Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (20 page)

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Nonetheless, Eisenhower added,

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Eisenhower concluded with a very specific warning to us, the generation that would follow:

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

War had become big business in America. Now we not only consume a vast amount of military equipment but we sell it to the world: we're the world's largest exporter of weapons of virtually all sizes and types.

Ever since corporations stole human rights in the
Santa Clara
coup of 1886 and began to first fully exercise them during the Reagan era (and continue today with increasing belligerence), Madison's and Eisenhower's warnings have become more of a concern.

Military spending is the least effective way to help, stimulate, or sustain an economy for a very simple reason: military products are used once and destroyed.

When a government uses taxpayer money to build a bridge or highway or hospital, that investment will be used for decades, perhaps centuries, and will continue to fuel economic activity throughout its lifetime. But when taxpayer dollars are used to build a bomb or a bullet, that military hardware will be used once and then vanish. As it vanishes, so does the wealth it represented, never to be recovered.

As Eisenhower said in an April 1953 speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The
world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

It was a brilliant articulation of human needs in a world increasingly dominated by the nonbreathing entities called corporations whose values are profit and growth—not the human values of fresh air, clean water, pure food, freedom, and happiness. But it was a call unheeded and, today, it is nearly totally forgotten.

Franklin Roosevelt once said, "There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

Perhaps, as he suggested, history does, indeed, repeat itself.

Today, as we face international financial and domestic political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany's response was to merge corporations into government, creating unequal protection for working citizens, privatizing much of the commons, and creating an illusion of prosperity through continuous and ever-expanding war. America's response was to pass minimum-wage laws, increase taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, establish Social Security, and become the employer of last resort through programs like the WPA to create a vibrant middle class and real prosperity.

One country chose corporatocracy; the other chose democracy and the rule of We the People.

Today James Madison's warning about an executive branch beholden to "commercial monopolies" and intoxicated by war
takes on a new and chilling meaning. And to the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours as to which path we'll pursue.

We have a name for government of, by, and for corporations. It's called
fascism.

Benito Mussolini, one of the best-known fascists of the twentieth century, claimed to have invented the word. It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the
Encyclopedia Italiana
that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry and claimed credit for it.

In 1938 Mussolini realized his vision of fascism when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni—the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Franklin Roosevelt's administration was quite aware of the nature of the fascist government. In early 1944 the
New York Times
asked Vice President Henry Wallace (in Wallace's words) "to write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

In April 1944, when Vice President Wallace published his answer in the
Times,
he certainly could point to examples of
Americans who had aligned themselves with Mussolini and Hitler. Wallace notes that "American fascists were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases." Indeed, several well-known and powerful Americans—including Prescott Bush, George W.'s granddaddy—lost businesses in the 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.

What concerned Henry Wallace most, however, was not political treason but the possibility that a distinctly American style of fascism could emerge. He wrote:

The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its fingers on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.

Roosevelt's government came to power in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. He didn't know he was going to fight a war in Europe, but he did plan to fight a war in America—a war on what he called the "economic royalists."

When Roosevelt accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, he gave a history lesson we could use today (see the transcript on pages 122–128). The American revolutionaries, FDR explained, fought for freedom against political royalty. We won and political royalty lost. The dawning of the modern industrial world of mass production and distribution, however, "combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it, a problem for those who sought to remain free. For out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved a new dynasty. New kingdoms were built on concentration of control over material things."

The new kings of FDR's day were corporate monopolists: Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Du Pont. "These new royals," he continued, "granted that the government could protect the
citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live."

This is the debate we are returning to in our time. Do we have a right to work, or is it a privilege? Is society organized to encourage business because business will work in a way that will benefit society, or does business operate independent of society?

Roosevelt knew too well that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If the new economic royalty were granted the sway over the economy that they desired, what would prevent them from stopping at economic control? Why not do what the fascists were doing in Mussolini's Italy and try to have it all?

Roosevelt said: "It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. . . . And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man."

Ceding economic control to the new economic royalty does not create a "free" market. It creates fascism: the replacement of a democracy of We the People with an economic and political system controlled by the new feudal lords.

In his article for the
New York Times,
Vice President Wallace outlined the Roosevelt administration's concern about the possibility of a particularly American fascism:

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. . . . They are patriotic in time
of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

Sinclair Lewis imagined just such a corporate takeover of America in his 1935 novel,
It Can't Happen Here.
In Lewis's novel a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. The politician—Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip—runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk-show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes president, he opens a Guantánamo-style detention center; and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the president.

As Lewis noted in his novel,

the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: "There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!" The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy.

And President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."

Vice President Wallace may have had Lewis's story in mind when he wrote that the fascists are particularly dangerous because, while "paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, [they] do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion."

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic, creating a modern version of feudalism by merging corporate interests with those of the state.

Fascists get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the middle class. In fascist administrations the locally owned small and medium-sized businesses are replaced by fascist-owned corporations. As Wallace wrote, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."

That's what we are seeing in the United States today. Instead of dissolving the House of Representatives like Mussolini did and replacing them with representatives of major corporations, however, we have people who are elected only because they can buy enough television advertising to get elected, and the only place they can get that kind of money is from the corporations.

American fascists—those who would want former CEOs as president, vice president, House majority whip, and Senate majority leader and who would write legislation with corporate interests in mind—don't generally talk to We the People about their real agenda or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.