God Ble$$ America
By J.T. Caswell, Progressive Charlestown contributor
“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew (19:24) quoting Jesus.
Pardon me for ignoring the U.S.
Constitution’s First Amendment as we traditionally celebrate our nation’s 239th
birthday this July 4 with the requisite cookouts, fireworks, and the hubristic
bacchanalia that is our birthright as citizens of the self-styled greatest
nation on Earth.
However, this column
pertains to everything that is or is becoming uniquely American, i.e. - foreign
wars, the “war on terror,” massive debt, taxes, the war on unions and the
dwindling middle class, charter schools, prohibitive college tuition, drug
addiction, globalization, the digital age, and high unemployment, among other
economic woes, so I thought the Prince of Peace would suffice as authoritative
support for an unpatriotic stance.
As an adolescent, I always wondered
how an economic system – capitalism – was so closely tied to a political system
– democracy. As a nominal adult, I
figured it out, and I didn’t like what I learned.
A local politician recently
reminded me and my colleagues that, “Democracy is about numbers.” Au
contraire! “Democracy” is about
dollars, and like a high stakes poker game, there’s not a lot of room at the
table.
This Independence Day, while
celebrating, in pursuit of, or clinging to what Bruce Springsteen christened
“the runaway American Dream,” it might be worthwhile to remember capitalism’s
role in a fledgling nation’s becoming the world’s reigning superpower.
It started with the forced
removal and attempted genocide of Native Americans. From King Philip’s War, to
the Trail of Tears, to Wounded Knee and countless other conflicts, whenever and
wherever Native Americans got in the way of economic progress – be it a transcontinental
railroad or gold in the Black Hills – Uncle Sam answered with ruthless
violence.
The egregious institution of
slavery in the United States lasted from 1619 until 1863, only to give way to
the Black Codes and sharecropping. The
oppression of African-Americans unofficially ended with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great
Society,” but there are those who claim it hasn’t ended yet.
Horace Greeley advised, “Go west,
young man.” We went west, stole Texas, California, and
wide swaths of the Southwest from Mexico, and then continued our imperialism in
Hawaii, and the Philippines.
Thanks to
the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to it, we also appropriated
Panama from Colombia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain. President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba
was a failed attempt to re-capture Corporate America’s (and the mob’s) casinos,
hotels, and sugar plantations.
JFK failed to supply air support
at the Bay of Pigs, which ticked off the C.I.A. while his attorney general
brother was riling up the mob, but the mighty Federal Reserve also had a beef
with the president when he tried to enact Executive Order 11110. The real nightmare on Elm Street happened
shortly thereafter.
The late 19th and
early 20th Centuries brought the Robber Barons and such severe
oppression of immigrant labor and unscrupulous exploitation of consumers and
the environment that a horrified Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to alert the nation.
It took a number of brutal and bloody incidents between management and labor
before Congress enacted the Wagner Act in 1935, which gave employees the right
to unionize.
The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in
1947, diluted some of those hard-won rights, while current Wisconsin governor
and presidential hopeful Scott Walker aspires to dismantle unions and their
political/economic clout completely.
Unions are the backbone of the middle class, and union membership, which
peaked at roughly 34% of all American wage earners in the economically
prosperous1950’s, is close to 6% nationwide.
Corporations nationwide continue
to resist regulatory laws and spew or dump toxic waste into the atmosphere and
fresh water sources.
Privatized prisons, like charter
schools, mean profit for the insiders and continued oppression of the
economically marginalized.
Despite historians’ and
politicians’ claims to the contrary, economic interests were the impetus for
our involvement in the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, and the same applies to the
Gulf and Iraq Wars.
Domestic terrorists
kill many more Americans than foreign terrorists do, but as long as our
military and C.I.A. can hunt that “shadowy enemy” and fight against their host
nations, the military/industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about
will remain robust.
It’s not a
coincidence that Halliburton and the Carlyle Group profited from the Iraq War;
nor do I think it’s a coincidence that, since the U.S. government seized
control of Afghanistan’s poppy fields from the Taliban, there’s been an endemic
of oxycodone and other opiate addictions.
The 9/11 attacks were most convenient and profitable for some, many of
whom ignored the warnings.
Trade agreements like NAFTA,
CAFTA, and President Obama’s pet peeve, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, are part
of the globalization trend to suppress wages. The digital age facilitates the corporate
outsourcing for the cheapest labor possible, and mechanized labor is taking
increasingly larger bites out of the work force.
Despite the political clamor to
the contrary, our federal government wants a huge debt, high taxes, and foreign
wars because they all contribute to the impoverishment and oppression of the
American wage earner, while charter schools and high tuition costs threaten to
make higher education for the affluent only.
Tea Partiers and those who would
dismantle social safety nets believe that nobody is entitled to anything, and
everything must be earned. Maybe so, but
paying exorbitant taxes should reap some benefits for everybody, not just corporate
welfare recipients.
Trickle down economics
affords Corporate America large gulps while the working masses share the last
drops from the canteen.
As a born and bred American
citizen, I should be a staunch proponent of capitalism, but I’ll take
socialism, and I’ll take a pragmatic, more equitable version of Plato’s
Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia. I’ll also take Jesus Christ, the man who
kicked the moneychangers out of the Temple, as my economic guru.