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The Communist Takeover of America
By Richard Girard
" ...Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I; Part VII, The Accumulation of Capital; Section 4: Different Forms of Relative Surplus Population, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation; page 401.
Communists have taken over the United States of America. And no, I have not been possessed by whatever malevolent spirit seems to possess Glenn Beck.
We were warned about these "communists," and the danger they represent to our Republic more than 120 years ago, when one President had the courage, and the intestinal fortitude, to warn us of the danger.
That President was Stephen Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th President.
In his Fourth Annual Message to Congress (the State of the Union Address before Congress is a modern innovation), President Cleveland wrote the following in December, 1888:
"Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government: but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.
He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor. Any intermediary between the people and their Government or the least delegation of the care and protection the Government owes to the humblest citizen in the land makes the boast of free institutions a glittering delusion and the pretended boon of American citizenship a shameless imposition."
First of all, no one could ever accuse President Cleveland of being the poster boy for socialism in any form.
What President Cleveland was addressing in the first part of his message to Congress (of which the above statement is part), was the American tariff system, which until the Sixteenth Amendment was the primary source of income for the Federal Government. In 1888, the system emphasized tariffs on less expensive goods from Europe--in order to "protect" American Markets (more often to permit price gouging of America's poor and middle class by America's capitalists)--while exempting from tariffs items like silk, ivory, etc., which only the rich could afford, because America did not produce these items.
The tariff system as it existed in 1888 was a very regressive system of taxation, deriving the majority of its income from the goods most needed and most used by America's poor and middle class, while exempting items which were used primarily or solely by the rich. This is very similar to the effect of today's Social Security tax, which is levied only against the first $110,000 of an individual's wages or salary. Anything above that amount is exempt. This means that the bottom 85% of the working population have to pay 4.2 percent (at least for the next two years, 6.2 percent afterwards) of their income to Social Security, while the top 15% have to pay an ever smaller percentage in relation to their total income that is subject to this tax.
President Cleveland expressed my feelings on this matter earlier in his 1888 Message to Congress:
"This is not equality before the law.
