The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the simultaneous shrinkage of organized labor. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.

All this is coming to a head in several ways.

Next week, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first U.S.-based union in its nearly 27-year history.

Conditions in Amazon’s warehouses would please Kim Jong un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings, “and they track our every move,” Jennifer Bates, a warehouse worker at Bessemer, told the Senate Budget Committee last week.  

To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a so-called “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.

Why is Amazon abusing its workers?

The company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39 percent of Americans put together.

Amazon is abusing workers because it can.

Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying around $15 an hour and treating their workers like cattle.

The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them, summoning the collective bargaining power of over a third of the entire American workforce.

By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4 percent of America’s private-sector workers are now unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.  

Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.

Today, organized labor’s political clout is miniscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged state “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections, and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.

They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations like itself to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.

Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.

This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1 of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together.

Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.  

The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals, and a renewed commitment to antitrust.

The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor law reforms in over a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises that trade deals will protect the interests of American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.

I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some hundred twenty years ago when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.

Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same.

The parallels are striking. In the last decades of the nineteenth century – the so-called “Gilded Age”— America experienced inequality on a scale it had never before seen, combining wild opulence and searing poverty.

American industry consolidated into a few giant monopolies, or trusts, headed by “robber barons” who wielded enough power to drive out competitors. A few Wall Street titans like J.P. Morgan controlled the nation’s finances.

These men used their huge wealth to rig the system. Their lackeys literally deposited stacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators, prompting the great jurist Louis Brandeis to tell America it a choice: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.“

We face a similar choice today.

Then, America chose democracy. President Theodore Roosevelt, railing against the “malefactors of great wealth,” broke up the trusts. And he pushed Congress to end the most blatant forms of corruption.  

His fifth cousin, FDR, went further – enacting social insurance for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled; a minimum wage and forty-hour workweek; the right to unionize; compensation for workers injured on the job; and strict limits on Wall Street.

In other words, between 1870 and 1900, American capitalism got off track. Between 1901 and 1937 (the effective end of the New Deal), America put capitalism back on track.

We’re now in the Second Gilded Age, and American capitalism is again off track. It takes about three generations for Americans to forget how our system, unattended, goes wrong. And then to right it. 

Inequality is now nearly at the same level it was in the late nineteenth century. Half of all families are poorer today than they were a decade-and-a-half ago, the pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers is in the stratosphere, and child poverty is on the rise.

Meanwhile, American industry is once again consolidating – this time into oligopolies dominated by three or four major players. You can see it in pharmaceuticals, high tech, airlines, food, Internet service, communications, health insurance, and finance.

The biggest Wall Street banks, having brought the nation to the brink of destruction a few years ago, are once again exercising vast economic power. And big money has taken over American politics.  

Will we put capitalism back on track, as we did before?

The vile election of 2016 doesn’t seem to offer much hope. But future historians looking back on the tumult might see the start of another era of fundamental reform.

Today’s uprising against the established order echoes the outrage average Americans felt in the late nineteenth century when they pushed Congress to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act, and when Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan fulminated against big business and finance.

One hundred twenty years later, Bernie Sanders – the unlikeliest of presidential candidates – won 22 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates in the Democratic primaries, and pushed Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to adopt many of his proposals.

At the same time, Donald Trump – a faux populist – has laid bare the deep discontents of America’s white working class, which both parties have long neglected. Not incidentally, Trump has also jeopardized the social fabric of America and nearly destroyed the Republican Party.

Hopefully some of America’s current elite will conclude, as it did at the turn of the last century, that they’d do better with a smaller share of a growing economy fueled by a flourishing middle class, in a society whose members feel the system is basically fair, than in one riven by social and political strife.

History has proven the early generation of reformers correct. While other nations opted for communism or fascism, Americans chose to make capitalism work for the many rather than the few.  

If Donald Trump is elected next week, all bets are off. 

But if Hillary Clinton assumes the presidency, could she become another Teddy or Franklin D. Roosevelt? 

You may think her too much of an establishment figure, too close to the moneyed interests, too cautious. But no one expected dramatic reform when each of the Roosevelts took the reins. They were wealthy patricians, in many respects establishment figures. Yet each rose to the occasion.

Perhaps she will, too. The timing is right, and the need is surely as great as it was over a century ago.

As Mark Twain is reputed to have quipped, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Hillary Clinton won’t be the only winner when Donald Trump and his fellow haters are defeated on Election Day (as looks increasingly likely). Another will be Paul Ryan, who will rule the Republican roost.

Democrats may take back the Senate but they won’t take back the House. Gerrymandering has given House Republicans an impregnable fortress of safe seats.

This means that in order for President Hillary Clinton to get anything done, she’ll have to make deals with Speaker Paul Ryan.

While the Clinton-Ryan years won’t be marked by the same kind of petulant gridlock we’ve witnessed over the last eight, the ascendance of Ryan and Clinton will mark a win for big business and Wall Street over the strongest anti-establishment surge America has witnessed since Great Depression.

Clinton might be able to summon Ryan’s support on a “Buffet rule” for the highest-income taxpayers – an effective minimum tax of 30 percent on top incomes. She might also be able to wangle some additional spending on infrastructure and paid family leave.

But the price Ryan can be expected to exact will be lower corporate tax rates, along with a tax amnesty on corporate profits repatriated to the United States. And to offset the added spending and tax cuts, Ryan will probably want Clinton to trim Social Security (perhaps reviving the terrible idea of a “chained” CPI for determining cost of living increases), and slow the growth of Medicare.

None of this will do much to remedy the central economic challenge of our era – reversing the declining incomes and wealth of most Americans.

Although incomes rose in 2015, the typical household is still worse off today than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. The assets of the typical family today are worth 14 percent less than the assets of the typical family in 1984. And the typical job is less secure than at any time since the Great Depression.

These trends are not sustainable – neither economically nor politically. They generated the fury that’s undergirded Trump’s ugly campaign, and fueled the anger that propelled Bernie Sanders’s insurgency.

They’ve fed a growing sense that the political-economic system is rigged in favor of those at the top.

And it is. Big money has corrupted our democracy, resulting in laws and rules that systematically favor big corporations, Wall Street, and the very rich over everyone else.

Consider, for example, the growing market power of leading pharmaceutical companies, private health insurers, the biggest Wall Street banks, giant cable providers, four major airlines, and five largest high-tech companies. And the decreasing market power of unions. 

The resulting imbalance is transferring money out of the pockets of average Americans directly into the pockets of major shareholders and top executives.

A similar upward distribution is occurring through bankruptcy laws that allow giant corporations and billionaires to avoid paying what they owe, yet don’t allow average people overburdened with mortgage or student debt to renegotiate those obligations.

Mandatory arbitration clauses in contracts with giant corporations are forcing people to give up rights under a wide variety of consumer and employment laws. Meanwhile, workers classified as “independent contractors” are losing whatever rights they once had under the nation’s labor laws.

In all these respects, the American political economy has become radically imbalanced.

The reforms Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan are likely to agree to are miniscule compared with the scale of this imbalance.

Hopefully, the leaders of big business and Wall Street – the true winners of the 2016 election – will realize that although they avoided Trump’s authoritarian populism and Sanders’s “political revolution” this time around, they won’t for much longer.

The forces that gave rise to both will grow unless our political economy is rebalanced to work for everyone and not just for those at the top.

There is precedent. In the first decades of the twentieth century, enlightened business leaders joined with progressive reformers to rebalance American capitalism – thereby rescuing it from the savage inequalities and corruption of the Gilded Age.  

If they understand what happened in the 2016 election, enlightened business leaders will do so once again.

What’s at stake this election year? Let me put as directly as I can.

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 is 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 wangle 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.

When suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony secured women the right to vote, reformers like Jane Addams got laws protecting children and the public’s health, and organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.

America enacted a progressive income tax, limited corporate campaign contributions, ensured the safety and purity of food and drugs, and even invented the public high school.

The progressive era welled up in the last decade of the nineteenth century because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power at the top were undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize.

We may have reached that tipping point again.

Both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party grew out of revulsion at the Wall Street bailout. Consider, more recently, the fight for a higher minimum wage (“Fight for 15”). 

Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign is part of this mobilization. (Donald Trump bastardized version draws on the same anger and frustration but has descended into bigotry and xenophobia.)

Surely 2016 is a critical year. But, as the reformers of the Progressive Era understood more than a century ago, no single president or any other politician can accomplish what’s needed because a system caught in the spiral of wealth and power cannot be reformed from within. It can be changed only by a mass movement of citizens pushing from the outside.

So regardless of who wins the presidency in November and which party dominates the next Congress, it is up to the rest of us to continue to organize and mobilize. Real reform will require many years of hard work from millions of us.

As we learned in the last progressive era, this is the only way the vicious cycle of wealth and power can be reversed.

Exactly a century ago, on February 3, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, authorizing a federal income tax. Congress turned it into a graduated tax, based on “capacity to pay.”

It was among the signal victories of the progressive movement – the first constitutional amendment in 40 years (the first 10 had been included in the Bill of Rights, the 11th and 12th in 1789 and 1804, and three others in consequence of the Civil War), reflecting a great political transformation in America.

The 1880s and 1890s had been the Gilded Age, the time of robber barons, when a small number controlled almost all the nation’s wealth as well as our democracy, when poverty had risen to record levels, and when it looked as though the country was destined to become a moneyed aristocracy.

But almost without warning, progressives reversed the tide. Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901, pledging to break up the giant trusts and end the reign of the “malefactors of great wealth.” Laws were enacted protecting the public from impure foods and drugs, and from corrupt legislators.

By 1909 Democrats and progressive Republicans had swept many state elections, subsequently establishing the 40-hour work week and other reforms that would later be the foundation stones for the New Deal. Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election.

A progressive backlash against concentrated wealth and power occurred a century ago in America. In the 1880s and 1890s such a movement seemed improbable if not impossible. Only idealists and dreamers thought the nation had the political will to reform itself, let alone enact a constitutional amendment of such importance – analogous, today, to an amendment reversing “Citizens United v. FEC” and limiting the flow of big money into politics.

But it did happen. And it will happen again.