Then came the anti-war movement which rose up in the United States from a coalition of middle class college students trying to avoid being sent to Vietnam, members of the Civil Rights Movement--including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.--who took notice that a disproportionate percentage of troops going to Vietnam were black, plus the survivors from McCarthy's witch-hunts of the 1950's.
In late 1967 and early 1968, the anti-war movement gained strength with the rise of the "hippies" in Haight - Ashbury , the January 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and Walter Cronkite's exposà © of the real situation in Vietnam in March 1968, following Tet. The strength of the movement was enough for President Johnson to decide that he could not successfully seek re-election as President in 1968.
The withdrawal from Vietnam became the focus of the next two Presidential elections, as college campuses raged out of control. Middle class America finally said, "We have had enough of this war." The power of the middle class then reached its peak in 1974 when Nixon was forced to resign because of his part in the cover-up of members of his re-election campaign burglarizing Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington D.C.
Even before the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote an infamous memorandum in 1971, to the Director of Education for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The program outlined in this memorandum provided the wealthiest one percent of the population in the Western Democracies step by step instructions on how to begin a concerted effort to reverse the political, social, and economic advances that had enlarged and empowered the middle class since the end of the Second World War. These advances had--the ownership class I am certain would argue--become a threat to their power.
Beginning with the founding of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 1973, and then accelerating with the elections of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan as President of the United States, the top one percent have used their vast wealth, as well as the cover of their corporations, to influence fundamentalist religious groups, buy up and consolidate media, take advantage of economic disruptions caused by the increasing importation of oil by the United States, to create a propaganda arm operating under the misleading banner of "think tanks," and manipulate both information and public opinion in their favor.
At the same time these plutocrats in the Western Democracies began the process by which they could destroy their nations' social safety nets--necessary for the maintenance and continued growth of a middle class--while at the same time, increasing their own wealth and influence. Starting with the United States and Great Britain, these plutocrats began to apply the neoliberal lessons of the Chicago School of Economics, cutting taxes for the rich while eliminating and privatizing social programs and any other government services when and where they could. These spiritual descendants of the robber baron's did this despite the fact that their economic laboratory experiment in Chile--after the overthrow of Allende--had proven just how disastrous that program could be for a nation and its economy. (For a more detailed description of the disaster of Chile, read Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine. I consider it one of the most important books of the last decade, and a primer for the oligarch's plans for the rest of us. I would also grab copies of Thom Hartmann's book Screwed, and Robert Reich's Aftershock, for more detailed descriptions of its application to Americans.)
The international class war was on.
This is not what most American's traditionally think of when we speak of "class war," i.e., the poor rising up against the rich. No, this is the real class war as it has been practiced throughout most of recorded history: the upper class doing everything in its power to prevent, subvert, or overthrow the rise of an empowered middle class, who actually represented a threat to their political and economic dominance. Revolutionary France, England under Oliver Cromwell, Renaissance Italy, Late Republican Rome, and Athens under Pericles: all of these represented periods where the middle class rose to unprecedented heights of power and influence in their state's histories. Their ascent was then marked by a struggle for political control between the traditional power of the aristocracy, and the bourgeois' own rising power.
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