cost of medical care and eventually, medical care was not affordable for the majority of citizens in the United States. The potential profit spawned corporate and investor attraction in medicine as an opportunity in the 1960’s. The appeal was deepened with the passage of Medicare.

The adoption of Medicare dramatically increased the market for medical services and provided a multi-billion dollar source of payments for medical providers.25 With this new guaranteed stream of income to the medical pro-viders, what was once a small proprietorship system grew into the modern health care industry: health insurance corporations, health care manage-ment corporations, and doctor led investment groups. The corporatization of the medical profession would begin to whittle away at the control and independence of medical professionals that resembles the erosion of the artisan industries of the nineteenth century.26

IV

The populist movement demonstrated that both individual and collective ways of achieving property ownership were available. Populists stressed the use of collective agency such as the farmers’ cooperatives to secure oppor-tunities for individual households to free themselves from debt peonage, employers, and landlords. They realized that only a collectively constructed political and economic space could free their membership. The populists also saw vividly what the dominance by a few corporations would mean for them: the ability to shut off access to credit, warehousing, and trans-portation to markets, with imposition of usurious pricing at each stage. Their lived experience with the credit mechanisms of the period convinced them that such mechanisms were not intended to assist them in becoming

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independent, but rather structured to maintain dependency and eventually to strip them of any ownership of property at all.27 Unable to break eco-nomic concentration, not capable of amassing enough capital through their own networks, they were eventually suffocated. Intellectual artisans took a different path to achieve independence. It is possible that the reason why a number of these artisan groups succeeded was because there was no profit-able way for the market system to invest and test new organizational experi-ments involving these areas until the twentieth century when, ironically, major new markets for investing in legal and medical services were created by government initiatives.28

Of lasting imaginative and symbolic importance even after the demise of the Farmers and Colored Farmers’ Alliances, the populist project, first initi-ated in the white and black farmer, artisan and worker movements of the late nineteenth century, contested the idea that the new business enterprises in the economic sphere, the corporations, should be afforded citizenship

rights, with the capacity to dictate the terms of people’s everyday lives. Specifically, they resisted this level of control over their lives as the terms of the relationship included debt peonage, losing their land, and losing other productive assets. All contributed to the loss of control over the means of their work and the intellec-tual and physical products of that work. They contested this control because they did not want to be subject to the arbitrary decisions of the owners and managers of these enterprises and their political surrogates. The cen-tral objective of the populist movement was to be free of landlords, employers, and creditors. Though unsuccess-ful in achieving their most expansive economic goals, the black and white populist movements challenged the new corporate and financial order and raised significant

theoretical and practical questions about the meaning of democratic citi-zenship within the new economic order.

V

Is there still a property-owning consciousness imbedded in US society? The answer is “yes.”29 However, elements and means by which this is to be achieved are now partially rooted in a radically individualist philoso-phy trumpeted by corporate interests.30 This “new ownership society” has

The populist

movement

demonstrated

that both

individual and

collective ways

of achieving

property

ownership were

available.

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seen millions of households gain an equity stake in home ownership, and millions more in shares of stocks and bonds in corporate enterprises and government debt. Millions of households also have lines of credit through contracts with credit lending institutions. Citizens are thus invested in the vagaries of the markets.31 While an “ownership society,” isn’t enjoyed by everyone, its appeal is based on a series of claims, revolving around the view that almost anyone can become the individual masters of their own destiny. Everyone can have their own unmediated relationship with their employer, their stock portfolio, and their credit card. Anyone can start a business if they have the courage to take risk. The individual, in an Ownership Society, is able to independently negotiate contracts with corporate entities and hold them “accountable.”

This set of claims has ushered in a new age. Each member of a house-hold supposedly has his or her own personal and unmediated relationship to markets and products, just as Protestants claim to have an unmedi-ated relationship with God. A quasi-religious theology indeed supports the philosophy of employers, while the success of the employee confirms the faith.32 Popular corporate culture offers the promise of myriad oppor-tunities to compete for that one chance to make dreams come true and concepts like the “American Dream” are turned on their head. In the new interpretation of the Dream, opportunities for fame and fortune appear in get-rich-quick schemes.33 Lotteries and gambling websites allow indi-viduals an “equal chance” with everyone else to strike it rich. The internet trumpets how anyone can become rich working from home or by owning their own business. At the same time, unions are cast as an anachronism and government becomes an inefficient expropriator and a danger to indi-vidual liberty.

In 2008, the virtual vision of independence came crashing down. The boom bust cycles of earlier periods were back.34 Billions of dollars in equity were lost by citizens in the stock market. Millions more lost substantial equity in their homes, and others lost their jobs, using credit cards to try to survive.35 The supposedly unbounded and unmediated relationship with the bank or credit company was revealed to be a cruel joke, as households found the interest rates on their credit lines rising to usurious levels.36 The economic crisis led to a bailout of major financial institutions, while mil-lions of citizens lost their financial security.

The bailout and investor abuses partly stripped away the facade of a system that had always been tilted in favor of the insiders. The integra-tion of the international economy, the creation of new technological tools and products to facilitate instant transactions,37 and the proletaritization

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of nearly all skill levels began progressing at an amazing pace. Almost simultaneously, once proudly independent professionals are increasingly transformed into salaried workers,38 small businesses collapse at an alarm-ing rate, and unemployed individuals become independent contractors. The relocation of capital and production facilities to all parts of the globe increases the pool of low cost high skilled labor dramatically driving down the bargaining power of the broad swath of workers. Oligopoly defines the structure of most major industries in the United States.39 The corporate sec-tor, particularly the financial sector, has engineered, over a sustained period of time, a massive redistribution of wealth upwards,40 and engaged in a capital hoarding campaign, rationalized as a response to uncertainty in the market place, and specifically in the stock market.41 A dramatic disruption of everyday life is underway at remarkable scale and duration, posing the most significant crisis since the Great Depression. Corporate influence is invading—perhaps invited—into more and more spheres of governmental and social life.42 And the centers where work and vocational identities form and develop—schools, colleges, universities, professional schools, and sem-inaries—are threatened with the loss of autonomy if they do not become efficient knowledge factories.43 Thus the “Ownership Society” turns out to be a trap for households, with little individual or collective insurance to cushion the fall.

VI

The question arises in such an environment, to what degree in a democratic society should the autonomy for self-organization of business enterprises and the economic sphere be limited? Arguments against limitations are familiar. The semi-autonomous sphere of the economy allows for creation and experi-mentation with new forms of business enterprises, innovations, products, and services. It can create potentially an unlimited number of new markets driven by producer and consumer imagination and demand. Consumer demand is fostered, nurtured, encouraged, and consummated through new mediums of mass communications, transportation, and marketing. This revolution in mass communications has generated new technologies that allow house-holds, communities, and workers to be connected to events, products, and labor markets around the clock, anywhere in the world.

Yet corporate enterprises are promiscuous. New technologies, advances in engineering, and the skill sets of workers internationally have made it

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possible for enterprises to move in and out of different constellations of economic relationships—workforces, supply chains, investors legal systems, environmental restrictions—and into new ones potentially everywhere.44 The switches occur in time frames that speed up the scale and frequency of disruptions of everyday life for those left behind. Promiscuity is particu-larly endemic in financial markets where time frames for transactions to occur are now measured in nanoseconds. Thus, speculative runs, leading to boom and bust cycles, are happening more frequently. Contagion fostered by interlocking economic and political relationships between countries is now a continuous and unpredictable possibility.

The delegation, in a democratic society, of the means by which wealth is created to a semi-autonomous economic sphere has generated sig-nificant accumulations of wealth and economic growth in the United States. The semi-autonomous economic sphere created a space where self-orga-nization, innovation and competition between different configurations of business enterprises thrived. However, all this comes with a Faustian bargain: In return for this wealth creation, enter-prises are “endowed” with personhood and citi-zenship status. Corporations are granted the same rights and opportunities to influence the spaces of democratic decision making as individual liv-ing citizens, with the singular exception that the business enterprises cannot run for office.45 This semi- autonomy and citizenship status contributes to the redistribution of wealth upwards, primar-ily to executives and owners of corporations. They close off entry or break up oligopolistic markets. The destruction generated in the economic sphere will have other consequences, including creating surplus pools of unneeded workers and employees who have become obsolete in the “new economies.” The sense spreads that one is constantly in a state of insecurity and disruption in everyday life, fearful of becoming dependent on others, and subject to arbitrary decisions.

The fact is that corporations are not individuals. The singularity implied in the definition of corporate citizen or corporate personhood obscures and masks inequalities of power that exist between the living citizen and the corporate citizen. The more a democratic society creates and sustains the

A contemporary

populist movement

will necessarily

have to address

the question of

how the ownership

of productive

property and the

bundle of property

rights associated

with ownership can

be reinvented in

order to stabilize

citizens and their

communities.

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legal fiction of citizenship, bestowing a fictive equality between collectives which are business enterprises and individual citizens, the greater will be the inequalities of power and influence.46 There will continue to be a mas-sive tilt towards those who organize and run corporations. As the econo-mist Robert Lekachman has observed:

The large corporation usually American based and global in scope is the dominant social invention of the Twentieth Century. The corpo-ration occupies a place as important in our time as that of the Holy Roman church in medieval Europe or of the monarch who ruled by reason of divine right during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century legacy of mercantilism.47

VII

A contemporary populist movement will necessarily have to address the question of how the ownership of productive property and the bundle of property rights associated with ownership can be reinvented in order to stabilize citizens and their communities. What kind of new collective insurances can be devised that will protect citizens from the ravages of the market and the forces that work beyond the individual’s control? This new populist movement will need to conduct thousands of citizen education-als across the entire country that revisit and recreate our understandings of the nature of corporations: what their role should be and what role our democracy plays in creating the space and the new legal mechanisms for them to flourish. These educationals need to also focus on the importance of citizens’ having an ownership interest in their work and in the products of their work. They need to discuss whether the right to organize them-selves to negotiate not only with individuals but also with corporate col-lectives should be as protected as the right to assembly. A contemporary populist movement will preach that the work of citizenship is to invent new democratic social mechanisms that expand the ability of citizens to par-ticipate in governing, at all levels of the republic and at the places where they work. A contemporary populist movement could see that the cur-rent two party system is limiting and unimaginative and seek to change it. And finally a contemporary populist movement will recognize that the space and lasting institutions which Hanna Arendt wrote about as neces-sary for the work of citizens in a republic have always existed in tension

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with the social inventions of the economic sphere. Democracy today is the Prometheus bound and tormented by corporate gods, yet it is also the means people need to believe and imagine, and also provides the tools that need to assemble to govern and co-create the republic and society as equals, who democratically control their social inventions. The question remains: can Prometheus be unbound again?

Gerald Taylor is Southeast Regional Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation. Over the past twenty-five years he has given lectures on the the-ory and practice of community organizing and social change at colleges and universities in the United States including, Duke Univesity, The University of Minnesota, Shaw University, Trinity College, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

NoTeS1. Hanna Arendt, On Revolution, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).2. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest 1st ed. (New York:

W. W. Norton & Co., 1987).3. For a significant discussion of the term “productive property” and an explanation

of property and race themes, see Phyliss Craig-Taylor, “To Be Free: Liberty, Property, and Race,” Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, 14 ser. (1998): 45.

4. Craig-Taylor, 45.5. For a helpful exposition see Benjamin Horace Hibbert, A History of Public Land

Policies (University of Wisconsin Press, 1965) and Paul W. Gates, “A History of Public Land Law Development,” Public Land Law Review Commission (1968).

6. For a thorough analysis see Everett Dick, The Lure of the Land (University of Nebraska Press, 1970), Robert Henry, The Railroad Land Grant Legend in American History Texts (The Torch Press, 1945), and Bruce Laurie, Artisans in Workers (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 113–40.

7. Nathan Rosenberg and LE Birzell Jr., How the West Grew Rich (Basic Books, 1986), 196–202.

8. See Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 20–25 and Laurie, 15–46.

9. Robert C. McMath, American Populism: A Social History 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 30.

10. Laurie and Craig-Taylor.11. Craig-Taylor.12. Goodwyn, 55–95; McMath, 83–107.13. See Craig-Taylor again, and Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in

the New South, 1886–1900 (University of Mississippi Press, 2010), 8.14. Craig-Taylor.15. Ali.

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16. See the groundbreaking works by Ali and Gerald Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement: Ballots and Bigotry in the New South (University of Alabama Press, 2005) for a thoughtful and intuitive analysis.

17. Goodwyn, 53–93; McMath, 83–107.18. Goodwyn, 255–86.19. Goodwyn, 83–107.20. Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in Red (University of California

Press, 2010), 36.21. Ali, 150–167. Also, for a “newer” framing of an economic commonwealth

similar in design to that of Black Populism in the New South, see for example W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 150–67, who was influenced by the history of black populism. New organizations came into being that would play pivotal roles in the black freedom struggle including NAACP and the Urban League. Also see Theda Skocpol, A Liazos, and Marshal Gantz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

22. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 73–143.

23. Particularly in medicine and the legal professions through the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.

24. Starr, 73–143.25. Starr, 73–143.26. Starr, 73–143.27. See similar claims in Goodwyn, Ali, Laurie, and McMath.28. Starr, 73–143.29. See the National Survery of Voters conducted by the Woodrow Wilson

International Center in which 5 percent of households who are not presently homeown-ers hope to buy a home in the future, and over 90 percent of those under 45 years old believe they will purchase a home.

30. For a discussion of hyper-individualism see E. J. Dionne Jr, Our Divided Political Heart (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012).

31. For example, the Investment Company Institute and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association reported that 47 percent of US households owned equities, bonds, or both.

32. The growth of the prosperity gospel movement across religious demonstrations believes that one has wealth because one believes the right way and that becoming wealthy is in God’s plan for believers. See for example, Oral Roberts and G. H. Montgomery, God’s Formula for Success and Prosperity (Tulsa: Abundant Life Publication, 1966) and Bruce Wilkinson, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking through to the Blessed Life (Multnomah Books, 2000).

33. Television shows exemplifying this mentality include American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and The Voice, and game shows such as The Price is Right and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The growth of state lotteries is also an important part of this matrix.

34. For a good historical account of events and policies leading up to the crash in 2008 see Kevin Philips, Bad Money: Reckless Finances, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism (Viking Press, 2008). In addition, many books provide an accurate accounting of the 2008 economic crisis. Among them, see Dean Baker, Plunder

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and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (Berrett-Koehler, 2009) for an analysis of the housing bubble and Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: WW Norton and Co., 2010) for a series of insider stories that high-light the degree of complexity in the financial markets that fueled the subprime housing collapse.

35. See Charles R. Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2008) for an exceptional analysis of the financial inventions that were critical in creating the credit bubble in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

36. See for example Elizabeth Warren, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke (Basic Books, 2004). Also see Amy Traub and Catherine Ruetschlin, “The Plastic Safety Net: Findings from the 2012 National Survey on Credit Card Debt of Low-and Middle-Income Households,” www.demos.org (22 May 2012), where one of the significant findings is that 40 percent of households use credit cards for basic living expenses because of lack of funds in checking and savings accounts.

37. Morris.38. William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism

(Touchstone Press, 1997).39. Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economies of

Destruction (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).40. Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012).41. The Wall Street Journal reported that although the estimate of idle cash is less

than previously believed, companies are sitting on 1.74 trillion dollars, over 700 billion more than 10 years ago. Ben Casselman, “Companies Sitting on Much Less Cash Than Before,” Wall Street Journal (7 June 2012).

42. The practice of outsourcing to private companies all manors of services and work formally done by the public sector to private for-profit companies continues to grow in the United States, as well as, the adoption of “market” practices by government agencies. See, for example, a study released by the Accenture Corporation suggesting increasing use of out-sourcing by many nations. See also another report issued by The Project on Government Oversight, which raises the question of how efficient outsourc-ing is for the federal government.

43. Thomas A. Garrett and William Poole, “Stop Paying More for Less: Ways to Boost Productivity in Higher Education,” The Regional Economist www.stlouisfed.org (January 2006). And The Kauffman Foundation’s “College 2.0: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Reforming Higher Education,” www.Kauffman.org (June 2012).

44. See Greider. For a more positive look at “The Third Industrial Revolution,” see Jeremy Riftkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and World (New York: Palgrave and McMillan, 2011).

45. See Charles E. Lindbloom, The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 226–50 and Warren J. Samuels and Authur S. Miller, Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (Greenwood Press, 1987).

46. See both Lindbloom, 226–50 and Stiglitz.47. Robert Lekachman, “A Cure for Corporate Neurosis,” The Saturday Review,

January 21, 1978, 30.

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Prometheus Unbound: Populism, The Property Question and Social Invention

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