This Land Was Made For Me and Me

These days, it's all about the money

[Before I start the essay, I thought I’d give you an update on my documentary feature film, How to Save Democracy, that I spent most of 2024 making.

The big news is that’s now done! I will be posting the trailer for the film soon, so stay tuned.]

Ok, now on with the essay:

In 1940, legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote a song that has become one of the most famous folk songs in the history of the U.S., This Land is Your Land.

It has been ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as number 229 on their list of the top 500 songs of all time.

This Land is Your Land is a song about the grandeur of the U.S., and how the promise of America is that it’s a land and society for everyone, regardless of how much money you have. From California to the New York island; from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters; and the sparkling sands of its diamond deserts—all of it was freely available to all.

The first three verses are the ones commonly sung, but in the fourth verse, Woody spelled out his true feelings:

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.”

Woody believed that the ideal land was one in which people weren’t walled off from going anywhere, and nothing could hold anyone back from bathing in the beauty of the land.

Woody’s feelings that he expressed in the song have its roots in the idea of the common good and the Commons, that a society should always make sure there are places people can go that are freely available to everyone, either for free or for a small fee.

The idea of the Commons is that there are cultural and natural resources that should be available to everyone, including air, water, and a habitable earth, and that these are managed for individual and community benefit.

The idea of the Commons dates back to the Roman Empire of the fourth century AD, with what was known as the Public Trust Doctrine. That doctrine stated that government is a trustee over essential natural resources, and the citizens, especially future generations, are the beneficiaries.

The Commons is the key to creating an open society; an open society is the dream and promise of anyone who envisions a more egalitarian and fair society.

The U.S. has seen glimmers of this realization, occurring when there was strong social cohesion, which allowed people to come together for the common good: During the Progressive Era, when the citizenry cohered to turn back the inequities of the Gilded Age; and during the 1930s and 1940s, when the New Deal, led by President Franklin Roosevelt and his administration, forged policies that turned back the wealth inequities that created the Great Depression; FDR’s pact with the citizenry was to create a society that worked for all, not just the wealthy.

So popular was FDR’s approach that in 1936, when he was up for reelection, he won in a landslide, despite the fact that banking and business interests, in cahoots with the majority of newspapers around the country, were overwhelmingly against him.

They branded FDR a communist and socialist (and to score a trifecta, a fascist), but the great majority of Americans didn’t take the bait and put their faith in Roosevelt, who was seen as a “man of the people,” because his priorities aligned with the needs of average Americans.

Social cohesion was also what enabled the landmark Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, when African-American rights were cemented and segregation and Jim Crow laws finally came to an end, all within the dream of “The Great Society,” as President Lyndon B. Johnson called it.

The main goal of the Great Society was the total elimination of poverty and racial injustice; besides the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also addressed were education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation, programs that in scope and sweep resembled FDR’s New Deal.

The sense of social cohesion was so strong that even after Johnson left office, both Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford expanded the Great Society’s programs.

What happened to this social cohesion? It all began to disintegrate in the late 1970s, with the dawn of the neoliberal age. With it, the pendulum swung back and focused on the rights of the individual to prosper on their own terms, and the rights of corporations to make obscene profits.

During this era, something got lost: the soul of America. A society that had been orienting towards basic human decency now turned on its heels and celebrated basic corporate decency: What was most important were profits, at the cost of human welfare. The lack of social cohesion started to bleed the country dry, causing the social fabric to unravel: the common good was seen as a relic from a bygone era, the pathway to socialism. If you wanted to make it, you had to go-it-alone through rugged individualism in a dog-eat-dog world.

A recent test of the common good versus the profit motive was in 1993 when the internet burst on the scene.

Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist best known as the creator of the World Wide Web. His creation has made quite a number of people filthy rich, yet when Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web, he saw it as a common good, as part of the Commons.

If Berners-Lee had wanted to, he could be richer than all the billionaires in the world combined; he could have taken ownership of the internet and made every person on the planet pay him a fee for using it.

But he had other ideas. As a colleague of his said, “He didn’t try to cash in and make millions. He took a different path.” Berners-Lee said he thought about trying to monetize his creation and received numerous offers from several major software companies to do so, but ultimately decided against it. “The essence of the Web is that it’s a universe of information,” he has said. “And it wouldn’t be universal if it was tied, in any way, to one company.”

In other words, Berners-Lee preferred to give something to humanity, without the expectation of how he could enrich himself.

If only the billionaires of today, most of whom have made their fortunes thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, thought like him. If any of these billionaires had one iota of Tim Berners-Lee’s altruism and sense of gifting, our world would be a far different place.

This takes us into an understanding of what exactly is success.

Is success making untold globs of money? In that case, Tim Berners-Lee may be the most unsuccessful human in the history of planet earth.

But instead, if we were to look at success as giving your gift to the world, regardless of remuneration and regardless of what that gift is, then that’s a far different way of defining success. If success was tied to traits such as integrity, authenticity, self-expression, the common good, purpose and meaning, then success would be at odds with the way it is seen.

By this new interpretation, success is the hallmark of an open society, where people give for the sake of giving and furthering humanity. If this was the case, people who’ve made a fortune by creating things that are harmful, whether to people, nature, or the environment, would be the least successful people in the world. They would be the pariahs of society.

Instead, we are a society that focuses on money and sees billionaires as the pinnacle of success. Granted, money is an important commodity—without it you can’t pay your bills. But when is enough enough?

Research has shown that peak happiness occurs when a person, or household, is making about $75,000 per year. After that amount, personal happiness doesn’t increase; furthermore, a person can be happy with an income far below that amount.

Unfortunately, many people keep chasing more and more, thinking they’ll be happy if they can just have this amount of money or these amount of things.

Our society portrays the very wealthy as the ultimate success story; this modeling of the wealthy as the exemplars of society causes some to be insatiable in their quest for the bauble and lifestyle.

There is an obscene level of wealth inequality in the U.S. right now, one that is championed by the new/old president, Donald Trump. But this isn’t the first rodeo with wealth inequality.

We currently live in a second Gilded Age in terms of wealth inequality, and the power that has accrued to the small sliver of the wealthy elite has allowed them to dictate public policy—this is what ushered in the neoliberal age, an era that has wrought extreme havoc, by virtue of the elite gaming the system.

This new Gilded Age is a monumental threat to democracy, and the biggest threat to the ability for everyone to experience a land that was made for you and me.

One of the prime hallmarks of the neoliberal era has been the slashing of tax rates. In the U.S. from 1932 to 1980, the top marginal income tax rate averaged 82 percent, with highs of over 90 percent from 1951 to 1963 and lows of 63 percent from 1932 to 1935. In the years since 1980, the highest tax rate has been 39.6 percent from 2013 to 2017, and the lowest rate was 28 percent, from 1988 to 1990.

High tax rates like these, payable only by people with income in the millions and billions of dollars, was a feature that created a much more equitable society, essentially imposing a legal maximum income. It allowed everyone to thrive and have the opportunity to be more socially mobile.

But with the shredding of the top levels of taxation, the social contract has also been shredded; now the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us has caused what is called “oligarchic drift,” a movement that has empowered a plutocracy, a rule by the wealthy, which is the defining principle of our time. As we have seen, this leads to major social and political problems.

We don’t need billionaires. Their fortunes are gained by ruthless business practices or inheritance, and they game the system to make sure their wealth stays secure and can be passed down to further generations with as little tax penalty as possible.

Some of the ruthless will assuage their guilt by philanthropic giving—that’s why Andrew Carnegie funded public libraries all across the U.S., David Koch funded the arts in New York City, and the Oxycontin billionaire Sacklers funded museums and universities.

Philanthropy isn’t the answer to recycling the money of the uber-wealthy: It’s a return to a higher tax rate, as the U.S. had in the years 1932 to 1980. A number of politicians believe this is necessary, as do economists—the French economist Thomas Piketty has advocated for a global wealth tax. Even some billionaires, including George Soros and Warren Buffet, are on board with this.

Buffet penned an op-ed in the New York Times called “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” in which he called for a higher tax rate for everyone making more than $1 million, and an even more stringent tax on those making $10 million or more.

The main goal in increasing taxes on the wealthy isn’t just to raise revenue to pay for social programs; that’s not the only reason higher top marginal income tax rates are necessary. It’s also about regulating inequality and safeguarding democracy against oligarchy. All societies that have successfully tamed inequality have done so mostly by having a fair progressive taxation.

An unfair taxation system leads to an extreme concentration of wealth, which leads to an extreme concentration of economic and political power. When everyone pays their fair share, a society is built in which the social cohesion is strong and every person has a sense of working together for the common good.

On January 20, 1961, when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent and the common good was still seen as a virtue, President John F. Kennedy spoke these immortal words at his inauguration, words that captured the essence of where the zeitgeist of the nation was back then: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

At another point in his speech, Kennedy said, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” The call in Kennedy’s speech for people to socially cohere and act in the greatest good wasn’t a scolding—these characteristics were innate in America’s DNA.

This is far from the case now. It’s an obscenity that in the richest country in the world, people work multiple jobs and still can’t pay their bills and do things such as selling racy pictures of themselves on websites like OnlyFans to makes ends meet.

When we move towards a more equitable tax rate, when we curb the means to amass large fortunes, when we create a more fair-minded economic system in which obscene wealth disparities don’t exist, we create the capability for this land being made for you and me.

America has always had a dichotomy, of the promise and the reality. It is a land that promises that we all have the opportunity to achieve whatever it is we want and that all opportunities are open to everyone, yet the reality is that so much of that opportunity is walled off to most people.

It’s time we realize Woody Guthrie’s vision and create a land that was made for you and me.