The realtionship between corporate imperialism, illegal immigrats, and destruction of U.S. middle class.

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National Insecurity Blanket
By Richard Girard

Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.
Georg Hegel (1770–1831), German philosopher. The Philosophy of Right, “The State,” Addition 149 (1821; tr. 1942).

One of the most interesting conclusions of the Warren Commission is that there is no way to absolutely protect the President against an individual (or a small group) who is willing to die to assassinate him. The grenade attack in the former Soviet republic of Georgia last year has demonstrated that this is still true.

Now, I am not in any way advocating the murder of President Bush. My point is this: If we cannot provide absolute protection to the President, how can we expect absolute protection against terrorist attacks for ourselves?

The simple answer is: we can't.

Now I will make another statement that is equally certain to be shocking: terrorists are not the most dangerous threat to our national security. The current state of affairs of our Federal Government, and its incestuous relationship with large multinational corporations, represent a far more dangerous threat to our nation's well being.

Let us look at the current state of the American military. It has been stretched to the point of breaking by the war in Iraq, especially our National Guard and Reserve units. Particularly the ground forces are not meeting recruitment goals. Billions of dollars of equipment are being worn out or destroyed faster than they can be replaced. Retention of commissioned and non-commissioned officers, vital for the future quality of the American military, is declining. Morale is in the toilet. All of the good that came out of the debacle in Vietnam (in terms of our armed forces capability) is being squandered at a precipitous rate.

An even more worrisome aspect is the current moribund state of our manufacturing sector. Len Deighton, master of the espionage/suspense novel, wrote of the difference in economic wherewithal for Great Britain between the First and Second World Wars in his non-fiction WWII history Blood, Toil and Folly. Great Britain had started the devolution from a manufacturing to a service economy around 1885. In the First World War, Great Britain still had the manufacturing base to be the Allies' arsenal, providing munitions for France, Russia, Italy and the United States. Sergeant Alvin York, for example, won his Medal of Honor using the British designed Lee-Enfield rifle, not the American Springfield.

By the time of the Second World War, British manufacturing had declined to the point that Great Britain was dependent on the United States for one-half of its tanks, plus airplanes, trucks, half-tracks, and other munitions. Without this aid, Great Britain would not have been able to hold on against Rommel's onslaught in North Africa, let alone hold off the U-boats in the North Atlantic.

The American manufacturing base has, over the last three decades, declined even further than Great Britain's had between the First and Second World Wars. Our machine tool capability has declined by at least fifty percent in the last quarter century. Many Americans have no idea about how to work an assembly line, or any of the other tools of mass production. Thousands of factories have been abandoned, stripped of their machinery, torn down, and millions of workers have suddenly found themselves without jobs.

In the event of a protracted war, we no longer have the capability to tool up—create the machinery we need to turn out the hundreds of thousands of weapons required for a long, intense war like Vietnam or the Second World War, or the people to train them—in less than three years. If you have any doubt about this, look up one of the stories on the web about the Pentagon having to buy ammunition from Israel and other friendly nations over the last two years.

Additionally, the incestuous relationship of the military-industrial complex threatens our current qualitative position in military affairs. Much of our current material quality is due not to the actions of the corporations and the Pentagon's procurement process, but to the late John R. Boyd (Colonel, USAF, ret.) and his "acolytes," derisively called "the Fighter Mafia" by the powers that be in the Pentagon (see the book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram for more on this story).

With the death and retirement of most of the "Fighter Mafia" from their Pentagon jobs, the military is returning to its previous unfortunate habits of "gold plating" and overdeveloping new weapons systems, and cost overruns. The B-2 bomber costs one billion dollars a copy; the F/A-22 fighter costs one quarter billion dollars a copy, making the loss of even one of these aircraft a budgetary disaster. Corporate mergers have left us ever fewer corporations competing for the Pentagon's money, reducing the competition that is supposed to improve program quality and hold down costs. The ease with which military decision makers move back and forth from the public to the private sector calls into doubt the objectivity of military procurement decisions.

Qualitatively, we may (currently) have better tanks, for example, than a potential enemy, such as Red China. However, we must remember that the Germans also had qualitatively superior, but difficult to produce, tanks during World War Two. Hordes of readily mass-produced Allied M-4 Sherman and T-34 tanks used sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm the qualitatively superior Nazi panzers and win the war. As Josef Stalin once observed, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

We face an even greater disadvantage in regards to our nation's economic weakness. The Roman orator Cicero observed twenty centuries ago that, “The sinews of war, [is] a limitless supply of money.” Our spiraling national debt—which George W. Bush has essentially doubled—leaves us without a solid economic foundation with which to fight a war. I am reminded that the Lend-Lease program was created by the Roosevelt administration to compensate for Great Britain's glaring economic weakness, as well as her manufacturing deficiencies.

In 1941 Great Britain was broke. She was sending the last of her gold reserves to the United States as collateral for food, munitions, and other goods that the United Kingdom desperately needed. Lend-Lease was created to provide credit by the government of the United States to Great Britain in exchange for leasing British military bases around the world.

One thing I remember from my high school economics class: you have to supply concrete, manufactured items—not simply provide services—if a nation is to have long-term economic stability. Our government has done nothing to address the deficit in our balance of trade in the twenty years since we went from being a net exporting nation to a net importing nation.

Related to this is the problem of illegal immigration. You continually hear the Republican refrain, “Americans don't want to do these jobs..., and “the unspoken second part of this statement is”...for what we want to pay them.”

Republicans have been, for most of the last century, what The Conceptual Guerilla has named on his website, the party of cheap labor. What Theodore Roosevelt called “big business,” has been the primary proponents of “individual responsibility” while doing all they can for “ever higher profit margins,” at the expense of their employees, consumers, and the communities where they do business. For these large, and increasingly multinational corporations, individual responsibility means if you are injured on the job or you can't work or you can't find a job at a decent wage, it is entirely your problem, not theirs.

Legally, all corporations' single, overriding concern, is providing profits for their shareholders, thanks to the 1916 Supreme Court decision, Ford v. Dodge. All other responsibility is limited to those imposed by local, state, and Federal laws and regulations, which have invariably been implemented as a reaction to a public outrage over corporate indifference, e.g., Love Canal, Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, strip-mining. And big business has fought these laws and regulations—so necessary for maintaining the quality of life for consumers, employees, and the people in their communities—almost every step of the way. In this they are following the socially amoral, legalistic tenets of people like Milton Friedman, who hold that corporate social responsibility can only be tolerated when it is insincere. (See Joel Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power; Ch. 2, p.p.33-42.)

It is this shortsighted vision of earning the maximum profit possible every quarter—as the highest moral value for a corporation—that has led us to our immigration problem. In 1981, it is estimated that there were only two million or so illegal immigrants in the United States; the best recent estimate is more than eleven million. I believe that this is due to the shrinking of the minimum wage (in terms of constant dollars); the slow, insidious emasculation of the American labor movement; and the deregulation of so many aspects of our economy.

These illegal immigrants are willing to work for the minimum wage—or less—live like serfs, and send most of their money home to support their families. Even legal immigrants, such as engineers from India, are hired at below the prevailing wage, but double or treble what they could make at home. By these methods, corporations rob millions of Americans of their livelihoods in the name of increased profit for themselves.

If you are asking what is wrong with corporations in America maximizing their profits in this manner, I will start with how it negatively affects our tax base.

George W. Bush's tax cuts have most positively affected those who are in the top quintile (20%) for annual income. In fact, according to Princeton economist Paul Krugman, the higher income you have, and the higher your tax cut as a percentage of your income. This increasingly places the tax burden on the middle and working class (the three middle quintiles of annual income). Further, they give the duplicitous excuse for harming the poorest Americans by reducing the benefits they need to survive, or eliminating programs that give them an opportunity to escape poverty, in the name of “balancing the budget.”

Much of our real budget deficit is masked by the continual theft of money from the Social Security Trust Fund. This payroll tax, which is essentially a flat tax that primarily effects the two-thirds of our population with the lowest wages, has almost no effect on the so-called “investor class” of Americans. The payroll tax does not apply to wages and salaries over approximately $90,000.00 per annum. This means that the people most likely to need Social Security when they retire—especially in view of the annihilation of so many corporate pension funds—are paying the majority of the money into the Social Security Trust Fund, which is then being “borrowed” by the Federal government to help cover part of the budget deficit. This is done while providing tax cuts for those people who are least likely to need Social Security.

So, the American middle class is saddled with an ever-increasing proportion of our nation's tax burden, while their household incomes have stagnated or declined for the last quarter of a century. If I remember what I learned in my class on the history of the French Revolution correctly, it was the increasing tax burden on the farmers and townsmen of France (caused by a monarchy which had bankrupted the nation with war, favors to cronies, and ostentatious displays of wealth, combined with tax exempt status for the nobility and the Church...hmm, that sounds familiar), that created the cauldron of popular resentment which boiled over in 1789. President Bush's insane economic policies threaten to create a similar predicament for the United States within a few years.

The second problem with permitting corporations to maximize their profits, regardless of the effect on the rest of society, is that this will eventually destroy upward mobility, and I have seen several reports—media, academic, and governmental—that say that this is already occurring. This, together with declining wages, will eventually create a divide between the wealthy upper class and the rest of the American people—similar to the one that exists in Mexico—unless of course the middle class decides to hoist the banner of revolution as the French did 217 years ago (or, hopefully, a non-violent revolution like the Poles did seventeen years ago), and rid themselves of their tormentors.

American corporations continue to hire foreign immigrants, both legal and illegal, at depressed wages and benefits, for those jobs that they haven't outsourced. These immigrants potentially pose the same sort of threat to the United States that the enslaved war captives posed to the Roman Republic during their primary period of conquest, roughly 264 B.C. to 27 B.C..

These nearly perpetual wars, both civil and foreign, destroyed Rome and Italy's yeoman farmer (middle) class (remember, in those days a man's wealth and class was calculated by the land he owned), who were the foundation of Rome's legions. Disasters like the battles of Cannae and Arausio cost Rome and her allies tens of thousands of dead citizens.

As Rome's farming middle class was dying in their thousands, members of the Roman nobility and upper classes bought the farms of deceased and absent legionnaires from economically distressed families. These plutocrats worked these larger, combined estates with the enslaved war captives of Rome: which was better for their bottom line, give or take the occasional slave revolt. The dispossessed families and returning soldiers gravitated towards the slums of Rome and other cities, picking up what work they could (often government make work jobs), engorging those cities' food doles in the process.

This enforced joblessness (and underemployment) of so many formerly productive Roman citizens—because of the masses of inexpensive of slaves taken in conquest—took away the hope and self-confidence of these men, now reduced to second class citizenship as part of the landless Head Count. When the consul Gaius Marius began the practice of utilizing members of the Head Count during an especially grievous shortage of manpower, the newly minted legionnaires felt more loyalty to their general than they did Rome. They essentially became mercenaries, loyal only to their general, and his promise of plunder and land grants. This was the direct cause of the Roman Republic degenerating into an Empire.

We are facing a similar situation now: an estimated eight to ten percent of real unemployment, a similar number of underemployed. We have a shrinking middle class, facing both rising costs and stagnant wages, and military service has become the primary way out of the ghetto. The rich are getting ever richer; the top ten percent of the population have doubled their percentage of the nation's assets in the last twenty-five years. As Ariana Huffington pointed out, the United States is becoming a welfare state for the rich, and the worst sort of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism for everyone else. This state of affairs will destroy our republic as certainly as it destroyed Rome's.

It is time for the American people to take a hand in the governance of their nation, and reverse our nation's declining fortunes. I steadfastly oppose violence, and prefer the power of the ballot to the sting of the bullet. If we do not stop corporate dominance now, we may have that choice taken away from us.

America, do your duty.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'