Friday, September 30, 2011

Chomsky to RT: Bush tortured people, but Obama just kills them



He also talks about OccupyWallStreet, the Arab Spring, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Here's a mindblowing speech by a Bahraini activist named Ahlam Al-Khezaei



The people of Bahrain have been fighting in the streets since February. This week, 20 doctors and medics were jailed for sentences ranging between 5 and 15 years, for treating injured protesters. The United States considers Bahrain an important ally, and continues to sell them weapons.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Lawrence O'Donnell covers the widespread police brutality on Wall Street over the weekend

“This weekend a few troublemakers turned a peaceful protest against Wall Street greed into a violent burst of chaos. The troublemakers carried pepper spray, and guns, and were wearing badges.”

NYPD wall in and mace a peaceful group of women at OccupyWallStreet for no god damn reason

I'm sure most people have seen this by now, but I ran across the blog of one of the women who was maced in that video.

...Upon arriving at Union Square, the police presence erupted. Our group stopped to regroup at the park, which unfortunately gave them time to surround the area and increase their force. We saw the nets coming out and they blocked off the streets; the march started to fray and split into different directions. We tried to turn around and march back to Wall Street, but we were not allowed.

The majority who were moving back to Wall Street headed down 12th Street. When we were between University and 5th Avenue, the [police] began blocking off the street. I was walking on the sidewalk in a clump with one of my friends and a few other women. Two female police officers blocked our path. We asked them repeatedly why we couldn’t walk down the sidewalk; they refused to talk to us. The one time they spoke was when one officer repeatedly said between her teeth, “do not get in my face. Get out of my face. GET OUT OF MY FACE.” The police force was increasing and blocking off the street from both ends, and not allowing people to cross the road. I was filming the scene with my DSLR.

I looked over, and in a second I saw the officer spraying something into the crowd. I recognized the mace immediately and shut my eyes; though I did deflect some of it, I was not completely successful. The burning set in immediately, and I heard the screaming. I started crying. A few women around me were lying on the ground holding their faces and wailing. My friend grabbed onto me.


Here's where the video comes in. The woman writing this is the redhead with the ponytail. She's 18.



I dropped my camera, but it kept filming. I was hysterical. I grabbed the woman closest to me, who got hit the hardest... She was absolutely hysterical, she couldn’t see. People were running out of local restaurants and bringing us water. The police promised there would be a medic; it never arrived. Some of the other people in the march had seen what happened and half-carried us across the street to get some milk and vinegar for our faces.


Here's the footage from her own camera:



During this time, the police were pushing their net up the street towards 5th Ave, and everyone on the sidewalk was being boxed in for arrest. They forced us to move, even though we were visibly suffering. As I was being pushed up the street, another protestor was pouring a milk solution on my face to ease the burning. They forced us all against the wall, and we knew we would be arrested. Everyone asked why; no police officer would respond. I was freaking out. One white-collar officer walked down the line and screamed, “YOU’RE ALL GETTING LOCKED UP!”. Some of the people on the block had not even been involved. Some were getting pushed or dragged under the nets by police so that they would be part of the mass arrest. Others in the area were tackled, beaten, dragged, or tazed by the officers. They put us all in plastic cuffs and placed us in lines...

Eventually, they brought in the loads of police vans to bring us to the station. They even utilized one MTA bus to put us on, because there were so many. They walked me to the van, and I waited several minutes to get inside as they prepared it...

They drove us to the station, precinct 1. We were forced to wait outside the station, in the vehicles, for almost 2 hours. The police were walking around outside, waiting, talking to each other. About 15-20 minutes in, one officer assured us that we would be moved in a few minutes and we would be processed and out in an hour or two. No one knew what was going on. It was during this time that I severely needed to use the bathroom. For an hour and a half, I asked over and over if I could get an escort to go. It got to the point where I was in so much physical pain that I was crying. I pleaded the cops over and over. Everyone else in the car tried to get their attention. They ignored us. They turned the music up. They told me to wait. It wasn’t until I cried so much that they were forced to face me, that somebody finally found me an escort. They didn’t remove my cuffs. She pulled my pants down for me and watched me. When we were exiting, she said that she didn’t like doing this, she had four kids and she didn’t think this was right. She agreed with our sentiment, but she didn’t understand why we had to be violent. I told her we were peaceful, and that I had been maced and arrested while walking on the sidewalk. She was silent. I looked at every officer who had let me through to use the bathroom and said thank you. They were silent.

I was finally put into the holding cell, where I was reunited with my friend and met with a bunch of the other women involved. Soon after, we were each placed in our own cells: 5 women per 1 person room. I was detained there for between 5 and 6 hours. Some demanded their one phone call, only to be told that they could only make calls within the five boroughs. We sat and waited to be processed.

I was finally released at 1:30 am. I have a court date on November 3rd at 9:30 am. I’m being charged with blocking vehicle traffic and unlawful conduct.


Anonymous has allegedly identified the cop who sprayed the women, and has released all his personal information to the public. I have no feelings about this.

As we watched your officers kettle innocent women, we observed you barbarically pepper spray wildly into the group of kettled women. We were shocked and disgusted by your behavior. You know who the innocent women were, now they will have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE WATCHING!!! Expect Us!


This is directly unrelated to the attack, but protester named Terri Lee recently emailed Noam Chomsky asking for his thoughts about the OccupyWallStreet, and he actually responded back. He called them "courageous" and "honorable," and I don't think he could've possibly chosen better words.

Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”

The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.


It's really clever the way the police did this. They only struck when they were able to divert a small group of protesters away from everyone else, and close them off. They never intended for this to end peacefully. The women weren't allowed to leave, and the cops wouldn't answer their questions. Outnumbered, the group was then maced and tazed and beaten. This was a message. At this point, the protesters only have two options: watch fascists beat the shit out of women, or fight back. It's that simple.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Friday, September 23, 2011

Crowd of Republicans boo an active duty soldier on national television for being gay

I can't fucking believe this happened. I watched this live and it made me sick to my stomach.



Here's a transcript I mostly nabbed from ThinkProgress in case you're at a place where you can't watch videos. You really need to watch it though.

Steven Hill: In 2010 when I was deployed to Iraq I had to lie about who I was because I'm a gay soldier, and I didn't want to lose my job. My question is, under one of your presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that has been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?

[Audience boos him]

SANTORUM: Yeah, I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military, and the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we’re going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege and removing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I think tries to inject social policy into the military and the military’s job is to do one thing — and that is to defend our country. We need to give the military, which is all volunteer, the ability to do so…and I believe this undermines that ability.

KELLY: So what would you do with soliders like Steven Hill. Now he’s out…so what would you do as president?

SANTORUM: Look, what we’re doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now and that’s tragic. I would just say that going forward, we would reinstitute that policy if Rick Santorum was president. Period. That policy would be reinstituted and as far as people in, I would not throw them out because that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration, but we would move forward in conformity to what was happening in the past, which is — sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself — whether your’re heterosexual or homosexual.


There are a few problems with this.

  1. He says that gay people are "making a point to include it [sexual activity] as a provision within the military..." If you think sexual promiscuity is a requirement for being gay, then you're a god damn idiot.
  2. Sexual activity in the military is not the issue being debated. Nobody is arguing that sexual activity among our soldiers should be encouraged or tolerated. The issue is soldiers being kicked out of the military because they're gay, and their colleagues using it as a tool for blackmail. That's the issue here, not your gay rape fears.
  3. This is not an "experiment." We know full well what happens when a military has gay people in it--nothing. You can ask Canada, Germany, England, France, Italy, Israel (Israel, for god's sake), Japan, Australia, and basically every country on that planet that's not a totalitarian regime.
  4. "Sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone." Right, we know. Except, people like myself take this attitude to mean that gay people can serve in the military.


There is no excuse for this. Nor is there a precedent in American history, I don't think. A week or two ago, Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul "Are you saying society should just let [someone without health insurance] die?" and audience members enthusiastically shouted "Yeah!"

The Republican party is powered by reactionary hate. These debates are not about coming up with solutions. They're about overhyping what little progress has been made in the last couple years, and foaming at the mouth trying to derail it. This is a cult.

GOProud, a group of gay Republicans (really) issued a statement, and said it better than I could:

Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology.

That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done – put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.

Stephen Hill is serving our country in Iraq, fighting a war Senator Santorum says he supports. How can Senator Santorum claim to support this war if he doesn’t support the brave men and women who are fighting it?

Thursday, September 22, 2011

A leftist defense of Ron Paul

I'm a little surprised I didn't write this.

I'll take the reactionary over the murderer, thanks by Charles Davis



Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I'll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn't protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn't overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government's criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you'll quickly be informed that yeah, Ron Paul's good on the war stuff -- yawn -- but otherwise he's a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who'd kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He's more cosmopolitan, after all; less Texas-y. He's a Democrat. And gosh, even if he's made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he's a murderer, in other words, but at least he's not a Republican!

Put another, even less charitable way: Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged. The number of party-line progressives who would vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama wouldn't be enough to fill Conference Room B at the local Sheraton, with even harshest left-leaning critics of the president, like Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, saying they'd prefer the mass-murdering sociopath to that kooky Constitution fetishist.

As someone who sees the electoral process as primarily a distraction, something that diverts energy and attention from more effective means of reforming the system, I don't much care if people don't vote for Ron Paul. In fact, if you're going to vote, I'd rather you cast a write-in ballot for Emma Goldman. But! I do have a problem with those who imagine themselves to be liberal-minded citizens of the world casting their vote for Barack Obama and propagating the notion that someone can bomb and/or militarily occupy Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya and still earn more Progressive Points than the guy who would, you know, not do any of that.

Let's just assume the worst about Paul: that he's a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let's say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

Barack Obama isn't exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he's not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he's pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry's product. You might argue Paul's a corporatist, but there's no denying Obama's one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There'd be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn't be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Paul would also stop providing subsidies to corporate agriculture, nuclear energy and fossil fuels, while allowing class-action tort suits to proceed against oil and coal companies for the environmental damage they have wrought. Obama, by contrast, is providing billions to coal companies under the guise of “clean energy” – see his administration's policies on carbon capture and sequestration, the fossil fuel-equivalent of missile defense – and promising billions more so mega-energy corporations can get started on that “nuclear renaissance” we've all heard so much about. And if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there's nothing to prevent states and local governments -- and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion -- from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn't a bad thing.

All that aside, though, it seems to me that if you're going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent “crimes” committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security's great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn't that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?

Over half of Americans' income taxes go to the military-industrial complex and the costs of arresting and locking up their fellow citizens. On both counts, Ron Paul's policy positions are far more progressive than those held – and indeed, implemented – by Barack Obama. And yet it's Paul who's the reactionary of the two?

My sweeping, I'm hoping overly broad assessment: liberals, especially the pundit class, don't much care about dead foreigners. They're a political problem at best – will the Afghan war derail Obama's re-election campaign? – not a moral one. And liberals are more than willing to accept a few charred women and children in some country they'll never visit in exchange for increasing social welfare spending by 0.02 percent, or at least not cutting it by as much as a mean 'ol Rethuglican.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, for example, has chastised anti-Obama lefties, complaining that undermining – by way of accurately assessing and commenting upon – a warmonger of the Democratic persuasion is “extraordinarily self-destructive" to all FDR-fearing lefties.

“Just ask LBJ,” Drum added. The historical footnote he left out: That LBJ was run out of office by the anti-war left because the guy was murdering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But mass murder is no reason to oppose a Democratic president, at least not if you're a professional liberal.

There are exceptions: Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman has a piece in Truth Out suggesting the anti-war left checking out Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who's something of a Ron Paul-lite. But for too many liberals, it seems partisanship and the promise – not even necessarily the delivery, if you've been reading Obama's die-hard apologists – of infinitesimally more spending on domestic programs is more important than saving the lives of a few thousand innocent women and children who happen to live outside the confines of the arbitrary geopolitical entity known as the United States.

Another reason to root -- if not vote -- for Ron Paul: if there was a Republican in the White House, liberals just might start caring about the murder of non-Americans again.


Monday, September 19, 2011

"Revoke Corporate Personhood? I don't know what that means."

So yeah, just like I said in that earlier post, the media is mocking the occupation of Wall Street. But I wasn't entirely right about that. They're mostly ignoring it. Which is better than openly mocking it I guess, at least the American public isn't being told what to think. I've noticed they're picking up on it a little bit, but most of it has been small tidbits and a lot of confusion, which isn't any different from how they normally act.

Here's some dumbshits on Fox forming opinions about things they don't understand.



But the worst part? How they say how they're inspired by the Arab Spring protests. Let's remember, people were killed in Egypt and Syria and Yemen, for something. Mentioning your little picnic in the same breath, relating it to the risks those people took should embarrass these twerps and their parents. But I imagine they're probably embarrassed enough already."


...says the Tea Partier, who draws inspiration for his own racism and homophobia "political movement" from a group of liberal revolutionaries who sparked a war to overthrow the English government.

But we have to be honest with ourselves too. I would love nothing more than to see something similar to the Arab Spring happen in the United States, but this isn't even close to it. I saw PoliticusUSA estimate that the crowd is around 50,000, but they're just as biased as alternet, so that's probably bullshit. People in the occupywallstreet reddit have been begging for more people, and most legitimate estimates I've seen put it at around 2,000 at most.

This is going to be cheesy as hell, but I'm putting it here because I think it fits. Here's a quote from The Matrix.

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.


Doesn't that hit you right in the gut? Americans just can't organize a liberal nationwide movement similar to the Arab Spring, for one simple reason: the country is fucking brainwashed. I'm not even trying to exaggerate, when I say "brainwashed," that's exactly what I mean. Even the "liberals" are making fun of this, assuming they know about it at all. The corporate media controls the information that Americans are exposed to, and they answer to Wall Street. You're damn right they're going to ignore this.

This is a battle for minds. Protests, from all political spectrums, are nothing but circlejerks. People from across the aisle are always going to throw shit at your protest, because they don't understand it. That dumbass on Fox said, word for word, "Revoke Corporate Personhood? I don't know what that means." I mean, there are just no words for this level of superficiality. Americans aren't even aware that corporations are legally able to buy politicians and run our government. No fucking wonder they're going to make fun of this. They don't even know what this is, or why they're fighting.

I think the reason why OccupyWallStreet is going to die off and fail is because it prided itself with being leaderless, and having no one established goal. In retrospect, it appears like that method kills the protest before it even starts. Nobody knows why they're there. And it doesn't help that all the major liberal voices are ignoring this too. I haven't seen Michael Moore or Olbermann or Maddow say anything about this at all. Democracy Now has made a few tweets about it and I'm sure they'll cover it Monday, but nobody watches them, and if the major players don't mention it in their shows tomorrow, I don't see how this can go anywhere from here.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Sunday Youtube Post





Saturday, September 17, 2011

Glenn Beck gives his take on the “Occupy Wall Street” protest set for tomorrow



Remember this guy? Yeah! He’s completely irrelevant now that he no longer has a TV show, but he’s still doing his stuff on something called “GBTV.” Oh, Glenn!

Glenn Beck says that Occupy Wall Street is made up of:

  • Muslim extremists
  • Socialists/Communists
  • Radicals/Revolutionaries

Glenn Beck claimed that Socialists, Communists, and Muslim extremists have all united, and they’re the ones behind this protest! As a socialist myself, it left me very confused. I can’t speak for every socialist, but personally, I think muslim extremists are a threat to civilization, and should be annihilated with extreme prejudice. Muslim extremism is fascist, while socialism is democratic. If Beck thinks we’re looking for allies, it certainly won’t be with fascists like himself. Oops, I mean, I’M A SOCIALIST AND I’M PLOTTING AND SCHEMING IN THE SHADOWS AND I’M GOING TO GET YOU.

While I have no doubt that socialists, communists, and revolutionaries will be at Wall Street tomorrow, their power and influence is so incredibly miniscule that they’re hardly even worth mentioning. Seriously. The United States has no “radicals.” The propaganda system in which we live has been so effective in wiping them out, that even pretending they have influence is embarrassing. Occupy Wall Street is made up of your average mainstream, moderate, Jon Stewart liberals who, in all likelihood, aren’t going to change a damn thing. I’m sorry. That’s not to say I’m not rooting for them, I hope they’re successful. I hope this will finally wake America up.

But I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. The media is going to spend a lot of time mocking them. Then the American public will turn against the only people who are fighting for them, and will become convinced that they’re just a bunch of stupid stoners. I've even had "liberal" friends say things like this to me already. They’ll have their little party in their tents, dance around a little, wave their signs, maybe even raise a fist or two if they’re daring enough, but in the end, the powers that be will simply wait for them to leave, and everything will continue unchanged. That’s how protests in America work. That’s why the government has outlawed all forms of protest that do work.

But then there’s another possibility. Maybe the police will come in an beat people up. There’s usually some amount of warning before this happens, so the moderates will all leave. Maybe some will stay and allow themselves to be roughed up for the cameras. Only the “radicals” (if they’re there at all) will actually defend themselves. Then all of America’s mainstream left will call them heroes for getting the shit beat out of them, but scold them for not going limp first.

Nothing is going to change, either way. Like I said, I wish them the best and I’ll be rooting for them, but I’m really not sure if they grasp just how much the bourgeois has dented the people’s power to change things. Mario Savio tried to change things, so the FBI spent ten years following him around for no reason. Martin Luther King tried to change things, so the government tried to blackmail him into killing himself. Fred Hampton tried to change things, so the FBI shot him in his bed as he slept (he was unable to wake of course, because he was drugged by the FBI). After confirming that he was still alive, they shot him twice in the head. Keep waving your signs though, you’ll show them.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Hacking Democracy

Here's a documentary explaining how our elections are rigged.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

The 9/11 decade of perpetual war proves that the American people haven't learned anything



In November of 1946, France bombarded Haiphong, a port in north Vietnam. The French would be at war with Vietnam for the next eight years. Throughout all of it, the United States supplied the French with 300,000 small arms, and $1 billion -- 80% of the total French war effort.

A secret memo of the National Security Council in June 1952 stated:

Communist control of Southeast Asia would render the U.S. position in the Pacific offshore island chain precarious and would seriously jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the Far East.


And:

Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities. . . .


A year later, a congressional study mission reported: "The area of Indochina is immensely wealthy in rice, rubber, coal and iron ore. Its position makes it a strategic key to the rest of Southeast Asia." It was also noted that Japan depended on that rice, and Communist victory there would "make it extremely difficult to prevent Japan's eventual accommodation to communism."

In 1963, Kennedy's Undersecretary of State, U. Alexis Johnson, spoke before the Economic Club of Detroit:

What is the attraction that Southeast Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate, fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of Southeast Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, teak, corn, tin, spices, oil, and many others. . . .


The next year, the public was told that American destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in international waters. This would propel the United States into the Vietnam War. It later turned out that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. The government had lied to the American public, just as it had done to justify the invasion of Cuba under Kennedy three years earlier (which Eisenhower had initially set into motion).

The American destroyers in question were in fact not in international waters at all. They were spying on the Vietnamese. So if an attack had actually happened, it would not have been "unprovoked." But no torpedos were actually fired at American ships. The 58,000 Americans who were killed in Vietnam did not die for our freedom. They died for nothing.



Why am I mentioning this on the 9/11 anniversary? Because our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are dying for the exact same reasons (or lack thereof). There seems to be this misconception among the general public that the government has learned its lesson, and doesn't do these things anymore. In fact, the exact same people continue to run our government. War criminal Dick Cheney, for example, was inside of Richard Nixon's inner circle, but conveniently not high enough to be taken down with Watergate. An ex-Powell aide stated a couple weeks ago that Dick Cheney was "president for all practical purposes" during Bush's first term. You know, when we invaded Iraq.

In 2005, 61% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was connected to terrorism. Considering the fact that the CIA leadership is made up almost entirely of racist neocon fanatics, I wouldn't be surprised if many in the government actually believed that themselves for a time. After it was shown that Saddam had no links to terrorism, and he had no WMD's, neocons latched onto their last explanation: we invaded out of the good of our hearts to spread freedom to the Iraqi people. Given how much the Bush sympathizers oppose Obama's bombing of Libya, it's pretty obvious that they don't give two shits about spreading freedom to oppressed peoples by military intervention. The cowards only give a shit when they think they're in immediate danger.

So what have we learned from all this? Not a thing. Vietnam did not teach us to be skeptical of the government, and so we had to pay for it with Iraq. I think the people who say Iraq was only about oil are oversimplifying it. There were many goals. Oil played an important role, but Iraq was definitely about establishing an American government in the reigion (turning the region pro-Israel). That's also why the west was reluctant to get behind the revolutionaries in Egypt. A democratic Egypt would actually stand up to Israel. And most of all, it was contractors. Nationbuilding is big business.

Charles Smith always enjoyed visiting US troops aboard. Though a civilian, he had worked for the army for decades, helping to run logistical operations from the Rock Island arsenal near Davenport, Iowa.

He helped keep troops supplied, and on trips to Iraq made a point of sitting down with soldiers in mess halls. "I would always ask them: what are we doing for you?" Smith told the Guardian.

Smith eventually got oversight of a multibillion-dollar contract the military had struck with private firm KBR, then part of the Halliburton empire, to supply US soldiers in Iraq. But, by 2004, he noticed problems: KBR could not account for a staggering $1bn (£620m) of spending.

So Smith took a stand. He made sure a letter was hand-delivered to KBR officials, telling them that some future payments would be blocked. According to Smith, one KBR official reacted by saying: "This is going to get turned around."

A few days later, Smith was abruptly transferred. The payments he suspended were resumed. "The emphasis had shifted. It was not about the troops. It was all about taking care of KBR," he said. . . .

[...]

What Smith had blundered into is one of the most disturbing developments of the post-9/11 world: the growth of a national security industrial complex that melds together government and big business and is fuelled by an unstoppable flow of money. It takes many forms. In the military, it has seen the explosive growth of the contracting industry with firms such as Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, or DynCorp increasingly doing the jobs of professional soldiers. In the world of intelligence, private contractors are hired to do the jobs of America's spies. A shadowy world of domestic security has grown up, milking billions from the government and establishing a presence in every state. From border fences that don't work to dubious airport scanners, spending has been lavished on security projects as lobbyists cash in on behalf of corporate clients.

Meanwhile, generals, government officials and intelligence chiefs flock to private industry and embark on new careers selling services back to government.

"The creation of this whole industry is a disaster. But no one is talking about it," said John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University and author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them.

Contractors form huge parts of the lines of supply for American troops. But they also fly planes, provide security and take on big infrastructure projects. Next year, as US combat troops draw down from Iraq, an estimated 5,000 private contractors will provide security on behalf of the US state department. That's a deployment roughly the size of an army brigade.

Worldwide, the ratio of contractors to US soldiers in uniform is about one-to-one. During Vietnam it was one-to-eight. It has speeded up since 9/11. "In the last 10 years, spending at the Pentagon has shifted enormously to contractors," said Pratap Chatterjee, a fellow at the Centre for American Progress and industry expert.

[...]

Oversight of contracting is weak or opaque – and is often contracted out, too. One recent investigation found $4.5bn of contracts awarded to firms with a history of problems or which had violated laws. A federal audit found an oil firm had overcharged the Pentagon by $204m for fuel in Iraq.

[...]

The benefits are obvious to employees. Pay is higher and some companies have offered sign-on bonuses or free cars. It is estimated that contractors from more than 100 firms make up a third of the CIA.

And as the rest of America suffers recession, this is an economic boom. The US intelligence budget last year was $80bn, more than twice 2001 levels.

[...]


I'm going to play fake psychologist. I think the Republican mindset has a difficult time with empathy. I suspect that this is in the back of the mind of every observant liberal already, but I think it needs to be said. In a study out last year,

...researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task -- and found big differences between the two groups.

Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.

Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives' value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts.

[...]


I don't know if that actually means anything, but I'm sure there are other studies concerning political mindsets that I'm too lazy to research. My point is that I seriously don't think conservatives are able to connect with people on an emotional level as easily as liberals do. It's why when Republicans are in power, they don't give a flying fuck about civilian casualties in war. And it's why we see shit like this:



This is freaky as shit. If they remembered how they felt on that day, then they wouldn't treat 9/11 like a god damn holiday to be celebrated. I just don't think they really know how they're supposed to act, and so they imitate what they see others doing. And blind nationalism is the result.

I think this is why conservatives are much more susceptible to manipulation than liberals. Liberals can be manipulated, I'm not denying that for a second. But conservatives I feel have a much harder time reading emotions and motives, and so they're usually the first ones to fall victim to the bastards in charge. That's why they fell for fascism. It's why they fell for the Red Scare. It's why they fell for Vietnam. It's why they fell for Reagan. It's why they fell for Iraq. That's why they're so willing to give up their freedoms in the name of national security. From that article I linked above:

Those cashing in on the international "war on terror" pale beside the security boom that is taking place in the US itself. Across America, new organisations sprang up in the wake of 9/11 as the flow of money was turned on. Nine days after the tragedy, Congress committed $40bn to fortify America's domestic anti-terror defences. In 2002, the figure was a further $36.5bn. In 2003 it was $44bn. More than 260 new government organisations have been created since 2001. The biggest of all is the Department of Homeland Security, whose workforce is 230,000-strong and awaiting new headquarters in Washington, which will be the biggest new federal building since the Pentagon. It is rising up on the grounds of a former asylum.


And here's how the Patriot Act is being used. I'm not even going to get into how the "war on drugs" is another fake war being waged for profit.



9/11 truthers try to point at the Reichstag fire as a comparison to the September 11th attacks. The Nazis supposedly set fire to their own parliament building, and used that disaster to limit freedoms and civil liberties. What the truthers never mention is that to this day, nobody really knows who set fire to the Reichstag. There's no evidence at all that points to the Nazis. And there's actually a good amount of evidence to suggest that it was this mentally disturbed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, acting entirely alone. And Hitler simply grasped at the opportunity.

Looking at it this way, I think a legitimate comparison could be made. Only a fucking moron would think the government was responsible for 9/11 (I mean, if their goal was to build up support to invade Iraq, then it probably would've been smarter to blame 9/11 on Iraq instead of terrorists). But in the aftermath of 9/11, we saw a huge surge of (Republican) politicians completely beating this disaster to death, in order to further their own careers. In closing, here's a truly disgusting video that Republican presidential candidate Hermain Cain put out the other day. That's him singing. Happy 9/11, and remember to vote Republican.

Sunday Youtube Post

I need to draw more.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Some of the world's greatest minds are predicting a much worse economic meltdown, fascist dictatorship, and possibly America's entire collapse



I've been noticing something over the past couple months. Every intellectual I pay attention to is starting to say that the United States is fucked. They say that the economic meltdown, combined with general apathy and self-delusion, drives us closer to transforming into something like 20th century fascism. We may collapse entirely. One of them even expressed fears of civil war. Almost all of them are convinced that another economic collapse is inevitable. I've actually been developing many of these same fears myself recently, but I didn't know how to research them and I was convinced I was probably wrong, so I don't think I've written a lot about it. BUT I HAVE ARGUMENTUM AD VERECUNDIAM NOW FUCKERS.

Okay so what the fuck is going on? I don't really know how to start this, so I guess I'll just jump right in. Chomsky said last year that he has "never seen anything like this."



“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority [which two-thirds of Fox News viewers already believe]. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”


Chris Hedges writes in Empire of Illusion:



We have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been dismantled by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8 trillion toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our part of the grand imperial project on credit. We are supposed to bring back the illusion of wealth created by the bubble economy. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state's preparations to crush potential unrest, and you get a glimpse of the future.


And another:

Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.


Slavoj Žižek also believes in the coming economic collapse. Although a Marxist, he's still realistic about it. He believes the current crisis, and any potential future crisis branching off of it, will only serve to make capitalism "leaner and meaner in the long term." But even he consents that we're probably going down eventually:



"I'm not cheap apocalyptic guy, I'm not saying, 2012, there will be a catastrophe. Let's be patient, no reason to lose nerves. Let's just be aware that we are dealing with a series of very serious problems, which, if we just leave the existing society to develop following its inherent tendencies, we'll eventually lead to some kind of zero level catastrophic point."


A documentary based on Naomi Wolf's book The End of America makes connections to the current state of America and the rise of fascism. It's up on youtube.



I have this friend, she and I often talk about news events together. And we would talk about the Bush administration, things that were happening, and she kept saying, "They did this in Germany. They did this in Germany." And at first, really, I have to tell you I thought this was crazy talk, you know, so extreme and so out there, right, and I really dismissed it. And she didn't drop it, she kept saying "They did this in Germany." Finally, she sat me down and she put a stack of books in front of me, and she pretty much said, "Read." And I started to read. And as I read, literally, my hair stood on end, because soundbites, and images, and phrases were leaping off the pages, and were current in the discourse around us. Little echoes, from things like "homeland," the Department of Homeland Security used to be called Domestic Security. Homeland, heimat, is a word that became current in National Socialist discourse in about 1931-32. The National Socialists pioneered the practice of unloading the war dead off of trains in the darkness of night, so people wouldn't know the extent of the war dead, the media couldn't take pictures. This administration has also unloaded the war dead from Iraq off the planes in the middle of the night, a departure from practice. . . . And so, what become so clear to me from my reading, Germany in those years wouldn't have looked so different from today. I mean, we tend to think, oh Nazi Germany, you know, it's like a Leni Riefenstahl film. But in fact, Germany in 1931-32 had gay rights organizations, human rights organizations, and feminist organizations. It had celebrities. It had all kinds of newspapers, all kinda of debate, all kinds of dissent. It was a modern state.

[...]

I didn't stop with Germany, I started to read about Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy. East Germany in the 50s. Czechoslovakia in the 60s. Pinochet's coup in Chile in '73. And the Chinese crackdown on the democracy protesters at the end of the 80s. The same things occur again and again and again: little subversions of people's rights, little constitutional changes.


And then there's Matt Taibbi. He read this brilliant article by a former GOP insider who's trying to warn us about how fucking insane the GOP has gotten, and suggests that these new Republican tactics may very well drive the country into another civil war.



In particular, the insane decision to turn the once-routine procedure of raising the debt ceiling (Lofgren notes it was done 87 times since WWII) into a political crisis revealed that the GOP party mainstream had sunk to the level of terrorism – holding our economic system hostage in exchange for political concessions.

This was a form of violence, and a serious escalation even from the days of George W. Bush, when the party was mostly limited in its willingness to use human beings as pawns in homicidal ploys for political power. Bush and Rove were willing to sacrifice Iraqi lives, and the lives of American servicemen, for oil and votes. But this current crew of Republicans shook canisters of kerosene over the entire American population and threatened to light a match if it didn't get what it wanted.

[...]

But for the new GOP, compromise of any kind defeats their central purpose, which is political totale krieg. This party's entire reason for being is conflict and aggression. There is no underlying patriotic instinct to find middle ground with the rest of us, because the party doesn't have a vision for society that includes anyone outside the tent.

I've always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it's intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war.

But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we're used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin.

[...]

Most people aren't thinking about this because we're so accustomed to thinking of America as a stable, conservative place where politics is not a life-or-death affair but more something that people like to argue about over dinner, as entertainment almost. But it's headed in another, more twisted direction. I'm beginning to wonder if this election season is going to be one none of us ever forget – a 1968 on crack. Anyway, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope everyone reads this Lofgren piece, which is a rare piece of insider insight.


Oh, is that ridiculous? That's too much, you say? How about after reading about the report out this morning that reveals the Obama administration feared a god damn military coup if they tried to prosecute war crimes? THIS. FUCKING. HAPPENED.

This shit isn't right. I feel like something is going to happen. I don't know if this is all going to lead to a collapse or a new birth of fascism or whatever. I hope these people are overreacting. I don't know. But this atmosphere is really scaring me. And I'm seriously considering buying a gun. Sometimes I think about all this and I just want to fucking scream. We know what the solutions are, and yet we do the exact opposite because the fucking bastards who own the country demand it. I'd go so far as to say a socialist economy would probably get rid of most of these problems altogether, but I'm so desperate at this point that I'm willing to give up and settle for good old fashion Keynesian theory. I don't care if that'd have us start the whole process all over again, just as long as we can get fucking stabilized. And what's most frustrating of all is that the world's smartest people are all watching this happen, warning us, and are yet still powerless. I'm reminded of a quote from 19th century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:

"It happened in a theatre that the coulisses caught fire. The Clown was sent to inform the public. It took this as a joke and applauded; he repeated; they jubilated even more. Thus I think that the World will perish under general jubilation from witty heads believing that it is a witticism."

I'm a little scared. But I'm also hopeful. Listen. If this happens -- which in all likelihood, it won't -- we can take advantage of this. If there's ever an opportunity to kick those bourgeoisie fucks out of power so we can run our own god damn country, then we need to take it. Maybe we can use this, and turn it into our own little "arab spring." The rest of the world is already two steps ahead of us, maybe we just need a little jolt. And OccupyWallStreet is next Saturday, eh guys? Maybe that will spiral. But on a final note, let's never, ever, ever forget what Leon Trotsky had to say about what we're fighting against:

"Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction."


Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Thoughts on the Banksy/Robbo Feud

I ordered an art book full of Banksy's stuff, and it came in earlier. It's really cool. It motivated me to do a bunch of google research tonight about the history of graffiti and street art, and I ran across something I'd never heard before. There's a "war" going on between Banksy and another street artist named King Robbo.

Robbo was a legendary graffiti artist back in the 80s. He became famous by tagging trains and buildings all over London, and his name was everywhere. He never got caught, and his identity remains a secret. He eventually decided to retire, because he has kids and he didn't want to risk getting busted and losing his life.



In 2009, Robbo was interviewed for a book and said he met Banksy once: "...he decided to get cocky and say 'I’ve never heard of you', so I gave him a swift backhand and said “you may never have heard of me but you’ll never forget me” and that was that."

Shortly after the book was published, Banksy painted over the last surviving Robbo piece in existence. This is considered a huge sacrilege in the graffiti community.





When asked to respond to Robbo's account of the "slap," Banksy said this: "Is this a joke? I've never been hit by Robbo in my life. I don't know who he slapped but I hope they deserved it." He also supplied this photograph of what it looked like when he painted it, and said, "If you want things to last, you shouldn't paint them under a bridge on the canal."



If you ask me, Robbo probably pulled his story out of his ass, and Banksy got pissed. I just got finished watching a short doc about this feud, and Robbo seems like an egotistical prick, and I wouldn't put it past him to lie for cred. And I think there's a message in what Banksy did, too. To me he's basically saying that the older generation of graffiti artists always get wiped out and forgotten by the city. And that makes sense to me, because there's already generational tension in the community between the older guys who focus on stylized lettering, and the younger guys who have messages and don't mind using stencils.

The graffiti community backlashed against Banksy immediately for what he did, and he's pretty much universally despised by them at this point. Robbo's come out of retirement, and has been vandalizing every Banksy piece he can find. Banksy's been being Banksy, and has been relatively quiet about it all. Meanwhile, Robbo painted over the wall:



A short time later, letters were added in the same style so it said "FUCKING ROBBO," but it's not known if that was Banksy or Banksy's fans. Then it just went back and forth, where the parties just kept painting over each other's stuff.

With Robbo in the spotlight again, he then (in my view) took advantage of it. He began submitting and selling paintings to art galleries (many of which bashed on Banksy some more). He went to Berlin, and agreed to paint on a wall to promote a movie that would premiere in the city -- right next to one of Banksy's most iconic pieces.







Banksy's a bit overrated, I'm not some mindless slobbering fan like every average joe who's ever seen a picture of his stuff on the internet. In fact, almost everything Banksy does, some guy named Blek le Rat did it all in Paris 20 years ago. But that doesn't mean what Banky's doing doesn't matter. I think his stuff is extremely clever and important, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. I even doubt that the "art" part of it is a very important factor to him, which I think is why the rest of the community despises him so much. If I were to make a guess, I'd say he's probably more into the anarcho-socialist circles if anything, and it's the message that matters to him the most. He admitted a long time ago that the reason why he uses stencils is to get in quick and leave before he gets arrested. I think he's basically trolling the graffiti community, just as much as he trolls the traditional art community, and society in general.

I think what Robbo ended up doing says a lot about what this feud is really about. In the end, Robbo painted an advertisement, a monument to a beautiful celebrity who didn't do shit to deserve it -- right next to a Banky mural meant to fight against that entire bullshit system. This is an actual screenshot from that documentary with Robbo on the red carpet at the premiere of the movie.



Robbo will get rich, but Banksy gets to continue being Banksy.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Racism: A History

This is really good.



Part 2

Part 3

Sunday Youtube Post

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Howard Zinn on the "permanent war economy"

Well. That's something I never knew. In A People's History, Zinn writes about the atomic bombs:

The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan, But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.. .." Blackett is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz (Atomic Diplomacy), who notes a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."


Zinn also writes that the famous million-death estimate (if we had invaded Japan) was simply made up by Secretary of State Byrnes, with no evidence or experts backing him. And Japan had been feeling around for peace talks for a year before the bombs were dropped.

You can read this entire chapter if you want. It's pretty great. When Zinn describes the bombings of German cities -- not of military targets, but of civilians -- you can taste his personal disdain. Zinn doesn't mention this in the book, but he had actually taken part in these bombings (my grandpa did as well, I've read his diary entry soon after his crew bombed Cologne). More than 100,000 people died in Dresden -- about as many people who died in Hiroshima. Howard writes in his essay Empire or Humanity: "In war, there's always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism."

But anyway, this here is what I made this post for. Zinn describes the process by which World War II transformed the economic structure of the United States into a permanent war economy, and goes on to describe the efforts of the government--and the business interests within it--to scare the living shit out of the American public, to justify their transformation of the United States into this soft form of fascism. And above it all, the astonishing apathy among the "liberals" throughout the process permeates well into today. Grab your beverage of choice and put your feet up, because although this excerpt is very long, I feel that it's extremely important. I think this puts our current economic situation into context. You want to know why the government won't cut back military spending? This is why. This right here is your answer. This is why the bourgeoisie continuously pumps money into useless military programs, while never doing a thing about the internal problems of the country. We never fully recovered from the Great Depression, and the American economy is designed to depend on a constant state of warfare. Enjoy.

True, the war then ended quickly [after the bombs were dropped]. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered. The Fascist powers were destroyed.

The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work—without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of "socialism" on one side, and "democracy" on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States—to make their rule secure.

The war not only put the United States in a position to dominate much of the world; it created conditions for effective control at home. The unemployment, the economic distress, and the consequent turmoil that had marked the thirties, only partly relieved by New Deal measures, had been pacified, overcome by the greater turmoil of the war. The war brought higher prices for farmers, higher wages, enough prosperity for enough of the population to assure against the rebellions that so threatened the thirties. As Lawrence Wittner writes, "The war rejuvenated American capitalism." The biggest gains were in corporate profits, which rose from $6.4 billion in 1940 to $10.8 billion in 1944. But enough went to workers and farmers to make them feel the system was doing well for them.

It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control. Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric Corporation, was so happy about the wartime situation that he suggested a continuing alliance between business and the military for "a permanent war economy."

That is what happened. When, right after the war, the American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization and disarmament, the Truman administration (Roosevelt had died in April 1945) worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. True, the rivalry with the Soviet Union was real—that country had come out of the war with its economy wrecked and 20 million people dead, but was making an astounding comeback, rebuilding its industry, regaining military strength. The Truman administration, however, presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat.

In a series of moves abroad and at home, it established a climate of fear—a hysteria about Communism—which would steeply escalate the military budget and stimulate the economy with war-related orders. This combination of policies would permit more aggressive actions abroad, more repressive actions at home.

Revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia were described to the American public as examples of Soviet expansionism-thus recalling the indignation against Hitler's aggressions.

In Greece, which had been a right-wing monarchy and dictatorship before the war, a popular left-wing National Liberation Front (the EAM) was put down by a British army of intervention immediately after the war. A right-wing dictatorship was restored. When opponents of the regime were jailed, and trade union leaders removed, a left-wing guerrilla movement began to grow against the regime, soon consisting of 17,000 fighters, 50,000 active supporters, and perhaps 250,000 sympathizers, in a country of 7 million. Great Britain said it could not handle the rebellion, and asked the United States to come in. As a State Department officer said later: "Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership . . . to the United States."

The United States responded with the Truman Doctrine, the name given to a speech Truman gave to Congress in the spring of 1947, in which he asked for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Truman said the U.S. must help "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

In fact, the biggest outside pressure was the United States. The Greek rebels were getting some aid from Yugoslavia, but no aid from the Soviet Union, which during the war had promised Churchill a free hand in Greece if he would give the Soviet Union its way in Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria. The Soviet Union, like the United States, did not seem to be willing to help revolutions it could not control.

Truman said the world "must choose between alternative ways of life." One was based on "the will of the majority . . . distinguished by free institutions"; the other was based on "the will of a minority . . . terror and oppression . . . the suppression of personal freedoms." Truman's adviser Clark Clifford had suggested that in his message Truman connect the intervention in Greece to something less rhetorical, more practical—"the great natural resources of the Middle East" (Clifford meant oil), but Truman didn't mention that.

[...]

The United States was trying, in the postwar decade, to create a national consensus-excluding the radicals, who could not support a foreign policy aimed at suppressing revolution-of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, around the policies of cold war and anti-Communism. Such a coalition could best be created by a liberal Democratic President, whose aggressive policy abroad would be supported by conservatives, and whose welfare programs at home (Truman's "Fair Deal") would be attractive to liberals. If, in addition, liberals and traditional Democrats could-the memory of the war was still fresh- support a foreign policy against "aggression," the radical-liberal bloc created by World War II would be broken up. And perhaps, if the anti-Communist mood became strong enough, liberals could support repressive moves at home which in ordinary times would be seen as violating the liberal tradition of tolerance. In 1950, there came an event that speeded the formation of the liberal-conservative consensus—Truman's undeclared war in Korea.

Korea, occupied by Japan for thirty-five years, was liberated from Japan after World War II and divided into North Korea, a socialist dictatorship, part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and South Korea, a right-wing dictatorship, in the American sphere. There had been threats back and forth between the two Koreas, and when on June 25, 1950, North Korean armies moved southward across the 38th parallel in an invasion of South Korea, the United Nations, dominated by the United States, asked its members to help "repel the armed attack." Truman ordered the American armed forces to help South Korea, and the American army became the U.N. army. Truman said: "A return to the rule of force in international affairs would have far-reaching effects. The United States will continue to uphold the rule of law."

The United States' response to "the rule of force" was to reduce Korea, North and South, to a shambles, in three years of bombing and shelling. Napalm was dropped, and a BBC journalist described the result:

In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus. . . . He had to stand because he was no longer covered with a skin, but with a crust-like crackling which broke easily. . . . I thought of the hundreds of villages reduced to ash which I personally had seen and realized the sort of casualty list which must be mounting up along the Korean front.

Perhaps 2 million Koreans, North and South, were killed in the Korean war, all in the name of opposing "the rule of force."

As for the rule of law Truman spoke about, the American military moves seemed to go beyond that. The U.N. resolution had called for action "to repel the armed attack and to restore peace and security in the area." But the American, armies, after pushing the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel, advanced all the way up through North Korea to the Yalu River, on the border of China-which provoked the Chinese into entering the war. The Chinese then swept southward and the war was stalemated at the 38th parallel until peace negotiations restored, in 1953, the old boundary between North and South.

The Korean war mobilized liberal opinion behind the war and the President. It created the kind of coalition that was needed to sustain a policy of intervention abroad, militarization of the economy at home. This meant trouble for those who stayed outside the coalition as radical critics. Alonzo Hamby noted (Beyond the New Deal) that the Korean war was supported by The New Republic, by The Nation, and by Henry Wallace (who in 1948 had run against Truman on a left coalition Progressive party ticket). The liberals didn't like Senator Joseph McCarthy (who hunted for Communists everywhere, even among liberals), but the Korean war, as Hamby says, "had given McCarthyism a new lease on life."

The left had become very influential in the hard times of the thirties, and during the war against Fascism. The actual membership of the Communist party was not large-fewer than 100,000 probably-but it was a potent force in trade unions numbering millions of members, in the arts, and among countless Americans who may have been led by the failure of the capitalist system in the thirties to look favorably on Communism and Socialism. Thus, if the Establishment, after World War II, was to make capitalism more secure in the country, and to build a consensus of support for the American Empire, it had to weaken and isolate the left.

Two weeks after presenting to the country the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey, Truman issued, on March 22, 1947, Executive Order 9835, initiating a program to search out any "infiltration of disloyal persons" in the U.S. government. In their book The Fifties, Douglas Miller and Marion Nowack comment:

Though Truman would later complain of the "great wave of hysteria" sweeping the nation, his commitment to victory over communism, to completely safeguarding the United States from external and internal threats, was in large measure responsible for creating that very hysteria. Between the launching of his security program in March 1947 and December 1952, some 6.6 million persons were investigated. Not a single case of espionage was uncovered, though about 500 persons were dismissed in dubious cases of "questionable loyalty." All of this was conducted with secret evidence, secret and often paid informers, and neither judge nor jury. Despite the failure to find subversion, the broad scope of the official Red hunt gave popular credence to the notion that the government was riddled with spies. A conservative and fearful reaction coursed the country. Americans became convinced of the need for absolute security and the preservation of the established order.

World events right after the war made it easier to build up public support for the anti-Communist crusade at home. In 1948, the Communist party in Czechoslovakia ousted non-Communists from the government and established their own rule. The Soviet Union that year blockaded Berlin, which was a jointly occupied city isolated inside the Soviet sphere of East Germany, forcing the United States to airlift supplies into Berlin. In 1949, there was the Communist victory in China, and in that year also, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. In 1950 the Korean war began. These were all portrayed to the public as signs of a world Communist conspiracy.

Not as publicized as the Communist victories, but just as disturbing to the American government, was the upsurge all over the world of colonial peoples demanding independence. Revolutionary movements were growing—in Indochina against the French; in Indonesia against the Dutch; in the Philippines, armed rebellion against the United States.

[...]

So it was not just Soviet expansion that was threatening to the United States government and to American business interests. In fact, China, Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, represented local Communist movements, not Russian fomentation. It was a general wave of anti- imperialist insurrection in the world, which would require gigantic American effort to defeat: national unity for militarization of the budget, for the suppression of domestic opposition to such a foreign policy. Truman and the liberals in Congress proceeded to try to create a new national unity for the postwar years-with the executive order on loyalty oaths, Justice Department prosecutions, and anti-Communist legislation.

In this atmosphere, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin could go even further than Truman. Speaking to a Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, in early 1950, he held up some papers and shouted: "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." The next day, speaking in Salt Lake City, McCarthy claimed he had a list of fifty-seven (the number kept changing) such Communists in the State Department. Shortly afterward, he appeared on the floor of the Senate with photostatic copies of about a hundred dossiers from State Department loyalty files. The dossiers were three years old, and most of the people were no longer with the State Department, but McCarthy read from them anyway, inventing, adding, and changing as he read. In one case, he changed the dossier's description of "liberal" to "communistically inclined," in another form "active fellow traveler" to "active Communist," and so on.

McCarthy kept on like this for the next few years. As chairman of the Permanent Investigations Sub-Committee of a Senate Committee on Government Operations, he investigated the State Department's information program, its Voice of America, and its overseas libraries, which included books by people McCarthy considered Communists. The State Department reacted in panic, issuing a stream of directives to its library centers across the world. Forty books were removed, including The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Philip Foner, and The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman. Some books were burned.

McCarthy became bolder. In the spring of 1954 he began hearings to investigate supposed subversives in the military. When he began attacking generals for not being hard enough on suspected Communists, he antagonized Republicans as well as Democrats, and in December 1954, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him for "conduct . . .unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate." The censure resolution avoided criticizing McCarthy's anti-Communist lies and exaggerations; it concentrated on minor matters on his refusal to appear before a Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, and his abuse of an army general at his hearings.

At the very time the Senate was censuring McCarthy, Congress was putting through a whole series of anti-Communist bills. Liberal Hubert Humphrey introduced an amendment to one of them to make the Communist party illegal, saying: "I do not intend to be a half patriot. . . . Either Senators are for recognizing the Communist Party for what it is, or they will continue to trip over the niceties of legal technicalities and details."

The liberals in the government were themselves acting to exclude, persecute, fire, and even imprison Communists. It was just that McCarthy had gone too far, attacking not only Communists but liberals, endangering that broad liberal-conservative coalition which was considered essential. For instance, Lyndon Johnson, as Senate minority leader, worked not only to pass the censure resolution on McCarthy but also to keep it within the narrow bounds of "conduct . . . unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate" rather than questioning McCarthy's anti-Communism.

[...]

When, in 1950, Republicans sponsored an Internal Security Act for the registration of organizations found to be "Communist-action" or "Communist-front," liberal Senators did not fight that head-on. Instead, some of them, including Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman, proposed a substitute measure, the setting up of detention centers (really, concentration camps) for suspected subversives, who, when the President declared an "internal security emergency," would be held without trial. The detention-camp bill became not a substitute for, but an addition to, the Internal Security Act, and the proposed camps were set up, ready for use. (In 1968, a time of general disillusionment with anti-Communism, this law was repealed.)

Truman's executive order on loyalty in 1947 required the Department of Justice to draw up a list of organizations it decided were "totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive . . . or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means." Not only membership in, but also "sympathetic association" with, any organization on the Attorney General's list would be considered in determining disloyalty. By 1954, there were hundreds of groups on this list, including, besides the Communist party and the Ku Klux Klan, the Chopin Cultural Center, the Cervantes Fraternal Society, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, the Committee for the Protection of the Bill of Rights, the League of American Writers, the Nature Friends of America, People's Drama, the Washington Bookshop Association, and the Yugoslav Seaman's Club.

[...]

It was Truman's Justice Department that prosecuted the leaders of the Communist party under the Smith Act, charging them with conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. The evidence consisted mostly of the fact that the Communists were distributing Marxist-Leninist literature, which the prosecution contended called for violent revolution. There was certainly not evidence of any immediate danger of violent revolution by the Communist party. The Supreme Court decision was given by Truman's appointee, Chief Justice Vinson. He stretched the old doctrine of the "clear and present danger" by saying there was a clear and present conspiracy to make a revolution at some convenient time. And so, the top leadership of the Communist party was put in prison, and soon after, most of its organizers went underground.

Undoubtedly, there was success in the attempt to make the general public fearful of Communists and ready to take drastic actions against them—imprisonment at home, military action abroad. The whole culture was permeated with anti-Communism. The large-circulation magazines had articles like "How Communists Get That Way" and "Communists Are After Your Child." The New York Times in 1956 ran an editorial: "We would not knowingly employ a Communist party member in the news or editorial departments . . . because we would not trust his ability to report the news objectively or to comment on it honestly. . . . An FBI informer's story about his exploits as a Communist who became an FBI agent—"I Led Three Lives"—was serialized in five hundred newspapers and put on television. Hollywood movies had titles like I Married a Communist and I Was a Communist for the FBI. Between 1948 and 1954, more than forty anti-Communist films came out of Hollywood.

Even the American Civil Liberties Union, set up specifically to defend the liberties of Communists and all other political groups, began to wilt in the cold war atmosphere. It had already started in this direction back in 1940 when it expelled one of its charter members, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, because she was a member of the Communist party. In the fifties, the ACLU was hesitant to defend Corliss Lamont, its own board member, and Owen Lattimore, when both were under attack. It was reluctant to defend publicly the Communist leaders during the first Smith Act trial, and kept completely out of the Rosenberg case, saying no civil liberties issues were involved.

Young and old were taught that anti-Communism was heroic. Three million copies were sold of the book by Mickey Spillane published in 1951, One Lonely Night, in which the hero, Mike Hammer says: "I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it. . . . They were Commies . . . red sons-of-bitches who should have died long ago. . . ." A comic strip hero, Captain America, said: "Beware, commies, spies, traitors, and foreign agents! Captain America, with all loyal, free men behind him, is looking for you. . . ." And in the fifties, schoolchildren all over the country participated in air raid drills in which a Soviet attack on America was signaled by sirens: the children had to crouch under their desks until it was "all clear."

It was an atmosphere in which the government could get mass support for a policy of rearmament. The system, so shaken in the thirties, had learned that war production could bring stability and high profits. Truman's anti-Communism was attractive. The business publication Steel had said in November 1946-even before the Truman Doctrine that Truman's policies gave "the firm assurance that maintaining and building our preparations for war will be big business in the United States for at least a considerable period ahead."

That prediction turned out to be accurate. At the start of 1950, the total U.S. budget was about $40 billion, and the military part of it was about $12 billion. But by 1955, the military part alone was $40 billion out of a total of $62 billion.

In 1960, the military budget was $45.8 billion—9.7 percent of the budget. That year John F. Kennedy was elected President, and he immediately moved to increase military spending. In fourteen months, the Kennedy administration added $9 billion to defense funds, according to Edgar Bottome (The Balance of Terror).

By 1962, based on a series of invented scares about Soviet military build-ups, a false "bomber gap" and a false "missile gap," the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority. It had the equivalent, in nuclear weapons, of 1,500 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, far more than enough to destroy every major city in the world-the equivalent, in fact, of 10 tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on earth. To deliver these bombs, the United States had more than 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 80 missiles on nuclear submarines, 90 missiles on stations overseas, 1,700 bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union, 300 fighter-bombers on aircraft carriers, able to carry atomic weapons, and 1,000 land-based supersonic fighters able to carry atomic bombs.

The Soviet Union was obviously behind—it had between fifty and a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles and fewer than two hundred long-range bombers. But the U.S. budget kept mounting, the hysteria kept growing, the profits of corporations getting defense contracts multiplied, and employment and wages moved ahead just enough to keep a substantial number of Americans dependent on war industries for their living.

By 1970, the U.S. military budget was $80 billion and the corporations involved in military production were making fortunes. Two-thirds of the 40 billion spent on weapons systems was going to twelve or fifteen giant industrial corporations, whose main reason for existence was to fulfill government military contracts. Senator Paul Douglass, an economist and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee of the Senate, noted that "six-sevenths of these contracts are not competitive. . . . In the alleged interest of secrecy, the government picks a company and draws up a contract in more or less secret negotiations."

C. Wright Mills, in his book of the fifties, The Power Elite, counted the military as part of the top elite, along with politicians and corporations. These elements were more and more intertwined. A Senate report showed that the one hundred largest defense contractors, who held 67.4 percent of the military contracts, employed more than two thousand former high-ranking officers of the military.

Meanwhile, the United States, giving economic aid to certain countries, was creating a network of American corporate control over the globe, and building its political influence over the countries it aided. The Marshall Plan of 1948, which gave $16 billion in economic aid to Western European countries in four years, had an economic aim: to build up markets for American exports. George Marshall (a general, then Secretary of State) was quoted in an early 1948 State Department bulletin: "It is idle to think that a Europe left to its own efforts . .. would remain open to American business in the same way that we have known it in the past."

The Marshall Plan also had a political motive. The Communist parties of Italy and France were strong, and the United States decided to use pressure and money to keep Communists out of the cabinets of those countries. When the Plan was beginning, Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson said: "These measures of relief and reconstruction have been only in part suggested by humanitarianism. Your Congress has authorized and your Government is carrying out, a policy of relief and reconstruction today chiefly as a matter of national self-interest."

[...]

When John F. Kennedy took office, he launched the Alliance for Progress, a program of help for Latin America, emphasizing social reform to better the lives of people. But it turned out to be mostly military aid to keep in power right-wing dictatorships and enable them to stave off revolutions.

From military aid, it was a short step to military intervention. What Truman had said at the start of the Korean war about "the rule of force" and the "rule of law" was again and again, under Truman and his successors, contradicted by American action. In Iran, in 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency succeeded in overthrowing a government which nationalized the oil industry. In Guatemala, in 1954, a legally elected government was overthrown by an invasion force of mercenaries trained by the CIA at military bases in Honduras and Nicaragua and supported by four American fighter planes flown by American pilots. The invasion put into power Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had at one time received military training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The government that the United States overthrew was the most democratic Guatemala had ever had. The President, Jacobo Arbenz, was a left-of-center Socialist; four of the fifty-six seats in the Congress were held by Communists. What was most unsettling to American business interests was that Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit, offering compensation that United Fruit called "unacceptable." Armas, in power, gave the land back to United Fruit, abolished the tax on interest and dividends to foreign investors, eliminated the secret ballot, and jailed thousands of political critics.

In 1958, the Eisenhower government sent thousands of marines to Lebanon to make sure the pro-American government there was not toppled by a revolution, and to keep an armed presence in that oil-rich area.

The Democrat-Republican, liberal-conservative agreement to prevent or overthrow revolutionary governments whenever possible whether Communist, Socialist, or anti-United Fruit-became most evident in 1961 in Cuba. That little island 90 miles from Florida had gone through a revolution in 1959 by a rebel force led by Fidel Castro, in which the American-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, was overthrown. The revolution was a direct threat to American business interests. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy had repealed the Platt Amendment (which permitted American intervention in Cuba), but the United States still kept a naval base in Cuba at Guantanamo, and U.S. business interests still dominated the Cuban economy. American companies controlled 80 to 100 percent of Cuba's utilities, mines, cattle ranches, and oil refineries, 40 percent of the sugar industry, and 50 percent of the public railways.

[...]

Cuba had changed. The Good Neighbor Policy did not apply. In the spring of 1960, President Eisenhower secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to arm and train anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Guatemala for a future invasion of Cuba. When Kennedy took office in the spring of 1961 the CIA had 1,400 exiles, armed and trained. He moved ahead with the plans, and on April 17, 1961, the CIA-trained force, with some Americans participating, landed at the Bay of Pigs on the south shore of Cuba, 90 miles from Havana. They expected to stimulate a general rising against Castro. But it was a popular regime. There was no rising. In three days, the CIA forces were crushed by Castro's army.

The whole Bay of Pigs affair was accompanied by hypocrisy and lying. The invasion was a violation—recalling Truman's "rule of law"—of a treaty the U.S. had signed, the Charter of the Organization of American States, which reads: "No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state."

Four days before the invasion-because there had been press reports of secret bases and CIA training for invaders-President Kennedy told a press conference: ". . . there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces." True, the landing force was Cuban, but it was all organized by the United States, and American war planes, including American pilots, were involved; Kennedy had approved the use of unmarked navy jets in the invasion. Four American pilots of those planes were killed, and their families were not told the truth about how those men died.

The success of the liberal-conservative coalition in creating a national anti-Communist consensus was shown by how certain important news publications cooperated with the Kennedy administration in deceiving the American public on the Cuban invasion. The New Republic was about to print an article on the CIA training of Cuban exiles, a few weeks before the invasion. Historian Arthur Schlesinger was given copies of the article in advance. He showed them to Kennedy, who asked that the article not be printed, and The New Republic went along.

James Reston and Turner Catledge of the New York Times, on the government's request, did not run a story about the imminent invasion. Arthur Schlesinger said of the New York Times action: "This was another patriotic act, but in retrospect I have wondered whether, if the press had behaved irresponsibly, it would not have spared the country a disaster." What seemed to bother him, and other liberals in the cold war consensus, was not that the United States was interfering in revolutionary movements in other countries, but that it was doing so unsuccessfully.

Around 1960, the fifteen-year effort since the end of World War II to break up the Communist-radical upsurge of the New Deal and wartime years seemed successful. The Communist party was in disarray-its leaders in jail, its membership shrunken, its influence in the trade union movement very small. The trade union movement itself had become more controlled, more conservative. The military budget was taking half of the national budget, but the public was accepting this.

The radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons had dangerous possibilities for human health, but the public was not aware of that. The Atomic Energy Commission insisted that the deadly effects of atomic tests were exaggerated, and an article in 1955 in the Reader's Digest (the largest-circulation magazine in the United States) said: "The scare stories about this country's atomic tests are simply not justified."

In the mid-fifties, there was a flurry of enthusiasm for air-raid shelters; the public was being told these would keep them safe from atomic blasts. A government consultant and scientist, Herman Kahn, wrote a book, On Thermonuclear War, in which he explained that it was possible to have a nuclear war without total destruction of the world, that people should not be so frightened of it. A political scientist named Henry Kissinger wrote a book published in 1957 in which he said: "With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears...."

The country was on a permanent war economy which had big pockets of poverty, but there were enough people at work, making enough money, to keep things quiet. The distribution of wealth was still unequal. From 1944 to 1961, it had not changed much: the lowest fifth of the families received 5 percent of all the income; the highest fifth received 45 percent of all the income. In 1953, 1.6 percent of the adult population owned more than 80 percent of the corporate stock and nearly 90 percent of the corporate bonds. About 200 giant corporations out of 200,000 corporations—one-tenth of 1 percent of all corporations—controlled about 60 percent of the manufacturing wealth of the nation.

When John F. Kennedy presented his budget to the nation after his first year in office, it was clear that, liberal Democrat or not, there would be no major change in the distribution of income or wealth or tax advantages. New York Times columnist James Reston summed up Kennedy's budget messages as avoiding any "sudden transformation of the home front" as well as "a more ambitious frontal attack on the unemployment problem." Reston said:

He agreed to a tax break for business investment in plant expansion and modernization. He is not spoiling for a fight with the Southern conservatives over civil rights. He has been urging the unions to keep wage demands down so that prices can be competitive in the world markets and jobs increased. And he has been trying to reassure the business community that he does not want any cold war with them on the home front.
. . .this week in his news conference he refused to carry out his promise to bar discrimination in Government-insured housing, but talked instead of postponing this until there was a "national consensus" in its favor. . . .

During these twelve months the President has moved over into the decisive middle ground of American politics. . . .


On this middle ground, all seemed secure. Nothing had to be done for blacks. Nothing had to be done to change the economic structure. An aggressive foreign policy could continue. The country seemed under control. And then, in the 1960s, came a series of explosive rebellions in every area of American life, which showed that all the system's estimates of security and success were wrong.