Almost everyone knows the feeling of a Déjà-vu. Sometimes it’s just a trick of memory, when you can even recall the exact moment you thought you had “foreseen.” More often, it’s simply our brain replaying fragments of earlier experiences, half-buried memories suddenly stitched together by a new but similar situation. There are many theories about Déjà-vu, and recently I was hit by more and more of them — they kept piling up. But when I started wondering, I realized they weren’t Déjà-vus at all.

My last “Déjà-vu” was even a double one. A few months back, Europe suddenly reached near-total consensus: massive rearmament, hundreds of billions of euros, with “no alternative.” A flood of money, and nobody asking where it should come from, or daring to say we couldn’t afford it. Sounded familiar. Then I remembered the same mantra during the pandemic: “Whatever the cost.” Of course, that didn’t mean helping ordinary people through the crisis, but showering endless taxpayer money on corporations—even highly profitable ones. And while thinking about that I was hit by another Déjà-vu … and another. The pandemic was not the first time governments produced limitless funds for private firms while pleading poverty when it came to people, health care, or education.

Just a few years before, there was the Euro-crisis: banks had shoveled reckless loans into corrupt southern governments, then demanded repayment. But the money was already gone deep down in the pockets of corrupt politicians and their sponsors. Northern governments stepped in — using taxpayer money, of course — while Greece was forced to slash pensions, health care, and public services to make the bankers whole. And before that, there was another crisis: the global financial crisis — a bonfire of greed, speculation, and miscalculation, and yet governments rushed to bail out the culprits — using again public money. Losses for private gamblers were “unacceptable,” we were told. There Is No Alternative.

Before that, billions were poured into automakers, before that airlines, before that the Asia crisis—and so on and on. This is how capitalism works: rivers of public money for corporations, but when you demand public money for public services, the answer is always “we’d love to, but there’s no money.” And also: „We don’t do socialism“ — „but for private companies and their owners“ but this they never say out loud.

I remembered this article by Charles Moore in the telegraph 14 years ago where he wrote:

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up. The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

Every word was true back then, was true in the last century and is true today. Because we keep „finding out“ about the same problems over and over again but do not act on our findings.

While I was refreshing my memories about this repeating pattern I came across a caricature drawn by John Baer in the 1940s. Almost a hundred years ago they had the exact same issues, the same “solutions” and the same spin—and it hit me:

We are trapped in a time loop.

So regarding government spending and subsidies towards private companies — nothing has changed in almost a century. What if this is not limited to this one problem? What if it was just the tip of the iceberg?

How can it be that our leaders always seem to be on our side when it comes to public spending on things everyone claims to support—universal health care, ending child poverty, building real social systems — but when it comes to doing it, they claim, that we do not have any money. But when private companies demand cash, the supply seems to be endless? Could it be that there is enough money and they are simply lying to us?

So I kept searching and found this poem by Robert Eduard Prutz from 1848, which translates roughly like this:

Beware of liberals
Who only talk, who only brag
Who always pay with words
But are poor in deeds:
Who look here, then there
Turning right, then left
Like a flag in the wind.

Beware of liberals
Those pale, those sallow
Who in newspapers and journals
Indulge in philosophy:
But when they see the beggar’s pain
They pass by unmoved, wise and cold-hearted.

Beware of liberals
Who, at sumptuous feasts
With filled goblets
Call themselves the tower of freedom
And yet, for a title
Become censors or bailiffs
Or even informants.

Nearly 200 years ago, people had the same problems: liberal centrists who talked endlessly, delivered little, and sold out the people to the rich without flinching. Prutz warned us long ago and many before him. We could have known and we were reminded many times by famous people like Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter From Birmingham Jail:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

I kept searching, moving from one grim repetition to the next. I found a study by Italian economists Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti, who compared Florentine taxpayers in 1427 with those in 2011. By tracing surnames, they showed that the richest families in Florence 600 years ago remain the same now.

In school we were taught that the nobility had been abolished, at least in the western world. In reality, only the labels changed: today they’re called millionaires billionaires instead of lords and kings, but that’s the only difference. Yes, a few of them did not inherit their wealth but „earned“ it. At least they claim so when we all know that nobody can do work billions of dollars worth all by himself. Sure, some other things changed. Slavery has been abolished in many places, women’s rights advanced to varying degrees, et cetera — but never nothing was ever carried through to the end. And yes, we claim to have democracy in many countries. We get to vote every few years and choose people who claim to represent us. But between elections we have almost no say and no politician cares about the people in between votes. And apart from that, there is no democracy. Not in our schools, not in the workplaces, or in media. The fundamental principle — that the rich rule — remains unchanged. This is the time loop we are stuck in.

Okay, I do not really believe that we’re trapped in a time loop. And I do not have real Déjà-vus on a daily basis. However, it often feels like Groundhog Day when the same problems, the same words out of our politicians mouths and the same inaction hit the news over and over again. The good news is: there is a solution, or at least a fighting chance.

We keep voting for the same parties, reading the same newspapers — both owned by the rich. Reforms come and go, sometimes helping small corners of the world, but they’re always just bandages, never cures. Because we’ve never touched the underlying problem.

So what is the one thing that has never changed? The ownership structure: a tiny class of the über-rich and the rest left scrambling. This imbalance is the root of all problems. It is the reason we have no real democracy, no independent media, global hunger, a seriously injured environment and everything just for more and more profits, so that 3,000 people can call themselves billionaires. It is both the source of our powerlessness and the one thing that, if changed, could transform the world for good.

All we have to do is what every movie’s underdogs finally do: Stop kneeling to mad kings and rise.