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Throughout history, some oligarchies have been tyrannical, relying on public servitude to exist, although others have been relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy. Some city-states from ancient Greece were oligarchies.
Keith Olbermann is gone from TV; his truthful comments snuffed out by another of the oligarchs -- the new wedding of NBC and Comcast. We all knew if this wedding took place, it would be bad for America, but none of us knew that the right wing would act so fast and so blatantly against the highest rated show on MSNBC.
We are under the control of the four oligarchs in America, and democracy be damned as far as they are concerned. They are: media moguls, corporations and their lobbyists, Congress and the President. The axing of Keith Olbermann -- while the madmen of Fox (Faux) TV and News, radio's Rush Limburger and NBC's donations to political campaigns and feigned unfair punishment for a few days of Olbermann until the public squawked loudly -- make clear that the right-wing fiasco has taken over America. The dumb will be dumbed down even more; the herd of sheeple will continue to grow until whatever is left of debate and freedom of dissent in America's faux "democracy" will be destroyed (once again, that enchanting word that lulls so many Americans to sleep and is used to conquer the world for the American empire).
This loss of Olbermann cannot be measured in mere numbers, but will be felt in many dimensions not only now, but in time to come. There has been no voice like speaking truth to power like his; Rachel Maddow is but a hollow copy, Chris Matthews does not speak out as directly, although his show is one of the best on TV after Olbermann and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As some have said to me, "I guess he stepped on some toes." But what of it, doesn't a real democracy allow for dissent and differences of opinion? Have we all become small replicas of George W. Bush and the devil Dick Cheney, who put us into two "valued" logic (or illogic) claims -- "you're either with us or you're against us," and "if you dissent from our right-wing policies, you are obviously a traitor."
Have we forgotten the rhetoric that Bush and Cheney used in their lies in the run-up to the attack of Iraq in the name of "freedom" and "democracy"? Lie after blatant lie that Saddam Hussein had "atomic weapons," and "weapons of mass destruction" although, after 10 years of American satellite and air surveillance, nothing had moved an inch in Iraq without American knowledge or acquiescence.
But we had the right-wing media moguls helping to aid the illegal war, with the TV networks, our major newspapers -- especially the New York Times with its dear Judith Miller, and the Washington Post regularly running columns by Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney; and the takeover of the independent Los Angeles Times by friends of the NY Times -- so it was all set for a right-wing oligarchical coup. And now, with the wedding of Comcast and NBC, the oligarchy is complete and there is no more critical commentary left on TV.
Those on the right were quick to jump into the fray. Matt Drudge, with his usual misleading headline, announced that it was mere "Drama"; that Keith just "Wanted More $$." This shake-up MSNBC's fault? Comcast's fault? No way. Nikke and Nellie, a couple of gals writing for Deadline/Hollywood, maintained an unnamed source told them...
"This was all Keith's choice. He has several times over the years said that he wants out of his contract. He never meant it until this year. He started lawyers negotiating twice this year. He stopped them in the spring. Then, about a month ago with the guidance of his new ICM team and a new LA manager (who were making zero $ on his current deal), he once again said he wanted to leave and this time they negotiated the full package.
"Because of all the false threats in the past, it was impossible for the network to know if he was really going to sign the final document yesterday. That's why promos for his show were still running after he quit on the air. The network couldn't really believe it or act on it until he said it on TV. They couldn't tell the promo people to pull Keith's show out of the cycle until they were sure. His staff learned he was quitting when they heard him say it on TV.
"Comcast has had no impact at all on MSNBC [yet]. Phil Griffin has complete authority. He makes deals without having to consult with anyone. He has made proposals over the years on the fly and in high-speed contexts where he is acting alone and with full authority. MSNBC is Phil Griffin's network and no one at NBC thinks they have a better idea than Phil about what to do next."
So, what do we have left, a mild and repetitious Maddow, a careful Chris Matthews, a blustery Ed Shultz? Saturday on MSNBC, a set of broadcasters spent a lot of time talking about a missing child, yet didn't even mention their most famous and most popular commentator, Keith Olbermann, being fired. When asked, they responded tersely -- "We have no comments." And there it was, all done overnight -- no warning, no mercy, no concern about the citizenry or the balance that used to be required in the FCC rules before the Clintonites and Bushites gutted the FCC with people like Michael Powell.
The FCC-destroying Powell is the lying Colin Powell's son. Yes, I no longer regard Colin as anything but a lying tool of the oligarchs, no matter how much he pleads "mea culpa" about Iraq. I remember the Colin Powell, who we hoped would run for president, when he came to Howard University to speak at the graduation commencement, and afterwards at lunch, he and his wife explained he wouldn't run for president because they were afraid he'd be assassinated. So, Colin assassinated his own reputation by lying for Bush and Cheney to take us into war.
I suggest that we all buy at least one or two shares of the new Comcast stock, and then raise hell at a stockholders meeting. And, we should also ask the SEC to investigate on behalf of our rights as stockholders against the oligarchical behavior. We should all write to the sponsors of whatever show is placed in Olbermann's place and tell them we are going to boycott their products, and even have demonstrations outside our local stores letting it be known that we are boycotting their products because of what Comcast did on taking over MSNBC; with letters to MSNBC letting them know that the boycotts will continue until Olbermann is returned to the air.
We should get some good civil rights organizations or the ACLU (of which I am a member), to try to reverse the takeover of NBC by Comcast because it was not in the public interest to allow this merger. But of course, the FCC is as corrupt as Attorney General Eric Holder and his faux "justice department" behavior, and his boss, the weak-kneed Obama, who are guided each day by marching orders from above, and now that Rahm Emanuel is gone, Bill Daley is conveying the orders of the oligarchs to our gutless president.
We may lose, but this fight is worth it for whatever we believe our long lost "democracy" to have been -- not that we ever really had a democracy, but the teeth of the oligarchs were not as visible as they are now. Robert Bly warned us way back during the VietNam War in his fine book, "THE TEETH MOTHER, AT LAST." Yes, we were warned; we thought we'd learned a lesson in VietNam, but we have the same lying, defeated officers from that war chanting the same mantras of lies who are now the generals following Westmoreland's lies. They insist they can "win the hearts and minds of the people," as they brutalize them with drones, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, numerous missiles, air strikes and black-op missions where civilians are killed by the dozens. And, the poisonous Depleted Uranium we used to kill people in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, will remain in the blood of those poor people for generations, and will also kill many of our veterans over time just as "agent orange," killed thousands of VietNamese and later killed many of our veterans after they had returned home.
The loss of Keith Olbermann is a bad omen for America. We should be aware of this loss, and do what we can to let others know its impact -- how much of democracy we have lost. I'm sure if George Orwell were alive today, he would weep at this atrocity. Just as we should, but we must also stand strong against these oligarchs. We must realize that they are in control; we must support our alternative media sites so long as we can -- because soon they will be taking our websites down by raising prices and by other underhanded means to silence all dissent -- even on the Internet.
http://www.todaysalternativenews.com
Sam Hamod, Ph.D. is a graduate professor; he has taught courses in creative writing, politics, religion, mass media and intercultural relations. He has one of the very few PhDs awarded by The Writers Workshop of The Univ. of Iowa, has published 12 (more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
It's the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us. We're losing.
In 1962 the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had 125 times the wealth of the median household. Now it's 190 times as much. Is that a case of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher? No.
From 1950 to 1965, median family income rose from $24,000 a year to $38,000 a year. That's close to 4 percent a year, close to 60 percent over 15 years. That's a rising tide.
In 1964 there was a big tax cut. That's when things started to slow down for average people. By the mid-'70s the rise of the middle class stalled. From 1975 to 2010 median family income rose $42,936 to $49,777. That's not quite 16 percent over 25 years, less than six-tenths of 1 percent per year.
Briefly, when taxes went up under Clinton, median income rose, peaked at $52,587 in 1999, and then, after Bush cut taxes, declined. Keep in mind that this is median family income. In the '50s and '60s, family income was usually earned by a single person. Today, family income normally comes from at least two people.
At the same time, income for the richest soared. In 1979 the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 9 percent of all U.S. income. Now they earn 24 percent of all U.S. income. One percent of Americans earn nearly one-fourth of all the income in the country.
Then came the crashes of 2001 and 2008 and the recessions that followed.
The crash hasn't changed anything. Things have become worse.
From 1990 to 2005, adjusted for inflation -- the minimum wage is down 9 percent, production workers' pay is up only over 15 years 4.3 percent.
At the same time, the rich get richer:
Corporate profits are up 106.7 percent. The S&P 500 is still up 141.4 percent since 1990. CEO compensation is up 282 percent. Call it transfer of wealth. Or call it class warfare.
What's wrong with the rich getting richer?
Slate's Timothy Noah, in "The United States of Inequality ," wrote, "Income distribution in the United States [has become] more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador."
Take a look at that list.
Countries with wide income inequality don't lead the world in research, technology, industry, and innovation. They're unstable. They have large underclasses. They have high rates of crime. They have little opportunity.
In such countries the rich have disproportionate power. They take control of all aspects of society, especially government, the police, and the judiciary. They become self perpetuating.
If current trends continue, "The United States by 2043 will have the same income inequality as Mexico." (Tula Connell, Mar 12, 2010, AFL-CIO Now.)
Countries with high levels of income inequality are third-world countries.
Here's how regular people can deal with cultures of high inequality. The primary, and best, weapon is a progressive tax structure. As people move up the income ladder they pay a higher rate at each rung. Unearned income -"from dividends and capital gains -" is taxed at least as high as earned income (money that people actually work for.) Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with great precision, the decline in fortunes of ordinary Americans. Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with equal precision, the increase in inequality. We had a chance to slow the process by letting the last round, the Bush tax cuts, expire. We've lost that round.
People can become educated and move on up.
Back in the '60s, when I was growing up, New York City had free universities. The burgeoning SUNY system charged $400 tuition a semester. The minimum Regents scholarship was $400 a semester. If a student didn't get one, he or she could easily earn enough to pay tuition with a summer job. The same held true for most state university systems across the country.
Today, students have to borrow. The median student debt for an undergraduate degree -" forget about a doctorate, law school, and med school -" is $20,000. The first, and truest, lesson you learn when you go to college is how to be in service to the banks.
We've lost that battle.
What does it mean?
"Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.
"Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent."
(Understanding Mobility in America , April 26, 2006, Tom Hertz, American University.)
Working people can organize and form unions. Unions do more than raise wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection against abuse, intimidation and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize their members to vote.
Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they're getting better at it. According to Business Week, ("How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay," 10/28/2002),"over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups."
In the 1940s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Now it's down to just 7.2 percent. Unions only remain strong in the public sector, where membership is 37 percent.
If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public service union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains, they're the police and fireman. The stories will tell you their pension fund liabilities will bankrupt the states; that it's unionized teachers who have ruined our schools. Charter schools -" without unions -" are the new favorite charity for billionaires.
When a country is, or becomes, a third-world country, the other thing people can do is run. To some place richer and freer. Like America.
But when America becomes Mexico, where you gonna run to?
LARRY BEINHART is the author of SALVATION BOULEVARD, soon to be released as a major motion picture with Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Marissa Tomei, Ed Harris, and Jim Gaffigan, WAG THE DOG, more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Over the last decade, dozens of media mergers and purchases have resulted in a media industry controlled by a handful of companies—and the cable giant Comcast wants to be one of them.
After a failed attempt to purchase Disney in 2004 for $66 billion (Inter Press Service, 3/20/04), Comcast offered to take over NBC Universal for the bargain price of $30 billion—which would buy a 51 percent controlling interest from General Electric, with the expectation of acquiring the remaining stake over the next seven years (Globe and Mail, 12/3/09).
While Comcast has so far been mainly a cable and Internet provider, with limited involvement in programming, the purchase of NBC Universal would make it a major media conglomerate. In addition to the NBC broadcast TV network, Comcast would get MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Studios, 26 local television stations and several other small holdings. NBC also holds a 30 percent stake in the online TV website Hulu, a point of much discussion in the coverage (New York Times, 11/9/09). If the FCC allows the merger to take place, the company will control nearly a quarter of cable subscribers in the country and 12 percent of all television content (New York Observer, 2/9/10).
On October 4, the FCC asked Comcast and NBC to provide more information before proceeding. Specifically, it wanted the proposed corporation to submit copies of its agreements to distribute Comcast’s cable channels, such as Regional Sports Network, E! and the Golf Channel, to its competitors, including Time Warner and DirecTV (WashingtonPost.com, 10/5/10). The FCC also wanted to know about how pay-per-view and video-on-demand services would be operated and managed, as well as information on advertising revenue from TV and online content.
Big media, consumers unite Conflict of interest problems have been an issue in media mergers before, but Com-cast/NBC would have unprecedented influence in both media content and distribution—controlling not just what we watch, but how we watch it, potentially keeping content behind a cable subscription pay wall. The Washington Post (1/29/10) outlined these concerns:
If the combined company chooses to charge too much for its shows and movies, prioritize the delivery of its own content, or flat out block its shows from getting to competitors such as Vuze, Sling Media, Boxee, YouTube or Netflix, it would forestall competition in the nascent online video market.
Unlike most other media mergers, the Comcast/NBC deal is not just a case of the public interest versus big business. The proposed merger is “causing sworn enemies and marketplace rivals to stand together to oppose the mega-deal” (Roll Call, 9/22/10), as progressive groups like Free Press and Common Cause join with the right-wing Concerned Women for America and corporations like Bloomberg to try and stop it.
The disputes between cable providers and networks have been escalating, as evidenced by Fox’s recent decision to temporarily pull its signal from Cablevision (FAIR Blog, 10/20/10). But when a stand-alone programmer like Fox withholds its programming from a provider, both sides have an incentive to reach an agreement, since at the same time that the provider is losing content, the programmer is losing viewers and therefore advertising revenue.
Comcast/NBC, by contrast, could drive up its asking price for other networks to carry NBC content, and other cable providers would have to absorb the cost or pass it onto consumers—or risk having Comcast/NBC pull its stations and content. Rather than viewing this as a profit loss, Comcast would be able to advertise that it carries exclusive NBC content, turning its intransigence into a competitive advantage.
The American Cable Association, a trade organization which represents small and medium-sized cable service providers, reported that the merger “could result in $2.4 billion in extra costs to consumers over nearly a decade” (WashingtonPost.com, 11/8/10). Comcast argued that the report “used flawed data and contradicted available data.” But it’s undeniable that this merger would give Comcast/NBC unmatched pricing power and market advantage.
A few senators have also openly declared their opposition to Comcast/NBC, including Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)—formerly an NBC employee on Saturday Night Live—and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who declared (Democratic Daily, 11/8/10):
There already is far too much media concentration in this country. We need more diversity. We need more local ownership. We need more viewpoints. We do not need another media giant run by a Republican supporter of George W. Bush.*
Hulu and Netflix NBC’s stake in Hulu adds another twist to the deal. Hulu claims it has 30 million users watching 260 million content streams (i.e., TV shows) every month. It also projects that it will more than double its revenue from $108 million to $240 million next year. Whether or not it reaches these figures, its viewership has been steadily increasing. The speculation is that more and more people are canceling their cable service and exclusively using their computers for accessing content (Venturebeat, 11/10/10).
There are a lot of concerns that Comcast/NBC’s power in this emerging field of online viewing would stifle new competition. After all, Internet television has long been a major threat to the business models of companies like Comcast (New York Times, 11/8/09). The current regulations for cable companies demand that media producers share their content with distributors, but as the Washington Post pointed out (1/29/10), “there are no rules in place to ensure that a merged Comcast/ NBC would share an expanded library of movies and shows with online companies that want to also deliver that content.”
Apparently, Comcast does not see any problem with this arrangement, and it has so far not offered to guarantee that it will share NBC’s media library online. “Availability of professional video content for online distribution likewise does not constitute a barrier that places new entrants at a disadvantage relative to incumbent online video distributors,” the company stated in its merger filing to the FCC (Washington Post 1/29/10). As anyone who watches Hulu, online television, or even old-fashioned television can figure out, the unavailability of popular shows like the American Office and Law & Order would certainly decrease any online television company’s userbase.
Hulu is not the only online content issue troubling the Comcast/NBC deal. A “scuffle” between Comcast and Level 3, the company that just signed a deal with Netflix to deliver its movies online, broke out when Comcast demanded a recurring fee for transmitting the streaming video; Level 3 agreed “under protest.” Comcast is accused of putting up an extra “toll booth” for the online movie provider (New York Times, 11/29/10).
Comcast maintained the issue was “a simple commercial dispute” having nothing to do with net neutrality. But this dispute demonstrates exactly the kind of problems that the proposed merger will create. Comcast/NBC will have a vested interest in ensuring its own content-distribution websites receive priority. Without any regulation, Comcast can simply shut off or slow down its competitors’ Internet access. Public interest? But Comcast would prefer to avoid public airing of such concerns. In a speech given at the Brookings Institution on November 15, company vice president David Cohen suggested we should just “move on” from the issue of net neutrality. “The courts, the FCC and the Congress” do not really have the “background necessary to work out consensus on what are essentially complicated technical issues,” Cohen said.
While the opinions of engineers are certainly valid in addressing Internet infrastructure issues, it is hard to say why they would override the protection of free speech and consumers’ rights to open access online, which are at the heart of the net neutrality debate. As Free Press points out (11/16/10), Comcast hasn’t proven itself a reliable company on these issues in the past:
The fact is that Comcast was caught interfering with lawful Internet traffic, lied about what it was doing, and tried every trick in the book to evade public scrutiny. Then when the FCC forced the company to stop discriminating against its customers, without even levying a fine, Comcast sued on a technicality to avoid any accountability.
That sort of record may make it hard to credit the “compromises” Comcast/NBC includes in its proposal to the FCC, like NBC’s promise to “maintain local over-the-air broadcasting services and to beef up programming for children and minority viewers” (Washington Post, 1/29/10). Comcast has also cited its charitable donations as evidence of its serving the public interest.
Merger express Despite the increasingly negative attention directed at the merger, neither the Justice Department nor the FCC are expected to block it, in part because, according the Wall Street Journal (11/15/10), as NBC and Comcast “aren’t direct competitors, it’s harder to mount an antitrust challenge.” The Journal noted that “Comcast executives have said they expect to close the deal by the end of [2010].”
One reason that Comcast might be feeling confident in its success is the many political donations it has made over the past year. Corie Wright, attorney for Free Press, told Extra! that Comcast has given nearly $1 million dollars to approximately three quarters of Congress over the past year. What Comcast received in ostensible exchange for this large sum of money were letters of support from members of Congress urging the FCC to support the proposed merger.
Susan Crawford, a law professor who is writing a book about the proposed merger, suggested that Comcast’s spending “tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists, donations, ads and investments” was “about as subtle as a wet fish in the face” (New York Times, 9/26/10).
As Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of ABC-affiliated station owner Allbritton Communications, pointed out, “If it’s such a good deal, and it’s so wonderful for everyone who watches television and is interested in news, why do so many lobbyists have to be hired and why does so much money have to be spent to push this merger through?’’
*Stephen Burke, president of Comcast Cable, raised at least $200,000 for Bush’s 2004 campaign (Think Progress, 11/5/10).
How has a tiny fraction of the population arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate those of the vast majority?
January 21, 2011 |
Who are they? The richest 1 percent. And maybe the next 9 percent.
Who are we? All the rest.
Which poses an interesting question.
How has a tiny fraction of the population – which is diverse in many ways – arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate the economic interests of the vast majority? And, while they’re at it, endanger the economic well-being of our nation, and bring the financial system of the whole world to the brink of collapse.
They have money.
We have votes.
Theoretically, that means we should have the government. Theoretically, government should be a countervailing force against the excesses of big money, take the long view for the good of the nation, and watch out for the majority. Let alone for the poor and downtrodden.
What we actually have is one political party that is flat out the party of big money and another party that sells out to big money.
Well, at least we have safety nets.
George Bush’s biggest regret is that he didn’t privatize social security. Why so eager?
One reason is that it is a big pile of money. Absolutely gigantic. It drives the bankers and brokers crazy that they can’t get their hands on it.
The other is ideological hatred. Stephen Moore (senior fellow at the Cato Institute, contributing editor of National Review and president of the Free Enterprise Fund) wrote, "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."
Where Bush failed, Obama has now taken the first step.
His recent tax deal includes cuts on employee contributions to Social Security. Which means defunding, weakening, and setting a new precedent, that Social Security contributions can be cut to “stimulate” the economy.
The crash has put the states in trouble. Rather than raise taxes, or borrow, several have decided on cuts to Medicaid, the program that services several categories of low income people: pregnant women, children under 19, the blind, disabled, or who need nursing home care. If you’re a poor kid who needs a liver transplant, you can beg, rob a convenience store, or die.
This shift to the right is a triumph of a long and very well-funded propaganda campaign.
Every time I read an op-ed in the New York Times that was written by a “senior scholar” from the Hoover Institute or a “fellow” from the Cato Institute, I want to scream, please replace that with “paid whore funded by psychotic right-wing billionaire.” Which is significantly more accurate.
They, in turn, have a great influence on the mainstream media. “As conservatives decried the media's left bias, they saw their institutions mentioned in various media almost 8,000 times in 1995, while liberal or progressive think tanks received only 1,152 citations” (How Conservative Philanthropies and Think Tanks Transform US Policy, by Sally Covington, Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1998).
Their influence on the national media affects the whole national dialogue.
Now, of course, they’ve taken the think tank concept to a whole new level – Fox News.
What about the media? Aren’t journalists – outside of Fox News – supposed to be objective?
In journalism there is no objective reality. There are only objectively collated quotes. Quotes can only come from “valid” sources. A journalist cannot look at tax cuts and compare them to economic results – job growth, changes in the median wage, and the like – and report that tax cuts do not create jobs. They can only quote politicians, like Bush and Obama, who say that tax cuts are a stimulus, and then look for someone of equal authority – or at least significant authority – to say the opposite, then go Chinese menu, two quotes from column A, one for column B. But what if there are no heavyweights ready to go on record for column B?
Here’s where it gets stranger than strange.
A whole field, economics, has lost its way.
This became obvious when 99.7 percent (that’s a made-up but probably accurate number), failed to predict the crash of ’08. Failed to diagnose the housing bubble, failed to understand the derivatives bubble, and failed to realize the world’s biggest banks were all bankrupt.
After the crash, they failed to cry out against the tax cuts that brought it on. They failed to come up with a way to solve the problems. Which, based on history, seem fairly obvious, raise taxes and spend the money on useful things that private industry can’t or won’t do, like hiring people.
Paul Krugman’s theory, loosely paraphrased, is that economists suffer from physics envy, which is like penis envy, but dumber. Economics is a social science, which is soft. Social scientists look at physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. They see lots of math and formulas. They imagine that if they have lots of math they will get hard, too. In order to create mathematical models out of the messy complexity of human activity, they presume perfect markets. So long as the economy is stable, that frequently works.
Faith in the perfection of markets promotes deregulation and tax cuts. That destabilizes the economy. The economists, therefore, help create the disasters that don’t exist in their mathematical models.
Charles Ferguson, who directed the superb documentary Inside Job, is much more cynical. He believes that academic economists, like doctors who shill for pharmaceutical companies, are on the take from big money interests. He does a marvelous job in the film of demonstrating exactly that.
Indeed, all of academia – except perhaps for English departments – have become part of the business, banking, military, and political nexus.
The ivory tower was supposed to be above the mucky world. That was one of our final defenses in the class war -- a place devoted to knowledge for its own sake and truth just because it was true.
Now, universities pursue truths that someone will fund a grant for.
Less than two weeks since the Tucson shooting tragedy, coalfield residents in central Appalachia and around the country are stunned and increasingly concerned about a "call to arms" issued by coal industry representatives for tomorrow's planned rally at the state capitol in Charleston, West Virginia.
An emergency situation of thinly veiled threats and increasingly strident rhetoric in West Virginia now has besieged coalfield residents wondering if the Department of Justice should intervene before their state becomes the next headline tragedy.
At the very least, coalfield residents are asking whether the permit for the "call to arms" rally should be revoked for inciting violence.
More so, it is still unclear who is footing the bill for the rally's "call to arms."
Despite pleas to "cool off the rhetoric in the coalfield rhetoric", coal industry front group "Friends of Coal" is hailing a rally planned by Acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin for Thursday, January 20th at the state capitol in Charleston, West Virginia as a "call to arms."
Threats from the coal industry are nothing new---I've written many times about Big Coal Gone Wild episodes of violence, threats, intimidation and the seeds of hate crimes.
In his campaign last fall, US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) made national news for firing a rifle while invoking President Obama's name and commitment to cap and trade policies. While shooting the gun, Manchin said he would take "dead aim."
Manchin, among other West Virginia politicians, has followed the coal industry's slogan to take on the Obama administration's "war on coal."
A little over a year ago, the great US Senator Robert C. Byrd called on the coal industry and its allies in government to end the fear-mongering. Byrd wrote: "Let's speak the truth. The most important factor in maintaining coal-related jobs is demand for coal. Scapegoating and stoking fear among workers over the permitting process is counter-productive."
At the memorial service for the Tucson shooting victims, President Obama called on the nation to end such violent rhetoric and use words that heal and not wound:
At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized--at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do--it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."
Besieged coalfields residents live daily with the violence of mountaintop removal mining.
As three million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives continue to be detonated daily for mountaintop removal mining operations, raining fly rock and silica dust and taking the peace and prosperity from affected residents in historic coalfield towns and mountains of West Virginia--and in Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southwest Virginia and stripmining communities around the nation--President Obama's pleas for restraint could never be more timely.
Let's hope they are heard in West Virginia before it is too late.
The mountain of damning information acquired by WikiLeaks just keeps growing -- as do attacks on Assange.
January 17, 2011 |
The mountain of damning information acquired by WikiLeaks just keeps growing, this time thanks to former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer, who has reportedly fed the whistle-blower site information that could uncover "massive, unmitigated tax evasion " by powerful individuals and corporations around the globe.
Elmer handed over two optical discs worth of data, said to contain Swiss bank accounts linked to thousands of individuals, including some 40 politicians and "pillars of society" from the U.S., Asia and Europe. Speaking at a press conference outside the Frontline Club, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under house arrest, Elmer called WikiLeaks "my only hope to get society to know what's going on" and said "it is damaging our society in the way that money is moved."
After leaving a Cayman Islands outpost of the Swiss bank Julius Baer in 2004, Elmer alleged that many of the bank's top clients engaged in tax fraud with the full cooperation of Julius Baer leaders, according to Raw Story. Elmer, who went on to found the Swiss Whistleblower website, has fed significant information to WikiLeaks once before, in 2007. He faced a court hearing over that release just last Tuesday.
Assange said he plans to release the information in "a matter of weeks," as soon as it's been verified.
The news comes as Assange faces allegations of sexual misconduct and attempts to extradite him from the UK to Sweden. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is continuing its efforts to smear Assange and punish everyone involved with his website. Most notably, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. soldier behind a massive leak of classified government documents, is being tortured by being kept in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison.
Assange himself has received numerous thinly-veiled (and not so thinly-veiled) death threats from people all over the world, including individuals associated with the governments of the U.S. and other countries. A website called "People OK With Murdering Assange" compiles the most egregious statements from individuals -- including politicians and prominent media personalities -- who have called for him to be killed.
The Feds have convinced a number of major companies, including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Amazon, to stop doing business with Assange's site.
Even the newly crowned Miss America got some jabs in at WikiLeaks' expense, saying during the question portion of Saturday's pageant, "You know when it came to that situation, it was actually based on espionage, and when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people's right to know. It's important that everybody who's in our borders is safe and so we can't let things like that happen, and they must be handled properly." That answer may have won Teresa Scanlan the crown, but it is of course inaccurate, since no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
Lauren Kelley is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer and editor who has contributed to Change.org, The L Magazine and Time Out New York. She lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter here.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, today pledged to make public the confidential tax details of 2,000 wealthy and prominent individuals, after being passed the data by a Swiss banker who claims the information potentially reveals instances of money-laundering and large-scale illegal tax evasion.
Julian Assange (l) receives CDs containing data on offshore bank account holders from Rudolf Elmer. (Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters)
In a carefully choreographed handover in central London, Rudolf Elmer, formerly a senior executive at the Swiss bank Julius Baer, based in the Cayman islands, said he was handing the data to WikiLeaks as part of an attempt "to educate society" about the amount of potential tax revenues lost thanks to offshore schemes and money-laundering.
"As banker, I have the right to stand up if something is wrong," he said. "I am against the system. I know how the system works and I know the day-to-day business. I wanted to let society know how this system works because it's damaging society," he said.
Elmer will appear in a Swiss court on Wednesday charged with breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at his former employer.
He denies the charges.
He refused to comment on the period of time covered by the data, contained on two compact discs, or the precise source of the information; nor would he give the names of any corporations or individuals whose details he was handing over, saying that the information needed to be "investigated" before it was released into the public domain.
Assange, making his first public appearance since being bailed in December on sex assault allegations, for which Sweden is seeking his extradition, said he would pass the information to the Serious Fraud Office(SFO), examine it to ensure sources were protected, and then release it on the WikiLeaks site, potentially within "a couple of weeks".
"Once we look at the data, yes, there will be full disclosure," he said.
He would not be drawn on questions relating to the extradition case, which will be heard at Belmarsh magistrates court on 7 February, or on other leaks the site has promised are forthcoming, including information involving a "big US bank", which many believe to be Bank of America.
The site was not yet fully functional, he said. "We are not open yet for public business. The volume of material that we would receive is too high for our internal mechanisms, but we are receiving in other ways, like this, in this manner," he said. The release of leaked US diplomatic cables, which the site originally released through the Guardian and four other international media organisations, would continue, however. Elmer said he was passing the information to WikiLeaks because he had previously approached universities with the information but it had not been followed up. He said his attempts to interest the Swiss media had resulted only in his being dismissed as "a paranoid person, a mentally ill person".
"I was close to giving up, but then a friend of mine told me: 'There's WikiLeaks.' I looked at it and thought: 'That's the only hope I have to [let] society know what's going on.'"
In 2008, he released to the site a much smaller collection of documents, also detailing the tax details of some of the bank's clients. Though the site has never published that information, Julius Baer succeeded briefly in shutting down Wikileaks.org before the site, supported by a number of US media and civil liberties organisations, succeeded in overturning the injunction. He also passed the information to the US tax authorities.
The data was later seen by the Guardian, which found "details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust"; the data also "[appeared] to include several cases where wealthy individuals sought to use trust money as though it were their own".
In a statement to the Observer on Friday, Julius Baer said: "The aim of [Elmer's] activities was, and is, to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public. With this goal in mind, Mr Elmer spread baseless accusations and passed on unlawfully acquired, respectively retained documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks. To back up his campaign, he also used falsified documents."
A spokeswoman for the SFO said it would "consider allegations made to it to determine if the matter is within its jurisdiction and criteria for investigation or possibly for another authority to consider".
Meet the new global elite. They’re pretty much the same as the old global elite, only richer and more smug.
Laura Flanders of GritTV interviews business reporter Chrystia Freeland about her cover story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly on the new ruling class. She says that today’s ultra-rich are more likely to have earned their fortunes in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street than previous generations of plutocrats, who were more likely to have inherited money or established companies.
As a result, she argues, today’s global aristocracy believes itself to be the product of a meritocracy. The old sense of noblesse oblige among the ultra-rich is giving way to the attitude that if the ultra-rich could do it, everyone else should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Ironically, Freeland points out that many of the new elite got rich from government bailouts of their failed banks. It’s unclear why this counts as earning one’s fortune, or what kind of meritocracy reserves its most lavish rewards for its most spectacular failures.
Class warfare on public sector pensions
In The Nation, Eric Alterman assails the Republican-controlled Congress’s decision to scrap the popular and effective Build America Bonds program as an act of little-noticed class warfare:
These bonds, which make up roughly 20 percent of all new debt sold by states and local governments because of a federal subsidy equivalent to some 35 percent of interest costs, ended on December 31, as Republicans proved unwilling even to consider renewing them. The death of the program could prove devastating to states’ future borrowing.
Alterman notes that the states could face up to $130 billion shortfall next year. States can’t deficit spend like the federal government, which made the Build America Bonds program a lifeline to the states.
According to Alterman, Republicans want the states to run out of money so that they will be unable to pay the pensions of public sector workers. He notes that Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) are also co-sponsoring a bill to force state and local governments to “recalculate” their pension obligations to public sector workers.
Divide and conquer
Kari Lydersen of Working In These Times explains how conservatives use misleading statistics to pit private sector workers against their brothers and sisters in the public sector. If the public believes that teachers, firefighters, meter readers and snowplow drivers are parasites, they’ll feel more comfortable yanking their pensions out from under them.
Hence the misleading statistic that public sector workers earn $11.90 more per hour than “comparable” private sector workers. However, when you take education and work experience into account, employees of state and local governments typically earn 11% to 12% less than private sector workers with comparable qualifications.
Public sector workers have better benefits plans, but only for as long as governments can afford to keep their contractual obligations.
Who’s screwing whom?
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is calling for a sense of perspective on public sector wages and benefits. In AlterNet he argues that the people who are really making a killing in this economy are the ultra-rich, not school teachers and garbage collectors:
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
Signs of hope?
The economic future looks pretty bleak these days. Yes, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4% from 9.8% in December, but the economy added only 103,000, a far cry from the 300,000 jobs economists say the economy really needs to add to pull the country out its economic doldrums.
Andy Kroll points out in Mother Jones that it will take 20 years to replace the jobs lost in this recession, if current trends continue.
Worse yet, what looks like job growth could actually be chronic unemployment in disguise. The unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people who are actively looking for work. Kroll worries that the apparent drop in the unemployment rate could simply reflect more people giving up their job searches.
For an counterweight to the doom and gloom, check out Tim Fernholz’s new piece in The American Prospect. He argues that the new unemployment numbers are among several hopeful signs for economic recovery in 2011. However, he stresses that his self-proclaimed rosy forecast is contingent upon avoiding several huge pitfalls, including drastic cuts in public spending.
With the GOP in Congress seemingly determined to starve the states for cash, the future might not be so rosy after all.
Last week, ThinkProgress conducted an impromptu interview with David Koch — one of the richest men in America, co-owner of the conglomerate Koch Industries, and a top financier of right-wing front groups — after we found him leaving the swearing-in ceremony for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). In the first part of the interview, Koch said that he “admire[s]” the Tea Party movement, and that “the rank and file are just normal people like us.” In the second part, Koch denied the existence of climate change and shrugged when asked if carbon pollution causes global warming. Koch Industries, which owns a coal shipping company, several of the country’s largest oil refineries and pipeline networks, and several fertilizer plants and factories, is a major contributor to climate change and funds much of the climate change-denying propaganda machine.
Throughout the interview, Tim Phillips — an “astroturf” lobbyist who is now president of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity front group — tried to push ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes away and yelled into the camera Keyes was holding. Phillips also continually yelled and tried to physically block us, even though Koch himself never objected to speaking with us. Regardless of Phillips’ interference, we asked Koch about the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the landmark case that eliminated one hundred years of campaign finance law by allowing unlimited corporate money in elections. The subject appeared to cause discomfort with Koch, who looked down once he realized what we were talking about. He later walked away when asked about his secret election planning meeting held last June with other corporate and right-wing leaders to plan the 2010 election:
FANG: What do you think of Citizens United? Has it helped your influence?
KOCH: Citizens United?
FANG: The Supreme Court decision.
KOCH: Oh.. Hm… [...]
FANG: I know you had a meeting last summer with Glenn Beck and several other conservatives. Could you tell the public what you discussed at that meeting?
Watch it:
Koch has long sought to expand his influence and the influence of other right-wing plutocrats by funding groups that have chipped away at campaign finance laws and disclosure laws for decades. When the Supreme Court took up the Citizens United case, Koch-funded front groups filed a series of amicus briefs arguing that unlimited corporate money in politics is protected by the First Amendment. For example, the Cato Institute, founded and financed by the Koch brothers, submitted a brief that called for “unfettered” corporate “speech” and the Institute for Justice, founded and financed by David’s brother Charles, submitted a brief claiming that campaign finance laws prohibiting unlimited corporate money “trump the First Amendment.” Koch-funded groups later lobbied aggressively to oppose efforts to provide transparency for the new tidal wave of corporate spending.
As ThinkProgress has covered extensively, the Citizens United case opened the floodgates for corporate money. Corporations funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into nonprofit groups to anonymously run attack ads against Democrats last fall. Koch’s own Americans for Prosperity group ran $40 million dollars in direct attacks, but also hired over 80 operatives to orchestrate pro-Republican Tea Parties across the country.
The Koch-elected Republican Congress and Koch-orchestrated Tea Party is well documented, but Koch’s relationship with the Supreme Court is more mysterious. As ThinkProgress reported, the Koch brothers have convened secret meetings for years with corporate leaders and right-wing partisans. We obtained a memo detailing the last meeting, in June of 2010, which was attended by executives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Glenn Beck, and a large group of businessmen (including major hedge fund managers, the CEO of Bechtel, oil billionaire Phil Anschutz, and others). The memo also indicated that Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have been featured at Koch meetings in the past. Scalia and Thomas, who maintains a close working relationship with Koch-funded front groups, of course supported the Citizens United decision.
In the first interview we published with Koch, he was excited about doing more political work. “We’re going to do more too in the next couple of years,” he boasted about Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity has ledtheway in whipping up paranoid right-wing Tea Parties and purchasing partisan attack ads on television. If the post-Citizens United midterm elections were any indication of the future, Koch’s influence will only grow.
In polite circles, among our political and financial classes, this is known as “the free market at work.” No, it’s “wage repression,” and it’s been happening in our country since around 1980. I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it’s the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.
But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.
That’s wage repression.
There are a number of other excellent observations at the source, which is the text of a speech Moyers gave at B.U. last month. Some additional excerpts:
That’s how financial capitalism works today: Conserving cash rather than bolstering hiring and production; investing in their own shares to prop up their share prices and make their stock more attractive to Wall Street. To hell with everyone else...
Late in August I clipped another story from the Wall Street Journal. Above an op-ed piece by Robert Frank the headline asked: “Do the Rich Need the Rest of America?”... the article went on to describe how the super-rich earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of America, “while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.”...
I’ll repeat that: “The dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.” That was the case before the Great Collapse of 2008, and it’s the case today, two years after the catastrophe. But the plutonomists are doing just fine. Even better in some cases, thanks to our bailout of the big banks...
Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what’s happening to our political system is corruption – a deep, systemic corruption. I urge you to seek out the recent edition of Harper’s Magazine. The former editor Roger D. Hodge brilliantly dissects how democracy has gone on sale in America. Ideally, he writes, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our pretended representatives. But voting is the beginning of civil virtue, not its end, and the focus of real power is elsewhere. Voters still “matter” of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the actual form of political influence – money...
The Gilded Age returned with a vengeance in our time. It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a “massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich.” As Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10 percent captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush – those huge tax cuts for the rich, remember, which are now about to be extended because both parties have been bought off by the wealthy – and by 2007 the wealthiest 10% of Americans were taking in 50% of the national income. Today, a fraction of people at the top today earn more than the bottom 120 million Americans.
The plutocrats who soaked up all the money now say the deficits require putting Social Security and other public services on the chopping block. You might think that Mr. Bush today would regret having invaded Iraq on false pretences at a cost of more than a trillion dollars and counting, but no, just last week he said that his biggest regret was his failure to privatize Social Security. With over l00 Republicans of the House having signed a pledge to do just that when the new Congress convenes, Mr. Bush’s vision may yet be realized...
Come now and let’s visit Washington’s red light district, headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the front group for the plutocracy’s prostitution of politics. The Chamber boasts it represents more than three million businesses and approximately 300,000 members. But in reality it has almost nothing to do with the shops and stores along your local streets. The Chamber’s branding, as the economics journalist Zach Carter recently wrote, “allows them to disguise their political agenda as a coalition of local businesses while it does dirty work for corporate titans.”...
Why isn’t government working for them? Because it’s been bought off. It’s as simple as that. And until we get clean money we’re not going to get clean elections, and until we get clean elections, you can kiss goodbye government of, by, and for the people. Welcome to the plutocracy.
I've excerpted quite a bit, but it's only a small portion of the essay, which is extensive and pulls no punches. I greatly admire Bill Moyers for his knowledge and insight, and for his willingness to speak truth to power. See my posts here and here. But most importantly,
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.
This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.
Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD's which clandestinely installed a rootkit onto PC's that provided administrative-level access to the users' computer. The copy-protected music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying prevent consumers from making multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally, the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC.
Traitorware is sometimes included in products with less obviously malicious intent. Printer dots were added to certain color laser printers as a forensics tool for law enforcement, where it could help authenticate documents or identify forgeries. Apple’s scary-sounding patent for the iPhone is meant to help locate and disable the phone if it is lost of stolen. Don’t let these good intentions fool you—software that hides itself from you while it gives your personal data away to a third party is dangerous and dishonest. As the Sony BMG rootkit demonstrates, it may even leave your device wide open to attacks from third parties.
Traitorware is not some science-fiction vision of the future. It is the present. Indeed, the Sony rootkit dates back to 2005. Apple’s patent application indicates that we are likely to see more traitorware on the horizon. When that happens, EFF will be there to fight it. We believe that your software and devices should not be a tool for gathering your personal data without your explicit consent.
Americans are conditioned to see our present form of government as a representative democracy. We're almost incapable of understanding that:
We live in a plutocracy
The United States Constitution was deliberately constructed so that the nation is ruled by the wealthy
The Two American Revolutions
We've been taught to believe that there was only one American Revolution, a struggle to throw off the tyrannies of Great Britain. And relative to that revolution, we're conditioned to believe that the heroes were revolutionary patriots such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, the Sons of Liberty, and the Committees of Correspondence.
But in reality there were two American Revolutions:
The revolt against British oppression by Americans
The revolt against wealthy American merchants and financiers by the common people of America
The first American Revolution was completed with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781. The second American Revolution is seldom if ever taught in our schools. Because it would make clear just what kind of a country this is: a plutocracy--the rule of the wealthy. And it's this second American Revolution which we must now complete. Only a few of its battles have been won and much work remains in our efforts to rid ourselves of the ideology and practice of plutocracy.
"We see then, that in the context of the struggle for independence, the specific aspirations of common people put them into conflict with the people we think of as the 'Founding Fathers' or Framers. The Sons of Liberty, the Loyal Nine, and the Boston Committee of Correspondence and other such groups which the Framers organized were rooted in the 'middling interests and well-to-do merchants' and upper classes. They have been wrongly described as revolutionary. The truth is that they took great measures to keep the peace and defuse revolutionary tendencies. As mass resistance to British policies mounted, for example, they urged, 'No Mobs or Tumults, let the Person and Properties of your most inveterate Enemies be safe.' Sam Adams agreed. James Otis urged, 'No possible circumstances, though ever so oppressive, could be supposed sufficient to justify tumults and disorders . . .' The Boston Committee of Correspondence actually did its best to contain and control the militancy of activists involved in the Boston Tea Party."
Jerry Fresia. Toward an American Revolution, 1988
What Was Colonial Life Really Like?
In Colonial America, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting much poorer. In 1687 in Boston, the top 1% owned about 25% of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1% owned 44%. In those same years, the poor--those who owned no property--represented 14% in 1687 and 29% in 1770.
In the various colonies the wealthy merchant class introduced property qualifications for voting in order to disenfranchise the poor and protect their own privileges:
In Pennsylvania, white males had to have 50 pounds of "lawful money" or own fifty acres of land.
The result was that only 8% of the rural population and 2% of the urban population of Philadelphia could vote
George Washington was the richest man in America, a man who enslaved 216 human beings who were not emancipated until after he and his wife had both died. Benjamin Franklin had a personal fortune worth at least $20 million in today's money. He was a champion of the Quaker plutocrats in Philadelphia and vigorously opposed the democratic western farmers of Pennsylvania.
John Hancock was an extremely wealthy Boston merchant who had made his fortune as a military contractor during King George's War (1739-1747). In 1748, Hancock engineered a merciless devaluation of Massachusetts currency as a cure to inflation, which reduced huge numbers of workers to poverty. Alexander Hamilton grew rich through his father-in-law's connections. James Madison created a large fortune with his vast slave plantations. The top 10 percent of the white male leaders in America owned half the wealth and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people.
To common people, freedom meant freedom from the oppression of colonial aristocracy as well as freedom from British rule. One of their favorite slogans was: "Common people must be free from all 'Foreign or Domestic Oligarchy.'" They thought in terms of liberation from all oppression, not just "independence from Britain."
During colonial times, the "common people" were sometimes in control of their local governments. To control the Boston Town Meeting, urban workers, artisans and country farmers formed an alliance in 1768. A group of Boston merchants complained: "At these meetings, the lowest Mechanicks discuss upon the most important points of government with the utmost freedom."
The "common people" were not taking orders, they were speaking and acting for themselves; they were making it clear that their vision of a new society was not that of the wealthy merchant class.
In Philadelphia, the working class was successful in gaining political power. In 1770, the mechanics held their first political meeting specifically restricted to their own class. By 1772, the working class had organized their own political organization, the Patriotic Society, to promote their own candidates and agenda. By mid-1776, laborers, artisans, and small tradesmen, had taken command in Philadelphia.
The Pennsylvania constitution was created primarily by farmers and artisans. As one historian describes it, "the extent of popular control" put forward by these common people "exceeds that of any American government before or since." (Kenneth M. Dolbeare. Democracy at Risk, 1986)
The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 ignored women, slaves, servants and the poor, but it did challenge property rights: all free men who paid any public taxes whatsoever were entitled to the vote. This constitution is of major importance in American history because it reveals that the working class had a clear vision of government and the intelligence and resourcefulness to gain and use political power. By contrast the later federal Constitution is clearly seen as an elitist document which empowered the wealthy class.
The Pennsylvania Constitution was a high mark of democratic ideals.
"A one-house Assembly whose members were elected annually was made the seat of almost all power. The Assembly was required to function in open public sessions, and to keep full records. Legislation had to indicate its purpose clearly in the preamble, and except in emergencies had to be published and distributed publicly by the Assembly before it could be considered for enactment--but only by the next session of that body, after another election had been held.
"The office of governor and its veto power were eliminated in favor of a weak Supreme Executive Council of 12 members, four of whom were elected each year for three-year terms. Judges were elected for seven-year terms, but were made removable for cause by the Assembly. A council of Censors was to be elected every seven years to review the government's performance and recommend a new constitutional convention if changes in its structure or powers were required. The extent of popular control involved in such a system exceeds that of any American government before or since. Indeed, opponents at the time referred to it as 'mob government.'"
Kenneth M. Dolbeare. Democracy at Risk, 1986
During the "War for Independence," many of the colonial states changed the form of their state constitutions to reflect their democratic ideals. In most states there was a movement toward subordinating the executive branch of government and conferring primary power on the legislature. In many states, the governor was elected and in ten states his term of office was one year. In every state there was an executive or privy council which the governor was required to consult on all important decisions. The purpose of such a council, usually appointed by the legislature, was to provide an important check on the governor. In every state, judges could be impeached by the lower branch of the legislature. In none of the states could the courts declare the acts of the legislature null and void.
The efforts of the working class to build widely popular governments similar to Pennsylvania's in other states failed by and large. In Massachusetts, for example, property qualifications for voting were increased rather than decreased. Ninety percent of the population in Maryland was excluded from holding office because of property qualifications. However, the Regulator Movement in 1766-1771 organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the colonial states and tried to get middle and lower class people elected to their assemblies.
The wealthy merchant class grew fearful of the working class's power and made sure that delegates to the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774 were selected from the "ablest and wealthiest men in America." John Jay, later to become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was elected as president of the Continental Congress. His sentiment was a forecast of what the Constitution would establish: "The people who own the country ought to govern it."
Dangerous Delusions
After the wealthy merchant class had decided to declare its independence from Britain, it needed cannon fodder for its "war of independence."
"Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality." 1
As in all wars in our national history, the working class answered the call to arms. However, the war exacerbated the growing class conflict when the working class soldiers experienced grievous inequities:
The rich could buy their way out of the draft
Officers received much more pay than common soldiers
Common soldiers often received no pay:
During the war some common soldiers who had not been paid attacked the headquarters of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, forcing the members to flee to Princeton across the river
After the war, the lack of pay to common soldiers was one of the major causes of the Shays rebellion
Civil strife due to class conflict continued throughout the war in Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. The working class was seeking what President Lincoln would later describe as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, whereas the wealthy class was seeking a plutocracy.
The Post-War Era
"[The Framers of the Constitution] . . . had no wish to usher in democracy in the United States. They were not making war upon the principle of aristocracy and they had no more intention than had the Tories of destroying the tradition of upper-class leadership in the colonies. Although they hoped to turn the Tories out of office, they did not propose to open these lush pastures to the common herd. They did believe, however, that the common people, if properly bridled and reined, might be made allies in the work of freeing the colonies from British rule and that they--the gentry--might reap the benefits without interference. They expected, in other words, to achieve a 'safe and sane' revolution of gentlemen, by gentlemen, and for gentlemen."
John C. Milller. (1943). Origins of the American Revolution
A small group of wealthy people in America has always ruled the nation for its own benefit, not for the welfare of the people. The huge land holdings of the British loyalists, for example, was one of the obscenities against which poor soldiers fought in the American "War for Independence." But after the war Lord Fairfax, a friend of George Washington, was allowed to retain his five million acres encompassing twenty-one counties in Virginia.
The first American revolution resulted only in a change in rulers: from the British elite to an American plutocracy. Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held colonial office under England.
But not all of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence were plutocratic chickenhawks. Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned and two lost their sons who were serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the signers fought and died from wounds or hardships in the Revolutionary War. These men signed the Declaration knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. They had security, but they valued liberty more. They pledged: "For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
The national situation in the post-war mid-1780s was incendiary. The merchants and coastal wholesalers had tried to re-establish large-scale trade with Great Britain, but the British merchants stopped giving credit, demanding cash ("specie"). In turn, wholesalers demanded hard money from shopkeepers and the shopkeepers demanded that farmers immediately repay their loans in cash.
American farmers had been used to paying back loans in crops, goods, and labor. Suddenly, farmers were dragged into debtor courts, their land or goods seized when they couldn't pay, or they were imprisoned for unpaid debts
As an example, in the farming community of Hampshire County Massachusetts:
32.4 % of the county's men over sixteen were hauled into court from 1784 to 1786
Many were thrown into jail: in one cell, 26 prisoners were held without proper food or ventilation, many got sick and some died
Not a single retailer went to jail
In Massachusetts, the state government (the instrument of the merchant class) shifted the tax burden away from merchants and onto farmers. State laws demanded that taxes be paid in hard money. The excuse for this attack on the working class was that this promoted commerce.
Nevertheless, there were a number of uprisings by enlightened elements of the middle class and the lower class because they recognized that the nation suffered under an oppressive plutocracy.
In May, 1779, the First Company of Philadelphia Artillery petitioned the Pennsylvania Assembly concerning the plight of "the middling and poor" and threatened "those who are avariciously intent upon amassing wealth by the destruction of the more virtuous part of the community."
Following the "War for Independence," debtors took over the Rhode Island legislature and began issuing paper money to pay off their debts.
Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Continental army, wounded in action, finally left the army in 1780 because he did not receive the pay promised him. Like hundreds of other unpaid army veterans, Shays found himself in court for nonpayment of debts when he returned home. He organized 700 armed farmers, most of them veterans of the war, led them to the Massachusetts capitol, and broke up a court which was passing judgment on war veterans for nonpayment of debts. In 1787, he marched a thousand men toward Boston but they were defeated by a blizzard and an army unit led by General Benjamin Lincoln supported by money raised by Boston merchants.
Many farmers, like Daniel Shays, were veterans who had trudged home from the "War for Independence" without having received their pay. They had been given government certificates which soon decreased in value so much that they were sold to speculators. Adding to the farmers' postwar plight, heavy land taxes were levied against the farm towns. Farmers grew irate as they watched the furniture, grain and livestock of their relatives and neighbors sold off to pay debts. Farmers were hauled into debtors' court, charged high legal fees, and often imprisoned.
When the Shays Rebellion broke out, Sam Adams engineered a Riot Act which prohibited 12 or more persons from congregating in public and which empowered county sheriffs to kill rioters. Sam Adams, who in the Declaration of Independence had defended the right of a people to revolt, now reversed himself :
"In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death."
"The Founding Fathers did lead the war for independence from Britain. But they did not do it for the equal right of all to life, liberty, and equality. Their intention was to set up a new government that would protect the property of slave owners, land speculators, merchants, and bondholders. Independence from England had already been secured in parts of the country by grassroots rebellion a year before the battles at Lexington and Concord that initiated hostilities with Britain. . . . It is one of the phenomena of modern times that revolutions are not favored unless they are led by people who are not revolutionaries at heart.
"I would rather recognize the greatness of all those who fought to make sure that the Founding Fathers would not betray the principles of the Declaration of Independence, to make sure that the dead and maimed of the Revolutionary War did not make their sacrifices in vain. And so I would honor the soldiers of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines, who mutinied against George Washington and Mad Anthony Wayne. They were rebelling against the luxurious treatment of their gentry officers, and their own mistreatment: 500 lashes for misconduct, Washington decreed, and executed a few mutinous leaders to set an example.
"Add to the honors list in that great generation the farmers of western Massachusetts who resisted the taking of their homes and land for nonpayment of exorbitant taxes. This was the Shays Rebellion, which put a fright into the Founding Fathers, especially as it led to uprisings in Maryland, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. That rebellion persuaded the Founding Fathers that a strong central government was needed to maintain law and order against unruly dissidents, slave rebels, and Indians. These were the true revolutionaries of the Revolutionary generation."
Howard Zinn. "The Greatest Generation," The Progressive, October 2001
The Federalist Conspiracy
Of the fifty-six men who had signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, only six of those attended the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the specially selected delegates secretly concocted a plutocratic structure of rule. Patrick Henry refused to attend the convention and genuinely democratic patriots such as George Mason, Luther Martin, John Francis Mercer, and Elbridge Gerry participated in the convention but refused to sign the new constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights and provided inadequate representation of the people.
John Lansing and Robert Yates attended the 1786 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as members of the New York delegation. As the Hamilton-Madison plutocratic conspiracy group took control of the convention, both Yates and Lansing became disillusioned because they believed it was exceeding its instructions to merely modify the Articles of Confederation. They were dismayed at the Hamilton-Madison-inspired movement to write an entirely new constitution. After six weeks, John Lansing and fellow New York delegate Robert Yates left the convention, explaining their departure in a joint letter to New York Governor George Clinton. They explained that they opposed any document that would consolidate the United States into one government, and indicated that they understood that the convention was going to consider such a consolidation. In their letter to Clinton, they warned that the kind of government recommended by the convention would not "afford that security to equal and permanent liberty which we wished to make an invariable object of our pursuit." As members of the New York ratifying convention in 1788, Lansing and Yates both vigorously opposed the Constitution.
In 1787, the vast majority of American people lived in a community-oriented culture, on farms or in cities working as artisans and laborers. Their concept of independence was associated with interdependence and cooperation--all for the common good. Women worked with men, families traded labor and animals. In this culture of mutual concern and mutual obligation, working class people took care of one another. They shared common values and interests, completely different from the values of a market-driven approach to life. According to this common welfare approach to life, merchants and financiers would be restricted to what the community decided about how resources are used. The working class had put its democratic, interdependent ideals into their state constitutions and in town and city charters when possible.
The wealthy class--shopkeepers, lawyers, bankers, speculators, commercial farmers--had adopted a completely opposite way of life: every person for himself. The world view of the wealthy class saw the community as a system of exchange between producers and consumers, capitalists and workers. The holy of holies for the merchant class was the "free market" ideology, according to which each man pursues only his own self-interest. Society is held together, not on the basis of common welfare, but by the "invisible hand of the market" implemented through impersonal contracts.
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
Adam Smith. (1776). Wealth of Nations
According to the view of the merchant class, the state is to be controlled by elites or "better people" who decide what is best for the "common people." Government's role is to protect the single human capability of ownership. All other capabilities--learning, pursuit of happiness, freedom, human concern--are to be subordinated to property. The state's only role is to assure that the impersonal market system runs smoothly. This requires that the government use violent force when it becomes necessary to protect personal property.
The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were selected by state legislatures--not by popular vote of the people. The capitalist class was frightened by how much power the working class had been able to muster in the separate colonies and they could see from the Shays rebellion that the people were quite capable of rebelling against the wealthy class when it seized their hard-earned lands, crops, and animals.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention were instructed that their only job was to amend the Articles of Confederation and that any proposed changes were to be approved by all the states before they were adopted. A conspiratorial junta, led by Hamilton and Madison, had already decided that they would scrap the Articles of Confederation and write an entirely new constitution which would create a centralized government controlled by the wealthy class. The Convention met entirely in secret, and it would be fifty-three years before American citizens were allowed to see the record of what had transpired in this coup d'etat which enshrined mercantile capitalism as the imposed way of life for Americans. Of the sixty-two delegates appointed to the Convention, fifty-five showed up. At the Convention, no more than eleven states were ever represented at one time. Of the fifty-five members of the Convention; only thirty-nine signed the final draft.
The illegal Constitution these conspirators contrived:
Was in effect an economic document, enshrining property as the primary value
Was anti-majoritarian, making sure that the "common people" could no longer gain political power over the minority capitalist class
Contained no checks against plutocratic (corporate) power
Created the private control of government by the capitalist class, including the creation of domestic and foreign policy
Disallowed city or state assemblies to make decisions which the federal government was to make
Assured that effective political power was unavailable at the local level
Knowing that the popular majority in all the states would oppose this oligarchic document, the framers of the Constitution inserted the provision that it would go into effect when ratified by only nine states.
Completing the Second American Revolution
The first post-constitutional major skirmish in the ongoing battle of the "common people" against the wealthy class, was the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791. These first ten amendments to the Constitution embodied many of the working class's concerns which had been expressed during the ratification process. But it is exceptionally important to recognize that the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights omit any protection for common people against corporations or capitalist employees.
Following the imposition of a plutocratic Constitution on American citizens, there have been continual uprisings by enlightened elements of the working class in America because they have recognized that the nation suffers under an oppressive capitalist class.
The Anti-Renter movement in the Hudson River Valley near Albany, New York in 1839 was a protest against the patroonship system, created in the 1660s when the Dutch ruled New York, in which the rich had vast land holdings and the tenants paid taxes and rents. The Rensselaer family, for example, ruled over about eighty thousand tenants and had accumulated a fortune of $41 million. The movement grew to ten thousand men and was finally put down by a cavalry unit of three thousand who came up from New York City.
The Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1841-1843 was led by Thomas Dorr, a lawyer from a well-to-do family. He advocated that the twelve thousand working class people in Rhode Island without the right to vote, should not pay taxes or serve in the militia for the five thousand who had land and could vote. Thousands joined the Dorr uprising and in 1841 they organized their own "People's Convention" outside the legal system. The convention drafted a new constitution without property qualifications for voting. In 1842 fourteen thousand people in Rhode Island voted for the new constitution, including about five thousand with property, a clear majority in the state. In April of 1842 they held an unofficial election in which Dorr ran unopposed for governor and six thousand people voted for him. The "official" governor of Rhode Island requested federal assistance to put down the rebellion and President John Tyler sent in federal troops to quash the uprising. In the Rhode Island elections of 1843, the Law and Order group, opposed by former Dorrites, used intimidation on a grand scale. Military officers threatened their men, employers intimidated their employees, landlords their tenants, to elect the proper people. The Law and Order group lost in the industrial towns, won in the agrarian areas, and took over all major offices. Dorr was convicted of treason and spent twenty months in jail before being pardoned.
In the early twentieth century, the workers formed the AFL, IWW, CIO, and many other labor organizations to try to force the rich industrialists to provide American workers a living wage and safe working conditions.
Even during the second world war, supposedly the most "popular" war in history, there were 14,000 strikes involving 6.7 million workers, more than in any other comparable period in American history. In 1944, a year before the end of WWII, there were a million workers on strike, in mines, steel mills, and in the auto and transportation equipment industries.
The Obscenities of Irresponsible Wealth
Since that time, the rapacious increase in wealth by American plutocrats has been fostered by the U.S. Constitution's plutocratic structure of government. In 1850, 1,000 southern families received about $50 million a year income while all the other 660,000 families combined received about $60 million a year. In 1920s America one-tenth of one percent of the wealthy at the top received as much income as the combined income of 42 percent of the people at the bottom.
No nation in man's history has ever achieved a true commonwealth. American citizens have historically enjoyed a wider range of liberties than most citizens in other countries. But those American liberties have always been at the sufferance of the rulers. When they have felt it necessary they limited or destroyed American liberties without compunction. Americans have suffered under restrictions to civil liberties throughout our history.
The 1780 Riot Act allowed the Boston authorities to keep people in jail without trial
The Sedition Act of 1789 made it a crime to say or write anything "false, scandalous and malicious" against the government, Congress, or the President
The 1917 Espionage Act led to imprisonment of Americans who spoke or wrote against World War I
President Truman's March 22, 1947 Executive Order 9835 initiated a program to search out any "infiltration of disloyal persons" in the U.S. government
The 1950 Internal Security Act laid the groundwork for the insane trampling of civil liberties called McCarthyism
The 1996 "Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act" deprives Americans of our Constitutional protections of habeas corpus review in federal courts.
The tyrannous "Patriot" Act instituted by Bush II creates, among other outrages, "roving wiretap" authority, unsubstantiated subpoena of anyone the FBI chooses and arrest of anyone who tells others of these illegal subpoenas, search and seizure of assets as long it is claimed that the search is "related to terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities," etc, ad nauseam.
The Struggle of the Oppressed
Most of what we hear or read today perpetuates the dangerous delusion that we live in a democracy. Even iconoclasts who strip away the democratic myth to reveal the reality of plutocracy often end their discussions with generalized theories of reform which have no hint of reality to them. A more realistic point of view is to outline the elements of a commonwealth way of life and complete the American Revolution of freeing ourselves from the mental and political restraints of imperialistic capitalism.
First, we need to realize that we don't live in a democracy, that the politicians who buy their way into office don't work for the good of people but for their own monetary gain. The richest one percent of Americans have gained over a trillion dollars in the past dozen years as a result of tax breaks.
"The decayed condition of American democracy is difficult to grasp, not because the facts are secret, but because the facts are visible everywhere. American democracy is in much deeper trouble than most people wish to acknowledge. Behind the reassuring facade, the regular election contests and so forth, the substantive meaning of self-government has been hollowed out. What exists behind the formal shell is a systemic breakdown of the shared civic values we call democracy.
"At the highest levels of government, the power to decide things has instead gravitated from the many to the few, just as ordinary citizens suspect. Instead of popular will, the government now responds more often to narrow webs of power - the interests of major economic organizations and concentrated wealth and the influential elites surrounding them.
"In place of a meaningful democracy, the political community has embraced a permissive culture of false appearances. Government responds to the public's desires with an artful dance of symbolic gestures - hollow laws that are emptied of serious content in the private bargaining of Washington. Promises are made and never kept. Laws are enacted and never enforced."
Greider. (1992). Who Will Tell the People?
With all its shortcomings, the United States still provides its citizens with a wide range of freedom, more than any other country in the world, primarily because of the Bill of Rights that the common people forced on the capitalist class. In our struggle to complete the American Revolution, the people have won some other important partial victories over plutocracy:
The women's rights movement
The civil rights struggle
Vietnam war resistance
The growing force of Internet-based news and analysis sources that are exposing the onslaughts of the Obama junta against our civil rights
"Talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them 'You are supreme: exercise your power.' They say, 'That's right: tell us what to do'; and I tell them. I say 'Exercise your vote intelligently by voting for me.' And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic Boanerges, in The Apple Cart, act 1
Within the United States the cabal has stolen the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections and has now set up permanent structures to make sure that fair elections are no longer possible
The cabal pretends that the client-state dictatorships it set up in Afghanistan and Iraq are democracies
Obama and other junta members use the word "democracy" as a shibboleth to fool the ignorant American masses, pretending that they are spreading this magic form of government to as many nations as possible. "Democracy" has now become the mask for tyranny and imperialism.
As Howard Zinn made clear in A People's History of the United States,
"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
Winston Churchill
We must train ourselves in the commonwealth way of life by:
Learning to think critically involves examining our own self-delusions and incapacities and recognizing the essential ingredients in the commonwealth way of life. Certain of our delusions and incapacities make a commonwealth impossible.
We've allowed ourselves to become consumed by egomania. Ego-obsession is the image we see everywhere, the individual feeling that he or she is the most important thing in the world. Movies, television, music, literature, all encourage us to feel that we are the center of the universe. We haven't learned to discriminate between ego-obsession, self-respect, and servility. Yes, we want to attain a healthy respect for ourselves and avoid a demeaning feeling of servility, but most people have gone to the extreme of ego-mania--literally becoming crazy about themselves. In a general social atmosphere of ego-obsession, a commonwealth life-style is impossible. People are not able to see beyond their own immediate, momentary interests to the good of a larger group interest which ultimately serves their individual wellbeing as well.
We have allowed ourselves to become splintered into special interest groups and factions, based on ethnicity, age, gender, or other characteristics. A commonwealth is only possible when people see the improvement of their society as a common good and are willing to develop a genuine sense of solidarity with others. One of the major difficulties with our present society is the inability and unwillingness of the wealthy rulers to work toward the good of all the people in our society. They act to serve only their own interests, gaining wealth and power. As we train for a commonwealth, we must learn to work toward a society which will serve the interests of all its citizens, rich and poor, old and young, men and women, and people of all ethnic backgrounds and value orientations.
We need to develop group decision-making skills as a foundation for the commonwealth way of life. This requires that we learn how to think critically, resolving issues through the use of evidence, not merely what we happen to feel or what some supposed authority has told us.
There are specific factors required for the commonwealth way of life.
First, we must realize that a commonwealth is not an external condition or system but a way of life. As such, it must be pursued, achieved, and then continually maintained. By definition, it requires of its participants certain values, qualities of character, and capacities. Those values, qualities, and capacities must be central to one's whole life and being.
This means that it is not possible to practice a commonwealth life-style in one area of life--say on the job or in a civic organization--and yet remain acquiescent to or unmindful of the fascism of a political-economic system, or remain tyrannical in one's personal relationships.
This also means that a commonwealth, by its very nature, cannot be given to us by decree, or mandate, or vote, or constitution, or even political revolt. It is a capability for group decision-making which we must achieve for ourselves and which then requires continual effort and vigilance. A commonwealth is not an end to be achieved once-and-for-all and handed from one generation to another. It is a process used by people in ordering their lives toward critical common goals such as constitutional liberties. Each generation's goals change, so a commonwealth life-style is a process which is never completed or achieved, any more than the process of learning is something we get the hang of and then stop doing.
A commonwealth can emerge only when certain persons decide to join with others in selecting and fulfilling common goals. To opt for a commonwealth must come out of the understanding that other seemingly simpler and more efficient processes of decision-making lead inevitably to the oppression of one group by another. We gain this understanding by experiencing oppressive forms of decision-making in the family, the workplace, the community, and the nation. By experiencing the oppression and life-destruction which anti-democratic regimes entail we gain an intense desire for the democratic way of life. We're presently experiencing the oppression of wealth and power under the fascistic Obama regime. Obscenely rich people are using political, economic, and military force to drive America into a society with two classes: the wealthy and the poor.
Americans have difficulty in understanding what a commonwealth means because we've lived, in the past decades, in a fairly affluent era ruled by a plutocracy masked as democracy. We're only now realizing that the United States isn't a democracy after all--it is a plutocracy controled by an evil cabal.
It's of importance to recognize the extent to which intelligent independence and self-direction in any realm are an achievement. The ability to be an independent, self-directing personality is present in possibility in original nature; but this possibility is made an actuality only through the proper kind of education. The same is true of a group.
"Independent, self-directing group conduct is . . . an achievement. Merely to offer democracy to a group does not mean that the group is able to conduct itself democratically. Just as individual independence comes gradually, first in more restricted and then in wider areas of life, so independence in a group comes gradually, first in more restricted and then in ever and ever widening areas of conduct. Whether the group be a family, a gang, a class in school, or a nation, it cannot change suddenly with any success from complete autocratic control to entirely independent self-direction." 2
Modern Times
Now that the conditions of widespread affluence and freedom of mobility are no longer profitable for the American plutocracy, some of the more unpleasant and inevitable features of their oppressive order are beginning to affect American citizens directly. Perhaps the harsh realities of unemployment, slave wages, tax-slavery, and government harassment will provide the kind of incentive we need to consider deeper values in life beyond mindless, superficial, addictive entertainment and sports--the "circuses" provided by the present rulers. Perhaps now we can begin to ask what democracy is and how we can train for it.
We must first realize just what led to our present enslavement under a fascist plutocracy, what characteristics in us allowed for our self-delusion, our being controlled by lust for possessions and social acceptance, our willingness to let others rule us as long as we feel we are getting our share. If we can understand what personal qualities lead to enslavement we can then begin to understand their opposite: the positive qualities that make democratic self-rule possible.
The Commonwealth Way of Life
The commonwealth way of life is possible only with people who desire to work toward full human potential. A commonwealth cannot exist in a context where some always say: "I can't do that or I can't understand that, let someone else decide who can do more or who understands more."
A commonwealth is very difficult to initiate because at almost any moment in time a ruling group is faced with people who've been trained to be and feel incompetent. The ruling group's temptation at that point is to say: "Since the people clearly can't rule themselves, we'll rule them now and continue to rule them."
A commonwealth can only begin when a small group of persons - having suffered under an oppressive form of rule and having prepared themselves for self-rule - take over the direction of a group or community. This preparation involves, among other things, the close examination of real, as opposed to assumed or imagined capacities, and the development of real competence. Even then there will be some persons in the community who can't yet participate effectively in decision-making. This is one of the major challenges of democratic rule. Will the leaders of democratic reform activate a process whereby others can learn to participate effectively in group decision-making or will they use the undeniable incompetence of others as an excuse for taking more absolute and final control?
It's hard for us to realize that we lack certain mental and behavioral skills required for a democratic way of life. We must train ourselves in the skills and understanding which a commonwealth requires.
A commonwealth can only come to those who are willing to work for the best and highest in human development for all. At almost any point in a nation's history it can be said: "Yes, there are problems here, but it could be worse. Instead of being a malcontent working for unnecessary change, be thankful for what you have." That has been said to every enslaved or oppressed group in human history. That's what the white owner said to his black slave, the British trying to mollify the oppressed colonists in America and India in the 1770s. The good is often enemy to the best. Today we hear: "What oppression? We never had it so good. Don't rock the boat." For many people, life under this present plutocracy, which they have been fully programmed to experience as a democracy, appears rewarding and complete.
"A democratic process is the best way to grow men and women. It is he who does the thinking, who faces the problems, who makes the plans, who alone achieves both the growth and the happiness. Our present idea and practice of leadership reserve these supreme values to the leaders. Life has become, for a large number of people, pure drudgery. Men become "robots, " machines for executing other people's desires. The leaders grow, the individuals in the crowd decline." 3
"This critique does not rely upon any idealized notions of what democracy means, but on the elementary principles everyone recognizes. Accountability of the governors to the governed. Equal protection of the law, that is, laws that are free of political manipulation. A presumption of political equality among all citizens (though not equality of wealth or status). The guarantee of timely access to the public debate. A rough sense of honesty in the communication between the government and the people. These are not radical ideas, but basic tenets of the civic faith.
"Nor does this analysis pretend that American democracy once existed in some perfected form that now is lost. On the contrary, Americans have never achieved the full reality in their own history or even agreed completely on democracy's meaning. The democratic idea has always been most powerful in America as an unfulfilled vision of what the country might someday become - a society advancing imperfectly toward self-realization."
Greider. (1992). Who Will Tell the People?
Mr. Smith doesn't need to go to Washington; he and other American citizens need to complete the American Revolution and learn to refashion a government of, by, and for the people by training for and building a commonwealth. Mr. Smith and other citizens should look forward to the day when their skills are developed to the point that they can begin to make a difference in their community and their nation, taking back the government that's been stolen from them.
"The difficulty in securing democracy has been that more attention has been paid to defending it as a philosophy than to developing the methodology by which it could be made to function in life." 4
_______________
1Howard Zinn. (1995). A People's History of the United States,
NY: Harper, p. 58
2 Harrison S. Elliott. (1938). The Process of Group Thinking,
NY: Association Press, p. 12
Elliott's conception of democracy is in line with what we are calling in this essay a commonwealth life-style.
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While 
On October 4, the FCC asked 
![[Julian Assange (l) receives CDs containing data on offshore bank account holders from Rudolf Elmer. (Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters)]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_szbOXzS60uvkImdwBGkWp-EXhkYIqF6nMv80eL-bUgAKRd5N8Wer62hA0SLbEWWv-IFsP5HXnyNelD3rZQ27dLInDr3Q3AxBoc2VRvOhl6Sq1c3I4Mdyu31zDTs8T4ZY9r7pV00h9HT85LEgi2Ti0=s0-d "assangevows_2000wealthy.jpg")
Julian Assange (l) receives CDs containing data on offshore bank account holders from Rudolf Elmer. (Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters)
As mass resistance to British policies mounted, for example, they urged, 'No Mobs or Tumults, let the Person and Properties of your most inveterate Enemies be safe.' Sam Adams agreed. James Otis urged, 'No possible circumstances, though ever so oppressive, could be supposed sufficient to justify tumults and disorders . . .' The Boston Committee of Correspondence actually did its best to contain and control the militancy of activists involved in the Boston Tea Party." 
In Colonial America, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting much poorer. In 1687 in Boston, the top 1% owned about 25% of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1% owned 44%. In those same years, the poor--those who owned no property--represented 14% in 1687 and 29% in 1770.
John Hancock was an extremely wealthy Boston merchant who had made his fortune as a military contractor during King George's War (1739-1747). In 1748, Hancock engineered a merciless devaluation of Massachusetts currency as a cure to inflation, which reduced huge numbers of workers to poverty. Alexander Hamilton grew rich through his father-in-law's connections. James Madison created a large fortune with his vast slave plantations. The top 10 percent of the white male leaders in America owned half the wealth and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people. 
To common people, freedom meant freedom from the oppression of colonial aristocracy as well as freedom from British rule. One of their favorite slogans was: "Common people must be free from all 'Foreign or Domestic Oligarchy.'" They thought in terms of liberation from all oppression, not just "independence from Britain."
The "common people" were not taking orders, they were speaking and acting for themselves; they were making it clear that their vision of a new society was not that of the wealthy merchant class.
property qualifications for voting were increased rather than decreased. Ninety percent of the population in Maryland was excluded from holding office because of property qualifications. However, the Regulator Movement in 1766-1771 organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the colonial states and tried to get middle and lower class people elected to their assemblies.
After the wealthy merchant class had decided to declare its independence from Britain, it needed cannon fodder for its "war of independence." 
But after the war Lord Fairfax, a friend of George Washington, was allowed to retain his five million acres encompassing twenty-one counties in Virginia.
But not all of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence were plutocratic chickenhawks. Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned and two lost their sons who were serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the signers fought and died from wounds or hardships in the Revolutionary War. These men signed the Declaration knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. They had security, but they valued liberty more. They pledged: "For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
When the Shays Rebellion broke out, Sam Adams engineered a Riot Act which prohibited 12 or more persons from congregating in public and which empowered county sheriffs to kill rioters. Sam Adams, who in the Declaration of Independence had defended the right of a people to revolt, now reversed himself :
Of the fifty-six men who had signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, only six of those attended the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the specially selected delegates secretly concocted a plutocratic structure of rule. Patrick Henry refused to attend the convention and genuinely democratic patriots such as George Mason, Luther Martin, John Francis Mercer, and Elbridge Gerry participated in the convention but refused to sign the new constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights and provided inadequate representation of the people.
After six weeks, John Lansing and fellow New York delegate Robert Yates left the convention, explaining their departure in a joint letter to New York Governor George Clinton. They explained that they opposed any document that would consolidate the United States into one government, and indicated that they understood that the convention was going to consider such a consolidation. In their letter to Clinton, they warned that the kind of government recommended by the convention would not "afford that security to equal and permanent liberty which we wished to make an invariable object of our pursuit." As members of the New York ratifying convention in 1788, Lansing and Yates both vigorously opposed the Constitution.
the values of a market-driven approach to life. According to this common welfare approach to life, merchants and financiers would be restricted to what the community decided about how resources are used. The working class had put its democratic, interdependent ideals into their state constitutions and in town and city charters when possible.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention were instructed that their only job was to amend the Articles of Confederation and that any proposed changes were to be approved by all the states before they were adopted. A conspiratorial junta, led by Hamilton and Madison, had already decided that they would scrap the Articles of Confederation and write an entirely new constitution which would create a centralized government controlled by the wealthy class. The Convention met entirely in secret, and it would be fifty-three years before American citizens were allowed to see the record of what had transpired in this coup d'etat which enshrined mercantile capitalism as the imposed way of life for Americans. Of the sixty-two delegates appointed to the Convention, fifty-five showed up. At the Convention, no more than eleven states were ever represented at one time. Of the fifty-five members of the Convention; only thirty-nine signed the final draft.
The first post-constitutional major skirmish in the ongoing battle of the "common people" against the wealthy class, was the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791. These first ten amendments to the Constitution embodied many of the working class's concerns which had been expressed during the ratification process. But it is exceptionally important to recognize that the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights omit any protection for common people against corporations or capitalist employees.
In 1842 fourteen thousand people in Rhode Island voted for the new constitution, including about five thousand with property, a clear majority in the state. In April of 1842 they held an unofficial election in which Dorr ran unopposed for governor and six thousand people voted for him. The "official" governor of Rhode Island requested federal assistance to put down the rebellion and President John Tyler sent in federal troops to quash the uprising. In the Rhode Island elections of 1843, the Law and Order group, opposed by former Dorrites, used intimidation on a grand scale. Military officers threatened their men, employers intimidated their employees, landlords their tenants, to elect the proper people. The Law and Order group lost in the industrial towns, won in the agrarian areas, and took over all major offices. Dorr was convicted of treason and spent twenty months in jail before being pardoned.
Since that time, the rapacious increase in wealth by American plutocrats has been fostered by the U.S. Constitution's plutocratic structure of government. In 1850, 1,000 southern families received about $50 million a year income while all the other 660,000 families combined received about $60 million a year. In 1920s America one-tenth of one percent of the wealthy at the top received as much income as the combined income of 42 percent of the people at the bottom. 
No nation in man's history has ever achieved a true commonwealth. American citizens have historically enjoyed a wider range of liberties than most citizens in other countries. But those American liberties have always been at the sufferance of the rulers. When they have felt it necessary they limited or destroyed American liberties without compunction. Americans have suffered under restrictions to civil liberties throughout our history. 
Most of what we hear or read today perpetuates the dangerous delusion that we live in a democracy. Even iconoclasts who strip away the democratic myth to reveal the reality of plutocracy often end their discussions with generalized theories of reform which have no hint of reality to them. A more realistic point of view is to outline the elements of a commonwealth way of life and complete the American Revolution of freeing ourselves from the mental and political restraints of imperialistic capitalism.
One of Plato's major works was entitled Politeia, the Greek word for Commonwealth. The title of this work has been mistranslated as The Republic when its actual title is The Commonwealth.
A commonwealth is only possible when people see the improvement of their society as a common good and are willing to develop a genuine sense of solidarity with others. One of the major difficulties with our present society is the inability and unwillingness of the wealthy rulers to work toward the good of all the people in our society. They act to serve only their own interests, gaining wealth and power. As we train for a commonwealth, we must learn to work toward a society which will serve the interests of all its citizens, rich and poor, old and young, men and women, and people of all ethnic backgrounds and value orientations.
We gain this understanding by experiencing oppressive forms of decision-making in the family, the workplace, the community, and the nation. By experiencing the oppression and life-destruction which anti-democratic regimes entail we gain an intense desire for the democratic way of life. We're presently experiencing the oppression of wealth and power under the 
Americans have difficulty in understanding what a commonwealth means because we've lived, in the past decades, in a fairly affluent era ruled by a plutocracy masked as democracy. We're only now realizing that the United States isn't a democracy after all--it is a plutocracy controled by an evil cabal.
the kind of incentive we need to consider deeper values in life beyond mindless, superficial, addictive entertainment and sports--the "circuses" provided by the present rulers. Perhaps now we can begin to ask what democracy is and how we can train for it.
A commonwealth is very difficult to initiate because at almost any moment in time a ruling group is faced with people who've been trained to be and feel incompetent. The ruling group's temptation at that point is to say: "Since the people clearly can't rule themselves, we'll rule them now and continue to rule them."
It's hard for us to realize that we lack certain mental and behavioral skills required for a democratic way of life. We must train ourselves in the skills and understanding which a commonwealth requires.
Mr. Smith doesn't need to go to Washington; he and other American citizens need to complete the American Revolution and learn to refashion a government of, by, and for the people by training for and 