As one of the babies of the boomer or prophet generation, we must explore the ways that we can bequeath to posterity the final stages of our good conscience

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REMEMBERING

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY

By: T. D. Duff Tonka Bay, Minnesota

As one of the victory babies of the boomer or prophet generation, we must explore the ways that we can bequeath to posterity our final states of good consciousness, much like the four old men of the gilded era, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell.

The psychological earthquake and the open wound on all baby boomers and their parents' hero generation psyches has forever been the horror of the Kennedy assassination, on November 22, 1963. VJ Day, the end of World War II and the Kennedy Assassination bracketed the consciousness of two generations. We all remember where we were when it happened.

I distinctly remember where I was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was a citizen of a country, the United States, at a time the future seemed bright and full of possibility, and the people had hope for a fuller and better life. Home was a place where our feet could leave but our hearts could not, where our faith in love was like the wind, we could not see it but we could feel its warmth. Our love endured because we loved the same things together.

I was living in a country where its citizens enjoyed basic human rights, where labor unions raised the living wage standards of all workers, not merely those under its contracts, and there was a coalition of conscience between the forces of labor, the church, the academic community and the civil rights movement. I was living in a country that had a progressive proportional tax system, the sublime legacy of FDR taxes that built the infrastructure of our country, and the constitution was taken seriously, by our elected representatives in Washington.

I was living in a country where Republicans and Democrats actually had respect for each other and worked together, respected each other and passed legislation that was for the benefit of the people. I was living in a time where we believed in Thomas Paine's words: "that reason and only reason can raise man's dignity from the depths of degradation, error and ignorance." This is where I was when JFK was put to death.

Yet, today I don't recognize this country any longer. It has been changed in a very negative way since the despicable men of Dealey Plaza ended the American Dream. It seems that at this tragic moment in our history, doing better and feeling worse has become part of our cultures new declinism, bringing on a façade of self- denigration, in a disappointing youth economy, a life that seems to lead nowhere, slackers and singles dazed and confused amid a culturally splintered world, full of exploitative sexuality and remorseless violence, all with a sense of personal directionless. Knowledge and education have become just another commodity through the monetization of knowledge production to the corporate model. Civics and government are no longer taught, and the teaching of history has become a mere regurgitation of times and dates.

President Kennedy demonstrated his willingness to stand up to big money during the "steel crisis" of April 1962, when he forced a price increase rollback by sending in FBI agents into corporate offices of the steel companies.

Kennedy's most perilous domestic initiative was his administration's actions against the oil depletion allowance, the enormous tax break that criminally amassed billions in unaccounted oil fortunes of Texas petro-owners. It gave the oil barons a huge and automatic tax deduction, regardless of their real costs, as a compensation for declining resources in the ground. Attorney General Robert Kennedy instructed the FBI to issue questionnaires, asking the oil companies for specific production and sales information. The oil industry, particularly the Dallas based independent producers did not appreciate the intrusion.

From its inception in 1913 to 1960 the oil depletion allowance had cost tax -payers $140 billion in lost revenues. Today, unlimited political power has been concentrated into the hands of the richest and most corrupt industry in the world, the fossil fuel industry, the very same industry that JFK was trying to protect us from, and the very same industry that today is endangering every aspect of our modern world, with its corruption and plundering pursuit of ever-increasing profits.

John Kennedy was very supportive of Enrico Mattei of Italy, a non-communist World War II resistance leader, who in the 1950s discovered vast amounts of oil and gas on Italian soil. He enjoyed great success until he attracted the negative attention of the Seven Sisters of oil. Mattei had negotiated a deal with the Shah of Iran for oil from lands outside of the British concession areas. He also negotiated a deal with the Soviets for oil from the Baku fields. A month after the Baku operation went into operation in October of 1962, Enrico Mattei was killed in a suspicious airplane accident in Italy. A week later the Rome CIA Station Chief left Italy for the United States, and Italy lost the driving force behind its economic post World War II recovery, and the fossil fuel industry in the name of the Seven Sisters criminally triumphed once more.

At the time of his death Enrico Mattei was scheduled to meet with President Kennedy, who was urging the U.S. oil companies to support and negotiate with Mattei. A year later, of course, Kennedy was assassinated, with trails of evidence also clearly leading to the doors of the Pentagon and CIA.

Our nation's economic decline began in the late 50's as European and Japanese productivity, with new factories and machinery, began to overtake that of the U.S., whose industrial base dated back to the 40's. The decline was greatly enhanced by the flow of investment funds overseas, the beginning of the Vietnam War, and LBJ's Great Society. President Kennedy attempted to make positive changes. Seeing that American investment banks were sending funds abroad in response to higher profits available there, instead of keeping the funds at home to invest in modernized factories and refurbished infrastructure, Kennedy introduced an Interest Equalization Tax on American funds invested overseas. He was murdered, however, and the version which passed in 1964 had been gutted by the Eastern financial community, the Wall Street banksters, by exempting Canada, through which investment funds would happily flow in the same amounts as before.

JFK was also moving to end the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict. In October of 1963 Kennedy with NSAM #263, announced his plan to have one thousand military men home by Christmas and all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. However, on November 21, 1963, in a stark contradiction to all previous Kennedy policy, McGeorge Bundy, then assistant to President Kennedy and a member of the National Security Council signed National Security Action Memorandum, NSAM #273 allowing the Vietnam War to continue. This was an act of outright treason by Bundy. How could this have happened unless Bundy knew that the next day November 22, Kennedy would not be around?

Before our President, our philosopher king, was murdered by the "deep state," money, and robber baron economics, the direct fraud of supply side economics which was essentially a repudiation of reality, loans to the rich that the middle and lower classes had to pay back, and ignore the future policy, had not turned morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic, justifying things that would otherwise seem outrageous and obscene, making greed good. Violence and the threat of violence with the new phenomenon of terrorism had not turned all human relationships into the cold calculus of mathematics. There was no hate media like Fox News and its dominance of right wing propaganda, its adherence to the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and its attempts to destroy our moral autonomy.

Lying and blatant fabrications had not become the growth industry of Washington republicans. Politics had not become an extortion industry, keeping the middle class un-empowered by creating a politically engineered anxious class versus the one percent class. The machinery of politics had not required our representatives to become agents of injustice. Politicians had not been blatantly compromised, with no sense of ethics or morality, operating in a vain- glorious system of conceit, deceit, debt and delusion, all the while with a friendly face, and with the solemn conceit of pretending to do the public's business.

The accumulated corruption of moneyed politics had not metastasized. In 1963 the Government had not been transformed from a public service and a public servant into a device for privatizing profit, eliminating the public sphere, totally liberating corporations, with sparse social spending. We were not living in a vile system where the hammer of freedom was divorced from the chisel of justice, and the common good, by the republicans in power, with their lobby money, and the uncontrollable corporate tyrannies that rule them.

The corruption that brought us to this stage of cancerous corporatism and fascism started with a 1971 memo by Republican activist Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce and the corporate multi-millionaires who belonged to the Chamber. Powell urged them to become actively involved in politics. The goal of the Powell memo was to build a large corporate and billionaire funded ideological machine of right wing think tanks and tax exempt foundations that capture and corrupt the US government. Powell wanted to put an end to the wave of environmental and consumer protections brought about by Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader. The system that Powell advocated has today become a corrupt oligarchy.

Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1972 by Nixon and he unconscionably began to destroy our democracy by giving the right of oligarchs to own politicians in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo, ruling that political money is speech and 1978 in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision overturning state restrictions on corporate political spending, saying such restrictions violated the First Amendment.

The Federalist Society soon followed, which built a nationwide nexus of jurists, attorneys, legal scholars and politicians that would bring about a new generation's un-democratic legal system that said Corporate personhood is real, money is speech, and democracy is mob rule, and organized money should have power over organized people.

The Federalists Society was founded in 1982 by the fossil fuel oligarch Koch family connected Bradley Foundation.

Because of five right wing conservatives on the Supreme Court, that our Constitution in Article III explicitly stated was under the regulation of Congress, those five democracy corrupters transformed our political system with the assertion that campaign spending is a First Amendment protected speech, in Citizen United in 2010. The ruling overturned campaign finance laws dating back to 1908. The court vomited up the unconstitutional claim that money was for soulless corporations, speech not property, attempting to design a control grid over a free humanity. In 2014 the same five right wing conservatives in the case McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission struck down the individual spending limits in the Federal Election Campaign Act.

What has happened since that ignoble day in November of 1963 that has made Washington a pox on our souls?

Corporate America with businesses like Walmart have slammed competitors' margins to the bare minimum, in addition to the captured population of its supply chain, through its punishing network effects. Transnational businesses have become narcissists, totally blind to where real value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.

Colonialism and cancerous capitalism, long fueled by envy and avarice, has imposed its predatory grim logic: what was ravishing was ravished, what was captivating became captive. The cruel history of our war mongering country brought bloodshed, and it took root, spreading across the world landscape like a toxic weed, nourished on injustice and inhumanity. The politicized human rights activities of Washington power politics have brazenly traded off the rights of citizens for the residual rights of the corporation. This unholy policy has hardened into the radicalized identities of world populations and an official institutionalization of discrimination and human abuse. It has distorted the ideals of sovereignty and citizenship and replaced it with a modern colonization form of trusteeship and ward-ship, with indentured servitude and loan-sharking imposed by the IMF, World Bank, and Wall Street banksters.

We have ended up with a maze of confusing paired opposites; egoism versus altruism, profit versus charity, materialism versus idealism, cold calculation versus spontaneity, none of which could ever be understood by us idealistic boomers, except by someone starting out from an amoral, craven, calculating self-interest in only unregulated market transactions.

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the criminal looting by the U.S. Treasury to bail out Wall Street banksters allowing them to make obscene profits? When will we reject the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When will we stand up and realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the enemies of freedom and the common good?

"It is only in showing men the truth," wrote Baron d'Holbach, a French philosopher and prominent figure of the French Enlightenment in 1772. "Then they will come to know their most vital interests and the true motives which should incline them towards what is good. For the less people know, the more obdurate they are in upholding, what they think they know."

Nearly 250 years ago, our nation signed a promissory note; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of property."

We have become a lost generation since JFK, because our lobbied representatives have become devoid of conscience, and because the unelected dictatorship of unlimited corporate campaign money, have failed to give mankind a peaceful society we were promised as our American heritage. Instead we are a decaying so called "democracy," that has vomited up a despicable serial rapist, corrupt white supremacist narcissist like Trump.

The great whale in Moby Dick, stands as a moral metaphor, for the driver of this country's evil since JFK's fateful day; the Pentagon. Herman Melville the author had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers. He was keenly aware that the wealth of countries was violently seized by Europeans and Americans from the poor people of the earth. All the authority figures on the ship Pequod were white men, Ahab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb. All the dirty work on the ship was done by slaves. The whalers in Moby Dick were paid by the amount of whale oil they could produce, and they made no effort to regard the whale as anything more than a commodity, whose other parts, head, blubber and ambergris were of no value to them. The rest of it, tons of meat, bones and guts were simply dumped back into the sea, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted sea gulls, fish and sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes and Native Americans would blanket the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of the whales litter the Oceans in the early nineteenth century.

The whale Moby Dick, as moral metaphor, rams and sinks the Pequod, and the whirlpool formed by the ships descent to the deep, our consumer and democratic descent into corporate tyranny, swallows all those who followed Ahab and his manic pursuit of wealth.

We have been lashed to our own Ahab and his disastrous desires ever since the creation of the National Security State in 1947. This great monster the Pentagon and CIA, have since their creation been the figures of fundamental evil and forces dismantling democracies around the world, that we cannot control, with a budget that has never been audited and today is more than one trillion dollars per year.

After the fated ship of Ahab and Starbuck went down failing to harness the gigantic whale, all that was left were seagulls, "screaming over the yawning gulf."

Today, 76 percent of US public supports higher taxes on the wealthy, 80 percent of the US public supports Medicare for all, 76 percent of the US public supports a $15 minimum wage, 60 percent of the US public support tuition-free college, 73 percent of the US public supports abortion rights, 96 percent of the US public supports an equal rights amendment, and 63 percent of the US public supports greater environmental regulation.

Yet, 5 unelected lifetime members of the Supreme Court and the unelected dictatorship of corporate and billionaire campaign contributors deny "we the people," of what we want, through Supreme Court legalized bribery.

People who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Our struggle is both a political one and a moral one. But, it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a forceful popular demand. It never has, and it never will.

Like Ahab and his crew, many of us rationalize our consumer madness. Even with the flashing warning signals before us, even with large segments of the country living in depression-like conditions, we genuflect slavishly to the enticing illusions provided to us by the corporate oligarchs of limitless power, wealth and technological might. This is a system that is literally destroying us, with the beastial amoral Trump as the current personification, yet many claim it our religion.

The crisis we now confront is the aggregation of a 500-year global tyranny of conquering, plundering, exploiting, raping, pillaging, and polluting the earth. Europeans and Americans have killed off all indigenous communities that stood in their way. The high-tech and scientific forces that brought about unparalleled riches and supreme military and economic power for a tiny global cabal, are now the forces that doom us.

We must never compromise, never forget our born duty, to fight for our constitutional rights. It was our successful fight for freedom against the tyranny of England, and the British East India Company that established our enlightened country.

The words of John F. Kennedy, made in a speech at the First anniversary of The Alliance for Progress, on March 13, 1962, are the words we must today make actionable and effective to save humankind.

"Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

Authors Bio:

I am a retired investment executive. I am a progressive activist and novelist. My novel THE FIND is due to be published this summer by Waterside Productions of California. I am working on my second novel, THE SURF. 

I also have written many topical opeds  published by various progressive publishers.

I am a Director for the Democratic DFL Party in Minnesota.