Is Capitalism Failing Middle America?

June 4, 2005

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Bush administration is getting ready to start another war. While the Congress and the public are gradually coming to grips with the fact that the Iraq war was built upon pretext and false accusations, the President is actively preparing to divert their attention by starting another one, this time in Iran. As before, the war propaganda is heating up. As before, the talk is only the tip of the iceberg.

Reliable reports, including especially Seymour Hersh in an upcoming New Yorker, now make clear that the Pentagon is, again, preparing battle plans and targets within a country with which we are at peace. As before, the claim will be that Iran is a nuclear danger. As before, the President is preparing this war on his own, without checks or restraints from the US congress. As before, the President is armed with a messianic belief that he has been sent to save the world.

As before, the attack is likely to be launched for maximum political advantage here at home, which means probably some time between July and November, hoping to bring a new flock of hawks to the Congress in mid-term elections. As before, the American public, raised on school books that say we are a peaceful nation, cannot quite believe that any president would be so bold, so out of touch, so likely to commit crimes of aggression. And so, therefore, as before, the people are likely to attend more to school and work, recreation and football than to the unthinkable of another war.

One has only to follow the path of statements by the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State over the past year to see that a pre-determined plan is unfolding. All three have begun to repeat slogans from 2002 that “all options are on the table,” a way of saying that regardless of diplomatic efforts, we intend, on our own timing and in our own way, to go in militarily. This week, thrown on the defensive by Hersh’s report, the White House asserts that they still seek a diplomatic solution. That, of course, is what these same people said only two weeks before they invaded Iraq.

Network news stations are playing the same role that they did the last time, gradually adopting the Administration’s terminology that this is a “crisis,” as if Iran somehow posed a realistic threat to the United States, or would ever commit suicide by launching a nuclear attack against the United States. The absurdity of the proposition does not deter reporters from treating the problem as if it were real. They do not, however, report another real crisis which is that a once-proud democracy is becoming a global empire, destroying all in its path.

The Iranians have been smart enough to bury some of their nuclear sites deep within the earth, making them largely invulnerable to conventional US warheads. According to Hersh, therefore, a difference for this war is that there is serious secret discussion, perhaps even an intent, to use American nuclear bombs to destroy underground sites in Iran.

After 50 years during which every American president since World War II has made every possible effort to contain use of nuclear weapons, now, this president will, on his own, driven by ideology and messianic imagination, march blindly forth into the nuclear night. Unleashing a new nuclear age will, of course, be a diplomatic catastrophe for the United States and send a message to every potential terrorist in the world that a nuclear response anywhere in America is entirely fair.

The war plans are not limited to bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. According to Hersh, targets also include chemical production plants, airfields, aircraft, cruise missile sites and Iranian diesel submarines. The destruction will be massive and, as is usual when ideology overrides common sense, no one will count the losses of innocent Iranian lives.

Perhaps the biggest illusion is that our attacks will be welcomed by the people of Iran who will thereupon rise up and overthrow the existing government. Which reminds us that Rumsfeld and Cheney said that Iraqis, too, would welcome us with flags in the streets. The thinking is delusional and that the president is receiving such advice is tragic beyond imagining.

It seems more than coincidental that once again the President is concerned with a regime that produces huge amounts of oil while allowing other nuclear regimes, such as in India, China, Pakistan, and North Korea to develop as they will, using only diplomatic pressures to restrain them. When oil lies beneath the sand, former-oil-men Bush and Cheney have an apparently unquenchable imperial appetite. They are no longer after bin Laden, but they are still after territory, with mostly all the same excuses.

Craig Barnes
Santa Fe, NM
April 9, 2006
www.craig-barnes.com

Craig S. Barnes

By now it has become clear that President Bush and his intellectual circle intend great changes in American society. They mean not merely to roll back the social reforms of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, not merely to take down the safety nets that arose out of the Great Depression, but to return even further back to the end of the 19th century and Darwinian capitalism. They mean to reinstate the survival of the fittest as the hallmark of American business.

Perfectly suited for this roll back and perhaps its prime example, the world’s largest enterprise, Wal-Mart, is spreading across the face of America like a red cancer, eating up local businesses. After that company invaded Iowa, between 1983 and 1993, that one state lost grocery, hardware, building supply, variety, clothing, shoe, and drug stores. Wal-Mart quite simply succeeded in driving more than 1800 local employers off the Iowa map. To achieve such dominance, the company absolutely rejects unions, pays minimal or no health insurance and pays starvation wages to workers in China and Latin America. In court cases now on file in this country the company is alleged to cheat on overtime pay and to discriminate against women. There are credible allegations that they hire illegal aliens and, if any one of them asks for fairness under the law, Wal-Mart threatens him or her with deportation.

The spread of such mean spiritedness is not limited to Wal-Mart. In rural America, Monsanto has for years been suing family farmers in order to force them to purchase Monsanto’s own expensive, patented seed. That company is even developing seed which will not reproduce but which will force families to buy new seed each year, or that is, to go deeper and deeper into debt and to live, like serfs of old, strung out desperately from annual payment to annual payment. Similarly, ranchers of great spreads in Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico seldom own the cattle they herd, regularly go into debt and end up working 15-hour days, having become, in effect, hired hands for banks.

It is consistent that Federal bankruptcy courts have recently stripped employees of United Airlines and Bethlehem Steel of billions of dollars in pensions. Employees who diligently paid for these benefits over the years are now simply being told that creditors are more important than workers and that the savings that they amassed have been given away.

While wage earners are thus squeezed in the same way that farmers and ranchers are squeezed, raw consumer debt has reached record highs in America and become a pre-occupation of nearly every middle-class family. Congress this spring responded with legislation, however, not to ease the pain, but to aid credit card companies once again choosing property over people.

In such conditions, when most Americans are working harder and saving less, is it not fair to ask whether such predatory capitalism is working, or whether it is failing the average American? And if it is failing on the farms and in the cities, if it is failing the middle classes and the poor, if it is failing workers and professionals, if it is failing new immigrants and heirloom ranchers, for whom is it working?

If, that is, the rising tide of predatory capitalism sinks many more boats than it lifts, then let us open up America’s political discourse, throw away the blinders. Let us discard the slogans, the utopian myths of unbridled competition and get back to the business of working together, of creating community, of pooling our resources, of husbanding our land, of educating our people and at last put capitalism in its place, one tool among many, but never sacred and never beyond regulation. And when, in my town or yours, Wal-Mart or Monsanto begins to gorge on our neighbors, or when bankruptcy courts opt to put creditors before workers, let us never hesitate to use the law, to change the law if need be, to use all our tools, to control the capitalist myth, to put it to the service of real people.

Craig S. Barnes
June 4, 2005
Santa Fe, NM
www.craig-barnes.com

"You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." George W. Bush, to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005