By Humphrey McQueen
For the worst part of 250 years, the United States of America has been a plutocracy. With 800 billionaires in a population of 345 million, the enemy is not ‘the One Percent’ but a 0.01%
Biden never tires of declaring himself the ‘proud, proud, proud son of Delaware,’ aka, the State of du Pont, after the original Merchants of Death – and long an on-shore tax haven for the likes of Mass Murdoch.
From the genocidal dispossession of the Amerindians and landing of chattel-slaves in 1619, the North American colonies have been shaped by power-plays among the ruling-race, as under Apartheid.
After the defeat of the Confederate War for Independence, radical Re constructionists thought that their Thirteenth, then the Fourteenth and finally the Fifteenth Amendment would secure adult male suffrage for the freed slaves. More than the Klan judged otherwise. To be ‘separate but equal’ equaled Jim-Crow segregation upheld by Lynch Law.
In the 1870, railroad companies approached the Supreme Court pleading equal rights for their property. By 1886, the bench had judged corporations to be legal persons. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, almost no coloured person dared to vote.
Presidents cut deals with legislators who abstain or cross the floor to repay whichever corporates are stuffing their Political Action Committees, as Big Pharma did for Hillary, on show in Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007). The National Riflemen’s’ Association is but the best known in a conga-line of open check books.
January 6, 2021, was a sideshow compared to the assaults on electoral democracy from the Supreme Court at promoting plutocracy. A majority extended First-Amendment guarantees of Free Speech in 2010 to let corporate persons spend as much as they need to buy Congress. Meanwhile, State Legislatures deprive the poor of their ability to vote at all, and –to be on the safe side – gerrymander the boundaries of electoral districts.
The result is that the land of the free holds the record for disease, mis-education and injustice in the over-developed world.
Democratic impulses continue through social movements which the plutocrats and their hired pens denounce as un-American.
From 1920s, the Civil Rights movement pushed back in struggles taken further by Black Power in the Sixties, their leaders assassinated or framed. Segments of the women’s movement continued to weave Civil Rights into labour protests.
Once, the working-class unionised, bosses called in Pinkerton detectives and the National Guard to disorganise labour, as in the execution of Joe Hill during the 1916 Colorado miners’ strike. Managerial violence erupted at the General Motors car-plants in 1936 at Flint and with the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre of Chicago steel-workers.
At several times and in various places, workers joined with farmers to challenge the Trusts and their legislative lackeys, leading towards an agrarian socialism. A bloody battle between Californian grain-growers and Stanford Railroad in the 1880s inspired Frank Norris’s novel, The Octopus (1901).
Those streams of resistance are our brightest and best hopes for hacking a path out of what Upton Sinclair recognised as The Jungle (1906) and from under what Jack London identified as The iron heel (1908).
The keenest critics of the United Mistakes continue to come from the inside, such as Ida Tarbell, a leading muckraker against the Robber Barons, Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker, Mike Davis’s analysis of how the poisonous food conglomerates installed the conditions for a 100-years of pandemics.
Soft power is an essential for the U.S. corporate-warfare state to pose as the bringer of peace, freedom and apple pie. On a mission from Hollywood and Madison Avenue to awaken the rest of the us to our being latent U.S. Americans, its operatives have no sense of ‘the other.’
Much of the world had already been taught a tougher lesson. ‘Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick,’ President Teddy (Bully) Roosevelt reiterated throughout the 1900s.
FDR’s middle name was Delano – a branch of the family which pushed opium into China from the 1830s. Commodore Perry’s bombardment of Yokohama in 1857 launched a decade of forcing Japan to open its doors to unequal ‘free-trade’ treaties.
In the 1890s, Yankee traders overthrew Hawaii’s Queen Liliukalani and seized the islands by imposing a ‘Bayonet Constitution.’ In a demonstration of moral leadership, Washington apologised a century later. The racist Woodrow Wilson had shown the way at Versailles in 1919 by making the world safe for hypocrisy.
To secure one more stepping stone into China, U.S. forces hacked their way across the Philippines from 1898. A front-line officer reported that, when he asked ‘what persons were to be spared,’ his commanding general responded that ‘all capable of bearing arms should be killed. Then I … asked for an age limit, and he gave the instruction of ten years – all over ten years.’ ‘The United States and the Philippine Islands’ is the subtitle to Kipling’s ‘The Whiteman’s Burden,’ parodied as
Then learn that if with pious words
You ornament each phrase,
In a world of canting hypocrites
This kind of business pays.
In that spirit, Harris assured the Chicago Democratic Convention that she was ready to take up the burden of ‘the greatest privilege on earth: the privilege and pride of being an American.’
Closer to home, Washington had inflated the Monroe Doctrine from keeping European colonisers out of Latin America into a drive to turn the entire hemisphere into a U.S. colony in all but name. Washington took Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas from Mexico, and bought Alaska in 1867 in the expectation of seizing Canada.
Between 1898 and 1910, the banana and sugar corporations snatched independence from the Cuban and Puerto Rican freedom fighters. ‘You furnish the pictures,’ William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) told his man in Havana in 1897, ‘and I’ll furnish the war.’
Marines invaded Haiti in 1915, seizing the $500,000 of its gold reserves to meet a debt to Wolf Street.
Appearing before the 1935 Senate Committee investigating armament manufacturers, Rtd Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler testified that he had spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Since then, U.S. forces have swept around six continents making democracy safe for Big Oil. Butler published an account of his career as War is a Racket.
Washington set up the School of the Americas [Assassins] in 1945 to train Latin American troops and police in how to overthrow governments and dispose of their leaders, as in Guatemala in 1954.
The School’s instruction manuals targeted unionists, whom its graduates tortured and killed by the thousand, They would have murdered Castro and Chavez, as they did Allende, had not the Cuban and Venezuelan peoples formed rings of steel around them. The C.I.A. marshalled ‘Operation Condor’ from 1975 to 1983, backing an alphabet of dictatorships from the Argentine to Uruguay, terminating 50,000 ‘terrorists.’
Australia got off lightly when the C.I.A. activated its three stooges Barwick, Hawke and Kerr for Whitlam’s dismissal to protect its base at Pine Gap.
Our world faces an uncomfortable truth. Ahead is a hundred-year-long fight to rid the planet of all imperia, whether hangovers in Britain and France, a writhing rattler, or its rival with Confucian characteristics.
‘Carthage needs to be destroyed.’
