“Tyranny is tyrrany”
When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: “Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.”
Racial prejudice and the Constitution
Banneker asked JeffersonThomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, Founding Father, 3rd president of the US. “to wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices which you have imbibed.”
Jefferson tried his best, as an enlightened, thoughtful individual might. But the structure of American society, the power of the cotton plantation, the slave trade, the politics of unity between northern and southern elites, and the long culture of race prejudice in the colonies, as well as his own weaknesses – that combination of practical need and ideological fixation – kept Jefferson a slaveowner throughout his life.
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation – all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in PhiladelphiaIn 1787 .
Quoting Hamilton on the structure of government
Alexander HamiltonAlexander Hamilton (1757 – 1804), statesman, politician, legal scholar, military commander, lawyer, banker, and economist. Founding Father. , aide to Washington during the war, was one of the most forceful and astute leaders of the new aristocracy. He voiced his political philosophy:
“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy […].”
On the Constitution and economic interest
As part of his argument for a large republic to keep the peace, James MadisonJames Madison Jr. (1751 – 1836), statesman, diplomat, philosopher, Founding Father, 4th president of the US from 1809 to 1817. tells quite clearly […] whose peace he wants to keep: “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.»
When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.
The ballot game
When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for President in 1884, the general impression in the country was that he opposed the power of monopolies and corporations, and that the Republican party […] stood for the wealthy. But when Cleveland [won], Jay Gould wired him: “I feel […] that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands.” And he was right.
[…] Cleveland himself assured industrialists that his election should not frighten them: “No harm shall come to any business interest as the result ofadministrative policy so long as I am President … a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance of existing conditions.”
The presidential election itself had avoided real issues […]. It took the usual form of election campaigns, concealing the basic similarity of the parties by dwelling on personalities, gossip, trivialities. Henry Adams, an astute literary commentator on that era, wrote to a friend about the election:
“We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved.. . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.”
Henry Cabot Lodge, US foreign policy, and the advancement of Western Civilization // US foreign policy
Senator Henry Cabot LodgeHenry Cabot Lodge (1850 – 1924), Republican senator and historian. Close friend of Theodore Roosevelt. of Massachusetts wrote in a magazine article: “In the interests of our commerce … we should build the Nicaragua canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian islands and maintain our influence in Samoa […] and when the Nicaraguan canal is built, the island of Cuba […] will become a necessity […]. The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march.”
Theodore Roosevelt and the war
Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858 – 1919), statesman, politician, conservationist, naturalist, 26th president of the US from 1901 to 1909. wrote to a friend in the year 1897: “In strict confidence […] I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
The End of World War II
True, the war then ended quickly. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered. The Fascist powers were destroyed.
But what about fascism – as idea, as reality? Were its essential elements – militarism, racism, imperialism – now gone? Or were they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors? A. J. Muste, the revolutionary pacifist, had predicted in 1941: “The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?”
Plea bargaining
Most of the Attica prisoners were there as a result of plea bargaining. Of 32,000 felony indictments a year in New York State, 4,000 to 5,000 were tried. The rest (about 75 percent) were disposed of by deals made under duress, called plea bargaining, described as follows in the Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in New York:
“The final climactic act in the plea bargaining procedure is a charade which in itself has aspects of dishonesty which rival the original crime in many instances. The accused is made to assert publicly his guilt on a specific crime, which in many cases he has not committed; in some cases he pleads guilty to a non-existing crime. He must further indicate that he is entering his plea freely […], and that he is not doing so because of any promises […] made to him.
In plea bargaining, the accused pleads guilty, whether he is or not, and saves the state the trouble of a trial in return for the promise of a less severe punishment.”
Hofstadter and the capitalistic boundaries of US politics
Halfway through the twentieth century, the historian Richard Hofstadter, in his book The American Political Tradition, examined our important national leaders, from Jefferson and Jackson to Herbert Hoover and the two Roosevelts – Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Hofstadter concluded that “the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. […] They have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man. […] That culture has been intensely nationalistic […].”
Inequalities in the US and the political system}
Clearly, there was something amiss with a political system, supposed to be democratic, in which the desires of the voters were repeatedly ignored. They could be ignored with impunity so long as the political system was dominated by two parties, both tied to corporate wealth. An electorate forced to choose between Carter and Reagan, or Reagan and Mondale, or Bush and Dukakis could only despair (or decide not to vote) because neither candidate was capable of dealing with a fundamental economic illness whose roots were deeper than any single presidency.
That illness came from a fact which was almost never talked about: that the United States was a class society, in which 1 percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth, with an underclass of 30 to 40 million people living in poverty. The social programs of the sixties – Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, etc. – did not do much more than maintain the historic American maldistribution of resources.
Swords and plowshares
Reagan’s policies clearly joined the two issues of disarmament and social welfare. It was guns versus children, and this was expressed dramatically by the head of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, in a commencement speech at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts in the summer of 1983:
“You are graduating into a nation and world teetering on the brink of moral and economic bankruptcy. Since 1980, our President and Congress have been turning our national plowshares into swordsMany peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. – Isaiah 2:3-4 and been bringing good news to the rich at the expense of the poor […]. Children are the major victims. Our misguided national and world choices are literally killing children daily […]. Yet governments throughout the world, led by our own, spend over 600 billion a year on arms, while an estimated 1 billion of our world’s people live in poverty and 600 million are under- or unemployed. Where is the human commitment and political will to find the relative pittance of money needed to protect children?”
She urged her listeners: “Pick a piece of the problem that you can help solve while trying to see how your piece fits into the broader social change puzzle.”
Gulf War and the smart bombs
In fact, the public was being deceived about how “smart” the bombs being dropped on Iraqi towns were. After talking with former intelligence and Air Force officers, a correspondent for the Boston Globe reported that perhaps 40 percent of the laser-guided bombs dropped in Operation Desert Storm missed their targets.
John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, estimated there had been thousands of civilian casualties. The Pentagon officially had no figure on this. A senior Pentagon official told the Globe, “To tell you the truth, we’re not really focusing on this question.”
The peace dividend
After the disintegration of the Soviet bloc began in 1989, there had been talk in the United States of a “peace dividend,” the opportunity to take billions of dollars from the military budget and use it for human needs. The war in the Gulf became a convenient excuse for the government determined to stop such talk. A member of the Bush administration said: “We owe Saddam a favor. He saved us from the peace dividend” (New York Times, March 2, 1991).
Iraq embargo
In an even more flagrant violation of the principle of free trade, the United States would not allow shipments of food or medicine to Iraq or to Cuba, the result being the death of tens of thousands of children. In 1996, on the television program 60 minutes, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked about the report that “a half million children have died as a result of sanctions against Iraq […]. That is more children than died in Hiroshima […]. Is the price worth it? Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”
Clinton and the arm industry
The United States continued to supply lethal arms to some of the most vicious regimes in the world. Indonesia had a record of mass murder, having killed perhaps 200,000 out of a population of 700,000 in its invasion and occupation of East Timor. Yet the Clinton administration approved the sale of F-16 fighter planes and other assault equipment to Indonesia. The Boston Globe wrote (July 11, 1994):
“The arguments presented by senators solicitous of Suharto’s regime-and of defense contractors, oil companies and mining concerns doing business with Jakarta-made Americans seem a people willing to overlook genocide for the sake of commerce.”