The right-wing faction that hates unions, Social Security and Medicare and loves unregulated capitalism and foreign wars has always been around. FDR had to deal with them. They are not new. If the JP Morgan bankers had succeeded in their attempt to stage a coup and remove F.D.R from office in 1934, the U.S. would certainly have become a fascist nation, modeled on Mussolini's Italy. What is different now is that this tiny minority is being celebrated by CNN , the world's largest media conglomerate, and is wielding power in Congress, thanks to corporate and financial industry bribes aka "campaign contributions" and front groups funded by corporations posing as grass roots movements . Their slogans are first, "Privatize Everything"; that is, make all human endeavors subject to the profit motive - a process well advanced, which has already led to rampant corruption; and second, "De-regulate Everything", another process well-entrenched, as the foxes - former corporate executives - now head most federal regulatory agencies. In a recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, former Congressman Alan Grayson summed it up: "Wall Street is controlling our economic policy; Big Oil is controlling our energy policy; and the military industrial complex is controlling our foreign policy, miring us in these endless wars that have cost us a fortune. People are just sick of it."
Economist Nouriel Roubini recently offered another perspective in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying, " Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself . You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened."
Wealth inequality in the United States has now
surpassed its feudal precedents. Feudal
lords took one third of their serfs' revenue, and in the Florence
of 1427 , the wealthiest 1% held only 25% of the wealth. In the United States of 2011, the top 1% hold
more wealth than the bottom 60% combined, or 40%
of all wealth and 70% of all financial assets. And Chris Hayes of MSNBC reported Sunday
morning that in New York City last year, the top 1% took home 44% of the city's
income. Democracy cannot, does not,
exist in a society with this wealth imbalance. It never has in human history. Serfdom,
it is us.
We let the bogus election of 2004 stand, when exit polls showed that Kerry had won by nearly six percentage points . Electronic voting machines in Ohio and other swing states were reportedly hacked and the vote totals changed electronically by the National Republican Party. In short, Bush never won any national election. Like his father, under whom the Savings and Loan Scandal cost taxpayers 1.4 trillion dollars, W used the presidency to transfer the nation's wealth to himself and his friends via Iraq arms contracts. The name "Bush" seems to be chronically associated with the bankruptcy of the United States treasury and the prodigious enrichment of the Bush family fortune. And look at how well he succeeded, how many billions in earmarks and how much nefarious, corporation-authored legislation passed through that corrupt and probably illegitimate Congress. Billions after billions of taxpayer dollars thrown willy-nilly at the arms trading and favorite son corporations largely owned by Dick Cheney (Halliburton) and Bush's father ( The Carlyle Group and United Technologies), the first and last having seen over 100% increases in their stock prices during the Iraq War.
Next Bush promoted and passed a moratorium on the estate tax, a bill which allowed the billions of dollars amassed from his father's war profiteering to pass on to himself tax-free. Not incidentally, those same rules applied to multi-billionaire hedge fund managers and their progeny. As the bill passed, American charities sounded alarm bells, warning that all charities would suffer enormous losses, and place the whole of society at great risk. Then literally as Bush walked out the front door of the White House, the rich, in the person of Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs, stole the last dime the nation would possess 50 years hence. The bailout rewarded bondholders, like Bush's father, and stole the life savings of middle class taxpayers.
They just stole and stole, all under the cover of making law. I still keep the photo of the Capital building, with the caption "Whorehouse" typed underneath it, taped to my refrigerator. If Republicans are guilty of calculating our demise, then Democrats are at least guilty of extreme cowardice in doing nothing to stop them. With few exceptions, they have been "Accessories Before the Fact" in their refusal to stand up for the welfare of the people and their cowardly acceptance of Wall Street money. Like Obama, they offered us a lot of lip service, and little action. Harry Reid's Senate, in those first two years of the Obama administration, never found a strategy to overcome Mitch McConnell's filibusters of Pelosi's 275 passed House bills, many of which were jobs bills and loans to students and small businesses. And our failure was in not stopping them, not demanding that the rampant, in-your-face corruption of Bush, Cheney and the utterly-for-sale Congress be stopped and prosecuted, not demanding impeachment of the infamous five on the Supreme Court, not challenging the election fraud, not demanding that Congress refuse to fund the Iraq War. We needed to be in the streets then. a decade ago.
What all of this tells us is that the wealthy elite have been consolidating their power for a very long time, and they will stop at nothing to retain that power ; no amount of personal wealth, not billions or even trillions, will ever be enough to make them stop. Moreover it tells us that we have been seriously outgunned for many decades, and, until now, we have barely tried to fight back.
Americans have been passive in this decade, made passive by a period of easy credit meant to create an illusion of prosperity. We were lured by advertising to vacuous goals and values. The easy credit was meant to pacify, while bankers knew that in the end they would own everything the minute they pulled the plug on low-interest loans. Back in the '70's I bought my first car, new, for $1500 in cash I had saved waiting tables. My total college tuition for four years, one of the highest in the nation at the time, was $20,000, a figure that would not finance even one semester at most colleges today. That was around the time that Nixon nullified Bretton Woods and took the world off of the gold standard. And then came the debt machine. No longer could one buy a car in cash; now we had to lease cars, or make monthly car payments for a $20,000 baseline VW bug. Now if one wanted a college degree, it meant running up a $100,000 debt to a bank.
But all of this was by design. The scheme was and is to create a feudal society, where Americans live mired in debt to bankers and learn to expect the dollar- a- day wages common in Asia, while the power brokers live in the obscene luxury of 17th century monarchs. That is why there has never been any government effort to write a sane immigration policy, like those in effect in every other industrialized nation, one that would bring immigrant wages up, rather than pitting them against unemployed citizens. The corporate goal has always been to drive down wages for the benefit of the feudal lords, i.e. corporations, and, finally, to end democracy. Much has been written about the sociopathic tendencies of corporate CEO's. A total absence of conscience is a crucial asset in reaching the power perches of the corporate hierarchy. So it is not surprising that so many multi-national corporations act without a trace of social responsibility - to their workforce, their nation, or the earth.. Corporations over time replaced pensions with 401k plans, and look where that got us. The retirement savings of the working class was run down to pennies in the last stock market crash, and will likely see those levels again, an event which forced millions to delay or cancel retirement plans.
And what stood in the way of the dollar-a-day wage scheme? Those last remaining union jobs that have long come with pensions and benefits. So the attacks have been levied on every profession that provided a living wage: First auto workers, then teachers, nurses, postal workers, state employees - many of those now laid off and made jobless when House Republicans delayed Federal aid to states. These are people who live modest lives, far from the high-risk casino of Wall Street. And these are the people being commanded to repay the casino's losses.
In the corporate arena, "casino capitalism" reveals itself as evermore heartless. Panasonic recently laid off 17,000 workers, Bank of America, 3500; and just as the Caterpillar Corporation reported record profits in 2008, it laid off 20,000 employees worldwide and shut down many local factories in anticipation of slower global growth. Casino capitalism demands that corporations do whatever is necessary to report high profits to shareholders. The lives and careers of the workers never enter into the equation or into board room discussions. ...because the workers do not matter. And what are corporations doing with all of the money they save by firing their workforce? This morning Bloomberg reported that corporate jet sales are expected to double in the United States in 2012.
Former Libertarian presidential candidate, the late Aaron Russo, made a film called America: Freedom to Fascism, in which he relates a terrifying conversation with one of the lesser known Rockefellers, global investor and Council on Foreign Relations member, Nicholas Rockefeller . He recalls that Rockefeller, with a cavalier air, spoke of his ultimate goal, "We are going to chip all of them. Then when they act up or resist, we just turn off the chip and they have no money" . Kind of like cattle. ( I recall that I replayed that segment of Russo's film several times, thinking I must have heard it wrong. When Russo asked him why, given that he had more money than he could possibly need, Rockefeller responded "Why do you care about them? Look after your family").
What he is describing is, needless to say, not a democratic society, but an authoritarian oligarchy, similar to the one described in the brilliant futuristic novel by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale. In subsequent interviews, Russo quotes Rockefeller as telling him in advance about the "event" (the 911 attacks) that would lead to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and create an endless, phony, "war on terror", a war that would keep the American people in a state of perpetual fear and submission. Whether you believe Russo's statements or not, there is no question that the Iraq War gave British Petroleum and Exxon-Mobil control over Iraq's oil fields for the first time; and that the US presence in Afghanistan, aka 'Pipelanistan' is calculated to establish a stable government that will permit U.S. oil and gas companies access to and protection for a longed-for pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Caspian Sea.
To quote Hillary Clinton, "it is a vast right wing conspiracy", a war being waged on multiple fronts with a single aim: To create a mass slave class and retain power for the 400 elite, comprised primarily of bankers and corporate executives. Some protesters in the Occupy movements may not have put the pieces together, but they know instinctively that they have been marginalized. A large contingent of the hapless Tea Party supporters are too misinformed to see that they are being used by corporations to cement their growing power. Were they better informed, they might not utter inanities like "keep your government hands off my Medicare". The deliberate, relentless effort to drive public education into the gutter is intended to create an ignorant, servile mass, incapable of critical thinking, reinforced by corporate-controlled, propaganda news media. The Right has long levied attacks on college professors as spewing "Liberal" (read anti-capitalist) propaganda, with the aim of intimidating university boards of directors into quashing the speech of their faculties, both in and out of the classroom. As totalitarian societies emerge, the first step is to remove the professors.
Can we stop them? Can the newly visible resistance of thousands of Americans finally taking to the streets turn the juggernaut around? Or will corporations continue to dictate to government, mandating that we all be squashed like bugs under some version of martial law? The hundreds of FEMA National Emergency Centers authorized in 2009 by HR645 actually exist, although their purpose is open to question. There is a lot of vague language in national emergency provisions, leading some to believe that FEMA camps could be used for mass incarceration of unruly citizens. What gives me hope is that the nation is so big and mistrust of government so pervasive, that in point of fact mass imprisonment would be hard to implement. But after so many natural disasters and so many bankruptcies, so many foreclosed homes and lost jobs, with so much desperation, I am not sure any but the very young have the wherewithal to fight a potentially authoritarian action. Many Americans are already broken. The diabolical undermining of democracy has been in the works for decades now. It has been a long and patient process; and it is nearing completion. We are there. My favorite protest sign reads, "Protests are nice, but we need a revolution." Have we had enough now? Are we ready to revolt?
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