The brutal truth about who swallowed the American middle class

A half-century ago, America had the largest middle class in the history of the nation and of the world.

Then, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the “free market.”

But as power and wealth have moved to the top in America (and, to a lesser degree, in other “rich” nations, almost everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.

America’s huge middle class has become a small shadow of what it once was. The bottom 90 percent are struggling to make ends meet. The richest 10 percent account for a large and growing portion of all consumption. The top one-tenth of one percent holds an increasing portion of all wealth.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.” It refers to a government of and by a handful of exceedingly rich people who control the major institutions of society and therefore have most power over other people’s lives.

Oligarchs may try to hide their power behind those institutions, or try to justify their power with platitudes about the public good, or try to excuse their power through philanthropy and “corporate social responsibility.” But no one should be fooled. Oligarchs wield power for their own benefit.

Even a system that calls itself a democracy can become an oligarchy if power becomes concentrated in the hands of a corporate and financial elite. Their power and wealth increase over time — as they make laws that favor themselves, manipulate financial markets to their advantage, and create or exploit economic monopolies that put even more wealth into their pockets.

Modern-day Russia is an oligarchy. A handful of billionaires there control most major industries and dominate politics and the economy.

What about the United States?

America has experienced oligarchy three times in its brief history.

The first was at the nation’s start. Many of the men who founded the United States were slaveholding white oligarchs. America didn’t have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farmhands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the population was Black, almost all enslaved.

A century later, a second oligarchy emerged, the robber barons. They were men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output.

They also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of these robber barons’ wealth. And most of their power was eliminated after the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

For the next half-century the gains from growth were more widely shared, and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans.

Although America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, there was still much to do — civil rights and voting rights for Black Americans, wider economic opportunities for them and for women and Latinos, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.

A third American oligarchy emerged starting around 1980. Since then, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from 0.8 percent to 3.7 percent).

The richest 130,000 Americans and their immediate families now own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent — 117 million — combined. The three richest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia.

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.

The average American now has little or no effect on public policy. Giant corporations, their CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have more influence than any comparable group since the robber barons.

The power shift that’s occurred in America since around 1980 is directly related to a tsunami of big money into politics.

In the 2024 election, just 300 billionaires (and their immediate family members) donated more than $3 billion to candidates — almost 20 percent of all contributions to federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.

Billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined. One of them — Elon Musk — devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s reelection. (This doesn’t count money that billionaires contributed through dark money groups that do not have to disclose their donors.)

Five presidential elections ago, adjusting for inflation, the share of billionaire spending on elections was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise. That was before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions.

Corporate lobbying has also soared. The voices of average people have been drowned out.

Meanwhile, and largely because of this vast power shift, taxes on the wealthy and on corporations have been slashed. Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill of July 2025 cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year, per household, and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year.

Meanwhile, safety nets for the poor and middle class have unraveled. About 3 million fewer Americans have access to Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage than they did before the second Trump regime, due to higher premium costs. Approximately 4.5 to 5 million fewer Americans receive food stamps. Public investments in education and infrastructure have also waned.

The “free market” has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts, and corporate welfare.

The American oligarchy is back, with a vengeance.

Not all wealthy people are culpable, of course. I am not advocating class warfare, although America’s latest oligarchy has waged it against everyone else.

The abuse has occurred at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain power and then utilize that power to accumulate more wealth. This is how oligarchy destroys democracy.

As oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates and deploy platoons of lobbyists and public relations flaks, they buy off democracy. Oligarchs know that politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them.

Which brings me back to Jamie Dimon — chair and CEO of JPMorganChase (the largest and most profitable bank in the United States) and the most influential CEO in America.

If you want to understand the American oligarchy, you need to understand Dimon.

As a lifelong Democrat, Dimon is a friend of Bill Clinton. He supported Obama in 2008 and mentored several of the people who became high officials in the Obama White House. At Obama’s inauguration in 2008, Dimon said to the incoming president, “Tell me what you need. I’ll send people down here. I’ll do anything.” In 2009, The New York Times called Dimon “Obama’s favorite banker.”

Dimon supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But he can be a switch hitter. Speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab in Davos, Switzerland, at the start of 2024, Dimon heaped praise on Trump. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump was “kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked.”

Hello? Trump has been dead wrong on immigration, the economy, and taxes. Why did Jamie Dimon — the most influential CEO in America — spout this nonsense in favor of Trump? Probably because he thought Trump had a good chance of becoming president again, and Dimon wanted to be in his good graces.

At a time in American history when the most powerful business leaders in America should be standing up loudly and clearly for the rule of law, for democracy, for decency, and against Trump, Dimon has led the charge in the opposite direction.

Dimon knows better. Over the years, he has frankly acknowledged the dysfunctions of the American system and urged that they be addressed.

In his 2017 letter to JPMorgan’s shareholders he warned, “We should be ringing the national alarm bell that inner city schools are failing our children.” In 2018 he told them that “middle class incomes have been stagnant for years. Income inequality has gotten worse” and cautioned that “no one can claim that the promise of equal opportunity is being offered to all Americans.” In his 2019 letter he noted that “a big chunk of [Americans] have been left behind.”

More recently, he told the Economic Club of Chicago that racial discrimination isn’t adequately understood by white people. “If you’re white, paint yourself black and walk down the street one day, and you’ll probably have a little more empathy for how some of these folks get treated,” and he called for making “a special effort because this is a special problem.”

Yet Dimon is full of contradictions. Let me list them, because Dimon represents the most responsible of the leaders of American business, and his contradictions suffuse corporate America (and are emblematic of so-called “corporate Democrats”).

1. Although he publicly worries about the plight of America’s poor, Dimon has never mentioned America’s growing concentration of wealth and power and the tight connection between the two.

He has never talked about the role of big money in politics. He has never advocated campaign finance reform. He doesn’t mention how the prospect of lucrative jobs on Wall Street upon retirement tempts some public officials to pull their punches.

To the contrary, Dimon lobbied Congress intensively for Trump’s 2017 and 2025 tax cuts. Overall, the tax cuts have rewarded the already wealthy, enriched big corporations, and exploded the federal debt while delivering no measurable benefits to America’s working class or poor; almost nothing trickled down.

Dimon is correct that many Americans have been left behind, but he has failed to address the role he and his bank have played in leaving them. For example, JPMorgan paid $13 billion to settle Justice Department claims that it defrauded borrowers and investors in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis when he was at the helm. Among its victims were many left-behind Americans.

2. Dimon has spoken about the devastating effects of climate change, including its effects on left-behind Americans who can’t afford homes able to withstand storms and floods and have no insurance against climate catastrophe.

Yet Dimon’s bank is the world’s leading financier of fossil fuels, according to the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report. This year alone, JPMorganChase pushed $58 billion toward fossil fuels, up 13 percent from 2024. A report, “Banking on Climate Change,” issued by a coalition of six major environmental groups, named Dimon the “world’s worst banker of climate change.” The likely consequence: More Americans left behind.

3. Dimon decries racial discrimination and points to the money JPMorgan is investing in poor cities.

Yet his bank has prevented Black people from getting loans. In January 2017 JPMorgan agreed to pay $55 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority borrowers by allowing its mortgage brokers to charge them higher interest on home loans than it charged white borrowers with the same credit profile, causing the Black borrowers to pay tens of millions of dollars in additional mortgage costs. The result: More Americans left behind.

4. After the August 2019 mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Dimon wrote a well-publicized email to his employees calling on them to “recommit ourselves to work for a more equitable, just and safe society.”

Yet Dimon’s bank is the largest source in the United States of financial services to gun makers and gun retailers, and of loans to gun buyers. If Dimon were serious about controlling the use of guns, he could stop this financing and urge other banks to do the same. He could have his banking and credit card systems track gun sales. He could use his formidable lobbying prowess to enact laws requiring that financial institutions create a world-class system for tracking gun sales with built-in safeguards.

But he has not. The result: more Americans killed, injured, and left behind.

5. Dimon has long expressed concern about gender discrimination and women’s rights.

Yet JPMorganChase maintained a long and close financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, processing $1.1 billion in more than 4,700 transactions for him across the 15 years spanning 1998 to 2013, including at least seven years after he pled guilty for solicitation of prostitution.

In a 2011 email, the bank’s general counsel, Steve Cutler, warned that Epstein “is not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client.” Yet the bank allowed Epstein to make large, recurring cash withdrawals totaling millions of dollars. Bank accounts managed by JPMorgan were used by Epstein to facilitate financial transfers and payments to victims of his trafficking ring.

The bank later paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits accusing it of enabling his sex-trafficking operation.

6. Dimon expresses concern about workers who don’t earn enough to live on.

Yet JPMorgan pays its bank tellers peanuts. In April 2019, at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, Congresswoman Katie Porter noted that the starting salary for a JPMorgan bank teller in her district in Irvine, California, was $24,000, which left the teller $567 a month short of what she needed to live on. “How should she manage this budget shortfall while she’s working full-time at your bank?” Porter asked Dimon.

“I don’t know, I’d have to think about that,” Dimon said.

“Would you recommend that she take out a JPMorganChase credit card and run a deficit?” Porter continued.

“I don’t know, I’d have to think about it,” Dimon repeated.

“Would you recommend that she overdraft at your bank and be charged overdraft fees?” Porter asked.

“I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”

“Mr. Dimon, you know how to spend $31 million in salary, and you can’t figure out how to make up a $561 shortfall?”

After Bank of America agreed to increase its minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2021, Dimon was asked if JPMorgan would match it. “It’s not an arms race,” he said.

I’ve focused on Jamie Dimon because he’s the Democrats’ favorite CEO. He’s thought to be liberal on social issues, moderate on the economy. His views are trusted by the establishment. He is the establishment.

But Dimon is awash in contradictions. He says he’s a patriot before he’s CEO, but in all the ways I’ve noted, he behaves as if his first responsibility is to maximize JPMorgan’s profits.

The underlying issue here isn’t hypocrisy. The world is filled with people who say one thing and do another. And let’s be clear: JPMorgan — its directors and shareholders — expect Dimon’s first priority to be JPMorgan’s profitability. That’s his job, and he’s paid handsomely for it.

The underlying problem is power and deception. Dimon has enormous public and political influence. But despite his rhetoric and the occasional trappings of social responsibility, he is using his public influence for private purposes: to make more money for JPMorgan.

When he takes public stands on issues, he clothes himself in the garb of the public interest. He appears to be a public leader whose primary interest is the good of the nation when he announces his support for Trump’s tax cuts, publicly opposes a wealth tax, proffers his alleged economic expertise on CNBC and other media outlets, urges members of Congress to loosen bank regulations, or warns Democrats against nominating someone other than a political moderate.

But his job is to do whatever he can to boost the profits of JPMorgan, even if and when that goal conflicts with the public interest. And one of the ways he achieves that goal is to exercise significant influence over government.

So how can the public, the media, and members of Congress ever trust his — or any oligarch’s — advice on the economy, taxes, financial regulation, the environment, widening inequality, and all else? Why should we think that he seeks any goal other than making more money for himself and his bank?

We cannot, and should not.

Dimon and his fellow oligarchs — Elon Musk and his billionaire bros; Brad Carp and many of America’s elite corporate lawyers; Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Ellisons — have kissed Trump’s assets to obtain corporate welfare, giant tax cuts, tariff exemptions, antitrust acquiescence, and war contracts, and to avoid his wrath. They’ve given Trump billions for his inauguration, his ballroom, his 250th birthday, his family businesses, and his superPAC.

All have sold their integrity in exchange for large profits. They’ve created media empires that won’t criticize Trump, financial empires that feed Trump’s crypto, energy empires that feed off Trump’s war, and legal empires that allow Trump to ride roughshod over the rule of law.

All have abdicated public responsibility to maintain the health of our political-economic system at a time when it is succumbing to authoritarianism.

They have used their power to siphon off the gains of the economy to give themselves unprecedented wealth — which has bought them even more power. They have justified their wealth and power as being in the interest of the public, but the public has been shafted.

They’ve changed the rules of American capitalism to favor themselves and harm most other people. They’ve eroded trust in the system. They’ve undermined democracy.

As long as the oligarchy is in control of America, there will be no meaningful response to the failure of most people’s paychecks to rise, nor to climate change, nor to the emerging dangers of Artificial Intelligence, nor racism, nor the soaring costs of health insurance, college, childcare, and housing.

These would require resources from the oligarchs or their corporations, which they don’t want to provide. As long as they control the purse strings, the oligarchs are unwilling to bear tax increases. They want their taxes to continue to drop.

As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will continue to grow larger, raise prices for consumers, and become more politically powerful.

As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will grow.

As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no limits to CEO pay, and Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will rake in billions more.

As long as the oligarchy is in control, government will dole out even more subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees to big corporations, and it will continue to eliminate protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.

The propagandists and demagogues behind the oligarchy (Donald Trump included) are pouring salt into some of the nation’s oldest wounds. They’re stoking racial resentments, describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists.

This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics.

The only way to disempower the oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and take power back.

This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and fighting against concentrated wealth, power, and privilege.

We must get big money out of politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression. And strengthen the countervailing powers of labor unions, employee-owned corporations, worker cooperatives, state and local banks, and grass-roots politics.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.