We are repeating the Gilded Age, the time of Robber Barons and income inequality without precedent. Today’s Gilded Age redux is giving me reflux as we exceed the excesses of the last quarter of the 19th century.

Then as now, the ultra-rich made and maintained their fortunes by owning transportation networks, ships, trains, canal barges, and, most critically, railroads. They owned and controlled energy from coal mines to electricity.

They also defended and expanded their fiefdoms by owning or influencing communications from telegraphs to telephones to newspapers. Using their influence and control, they could create and exploit xenophobia, racism, patriotism, and religious fervor. They could and did, push us into isolationism or into war, whichever served their immediate interests.

Today a century and a quarter later, little has changed. Our current crop of billionaires also own newspapers and media corporations, e.g., Fox and Sinclair. They own our modern version of the telegraph, i.e. satellite communications systems. They control space exploration companies. They dominate Big Agriculture and even own genetic patents on our food. Then there’s Big Pharma controlled by families and closely held corporations. They create a destructive synergy that identifies problems, spreads fear of them, feeds our insecurities and then pushed drugs to cure the conditions they helped to create.

The Gilded Age burned itself out with the political realization that Free-market Capitalism and Monopolies were contradictions. Monopolies kill the freedom of the market. It took a Republican, and sometimes Bull Moose, Teddy Roosevelt, to begin to protect capitalism from its self-destructive excesses through Antitrust legislation.

The great plutocrats didn’t surrender their perks without resistance but they did adjust. Diamond Jim Brady didn’t starve. The Rockefellers weren’t reduced to begging on the streets. The Morgans and Carnegies somehow survived. And Anderson Cooper, a Vanderbilt legacy, while still very wealthy, doesn’t dominate through his fortune. He barely makes a ripple in the shrinking cable ratings. Still, these legacy descendants of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age are economically comfortable.

Today’s Robber Baron redux may not go quite so easily. A few potential oligarchs have turned towards the light. Bill Gates of Microsoft and Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway have gone from accumulating fortunes to de-acquisition and philanthropy. They are a minority. The Musks and Bezos of the world keep on accumulating wealth and inevitably turn their mania for money into lust for power.

How will we cope with America as an oligarchy with Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Bloomberg, Dell and Ballmer?

Some will do good. Some will not. Most will be seduced by their own power. However, the great question is if we will also get seduced by their power and their means of conveying that power, disguised in anodyne form, to a credulous population? The choice is clear: Surrender to bullies or stand up for our democracy.