This is a "must read" article. Keep as open a mind as possible and
ask, "Where do I, and my loved ones turn for protection? Is this
government caring for the needs of all citizens, or just the Corporate
Persons?
Carl Jarvis
*******
The American Sea of Deception
On the list of presidential liars: Shortly after being told of the 9/11
attacks of 2001, George W. Bush confers with administration members at a
Florida school he was visiting. Months later, he would lie to the American
people as he sought to justify an invasion of Iraq partly on the basis of
the attacks. (The U.S. National Archives)
Paul Street's column will appear in Truthdig each Sunday through Aug. 12.
Its regular schedule will resume when Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges
returns from vacation.
Four days ago, The Washington Post reported that the epic pathological liar
Donald Trump made 4,229 false statements during his first 558 days as United
States president. Trump spoke or tweeted falsely, on average, an astonishing
7.6 times per day during that time.
We have no historical database of presidential untruth on which to rely to
make detailed comparisons, but it is certain that Trump's rate of falsehood
is beyond anything ever seen in the White House. Armed with Twitter and a
mad and malignantly narcissistic penchant for twisting facts and truth in
accord with his own ever-shifting sense of what serves his interests and
hurts his perceived foes, this monstrosity is gaslighting the last
flickering embers of civic democracy at a velocity that would make Goebbels
green with envy.
Keeping up with Trump's erroneous and duplicitous statements is exhausting
work, hazardous to one's own sanity. Just as depressing as Trump's serial
fabrication and invention is the apparent willingness of tens of millions of
ostensibly decent and honest ordinary Americans to tolerate, dismiss or even
believe the endless stream of nonsense and bullshit.
Still, if much of the populace has become inured to presidential lying and
misstatement, it's hardly all the current president's fault.
Deception and misstatement are "as American as Cherry Pie" (to quote H. Rap
Brown on violence)-though here perhaps I should say "as American as George
Washington's childhood cherry tree fable."
While we've never seen anything on Trump's psychotic scale, the problem of
U.S. presidential deception goes way back in American history.
Eager for a back-door pretext to enter the war against German fascism (a
good thing in the opinion of many), for example, U.S. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt lied to Congress and the American people when he claimed that the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was "unprovoked" by the U.S. and a complete
"surprise" to the U.S. military.
President Dwight Eisenhower flatly lied to the American people and the world
when he denied the existence of American U-2 spy plane flights over Russia.
President John F. Kennedy lied about the supposed missile gap between the
United States and the Soviet Union. And Kennedy lied when he claimed that
the United States sought democracy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and
around the world.
President Lyndon Johnson lied on Aug. 4, 1965, when he claimed that North
Vietnam attacked U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. This provided a
false pretext for a massive escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam, resulting
in the deaths of more than 50,000 U.S. military personnel and millions of
Southeast Asians.
Regarding Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg recalled 17 years ago that his 1971
release of the Pentagon Papers exposed U.S. military and intelligence
documents "proving that the government had long lied to the country. Indeed,
the papers revealed a policy of concealment and quite deliberate deception
from the Truman administration onward. . A generation of presidents,"
Ellsberg noted, "chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the real
policy was. ."
President Richard Nixon lied about wanting peace in Vietnam (his agent,
Henry Kissinger, actively undermined a peace accord with Hanoi before the
1968 election) and about respecting the neutrality of Cambodia. He lied
through secrecy and omission about the criminal and fateful U.S. bombing of
Cambodia-a far bigger crime than the burglarizing of the Democratic Party
headquarters in the Watergate complex, about which he of course famously
lied.
The serial fabricator Ronald Reagan made a special address to the nation in
which he lied by saying, "We did not-repeat-we did not trade weapons or
anything else [to Iran] for hostages, nor will we."
President George H.W. Bush falsely claimed on at least five occasions in the
run-up to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that Iraqi forces, after invading
Kuwait, had pulled babies from incubators and left them to die.
President Bill Clinton shamelessly lied about his White House sexual
shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky. He falsely claimed to be upholding
international law and to be opposing genocide when he bombed Serbia for more
than two months in early 1999.
The serial liar George W. Bush and his administration infamously, openly and
elaborately lied about Saddam Hussein's alleged Iraqi "weapons of mass
destruction" and about Iraq's purported links to al Qaida and the 9/11
jetliner attacks. After the WMD fabrication was exposed, Bush falsely
claimed to have invaded Iraq to spread liberty and democracy.
Bill Clinton (subject of a useful Christopher Hitchens book titled "No One
Left to Lie To") and Barack Obama were both silver-tongued
corporate-neoliberal Wall Street and Pentagon Democrats who falsely claimed
to be progressive friends of working people and the poor. President Obama
lied repeatedly, as when he falsely claimed that he would have his
Department of Justice investigate and prosecute abusive lenders for cheating
and defrauding ordinary homeowners. Obama misrepresented the facts badly
when he repeatedly claimed (in what PolitiFact determined to be "The Lie of
the Year" in 2013) that, under his Affordable Care Act, "If Americans like
their doctor, they will keep their doctor. And if you like your insurance
plan, you will keep it."
In a grotesque lie early in his presidency, Obama's White House claimed that
the carnage caused by its bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk (where
dozens of children were blown to pieces by U.S. ordnance) had really been
inflicted by "Taliban grenades."
But presidential lies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an
American political, media, intellectual and educational culture that has
long been drenched in a vast sea of fable, deception, ideological selection
and flat-out propagandistic falsification. The biggest and most relevant
lies of our time don't just issue from the mouths, press releases and now,
sadly, Twitter feeds of presidents. They are major historical and societal
myths and grand narratives of broad falsehood widely shared across the major
party spectrum by "responsible" and "respectable" authorities in politics,
business, education, literature, religion, media and public affairs.
I recently asked a dozen or so online associates and friends for their top
five nominations under the category of the Big Lies of Our Time in the
United States. We came up with fully 50 great national fairy tales and
untruths (one for each U.S. state). Here are my nominations for the Top 10
Big National Lies:
1. We live in a democracy. This core myth cries out for demolition with
special urgency at present thanks to constant media and political class
repetition of the claim that Russia "undermined our democracy" during the
2016 presidential election. I have written at length against this claim so
many times that it has become difficult to do so again without excessive
self-repetition. Here are just three among a large number of reports and
commentaries in which I have carefully explained why the U.S. is a corporate
and imperial plutocracy and even an oligarchy, not a democracy:
"Time Is Running Out: Who Will Protect Our Wrecked Democracy From the
American Oligarchy?" CounterPunch, March 21, 2018
"American Money, Not Russia, Put Trump in the White House: Reflections on a
Recent Report," CounterPunch, March 30, 2018
"Who Will Protect U.S. Election Integrity From American Oligarchs?"
Truthdig, April 18, 2018
"Putin's War on America Is Nothing Compared With America's War on
Democracy," Truthdig, July 22, 2018
Also see my book "They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy" (2014).
2. Capitalism is about democracy. No, it isn't-and one need not be an
anti-capitalist "radical" like myself to know better. My old copy of
Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as "the
economic system in which all or most of the means of production and
distribution . are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under
fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a
tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the
growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc."
There's nothing-nada, zero, zip-about popular self-rule (democracy) in that
definition. And there shouldn't be. "Democracy and capitalism have very
different beliefs about the proper distribution of power," liberal economist
Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s: "One [democracy] believes in a
completely equal distribution of political power, 'one man, one vote,' while
the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit
to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. . To put it in its
starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is
not." More than being compatible with slavery and incompatible with
democracy, U.S. capitalism arose largely on the basis of black slavery in
the cotton-growing states (as historian Edward Baptist has shown in his
prize-winning study "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of
American Capitalism") and is, in fact, quite militantly opposed to
democracy.
"We must make our choice," onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is
reputed to have said or written: "We may have democracy in this country, or
we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have
both." This statement was unintentionally but fundamentally anti-capitalist.
Consistent with the dictionary definition presented above, the brilliant
French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been
inexorably pulled toward the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands.
3. Capitalism is about the free market. Nope, it's about the rich seizing
control of the state and using it to make themselves richer and to
thereby-since wealth is power and pull-deepen their grip on politics and
policy. The profits system is so dependent on, and enmeshed with,
governmental protection, subsidy and giveaways that one might even question
the accuracy of calling it capitalism. (For elaboration, please see my
recent Truthdig essay "Our 'Rentier Capitalism' Is One More Nail in Earth's
Coffin"). It is at the very least state capitalism, and always has been. A
truly "free market," that is fully laissez-faire capitalism, has never
actually existed. At the same time, state-capitalist market forces in all
forms, including their most government-free ones, have always brought widely
different levels of freedom and un-freedom (including even literal slavery)
for people depending on what class they belong to and how many resources
they bring to influence and profit from market processes.
4. Big business and its political agents are freedom-loving libertarians who
hate "big government." False. They only hate big government that's not under
their control and doesn't serve their interests. The contemporary capitalist
elite and its many agents and servants hate only what the left French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "the left hand of the state"-the parts of
the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the
non-affluent majority. They want to starve and crush those branches of
government that reflect past popular victories in struggles for social
justice and democracy. But the portions of the state that serve the opulent
minority and dole out punishment for the poor are not the subject of their
ire. The regressive and repressive "right hand of the state," comprising the
big sections of "big government" that distribute wealth upward and attack
those who resist empire and inequality, is not its enemy. It grows in
accordance with the slashing of left-handed social protections, as the
increased insecurity that results drives ever more disadvantaged people into
the clutches of the military and the criminal injustice system.
5. The United States is a great land of liberty. Really? It depends on what
part of the class-race structure you inhabit. With a massive and highly
militarized police and prosecutorial state that has used the so-called war
on drugs and related cooked crime crazes as pretexts for racially
hyper-disparate mass arrest and imprisonment, the U.S. is home to the
highest rate of mass incarceration in the world (and in world history).
Social movements are regularly infiltrated, surveilled and crushed by the
high-tech U.S. police state.
Hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens depend on employers not just for their
incomes but also for their and their families' health insurance, something
that militates strongly against their willingness to speak freely within or
beyond the workplace.
Americans suffer the longest working hours in the "developed" (rich nation)
world; they spend inordinate and crippling amounts of time under the
despotic supervision of bosses and lack the time and energy and information
to participate meaningfully in the nation's supposed "democracy."
Freedom to do what one wants with one's life depends on the possession of
money and wealth, which is more unevenly distributed and harshly
concentrated in the U.S. than in any other wealthy capitalist nation.
Liberty is certainly enjoyed in great proportions by the top 10th of the
upper U.S. 1 percent, which owns as much wealth as the nation's bottom 90
percent. Liberty is far less prevalent among the 57 percent of Americans
who, as CNBC reported last fall, have less than $1,000 in savings; 39
percent have no savings at all. Last January, the same network reported that
more than a third (36 percent) of Americans would have to go into debt to
pay for a major unexpected expense like a trip to the hospital or a car
repair.
Wall Street chieftains who threw millions of Americans out of work and
destroyed billions of dollars in savings through their reckless and often
criminal practices have escaped prosecution while the nation's jails and
prisons are loaded with disproportionately black, Latino and poor people
serving long terms for comparative small-time drug offenses. In a report
titled "The Price of Justice," The Nation reported last year that "roughly
500,000 people are in jails across the country simply because they are
poor"-that is, because they can't make bail payments or pay fines and/or
court fees.
In the words of the title of one report on the poverty and bail jail
problem, "Freedom Isn't Free."
6. The United States is a great monument to classlessness. No, it isn't.
The U.S. is a great monument to savage class inequality, marked by an
extreme concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands (Louis Brandeis' death
knell for democracy) and the lowest rates of upward mobility from the lower
and working classes into the middle and upper classes in the "advanced"
world. Three absurdly wealthy Americans (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill
Gates) now possess among them as much wealth as the poorest half of the
United States. As one of those three, Buffett, noted 12 years ago: "There's
class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making
war, and we're winning." As wealth and income congeal ever upward in New
Gilded Age America, even the professional middle class now experiences
ubiquitous "precariousness," lost security and status, and downward
mobility. As the cultural theorist Lynn Parramore writes in a recent review
of journalist Alissa Quart's new book, "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't
Afford America":
"
Today, with their incomes flat or falling, [young middle-class] Americans
scramble to maintain a semblance of what their parents enjoyed. They are
moving from being dominant to being dominated. From acting to acted upon.
Trained to be educators, lawyers, librarians, and accountants, they do work
they can't stand to support families they rarely see. . Their new reality:
You will not do as well as your parents. Life is a struggle to keep up. Even
if you achieve something, you will live in fear of losing it. America is not
your land: it belongs to the ultra-rich. .
They are somebodies turning into nobodies . the Chicago adjunct professor
with the disabled child who makes less than $24,000 a year; and the
California business reporter who once focused on the financial hardships of
others and now faces unemployment herself. . Uber-driving teachers and law
school grads reviewing documents for $20 an hour-or less. Ivy Leaguers who
live on food stamps. . Their labor has sputtered into sporadic contingency:
they make do with short-term contracts or shift work. . Once upon a time,
only the working poor took second jobs to stay afloat. Now the Middle
Precariat has joined them. . Deep down, they know that they probably can't
pass down the cultural and social class they once took for granted.
It sounds like something out of, well, Marx.
7. Hard work and individual brilliance is the key to individual wealth, and
the lack of such work and brains is the source of individual poverty.
Nonsense. In the U.S. as across the capitalist world, private oligarchic
fortunes rest on the parasitic collection of multiple forms of rent obtained
through the ownership of multiple forms of inherited property and the wildly
inordinate influence that the wealthy Few exercise over the oxymoronically
named "capitalist democracies." The preponderant majority of the wealth
"earned" (appropriated) by the ever more obscenely opulent is produced by
countless less privileged others and by a set of societal and institutional
arrangements designed to serve those fortunate enough to be born into
affluence. (See the brilliant left geographer Richard A. Walker's masterful
discussion of the real source of Silicon Valley's spectacular profits in his
recent book "Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and Dark Side of Prosperity in
the San Francisco Bay Area.") Millions of Americans work absurdly long,
smart and hard hours for an ever-shrinking share of total income and wealth
and face economic precarity for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do
with their own personal effort and smarts. Rising labor productivity has not
remotely been matched by rising wages or benefits in a globalized labor
market structured by and for the employer class.
8. Growth is good. U.S. and Western state capitalist ideology has long
proclaimed that growth-not redistribution and sociopolitical
democratization-is the solution to poverty and joblessness. But contemporary
capitalist expansion is largely predicated on low wages, weak benefits, a
fading left-handed social welfare state, generalized precarity for the Many,
and relentless destruction of the earth on which we all depend. Economic
growth under the heedless, commons-plundering command of the unelected
dictatorship of capital is now clearly environmentally exterminist-a grave
threat to livable ecology. There are no jobs, no economy, on a dead planet,
and there's no Planet B.
9. We have an "independent" and "mainstream" media. False. We have neither.
For elaboration (I am running of word count), please see my 2015 ZNet essay
"On the Nature and Mission of U.S. Corporate Mass Media."
10. The U.S. is a force for good and peace in the world. It is no such
thing. For some ugly details (word count again, dear reader), please see my
recent Truthdig essays "The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S.
Hegemony" and "The Chomsky Challenge for Americans."
Trump deserves a special place in the Totalitarian Hall of Shame's special
Lying Head of State exhibit, but all these grand national deceptions were in
place under Obama, Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41 and Ronald Reagan. Most of them
have been operational under most of modern U.S. history. Impeaching or
un-electing the uber-dissembler who now occupies the Oval Office will not
magically make them go away. Only a great people's rebellion on behalf of
liberty, equality, solidarity, the common(s) good-and truth-can do that.
For the full list of Fifty Big National Lies, go to my website, paulstreet.
org.
Paul Street
On 8/6/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The American Sea of Deception
On the list of presidential liars: Shortly after being told of the 9/11
attacks of 2001, George W. Bush confers with administration members at a
Florida school he was visiting. Months later, he would lie to the American
people as he sought to justify an invasion of Iraq partly on the basis of
the attacks. (The U.S. National Archives)
Paul Street's column will appear in Truthdig each Sunday through Aug. 12.
Its regular schedule will resume when Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges
returns from vacation.
Four days ago, The Washington Post reported that the epic pathological liar
Donald Trump made 4,229 false statements during his first 558 days as
United
States president. Trump spoke or tweeted falsely, on average, an
astonishing
7.6 times per day during that time.
We have no historical database of presidential untruth on which to rely to
make detailed comparisons, but it is certain that Trump's rate of falsehood
is beyond anything ever seen in the White House. Armed with Twitter and a
mad and malignantly narcissistic penchant for twisting facts and truth in
accord with his own ever-shifting sense of what serves his interests and
hurts his perceived foes, this monstrosity is gaslighting the last
flickering embers of civic democracy at a velocity that would make Goebbels
green with envy.
Keeping up with Trump's erroneous and duplicitous statements is exhausting
work, hazardous to one's own sanity. Just as depressing as Trump's serial
fabrication and invention is the apparent willingness of tens of millions
of
ostensibly decent and honest ordinary Americans to tolerate, dismiss or
even
believe the endless stream of nonsense and bullshit.
Still, if much of the populace has become inured to presidential lying and
misstatement, it's hardly all the current president's fault.
Deception and misstatement are "as American as Cherry Pie" (to quote H. Rap
Brown on violence)-though here perhaps I should say "as American as George
Washington's childhood cherry tree fable."
While we've never seen anything on Trump's psychotic scale, the problem of
U.S. presidential deception goes way back in American history.
Eager for a back-door pretext to enter the war against German fascism (a
good thing in the opinion of many), for example, U.S. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt lied to Congress and the American people when he claimed that the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was "unprovoked" by the U.S. and a complete
"surprise" to the U.S. military.
President Dwight Eisenhower flatly lied to the American people and the
world
when he denied the existence of American U-2 spy plane flights over Russia.
President John F. Kennedy lied about the supposed missile gap between the
United States and the Soviet Union. And Kennedy lied when he claimed that
the United States sought democracy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and
around the world.
President Lyndon Johnson lied on Aug. 4, 1965, when he claimed that North
Vietnam attacked U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. This provided
a
false pretext for a massive escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam,
resulting
in the deaths of more than 50,000 U.S. military personnel and millions of
Southeast Asians.
Regarding Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg recalled 17 years ago that his 1971
release of the Pentagon Papers exposed U.S. military and intelligence
documents "proving that the government had long lied to the country.
Indeed,
the papers revealed a policy of concealment and quite deliberate deception
from the Truman administration onward. . A generation of presidents,"
Ellsberg noted, "chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the
real
policy was. ."
President Richard Nixon lied about wanting peace in Vietnam (his agent,
Henry Kissinger, actively undermined a peace accord with Hanoi before the
1968 election) and about respecting the neutrality of Cambodia. He lied
through secrecy and omission about the criminal and fateful U.S. bombing of
Cambodia-a far bigger crime than the burglarizing of the Democratic Party
headquarters in the Watergate complex, about which he of course famously
lied.
The serial fabricator Ronald Reagan made a special address to the nation in
which he lied by saying, "We did not-repeat-we did not trade weapons or
anything else [to Iran] for hostages, nor will we."
President George H.W. Bush falsely claimed on at least five occasions in
the
run-up to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that Iraqi forces, after invading
Kuwait, had pulled babies from incubators and left them to die.
President Bill Clinton shamelessly lied about his White House sexual
shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky. He falsely claimed to be upholding
international law and to be opposing genocide when he bombed Serbia for
more
than two months in early 1999.
The serial liar George W. Bush and his administration infamously, openly
and
elaborately lied about Saddam Hussein's alleged Iraqi "weapons of mass
destruction" and about Iraq's purported links to al Qaida and the 9/11
jetliner attacks. After the WMD fabrication was exposed, Bush falsely
claimed to have invaded Iraq to spread liberty and democracy.
Bill Clinton (subject of a useful Christopher Hitchens book titled "No One
Left to Lie To") and Barack Obama were both silver-tongued
corporate-neoliberal Wall Street and Pentagon Democrats who falsely claimed
to be progressive friends of working people and the poor. President Obama
lied repeatedly, as when he falsely claimed that he would have his
Department of Justice investigate and prosecute abusive lenders for
cheating
and defrauding ordinary homeowners. Obama misrepresented the facts badly
when he repeatedly claimed (in what PolitiFact determined to be "The Lie of
the Year" in 2013) that, under his Affordable Care Act, "If Americans like
their doctor, they will keep their doctor. And if you like your insurance
plan, you will keep it."
In a grotesque lie early in his presidency, Obama's White House claimed
that
the carnage caused by its bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk
(where
dozens of children were blown to pieces by U.S. ordnance) had really been
inflicted by "Taliban grenades."
But presidential lies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an
American political, media, intellectual and educational culture that has
long been drenched in a vast sea of fable, deception, ideological selection
and flat-out propagandistic falsification. The biggest and most relevant
lies of our time don't just issue from the mouths, press releases and now,
sadly, Twitter feeds of presidents. They are major historical and societal
myths and grand narratives of broad falsehood widely shared across the
major
party spectrum by "responsible" and "respectable" authorities in politics,
business, education, literature, religion, media and public affairs.
I recently asked a dozen or so online associates and friends for their top
five nominations under the category of the Big Lies of Our Time in the
United States. We came up with fully 50 great national fairy tales and
untruths (one for each U.S. state). Here are my nominations for the Top 10
Big National Lies:
1. We live in a democracy. This core myth cries out for demolition with
special urgency at present thanks to constant media and political class
repetition of the claim that Russia "undermined our democracy" during the
2016 presidential election. I have written at length against this claim so
many times that it has become difficult to do so again without excessive
self-repetition. Here are just three among a large number of reports and
commentaries in which I have carefully explained why the U.S. is a
corporate
and imperial plutocracy and even an oligarchy, not a democracy:
"Time Is Running Out: Who Will Protect Our Wrecked Democracy From the
American Oligarchy?" CounterPunch, March 21, 2018
"American Money, Not Russia, Put Trump in the White House: Reflections on a
Recent Report," CounterPunch, March 30, 2018
"Who Will Protect U.S. Election Integrity From American Oligarchs?"
Truthdig, April 18, 2018
"Putin's War on America Is Nothing Compared With America's War on
Democracy," Truthdig, July 22, 2018
Also see my book "They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy" (2014).
2. Capitalism is about democracy. No, it isn't-and one need not be an
anti-capitalist "radical" like myself to know better. My old copy of
Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as "the
economic system in which all or most of the means of production and
distribution . are privately owned and operated for profit, originally
under
fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a
tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the
growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc."
There's nothing-nada, zero, zip-about popular self-rule (democracy) in that
definition. And there shouldn't be. "Democracy and capitalism have very
different beliefs about the proper distribution of power," liberal
economist
Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s: "One [democracy] believes in a
completely equal distribution of political power, 'one man, one vote,'
while
the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit
to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. . To put it in its
starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy
is
not." More than being compatible with slavery and incompatible with
democracy, U.S. capitalism arose largely on the basis of black slavery in
the cotton-growing states (as historian Edward Baptist has shown in his
prize-winning study "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making
of
American Capitalism") and is, in fact, quite militantly opposed to
democracy.
"We must make our choice," onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is
reputed to have said or written: "We may have democracy in this country, or
we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have
both." This statement was unintentionally but fundamentally
anti-capitalist.
Consistent with the dictionary definition presented above, the brilliant
French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been
inexorably pulled toward the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands.
3. Capitalism is about the free market. Nope, it's about the rich seizing
control of the state and using it to make themselves richer and to
thereby-since wealth is power and pull-deepen their grip on politics and
policy. The profits system is so dependent on, and enmeshed with,
governmental protection, subsidy and giveaways that one might even question
the accuracy of calling it capitalism. (For elaboration, please see my
recent Truthdig essay "Our 'Rentier Capitalism' Is One More Nail in Earth's
Coffin"). It is at the very least state capitalism, and always has been. A
truly "free market," that is fully laissez-faire capitalism, has never
actually existed. At the same time, state-capitalist market forces in all
forms, including their most government-free ones, have always brought
widely
different levels of freedom and un-freedom (including even literal slavery)
for people depending on what class they belong to and how many resources
they bring to influence and profit from market processes.
4. Big business and its political agents are freedom-loving libertarians
who
hate "big government." False. They only hate big government that's not
under
their control and doesn't serve their interests. The contemporary
capitalist
elite and its many agents and servants hate only what the left French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "the left hand of the state"-the parts
of
the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the
non-affluent majority. They want to starve and crush those branches of
government that reflect past popular victories in struggles for social
justice and democracy. But the portions of the state that serve the opulent
minority and dole out punishment for the poor are not the subject of their
ire. The regressive and repressive "right hand of the state," comprising
the
big sections of "big government" that distribute wealth upward and attack
those who resist empire and inequality, is not its enemy. It grows in
accordance with the slashing of left-handed social protections, as the
increased insecurity that results drives ever more disadvantaged people
into
the clutches of the military and the criminal injustice system.
5. The United States is a great land of liberty. Really? It depends on what
part of the class-race structure you inhabit. With a massive and highly
militarized police and prosecutorial state that has used the so-called war
on drugs and related cooked crime crazes as pretexts for racially
hyper-disparate mass arrest and imprisonment, the U.S. is home to the
highest rate of mass incarceration in the world (and in world history).
Social movements are regularly infiltrated, surveilled and crushed by the
high-tech U.S. police state.
Hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens depend on employers not just for
their
incomes but also for their and their families' health insurance, something
that militates strongly against their willingness to speak freely within or
beyond the workplace.
Americans suffer the longest working hours in the "developed" (rich nation)
world; they spend inordinate and crippling amounts of time under the
despotic supervision of bosses and lack the time and energy and information
to participate meaningfully in the nation's supposed "democracy."
Freedom to do what one wants with one's life depends on the possession of
money and wealth, which is more unevenly distributed and harshly
concentrated in the U.S. than in any other wealthy capitalist nation.
Liberty is certainly enjoyed in great proportions by the top 10th of the
upper U.S. 1 percent, which owns as much wealth as the nation's bottom 90
percent. Liberty is far less prevalent among the 57 percent of Americans
who, as CNBC reported last fall, have less than $1,000 in savings; 39
percent have no savings at all. Last January, the same network reported
that
more than a third (36 percent) of Americans would have to go into debt to
pay for a major unexpected expense like a trip to the hospital or a car
repair.
Wall Street chieftains who threw millions of Americans out of work and
destroyed billions of dollars in savings through their reckless and often
criminal practices have escaped prosecution while the nation's jails and
prisons are loaded with disproportionately black, Latino and poor people
serving long terms for comparative small-time drug offenses. In a report
titled "The Price of Justice," The Nation reported last year that "roughly
500,000 people are in jails across the country simply because they are
poor"-that is, because they can't make bail payments or pay fines and/or
court fees.
In the words of the title of one report on the poverty and bail jail
problem, "Freedom Isn't Free."
6. The United States is a great monument to classlessness. No, it isn't.
The U.S. is a great monument to savage class inequality, marked by an
extreme concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands (Louis Brandeis' death
knell for democracy) and the lowest rates of upward mobility from the lower
and working classes into the middle and upper classes in the "advanced"
world. Three absurdly wealthy Americans (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and
Bill
Gates) now possess among them as much wealth as the poorest half of the
United States. As one of those three, Buffett, noted 12 years ago: "There's
class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making
war, and we're winning." As wealth and income congeal ever upward in New
Gilded Age America, even the professional middle class now experiences
ubiquitous "precariousness," lost security and status, and downward
mobility. As the cultural theorist Lynn Parramore writes in a recent review
of journalist Alissa Quart's new book, "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't
Afford America":
"
Today, with their incomes flat or falling, [young middle-class] Americans
scramble to maintain a semblance of what their parents enjoyed. They are
moving from being dominant to being dominated. From acting to acted upon.
Trained to be educators, lawyers, librarians, and accountants, they do work
they can't stand to support families they rarely see. . Their new reality:
You will not do as well as your parents. Life is a struggle to keep up.
Even
if you achieve something, you will live in fear of losing it. America is
not
your land: it belongs to the ultra-rich. .
They are somebodies turning into nobodies . the Chicago adjunct professor
with the disabled child who makes less than $24,000 a year; and the
California business reporter who once focused on the financial hardships of
others and now faces unemployment herself. . Uber-driving teachers and law
school grads reviewing documents for $20 an hour-or less. Ivy Leaguers who
live on food stamps. . Their labor has sputtered into sporadic contingency:
they make do with short-term contracts or shift work. . Once upon a time,
only the working poor took second jobs to stay afloat. Now the Middle
Precariat has joined them. . Deep down, they know that they probably can't
pass down the cultural and social class they once took for granted.
It sounds like something out of, well, Marx.
7. Hard work and individual brilliance is the key to individual wealth,
and
the lack of such work and brains is the source of individual poverty.
Nonsense. In the U.S. as across the capitalist world, private oligarchic
fortunes rest on the parasitic collection of multiple forms of rent
obtained
through the ownership of multiple forms of inherited property and the
wildly
inordinate influence that the wealthy Few exercise over the oxymoronically
named "capitalist democracies." The preponderant majority of the wealth
"earned" (appropriated) by the ever more obscenely opulent is produced by
countless less privileged others and by a set of societal and institutional
arrangements designed to serve those fortunate enough to be born into
affluence. (See the brilliant left geographer Richard A. Walker's masterful
discussion of the real source of Silicon Valley's spectacular profits in
his
recent book "Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and Dark Side of Prosperity in
the San Francisco Bay Area.") Millions of Americans work absurdly long,
smart and hard hours for an ever-shrinking share of total income and wealth
and face economic precarity for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do
with their own personal effort and smarts. Rising labor productivity has
not
remotely been matched by rising wages or benefits in a globalized labor
market structured by and for the employer class.
8. Growth is good. U.S. and Western state capitalist ideology has long
proclaimed that growth-not redistribution and sociopolitical
democratization-is the solution to poverty and joblessness. But
contemporary
capitalist expansion is largely predicated on low wages, weak benefits, a
fading left-handed social welfare state, generalized precarity for the
Many,
and relentless destruction of the earth on which we all depend. Economic
growth under the heedless, commons-plundering command of the unelected
dictatorship of capital is now clearly environmentally exterminist-a grave
threat to livable ecology. There are no jobs, no economy, on a dead planet,
and there's no Planet B.
9. We have an "independent" and "mainstream" media. False. We have
neither.
For elaboration (I am running of word count), please see my 2015 ZNet essay
"On the Nature and Mission of U.S. Corporate Mass Media."
10. The U.S. is a force for good and peace in the world. It is no such
thing. For some ugly details (word count again, dear reader), please see my
recent Truthdig essays "The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S.
Hegemony" and "The Chomsky Challenge for Americans."
Trump deserves a special place in the Totalitarian Hall of Shame's special
Lying Head of State exhibit, but all these grand national deceptions were
in
place under Obama, Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41 and Ronald Reagan. Most of
them
have been operational under most of modern U.S. history. Impeaching or
un-electing the uber-dissembler who now occupies the Oval Office will not
magically make them go away. Only a great people's rebellion on behalf of
liberty, equality, solidarity, the common(s) good-and truth-can do that.
For the full list of Fifty Big National Lies, go to my website, paulstreet.
org.
Paul Street
