Sam Smith
The biggest war America has
fought since World War II began about three decades ago.
It was a silent war without
explosions or gunfire. And it was not about geography, because it was a modern
war. Instead, it was about money and power.
During these three decades
more money and power has been transferred from America’s many to the few at its
top than at any time in this country’s existence - a successful civil war by
America’s elite against its masses.
A few battles the top has
won:
- The wealth of the top 1% of households is up
over 100% since the 1980s.
- The wealth of the poorest 40%
of households down over 60% since the 1980s
- Food stamp use is at record
levels
- The bottom 90% is earning
only $59 more than in 1966
- Wages have fallen to a
record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product.
- In the 1950s, corporations
paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. In 2012 it was a tenth.
- Back in 1950, more than 80
percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent
of all men in the United States have jobs.
And so on.
While it’s true that the
recent economic crisis was not as bad as the Great Depression, it is also true
that the New Deal worked hard to restore a decent economy, while the current
administration has placed little emphasis on helping those at the bottom – or even
in the middle. Instead it has bailed out banks while leaving foreclosed
homeowners largely to suffer on their own. It has done little to create new
jobs and has repeatedly aligned itself with the austerity aristocracy.
One can’t imagine Obama speaking
as FDR once did:
“For nearly four years you
have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up
its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the
old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking,
class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider
the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.
We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government
by organized mob.”
I carry in my pocket a Wiki clip
describing the 1930s Works Progress Administration that illustrates how stunningly different
Roosevelt’s New Deal was from Barack Obama’s My Deal: “The WPA employed 8.5
million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects,
including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500
hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800
playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 miles of highways
and roads.”
Even a Republican president,
Dwight Eisenhower, fostered a federal interstate highway program that would
eventually cover 45,000 miles.
Obama, on the other hand, has
talked of infrastructure but has done little. And while banks have been bailed
out, their officers have escaped needed prosecution even as the Occupiers,
whose first target was Wall Street, have suffered nearly 8,000 arrests.
Meanwhile, some 67,000 bridges need repair.
But then a major goal of the
silent war has been to dismantle the progress that Democrats had brought the
country under the New Deal and the Great Society.
The two Democratic presidents
of this period – Bill Clinton and Obama – have some interesting things in
common
Both were carefully vetted by
the Democratic Leadership Council, a rightwing group dedicated to dismantling
the party’s progressive past. The leading Democratic candidate for 2016,
Hillary Clinton, was also an active member of the DLC, which has been so
successful that it has now retired, leaving its papers with, yes, the Clinton
Foundation.
As a senator, Obama showed up
on the “New Democrat Directory” of the DLC but asked to be removed for it
wasn’t the image he wanted to sell to liberals. Yet less than six months after
being elected president, he told a congressional group that he was a “New
Democrat,” a code phrase for party
dismantlers of the New Deal and Great Society.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
had something else in common. They both had ties to the CIA as young men, a
good place for the establishment to check out up and coming applicants to its
ranks.
Bill Clinton, according to
several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, worked as a CIA
informer while a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of
support, he traveled around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the
ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government was using well
educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to
break student resistance to the war and the draft.
They found the right guy.
When he reached the White House he helped get rid of important social welfare
programs, create job smashing projects like NAFTA, and approved the repeal of
legislation that for decades had prevented banks from acting like casinos. And,
like Obama, he would never meet a civil liberty he truly liked.
As just one example of the
results: before NAFTA, America had a trade surplus with Mexico of $1.6 billion. By 2010, trade deficit with Mexico was $67
billion.
A young Obama made one or two
trips to Pakistan, funded by unknown sources, where he met prominent figures.
His mother worked for a number of large institutions with close ties to the CIA
and he eventually got a job with Business International, a CIA front. Bill Blum
wrote during Obama’s first presidential campaign:
“In his book, not only
doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked
there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these
omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with
the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the
radical left -- including Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to
wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own
association with this world.”
Obama clearly passed his tests
and by early 2004, wrote Chicago Tribune reporter and biographer David Mendell,
“Word of Obama's rising star was now spreading beyond
Illinois, especially through influential Washington political circles like blue
chip law firms, party insiders, lobbying houses. They were all hearing about
this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African American who
unbelievably could win votes across color lines. . . [His handlers and]
influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers all vigorously worked their
D.C. contacts to help Obama make the rounds with the Democrats' set of power
brokers.”
According to Mendell, Obama had
cultivated the support of the privileged few by advocating fiscal restraint and
"calling for pay-as-you-go government" and extoling “the merits of
free trade and charter schools." He "moved beyond being an obscure
good-government reformer to being a candidate more than palatable to the
moneyed and political establishment."
A candidate markedly
different from who many in a few years would think they were voting for.
Clinton and Obama helped to end America’s traditional
two party system. And they helped create a nation that so pessimistic that even
liberals thought a Clinton or Obama was the best they could do.
There were many other silent war
victims, among the saddest being America’s children. Our kids are now being
trained to be cultural robots as education bullies remove curiosity,
imagination, creativity, cooperation, civics and wisdom from their curriculum.
Destroyers of public education like the Gates Foundation and Arnie Duncan want
our children to become mere microchips that absorb and regurgitate data and
values without ever having to think about, or act upon, what they really mean.
Many who didn’t go along were
drugged as the definition of mental disorder expanded to meet the need for
compliance in mind and deed to those in charge
And those who sought comfort
in their own drugs were arrested and thrown into jail at levels far greater
than during alcohol prohibition.
There has also been an
unprecedented attack on over half the Bill of Rights, most recently
demonstrated by the Obama administration’s assault on the right of privacy,
freedom of the press, and protection
from seizures without warrants.
And we have a deteriorating
environment that hardly gets on either the government agenda or on the evening
news of a media so unwilling to challenge the elite that even the White House
Correspondents Association won’t stand up for fellow reporters abused by the
administration.
While it is true that during
this period, the status of women, blacks, and latinos improved relative to that of white
men, there is also overwhelming evidence that, in an absolute sense, everyone’s
rights markedly declined.
The death toll of the silent
war – such as victims from drug prohibition, welfare cutbacks and environmental
indifference - has easily exceeded that of any war since WWII. Our climate has
been extraordinarily and perhaps permanently endangered. Community has been
replaced by Facebook and Iphones and our schools are becoming more like boot
camps. Even our universities – where voices of freedom and sanity once broke
the silence around them – are now quiet and dutiful recipients of government
and corporate grants.
Finally, those responsible
for these changes have no particular loyalty to our country. If you are the CEO
of a multinational corporation your products need not be made here, your
workers hired here, nor your profits deposited here. You no longer need
American workers, American customers, nor
an American commitment. America for our elite is now just another address to
reach those whose minds and actions are far away.
Robert A.G. Monks, a former corporate lawyer,
corporate CEO, founder of companies, and bank chairman told it well in his
book, Citizens Disunited, as Ralph Nader describes:
[Monk] quotes an Apple executive who told The New York Times: "We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries. We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems." Monks responds: "This is what greed looks like in the global epoch of corporatism: plunder the Treasury, to be sure, but then deny all sense of responsibility to your country of domicile, outsource all obligations, and, like maggots, set to work destroying the host from inside by exporting its jobs and depleting its revenue sources."
He then cites Clyde Prestowitz, founder of the Economic Strategy Institute, who wrote that, as a top U.S. government trade negotiator, he went to great lengths to open up the Japanese market for Apple in the early nineteen eighties, adding: "We did all we could and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by U.S. government money."
Monks sums up: "Henry Ford's great success was built in part on his decision to pay his workers a high enough wage so that they could afford the products they were producing. No more. The shrinking middle class, the widening gap between the rich and the poor – these are some of those American ‘problems' that American-born-and-bred corporations like Apple really have no time for."
If you find all this
unbelievable, listen to Warren Buffet who has stated, “Of course there is a
class war, but it's my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we're
winning.” Or as the 19th century journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd put it, “If
our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our
barbarians come from above.”
The barbarians from above
have caused more damage to our country than the terrorists they would have us surrender
our democracy in order to fight. The barbarians from above have killed more
people and caused more loss of life, permanent damage to the environment,
economy and civilized community.
But they had done it quietly,
using lies instead of bombs, hedge funds instead of explosions, and misdirected
budgets instead of random assaults. But it has still been a deadly war.
Whether and how we can end it
remains unclear, but one thing is certain.
We can’t save ourselves
without ending the silence.
