Michael McCaffrey lives in Los Angeles where he works as an acting coach, screenwriter and consultant. He is also a freelance film and cultural critic whose work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog.
Anyone who has eyes to see can clearly make out that America is an addled empire in steep decline that is firmly entrenched in its bread-and-circuses stage. This has been brought into clear focus due to Covid-19. Since there is now a shortage of bread, as supermarket shelves are bare, and the distraction of the circus of sports has been indefinitely removed from the culture, Americans are left with little to distract them from cold, hard reality.
With no brawls or ballgames to watch, and the fear of potential hunger gnawing at their bloated bellies and brains, and with social distancing leaving them isolated with little but their thoughts as company, Americans will now find it harder and harder to ignore the truth about their country and its deplorably corrupt media, financial, government, education and health care systems, that is staring them in the face.
As the old adage goes, crisis reveals character, and the coronavirus contagion is a crisis of epic proportions that is revealing America to be utterly devoid of any redeeming character whatsoever.
If America were a sane, healthy, and rational country this would be a great opportunity for change to occur…alas, it is not. America is an insane, unhealthy and irrational nation, and so any genuine change is inconceivable.
For example, this crisis has once again revealed the house of cards that is the smoke and mirrors American economy. The American economy has long been rigged through financialization, where stock buybacks and accounting shenanigans inflate the stock market but create nothing of substance for the masses except the illusion of prosperity. Here in America the economy long ago stopped working for regular folks, as evidenced by the fact that despite productivity soaring, for the last forty years wages have remained stagnant, while the cost of living has escalated.
The American Way has devolved into a bizarre reverse-Robin Hood world, where the rich steal from the poor and keep it for themselves. Proof of this is that this Covid-19 crisis will undoubtedly be used, just as the 2008 collapse, as a way for the malicious narcissists in Washington, Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms to come together to assure that all their losses are socialized and their profits privatized. Casinos, cruise lines, airlines, hotels and others are already lining up — including of course the scoundrels on Wall Street — for their taxpayer-funded handout.
Bailing out working- and middle-class Americans, though, is an absolute non-starter for the ruling elite. The upper crust will throw around vacuous catch phrases, like the deliciously ironic “moral hazard,” to make their argument, which is pretty rich considering the vermin on Wall Street and their cronies on Capitol Hill are so morally bereft, it is a hazard to all humanity.
Coronavirus is not nearly as deadly as the cancerous corruption that is endemic in our oligarchic corporatocracy. For proof of that look no further than Nancy Pelosi’s emergency “sick pay” bill, that exempts companies of over 500 employees from paying sick pay — and has a boatload of special exemptions for businesses below that threshold — which leaves all but 20% of workers eligible for benefits. The holes in Pelosi’s bill are bigger than the gaping void where her brain and soul should be.
This corruption of the elites is bipartisan, as evidenced by two Republican Senators, Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler (who is married to Jeffrey Sprechter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange), who allegedly took advantage of classified briefings on the impending severity of coronavirus in late January and early February to pull off some slick insider trading maneuvers so they could cash in before the public had any clue what was coming. Both, of course, deny any impropriety.
The egregious economic divide in America is further highlighted by the Covid-19 debate over whether to close schools amidst the crisis. The reason this debate raged on well past the rational time to act is that our education system is not a system of learning but rather a glorified daycare and food delivery service.
Proletarian parents are unable to stay home and raise their kids anymore because it now takes two parents — usually working multiple jobs — to make less equivalently than what one working parent did forty years ago.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 70% of all students are below the poverty line and rely on the school system for the majority of their meals. In the wealthiest country on the planet, that is absolutely disgraceful. The virus of structural economic inequality isa much more long-term and deadly problem than coronavirus, and the ruling class and their shameless lackeys in the press, have no interest in ever honestly addressing or acknowledging it.
The corporate whores in Congress and the White House (of both parties) also gleefully inform Americans that universal, single-payer health care, which every other industrialized nation in the world already has, is a pipe dream and impossibility.
They tell us they could never ever pay for something so decadent and luxurious as health care, but then they magically pull $1.5 trillion out of their gold-plated assholes in order to stave off a collapse of their own making. It is amazing how the Lords of Finance can make money miraculously appear in order to get things done when it is their exorbitant wealth on the line, and not ordinary Americans’ health and wellbeing.
Coronavirus is a crisis that is revealing the ugly truth about America and the malignant character of its ruling class. The crisis is going to get worse before it gets better, but it eventually will get better. America, on the other hand, will only get much worse, with no hope that it is ever going to get better.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Without a mass movement continually pushing and prodding for real change and holding politicians accountable—for their policies as well as their words—our neoliberal rulers assume that they can safely ignore the concerns and interests of ordinary people.
Demonstrators wave flags as they take part during the day of cultural activities ‘El Derecho a Vivir en Paz’ called by ‘Movimiento Unidad Social’ at Plaza O’Higgins on October 27, 2019 in Santiago, Chile. Unidad Social, an organization conformed by various social groups, has called society to be part of cultural activities in defence of human rights and against abuses, under the slogan #NoMasAbusos (No more abuses) people demand Sebastian Piñera’s Government attention to issues such as health care, pension system, privatization of water, public transport, education, social mobility and corruption. (Photo: Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images)
The waves of protests breaking out in country after country around the world beg the question: Why aren’t Americans rising up in peaceful protest like our neighbors? We live at the very heart of this neoliberal system that is force-feeding the systemic injustice and inequality of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. So we are subject to many of the same abuses that have fueled mass protest movements in other countries, including high rents, stagnant wages, cradle-to-grave debt, ever-rising economic inequality, privatized healthcare, a shredded social safety net, abysmal public transportation, systemic political corruption and endless war.
We also have a corrupt, racist billionaire as president, who Congress may soon impeach, but where are the masses outside the White House, banging pots and pans to drive Trump out? Why aren’t people crashing the offices of their congresspeople, demanding that they represent the people or resign? If none of these conditions has so far provoked a new American revolution, what will it take to trigger one?
In the 1960s and 1970s, the senseless Vietnam War provoked a serious, well-organized antiwar movement. But today the U.S.’s endless wars just rage on in the background of our lives, as the U.S. and its allies kill and mutilate men, women and children in distant countries, day after day, year after year. Our history has also witnessed inspiring mass movements for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights, but these movements are much tamer today.
The Occupy Movement in 2011 came closest to challenging the entire neoliberal system. It awakened a new generation to the reality of government of, by, and for the corrupt 1%, and built a powerful basis for solidarity among the marginalized 99%. But Occupy lost momentum because it failed to transition from a rallying point and a decentralized, democratic forum to a cohesive movement that could impact the existing power structure.
The climate movement is starting to mobilize a new generation, and groups like School Strike for the Climate and Extinction Rebellion take direct aim at this destructive economic system that prioritizes corporate growth and profits over the very survival of life on Earth. But while climate protests have shut down parts of London and other cities around the world, the scale of climate protests in the U.S. does not yet match the urgency of the crisis.
So why is the American public so passive?
Americans pour their energy and hopes into electoral campaigns
Election campaigns in most countries last only a few months, with strict limits on financing and advertising to try to ensure fair elections. But Americans pour millions of hours and billions of dollars into multi-year election campaigns run by an ever-growing sector of the commercial advertising industry, which even awarded Barack Obama its “Marketer of the Year” award for 2008. (The other finalists were not John McCain or the Republicans but Apple, Nike and Coors beer.)
When U.S. elections are finally over, thousands of exhausted volunteers sweep up the bunting and go home, believing their work is done. While electoral politics should be a vehicle for change, this neoliberal model of corporate “center-right” and “center-left” politics ensures that congresspeople and presidents of both parties are primarily accountable to the ruling 1% who “pay to play.”
Former President Jimmy Carter has bluntly described what Americans euphemistically call “campaign finance” as a system of legalized bribery. Transparency International (TI) ranks the U.S. 22nd on its political corruption index, identifying it as more corrupt than any other wealthy, developed country.
Without a mass movement continually pushing and prodding for real change and holding politicians accountable—for their policies as well as their words—our neoliberal rulers assume that they can safely ignore the concerns and interests of ordinary people as they make the critical decisions that shape the world we live in. As Frederick Douglass observed in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.”
Millions of Americans have internalized the myth of the “American dream,” believing they have exceptional chances for social and economic mobility compared with their peers in other countries. If they aren’t successful, it must be their own fault—either they’re not smart enough or they don’t work hard enough.
The American Dream is not just elusive—it’s a complete fantasy. In reality, the U.S. has the greatest income inequality of any wealthy, developed country. Of the 39 developed countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only South Africa and Costa Rica exceed the U.S.’s 18% poverty rate. The United States is an anomaly: a very wealthy country suffering from exceptional poverty. To make matters worse, children born into poor families in the U.S. are more likely to remain poor as adults than poor children in other wealthy countries. But the American dream ideology keeps people struggling and competing to improve their lives on a strictly individual basis, instead of demanding a fairer society and the healthcare, education and public services we all need and deserve.
The corporate media keeps Americans uninformed and docile
The U.S.’s corporate media system is also unique, both in its consolidated corporate ownership and in its limited news coverage, endlessly downsized newsrooms and narrow range of viewpoints. Its economics reporting reflects the interests of its corporate owners and advertisers; its domestic reporting and debate is strictly framed and limited by the prevailing rhetoric of Democratic and Republican leaders; its anemic foreign policy coverage is editorially dictated by the State Department and Pentagon.
This closed media system wraps the public in a cocoon of myths, euphemisms and propaganda to leave us exceptionally ignorant about our own country and the world we live in. Reporters Without Borders ranks the U.S. 48th out of 180 countries on its Press Freedom Index, once again making the U.S. an exceptional outlier among wealthy countries.
It’s true people can search for their own truth on social media to counter the corporate babble, but social media is itself a distraction. People spend countless hours on facebook, twitter, instagram and other platforms venting their anger and frustration without getting up off the couch to actually do something—except perhaps sign a petition. “Clicktivism” will not change the world.
Add to this the endless distractions of Hollywood, video games, sports and consumerism, and the exhaustion that comes with working several jobs to make ends meet. The resulting political passivity of Americans is not some strange accident of American culture but the intended product of a mutually reinforcing web of economic, political and media systems that keep the American public confused, distracted and convinced of our own powerlessness.
The political docility of the American public does not mean that Americans are happy with the way things are, and the unique challenges this induced docility poses for American political activists and organizers surely cannot be more daunting than the life-threatening repression faced by activists in Chile, Haiti or Iraq.
So how can we liberate ourselves from our assigned roles as passive spectators and mindless cheerleaders for a venal ruling class that is laughing all the way to the bank and through the halls of power as it grabs ever more concentrated wealth and power at our expense?
“How can we liberate ourselves from our assigned roles as passive spectators and mindless cheerleaders for a venal ruling class that is laughing all the way to the bank and through the halls of power as it grabs ever more concentrated wealth and power at our expense?”
Few expected a year ago that 2019 would be a year of global uprising against the neoliberal economic and political system that has dominated the world for forty years. Few predicted new revolutions in Chile or Iraq or Algeria. But popular uprisings have a way of confounding conventional wisdom.
The catalysts for each of these uprisings have also been surprising. The protests in Chile began over an increase in subway fares. In Lebanon, the spark was a proposed tax on WhatsApp and other social media accounts. Hikes in fuel tax triggered the yellow vest protests in France, while the ending of fuel subsidies was a catalyst in both Ecuador and Sudan.
The common factor in all these movements is the outrage of ordinary people at systems and laws that reward corruption, oligarchy and plutocracy at the expense of their own quality of life. In each country, these catalysts were the final straws that broke the camel’s back, but once people were in the street, protests quickly turned into more general uprisings demanding the resignation of leaders and governments.
They have the guns but we have the numbers
State repression and violence have only fueled greater popular demands for more fundamental change, and millions of protesters in country after country have remained committed to non-violence and peaceful protest – in stark contrast to the rampant violence of the right-wing coup in Bolivia
While these uprisings seem spontaneous, in every country where ordinary people have risen up in 2019, activists have been working for years to build the movements that eventually brought large numbers of people onto the streets and into the headlines.Sanders’ wildly successful first presidential campaign in 2016 pushed a new generation of American politicians to commit to real policy solutions to real problems instead of the vague promises and applause lines that serve as smokescreens for the corrupt agendas of neoliberal politicians like Trump and Biden.
Erica Chenoweth’s research on the history of nonviolent protest movements found that whenever at least 3.5% of a population have taken to the streets to demand political change, governments have been unable to resist their demands. Here in the U.S., Transparency International found that the number of Americans who see “direct action,” including street protests, as the antidote to our corrupt political system has risen from 17% to 25% since Trump took office, far more than Chenoweth’s 3.5%. Only 28% still see simply “voting for a clean candidate” as the answer. So maybe we are just waiting for the right catalyst to strike a chord with the American public.
In fact, the work of progressive activists in the U.S. is already upsetting the neoliberal status quo. Without the movement-building work of thousands of Americans, Bernie Sanders would still be a little-known Senator from Vermont, largely ignored by the corporate media and the Democratic Party. Sanders’ wildly successful first presidential campaign in 2016 pushed a new generation of American politicians to commit to real policy solutions to real problems instead of the vague promises and applause lines that serve as smokescreens for the corrupt agendas of neoliberal politicians like Trump and Biden.
We can’t predict exactly what catalyst will trigger a mass movement in the U.S. like the ones we are seeing overseas, but with more and more Americans, especially young people, demanding an alternative to a system that doesn’t serve their needs, the tinder for a revolutionary movement is everywhere. We just have to keep kicking up sparks until one catches fire.
John W. Whitehead
November 1st, 2019
The Rutherford Institute
This article was originally published by John W. Whitehead at The Rutherford Institute.
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”
In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
The answer is the same in every age: fear.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, laptops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?
Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega-corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
If we’re watching, we’re not doing.
The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.
That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes if we would only open them.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
http://www.theorganicprepper.com
In a nation that has prided itself on the “American Dream” – the dream that anyone can become wealthy if they work hard enough and make the right decisions – it’s probably a shock to learn that a lot of folks no longer believe in capitalism.
But the shock goes even deeper than that. A report from the Cato Institute that examined Americans’ opinions on wealth and the wealthy says that 47% of American socialists believe that “taking violent action against the rich may be justified.”
The Cato Institute is a think tank that performs independent, non-partisan research into a wide range of issues related to personal liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. You can learn more about the Cato Institute here.
The new report is entitled What Americans Think About Poverty, Wealth, and Work.
The survey…investigates attitudes toward the rich and the poor and examines what Americans believe about work, welfare, and social mobility. (source)
Many of the results seem to be right down party lines and in this political climate, are frighteningly predictable.
Let’s take a look at the findings.
Opinions have taken a shift since 2016.
In 2016, Democrats were about as favorable toward capitalism (58%) as socialism (56%). But after President Donald Trump took office, Democrats became more favorable toward socialism. Today, 64% of Democrats have favorable opinions of socialism and 45% are favorable to capitalism. Republicans continue to have overwhelmingly favorable views of capitalism (77%) while only 13% have favorable views of socialism. (source)
Why did this shift occur?
According to half of the Democrats surveyed, President Trump caused them to dislike capitalism and lean more toward socialism.
At the same time, 44% of Democrats say that Trump has not influenced their views on capitalism vs. socialism. 72% of independents and 64% of Republicans reported that President Trump has not influenced their views on the economic model.
Overall, 59% of Americans favor capitalism and 39% favor Socialism.
Opinions on wealth were varied. Here were some of the findings:
84% of Americans believe “there is nothing wrong with a person trying to make as much money as they honestly can.”
A worryingly slim majority of Americans do not believe that wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor.
More than half of Americans (55%) believe that the distribution of wealth in this country is “unfair.” This is divided by age and political philosophy.
The distribution of wealth (or lack thereof) will probably be a key factor in the next election. It was only a couple of years ago when a group went public about their desire to “expropriate” the assets of the wealthy and redistribute them to the poor.
Let’s talk about younger people’s opinions versus older people’s opinions. Cato reports:
People under 30 are about 20–30 points more likely than Americans 65 and over to:
- believe the rich got rich by “taking advantage of other people” (52% vs. 27%)
- believe billionaires are a threat to democracy (51% vs. 26%)
- feel “angry” when they read or hear about rich people (44% vs. 11%)
- believe it’s “immoral” for society to allow people to become billionaires (39% vs. 13%)
- believe that citizens taking violent action against the rich may be justified (35% vs. 10%)
- support redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor (53% vs. 20%)
- support raising top marginal tax rates (62% vs. 43%)
Young Americans are about equally favorable toward socialism (50%) and capitalism (49%). In stark contrast, Americans 65 and over solidly prefer capitalism (76%) to socialism (34%). (source)
It is not out of line to blame our education system for pushing socialism and leftist professors who promote violence for these attitudes. In fact, the Democratic Socialists of America urge socialists to become teachers to accomplish just this.
However, it might be consoling to note that when a similar survey was undertaken in 1978, more than half (54%) of Americans under 30 believed that wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. The young people who were 18-29 then are 59-70 now, and you can see how their opinions have changed. That should provide some hope that the attitudes of current young people will change as they become more mature and have more life experience.
One of the biggest points of disparity was opinions on how rich people attained their money. Liberals and conservatives are completely at odds regarding this.
- Strong liberals say the top drivers of wealth are family connections (48%), inheritance (40%), and getting lucky (31%)
- Strong conservatives say the top drivers of wealth are hard work (62%), ambition (47%), self-discipline (45%), and risk-taking (36%)
- Strong Liberals say the top causes of poverty are discrimination (51%), an unfair economic system (48%), and a lack of educational opportunities (48%)
- Strong Conservatives say the top causes of poverty are poor life choices (60%), a lack of work ethic (52%), breakdown of families (47%), and drugs and alcohol (47%) (source)
With these differences in perspective, it is easy to see how difficult it would be for liberals and conservatives to come to a consensus regarding policy to “fix” the poverty in America.
According to this report, there are two major factors that influence people’s points of view regarding capitalism vs. socialism: resentment and compassion. The report says:
Statistical tests find that resentment of high achievers has about twice the impact as compassion for the needy in predicting hostility toward capitalism and support for raising taxes on the rich. However, compassion is a better predictor of support for increasing welfare benefits. Both resentment and compassion predict support for socialism. (source)
At the same time, 69% believe that billionaires became wealthy by creating value for others, and 65% believe that the nation is better off when people become wealthy because they, in turn, will invest in businesses that create jobs.
Most Americans (82%) believe that people should be “allowed” to become billionaires. However, this really breaks down in the Democratic party, where 54% of them believe that billionaires are a “threat to democracy.” Unsurprisingly, 65% of socialists believe that “allowing” billionaires is immoral.
There are more people than you might think who believe that “citizens taking violent action against the rich” is acceptable. Here are the people who believe that it is acceptable in some situations to be violent toward the wealthy.
One must wonder what they mean by “violence.”
Do they mean that violence should be used to expropriate the wealth or violence should be used just for the sake of harming the wealthy for the audacity of being financially well-to-do? Do they want to use guillotines like the people in the French Revolution to enforce their goals of wealth distribution?
At this point, there’s a hard push toward socialism in this country.
Most folks who believe in socialism don’t see the correlation between those policies and the collapse of Venezuela for example. They don’t understand that every time in history that food production was collectivized, people died of starvation. On the other hand, a lot of the vocal people who are against socialism have views that appear to be condescending and judgmental, neither of which is going to win over hearts and minds.
As someone who has been dirt poor despite my very hard work, I find the opinions that cite laziness and drug use to be downright offensive. As someone who managed to dig myself out of poverty, I find the concept of having the results of my hard work “redistributed” to be equally offensive.
Also note: this article is based on the Cato Institute’s statistics – this isn’t an opinion piece.
What do you think of the results of this survey? Do you believe there will be violence against the wealthy? Do you think the push for socialism will continue until we no longer recognize the United States as the land of opportunity?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the findings. Do they seem accurate to you? Do you have any personal experiences that support or contradict the survey? Please share those stories in the comments.
And try to keep it civil – this only has to be volatile if we allow it to be.
Please visit The Cato Institute to read more details of this survey on the state of our union, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company. She lives in the mountains of Virginia with her family. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
We have raised an entire generation of Americans that have no respect for the law, and now we are reaping what we have sown. I cannot even begin to tell you how alarmed I am by some of the videos that I have been watching lately. As you will see below, all over the nation young people are brazenly flouting the law, obstructing and assaulting law enforcement officers, and committing criminal acts in large groups. I think that “lawlessness” is perhaps the best word to describe what is happening, and many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning. I have so much respect for the good law enforcement officers across the country that put their lives on the line day after day to protect all of us, but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes at this point. If you wonder why I would say such a thing, just consider what just happened in New York City…
In a series of shocking videos, NYPD officers can be seen being doused with buckets of water and pelted with projectiles as they tried to do their jobs (in one video, the officers were in the middle of making an arrest).
The stunning footage, which was first spotted online on Monday, shows the brazen young men in Harlem and Brooklyn dousing cops with water and, in one frame, an officer gets beaned in the back of the head with an empty red plastic bucket. The attacks on the officers started as they were arresting another young man, and in the video, they can be seen handcuffing the man while he was splayed out on the hood of a car.
How would you respond if you were attacked like this?
If I was a police officer in that situation, I would not have been able to let that kind of abuse go, and those young attackers would have learned the hard way that there are very serious consequences for assaulting a police officer. But this is what happens when we raise an entire generation without any values whatsoever.
These young people are just doing whatever seems right in their own eyes, and similar things are happening all over the nation.
For example, a “flash mob” recently stormed into a North Face store in Wisconsin and stole $30,000 worth of merchandise…
A band of shoplifters who formed a ‘flash mob’ and rushed into a North Face store are accused of stealing $30,000 worth of merchandise, according to a report in the Kenosha News.
Dramatic video obtained from the Pleasant Prairie Police Department shows the group of ten shoplifters walk into the store, before quickly grabbing as many items as they can carry and rushing out.
How cold-hearted do you have to be to do something like this?
An even larger flash mob stormed a Walgreens in Philadelphia on the 4th of July…
Philadelphia police have released surveillance video showing dozens of teens vandalizing and stealing from a South Street Walgreens on the 4th of July. The incident happened at the store on the 1800 block of South Street in the Graduate Hospital section of the city.
As you can see from video footage of the incident, the young people seemed to take great joy in the crimes that they were committing.
If things are this crazy now, what will things look like when economic conditions get really bad and those young people get really desperate? Elsewhere in Philadelphia, a pack of teen girls was viciously attacking random female victims that they came across in the street, and video of the attacks caused quite a bit of outrage…
A gang of teenage girls filmed themselves targeting female strangers in random attacks on the streets of Philadelphia.
The disturbing video shows the girls approaching their unsuspecting victims on the street before proceeding to slap them and wrestle them to the ground.
The violent video sparked outrage when it was shared online.
Of course, many of these young criminals will end up in prison, but in many cases that will just mean that they will learn how to be even better criminals from those they are incarcerated with.
And the truth is that in many instances our prisons are completely and utterly out of control. For example, it is being reported that one prison down in Mississippi allegedly put the gangs in charge at one point.
Everywhere you look there is lawlessness. This week when ICE officials showed up to arrest an illegal immigrant in Nashville, the man’s neighbors formed a human chain around him in order to keep that from happening…
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived at a Nashville home Monday in an attempt to detain a man there, neighbors and activists gathered to support the man, who remained shuttered in a van with a child for hours before the agents left.
And once the agents and police officers they had called to the scene finally drove away, neighbors who had kept the man and the boy fed, hydrated and cool, formed a human chain from the van to the house as the man and the boy shuffled inside.
In the end, the ICE officials left and the illegal immigrant got away.
When there is a complete and utter lack of respect for law enforcement on a widespread basis, that is a recipe for chaos.
And without a doubt, our nation is on the brink of great chaos. Just consider these numbers…
After a week that saw President Trump and his foes toss toxic words at each other, there is now a warning that the next phase could be “violence.”
Nearly 8 of 10 Americans told the Pew Research Center that supporters for both sides could “act” on the politically charged rhetoric with violence. It was higher for Democrats, 91%, than Republicans, 61%.
It is not going to take much of a spark at all to set off the kind of civil unrest that I have been repeatedly warning about.
Day after day, the mainstream media is stirring up more anger, frustration, strife, discord, and division. I have never seen more hatred in America than I see right now, and it is exceedingly difficult to imagine how all of this could possibly end well.
About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The Endand Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.
The Working Poor and Homeless in the US
Four Corners (2017)
Film Review
This Australian documentary challenges whether job growth in the US (25 million new jobs in ten years) really represents economic recovery. The film makes three important points: 1) the vast majority of new American jobs are minimum wage part-time jobs, 2) well-paid middle-class jobs continue to vanish, and 3) approximately one-half of US workers live in poverty.
The film follows three families. The first, in Orlando Florida, consists of a single mother of three who works 70 hours a week for Dunkin’ Donuts and MacDonald’s. Earning $8 an hour, she and her family live in a cheap motel because they can’t afford rent. She sleeps 1-2 hours a night, and her mother-in-law provides childcare while she works.
The second family is a couple with two children who live in a homeless camp in the parking lot of a Seattle church. The wife works full-time as a cashier at Seattle Center, and her husband takes temporary construction jobs when he can find them. Most of the camp residents are employed workers with kids.
The third individual is a middle-aged machinist in Erie Pennsylvania who has been just been laid off from General Electric Transport after 13 years. The factory is moving to Fort Worth Texas. GE anticipates cutting wages in half because Texas in a non-union state. In addition to losing millions of industrial jobs when manufacturers moved overseas in the eighties and nineties, the US lost an additional five million industrial jobs in the last 15 years.
Living on the edge, being dragged down by debt, and having little hope for the future is no way to live. But that is precisely where most Americans find themselves in 2019. Despite a supposedly “booming economy”, the middle class continues to shrink and most of the country is barely scraping by from month to month. In fact, a brand new survey that was just released by Charles Schwab discovered that 59 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck…
Overall, 59 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, according to the survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Charles Schwab.
However, the Millennial generation (people ages 23-38) was the most likely to struggle in between payday, at 62 percent, followed by Generation X (60 percent), Generation Z (55 percent) and Baby Boomers (53 percent).
I realize that those numbers look really high, but this is really where we are at as a society.
In fact, a study that was just conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago found that 51 percent of all “working adults” would not be able to cover basic necessities “if they missed more than one paycheck”…
Missing more than one paycheck is a one-way ticket to financial hardship for nearly half of the country’s workforce.
A new study from NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent social research institution, found that 51% of working adults in the United States would need to access savings to cover necessities if they missed more than one paycheck.
So when the next recession strikes, millions of Americans that suddenly lose their jobs could find themselves facing financial disaster almost immediately.
The survey that was just released by Charles Schwab found that there are a lot of reasons why Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and “rising college debt” is one of them…
‘Spending is certainly one factor,’ said Terri Kallsen, executive vice president for Schwab Investor Services.
‘But especially for younger Americans, we know there are factors beyond their control that make it difficult to save, including rising college debt, stagnant wages and the high cost of living, particularly in urban centers,’ she told DailyMail.com.
Today, Americans owe more than 1.5 trillion dollars on their student loans, and it is a bubble that keeps getting worse with each passing year. The following numbers about our growing student loan debt crisis come from CBS News…
Currently, 43 million Americans have student debt. The average household with student debt owes almost $48,000 and 5.2 million borrowers are in default.
Meanwhile, college costs keep rising. At Ohio State, a public university, in-state students pay $27,000 a year. Stanford University costs $74,000.
Personally, I don’t know why anyone would ever pay $74,000 a year to go to Stanford.
And as far as Ohio State and other public universities are concerned, the truth is that you can get a better education from the Internet without too much effort. I spent eight years studying at public universities, and the quality of education is a joke.
But we fill the heads of our high school students with all of this nonsense about how college “is the key to a bright future”, and we encourage them to not even worry about how much it will cost.
So they pile up enormous loans, and many of them don’t even realize that they are destroying their financial futures until it is too late.
When 25-year-old Taylor Smith first discovered how high her student loan balance had gotten, she immediately had a panic attack…
To pay for her education at Texas A&M University, Smith worked full-time throughout college. She also cobbled together 11 student loans.
“I probably graduated with about $53,000 in student debt,” Smith said. “That number hit me for the first time my last semester of college. And it was the first time I saw the full balance. And I had a panic attack immediately.”
Our system of higher education is deeply broken, and radical change is desperately needed.
Another reason why Americans are living paycheck to paycheck is because of social media envy. The following comes from USA Today…
Call it keeping up with Instagram.
Thirty-five percent of Americans admit they feel pressured to spend more than they can afford after seeing images of their friends’ lives on sites like Facebook and Instagram, according to Schwab’s 2019 modern wealth survey. The FOMO effect is most dramatic for young adults. About half of millennials and 44% of Generation Z (those born approximately between 1995 to 2015) acknowledge their spending habits are at least partly shaped by social media.
Once upon a time, Americans were concerned about keeping up with the neighbors, but these days social media is where everybody shows off.
And this is particularly true when it comes to Instagram. As far as I can tell, Instagram is the perfect social media platform for narcissists. Everyone is constantly posting photos that show how attractive, wealthy and adventurous they are, and those with the most followers tend to be ultra-attractive, ultra-wealthy and/or ultra-adventurous.
But for most of us, life is not a constant stream of Instagramable moments. Instead, life is about doing the laundry, trying to save some money on the groceries and scooping poop out of the cat litter.
If you try to keep up with the fantasies that you see on Instagram, the truth is that you will go broke really quick.
And study after study has found that is precisely where about half the country currently is…
A study from home repair service HomeServe USA found that roughly 50% of consumers either have nothing set aside to cover an emergency or less than $500 put away. And research from the Federal Reserve has indicated that roughly 4 in 10 Americans couldn’t afford a $400 emergency.
One of the things that I always stress with my readers is that if you ever want to make financial progress in life, you have got to start building wealth.
If your paycheck goes up, that doesn’t mean that you should start spending more money. Instead, you should look at it as an opportunity to start saving more money.
But for most Americans, the future is now, and that means that most of them will ultimately end up facing financial disaster down the road.
About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The Endand Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.
Could you imagine living in an RV on a permanent basis? On the one hand, such a lifestyle can offer a sense of freedom that is absolutely exhilarating. Instead of being tied down to just one place, you can freely travel the country and live anywhere that you want.
endoftheamericandream.com
Could you imagine living in an RV on a permanent basis? On the one hand, such a lifestyle can offer a sense of freedom that is absolutely exhilarating. Instead of being tied down to just one place, you can freely travel the country and live anywhere that you want. Such a lifestyle makes it easy to escape the cold in the winter and the heat in the summer, and if you don’t like your neighbors you can literally leave the next day. But of course there are a lot of negatives too. Life in an RV can be extremely cramped, there is very little privacy, and most people have to cut their possessions way, way down in order to fit all their things into an RV. Living on the road constantly can get really old, because you have to sacrifice many of the comforts of a traditional home in order to live such a lifestyle on a full-time basis. But without a doubt, more Americans are choosing to go this route than ever before. In fact, the RV Industry Association says that a million Americans now live in their RVs full-time…
A million Americans live full-time in RVs, according to the RV Industry Association. Some have to do it because they can’t afford other options, but many do it by choice. Last year was a record for RV sales, according to the data firm Statistical Surveys. More than 10.5 million households own at least one RV, a jump from 2005 when 7.5 million households had RVs, according to RVIA.
Living in an RV is certainly a lot less expensive than living in a traditional home, and that is one of the big things that is drawing people to this lifestyle.
A 30 year mortgage is essentially a suffocating lifetime financial commitment for many people, and so a lot of Americans are choosing to embrace the RV lifestyle in order to escape those financial chains. One family that the Washington Post recently interviewed says that they are “redefining what the American Dream means”…
“We’re a family of four redefining what the American Dream means. It’s happiness, not a four-bedroom house with a two-car garage,” said Robert Meinhofer, who is 45.
The Meinhofers and a dozen others who spoke with The Washington Post about this modern nomadic lifestyle said living in 200 to 400 square feet has improved their marriages and made them happier, even if they’re earning less. There’s no official term for this lifestyle, but most refer to themselves as “full-time RVers,” “digital nomads” or “workampers.”
Some are willingly choosing the RV lifestyle because they want more freedom, but others are doing it out of economic necessity.
But in almost every case, those living the RV lifestyle still need to work, and the jobs that they are able to get often don’t pay very well…
Most modern nomads need jobs to fund their travels. Jessica Meinhofer works remotely as a government contractor, simply logging in from the RV. Others pick up “gig work” cleaning campsites, harvesting on farms or in vineyards, or filling in as security guards. People learn about gigs by word of mouth, on Workamper News or Facebook groups like one for Workampers with more than 30,000 members. Big companies such as Amazon and J.C. Penney even have programs specifically recruiting RVers to help at warehouses during the peak holiday season.
So it can be tempting to dream of hitting “the open road”, but the reality of the matter is that many of these people spend long hours cleaning public toilets or stuffing boxes for big retailers.
For other Americans, even the RV lifestyle is out of reach financially, and so they are living in their vehicles.
Even though the U.S. economy has supposedly been “booming” for the last couple of years, the number of Americans that live in their vehicles has been rising very rapidly. In fact, CBS News has reported that the number of people living in their vehicles in King County, Washington increased 46 percent in the past year alone…
The number of people who live in their vehicles because they can’t find affordable housing is on the rise, even though the practice is illegal in many U.S. cities.
The number of people residing in campers and other vehicles surged 46 percent over the past year, a recent homeless census in Seattle’s King County, Washington found. The problem is “exploding” in cities with expensive housing markets, including Los Angeles, Portland and San Francisco, according to Governing magazine.
Meanwhile, the ranks of the homeless continue to surge all across the country as well. More than half a million Americans are currently homeless, and that number just keeps getting larger and larger.
All of the things that I have just shared with you are signs that the middle class in America is rapidly evaporating. Once upon a time, America had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world and homebuilders struggled to build new homes fast enough to keep up with the demand. But over the past decade the rate of homeownership in the U.S. has fallen steadily as the middle class has shrunk. More people than ever are living in RVs, in their vehicles or on the streets, and this trend is going to accelerate greatly once the next economic downturn kicks into high gear.
But I definitely do not want it to seem like I am dissing the RV lifestyle. Members of my own extended family are living in their RVs by choice, and they seem to absolutely love it.
If living in an RV will enable you to escape the rat race and live a much happier life, then go for it. The RV lifestyle is not for everyone, but many that have made the jump say that they will never go back.
And considering the times that are ahead, being able to relocate very rapidly is a good option to have. There isn’t a whole lot of room in an RV, but at least you can pick up and leave whenever you like.
About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.
Just like when the medieval executioners tortured their prisoners to scream out for “mercy”, so today two former aides of US President Donald Trump are put being on the rack to extract a begging response. If they finger the president, then maybe mercy will be shown to the prisoners.
Trump’s former lawyer and his campaign manager are facing lengthy prison sentences for financial fraud and political campaign irregularities. Michael Cohen could get five years in jail, while Paul Manafort faces a soul-crushing 80 years behind bars. A de facto death sentence, given his age.
The set-up here is so obvious and pathetic. Both men are being dangled by the feet ahead of their sentencing, with the blatant purpose of forcing them to incriminate Trump, and in that way, Trump’s political enemies finally get their long-held objective of impeaching the president.
This is how the “American Dream” really operates. It’s dirty, grim, and brutal, and has very little to do with democracy or rule of law. Forget the emblems of supposed American civility, the white-picket fences, apple pie in bourgeois comfort, old glory fluttering down at the courthouse, and all those other imaginary democratic virtues.
READ MORE: GUILTY: Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort Face the Music…
American politics has more in common with Francis Ford Coppola’s classic movie, The Godfather, illustrating how organized crime is intertwined with politicians and lawmakers. Mob practices are more the currency of American politics than dainty civic duties. In reality, it’s not the American Dream, it’s the American Scream.
READ MORE: Trump Praises Manafort: ‘Such Respect For a Brave Man!’
The impossibly perfect American Dream is nevertheless so powerfully ingrained and inculcated in the popular psyche by Hollywood and national myth-making propaganda, it is hard to see the brutal reality.
When the American military obliterated Japanese civilians with atomic weapons, or incinerated children in Southeast Asia with napalm, or when it organized death squads to mutilate peasants in Central America, such practices can be easily obscured because of the opium that is the American Dream and its seductive, illusory vanity.
Even when an American president is hideously assassinated in broad daylight by his own security services, the people are not awakened from the impossible “dream”.
American politics is as dirty and as criminal as it gets. Assassinating foreign leaders, overthrowing governments, subverting and rigging elections, brainwashing the public with lying news media and think tanks, militarizing “allied” societies in the name of “protection”. These are some of the realities that define the US capitalist power system, at home and abroad.
One of America’s most celebrated presidents John F Kennedy began his term in the White House under sordid conditions. Talk about interference? It is well-documented Kennedy’s election was secured by the Chicago-based Mafia, under crime boss Sam Giancana, rigging the ballots in key states to give Kennedy the decisive vote over rival Richard Nixon in 1960.
READ MORE: Truth and Lies: Media’s Misdirection of Manafort Verdict and Cohen Plea
Admittedly, JFK seemed to undergo a genuinely personal and political evolution during his brief presidency, when he subsequently desired to normalize Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. His perceived betrayal of the Mafia and the US military-security apparatus probably cost him his life when he was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, three years into his presidency. It is claimed that the CIA and Mafia worked together to organize the killing involving teams of snipers. The hapless Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged shooter, was only a patsy, which the “great and good” American media have used as an odious cover-up ever since.
READ MORE: JFK’s ‘Peace Speech’ and The Road Not Taken
Anyway, let’s get back to Trump. It seems obvious that the prosecution of his former aides is all about a vendetta against Trump, to get him out of the White House. The US political establishment, or deep state, has never accepted this “outsider” as the president. His stated preference to normalize relations with Russia is a particular red line. The whole “Russiagate” saga has been concocted in order to delegitimize Trump’s election and to have him “taken out” as the figurehead for the deep state.
Prosecuting two of Trump’s former associates was bound to dig up plenty of dirt. Because dirt is endemic to how American big business and politics operate. It should not be surprising that Trump and his former friends are inculpated for bank and tax fraud and paying off hookers. That’s how the system pretty much works, and those transgressions are only the surface.
Look at how Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton was involved in political bribery and vote rigging, as well as soliciting foreign interference from trying to get “Russian dirt” on Trump. Not just Clinton, but the senior law enforcement and intelligence services under the Obama presidency were also involved in this massive subversion of American democracy.
What’s going on with Trump’s two associates facing jail time is the Mob’s equivalent of threatening to cut ears off a hostage unless the hostage squeals to betray another, more important target.
Already, it seems the coercion is working. Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen is reportedly “ready to cooperating” with the so-called Russia probe led by former FBI chief Robert Mueller. Mueller is a long-time operator for the deep state with his own baggage of criminal skeletons, such as lying over the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ruse to wage a genocidal war on that country. His appointment as the chief inquisitor to entrap Trump is therefore apt.
Cohen is said to have “interesting things” to tell the Mueller inquisition concerning Trump and allegations of collusion with Russia to get him elected. Those allegations are, for any sane person, a risible farrago of lies and fantasies. No evidence has ever been produced despite two years of investigation and prosecutions. The only crimes uncovered so far are financial fraud, American-style.
But, we can be sure, that Cohen, a sniveling, greasy attorney, will deliver “information” to hang Trump in order to save his own skin from five years in the clanger. Expect more and bigger lies about Russia.
By the way, there are no good guys in this squalid drama of American politics. Trump and his gang are as rotten as the rest of the barrel.
The former New York real-estate hustler may deserve some credit in that he at least is not psychotically anti-Russia. Another indirect credit to Trump is that the whole debacle he has provoked with the deep state goes to expose the profound decay and corruption in American politics.
Just to show how Trump is no better than the rest. This week he told media that he would consider lifting economic sanctions off Russia if Moscow made “concessions” on Syria and Ukraine. On Syria, the Trump administration wants Russia to use its leverage to get Iran out of the country in order to pander to Israeli concerns.
So there you have it. Just like the gangsters at home are leveraging Trump’s associates with pain in order to get them to squeal and betray the president, we see the same sordid mentality and methods being played by Trump himself with regard to Russia. The sanctions he has slapped Russia with could be removed, he says, if Moscow does Trump’s bidding on Iran.
The American Dream? It’s a nightmare that screams with crimes and corruption. When will the people awake?
The views and opinions expressed by Finian Cunningham are those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
Europeans are told America is religious, but “church going” Americans too often exhibit an undercurrent of hate mongering and hypocrisy that is impossible to not recognize, except among themselves.
Similarly, an education in history or sociology in America is akin to studying science fiction as fact.
Economics, as taught at America’s top business schools, is more fiction than fact, more fake than fundamentals.
Many, too many, feel America’s love affair with prevarication and fakery is new-found, a thing of recent times, from the continual lies and gaffs of Trump to the bumbling idiocy of his predecessor in outright ignorance, George W. Bush.
At its heart, America is a fake nation with fake institutions, fake religions, a fake government and fake people. Anyone who comes to America notes it. Tocqueville, the author, in his first commentary on America, “Democracy in America,” began chronicling America’s descent into “hokeydom” in 1831.
America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other. (Tocqueville)
There was a time when a version of Tocqueville, albeit one deeply censored, was still taught in schools. His books were never assigned, never discussed, not even for history majors in universities, only covered in deeply sanitized lectures by academic hacks grasping at tenured positions.
We might also cover Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (Columbia University Press 1935) which debunks that document so many of us swore to protect and defend as a useless rag penned by counter-revolutionary forces intent on handing power to Britain’s banks while starving out America’s military veterans and small farmers.
Beard, once America’s most prominent historian, isn’t taught anymore either. His works were the basis for all legal education in the US. They have been in the dustbin for decades, next to Tocqueville.
Revisionists, the most aggressive and realistic of which are mostly called conspiracy theorists today, are too often a lazy lot, shy of scholarship and bereft of the discipline needed to make one’s mark in history.
Ah, but there’s the rub, history now is fake, laundered, rewritten, fabricated from fake narrative with fake characters and fake struggles. One of the driest reads of all time was John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, the necessary scholarly work needed by a young presidential candidate to prove his metal. Yet it’s subject matter, heroes unseen and unappreciated, is more important today than ever before.
It was Kennedy who recognized Robert Taft’s worth in trashing the fake Nuremberg trials. Taft, a senator from Ohio, gave up the probable presidency in 1948 because he opposed trying Nazis as war criminals based on fake laws passed ex post facto.
Another favorite of mine from Kennedy’s work is John Quincy Adams, recognized for breaking away from the Federalist Party, the real “muscle” behind the then and now present global banking cartel that sits at the heart of the “right” in Britain and the United States.
Most Americans themselves are aware of the heroes in their past. Few understand anything of Washington, what he risked, his tenacity in face of continual defeat and, to an extent, his failures as well. We don’t blame Washington, and well should not, for failing to recognize all that might transpire in his name. With Alexander Hamilton at his side, pecking away day after day, a voice for sloth, for theft, for immoderation, Washington was certainly poorly advised.
Key, in may respects, was America’s love affair for military veterans, not just leaders but men of physical courage as well. The military caste system and “push button warfare” of today has mitigated much of that tradition with so many of today’s “heroes” bespewn with fake medals for fake acts in fake wars for fake causes.
Men like Andrew Jackson, the glaring opposite of Donald Trump, fought their own battles, gun or sword, stood against political enemies based on values and didn’t hide behind fake “faith.” If Jackson carried a bible, he would have used it as a weapon to throw rather than as a shield to hide behind as so many do today.
There is a reason we began with Tocqueville. Russian’s are among the most religious people on earth despite their half century of communist rule. When a Russian worships, it isn’t for show. The same is true in Poland and much of Germany.
Few Americans are aware to what extent France, Italy and Spain have abandoned religion. Their history still recognizes how the Church aligned itself with monarchy and right-wing extremism, how it suppressed intellectuals, fostered ignorance and opposed social advancement.
Religion in America is, today, doing what religion in those nations had done for centuries, perhaps with fewer burned alive but, do note, there would not be millions locked away in America’s prisons without the self-righteous “hokeydom” of America’s religious fakes.
Similarly, without the failed institutions, failed and fake academia, a failed and faked military, a failed and fake government and, perhaps most glaring of all, the meteoric rise of custom designed fake information delivered by ubiquitous “devices, “would not represent the threat it does today.
There have always been Americans who have recognized, to an extent, what Tocqueville saw and expressed with such eloquence and clarity or, to a lesser extent, the rot at the center of America’s form of government outlined in Beard.
For the best of those, it brought about a search for heroes and saviors of a kind, a search that brought men like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy to the forefront, men of grace and courage.
Gone awry, the same search, with ignorance and fear as guiding principles, brought us Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and the Bush-Trump duo, split by an anecdotal and truncated Obama presidency crippled by a Wall Street hijacked congress.
You see, with no functioning institutions, with no real “checks and balances” in a government long ago engineered for failure with the overthrow of the Articles of Confederation and the erasure of the Founding Father’s ideals, all that is left is “cult of personality” and dictatorship.
For those doubting such words, perhaps Jefferson’s might provide a reminder.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Where Jefferson’s words from 1776, written for educated elites, some, perhaps many, who had suffered financially at the hands of British misgovernment, call for action and individual responsibility, today such words might well be a source of terror.
The America that abided slavery for the better part of a century might well abide the same. At her roots, America was never intended to be a colonial power or a global policeman. Tocqueville’s observations nearly two centuries ago made the reasons clear, that the fakery that had taken hold even then made real greatness would remain forever unachievable.
America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
It has become easier to fake goodness, to simply invent it, “tweet” about it rather than do it. America smears, America blames, it points fingers, it accuses, it punishes, it bullies, and it has done so for most of its existence.
The moments of greatness have been fleeting, now not even a memory. Americans lie to themselves, to each other out of shame and humiliation.
Americans who believe in nothing, and this is the heart of America’s religion, delusion, disinformation, fakery and fraud, religions of intolerance and hate, or so it is for many millions, turn to their fake god to justify their fears and weaknesses.
This is why America is fake. America’s history is fake, its wars are fake, its “greatness” is fake because it is all based on self-deception, on beliefs chosen not from moral certainty and values but to serve the baser instincts, the worst of humanity, greed, lust and envy.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
Our society should’ve collapsed by now. You know that, right?
No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.
Worldwide, one in 10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has? 193 million years. (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our current world or even just our nation.
So … shouldn’t there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn’t it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren’t on fire. No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone’s going to work at gunpoint? No. We’re all choosing to continue on like this.
Why?
Well, it comes down to the myths we’ve been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.
I’m going to cover eight of them. There are more than eight. There are probably hundreds. But I’m going to cover eight because (A) no one reads a column titled “Hundreds of Myths of American Society,” (B) these are the most important ones and (C) we all have other shit to do.
If you think we still have a democracy or a democratic republic, ask yourself this: When was the last time Congress did something that the people of America supported that did not align with corporate interests? … You probably can’t do it. It’s like trying to think of something that rhymes with “orange.” You feel like an answer exists but then slowly realize it doesn’t. Even the Carter Center and former President Jimmy Carter believe that America has been transformed into an oligarchy: A small, corrupt elite control the country with almost no input from the people. The rulers need the myth that we’re a democracy to give us the illusion of control.
Gerrymandering, voter purging, data mining, broken exit polling, push polling, superdelegates, electoral votes, black-box machines, voter ID suppression, provisional ballots, super PACs, dark money, third parties banished from the debates and two corporate parties that stand for the same goddamn pile of fetid crap!
What part of this sounds like a legitimate election system?
No, we have what a large Harvard study called the worst election system in the Western world. Have you ever seen where a parent has a toddler in a car seat, and the toddler has a tiny, brightly colored toy steering wheel so he can feel like he’s driving the car? That’s what our election system is—a toy steering wheel. Not connected to anything. We all sit here like infants, excitedly shouting, “I’m steeeeering!”
And I know it’s counterintuitive, but that’s why you have to vote. We have to vote in such numbers that we beat out what’s stolen through our ridiculous rigged system.
Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard on hard-on pills, but we can’t get anything resembling hard news because it’s funded by dicks.) The corporate media’s jobs are to rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It’s their mission to actually fortify belief in the myths I’m telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they’re standing on a playground wearing nothing but a trench coat.
The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges recently noted, “The most basic constitutional rights … have been erased for many. … Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security.”
If you’re not part of the monied class, you’re pressured into releasing what few rights you have left. According to The New York Times, “97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence.”
That’s the name of the game. Pressure people of color and poor people to just take the plea deal because they don’t have a million dollars to spend on a lawyer. (At least not one who doesn’t advertise on beer coasters.)
That’s funny. I don’t recall my friend pressuring me into sex to get out of a speeding ticket. (Which is essentially still legal in 32 states.)
The police in our country are primarily designed to do two things: protect the property of the rich and perpetrate the completely immoral war on drugs—which by definition is a war on our own people.
We lock up more people than any other country on earth. Meaning the land of the free is the largest prison state in the world. So all these droopy-faced politicians and rabid-talking heads telling you how awful China is on human rights or Iran or North Korea—none of them match the numbers of people locked up right here under Lady Liberty’s skirt.
This myth is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious).
If we’re lucky, we’ll make enough money during the week to afford enough beer on the weekend to help it all make sense. (I find it takes at least four beers for everything to add up.) But that doesn’t truly bring us fulfillment. So what now? Well, the ads say buying will do it. Try to smother the depression and desperation under a blanket of flat-screen TVs, purses and Jet Skis. Nowdoes your life have meaning? No? Well, maybe you have to drive that Jet Ski a little faster! Crank it up until your bathing suit flies off and you’ll feel alive!
The dark truth is that we have to believe the myth that consuming is the answer or else we won’t keep running around the wheel. And if we aren’t running around the wheel, then we start thinking, start asking questions. Those questions are not good for the ruling elite, who enjoy a society based on the daily exploitation of 99 percent of us.
According to Deloitte’s Shift Index survey: “80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs” and “[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime.” That’s about one-seventh of your life—and most of it is during your most productive years.
Ask yourself what we’re working for. To make money? For what? Almost none of us are doing jobs for survival anymore. Once upon a time, jobs boiled down to:
I plant the food—>I eat the food—>If I don’t plant food = I die.
But nowadays, if you work at a café—will someone die if they don’t get their super-caf-mocha-frap-almond-piss-latte? I kinda doubt they’ll keel over from a blueberry scone deficiency.
If you work at Macy’s, will customers perish if they don’t get those boxer briefs with the sweat-absorbent-ass fabric? I doubt it. And if they do die from that, then their problems were far greater than you could’ve known. So that means we’re all working to make other people rich because we have a society in which we have to work. Technological advancements can do most everything that truly must get done.
So if we wanted to, we could get rid of most work and have tens of thousands of more hours to enjoy our lives. But we’re not doing that at all. And no one’s allowed to ask these questions—not on your mainstream airwaves at least. Even a half-step like universal basic income is barely discussed because it doesn’t compute with our cultural programming.
Scientists say it’s quite possible artificial intelligence will take away all human jobs in 120 years. I think they know that will happen because bots will take the jobs and then realize that 80 percent of them don’t need to be done! The bots will take over and then say, “Stop it. … Stop spending a seventh of your life folding shirts at Banana Republic.”
One day, we will build monuments to the bot that told us to enjoy our lives and … leave the shirts wrinkly.
And this leads me to the largest myth of our American society.
And I’m not talking about the millions locked up in our prisons. I’m talking about you and me. If you think you’re free, try running around with your nipples out, ladies. Guys, take a dump on the street and see how free you are.
I understand there are certain restrictions on freedom we actually desire to have in our society—maybe you’re not crazy about everyone leaving a Stanley Steamer in the middle of your walk to work. But a lot of our lack of freedom is not something you would vote for if given the chance.
Try building a fire in a parking lot to keep warm in the winter.
Try sleeping in your car for more than a few hours without being harassed by police.
Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms.
Try signing up for the military because you need college money and then one day just walking off the base, going, “Yeah, I was bored. Thought I would just not do this anymore.”
Try explaining to Kentucky Fried Chicken that while you don’t have the green pieces of paper they want in exchange for the mashed potatoes, you do have some pictures you’ve drawn on a napkin to give them instead.
Try running for president as a third-party candidate. (Jill Stein was shackled and chained to a chair by police during one of the debates.)
Try using the restroom at Starbucks without buying something … while black.
We are less free than a dog on a leash. We live in one of the hardest-working, most unequal societies on the planet with more billionaires than ever.
Meanwhile, Americans supply 94 percent of the paid blood used worldwide. And it’s almost exclusively coming from very poor people. This abusive vampire system is literally sucking the blood from the poor. Does that sound like a free decision they made? Or does that sound like something people do after immense economic force crushes down around them? (One could argue that sperm donation takes a little less convincing.)
Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers—most of the time—don’t need guns and tear gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for us all to buy into, hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults.
It’s time to wake up.
January 5, 2018
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” ― Nelson Mandela
This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.
Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite gets poorer and more powerless to do anything about the nation’s steady slide towards fascism, authoritarianism and a profit-driven police state.
Not content to merely pander to law enforcement and add to its military largesse with weaponry and equipment designed for war, Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.
Now Sessions has given state courts the green light to resume their practice of jailing individuals who are unable to pay the hefty fines imposed by the American police state. In doing so, Sessions has once again shown himself to be not only a shill for the Deep State but an enemy of the people.
First, some background on debtors’ prisons, which jail people who cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fines imposed on them by courts and other government agencies.
Congress banned debtors’ prisons in 1833.
In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the practice to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.
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“Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt,” concludes The Atlantic, “the practice persists every day.”
Where things began to change, according to The Marshall Project, was with the rise of “mass incarceration.” As attorney Alec Karakatsanis stated, “In the 1970s and 1980s, we started to imprison more people for lesser crimes. In the process, we were lowering our standards for what constituted an offense deserving of imprisonment, and, more broadly, we were losing our sense of how serious, how truly serious, it is to incarcerate. If we can imprison for possession of marijuana, why can’t we imprison for not paying back a loan?”
By the late 1980s and early 90s, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of statutes listing a prison term as a possible sentence for failure to repay criminal-justice debt.” During the 2000s, the courts started cashing in big-time “by using the threat of jail time – established in those statutes – to squeeze cash out of small-time debtors.”
Fast-forward to the present day which finds us saddled with not only profit-driven private prisons and a prison-industrial complex but also, as investigative reporter Eli Hager notes, “the birth of a new brand of ‘offender-funded’ justice [which] has created a market for private probation companies. Purporting to save taxpayer dollars, these outfits force the offenders themselves to foot the bill for parole, reentry, drug rehab, electronic monitoring, and other services (some of which are not even assigned by a judge). When the offenders can’t pay for all of this, they may be jailed – even if they have already served their time for the offense.”
Follow the money trail. It always points the way.
Whether you’re talking about the government’s war on terrorism, the war on drugs, or some other phantom danger dreamed up by enterprising bureaucrats, there is always a profit-incentive involved.
The same goes for the war on crime.
At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.
Sessions’ latest gambit plays right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.
Sharnalle Mitchell was one such victim of a system for whom the plight of the average American is measured in dollars and cents. As the Harvard Law Review recounts:
On January 26, 2014, Sharnalle Mitchell was with her children in Montgomery, Alabama when police showed up at her home to arrest her. Mitchell was not accused of a crime. Instead, the police came to her home because she had not fully paid a traffic ticket from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children (aged one and four) and taken to jail. She was ordered to either pay $2,800 or sit her debt out in jail at a rate of fifty dollars a day for fifty-nine days. Unable to pay, Mitchell wrote out the numbers one to fifty-eight on the back of her court documents and began counting days.
This is not justice.
This is yet another example of how greed and profit-incentives have not only perverted policing in America but have corrupted the entire criminal justice system.
As the Harvard Law Review concludes:
[A]s policing becomes a way to generate revenue, police start to “see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught.” This approach creates a fugitive underclass on the run from police not to hide illicit activity but to avoid arrest for debt or seizure of their purportedly suspicious assets… In turn, communities … begin to see police not as trusted partners but as an occupying army constantly harassing them to raise money to pay their salaries and buy new weapons. This needs to end.
Unfortunately, the criminal justice system has been operating as a for-profit enterprise for years now, covertly padding its pockets through penalty-riddled programs aimed at maximizing revenue rather than ensuring public safety.
All of those seemingly hard-working police officers and code-enforcement officers and truancy officers and traffic cops handing out ticket after ticket after ticket: they’re not working to make your communities safer—they’ve got quotas to fill.
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Same goes for the courts, which have come to rely on fines, fees and exorbitant late penalties as a means of increased revenue. The power of these courts, magnified in recent years through the introduction of specialty courts beyond your run-of-the-mill traffic court (drug court, homeless court, veterans court, mental health court, criminal court, teen court, gambling court, prostitution court, community court, domestic violence court, truancy court), is “reshaping the American legal system—with little oversight,” concludes the Boston Globe.
And for those who can’t afford to pay the court fines heaped on top of the penalties ($302 for jaywalking, $531 for an overgrown yard, or $120 for arriving a few minutes late to court), there’s probation (managed by profit-run companies that tack on their own fees, which are often more than double the original fine) or jail time (run by profit-run companies that charge inmates for everything from food and housing to phone calls at outrageous markups), which only adds to the financial burdens of those already unable to navigate a costly carceral state.
“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” stated former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system, setting inequality in place from the beginning.”
In “Policing and Profit,” the Harvard Law Review documents in chilling detail the criminal justice system’s efforts to turn a profit at the expense of those who can least afford to pay, thereby entrapping them in a cycle of debt that starts with one minor infraction:
In the late 1980s, Missouri became one of the first states to let private companies purchase the probation systems of local governments. In these arrangements, municipalities impose debt on individuals through criminal proceedings and then sell this debt to private businesses, which pad the debt with fees and interest. This debt can stem from fines for offenses as minor as rolling through a stop sign or failing to enroll in the right trash collection service. In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail. If an arrestee owes fines in more than one of St. Louis County’s eighty-one municipal courts, they are passed from one jail to another to await hearings in each town.
Ask yourself this: at a time when crime rates across the country remain at historic lows (despite Sessions’ inaccurate claims to the contrary), why does the prison population continue to grow?
The prison population continues to grow because of a glut of laws that criminalize activities that should certainly not be outlawed, let alone result in jail time. Overcriminalization continues to plague the country because of legislators who work hand-in-hand with corporations to adopt laws that favor the corporate balance sheet. And when it comes to incarceration, the corporate balance sheet weighs heavily in favor of locking up more individuals in government-run and private prisons.
As Time reports, “The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the two major players in this game—the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group—invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.”
It’s a vicious cycle that grows more vicious by the day.
According to The Atlantic, “America spends $80 billion a year incarcerating 2.4 million people.” But the costs don’t end there. “When someone goes to prison, nearly 65 percent of families are suddenly unable to pay for basic needs such as food and housing… About 70 percent of those families are caring for children under the age of 18.”
Then there are the marked-up costs levied against the inmate by private companies that provide services and products to government prisons. Cereal and soup for five times the market price. $15 for a short phone call.
The Center for Public Integrity found that “prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives… Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.”
Worse, as human rights attorney Jessica Jackson points out, “the fines and fees system has turned local governments into the equivalent of predatory lenders.” For instance, Jackson cites:
Washington state charges a 12% interest rate on all its criminal debt. Florida adds a 40% fee that goes into the pockets of a private collections agency. In California, penalties can raise a $100 fine to $490, or $815 if the initial deadline is missed. A $500 traffic ticket can actually cost $1,953, even if it is paid on time. And so we are left with countless tales of lives ruined—people living paycheck to paycheck who cannot afford a minor fine, and so face ballooning penalties, increasing amounts owed, a suspended license, jail time, and being fired from their jobs or unable to find work.
This isn’t the American Dream I grew up believing in.
This certainly isn’t the American Dream my parents and grandparents and those before them worked and fought and sacrificed to achieve.
This is a cold, calculated system of profit and losses.
Now you can shrug all of this away as a consequence of committing a crime, but that just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when average Americans are being jailed for such so-called crimes as eating SpaghettiOs (police mistook them for methamphetamine), not wearing a seatbelt, littering, jaywalking, having homemade soap (police mistook the soap for cocaine), profanity, spitting on the ground, farting, loitering and twerking.
There is no room in the American police state for self-righteousness. Not when we are all guilty until proven innocent.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.
By John Kaminski
Dishonest officials fail to explain bizarre fires and chaotic shooting
It’s almost as if our consciences have been deliberately and systematically aborted, or consigned to insignificance by the puppetmasters who insist that everyone should believe their government even when they know it is lying.
This is the new freedom those who are controlled by Jews speak about.
What do you see, my friend, when you behold your own reflection in the splintered shards of shattered glass that once was the mirror of your American dream?
Do you dream at night of directed energy beams like ones that ravaged California wine country and incinerated people in their own beds because their houses were located on land somebody with political clout wanted to steal?
What would it feel like to be incinerated in your own bed? Is your home located in some future government plan that would require it to be demolished? Will they blame the fire on a natural disaster? Except when you look closely at it, it was the most unnatural firestorm on record as it incinerated only houses and cars yet left unburned the very flammable vegetation surrounding these utterly demolished homesteads?
Or perhaps you dream you’re at a concert with people shooting at you from all directions. You see people bleeding. Later you hear there were multiple shooters and also crisis actors. The cops insist there was only one shooter. Many who insist the cops are lying are shortly thereafter found dead in a string of unlikely mishaps. And shortly after that it was discovered the FBI was in place at the crime scene for a week in advance! And then suddenly the cops stop talking about what happened.
If you have a conscience and are attuned to current political events you may have noticed the number of people who are trying to defend our now defunct Constitution first being held illegally in abusive conditions before being given long prison terms for protesting the criminal federal takeover of the American West. The promise Trump made about putting Hillary in jail should first free the Hammond farmers whose land figures in the notorious sale of America’s uranium to Russia.
And by all means, set the Bundys free! This is the ultimate extermination of individuals, sacrificed on the bloody altar of the state.
Here’s a religious family defending Constitutional sanity being illegally jailed for two years on bogus terrorism charges. And they are brought to all their court hearings in chains after being kept in solitary confinement! This is a message to all those who think they can demand their Constitutional rights or those who sound alarms when their own government breaks laws that everyone else must follow.
This is what we see today in the scrambled pieces of the broken mirror in our minds.
The government is showing everyone what it will do to you if you dare to fight for your Constitutional rights, which are still in force despite what some crooked Jewish judge might tell you.
This is both tyranny and treason, and the government endorses it. We must not allow it.
Yet the idea that every American has an equal opportunity to move up in life is false.
Social mobility has declined over the past decades, median wages have stagnated and today’s young generation is the first in modern history expected to be poorer than their parents. The lottery of life – the postcode where you were born – can account for up to two thirds of the wealth an individual generates.
The growing gap between the rich and the poor, the old and the young, has been largely ignored by policymakers and investors until the recent rise of anti-establishment votes, including those for Brexit in the UK and for President Trump in the US. This is a mistake.
Inequality is much more than a side-effect of free market capitalism. It is a symptom of policy negligence, where for decades, credit and monetary stimulus shortcuts too easily substituted for structural reform, investment and economic strategy. Capitalism has been incredibly successful at boosting wealth, but it has failed at redistributing it. Today, without a push to redistribute wealth and opportunity, our model of capitalism and democracy may face self-destruction.
The widening of inequality has deep historical roots. Keynes’ interventionist policies worked well during the post-war recovery, as fiscal stimulus for the reconstruction boosted demand for US goods from Europe and Japan.
But soon the stimulus faded. The U.S. found itself with declining growth and rising inflation at a time when it was mired in the Cold War and Vietnam conflicts.
The baby boomer generation demanded higher living standards. The response was the Nixon shock in 1971: a set of policies which moved away from the gold standard, initiating the era of fiat money and free credit.
Credit was the answer to declining growth and rising inequality: if you couldn’t afford university, a new house or a new car, Uncle Sam would lend you the key to the American Dream in the form of that extra loan you needed. Over the following decades, state subsidies to private credit became popular, spreading to the U.K. and Europe.
It was the start of debt-based democracies. Private debt outgrew GDP four times in the US and Europe over the following decades up to the 2008 financial crisis, accompanied by the deregulation of financial markets and of banks. The rest is history: nine long years after the crisis, our economies are still healing from excess debt, and regulators are still working on strengthening our financial system. Inequality, however, has deepened even further. Has capitalism failed?
The deus ex-machina of capitalism was competition; a distorted interpretation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Competition among individuals and companies created efficient markets, increasing production and GDP. Government intervention became unnecessary: any wealth generated in the economic process would automatically trickle down from the haves to the have-nots. Greed, the unshackled pursuit of individual wealth, turned from vice to virtue.
Today, we know the neoliberal policies initiated by Reagan and Thatcher have been successful at generating growth: the United States and the UK have outpaced others. But we also know that the same neoliberal policies have failed at redistributing resources and opportunity. If individual economic success is deemed the highest possible achievement, poverty becomes justified by someone’s lack of effort or ability. But with rising social and corporate inequality, productivity has stagnated, lowering potential growth rates for the whole economy. The result has been a self-reinforcing cycle of lower productivity, lower interest rates, higher debt levels and even higher inequality.
If trickle-down and neoliberalism have failed the good news is there are some policy fixes. One of them is taxation, combined with investment in productive infrastructure and education. The bad news is policy is going exactly in the opposite direction, especially in the US and the UK.
The Trump Administration’s tax breaks may boost markets, but will likely increase public debt even further, calling for more cuts to education and healthcare.
Defenders of neoliberal policies like Mr Ryan argue that equality of opportunity is fair, while equality of outcome – which Milton Friedman called socialism – is unfair and not meritocratic. The reality is that both wealth and income inequality are closely linked. Richer parents can afford to send their children to better schools: nearly half of the variation in wages of sons in the United States can be explained by looking at the wages of their fathers a generation before. That compares to less than 20% in relatively egalitarian and tuition-free countries like Finland, Norway and Denmark. The story is similar in the UK, where over half of judges, MPs and CEOs of UK companies attended expensive private schools, while around one third of children live below the poverty line – 67% of those from working families. Better education means better opportunities and more wealth later in life: the cycle reinforces itself from generation to generation.
But today this cycle may be now at breaking point. If “let-them-eat-credit“ policies allowed the 99% to borrow and increase their well-being over the past decades, interest rates have now reached rock-bottom and private debt levels are at their highest. There are signs that monetary policy may have reached its limits – creating asset bubbles and keeping zombie companies alive – and that it may no longer be able to support this ever-growing debt mountain.
The risk is that rising inequality, lower social mobility and the disenfranchisement of younger generations could result into even more polarised and short-sighted politics, creating a populist trap. The US and the UK could already be stuck: many of the policies on the table in both countries are far from sustainable, and damaging for the people they were to protect. Brexit or an exit from NAFTA are both striking examples.
Continental Europe and Scandinavia – even though far from perfect – have so far escaped from the worst of the populist threat of the Front National, Alternative for Germany, True Finns or the Danish People’s Party, perhaps thanks to their stronger safety net and welfare policies. However, these parties continue to gain ground, as recent elections in Germany and Austria show.
There are two ways we think the world may exit this loop of rising inequality, political polarisation and short-sighted politics. One is to make the poor richer through education and investment. The other is to make the rich poorer.
Last year, the IMF ditched neoliberalism and recommended measures to redistribute wealth and opportunity. This policy mix could reduce inequality, boost political stability and improve long-term growth. In its five-year plan, China’s leadership recently announced a renewed focus on reducing inequality. The US and UK, too, should acknowledge they have a structural, not a cyclical problem, that cannot be solved with one more round of monetary stimulus. Redistribution should be coupled with a reform of the financial system, still too centered on risk-taking and debt incentives; as well as changes to the tax system, which still places too much burden on income and too little on assets.
The alternative to redistribution is instability and crisis. Inequality provides fertile ground for populist parties to harvest support. The US, for instance, has recently been downgraded from full democracy to a flawed democracy. Over time, populist policies can destabilize democracies, turning them towards nationalism, militarism and anti-capitalism. The outcome of populist regimes in history ranges from higher taxes to nationalizations and violations of private property, to commercial and military conflicts.
Neoliberal theory and its policy offshoots have failed. Promoting individual happiness as our utmost ethos is self-defeating, as deeply divided societies turn unstable and unhappy. We need a new American dream based on equality and sustainable growth. The cost of sharing opportunity and wealth may be high for today’s elites, but the alternative is far worse.
With stagnant wages, rising cost of living (see shelter inflation), and a lack of savings, Americans are retiring later than ever before (if at all). But in a double-whammy for seniors, whose health is declining, their lifespans are shrinking offering them little if any time to enjoy the end of the American Dream walking hand in hand into the sunset on a faraway beach…
As Bloomberg reports, data released last week suggest Americans’ health is declining and millions of middle-age workers face the prospect of shorter, and less active, retirements than their parents enjoyed.
Here are the stats:
The U.S. age-adjusted mortality rate – a measure of the number of deaths per year – rose 1.2 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to the Society of Actuaries.
That’s the first year-over-year increase since 2005, and only the second rise greater than 1 percent since 1980.
At the same time that Americans’ life expectancy is stalling, public policy and career tracks mean millions of U.S. workers are waiting longer to call it quits.
Almost one in three Americans age 65 to 69 is still working, along with almost one in five in their early 70s.
And finally, Americans in their late 50s already have more serious health problems than people at the same ages did 10 to 15 years ago, according to the journal Health Affairs.
Bloomberg’s Ben Steverman points out that researchers have offered many theories for why Americans’ health is getting worse. Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize winner, have argued that an epidemic of suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse have caused a spike in death rates among middle-age whites.
Higher rates of obesity may also be taking their toll. And Americans may have already seen most of the benefits from previous positive developments that cut the death rate, such as a decline in smoking and medical advances like statins that fight cardiovascular disease.
So there you have it – The New American Dream: Work Longer, Live Sicker, Die Sooner…
Source: The Vanishing American Dream – PaulCraigRoberts.org
With permission from
PaulCraigRoberts.org
Paul Craig Roberts
Sept 4, 2017
Today is Labor Day, a difficult day to celebrate now that American labor has been cast aside and US jobs offshored and given to foreigners. The remainder of the jobs is slated to be replaced by robotics.
Friday’s payroll jobs report was full of bad news. Full-time jobs declined by 166,000. The meager 156,000 new jobs claimed are really only 115,000 net of the prior month’s revision, and this 115,000 jobs estimate is within the range of statistical insignificance. In other words, there is no confidence that the jobs are actually there.
The US work force continues to develop a Third Word complexion of lowly paid part-time domestic service employment. The American Dream continues its closedown.
Meanwhile the government tells us that we are at full employment with an unemployment rate of 4.4%.
Photo Credit: The Tyee
The following is an excerpt from the new book Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All by Donald Jeffries (Skyhorse Publishing, July 2017), available for purchase from Amazon, Indiebound and Skyhorse:
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all. … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.” —Helen Keller
Most people shy away from the simple question; do those who are paid the most in our society deserve to be compensated like that? If a particular individual was the driving force behind a cure for all cancer, or instrumental in significantly increasing the human life span, I think most everyone would agree that their value to society would be such that they’d be entitled to millions, even billions of dollars. But the world’s wealthiest individuals do not, in fact, seem to have contributed in such a way that they have earned a distinction placing them above the masses, garnering more money in less than a year than what virtually everyone else earns in a lifetime. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the world’s richest three hundred people, these incredibly wealthy elite saw their net worth jump by $52.4 billion in 2013. On July 21, 2016, Bloomberg would recount how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had surpassed Warren Buffet as the third richest person in the world, thanks to a tidy increase of $5.4 billion in his personal fortune in 2016. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers, who desperately need a significant pay raise, are simply not getting one.
The wealthiest people in our society don’t appear to be improving any lives but their own, and they don’t seem to have special qualities or skills that explain why they’re being compensated so much more extravagantly than the rest of us. Warren Buffet, like so many very wealthy people, made his fortune with investments. Multi-billionaire Mexican Carlos Slim Helú is another whose occupation is investor. When we examine any list of the richest Americans, we find names such as notorious corporate raider Carl Icahn, whose more polite title is investor, George Soros, who is yet another investor, hedge fund managers John Paulson and James Simons, and plenty of financiers, bond mavens, chairmen, and others with predictable titles that assure us, whatever they do, they aren’t positively impacting the lives of the bulk of humanity. The very wealthy, in all reality, can generally be defined as those who are abnormally good at making money.
Bill Gates’s Microsoft was primarily known for creating an operating system with numerous flaws, charging excessive prices for all the unnecessary upgrades and new versions, and engaging in monopolistic practices. Apple founder Steve Jobs would declare that Gates had “shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.” Jobs had a right to feel that way; most people think that Microsoft stole many essential features from Apple. Of course, many believe that Jobs himself stole from Xerox. Gates acknowledges that advances in technology, including robotics, “will reduce demand for jobs particularly at the lower end of the skill set.” Senator Jeff Sessions, now President Trump’s attorney general, was a fierce critic of Gates’s call for increased foreign visa workers at the same time Microsoft announced plans to lay off eighteen thousand workers in 2015. The Heritage Foundation has estimated that the disastrous June 2013 immigration “reform” bill, which Gates and every other pillar of the establishment supported, would cost taxpayers some $6.3 trillion over the next few decades.
Like almost all modern corporate leaders, Jobs used cheap, if not slave, labor in foreign countries to build his beloved iPhones. Both Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Iowa, and Bill Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, referred succinctly to Jobs as “a walking antitrust violation.” Walter Isaacson, author of a biography on Jobs, declared that the founder of Apple “always believed that the rules that applied to ordinary people didn’t apply to him.” Bill Gates is about as pedestrian a personality as one can imagine; in an interview with Christine Amanpour, he declared that “Clearly, you can’t raise the taxes we need just by going after that 1 percent.” In his 2014 annual Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation letter, Gates expounded upon his delusional misinformation, writing, “By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been.” Well, it’s certainly become a better place for him. If it could be demonstrated that either Gates or Jobs had single-handedly invented the personal computer, they might indeed be worth their fortunes. By any definition, that clearly isn’t the case.
We hear regular, nonsensical references in the mainstream media about the difficulty of finding suitable executive talent and thus the need to compensate them extravagantly in order to beat the competition. It is never explained just what talent one requires to be an executive in a large corporation. One can’t quantify this kind of talent in any measurable way, the way one can assess the skills of an athlete, a musician, or an artist. Many powerful corporate leaders attain their positions in the most traditional manner, through simple nepotism. Sam Walton’s children, for example, exhibited no talent whatsoever in inheriting their father’s fortune. The Koch brothers inherited an oil refinery firm from their father. Fidelity’s Abigail Johnson is merely continuing the family tradition of running the company her grandfather established. Donald Trump began life as the son of a multimillionaire, which made the arduous climb to billionaire a bit easier. Bill Gates did not come from a “middle-class” family; his parents were quite wealthy, and his father was on the board of Planned Parenthood. Warren Buffet’s climb up the corporate ladder was undoubtedly aided by the fact he was the son of a United States congressman. Nike founder and chairman Philip Knight’s father was a newspaper publisher. Hedge fund magnate James H. Simons grew up the son of a factory owner. Any present-day Rockefeller, Rothschild, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, etc. invariably succeeded because of their names and their inherited wealth, while Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduaro Salverin, Chris Hughes, and Justin Rosenstein all came from wealthy families and met at the ultimate breeding ground for the elite, Harvard University. Horatio Alger stories, if they ever existed to any great degree, are clearly a thing of the past.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent much of his childhood on a 25,000-acre Texas ranch with his maternal grandfather, who was a regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission. Liliane Bettencourt, presently estimated to be worth more than $33 billion, earned her riches by inheriting L’Oreal, one of the world’s biggest companies, from her father. Google founder Larry Page’s father Carl was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. Forest Mars Jr., worth some $21 billion, achieved his success through inheriting the giant candy company from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather. His siblings, John and Jacqueline, are also worth $21 billion each. They mirror the work ethic of Sam Walton’s children, yet undoubtedly many Americans, from all income levels, would argue that they earned this incredible wealth. When he uttered the statement, “You didn’t build that,” Barack Obama inadvertently tapped into the strong personal belief most Americans possess, that they have attained whatever success they’ve achieved solely through hard work or their own brilliance. Those who make it almost always have been fortunate in different ways. They might have been born into a supportive, financially stable family. They might have known someone who opened the right doors for them. They might have been blessed with a set of genes that made them physically attractive enough that others want to help them. They might simply have been in the right place at the right time. For whatever reason, human beings seem to blanch at the notion that they’ve been lucky. Senator Elizabeth Warren echoed Obama’s comments, saying, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”
Author Chrystia Freeland, in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, explored the attitudes of these unfathomably wealthy people. She found that each of them felt strongly that they’d earned their great wealth. Just as unanimously, though, they all thought that at least some of their billionaire brethren hadn’t earned theirs. Oddly, this attitude seems just as prevalent among the upper middle class, the middle class, and even many in the lower middle class. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard working-class people moan that “I worked hard for what I got,” or “nobody helped me.” When talking about redistributing the wealth, I’ve often been met with fierce opposition from those who have no wealth to share, and thus would benefit in some way from such a proposition. They love to counter with statements such as, “How do you define rich?” or “I guess rich means anyone who has more than you.” Another perennial favorite, from those who’ve made it as well as those who haven’t, is, “If you divided up all the money in the world evenly, in a few years, the same people would have it all again.” This is, of course, a very convenient defense for those who have hoarded all the wealth. Why should society even bother to distribute the wealth more fairly, when everyone knows the money would just magically gravitate back to them?
Slightly below this lofty top level of multibillionaire investors and the like are entertainers and athletes. By 2016, the average salary for a Major League Baseball player had risen to $4.4 million a year. In the NBA, it was an even more incomprehensible $5.2 million annually. NHL players average $2.5 million, and NFL players “only” $2.1 million each year. The biggest movie stars are in the “$20 million club,” indicating they command that kind of salary per picture. Tom Hanks hauled in as much as $49 million from The Da Vinci Code. Often these figures don’t factor in the considerable residuals that can result from a huge box office hit. Tom Cruise made $290 million from his four Mission: Impossible films alone. Keanu Reeves, meanwhile, piled up $262 million from the three Matrix movies. Reeves is an unusually generous sort and gave up some profits from his back-end points in order to help finance the special-effects team and costume designers for the sequels. By the end of the long-running Friends television show, each of the six cast members was garnering a million dollars per episode. Even if one accepts categorically that these athletes and entertainers are that exceptional and wildly talented, can anyone maintain they deserve to be so lavishly compensated?
By the end of 2013, the distribution of wealth in America had become so unequal that we no longer could be classed among the First World, developed nations in this category. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, 75.4 percent of all wealth in the United States belongs to the richest 10 percent of the people. Comparable nations (none of them as bad as the United States) in terms of wealth disparity include Chile, Indonesia, and South Africa. The bottom 90 percent of American citizens own only 24.6 percent of the aggregate wealth, while the norm for developed countries is around 40 percent. Meanwhile, under Obama, who was often accused of being a socialist, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans received 95 percent of the income gains during the alleged economic “recovery.” During his 2016 presidential run, Bernie Sanders would embrace this issue with statements such as “something is profoundly wrong when the twenty richest people in our country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population—150 million people.” FactCheck.org claimed that the situation for the 40 percent at the bottom of the ladder has grown even more dismal, declaring that by early 2016, they actually had a combined negative financial worth. Every statistic on income and wealth disparity supports the notions of Ferdinand Lundberg, who postulated in his 1937 book America’s Sixty Families that, “The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of the richest families, buttressed by no more than 90 families of lesser wealth.”
While millions of Americans have lost their homes and were financially devastated by this undeclared Depression, the wealthy continue to be rescued from their own mistakes, time and time again. The 2008 Banker Bailout was one of America’s most disgraceful acts. With foreclosures and bankruptcies at all-time highs, the criminal banks who orchestrated it all were given the kind of security net denied to those suffering individuals across America. When individual Americans experience a terrible financial setback, they are told it’s their own fault and to try harder and pull up their bootstraps. Helping them somehow is a handout most Americans resent giving. But when the wealthiest groups in our society—the big banks, General Motors, etc.—make bad decisions and should ostensibly suffer the consequences, they aren’t penalized at all. They don’t feel the wrath of the vaunted marketplace, as powerless individual citizens do.
The liberal political advocacy group Common Cause would report that the banks bailed out by the taxpayers certainly didn’t stop lavishing excessive benefits on their top executives. Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, was given over $70 million in total compensation in 2008, despite his company having been gifted $10 billion in the bailout. J. P. Morgan Chase’s James S. Dimon earned nearly $28 million, while his company had taken $25 billion from the taxpayers. The list goes on, as huge conglomerates such as American Express, Bank of America, and Capital One bestowed millions on their CEOs, only months after begging for handouts from the unwashed masses who were struggling to make ends meet, and to whom were still being told to sacrifice for the good of the country. All told, nine banks that begged the struggling taxpayers to bail them out awarded cumulative bonuses of nearly $33 billion in that same year of 2008, including $1 million each to some five thousand employees. Exposing the lie that these economic excesses are connected to the ironclad manifestations of an all-knowing marketplace, six of the nine banks paid out more in bonuses than they earned in profit. The Obama administration reacted to these shameful figures with a statement by Robert Gibbs, “The president continues to believe that the American people don’t begrudge people making money for what they do.” Citigroup, which received about 25 percent of the bailout money going to the nine banks, bestowed an incredible $98.9 million in compensation on Andrew Hall, head of their energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, which dwarfed the $38 million they paid CEO Vikram Pandit in 2008.
As has been widely reported, only a few relatively small fry—loan officers and the like—were ever prosecuted for crimes related to the 2008 financial crash. By comparison, the much smaller Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s resulted in over thirty thousand criminal referrals and one thousand felony convictions by the Department of Justice. In contrast, only one banker—the Egyptian-born Kareem Serageldin—was ever sent to jail for the 2008 financial crisis. Despite that even the judge admitted that others at Credit Suisse were guiltier and that Serageldin was merely “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks,” he nevertheless sentenced him to thirty months behind bars. The overall lack of prosecutions related to the worst banking crisis in American history reflected a disturbing trend. From 1995–1997, the percentage of federal white-collar prosecutions was 17.6 percent. In the period from 2010–2012 however, this figure dipped to only 9.4 percent. As multiple sources within the banking industry told the New York Times, federal authorities appeared to lack the courage to go after powerful corporate figures, part of an overall change within the Justice Department of seeking settlements in lieu of prison sentences.
CEOs are not only given wildly excessive salaries and “performance” bonuses; they are often given parting “gifts” that boggle the mind. ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva, for example, was gifted an unbelievable $260 million from the company when he left them in June 2012. Evidently the $141 million total compensation package he’d accrued in 2011 wasn’t enough. Mulva’s package paled in comparison to the more than $417 million doled out to John Welch, in honor of his twenty-year tenure at General Electric. But perhaps Welch was deserving of such an honor, considering General Electric paid no taxes at all in 2010, according to the New York Times and numerous other mainstream media outlets. In 2015, Citizens for Tax Justice claimed that GE had again paid no taxes, along with fourteen other Fortune 500 companies. These lucrative deals, often called golden parachutes, are extended to overpaid executives even when they fail miserably at their jobs. The magazine Mother Jones calculated that the average golden parachute for these CEOs was an amount equal to forty-nine lifetimes’ worth of work for a median income employee. In the case of Welch, this would rise to 203 lifetimes’ worth of work.
Some executive pay rates are so astronomical that they defy belief. John Hammergren, CEO of drug giant McKesson, made $54.4 million in 2010. This works out to $210,000 a day, and that daily salary would be more than nearly 99 percent of Americans make annually ($250,000 a year is generally considered the basement level for the top One Percent). Health Care pays its executives extremely well, too, which goes a long way toward explaining the spiraling, out of control medical costs in this country. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield paid CEO Larry Glasscock a $42.5 million bonus in 2004, which nicely dwarfed his $3.6 million compensation for the year. As an anonymous wit on a conspiracy forum noted in outrage over this, “At my former salary, I would have to work 1,214 years to make $42.5 million. That’s over twelve centuries.” To show just how rapidly, and drastically, the gap between upper management and workers is growing, during the 1980s, executives made about forty times what average workers did. By 2015, the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 204 to 1. During the Clinton years, the average pay for CEOs increased more than 400 percent.
While paying no tax at all in 2010, GE, citing merely one example of corporate tax “fairness,” paid an average of just one-eighth of a percent in taxes between 2002 and 2011. In response to these astonishing statistics, GE CEO Jeff Immelt termed the US tax system, “old, complex, and uncompetitive.” Uncompetitive with what, one wonders. Immelt exemplifies everything wrong about present-day America; since he took over as GE’s CEO, the company’s stock lost 50 percent of its value, and GE had closed thirty-one factories and laid off nineteen thousand workers. For this dazzling performance, Immelt earned over $12 million a year. Forbes magazine ranked Immelt as the fourth worst CEO in America in its May 2012 issue. Perhaps Immelt possesses that indistinguishable executive talent we’ve heard so much about.
One could fill a good-sized book with the excesses of CEO compensation alone. The figures are mind-boggling. Angelo Mozilo was the cofounder and longtime CEO of Countrywide Financial. During one eight-year period alone, Mozilo earned $521.5 million from his company, according to compensation research firm Equilar. Mozilo became the first executive to be penalized for the losses incurred by millions of investors during the mortgage collapse when he agreed to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission in a civil fraud case. Of the $67.5 million Mozilo was assessed, Countrywide agreed to pay $20 million as part of the indemnification agreement he had with the company. Mozilo, like many of the highest-paid corporate leaders, received innumerable, valuable perks along with his millions. For instance, his compensation package covered annual country club and golf course dues. Mozilo knew how to take care of his influential friends, too; Senator Christopher Dodd, for example, was given a $75,000 reduction in mortgage payments at below-market interest rates, that in real terms worked out to be a sweetheart deal worth over a million dollars. Other luminaries who benefited financially from being “friends of Angelo” included members of Congress Kent Conrad and Barbara Boxer, as well as Nancy Pelosi’s son, Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, and Democratic Party figures Richard Holbrooke and Donna Shalala.
The unfathomable salaries CEOs regularly give themselves are, for all intents and purposes, tax subsidies from the government. Congress, in 1993, capped the tax deductibility for executive pay at $1 million but still allowed US corporations to profit from deducting so-called performance-based pay, including stock options. Thanks to this provision, corporations regularly use these stock options to lower their taxes, making large executive bonuses in effect tax free. The total yearly cost to taxpayers from all these shenanigans is some $7 billion, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The fast-food industry has been especially noteworthy in this regard; the Institute for Policy Studies found that fast-food CEOs had deducted about $183 million of this performance pay, which decreased their tax liability by $64 million over two years. These are the same folks who are claiming no one will be able to afford their putrid food if they were forced to pay their employees a living wage. McDonald’s CEO James Skinner, for example, received a performance bonus of $23 million in 2012, while David Novak, CEO of Yum! Brands (which includes Taco Bell and KFC), was given more than twice that amount, with a $48 million “performance” bonus.
While these CEOs are earning unconscionable amounts of money, their workers are often forced to make ends meet on $20,000 annually or less, with decreasing benefits every year. Walmart has become notorious in this regard; their employees are even given instructions on how to apply for welfare and food stamps during their orientation. The fact that some of these companies are paying their workers so little that they qualify for government subsidies seems to have largely escaped the attention of the public, who have been trained to focus their anger on the poorest individuals, benefiting from some nominal form of government assistance. In the minds of many Americans, it’s fraud for a decidedly poor person to be on government assistance and still have what appears to be too good of an automobile or television for someone of their lowly lot in life, but it’s okay for huge corporations to be given unlimited handouts from taxpayers to subsidize the shameful pittances they pay their employees.
During the 2013 holiday season, Walmart launched a canned-food drive for its own employees. Somehow, I don’t expect Sam Walton’s children to reexamine their priorities, despite all the attention and criticism this campaign received. No less ironic was the incredible boast from Walmart’s CEO Bill Simon, the month before, during a presentation about the opportunities at his corporation, that 475,000 Walmart associates earned salaries of at least $25,000. There are about a million Walmart employees, so this means that less than half of them are paid even this kind of paltry salary. The Committee for Better Banks surveyed bank tellers in New York and found that 39 percent of them were on some form of public assistance, because their salaries were so low. By the end of 2012, the top ten CEOs each were making over $100 million a year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg led the way, with $2.28 billion. Almost all of Zuckerberg’s earnings came through stock options, which meant a very low tax bill.
The results of a study published in the New York Times on July 22, 2013, confirmed that whether you’re born poor or born rich you tend overwhelmingly to stay that way. Nationally, a Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder never move up at all, while 70 percent never reach the middle rung. Even students from wealthy families with lower test scores are more likely to graduate from college than poor students with higher test scores. So few people control the marketplace that, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the top One Percent own half of all the stocks in this country, while the bottom 50 percent own only .5 percent of them. Sociologist and author G. William Domhoff revealed, in an illuminating report on his Who Rules America? website, that the One Percent has only 5 percent of the collective personal debt, while the bottom 90 percent has 73 percent. When we contrast the distribution of income and debt, it becomes obvious just how difficult economic upper mobility is in present-day America. Joseph Stiglitz went over much of this material in an excellent article in the May 2011 Vanity Fair, titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” There is probably no truer saying than the chestnut, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
As Ambrose Bierce once defined it, a corporation is an ingenious device whereby individual profit is obtained without individual responsibility. Those who suggest that top executives are indispensible and crucial to the success of the company should try a simple experiment; allow a week to go by without any executives reporting to work (or even telecommuting, one of their countless perks). Then go a week without the janitorial staff. It will be crystal clear to everyone just who is doing the important work.
Tales from the Conspiratum 