The Crooked Corporate Elite and
Social Conservatives: Divide & Conquer
Jesse Lee
When
Josh Marshall asked Joseph Wilson for an honest assessment of the
situation in Iraq, he responded, “I think we’re fucked”.
And despite the pathetic attempts to portray Wilson as a partisan
mudslinger, the truth is that here was a veteran statesman, a former
ambassador to Iraq, stating not that things had the potential to go wrong,
but that they already had gone wrong, possibly beyond repair. Only a few months ago the Council on Foreign Relations, an
institution with a traditional conservative/ centrist bent and on a
mission ordained by the administration, argued that the window for success
in Iraq would be open for… a few months.
The point here is that it is time to entertain the possibility that
the window for success in Iraq in the near future has, in fact, closed.
And while the administration is still demonstrating fits of
internal dissent on how and to what to degree they should pursue
international assistance, and while they seem to have managed to dig out
an uninspiring resolution at the UN, that discussion may have quietly
become moot. The UN has
always been viewed by Iraqis as somewhat of an extension of the US, since
the main force behind the UN sanctions was the US, and at this point even
a complete handover of power to the UN would give the appearance that the
UN was little more than a proxy. More
importantly, even optimistic hopes for additional international troops
have hovered around 20,000, hardly a tide-turning number amidst 160,000
Americans. Above all, it is
hard to imagine how terrorist resistance can possibly be stamped out, and
more and more Iraq threatens to become every bit as intractable as the
Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
And having seen all of its supposed motivations
revealed as the absurdities they always were, the administration has dared
to resort publicly to the neocon sophistry about “transforming the
Middle East”. But it should
be plain for all to see that the Project for a New American Century, the
American Enterprise Institute, and the rest of the neocon “think tank”
machine was a façade. They
proclaimed themselves to be intellectuals of the highest calibur, kidded
themselves that they were above the common moral order, spoke privately of
the New World Order and America “straddling the globe like a Colossus”,
while whipping the public into a terrified frenzy over a paltry if not
non-existent stash of expired weapons.
Above all, they patted each other on the back for the grand global
vision they had concocted.
But where was this vision after Saddam
scurried out of Baghdad? For
all of the talk about vast plans for remaking and democratizing the Middle
East, shouldn’t there have been at least a sketchy blueprint for how
this would develop in Iraq? Did
not the sincerity of the desire to “liberate” Iraq compel them to
devise a timetable, a process for turning over sovereignty…something?
The answer to this conundrum, which is so disturbing even liberal
pundits are scared to wrestle with it, is that it was all about money. Period.
And it is absolutely irresponsible of the media not
to recognize the fact that this mess was brought to us by corporate
America, as were the fiscally devastating tax cuts, as was the rolling
back of environmental standards across the board, as was the attack on
labor through cutting overtime pay, as is the nomination of judges who
have tried dozens of corporate cases and found against the corporation
zero times. On 9/11 the
neocons saw their cash cow oil sources in the Middle East coming
dangerously close to falling into the control of militant anti-Western
forces and panicked,
reverting immediately to their pet project, the neo-colonization of Iraq.
And while it is a conspiracy theory to claim that all
corporations are evil, it is a simple fact that there is a class of
multinational corporations which operate on pure greed and hold more power
than most states. And while
not every large multinational is run so amorally, the survival of the
fittest principle is very much in operation, and it is not likely for a
company to rise to the level of a Halliburton, Bechtel, or Enron without
having slit a few throats on the way.
And while many such corporations are linked
by common board members and social circles, it is probably more accurate
to call it a sub-culture. They
believe, amongst other things, that corporate America is
America, and that as the avant-garde of capitalism, or the
market, they are the true epic movers of history.
To run the government is the natural extension of all of this,
particularly in foreign policy and tax code.
If you think this is just baseless liberal narrative and that no
such culture exists, you probably haven’t looked too closely at the Project
for a New American Century. Politics
can bring together the corporate elite, even without an intricate
conspiracy, to bankroll pricy institutions like PNAC and AEI where the
sole mission is to spin, rationalize, and propagandize those policies
pursuant to corporate interests. Consider
the Bush fundraising tour from a millionaire’s business perspective: a
$2000 investment will return $360,000 in tax cuts alone – let alone
no-bid contracts, etc. Anything
short of $2000 is a bad business, pure and simple.
To understand the full
dimensions of what I’ll refer to as the CCE (crooked corporate elite)
and their role in this administration, take a look at New
Bridge Strategies, a group headed by Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s 2000
campaign manager and close ally, whose goal is to facilitate contracts for
work in Iraq. The Washington Post
reports:
“Getting
the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products would be a gold
mine,” said one of the partners at New Bridge who did not want to be
named. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a
Wal-Mart could take over the country,” he said.
There are a handful of
such groups, staffed by such cronies as former Rumsfeld aide and
arch-neocon Doug Feith and even the nephew of (Cheney favorite) Ahmed
Chalabi. It is greatly
underestimated how important imposing “free markets” is to the
neo-colonization process, and these men are professionals in this line of
work. To say it plainly,
there are around 22 million people in Iraq who represent little more than
potential consumers and untapped cheap labor to throw in the pathetic race
to the bottom that is the global labor pool. Valuable commodities they are.
And the same goes for the
next front in the corporate war,
which has remained under the radar so far.
South America is a continent rich in natural resources, all of
which are owned by the US and to a lesser extent Europe.
It blames, in large part correctly, the IMF and the World Bank for
ruining their economies, preserving the exploitation of their labor, and
for practicing what amounts to predatory lending.
Militant anti-Americanism and even militant Islam are on the sharp
rise, and burning of the American flag is stunningly commonplace.
Many nations are losing their last hopes as they see the helping
hand of the West producing nothing but mountainous debt which devours half
of their GDP in minimum payments. The theory that poverty, economic injustice, and hopelessness
produce terrorism will soon be tested in South America.
And by the way, there’s oil there too.
Much of the world has been
living on fumes of hope for some time; hope that the West was truly
interested in bringing them into the fold, hope that Western citizens
would realize that the exploitation of foreign labor was undercutting
their own, hope that some day the West would cut their protectionism too-
especially the $300 billion in agricultural subsidies.
To get an idea of what this tilted field results in, think of
cutting all aid to all American farmers overnight and the disaster that
would result. It is exactly this disaster that is being imposed on the
nations of South America, Africa, and the rest of the undeveloped world;
the only difference is that they are on the brink of starvation already
and have no welfare state.
There is a war coming
between the CCE and the rest of the world, and as long as the CCE have the
planes, tanks, and nukes, they will drive humanity directly into this
catastrophe out of sheer arrogance.
As long as they hold the
red pen, they will shift the tax burden down and cut anything that does
not directly benefit them or their friends.
As long as they write the
labor laws at home and abroad, labor will always lose.
And yet they are such a
tiny minority- so how do they keep getting elected?
Partly because money has
an uncanny if not demoralizing correlation to votes.
Both parties know that, which is why so much in the primaries rides
on fundraising. But above all
it is the CCE’s unnatural marriage to another group, social
conservatives, that has put them into power.
The Wall Street Journal
editorial page has jumped into the culture war because the tiny portion of
America that is the CCE realize that they can hijack this division of
American culture and manipulate it to vote them into power.
So while the larger social conservative block sings that the weak
shall inherit the earth, those in charge of the Republican Party are
working tirelessly to ensure that never happens.
There are a few public figures who successfully represent a bizarre
nexus of these two forces- Pat Robertson, with his gold interests in
Liberia and media empire, and Jerry Falwell who argues in earnest that
Jesus would drive a Hummer were he alive today.
But even Pat Robertson casts shame on the US government for giving
the lowest percentage of its GDP in aid of all industrialized nations, and
in general there is lurking tension between the two forces which threatens
to tear the party apart- if only somebody is willing to exploit it.
The unholy marriage was
forged in the depths of the Jim
Crow South when it was harnessed by Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats in a
way that would serve as an example for Republicans for decades to come.
The approaching Civil Rights era was a threat to the cultural
fabric of the South, but contrary to popular conception, it was not the
primary threat driving the Dixiecrat presidential campaign.
The real threat to these rich white businessmen was the
solidification of labor across color lines.
The vast majority of whites were desperately poor, and they were
slowly realizing that the exploitation of black labor as tenant farmers
and in prison work camps (which are often described by scholars as “worse
than slavery”) was, in fact, undercutting their own wages- just as the
exploitation of foreign labor is doing today. They began to realize that those who owned the land and
lorded it over them could only be checked by organized labor, and that
whites and blacks would have to unify for labor to be strong.
This possibility terrified the rich whites, and so they used the
image of the black man as sexual monster (rewatch King
Kong with this in mind if you want a shock) to effectively divide and
conquer labor. They were
amazingly successful, they even convinced poor whites to vote for poll
taxes in order to keep blacks from the polls, even though most of the
whites could not afford the poll tax themselves.
The perfection of this
technique, and the concurrent reorganization of the Republican party
around a watered-down and increasingly subtle version of Thurmond’s
platform, also coincided with another epic tool of manipulative
politicians: the Red Scare. Republicans
made particularly good use of this device, wielding it most disgracefully
during McCarthyism but using it continuously up to and throughout the
Reagan years as well. They
morphed a legitimate fear of nuclear holocaust into a belief that any call
for a more equal and humane distribution of wealth was quite simply evil.
This was probably the
single most important acheivement of the right in the second half of the
20th Century. It
inoculated the greedy factions of the Republican Party from obvious
attacks on the morality of their policies, and convinced much of America
that capitalism, as the opposite of “Satanic” communism, went hand in
hand with Christianity. To
this day calls of “class warfare” quiet Democratic criticisms more
potently than any actual argument, and to this day Texas Republicans refer
to the idea of universal health care as an idea “born in the depths of
hell”.
The irony of this
political posture is difficult to avoid.
Kurt Vonnegut has been the only prominent public figure to make the
obvious argument that socialism, as an economic theory, is the natural
extension of Christianity. Clearly
a society in which all are cared for, and where none are engulfed in the
trappings of insatiable greed, would bear much more resemblance to the
teachings of Jesus than does today’s system which rests on the principle
that the collective good demands the maximum greed of each individual.
It is little known, probably due to the incendiary effect such
knowledge would have on many Americans, but the early Christians lived in
relatively small retreats called koinonia, which were in fact communes.
So while socialism as an economic system might be unrealistic or
problematic in many ways, the fundamental ideals of socialism and
Christianity are almost indistinguishable.
And so we see that on
basic principles, the vast majority of the free citizens of this nation
agree that economically, we are a nation that is rich enough to take care
of our sick, educate our poor properly, provide social programs, and
establish a progressive tax system that puts a slightly higher burden on
those who have more money than they can spend.
And yet the tiny remaining minority that does not believe this, the
CCE, have managed to gain control of the legislative, the executive, and
with Bush’s packing of the courts, even the judiciary to an
unprecedented extent. They have done so by convincing social conservatives
that they are on their side, even as they empty the nation’s treasure
into their own pockets. They
have been able to do so because the opposition bites its tongue the moment
the words “class warfare” are hollered.
But if those calls are
shrill it is only because the CCE know how tenuous their grip on this
country is. That phrase may
be the lone, paper-thin wall preventing the CCE from being relegated to
their proper minority role in the government of the country.
All of America has watched as Western Europe and Japan have surged
well ahead of us in education, in health care, and in social justice
generally. This tension will
only grow.
Conservatives (as well as
Clinton and too many Democrats) have been very effective in pushing the
notion that “free markets” as they call them, and “freedom”, are
two sides of a coin. It is
time to harness the power and legitimacy of the unions as well as the
noise of the protesters to expose this propaganda in broad daylight.
It is encouraging to see Democratic candidates at least cautiously
addressing this issue, which was viewed as “far-left” only months ago.
The surge of populism that has emerged in response to this
administration deserves much of the credit, and this surprise should be
taken as proof of how much can be done by millions organized to demand
justice from their government.
This administration, which
has taken shameless corporate greed to once unimaginable heights, is in
serious danger of crashing and burning- and in the process exposing CCE
government in all of its despicable glory.
The administration has survived by exploiting the blind trust given
to it after 9/11, and also by acting so ridiculously, so heinously, that
the average citizen might intuitively say to himself, “Nah, they couldn’t
be that bad- there must be
another explanation even if I don’t understand it”.
The danger is that as the lies are dismantled, as the momentum
continues to mount, there may be a moment in which the public
consciousness realizes: “Wow, they really are that bad”, and
- perhaps - CCE government will suddenly be stigmatized the way it
always should have been.
But those of us who
believe in a government of, for, and by the people cannot just sit back
and hope for this to happen. For
the Democratic Party, in pure calculating political terms, the overarching
goal of the next decade must be to divide and conquer the Republican
Party, turning social conservatives on their CCE leaders.
For the rest of us, and I favor this perspective, we must attempt
to dull the passions of the culture war just enough to communicate to
social conservatives that economically, and truly in most ways, we are on
the same side. With precious
few exceptions, they have many more interests in common with progressives
than they do with those they are electing to represent them.
The political landscape of this nation is overripe for an overhaul.
If this can be
accomplished, the culture war will also take on a very different dynamic.
It is of monumental importance to understand how great of an
interest the CCE have in preserving the culture war.
For decades they have been promoting bigotry of every imaginable
variety: claiming that gays are after the nation’s children, that black
men are after the white woman, that minorities in general are to be blamed
for everything wrong with this nation and everything wrong with the
individual white man’s life. It
is only open to speculation the degree to which the CCE have actually kept
alive such bigotry in opposition to natural social progress.
But there is no doubt how much the Republican Party needs bigotry
in this country in order for the GOP to survive as it stands, and it how
desperately it needs to make sure bigots turn out to vote.
When Karl Rove scheduled the opening of Bush’s 2000 campaign at
Bob Jones University, known until recently for its ban on interracial
relationships, it was not an expression of personal racism, it was a wink
and a smile to multitude of bigoted voters in the South.
In a textbook example of what is known as the two-pronged approach,
the administration told the bigoted vote not to worry if they heard some
wishy-washy rhetoric on the campaign trail- Bush was one of them.
It is time to close the
ideological chasm that divides this country, if only small enough for a
fraction of the social conservatives to hear our warnings about CCE rule
and jump across. If this
nation became 55/45 instead of 50/50, that would be more than enough to
force Republicans to drastically alter their policies and leadership. This administration has overplayed the corporate hand, and
let them rue the day. Let the
CCE be vanquished from the pivot of history once and for all.
As a small step in this direction I am operating a
newsletter, entitled Common Sense
in recognition of Thomas Paine’s seminal work.
It is currently distributed by around 80 readers across America, in
the cities and towns of Bush Country, planting the seeds of dissent where
the CCE has tried to salt the earth.
It is one page, front and back, with a bulleted news summary
including the most damning stories from the mainstream media (NYTimes,
Washington Post, regional and local newspapers), and one opinion
piece, chosen to be potent but not strident in tone.
The newsletter can be dropped off at the library, posted on a
bulletin board, anyplace where your neighbors and fellow citizens can see
it and learn what the administration and the CCE are doing.
To receive Common Sense
in your inbox every two weeks (certainly free of charge), simply email us
at commonsense@opednews.com,
and we will add you to the list.
Jesse Lee is
a regular columnist for www.opednews.com
and operates Common
Sense in conjunction with Rob Kall.
He co-operates the blog moneyjungle.org
and is a founding contributor
to the platform of 2020
Democrats. This
article is copyright by Jesse Lee, but permission is granted for reprint
in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this entire credit
paragraph is attached
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