Mr. Street delivered these remarks at Black Agenda Report’s “Black Politics at the Tail End of Obama” session at the Left Forum, in New York City, June 9, 2013. Orginally published at Black Agenda Report.

The wonderful radical commentator John Pilger said something important about the dawning age of Obama in July 2009.  “The clever young man who recently made it to the White House,” Pilger told a group of socialists in San Francisco four years ago, “is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However,” Pilger noted, “this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters…above all,” Pilger observed, “is the class one serves [emphasis added].”

 I want to return to Pilger’s formulation at the end of my comments because I believe the thinking behind it is critical to the re-awakening of independent black and independent radical politics in America today – a re-awakening that must occur, I might add, if the species is going to have any chance of a decent and democratic future.

Lately I’ve been referring to the president as “Under the Bus Obama.” The list of those Obama has thrown under the runaway buses of neoliberal capitalism, military empire, and white supremacy is daunting. His resume of betrayal includes his maternal grandmother, his preacher, the labor movement (betrayed and abandoned on global trade, labor law reform, the Wisconsin rebellion, the wage- and job-slashing terms of the much-ballyhooed auto bailout and more); environmentalists (abandoned and betrayed on offshore drilling, hydraulic fracturing, global trade, global carbon emission reduction-efforts, nuclear power, clean coal and more), senior citizens (betrayed by the president’s ongoing effort to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits), immigrants (betrayed by a president who has actually increased the number of deportations) civil libertarians (abandoned and betrayed on Guantanamo, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, secret kills lists, whistleblower protection, domestic drones, the infiltration of protest organizations, and more), the mainstream press (recently betrayed by the president’s arch-authoritarian seizure of Associate Press phone records), nuclear disarmament advocates (recently betrayed by Obama’s $547 million request for the B61 nuclear gravity bomb in Europe), and the antiwar community (betrayed by Obama’s sick global drone war, the undeclared war on Libya, the escalating U.S. invasion of Africa, U.S. saber-rattling in relation to Iran, Syria, and East Asia and much more).  Last but not least and of special interest to this panel, we have Black America, betrayed by a first technically black president who has said and done less about racial inequality than any American chief executive in recent memory.

Last October in the New York Times, the Columbia University political scientist Frederick C. Harris offered some interesting reflections on the last and all too rarely noted betrayal. “Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017,” Harris noted, “the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality…. Mr. Obama,” Harris continued, “has had little to say on concerns specific to blacks. His State of the Union address in 2011 was the first by any president since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor… [and] Mr. Obama, in his first two years in office, talked about race less than any Democratic president had since 1961. From racial profiling to mass incarceration to affirmative action, his comments have been sparse and halting” (Frederick C. Harris, “The Price of a Black President,” New York Times, October 27, 2012).

Meanwhile, as Obama has less to say about race than any American president since Eisenhower, the crisis of black America deepens. Fully 28 percent of African Americans, and 37 percent of black children, are officially poor, compared to 10 percent of whites and 13 percent of white children.  Thirteen percent of blacks are officially unemployed, compared to 7 percent of whites. More than 900,000 black men are in prison and an astonishing 1 in 3 black adult males is marked for life with the crippling, many-sided stigma of a felony record. Blacks have suffered a far bigger fall in income since 2007 than any other racial group. Their net worth, disproportionately concentrated in housing, has bottomed out at its lowest level in decades.  Blacks today account for more than 4 in every 10 new HIV infections. I could go.  Flying out here, by the way, I saw the following article cited in Henry Giroux’s latest book: Michelle Alexander, “The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare” (TomDispatch, March 25, 2012).  

During all of this, the black bourgeois so-called leadership class has been depressingly silent both on the depth and degree of the black crisis and on Obama’s refusal to meaningfully address that crisis. It’s not just that the president is a Democrat. The black political class offered far more criticism of President Bill Clinton’s silence on race than it has of Obama’ silence on race because, despite what Chris Rock had to say, president Clinton was white and because Obama for all his Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner post-racial white-friendliness is technically black. The black political class has accepted the president’s silence on race, Harris noted last October, as “the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.”

Now, I guess professor Harris has a book out on that price and the racial politics of the Obama era and I ought to read it but I want to make three mostly friendly criticisms of his New York Times piece I quoted from above. My first criticism is that Obama, like Clinton, has been worse then merely silent on the question of racial oppression. As I documented in my 2010 book The Empire’s New Clothes, the president has been openly hostile to the notion that he or anyone else in government ought to pay special attention to blacks’ needs. This is consistent with candidate Obama’s instantly and widely white-heralded Philadelphia Race Speech, which was dedicated to the proposition that Jeremiah Wright’s anger at American racial oppression was no longer appropriate in the contemporary supposedly post-racist and color-blind United States. It is consistent also with candidate Obama’s ridiculous claim that black America ’s post-Civil Rights “Joshua Generation” had comes 90 percent of the way to full equality.

 Just three weeks ago, Obama gave a commencement address at historically black Morehouse College where he told young black men that “there’s no longer any room for excuses” and that “Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination” and that, quote, “whatever you’ve gone through pales in comparison the hardships previous generations endured…and overcame.” He said all this after citing his own ascendancy to the presidency as an example that “barriers have come tumbling down” and that “new doors of opportunity have swung open.” Now can you imagine the president saying the same thing to the graduates of an all-female college or to the graduates of a Latino/a high school?

 The second criticism really isn’t fair because Harris didn’t purport to write about any other than racial politics.  It is simply that Obama’s racial identity – and I would add his technically Muslim ethno-cultural nomenclature – has been relevant not merely to the silencing of black elite dissent and to dissent regarding racism.  It has been relevant also to the silencing of white and Latino and Asian liberal and progressive and left dissent regarding the whole panoply of interrelated oppression structures that exist today, including class, capitalism, nationality, militarism, empire, eco-cide, patriarchy, and more.

 The third criticism is that I saw no recognition in Harris’s essay of how a good cadre of us on the left raised early and strident alarms about precisely the outcome that he describes. We predicted it and warned against it and much more regarding the Obama phenomenon and presidency in the pages of Black Agenda Report and elsewhere.  My own warnings – which had as much to do with class and empire as race – started two days after Obama’s Keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. They were developed in great detail in my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, most of which was written in 2007, and which includes a chapter titled “How Black is Obama? Color, Class, Generation and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era.”  I even spoke briefly to a CNN reporter about how Obama would betray black Americans and be a negative for the struggle against racism in the summer of 2008. And it wasn’t just me.  A slew of left writers and activists including Glen, Bruce, Michael Hureaux, Pilger, Juan Santos, Alexander Cockburn, Pam Martens, Marc Lamont Hill, and others had similar and related things to say in genuinely radical venues like BAR and ZNet and CounterPunch.  

 What did we know – those of who warned early on from the actual Left about the racially and more broadly reactionary and conservative nature of a likely Obama presidency?  We understood very well what Pilger said in the quote I gave at the beginning.  We knew what W.E.B. DuBois in his Marxist phase and what the old American Communist Party, including Obama’s adolescent mentor Frank Davis, knew about race, which is that while it has an oppressive life of its own, it cannot be fully or properly understood outside the critical contexts of class and empire.  We knew that the predominantly white governing class and the imperial establishment play clever Machiavellian games with race and gender and ethnicity and religion and sexual orientation, using these and other aspects of social identity as seductive propaganda tools to bamboozle millions into seeing democratic transformation when the underlying reality is the deepening grip of the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire.

We knew what Martin Luther King knew when he rejected efforts to enlist for a presidential run in 1968. “The black revolution,” Dr. King wrote that critical year, is “exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that the radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” The changes we needed to avert catastrophe and build a human civilization, King felt, could not be limited to the periodic re-shuffling of the names and faces and parties in nominal power. It had to go deeper than replacing one brand or shape or color of corporate- and military-captive office-holders with another such brand once every two, four or eight years. 

We knew that, as Howard Zinn said, “the really critical thing isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories.  Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.” It’s not about running for president.

If we’re going to get a radical politics, including a radical black politics, back in this country, we have to drop out of major party electoral-ism and bourgeois identity politics once and for all. We have to get back to supposedly old-fashioned Marxist and black-nationalist understandings of how race, racial identity and sham electoral democracy function together within the overall and interrelated frameworks of capitalism and imperialism.

So, you know, liberals ask me, “gee whiz golly shucks Mr. Street , but isn’t there anything good about the Obama experience and presidency from a racial justice perspective?” And I will report that I simply cannot listen to all the “black role model” talk any more after everything this man has done in office.  At this point, I’m not sure I would rather have Black American youth dreaming of being a Jordan or a JayZee or a Beyonce than of being an Obama or a Colin Powell or a Condi Rice or a Susan Rice or a Cory Booker T. If there’s anything good about the Obama experience and era, I think it is that professor Obama has given billions of ordinary people at home and abroad an advanced seminar on who really runs this vicious capitalist nation state beneath and beyond its quadrennial major party big money candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas.  He has given us an extreme tutorial on the idiotic futility of seeking progressive change through the bourgeois ballot box and bourgeois identity politics. He has been a perfect embodiment of how the ruling class can flip the old racial divide-and-rule over in a devious way to put false rebels’ clothes on the persistent, predominantly white plutocracy and its bloody empire. The lesson of Obama…it’s the lessons that Occupy acted upon before it got shut down to make way for the year long election spectacle – the lesson once again that its not about who’s sitting in the White House, it’s about who’s sitting in the streets, who’s occupying the shop-floors, who’s occupying the public square, who’s occupying the schools and the media and the legislative halls from the bottom up.

So, you know, let the president dream his dreams of Mount Rushmore. Let him have his global ex-president foundation and his untold millions in corporate speaking fees and his Secrete Service detachments. Let him send Sasha and Malia to the Deerfield Academy and Harvard or Oxford and let him drone on about how that proves that equal opportunity has come to America for all who refuse to “make excuses.” I know Obama still has business to finish up for the ruling class, like cutting back Social Security and Medicare, final Keystone Pipeline approval, sneaking through the Trans Pacific Partnership and positioning the Pentagon to more effectively confront China. Yes, we have to resist him and the ruling class he supports right now, everyday, Still, we can already feel the president starting to slip under the bus of history. That’s a good thing.  I don’t think either Hillary Clinton or Marc Rubio can give this vicious sociopathic racist empire a deadly re-branding to anything like the same degree as what Obama did.

 In the meantime, those of us on the real left have got bigger and better things to worry about than the life and times of Booker T. Obama.  We have a bigger timeline than the two-and four-year election cycles of American politics, not to mention the quarterly earnings statements of capital, the real executive authority beneath and beyond the comings and goings of politicians. We are in pursuit of what Dr, King rightly called the real issue to be faced beyond superficial matters – the radical reconstruction of society itself. Thank you very much.

Paul Street’s books include Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post Civil Rights Era (2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010), and They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (Paradigm, January 2014).

Paul Street will speak on three different panels* at The Left Forum at Pace University in New York City’s lower Manhattan  over the course of the weekend of June 8-9, 2013. For Directions to Left Forum see http://www.leftforum.org/directions 

*The Green-Red New Deal: Capitalism, Climate Catastrophe, and the Alternative

 *The Marginalized Left: Lessons from Past and Recent Histories 

Black Politics at the Tail End of Obama – and Beyond

First published on ZNet, May 14, 2013. By now, perhaps, you have picked up a media report claiming a recent and almost miraculous comeback for United States manufacturing – one that is, to quote a recent Time magazine cover story, “defying the narrative of the nation’s supposedly inevitable manufacturing decline.” 

“Made in the USA” 

There is evidence that factory employment is picking up in “post-industrial” America. The county has grown half a million manufacturing positions in the last three years, a shift from the regular pattern of declining American industrial employment over the last three-plus decades. [1] 

There are reasons to think this “Made in the USA” trend will continue. General Electric has announced that it will move much of its appliance manufacturing back to the U.S. from China. Apple has chosen to assemble one of its computer lines domestically, not in China. Europe’s Airbus is going to build JetBlue commercial airplanes in Alabama. Ashley Furniture is building a brand new $80 million plant in North Carolina. The nation’s top out-sourcing platform Walmart has announced that it will increase purchases from U.S. suppliers by $50 billion over the next ten years. The retired left political economy professor Allen Nasser reports that “Companies like Ford, Caterpillar, Wham-O Inc. (Frisbees), Master Lock, Suarez Manufacturing and General Electric have recently relocated production from China and Mexico to Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, California and Michigan.”[2] 

Three Reasons Not to Celebrate “Reshoring” 

But how excited do Americans want to get about this “reshoring” (Time) of manufacture? There are at least three good reasons for U.S. workers to be less than enthusiastic. First, China clearly remains far and away the world’s factory, along with other parts of East Asia, particularly when it comes to labor-intensive industries like consumer electronics, furniture, and apparel. There’s little chance that manufacturing will ever come remotely close to offering U.S. workers the employment opportunities it gave them during the early and middle decades of the last century, when it was understood even in the depths of the Great Depression, that “the United States had the largest, most productive industrial machine in the world. It could make almost anything.”[3] 

Second, the jobs dividend flowing from American manufacturing’s mini-renaissance is slight in an age of super-automation. Time’s description of a new General Electric battery factory in Schenectady, New York offers a glimpse of the problem: “The 200,000 sq.-ft. facility requires only 370 full-time employees, a mere 230 of them on the factory floor. The plant manager runs the operation – from lights to heat to inventory to purchasing and maintenance – from an iPad, on which he gets a real-time stream of data from wireless sensors embedded in each product rolling across the line…The sensors let the batteries talk to GE via the Internet once they’ve left the factory. Each part of the product and, indeed, the factory, including the equipment and the workers who run it, will soon communicate with one another over the Internet.”[4] 

This depiction reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952), which depicted an automated society where corporations were replacing workers with machines without any concern for the workers’ fate or dignity. The novel was loosely based on Vonnegut’s years as an employee at General Electric, in Schenectady. [4A] 

Third, the fact that American and other global capitalists and their corporations increasingly find the U.S. to be a hospitable environment for manufacturing reflects the declining fortunes of the U.S. workers across the long neoliberal era (1970s to the present). The mass “off-shoring” (export) of formerly U.S.-based manufacturing jobs during that era did not occur because big “American” capital was interested in de-industrialization per se. It occurred because capital was interested in maximum profits and reduced costs – reduced labor costs above all [5]. Capitalists who dismantled industry in the “high wage” and once heavily unionized United States were happy to promote a type of industrialization in “developing nations” – ultimately and above all “communist” China (endowed with spectacular supplies of newly available and super-exploitable labor power) – where low wages and weak worker protections promised higher rates of surplus value and profit. It was always implicit that some manufacturing might return to the U.S. if and when American unions were smashed and wages cut.   

“U.S. Steel,” that company’s former Chairman David Roderick once commented in explaining why his firm was laying off workers and closing plants, “is in business to make profits, not to make steel.” That was a very candid statement of the cold reality of the profits system. “Rarely is the reality put with greater clarity,” notes the prolific Marxist analyst David McNally: “under capitalism, use is irrelevant; profit is king. Capitalist enterprises have no particular attachment to what they turn out, be it flat-rolled steel, loaves of bread, or pairs of jeans.” [6]. An obvious fact should be added: capitalism has no particular attachment to turning out anything material or tangible [7] in any particular country. 

If manufacturing is reviving in the U.S. to any significant degree, it is not because of any particular commitment to the United States on the part of investors. It is happening because U.S. labor, materials, energy, transportation and/or other production costs have fallen so low that capitalists finally find it competitively advantageous to make more things in the so-called homeland. 

“Europe’s Mexico” 

The labor dimension is critical. Nasser provides a chilling perspective on how the three decades-plus slashing of U.S. workers’ income and power – so pronounced that the U.S. now functions as a low-wage periphery for European capitalists – creates the basic context for capital’s increased willingness to invest in U.S. manufacturing. As Nasser notes: 

“It is not far-fetched to see a growing resemblance of US and poor-country workers. High-priced economic forecasters and consultants are known to refer to the US as ‘Europe’s Mexico.’ In the near future, they predict, some US states, mostly in the South but also including California and the Rust Belt, will be not only the cheapest manufacturing locations in the developed world, but also competitive with India and China. Wages are rising in the production- and service-oriented poor countries and falling in the rich ones. And US workers tend to quiescence, while unrest is brewing in the periphery. Costs of production are gradually converging between China and the US: declining-wage US workers are more productive, and fuel prices are expected to continue to rise, making it increasingly expensive to ship goods around the world. Non-union workers contracted by Ford to do inspection and repairs at the Dearborn truck plant make $10 an hour without benefits, which is projected to be less than the Chinese average by 2015.”[8] 

According to Paul Ashwroth, chief U.S. economist for the research firm Capital Economics, “The offshoring boom…appear[s] to have largely run its course.” Time explains Ashworth’s comment in the following terms: “U.S. factories increasingly have access to cheap energy, thanks to oil and gas from the shale boom. For companies outside the U.S., it’s the opposite: high global oil prices translate into costlier fuel for ships and planes, which means some labor savings from low-cost plants in China evaporate when the goods are shipped thousands of miles. And about those low-cost plants: workers from China to India are demanding and getting bigger paychecks, while U.S. companies have won massive concessions from unions over the last decade. Suddenly the math of outsourcing doesn’t look quite as attractive.”[9] 

Time might have added that the neoliberal White House has won massive concessions from labor. “The Obama administration,” left analyst Joel Geier notes in the latest issue of International Socialist Review, imposed a two-tier wage system in the auto industry, slashing new hires’ wages from $28 to $16 an hour, “as the price of bailing out GM and Chrysler.” It’s part of the American ruling class’s “template” for U.S. “restructuring” by turning the nation into “the cheap labor market of the industrialized world.” [10]. For its part, Vonnegut’s old employer General Electric took advantage of the Great Recession to slash entry level wages from $24 to $13 of its own accord. 

Dismantling Livable Ecology 

Along with cheap “homeland” labor, U.S. industrial competitiveness and “restructuring” is receiving a further boost from cheap “homeland” energy obtained in some very ugly ways. “Oil and gas from the shale boom” is Time’s polite way of referring to the recent explosion of domestic hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and horizontal drilling inside the U.S. –environmentally disastrous practices [11] that promise to make the United States the largest world producer of oil within a few years [11A] while wreaking havoc on U.S. water sources and safety. The ecologically deadly way in which this dramatic and in itself eco-cidal increase in planet-baking oil and gas production has been achieved is a reminder that capital dismantles more than a nation’s former manufacturing base. It is also tearing down sustainable ecology and the prospects for a livable future at home and abroad. 

The Green-Red New Deal 

For what it’s worth, an alternative exists. The Green New Deal advanced by the officially invisible Green Party would attack both the nation’s economic crisis and the climate crisis by creating “5 million jobs in green energy, sustainable agriculture, public transportation and infrastructure improvements—as well as jobs that meet our social needs, including teachers, nurses, day care, affordable housing, drug abuse and violence prevention and rehabilitation. It would be funded,” Green Party leader Jill Stein notes, “by scaling back the oversized military budget to year 2000 levels, adopting a Medicare-for-All insurance system that would save trillions of dollars, requiring Wall Street gamblers to pay a small (0.5 percent) sales tax, taxing capital gains as income, and taxing income more progressively.” All of the Green New Deal’s key components receive majority support from Americans in poll after poll [12].As should surprise nobody familiar with business-rule-as-usual in the U.S., Stein’s proposal has been thoroughly ignored in the nation’s dominant corporate mass media – a typical reflection of what it means to live under “the unelected dictatorship of money.” [13] 

Those on the radical left who worry that pursuing a Green New Deal means moving off the struggle against “the 1%” (the capitalist elite and its corporations and politicians) and for a socialist “world turned upside down” can rest easy. The great green economic conversion required for human survival will be bright rouge. With its inherent privileging of private profit and exchange value over the common good and social use value, its intrinsic insistence on private management, its inbuilt privileging of the short-term bottom line over the long-term fate of the earth and its many species, its deep investment in endless quantitative growth, wasteful marketing and production and the carbon-addicted way of life and death, and with its attachment to the division of the world into competing nations and empires that are incapable of common action for the global good, capitalism is simply and finally incapable of making or permitting the environmental changes required [14]. “Green capitalism” is an oxymoron. It is naïve to think that the environmental production conversion required for civilization’s survival can take place without an epic confrontation with – and defeat of – the capitalist elite. 

Paul Street (paulsteet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many books. His next, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy will be published in January of 2014. Street will speak at three panels at the Left Forum (www.leftforum.org) in New York City next month: “The Green-Red New Deal: Capitalism, the Climate Catastrophe, and the Alternative;” “Black Politics at the Tail End of Obama;” and “The Marginalized Left: Lessons From Past and Recent Histories.”

NOTES 

1. Rana Foroohar and Bill Saporito, “Made in the USA,” Time (April 22, 2013), 23. 

2. Alan Nasser, “The Political Economy of Redistribution,” http://www.alannasser.org/articles/offshoring_jobs_markets.html; Foroohar and Saporito, “Made in the USA,” 23-34. 

3. Mike Davis, interviewed by Bill Moyers, Public Broadcasting System, Bill Moyers’ Journal (May 20, 2009), http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03202009/watch2.html 

4. Foroohar and Saporito, “Made in the USA,” 24-25. 

4A. “I quit GE and started my first novel – Player Piano. It is a lampoon on GE. I bit the hand that used to feed me. The book predicted what has indeed come to pass, a day when machines, because they are so dependable and efficient and tireless, and getting cheaper all the time, are taking the halfway decent jobs from human beings.” Kurt Vonnegut, “Short Career,” http://melanconent.com/lib/rev/bagombosnuffbox/shortcareer.html. For reference to Vonnegut’s years in Schenectady and at GE, see New York State Writers Institute, State University of New York at Albany, “Author Page: Kurt Vonnegut,” http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/vonnegutkurt.html 

5. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance During the 1970s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 

6. Roderick was quoted in David Bensman and Roberta Lynch, Rusted Dreams: Hard Times in a Steel Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 88. David McNally: Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 70. 

7. Contrary to what you hear from many muckraker critics of Wall Street’s financial capitalism, purely financial and largely parasitic instruments like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations are normal capitalist productions no less than a ton of steel produced by a multinational corporation in Gary, Indiana or central China. For good examples of confusion on this score, see Dylan Ratigan, Dirty Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires From Sucking Us Dry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 12, and Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History (New York: Spieel and Grau, 2010), 14. For different analyses that root the financial crisis and its instruments in the timeworn contradictory development of capitalism and capitalist production, see Richard Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About it (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2010), 2-148; Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 19-52; McNally, Global Slump, 1-112; John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis :Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). 

8. Nasser, “Political Economy of Redistribution.” 

9. Foroohar and Saporito, “Made in the USA,” 2.

10. Joel Geier, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,” International Socialist Review, 88 (March-April 2013), 6. 

11. Alyssa Figueroa, “5 Weird and Frightening Effects of Fracking You Might Not Know About,” AlterNet (October 20, 2012), http://www.alternet.org/fracking/5-weird-and-frightening-effects-fracking-you-may-not-know-about 

11A. Geier, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,” 11. 

12. Jill Stein, “Obama Budget Throws American People Under the Bus,” (April 11, 2013), www.jillstein.org 

13. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Riding the ‘Green Wave’ at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond,” Electric Politics, July 22, 2009, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/hp240709.html; Paul Street. “America’s Unelected Dictatorship of Money,” ZNet (April 14, 2011) www.zcommunications.org/america-s-unelected-dictatorship-of-money-by-paul-street 

14. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Planet (New York: Monthly Review, 2010); Chris Williams, Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010); Paul Street, “Our Pass-Fail Moment: Livable Ecology, Capitalism, Occupy, and What is the be Done?,” Critical Education, Vol. 3, No,10 (2012); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review vol. 54, Issue 7 (December 2012), http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/the-planetary-emergency; Paul Street and Janet Razbadouski, “The Ecological Poverty of Liberal Economics,” ZNet (August 12, 2012), http://www.zcommunications.org/the-ecological-poverty-of-liberal-economics-by-paul-street; Paul Street, “Less Than Zero: The 1% and the Fate of the Earth,” ZNet (December 9, 2011), http://www.zcommunications.org/less-than-zero-the-1-percent-and-the-fate-of-the-earth-by-paul-street 

Published in Z Magazine, May 2013. In a story that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with business rule as usual in Washington, U.S. military contractors will suffer no great or particular loss from the federal austerity fiscal policy called sequestration. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA)—the top lobbying and public relations arm of the nation’s high-tech corporate “defense” (military empire) contractors—was crying wolf when it claimed that the sequestration would be a deadly blow against its industry, which gets nearly $1 billion a day from U.S. taxpayers.

It is true that “defense” is included on an even basis in the across-the-board federal budget cuts mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act—the $85 billion in automatic spending reductions that took effect on March 1, 2013, as a result of the government’s failure to make a “deficit reduction deal” at the beginning of the year. But sequester is no disaster for the giant corporate component of the military industrial complex (MIC) that outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans about in 1960. 

This is for three basic reasons. First, the corporate warmasters’ many heavily “defense”-sponsored supporters in Congress (the “Hawks on the Hill,” led by Senator John McCain [R-AZ]) were determined to soften the sequester blow to the war industry by giving the Pentagon more flexibility than other federal departments will garner to adjust spending across its programs. At the end of March, President Barack Obama signed a bill granting that flexibility, which will be utilized to make sure that war contractors are not hurt. As new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said during his confirmation hearing: “The continuing health of the [military-] industrial base will be a high priority.”

Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale was more specific in a sequestration briefing. “I don’t anticipate that we will cancel many, if any, contracts…. I would like to say to reassure them [military firms],” Hale added, “that if you’ve a contract with us, we’re going to pay you.”

 Second, the Pentagon is well-positioned to absorb cuts thanks to the significant and disproportionate increase in U.S. military spending that occurred over the previous decade. That spending nearly doubled between 2001 and 2012, rising to a fifth of the federal budget and a remarkable 57 percent of federal discretionary spending. Domestic discretionary spending, by contrast, rose by only 8 percent during the same period, a telling disparity given the significant increases in joblessness and poverty that came with the Great Recession (National Priorities Project, “Sequestration, the Pentagon, and the States,” February 21, 2013). 

Along the way, the National Priorities Project notes that the Pentagon continues to “waste billions of [taxpayer] dollars developing and purchasing Cold War legacy weapons” (examples include the F-34 Fighter, the V-22 Osprey Aircraft, and the SSN-774 Virginia Attack Submarine) that bear little relation to real “national security” threats in the 21st century. As socialistworker.org noted on the eve of the cuts last February, “the $46 billion cut that the Pentagon would suffer from sequestration is a drop in the bucket compared to its $400 billion F-35 joint strike fighter project, which has been plagued by cost overruns for practically meaningless improvements over existing aircraft” (“The Austerity v. Austerity Debate,” socialistworker.org, February 27, 2013).

On a less spectacular and more comic level, leading defense budget analyst Ben Freeman of the Project on Government Oversight reports that the Pentagon “recently spent taxpayer money on an app that lets you know when it’s time for a coffee break and $1.5 million to develop its own brand of beef jerky.”

The Pentagon cuts are small in comparison to the massive amounts of taxpayer money defense contractors receive and store up through the Pentagon system. According to Freeman: “Every year for the last five years, the Pentagon has doled out at least $360 billion to contractors. In fact, every year since the war in Afghanistan began contractors have received more than half of the Pentagon’s total budget…contractors have received more taxpayer money than the Department of Defense’s civilian employees and nearly 1.4 million active duty military personnel combined….All that money has really added up. So much so that the Pentagon contractors are sitting on a backlog of contracts worth nearly as much as the entirety of Pentagon sequestration…. In other words, even if contractors absorbed all of the Pentagon sequestration cuts, they’d still be on track to receive more than $300 billion a year in new contracts, which is more than double what any other country in the world spends on its military” (Ben Freeman, “Despite Hype, Defense Industry Still Thriving After Sequestration,” Salon, March 12, 2013). 

Which brings us to the third reason for the MIC to stop crying sequester wolf. In fact, it’s civilian employees, not contractors, who are being significantly hurt by the cuts. Even as he has declared his reassurance of no lost contracts and profits to defense corporations, Comptroller Hale announced that the Pentagon would furlough most of its civilian workforce one day per week, without pay, for the rest of the fiscal year. The Pentagon has subsequently cut the originally projected number of furloughed days from 22 to 14, still significant amount of lost wages (amounting to about $2.5 billion) for nearly 800,000 workers.

Meanwhile, significant cuts are being inflexibly imposed on essential domestic social programs—no small problem in the U.S.—home to by far and away the most extreme inequality and the highest poverty rate among all rich nations. Millions of Americans struggle to find adequate shelter, health care, education, and food, not to mention minimally adequate employment chances. Their struggle has become considerably more difficult thanks to the slashing of government benefits and supports and to the depressive economic impact of cutting $85 billion in government spending. Since the fiscal year began last October, the one year cut is being pressed into just seven months, leading to cuts as high as 10 percent in unemployment checks. It appears that 70,000 pre-school children will be booted out of the federally funded Head Start in the name of sequester before the end of the current school year.

A Short History  

All of this is fairly predictable given the massive Pentagon System’s longstanding central role in the workings of the nation’s reigning wealth-concentrating profits system. One of the lessons of the Great Depression was that the U.S. “free enterprise system” could not survive without significant federal government spending. The question was what sort of spending would hold sway: expenditure on human and social welfare or on military empire? 

Guns won out over butter, on the whole, reflecting both the global ambitions of the United States post-WWII power elite and the related imperatives of domestic business class rule. As the U.S. economic elite determined, massive spending on military empire, war, and the preparation for war provided a useful way for government to stimulate demand and sustain the domestic corporate political economy without fueling threats to business class power and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few in the way that “progressive civilian spending” (Edward S. Herman’s useful phrase) would. Business Week explained this elite preference for war over welfare when it came to “Keynesian” stimulus in February 1949.  

The magazine noted that: “there’s a tremendous social and economic difference between welfare pump-priming and military pump-priming…. Military spending doesn’t really alter the structure of the economy. It goes through the regular channels. As far as a businessman is concerned, a munitions order from the government is much like an order from a private customer. But the kind of welfare and public works spending that [liberals and leftists favor]…does alter the economy. It makes new channels of its own. It creates new institutions. It redistributes wealth….. It changes the whole economic pattern.” (“From Cold War to Cold Peace?” Business Week, February 12, 1949, quoted in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, 1985, 209-2010.)

 In the early 1990s, the leading critic of U.S. imperialism, Noam Chomsky, elaborated on Business Week’s post-WWII reflections in explaining why there would be no “peace dividend” (no major shift of resources from military to domestic social spending) after the demise of the official Cold War enemy: “Business leaders recognized that social spending could stimulate the economy, but much preferred the military Keynesian alternative—for reasons having to do with privilege and power….The Pentagon system[’s]…form of industrial policy does not have the undesirable side-effects of social spending directed at human needs. Apart from unwelcome redistributive effects, the latter policies tend to interfere with managerial prerogatives; useful production may undercut private gain, while state-subsidized waste production (arms, Man-on-the-Moon extravaganzas, etc.) is a gift to the owners and managers, to whom any marketable spin-offs will be promptly delivered. Social spending may also arouse public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy; the public cares about hospitals, roads, neighborhoods, but has no opinions about the choice of missile and high-tech fighter planes. The defects of social spending do not taint the military-Keynesian alternative” (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, 1994, 100-101).

It was with these sorts of considerations in mind, no doubt, that former and future General Electric (GE) President and sitting War Production Board executive Charles Edward Wilson warned in 1944 about what later became known as “the Vietnam syndrome”—the reluctance of ordinary citizens to support the open-ended commitment of American troops and resources to military conflict abroad. “The revulsion against war not too long hence,” Wilson cautioned fellow U.S. industrialists and policymakers, “will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must now begin to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy” (quoted in Joel Bleifuss, “Leader of the PAC,” In These Times, December 16-23, 1986, 4). The Cold War provided the justification for the continuation of such an economy for more than four decades. 

The American power elite’s fondness for military over social Keynesianism—and for a permanent war political economy over a permanent progressive justice and anti-poverty economy—survived the struggle between Soviet “socialism” and American “capitalism,” as predicted by those who understood the state-capitalist functions of the Cold War for the investor class. Thus, it was that military spending remained at colossal Cold War levels during the “interwar period” between the decline of the Soviet system and 9/11/2001.  

Then came the jetliner attacks, predictable blowback from imperial U.S. policy in the oil-rich Middle East. The stunning al Qaeda assault served as the “the New Pearl Harbor” that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other members of the ultra-imperialist Project for a New American Century thought would be necessary for military spending to reach the unprecedented levels they saw as required to extend U.S. global dominance, beginning with major new invasions of the oil-rich Middle East. 

No Peace Dividend

Defense” spending has increased significantly under the supposed “peace” president Barack Obama, an empire-vetted militarist who advised and agreed before the 2008 election that (in the words of researchers at the leading financial bailout recipient firm Morgan Stanley) “there is no peace dividend” (Heidi Wood et al., “Early Thoughts on Obama and Defense,” Morgan Stanley Research, Aerospace and Defense, November 5, 2008). The government could have attained the $4 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years that Obama proposed early in the 2011 “debt-ceiling crisis” simply by returning to the enormous military budgets of the Clinton era. As Ronald Reagan’s former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb noted in early 2011, American military spending, adjusted for inflation, was “higher than at any time since the end of World War II. Over the past decade,” Korb acknowledged, “the U.S. share of global military spending has risen from one-third to one-half. The United States now spends six times as much as China, the country with the next biggest budget” (CNNMoney, January 5, 2011).

The title of the essay in which Korb made these scandalous observations was “How to Cut $1 Trillion From the Pentagon.” Such a move has been just as completely off the table of serious policy discussion in the Empire-rebranding Age of Obama as it was during the long national Bush-Cheney nightmare. As Edward S. Herman observes, the newly inaugurated Obama: “…soon found that that political success demanded killing foreigners; that budget enlargement for killing was easy, but spending for progressive civilian needs was difficult and would anger powerful people. He quickly adapted to being a warrior president, his seemingly most proud accomplishment being the killing of bin-Laden…. Obama had played all the war cards. He has lauded the Vietnam War as a noble enterprise…. Like Bush he loves to speak to military cadres where he can draw resounding applause with patriotic and belligerent rhetoric” (Edward S. Herman, “Support Our Troops, Our War, and Our War Criminals,” Z Magazine, April 2013). 

An Open-Ended Entitlement 

Claiming to be nervous about “the business impact of the winding down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” (the Wall Street Journal) and Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s call for modest reductions in “security spending,” the AIA (anchored by war masters Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon) launched a major lobbying push to defend their interests on Capitol Hill as the debt-ceiling crisis that brought us the sequester heated up in the summer of 2011 (Nathan Hodge, “Defense Industry Fears More Budget Cuts,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2011). In reality, the high-tech “defense” firms have had little to fear in Washington, where the Pentagon never has to worry about fiscal solvency even as Wall Street interests claim regularly and falsely that Social Security is nearing bankruptcy and thus requires privatization. As Herman wryly observed in June 2009: “The Pentagon has regular gigantic overruns in its payments for weapons systems and fraud and waste are endemic. But the Pentagon is never threatened with ‘insolvency.’ Its overruns and waste are simply passed on to taxpayers. The supine media, while occasionally chiding the Pentagon for, say, ‘running almost $300 billion over estimates and averaging 22 months behind delivery’ never talk about any crisis in the funding of overkill, military boondoggles, and waste.… We know that in the real world the taxpayer funds the Pentagon on an open-ended basis without any trust funds or limits beyond what logrolling can produce. After all, it is protecting our ‘national security,’ using the phrase with its usual infinite elasticity to cover anything the Pentagon, its contractors, their lobbyists, and the congressional servants of the military-industrial complex want.” (Edward S. Herman, “John Yoo, Social Security, and Korean Threat,” Z Magazine, June 2009.) 

The military system enjoys an open-ended entitlement to tap the treasury of a government that has spent decades raiding the Social Security trust fund to offset deficits caused by the war budget and tax cuts and loopholes for the rich (Jack Rasmus, “Budgets, Taxes, and Classes in America,” Z Magazine, June 2011). 

War is a Racket 

War is a racket,” wrote Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine general who recalled functioning in essence as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers” during numerous early 20th century deployments in Central America and the Caribbean. The militarism that he coordinated enriched a select few wealthy Americans, Butler reflected, not the mostly working class soldiers on the front lines. “How many of the war millionaires shouldered a rifle. How many of them dug a trench?” 

Butler’s reflections have, if anything, grown in relevance since World War II when the U.S. became home to the greatest empire the world has ever seen—and to a vast military-industrial complex whose direct prices (including mass death and injury in a long line of neocolonial wars of invasion and occupation from Korea through Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) and more indirect costs (including social welfare opportunity costs) have been borne by American society as a whole (not to mention the many millions of non-American others killed, injured and displaced by the U.S. military and its military client states) as the benefits have flowed especially to wealthy Americans. Today, as during the Cold War and before, Ralph Nader notes, war and the apparently permanent preparation for war is a source of corporate mega-profits as it provides a deceptive cloak of national unity behind which elites concentrate wealth and power, shaming those who question that upward redistribution as unpatriotic carpers seeking to “divide rather unite America” (Ralph Nader, The Seventeen Solutions). 

Military Keynesian remains intact while the business class’s campaign to dismantle what’s left of the welfare state takes another step forward in poverty- and prison-ridden America. Such are the “perverted priorities” (Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase) of policymakers in the U.S., the “beacon to the world of the way life should be,” to quote onetime U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), reflecting on why George W. Bush should be allowed to invade Iraq if he wanted to. Z

Paul Street is an author and journalist in Iowa City, Iowa. His next book, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy, is available fall 2013.

First published on ZNet, May 3, 2013. Yesterday (I am writing on May 2, 2013), millions around the world hit the streets to protest state-capitalist austerity, plutocracy, and exploitation on a planet where the world’s richest 100 people “earned” $240 billion in 2012 (enough money to abolish extreme global poverty four times over)[1] and 2.4 billion live on less than $2 a day.[2] They did so on May Day, an international day of working class protest day born in the great Midwestern U.S. city of Chicago in connection with a Left- and labor-led struggle for the Eight Hour Day in the mid-1880s. Sadly but predictably enough given the unparalleled degree to which the United States’ corporate-dominated ideological and propaganda system has succeeded in separating the “homeland” citizenry from the egalitarian and progressives sides of its own history, only a small portion of the U.S. population knows the meaning or North American origins of May Day. It is as good time as any, perhaps, to take a brief look back at the United States’ own rich but purposefully buried history of “populist,” anti-plutocratic anger.

“Wall Street Owns the Country” (1890) 

Though you wouldn’t have know it from the characteristically superficial and amnesiac way in which dominant U.S. mass media covered the populist and Left-led Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Rebellion, the United States has long been scarred by harsh socio-economic and class disparities that have defied its “land of equality” mythology and raised popular fears and anger about the undemocratic domination of the nation’s economy, society, and politics by the rich and powerful Few. The historical peak of such concern came in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when millions of American populists, socialists, anarchists, labor rebels, and progressives of various stripe rallied and railed against the stupendous concentration of wealth amidst massive poverty and economic insecurity that came along with the United States’ rise to industrial supremacy and the emergence of the modern “managerial” corporation as the leading form of American capitalist enterprise, at once largely financed by and feeding the deep pockets of an ascendant Wall Street. This is how the great Kansas populist orator Mary Ellen Lease put things to an angry crowd in 1890, one hundred and twenty-one years before OWS launched its remarkable but short-lived, police state-dismantled encampment in lower Manhattan: 

“Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street….Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags….” 

“…The politicians said we suffered from ‘overproduction.’ ‘Overproduction!,’ when 10,000 little children starve to death every year in the U.S. and over 100,000 shop girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for bread…” 

“There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. And there are half a million looking for work….The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.” [3] 

Another sterling populist speaker of the time spoke in similar and hauntingly Occupy-foreshadowing terms, adding a critique of the two dominant parties’ (Republicans and Democrats) shared subservience to the moneyed power. As Ignatius Donnelly noted at the People’s Party national convention on July 4^th, 1892: 

“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized…The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.” 

“…The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down….The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty.” 

“We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them…. …They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires…. [4]

All the Wealth of Society Comes to Them” (1906) 

Twelve years later, after a decade in which a major industrial depression furthered the control of the economy by a small number of giant corporations and in the wake of a failed national strike against the leading U.S. meatpacking chains Swift’s and Armour’s, the American socialist, novelist, and pamphleteer Upton Sinclair captured a broadly held sentiment when he wrote the following in the widely read socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason:

 “Rise up…and look about you.They own all the instruments and means of production. They own the railroads and the telegraphs, the coal mines and the oil fields, the factories and the stores! They own half the farms and have mortgages on the rest.They own society. They own the government! [5]”  

In 1906, Sinclair published his bestselling novel The Jungle, set among the workers in Chicago’s gigantic animal slaughtering and meatpacking houses. A brilliant expose of the unsanitary and oppressive conditions in one of the nation’s leading food industries, the novel neared its conclusion with its battered proletarian protagonist standing transfixed before a mesmerizing radical orator who spoke of the shocking disparities that had emerged in early 20^th century America. The speaker told of the misery inflicted on the laboring multitudes who endured homelessness, hunger, poverty and “the curse of the wage-slave[s], who toil every hour they can stand and see, who are condemned till the end of their days to monotony and weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt and disease….” Then the orator asked his listeners to regard the luxuriant, parasitic lives and power of the wealthy few: 

“…turn over the page with me and gaze upon the other side of the picture. There are a thousand – ten thousand, maybe – who are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil…They live in palaces, they riot in luxury and extravagance – such as no words can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets, for shiny little stones with which to deck their bodies. Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their fellow creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears of the human race!” 

“It is all theirs – it comes to them…all the wealth of society comes to them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner digs the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone, the clever man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired man sings – and all the results…are gathered in one stupendous stream and poured into their laps! The whole of society is in their grip, the whole labor of the world lies at their mercy….They own not merely the labor of society, they have bought the governments; and everywhere they used their raped and stolen power to entrench themselves and their privileges, to dig deeper and wider the channels through which the rivers of profit flow to them!”[6] 

In the original, serialized version of The Jungle, Sinclair used a fictional representation of the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs to extend his observation that the wealthy “masters” owned “the whole of society” by having the candidate claim that “the two [dominant U.S.] political parties”- the Democrats and the Republican – were “two wings of the same bird of prey. The people [are] allowed to choose between their candidates, and both of them [are] controlled, and all their nominations [are] dictated by, the same [money] power.”[7] This was hardly a negligible sentiment among Americans during the Progressive Age (1890-1917), a high water mark for Socialist electoral success in the U.S. and legislative action to address the system’s most malignant abuses.

 “The Well-Born[‘s] Government of Oppression (1787) 

Deep “populist” suspicions of the wealthy Few and their political reach have hardly been restricted to late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. During the great debate over the U.S. Constitution in the late 1780s, “Anti-Federalist” opponents of ratification warned that a strong a new and powerful government would be captured by wealthy merchants, creditors, and other “moneyed elites” opposed to the interests of ordinary Americans. Genuinely popular self-government, they said, thrived best in small jurisdictions where political rulers and everyday citizens interacted daily. Only wealthy elites, “ignorant of the sentiments of the middling and lower classes,” possessed the resources to win election to a national government. New York Congressman Melancton Smith warned that the Constitution would lead to the domination of “the common people” by “the well-born” and a “government of oppression.” (Fittingly enough, the distinguished American historian Eric Foner notes that pro-Constitution sentiment was strongest among “mean of substantial property.” If ratification had been put up to a popular plebiscite, the economic historian Lee Soltow has shown, it would not have passed, thanks to the opposition of the non-wealthy majority.)[8] 

“Temple of Mammon” (1830s) 

Four decades later, early U.S. trade unionists and workingmen’s parties denounced what they saw as “the most unequal and unjustifiable distribution of wealth in the hands of a few individuals.” A popular newspaper cartoon from the mid-1830s bore the title “A Confederacy Against the Constitution and the Rights of the People.” It portrayed a diabolical “Temple of Mammon” where a wealthy northern manufacturer conspired with a rich southern planter, saying “You Southern Barons have black Slaves; will you not allow us to make White Slaves of our poor population in our Manufacturing Baronies?” In a similar vein, a labor placard from the time was titled “The Rich Against the Poor!” It proclaimed that “the Freemen of the North are now on a level with the Slaves of the South with no other privileges than laboring that drones may fatten on our lifeblood.”[9] 

Against “Industrial Dictatorship” and “Privileged Enterprise” (FDR/1930s) 

Trumped during the 1860s by North-South sectional conflict and the slavery question, popular anger at the wealthy few and their business order nonetheless lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction to fuel numerous epic labor strikes and other popular struggles across the late 19^th century and into the Progressive Age. The open expression of popular loathing of the rich and powerful was interrupted and challenged again by World War I, the federal government and business elite’s Red Scare campaign against labor activists and real and perceived radicals after the war, and a remarkable but short-lived and unequally distributed burst of economic growth in the 1920s. 

But the anger naturally resurfaced in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression. The greatest economic collapse in history, responsible for mass hunger, homelessness, and unemployment rates that reached 30 percent, the Depression was transparently triggered by the reckless malfeasance of the Wall Street financial elite and driven and deepened by an astonishing, government-led upward distribution of wealth and income after the war. In 1940, a former Wall Street trader named Fred Schwed wrote a humorous, anecdote-filled book titled Where are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street, wherein he observed that the American public believed that Wall Street was inhabited mainly by “crooks and scoundrels, and very clever ones at that; that they will sell for millions what they know is worthless; in short that they are villains.” It was “an extreme view,” economic writer John Cassidy notes, “but public antagonism toward bankers and other financiers” during and beyond the 1930s would “ke[ep] them in check for forty years,” fueling policies that “restrained the growth of the banking sector” across the 1940s and the post-WWII years: limits on interest rates, a prohibition on deposit-taking institutions from issuing securities, preventing financial institutions from merging with one another [10] — policies whose repeal over the long neoliberal era (1979-present) would contribute to the great financial collapse of 2008-2009. 

The rage against wealthy masters who caused the collapse worked its way into the rhetoric of the White House. In 1935 and 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) “turned the [1936] presidential election into a contest between the haves and the have-nots.”[11] In his 1936 acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt thundered against the “economic royalists” and “privileged princes” who sought “a new industrial dictatorship.” FDR called “the over-privileged” an “enemy within our gates” and argued that “private enterprise” had become “too private.” It had become “privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.” The economic elite, FDR noted, “complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”[12] 

In his end-of-campaign speech at Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt called his quest for re-election a struggle between “the millions who never had a chance” and “organized money.” The “forces of selfishness and lust for power,” he observed, “have never before …been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” [13] 

“We have,” FDR said in his second Inaugural Address, “begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.”[14] 

 No sitting U.S. president before or since has ever appealed so boldly to class hostility. Still, FDR’s successor Harry Truman liked to identify himself with the fight of the “everyday man” against “special privilege” and Democratic politicians have always retained a certain carefully calibrated measure of FDR’s populist-sounding rhetoric for vote-getting use at election time – as when Obama inveighed against “the breathtaking greed of a few” in a 2011 campaign speech in Osawatomie, Kansas.

 “The Property Party” 

Tens of millions of workers, farmers, unemployed, and middle class progressives enlisted in FDR’s Democratic New Deal coalition. Still, many leftists, including the well known radical commentator Ferdinand Lundberg, never forgot that Roosevelt and his party were no less dedicated to the rich man’s profit system than the Republicans and their wealthy backers. Even as the New Deal reconfigured U.S. politics and introduced such hallmark progressive policy achievements as the National Labor Relations Act (legalizing and empowering union organizing and collective bargaining rights) and the Social Security Act (introducing old age pensions for Americans 65 and over, and unemployment insurance), Lundberg echoed Upton Sinclair by noting that “The United States can be looked on as having, in effect, a single party: the Property Party. This party can be looked upon as having two subdivisions: The Republican Party, hostile to accommodating adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Conservative’) and the Democratic Party, of recent decades favoring such adjustments (hence dubbed ‘Liberal’).” [15] 

“The Minority in Business and Finance Who Own and Run This Country” (Savio) 

The New Left rebellion of the late 1950s,1960s, and early 1970s may have focused primarily on black civil rights and the Vietnam War but it also contained a strong dose of opposition to the rich and their business system. Its underlying populism and democratic socialism is captured in the following formulation in Students for a Democratic Society’s founding 1962 Port Huron Statement: “the economy is of such social importance that is major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”[16] In December of 1964, Free Speech Movement (FSM) leader Mario Savio’s charge that the modern corporate “university’s ‘respectable’ bureaucracy masks the financial plutocrats.” American capitalists and their “authoritarian” system – the “machine” whose “operation” Savio said had become “so odious…that you can’t take part [and have to] put your bodies on the gears …to make it stop”[17] – and amoral profit imperatives were held in distinctly low esteem by the insurgent popular movements and the counterculture that emerged during these years. Four years after the FSM, Savio nicely channeled the feelings of many New Left activists on the profit system and what Occupy would latter call “the 1%.” In a statement that might be seen as prefiguring contemporary concerns about environmental ruin, Savio announced his candidacy for the California state senate: 

“All those who gain least from war and poverty – the working people, the small farmers, the small businessmen, the professionals…must join together now against the minority in business and finance who own and run this country, and whose lust for power and profit and whose utter disregard for human suffering threatens now to bring the world to a final catastrophe….Our great task is to organize the people into a new majority. Americans are practical people….we must convince them that it is essential that our economy be dominated by production to satisfy human needs, not to swell profits; that this production can be planned publicly and democratically…and that administration of the economy should be highly decentralized so that the decisions are really made by the people…”.[18]

The New Gilded Age 

Occupy’s anger and rhetoric was richly consistent with this all-too-forgotten history, which suggests that populist anti-plutocracy and suspicion of concentrated capitalist wealth and power is “as American as Apple Pie.” Such anger is richly appropriate to life under the United States current Second Gilded Age (1979-20??), the nation’s post New Deal and “neoliberal” era in which the U.S. is far and away the industrialized world’s most unequal country (its wealth distribution is now more comparable to Latin America and Africa than it is to Western Europe ad Japan) and which the richest 400 Americans now possess more wealth together than the entire bottom half of the population (the six Wal-Mart heirs together have as much net worth as the bottom 41.5 percent) [19] – a reflection among other things of the fact that lowest two U.S. wealth quintiles (the bottom 40 percent) of the U.S. control an astonishingly paltry 0.3 percent of the nation’s net worth, essentially nothing.[20] Half the nation’s population is now officially “low-income” and a third lives either in poverty or “near poverty” (at or below 150% of the federal government’s notoriously inadequate official poverty level) while the owners of Wall Street and corporate America enjoy record-setting profits and hyper-opulent lifestyles that would make the original Robber Barons blush. 

These savage inequalities are the result not of any deficiency of effort, education, wholesomeness, or still on the part of ordinary American working and middle class people.[21] They are a clear and predictable result of numerous government policies reflecting the corrupting power of the nations leading financial institutions and other giant corporations.[22] “All the wealth of society comes to [the rich and powerful] because that’s how the game is rigged by corporate- and Wall Street-captive policymakers at all levels of government. “It is not,” the progressive economist Laurence Mishel writes, “that the economy been broken for the last 30 years or so, but rather that it is working as has been designed to work…For 30 years, policy levers have been pulled to help the well-off, and this policy orientation worked spectacularly on its own terms.” [23] 

For that and other reasons, the contemporary capital-occupied United States is overdue for rank-and-file re-Occupation from the bottom up – for another great wave of popular anti-plutocratic rebellion, one that builds on the lessons and record of earlier generations of egalitarian rebels and revolutionaries up to and beyond OWS. 

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007) and The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010). His next volume, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm) will be available this Fall.

[1] Oxfam, The Cost of Inequality (January 2013), http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/the-cost-of-inequality-how-wealth-and-income-extremes-hurt-us-all-266321 

[2] The World Bank, “Poverty At a Glance” (April 2013), http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20040961~menuPK:435040~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367~isCURL:Y,00.html

 [3] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of United States (New York, 1980), 288.

[4]  Larry Goodwyn, The Populist Movement  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 167-168

[5] Upton Sinclair, “You Have Lost the Strike! And Now What Are You Going to Do About it?” The Appeal to Reason, September 17, 1904.

 [6] Upton Sinclair, The Jungle ([1906]New York: Vintage, 1985), 363-64. 

[7] The Appeal to Reason, no. 459, September 17, 1904, 1, reproduced in Gene DeGruson, ed., The Lost First Edition of Sinclair’s “The Jungle” (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Press, 1988), Illustration L. 

[8] Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, volume 1 (New York: WW Norton, 2005), 257; Lee Soltow, Distribution of Wealth and Income in the United States in 1798 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 215-228. 

[9] American Social History Project, Who Built America? Volumes (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 333-34. 

[10]  Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street (New York: Wiley, 2006 [1940]), quoted in John Cassidy, “What Good is Wall Street?” The New Yorker, November 29, 2010. 

[11] Robert S. McElvane, The Great Depression (New York: Times Books, 1993), 281. 

[12]FranklinDelanoRoosevelt, “Rendezvous With Destiny: Speech Before the 1936 Democratic National Convention,”Philadelphia,PA, June 27, 1936.  

[13] McElvane, The Great Depression, 280-81. 

[14] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937, read full text at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5105

 [15] Quoted in Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 13. 

[16]  Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (June 1962), http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html

 [17] Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2012), 216-217.

[18] Rosenfeld, Subversives, 412. 

[19] Tampa Bay Times, “Bernie Sanders Says Walmart Heirs  Own More Wealth Than Bottom 40 Percent of Americans,”  PolitiFact.com (July 31, 2012), http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/; Truth-0-Meter, “Michael Moore Says 400 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half of All Americans Combined,” (March 2011), Journal-Sentinel PolitiFact Wisconsin,  read online at  http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/ (accessed December 18, 2012) 

[20 Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better AmericaOne Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2010. 

[21] For some excellent evidence-based alternatives to dominant neoliberal (bourgeois) victim-blaming narratives (including the “skills gap” narrative) on contemporary U.S. inequality and poverty, see Jeff Madrick, “The Anti-Economist: Half Empty,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2012); Roger Bybee, “Elites Push the Skills Gap Myth,” Z Magazine (April 2013); Marc Levine, The Skills Gap and Unemployment in Wisconsin: Separating Fact From Fiction (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Center for Economic Development (March 2013).   

[22] I detail those policies (with no great claim to originality) in the third and fourth chapters of my forthcoming book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, Fall 2013). 

[23] Josh Bivens, Failure By Design: The Story of America’s Broken Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

First published on ZNet, April 19, 2013. When you hear corporate media news broadcasters talk about “the economy” and “recovery,” always ask yourself whose economy and whose recovery they have in mind. 

According to the New York Times’ economics writer Nelson Schwartz, “it’s tough to make sense of the economy these days.” In what he calls “a seeming riddle,” Schwartz notes that the stock market “is defying gravity, marching ever higher” even as hiring and consumer confidence are down and “austerity reigns in Washington.” 

On one hand, everyday working people and smaller businesses – what pundits and politicians like to call Main Street – are hurting. The pain comes in no small part from “The fiscal tightening in Washington – primarily the automatic budget cuts imposed by Congress…and the increase in Social Security taxes this year.” Small business is “dead in water” (so says the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses), generating a bleak mood that “remains stuck near recession levels.” 

On the other hand, corporate “earnings” are at record levels. Profits for the largest 100 companies in the Standards & Poor 500 stock index are expected to increase by 6.6% this quarter. Fully 22% of the S&P 500’s profits will come from the nation’s largest 10 publicly traded companies, up from 18% in 2010 [1].

 Schwartz could have added that after-tax U.S. corporate profits last year were $1.75 trillion, a more-than-50% increase over the previous record of $1.125 trillion in 2006. He might have noted that, as Joel Geier recently observed in the International Socialist Review, those “profits were the highest percentage of GDP on record, with wages the lowest percentage historically.” 

Schwartz could also have added that U.S. corporations are currently sitting on a remarkable $2 trillion cash hoard – a giant surplus that could be used to put people to work, to fund social programs for the many millions of poor, and/or to pay down the deficit that corporate propagandists and corporate-captive politicians constantly (and disingenuously) bemoan. The hoard is used instead to “fuel…the asset bubble of the stock market rally of recent months, as cash moves out of low interest-rate bonds into equities or [into] mergers and acquisitions” [2].

Additions aside, where’s the “riddle?” The notion of there being a paradox or something “tough to make sense of” in the fact that Main Street and working class America are hurting while Wall Street and corporate America are thriving is naïve. It is based on the childish assumption of a harmony of interests between the wealthy few’s giant corporations and the rest of us. 

Capitalist reality is rather different. Contrary to any notion of shared interests, less business and market share for smaller and medium-sized business is more business and market share for giant firms. Less hiring sustains the “reserve army of [jobless] labor” (Marx’s excellent still relevant term), which helps suppress wages, which boosts profits. The deficit and austerity reflect the reduction of taxes on U.S. corporations, who have been quietly granted a remarkable 50% tax cut between 2006 and 2012 (another great sign of the “progressive” Obama era!) while slashing the social wage. The reduction of the social wage (benefits to workers that come from sources other than employment) deepens workers’ reluctance to challenge bosses and demand higher rent levels for their labor power [3].

The powerful and highly class-conscious political and policy actors in the corporate and financial “1%” [4] know all this very well. They do not rely on the market alone to bring about record-setting profits while millions struggle with the merely “human recession” that festers beneath the “statistical recovery.” Behind their “anti-government” and “free market” rhetoric, they pull plutocratic strings to ensure that government works on behalf of big capital and the upward distribution of wealth. Thanks in no small part to their pressure, for example, the White House and Congress imposed the lion’s share of last year’s last-minute tax increase on the working and middle classes – not the so well-to-do who sit atop a class structure that is now so savagely unequal that the six Walton (Wal-Mart) heirs have as much total net worth as the bottom 41.5% of Americans [5]. The majority of the whittled-down Obama tax hike – $125 billion of the $212 billion increase – came from increasing the payroll tax by 2%. This amounted to a 2% wage reduction for all Americans making less than $113,000 a year. Thanks to elite money influence, it remains unthinkable that policymakers would exhibit a serious commitment to deficit reduction and to the reasonable funding of Social Security by getting rid of the blatantly regressive cap on payroll taxation beyond $113,000 [6].

To mention another among many examples of U.S. state capitalism today, the Federal Reserve has acted since the Great Recession’s onset to:

 “organize…the rapid, large-scale concentration of the banking system, subsidizing the largest banks’ acquisition of weaker, less efficient banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy….In this crisis, the state arranged for and provided indirect capital in order to concentrate finance capital. The top five banks (Chase, Wells, Bank of America, Citicorp, and Goldman Sachs) now control more than 70 percent of bank assets, up from 50 percent before the crisis. The Fed forced through sales (of Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and many others) to the top banks at prices beneficial to them, guaranteeing the non-performing loans of the banks being sold, and has assured the large banks of its protection on the grounds that they are too big to fail. As a result, the rates the large banks pay for capital are significantly lower than their smaller, weaker, non-Fed-protected competitors, subsidizing their profits by billions of dollars each year…..” 

As if that isn’t plutocratic enough, the Fed has “kept interest rates at zero for more than four years, giving the banks free money with which to speculate (in commodities, stocks, junk bonds, derivatives, and the whole symphony of instruments that provoked the financial panic of 2008) and restore their balance sheets. The Fed has bought $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and continues to do so at a rate of $40 billion a month…” [7].

It is true that, as Schwartz worries, the current austerity (imposed by big capital, as Schwartz fails to note) threatens to slow the “recovery.” Big capital has a response to that concern: “So what?” The biggest “American” companies tend to be multinational corporations like General Electric (GE), which garners more revenue and employs more workers abroad than at “home.” As Schwartz reports, the U.S. share of GE’s workforce and revenues fell from 51% and 55% to 44% and 47% between 2005 and 2012, respectively [8].

At the same time, the elite business class is banking on the U.S. becoming a more hospitable (profitable) environment for investment and production in the not-so distant future, once the shocks imposed by fiscal austerity force down wages, benefits, taxes and regulations to the point deemed sufficient. As Geier observes, the Obama administration’s introduction of a two-tier wage system (cutting new hires’ hourly wage from $28 to $16) is part of a domestic restructuring plan whereby “the United States is becoming the cheap labor market of the industrialized world” [9].The regressive auto bailout was just one of many ways in which the corporate- and Wall Street-captive federal government has been helping the latest crisis play the basic role assigned to recessions and depressions under the profits system: cutting labor, materials, tax and regulatory costs for capital, eliminating “less efficient” capital, and concentrating wealth and control into fewer hands. Another method is the recent dramatic, Washington-approved and environmentally disastrous expansion of domestic oil and gas production through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling [10].

There’s no mysterious paradox – no hint of a “riddle” – in all of this. It’s American State Capitalism 101, working for the rich and powerful as always and now posing an ever more clearly imminent threat to life on Earth. 

Paul Street is the author of many books. His next volume is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, Fall 2013).

1. N. Schwartz, “As Wall Street Soars in Tough Era,” NYT, April 15, 2013, A1, B9. 

2. J.Geier, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,” ISR 88 (March-April 2013), 4. 

3. For a useful discussion of the importance of the social wage to workers’ labor market bargaining power, see Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan’s Assault on the Welfare State and Its Consequences {New York: Pantheon, 1985), 22-36, 53-70

4.  use quote marks because the real beneficiaries of American neoliberal capitalism are in a far more elevated income and wealth segment than just the top hundredth. As the global business journalist Cynthia Freeland noted last year: “Notwithstanding Occupy Wall Streets focus on the ‘one per cent’ or Obama’s choice of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the level at which taxes on family incomes should rise, the salient dividing line between rich and not-rich is much higher up the income-distribution scale.” Cynthia Freeland, “Super-Rich Irony: Why do Billionaires Feel Victimized by Obama,” New Yorker, October 8, 2012. It should be noted that Obama was subsequently prevailed upon to push the tax-rise threshold for family income to $400,000.

5. Tampa Bay Times, “Bernie Sanders Says Walmart Heirs Own More Wealth Than Bottom 40 Percent of Americans,” PolitiFact.com (July 31, 2012), http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/ . See also Truth-0-Meter, “Michael Moore Says 400 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half of All Americans Combined,” (March 2011), Journal-Sentinel PolitiFact Wisconsin, read online at http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/ (accessed December 18, 2012). The unnamed authors of this fact-checking provide exhaustive sources and data supportingMoore’s assertion 

6. Geier, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,” 6, 

7. Geier, 5. 

8. Schwartz, “As Wall Street Soars,” B9. 

9. Geier, 6. 

10. For a chilling account, see Richard Manning, “Letter From Elkhorn Ranch: Bakken Business,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2013)

Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain(New York: Springer, 2012)

Think of the values and ideas we left progressives tend to identify with and defend and advance against those rapacious “1%”’ masters of capital, for whom the Golden Rule is that “those who have the gold deserve to rule.” Words that first come to mind probably include solidarity, democracy, the common good, equality, justice, peace, and dignity. Other terms might arise: human rights, socialism, freedom, liberty, the commons, people over profits, and people’s power.

Here’s one you might not think to mention: empathy. Empathy, which Gloria Steinem once called “the most radical of human emotions,” means the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes – to understand and sense what that other is experiencing and feeling. In Christian terms it refers to the decision to “love your neighbor as yourself,” yielding the original Golden Rule:  “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In Buddhist terms, empathy means exchanging oneself for others, subordinating ego to what the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” It means abandoning the standard reigning Western sense of a solid, separate self apart from other sentient beings and the earth we share.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the ultimate example of what the left political scientist and teacher Gary Olson calls “dangerous empathy.”  Having dedicated his life early on to “agape” – to a sense of “redeeming good will for all men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return (emphasis added)”[1] – Dr. King was moved to protest the U.S. racist and imperial slaughter called “the Vietnam War” when he saw photos of Vietnamese children killed and burned by American “liberators.” His civil rights colleague Bernard Lee never forgot King’s response:

“When he came to Ramparts magazine he stopped. He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, ‘Doesn’t it taste any good?’, and he answered, ‘Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.’ …That’s when the decision was made. Martin had known about the war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” [2]

King’s decision came with no small risk. He was assassinated (or executed) on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after he gave his famous “Time to Break the Silence” speech, in which his sense of what he called “the true meaning of compassion” compelled him to openly oppose U.S. war crimes abroad and to acknowledge that the U.S. was “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today.” On behalf of “all of us….bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism,” King said that “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” [3]

The word “empathy” no doubt strikes some angry, aggression-attached radicals as soft and “touchy-feely” – as something for sappy, “bleeding heart liberal” social workers and school psychologists. It’s the stuff of sentimental bourgeois moralists like Charles Dickens, who specialized in the fantasy of the good rich man who helps poor people he comes to care about (e,g, Mr. Bownlow’s rescue of the street orphan Oliver Twist) but who (contrary to the British Communist Party’s Popular Front-era effort to claim him as a “proletarian” writer) never embraced the working class struggle and revolutionary change required.[4] “Empathy” is not for serious, tough-minded revolutionaries, who know that the profits system needs to be overthrown and that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”

Or is it? How can solidarity and camaraderie (not to mention comradeship) in shared struggle for democracy/liberty/ justice/ the common good/protection of the commons/socialism/peace etc. form and endure among people without basic empathy for each other? Serious popular movements have always depended and thrived on the embrace of a core rejection of individualistic and narcissistic ego, trading in “I, me, me, mine” for the notion that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

For what its worth, empathy for the plight of others is written all over the famous first volume of the legendarily tough- and revolution-minded Karl Marx’s Capital,  which contains long and evocative passages on the dreadful damage done to British workers’ health and happiness by capital’s “voracious appetite for surplus labor.” Consistent with the horrific reports in Frederick Engels’ Condition of the English Working Class (1844), Capital is loaded with lengthy quotes from factory inspectors on the terrible price imposed on working class individuals, and communities by the bourgeoisie’s relentless quest to squeeze as much profit as possible from those who toiled in their despotic and “hidden abode of production.” From his partly Engels-funded perch in the British Museum, Marx recoiled at how the worker “emerges from the process of [vicious capitalist] production looking different from when he entered it.” As he wrote in his chapter on “The Working Day”:

“In the market, as owner of the commodity ‘labor power,’ [the worker] stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labor power to the capitalist proclaimed in black and white, so to speak, that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labor power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited” (emphasis added).[5]

For his part, King ended his life in agreement with Marx on some key matters. “The black revolution,” King wrote in a posthumously published essay, was “forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced” (emphasis added).[6] Consistent with the often harsh and quick-tempered ole Mole and contrary to sentimental middle-class moralists and reformers before and since Dickens, King determined that, in his words in 1967, “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in men or faulty operations” (emphasis added). [7]

For King as for Marx and generations of serious radicals before and since, one did not act sufficiently on one’s concern for others through isolated acts of charity and assistance. A serious believer in the Golden Rule worked to eliminate the underlying structures of inequality and oppression that gave rise to the need for charity in the first place. “Philanthropy,” King wrote in The Strength to Love (1963), “is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which makes philanthropy necessary.” [8]

The U.S. ruling class understands the dangerous power of empathy quite well. As Olson shows in his important new book Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain, the reigning neoliberal culture that the rich have promoted with great success over the last four decades is dedicated among other things to the eradication of human beings’ capacity for empathy. Consistent with the vicious neoliberal pioneer Margaret Thatcher’s claims that “there is no such thing as a society” and that “there is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness,” the dominant doctrine promotes a “feral” society in which life is all about personal gain and the primary concern of serious adults is “mine, mine, mine.” Neoliberal ideology and culture attacks the bonds that connect humans to each other – and to their shared natural environment and other sentient beings. It might be termed “the political economy of narcissism. Once people are brought around to the belief that society is a chimera,” Olson observes, “a perverse ‘rational pursuit of self-interest’ favors the commodification of the self as a survival strategy,” leading to “a commodification of morals” and “an incapacity for empathy” as “people are increasingly valued only for their utility, their market value.”[9]

The authoritarian implications are chilling. A democratic political culture cannot last or take root in a society whose members are simply out to serve their narrowly defined self-interests. It cannot flourish in a society where people have been turned into “disconnected, apolitical individuals,” as Latin Americanist scholar Cathy Schneider has described the shell-shocked Chilean people after a U.S-sponsored military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 ( “Latin America’s 9/11,” ushering in a mass murderous and proto-fascist dictatorship that instituted neoliberal economic policies designed by American academicians from the University of Chicago’s “free market” economics department). Under the reigning neoliberal doctrine of what we might call the post-Allende era, the populace must be “taught,” in the British global justice activist Susan George’s words:

“to believe that we are not citizens or members of a social body but discrete, individual consumers. We are entirely responsible for our own destinies and if we fall by the wayside for whatever reason—illness, job loss, accident, failure, whatever—it’s our own fault….We have no responsibility for other people either. Solidarity is a banished word. …. That’s the essence of the neo-liberal spirit: ‘You’re on your own’….If you are well-schooled in neo-liberalism, you will never join a social movement, never engage in a struggle against an unjust action of the government, never contribute to an effort to protect the natural world….”(emphasis added). [10]

Look at the longstanding Wall Street campaign to dismantle Social Security. It’s about more than the billions of dollars in profits the leading financial institutions expect to result from privatizing the nation’s successful and popular public old age retirement system. Also relevant to that system’s rich and powerful enemies is the dangerously empathic and egalitarian rooting of Social Security in what Olson calls “the principle of caring about others who are living on the margins.” [11] As Noam Chomsky has noted, “The preferred doctrines” promoted by the corporate and financial elite “are just to care about yourself; don’t care about anyone else…The very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening for those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient…” (emphasis added).[12] “You have,” Chomsky has told the Canadian law professor Joel Bakan, “to drive out of people’s heads natural sentiments like care about others….the ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another; who don’t care about anyone else.”[13]

Yet even as it works to wipe out our capacity for empathy, the business elite also and at the same time exploits that capacity for selfish purposes. As Olson demonstrates in a chapter titled “Neuromarketing 101: Branding Empathy,” corporations widely deploy sinister neuroscience-informed marketing strategies that utilize fake empathy. “How to Empathize Your Way to Profits” reads the title of a business article that shows its readers how “wearing [potential customers’] skin” gives their business an edge over the competition in taking advantage of consumers’ “emotional triggers.” The notion that corporations “care” and “feel for” for people, other sentient beings (a recent example is Coca Cola’s advertising campaign identifying itself with the fate of the Polar Bear) is ubiquitous in American advertising and public relations. [14]

The notion is a lie. Beneath the pretense of concern, American corporations, Olson notes, are “empathy-devoid psychopaths.” In 2003, the Canadian law professor Joel Bakan published his widely read volume The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Noting that the U.S. judiciary defined corporations as legal “persons” by the end of the 19^th century, Bakan posed an interesting question: what kind of “person” is a modern corporation?  His answer: a sociopath, consistent with the corporation’s judicially certified mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its investors’ selfish economic self-interest, regardless of – and without any guilt or conscience about – any injury it may cause to others and the common good along the way. Bakan asked the internationally recognized psychologist Dr. Robert Hare to evaluate the modern corporation against his globally acclaimed diagnostic tool The Psychopathy Checklist. The results were instructive:

“Hare found there was a close match. The corporation is irresponsible, Dr. Hare said, because ‘in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk.’ Corporations try to “manipulate everything, including public opinion,’ and they are grandiose, always insisting ‘that we’re number one, we’re the best.’ A lack of empathy and asocial tendencies are also key characteristics of the corporation, says Hare – “their behavior indicates that they don’t really concern themselves with their victims’; and corporations often refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions and are unable to feel remorse: ‘If [corporations] get caught [breaking the law], they pay big fines and they continue doing what they did before anyway. And in fact in many cases the fines and penalties and the penalties paid by the organizations are trivial compared to the profits they rake in.’….Finally, according to Dr. Hare, corporations relate to others superficially:  ‘their whole goal is to present themselves to the public in a way that is appealing to the public [but] in fact may not be representative of what th[e] organization is really like.’  Human psychopaths are notorious for their ability to use charm as a mask to hide their dangerously self-obsessed personalities. For corporations, [claims of] social responsibility may play the same role.”[15]

It goes back a long way. The modern corporation’s cloak of personhood provides a great shield of invisibility for capitalists who reap enormous benefits from the economies of scale and the barriers to competition afforded by their freedom to combine assets while avoiding liability beyond their individual investment for the harm their agglomerated entities cause. “The basis of a corporation,” Chomsky casually noted last year, “is limited liability, meaning as a participant in a corporation you’re not personally liable if it, say, murders tens of thousands in Bhopal.”[16]

Despite its cautionary title and harsh findings, Olson’s powerful little[17] book concludes on an optimistic note. The author is convinced on the basis of recent neuroscience findings (particularly Marco Iacoboni’s path-breaking work on “mirror neurons”) that human beings are “wired for empathy” by an evolutionary process that selected mutual concern for the common good over atomization and selfishness as key to human survival. The reigning neoliberal (really bourgeois) notion that human beings are basically selfish and competitive is a great lie promoted for selfish reasons by the disproportionately sociopathic capitalist elite.[18] Our task as “dangerous Samaritans” and revolutionaries is to more properly align our institutional and ideological order with our underlying human and caring nature. Given the currently “ecocidal” level of capitalism’s threat to a livable environment,[19] that task would now appear to be nothing less than a life or death matter for the species.

Paul Street’s next book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, fall 2013).

Iowa City, IA, April 4, 2013.

Postscript (April 5, 2013). A television advertisement for an insurance company during the Iowa-Baylor basketball game last night proclaimed the following: “Everythng we do, we do for you.”  The company apparently has no capitalist investors with selfish profit motives. This claim of selflessness is of course ubiquitious in corporate advertising and public relations. In its many commercials on the “public” broadcasting system  (“P”BS, which claims during its membership fundraising drives to have “no corporate sponsors to answer to” —-a brazen lie), the leading war contractor The Boeing Corporation boasts of its selfless service to Americans, including “our troops,” who are of course employed in purely humanitarian and altruistic operations around the world.  British Petroleum’s (BP’s) ads on “P”BS purport to portray that company’s noble commitment to a clean environment, making sure to show pictures of windmills and clean Gulf Coast beaches and so on.  Individual sociopaths are notorious for their ability to elicit sympathy and to appear altruistc and concerned as they commit their crimes.  Corporations are experts of this deception on a monumental scale, with dire implications for our and other species.

Selected Endnotes

First published on ZNet on March 30, 2013.

“This is Not Dick Cheney We’re Talking About”

Questioned by a handful of Senate Democrats on his secret killer drone program earlier this month, Barack Obama said “This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here.”

“No Mr. President,” one of those Senators should have retorted (none did), “it is not. It is worse, actually, in three ways. First, Cheney was Vice President and you, sir, are President. Second, you have gone very far beyond George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when it comes to the cowardly and indiscriminate murder of thousands of people with drones. Third, you have done this under the cloak of liberalism, progressivism, peace, and multiculturalism whereas Bush and Cheney were openly reactionary white-nationalist messianic-militarists, which made their evil easier to identify and oppose.”

Of 366 U.S. drone attacks that have killed 3,581 people in Pakistan since 2002, 316 have been launched by the Obama administration. Less than 2 percent of those killed have been high-profile Taliban militants, the avowed targets. Many of those blasted out of earthly existence by America’s airborne remote-control killing machines have been innocent bystanders, including women and children.

Along with his proclaimed right to order the targeted killing of even U.S. citizens on executive choice alone (with no judicial or congressional review), Obama’s drone war “breaks new ground in criminality and in enlarging the scope of acceptable war crimes” (Edward S. Herman, “Support Our Troops, Our War, and Our War Crimes,” Z Magazine, April 2013, 7).

Unworthy Victims of Indeterminate Number

How many people has the U.S, killed via drones since 9/11 in the richly ironic name of a “war on terrorism”? 4000? 5000? 10,000? U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently pegged the toll at precisely 4,700. Graham’s total sounds low. Perhaps he was revealing privileged information from a high-level briefing, perhaps not. Who knows? The real number is mysterious, thanks to the drone program’s secrecy (which will survive the transfer of its management from the CIA to the Defense Department) and to the officially unworthy nature of the predominantly Muslim and nonwhite victims of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

A sign of that official unworthiness is found in the curious fact that many of those in Washington who have advocated judicial review of Obama’s decisions to order the targeted killings of terrorists would limit that review to the murder of American citizens. As Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu asked in a letter to the New York Times last February, “Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is American?  Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19^th century, are not as human as you are?” (NYT, February 13, 2013, A26).

 Why Obama Loves Drones

There’s no mystery about the drone war’s appeal to Barack “the Empire’s New Clothes” Obama and to the military empire he was selected/elected to re-brand. Like the Vietnam War, the U.S. ground invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan proved to be bloody fiascos that were launched on dubious grounds and created a steady flow of dead and damaged U.S. military veterans. This has tried the citizenry’s patience with the recurrent overseas conflicts required by the nation’s costly “permanent war political economy” (Herman’s excellent phrase), which accounts for more than half of the nation’s discretionary federal spending and nearly half the world’s military spending. Call it “the Iraq syndrome,” if you like.

Drone warfare keeps deep-pockets “defense” (empire) contractors happy while offering quick and “efficient” kills of distant Evil Others without the unseemly sight and cost of “our boys” in body bags, wheelchairs, and psych-wards. Drone kills let Obama look like a righteous, blood-spilling Commander-in-Chief to his more militaristic supporters (and opponents) while he gets to pacify his more peace-oriented “progressive base” by overseeing the removal of defeated ground forces from their supposedly benevolent missions[1] in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Launched without an effort to seek congressional approval (unlike Bush and Cheney’s invasion of Iraq), the Libyan War (remember that?) also let Obama reign death and destruction from the sky on devilish Muslim enemies without risking U.S. casualties. But drones go beyond bombs in reducing the spread of politically uncomfortable “collateral damage.”

The U.S. currently possesses roughly 7,500 drones in its military inventory, purchased at a price of $28 million each – no small taxpayer-funded profit stream for the leading drone war manufacturers Boeing, ITT Corp, Honeywell, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and General Atomics Corp. ( “Drone – FAQ,” KNOWDRONES at http://www.knowdrones.com/FAQ.pdf)

 Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

On a much happier note, a series of public protests against the domestic infrastructure that supports Washington’s overseas drone campaign are planned for April of 2013. According to The Guardian’s Paul Harris:

“The protests will begin on April 3 with a rally in New York, followed by three days of protest outside the facilities of companies that make drones, including at San Diego-based General Atomics which makes Predator and Reaper drones….Later in the month, protests will take place at universities and other institutions that conduct research into drones or help train drone pilots and operators. At the end of the month, rallies and demonstrations will target military bases in the US from where drones operate, including Hancock air base near Syracuse, New York.”

The group behind the effort, the Network to Stop Drone Surveillance and Warfare, says that its April Days of Action are intended to forge a popular movement for an end to U.S. drone warfare.

This is a very welcome development, one I strongly encourage Americans and others to join. The activists behind the protests are correct to take the fight beyond government to the “defense” corporations and also to the universities that develop Superpower’s drone technologies. For what its worth, killer drone research and development is just one of the many ways in which American universities have been “pulled into the machinations of the national security state” (see Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex [Paradigm, 2007]). The universities, which long ago resumed their normal historical pattern of supine self-subordination to the corporate and military state, have escaped serious public scrutiny of their cozy relationship with the imperial “defense” establishment for far too long.

It’s a protest plan that might even raise a smile from Dwight Eisenhower. It is not widely known that he originally meant to call the “military-industrial complex” he so presciently warned Americans about “the military-industrial-academic complex.”  The second phrase was dropped from his famous 1961 farewell address but got picked up again in the later 1960s by the Vietnam War critic and U.S. Senator William Fulbright (Giroux, University in Chains, 14-15) – a rare Senator who might have actually responded to Obama in the terms suggested at the beginning of this essay.

 Politicians or Citizens?

Such individuals are nowhere to be found in the contemporary Democratic Party. As Herman notes, “increasing numbers of liberal Democrats have gotten on board [Obama’s] war-oriented ship of state and also find his warrior actions and rhetoric agreeable” (Herman, “Support Our Troops,” 7). It is left to a clownish arch-reactionary Teapublican named Rand Paul to make any significant protest against Obama’s drone war policy – and against the related problem of domestically deployed drones – in the U.S. Congress.

But then, if the Age of Obama has taught us anything on progressive change and how it happens, it should be that it’s not about politicians and their calculations. As Howard Zinn noted in an early 2007 commentary on the Democratic Party’s continuing willingness to fund the invasion of Iraq:

“We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable…It is not easy, in the corrupting atmosphere of Washington, D.C., to hold on firmly to the truth, to resist the temptation of capitulation that presents itself as compromise. Except for the rare few, our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do” (H. Zinn, “Are We Politicians or Citizens?” The Progressive. May 2007).

Paul Street is the author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011, co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio), and numerous other books. His next book, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2013) will be out this fall.

First published on ZNet on March 21, 2013. To appreciate the power of the dominant imperial ideology in the United States it is best to examine commentary at the “leftmost” outposts of establishment opinion. It is at the “liberal” New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and the “public” broadcasting system where the most relevant boundaries of acceptable debate are set, not at more reliably and stridently reactionary venues like FOX News or the Wall Street Journal, or other “conservative” organs like the Weekly Standard. 

Behold the Times’ editorial board’s reflections this morning (I am writing on Wednesday, March 20, 2013) on the tenth anniversary of the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq:

“Ten years after it began, the Iraq war still haunts the United States in the nearly 4,500 troops who died there; the more than 30,000 American wounded who have come home; the more than $2 trillion spent on combat operations and reconstruction, which inflated the deficit; and in the lessons learned about the limits of American leadership and power.” 

“It haunts Iraq too, where the total number of casualties is believed to have surpassed 100,000 but has never been officially determined; and where one strongman was traded for another, albeit under a more pluralistic system with a democratic veneer. The country is increasingly influenced by Iran and buffeted by the regional turmoil caused by the Arab Spring.” (“Ten Years After,” NYT, March 20, 2013, A22).

I am struck by three problems in these two short paragraphs. First, consider the term “the Iraq War.”  Besides being historically unspecific (it could also be applied to Dessert Storm [1991] or Iraq’s long U.S.-fueled war with Iran in the 1980s), the designation “the Iraq war” tells you nothing about the basic fact of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF), which is that it was a monumentally illegal and immoral and brazenly imperial invasion and occupation of Iraq by the world’s only Superpower. It was not just a war that Uncle Sam happened into somehow on Iraqi soil. 

Second, the Times editors underplay the damage the imperial invasion and occupation did to Iraq. Their reflections on what “haunts Iraq” is quite an understatement of the appalling havoc America wreaked in Mesopotamia. As the left journalist, author and editor Tom Engelhardt noted in mid-January of 2008:

“Whether civilian dead between the invasion of 2003 and mid-2006 (before the worst year of civil-war level violence even hit) was in the range of 600,000 as a study in the British medical journal, The Lancet reported, or 150,000 as a recent World Health Organization study suggests, whether two million or 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country, whether 1.1 million or more than two million have been displaced internally, whether electricity blackouts and water shortages have marginally increased or decreased, whether the country’s health-care system is beyond resuscitation or could still be revived, whether Iraqi oil production has nearly crept back to the low point of the Saddam Hussein-era or not, whether fields of opium poppies are, for the first time, spreading across the country’s agricultural lands or still relatively localized, Iraq is a continuing disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1] 

According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of the mainstream journal Current History, “The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century…The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–>

Third, it is telling that the Times’ editors see the United States as “haunted” only “in” the losses inflicted on its own people and government. Shouldn’t it also and especially be haunted by mass-murderous Mongols-surpassing misery its criminal war of invasion and occupation imposed on the people of Iraq? Even going by the Times editors’ lowball statistics, the damage done to Iraq far surpasses the damage to the United States in both absolute and proportional terms.

Part of why the Times’ editors don’t seem more disturbed by the harm inflicted on the Iraqis is suggested in a lament that comes later in their “Ten Years After” editorial. “None of the Bush administration’s war architects have been called to account for their mistakes,” the editors complain, “and even now, many are invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible for one of the worst strategic blunders in American foreign policy” [emphasis added] (New York Times Editors, “Ten Years After”). 

Another and related part of the reason for the editors’ indifference is suggested in an Op Ed piece by that vanguard neoliberal war champion and regular Times columnist Thomas Friedman one page over in today’s paper. “Given its history of brutal dictatorship,” Friedman proclaims, “Iraq might seem to be the last place in the Middle East we should have tried to help give birth to a self-governing democracy…Iraqi society under Saddam has been traumatized,” Friedman writes, “and the impact of 35 years of authoritarian rule will not dissipate quickly” – as if nothing had been done by the U.S. to traumatize Iraq when and after Saddam was deposed. Unreal. 

Friedman concludes with hope that “all who sacrificed so that Iraq would have an opportunity for decent governance” will see democracy flourish in coming years, yielding a “positive judgment” on the invasion (T. Friedman, “Democrats, Dragons, and Drones,” NYT, March 20, 2013, A23). 

Never mind that the invasion was launched under thoroughly false and concocted pretexts (“weapons of mass destruction” and supposed connections between Saddam and al Qaeda/9-11). Or that freedom- and democracy-promotion were only installed as the main reason for the neocolonial war of invasion once the original pretexts were exposed as deceptions. Or that the occupation continued over and against the opposition of the great majority of Iraqi people. Or that the real and frankly imperial goal behind the invasion, deeply consistent with U.S. foreign policy since World War II and before, was clear as day to millions at home and abroad: to deepen U.S. control over Iraqi’s remarkable and largely untapped reserves of economically and strategically hyper-significant oil. 

There’s nothing new here. The Times editors’ criticism of the Iraq invasion/occupation falls within the same narrow “hawk-dove” spectrum that defined and restricted acceptable power elite foreign policy debate during the Vietnam era. Then as now the bipartisan imperial Establishment’s official “doves” (including later Barack Obama adviser Anthony Lake) could only question the practical outcomes (for American power and lives) and implementation of a monumentally mass murderous and deeply criminal war of aggression they insisted on seeing (or claiming to see) as driven by noble and democratic (never imperialist or racist) goals. And the people on the wrong end of Uncle Sam’s inherently dignified global guns and policies were beyond the sphere of the “doves” imaginable concern. The supposed “antiwar” establishment’s critique was about the Vietnam War’s negative impact on American lives and power, not the U.S. military’s role in killing 2 million or more Southeast Asians. “The doves,” Noam Chomsky recalled in 1984:

“felt that the [Vietnam] war was ‘a hopeless cause’ ….[But] Everyone across the all-too narrow elite spectrum — ‘doves’ no less than ‘hawks’ – agreed that it was a ‘failed crusade,’ noble but ‘illusory’ and undertaken with the ‘loftiest intentions’ …there is a possible position omitted from the fierce debate between hawks and doves, namely the position of the peace movement, a position in fact shared by the large majority of citizens as recently as 1982: the war was not merely a ‘mistake,’ as the official doves allege, but was ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral.’ To put it plainly: war crimes, including the crime of launching an aggressive war, are wrong, even if they succeed in their ‘noble’ aims.  This position does not enter the debate, even to be refuted; it is unthinkable within the ideological mainstream” (emphasis added).

Chomsky recalled the comments of the “antiwar” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who once described the U.S. assault on Vietnam as “a blundering effort to do good” – consistent with what Chomsky called “the fundamental doctrine that the [U.S.] state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3] 

Such, more than four decades later, is the recycled doctrinal claim of the bipartisan imperial establishment (from the president on down) in relation to Iraq. The notion that the criminal, immoral and petro-imperialist attack on Iraq was, well…criminal, immoral and petro-imperialist is simply unthinkable within reign elite doctrinal parameters. As Chomsky noted five years ago, “the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4] 

It is disgusting that messianic militarists like Paul Wolfowitz and other “OIF” planners and propagandists are treated with respect and receive hefty speaking fees to share their rancid views on world events in the wake of their monumental transgressions. Wolfowitz, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest, including Condi Rice and Colin Powell (the onetime My Lai whitewasher who sold the criminally false WMD pretext for the invasion at the United Nations) should be confined behind bars for the rest of their days. But “mistakes” and “strategic blunders” don’t really cut it by any civilized moral criteria when it comes to evaluating the criminal and brazenly petro-imperialist (and richly bipartisan) U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[1] Tom Engelhardt, “The Corpse on the Gurney: the Success Mantra in Iraq,” Antiwar.com, January 18, 2008, read at www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=12229