As we celebrate the Fourth of July

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 239^th 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.  

The United States of America, the King of the Capitalist World, has perpetrated the sham of “democracy” practically since this nation’s birth.  However, the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission ruling officially established the incestuous union between Uncle Sam and Corporate America, and the capitalist wolves are running amok.  

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.