And the Winner is... Hillary.

Many months ago I made a bet with certain of my political friends. It was my contention that the bipartisan oligarchy that rules our country had manufactured a crisis of electability for Barack Obama with the Reverend Wright imbroglio. They would limit our expectations by handing the nomination to Hillary. I also contended that Obama was himself a willing pawn in that game. It turns out I was right... I was just a hair early on when the switcheroo would go down.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins caught wind of it in September when she wrote that "Barack Obama had turned into Hillary Clinton...fooling the voters with oblique promises of change." Now the new cabinet choices (selected by Obama personally? More likely by our shadowy cabal) remove all doubt about the actual outcome of the election. It's the second Clinton administration!

Of course, since the country is governed by a shadowy cabal, a bipartisan oligarchy, a ruling class interested in maintaining the power and wealth of the few, it doesn't really matter who the president is; that is largely a cosmetic choice having to do with manipulating the electorate. It is the men behind the president that matter, and in the case of the administration-elect they haven't even bothered to mask their ugly intent with a fresh-smelling retinue of evildoers. No they're doing it to us in plain sight, with the same old evil-smelling suspects! In fact, the wholesale importation of the first Clinton administration into the Obama White House is being hailed by many of the wind-up policy wonks as signs of a healthy political realism! After all, we are a center-right country, as the last election so clearly proves!

Not only is the vile and freakish Larry Summers being seriously considered for his old post as Treasury Secretary, (the man who once suggested as chief World Bank Economist that sections of Africa that were underpopulated and "underpolluted" would make great toxic waste dumps), but Rham Emmanuel has been selected as Chief of Staff, often considered the second most powerful post in Washington. (Who it's second to, I suppose, depends on who is president. The presidency may have power if the president was also once CIA director.)


Just who is Rham Emmanuel? Only the mafia goon who, as Senior Policy Advisor to Clinton I, rhammed NAFTA down the country's throat. Remember the North American Free Trade Agreement? It's the series of supra-national trade deals that made it impossible not to close factories all over the country and ship the machines to Mexico, thus destroying the middle class! Because you see, that's what they do under the cosmetics line labeled "Democrat;" they viciously attack the 100 million poor people in the country! They dissolve the middle class! They conduct more interventions, but they call them "humanitarian!" For the environment, they introduce the SUV by way of the CAFTA laws! Stuff they wouldn't get away with quite as easily under brand "Republican."


"But maybe Rham has changed," you say! Maybe the Obama campaign has infused him with the bonhomie of Hope and Change! Well as of September 2008, as the columnist David Sirota quoted from the pages from Inside US Trade, it hasn't a bit. The expansion of NAFTA (to South Korea, Panama, and Columbia, this last the number-one place where unionists are assassinated) is being led by none other than... Rhamalama Ding-Dong Emmanuel!


"...Democratic Caucus Chair Rham Emanuel (D-IL) is actively advocating that Democrats would be better off having the votes on pending [free trade agreements] this year for a number of reasons, sources said. They said that one of the reasons Emanuel cites is that there are likely more Republican members in this Congress than there will be in the next, which would mean that fewer Democrats would have to take a potentially divisive trade vote now."

I added the emphasis, for as Sirota rightly points out, this means that the Democratic leader, Emmauel, is "effectively acting as the House Republican whip. He's saying that he wants these bills up for a vote because there are enough Republican votes right now in the House to pass it over current Democratic objections - and there won't be enough GOP votes in the next Congress." (My emphasis).

So that's Mr. Hope for a Change you can Believe In's choice for enforcer and congressional liason. A man very interested in continuing the impoverishment of Americans and the enslavement of the Third World. He will (baring divine intervention) champion the continuation of policies that have caused incalculable suffering to millions of Americans, especially poor and middle-class black Americans. Great.

Maybe this is all part of the plan to limit our expectations. That plan proceeds nicely. As Christine Amanpour seems paid to do, she said for the millionth time last week that Obama has the "in-box from Hell." What with two hot wars and a trillion dollar defecit, everyone is talking about what part of his plan (health-care, green-energy, education) he will have to scrap first...

And now the latest attack in the anti-expectations crusade: a stimulus package! A spending package to "get the economy moving again," (more pay-offs to big business?) even though as Paul Krugman himself is compelled to admit in today's Times, that grand-daddy of them all stimulus package, the New Deal, didn't work very well until the public-works project known as World War II got things going again. Hey! Maybe that's why Obama has been promising us a wider war in Afghanistan!

How will they excuse their excuses? "It was all the last administration's fault, you see. No, no, the Republicrats and Demublicans aren't in it together! Noooo. Nancy Pelosi took impeachment "off the table" because she really is among the leaders of an-honest-to-goodness-opposition party in America!" And if you'll buy that one, I've got a fine looking bridge for you, only 100 or so years old, for sale here in Brooklyn...

Meanwhile, good-bye Hope! Farewell, Change! Will we fool ourselves into believing you might come again in 2012? Or will that be a year of malaise and reaction? Another retrenchment after yet another suspiciously easy terrorist attack?

Some CNN lovely opined after last Tuesday's election that the Russian leadership weren't gracious to Barack because they were mad that we had a "real" democracy, where their's was only nominal. They had all cynically assumed, as I did, that our presidential history would go "Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton." Well, turns out me and the Ruskies won the bet after all. Yippee. But to the half dozen or so I bet a bottle of whiskey with, not to worry. I will share it with you as the realization that we live under a sophisticated techno-fascist regime slowly begins to dawn on you....

In the meantime, what do I have to do to convince people that our democracy is now completely phony? Make a movie about it? Oh wait, I did, imperfect as it is: The American Ruling Class.

The Bottom of The Bailout

What's at the bottom of the bailout? Wall Street greed ain't the half of it. Here's what the fine print reads: "How to continue to withhold 21st-century social services from a frustrated public in one easy step." Period.

You will have noticed that in each of the Presidential debates thus far the question of how the "rescue plan" will affect the candidates' health care, education, infrastructure and energy proposals has been raised repeatedly by the well-groomed moderators. What will you have to cut? What are your priorities?

After a little bit of "Everything we need to do is really important," they all reluctantly concede: There will have to be some painful cuts; to pay for the bail-out, to pay for the war, to pay down the debt.

The Republicrats make a virtue of this "necessity" by rightly, if only rhetorically, decrying public waste. McCain the war hero has even spoken of freezing defense spending! Obama speaks of our "right" to some form of health care, God bless his heart. But all must bow, (they are each so sorry to say) to the impending calamity: A new debt bomb which will explode over the heads of our children. Naomi Klein put it that way on the Bill Maher show, and she is right.

But what Klein has identified as "The Shock Doctrine," the late political historian Walter Karp would simply have called "Bi-partisan Domestic Policy".

For while the disastrous extremes of fraud and calamity committed or countenanced by the corporatist wing of the American Ruling Class are surely at a post-war high, the technique (manufacture a disaster--usually a war--then rob the budget blind, divert the country's attention, demand sacrifice, destabilize a restive citizenry) dates at least to the Spanish-American War.

Back then it was the Populist's patriotic warnings against a growing Big Business-Big Government monstrosity, a beast that would devour American liberty and fairness, which needed to be smothered without a public hearing.

So the McKinley Administration, with the active support of the Demublicans, threw a war down in Cuba and the Phillipines(!), under the pretense of liberating the natives from Spanish rule. Of course the Powers That Be took the colonies for themselves, but the American people, in the doldrums of economic and social depression, welcomed the parades and the heroic reports of Teddy Roosevelt's "Rough Riders." Public demands for reform? Diverted, forgotten, buried. Have we ever really remembered the Maine?

I have dealt elsewhere with what happens next, the growing concentration of wealth and power, the social movements which rise to meet them, the reaction as the movements are put down by war and economic depression and outright police action. Decade after decade this has been the pattern in our country, as parallel tendencies develop: on the one hand, our ever-more sophisticated consciousness of the State's misdeeds; on the other, the State's ever-more sophisticated ability to fool us.

And so we have the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the subsequent bail out. The public record shows that it was the government, under both parites, that encouraged banks to make risky loans to people who couldn't afford them. Why couldn't they afford them? Because all their jobs have been run out of the country (once again and infamously with the active support and encouragement of the Federal Government).

We no longer make what we use: China does. That fundamental economic principal which Henry Ford understood as the basis of sustained growth--Pay people such that they can afford to buy what they make--was long ago violated.

Why? Because such people become economically secure, they unionize, they have time to think about politics, they start to own homes and raise children who go to college... who then begin to question a consumerist lifestyle and perpetual war, who feel the stirrings for something more from themselves and their government, something finer...

Well, you get the picture. If you are the Ruling Class, this is a development to be avoided at all costs. A citizenry consisting of economically secure, educated thinkers has to be destabilized, or the State looses its power.

And so the educational infrastructure was deliberately weakened, such that you'll be hard pressed to find a Harvard graduate who can tell you the first thing about the Civil War, let alone an inner-city high-schooler who's heard the word "revolution" anywhere outside of an ad for high-tops.

Concurrently, both parents were sent to work, for longer hours and less pay, and the only way to afford the advertised life became a handful of credit cards at usurious, impossible rates. The American Dream at 13 and a half percent!

So when you're offered a house of your own for no money down? Well, you grab at the chance, don't you? Personal responsibility be damned!

This latest economic war on the people of the United States isn't the brainchild of our mindless business class. They are merely pigs let loose at the trough. The bail out is the scheme of men of power who aim to get us on our knees and keep us there.




For more on economic warfare, Goldman Sachs, and getting "nickel and dimed," see John Kirby's film The American Ruling Class, now available on DVD, www.alivemind.net, and showing on the Sundance Channel, October 20th at 6:30PM nationally.

The (scripted) Drama of the Primaries

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt



Just a couple of weeks ago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright's lecture on "Anti-Imperialist African-American Hermeneutics" had many supporters of Barack Obama scratching their heads in bewilderment and frustration. Why, oh why, would the Good Shepard deliver the Hope of the Flock to the wolves? He certainly couldn't have believed his warmed over course in radical-chic was going to boost Barack's chances in Indiana, an old-timey stronghold of the Klu Klux Klan, could he?

And indeed, Obama lost Indiana, and the issue of race is now front and center, reinforced by Hillary's latest comments concerning her broad, white, blue-collar base. It is now part of the conventional wisdom that even if Wright's comments didn't hurt as much as they might have, they will be a factor in the fall, as the Republicans make hay out of them and other lefty skeletons in Obama's closet. So why did the good Reverand do what he did, when he did?

The standard explanations for what commentators from both the left and the right dubbed "sabotage" ranged from "revenge"-for Mr. Obama's alleged snubbing of Mr. Wright as he prepared to announce his candidacy- to "vanity." On Fox News, Juan Williams opined that Reverend Wright committed this willful treachery because if a black American won the presidency, it would disprove all of the Reverend's beloved (and no doubt benighted) theories that America is racist!

But because of a fundamental error in our political understanding, even the most well meaning analysts have missed a more likely explanation, the one we would see immediately were we a bit less credulous as a people: that Barack's well-connected spiritual father was acting on orders when he unaccountably chose to step into the spotlight at this "critical juncture" in the campaign.

Not on orders from Hillary, as some in the blogosphere have claimed (though she plays her part) but from the party leadership itself. And with the complicity and consent, given gladly or not, of that most sacred of demagogic cows, (not to mention groomed product of Chicago machine politics), Mr. Barack H. Obama.

"What!?" I hear you say, "Why on earth would Barack be complicit in his own takedown? Is he not an ambitious man? Doesn't he truly seek the highest office in the land? Does he not have his own power base, derived from the good wishes and millions in small donations from his many supporters, multiplying like so many loaves and fishes across the nation? How could such a man be anybody's tool?"

Before we answer that, let's consider for a moment. Why would Barack' s pastor of 20 years, the man who married him and his wife, who baptized his children, have chosen this critical moment to alienate a close friend who might soon occupy the highest office in the land? As New York Times editorialist Bob Herbert wrote of the Reverend, "he is no fool." He is also extremely well connected politically in Chicago. When the young Barack began casting about for a church to provide him with his religious bona fides, an essential component to a political career in America, he didn't choose Wright's church out of a hat. It was a calculated, political choice.

Especially now that Barack has "weathered the storm" in the estimation of many pundits (who repeat each other's thoughts and are easily directed), more possibilities come into view: by encouraging the Reverend to give free reign to his theories, Barack can have it both ways. Since many Americans (not just Rosie O'Donnell) consider a lot of what the pastor has been saying to be true (The American government has in fact committed terrorism around the world and against many groups within our borders), the pastor's radical vibe can rub off on his prodigal son, even as the son publicly renounces the teachings he formerly absorbed on any given Sunday.

And doing it now, as the Times has gone on to point out, has made Barack stronger for whatever office he ends up running for. I am going out on a limb here, as it is always hard to predict what our oligarchy has in store for us, but I would argue that the Party mandarins have laid plans for Barack to be Vice-President to Hillary's President, and that achieving this goal has been the main purpose behind the presentation of "Bittergate" and the Wright imbroglio. In order to reconnect us to the system, they have inflated our hopes with some high-sounding rhetoric. Now, how to back out of the deal?

END PART ONE. TO BE CONTINUED...

THEATER OF POLITICS , PART TWO:

In Part One, I proposed that Barack Obama, under orders from the machine politicos who underwrite him, has done things to deliberately throw the primary to Mrs. Clinton, like act his part in the drama of Reverend Wright. I will now go into the historical reasoning behind my speculation, which I hope will suggest that if Barack is not acting under orders, he would be the first major presidential candidate in modern history to come so far without party backing and control..

Barack Obama, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, are creatures of their parties; they would be nowhere without the vast patronage machine. And their parties are both, Republicrat as much as Demublican, in thrall to the American Ruling Class. It's not so much that there's "no difference" between Republicrats and Demublicans, its that they are both at the highest levels under the control of an oligarchy made up of elites from various overlapping worlds: military, financial, corporate, etc.

Sometimes the hardest thing for this bunch to pull off, as the political historian Walter Karp once wrote, is to lose an election. John Kerry managed it in 2004, against all odds, against a fellow Bonesman acting out another caricature, the "misunderestimated idiot." How do you loose to that? Kerry nicely scuttled his own Swiftboat for the sake of four more years of Bush.

Howard Dean had handed it to Mr. Kerry early on, after having acted as that season's candidate from hope. On orders, one imagines, from the Democratic National Committee and God knows who else, he obligingly had a spaz attack in full view of a nationwide television audience. Now he's chairman of the DNC.

Back in 2000, Al Gore worked hardest of all to lose. He had to actually preside, as president of the Senate, over the certification of an election that was stolen from him in full public view! He seemed to smile as he gaveled away the entreaties of the small group of honest congressmen and women who were fighting for him, a candidate who strangely didn't seem to want to win!

(But of course, the 2000 election was really just Nader's fault. Another case where "vanity" would appear to explain it all).

The myth that allows these charades to continue is among the most enduring in our political life, namely, that the point of running for office is always and everywhere to win.

In Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America, the late great Walter Karp made all this understandable to the ordinary citizen. He showed that, again and again, "behind the hoopla of partisanship, the two parties worked together in collusive harmony." Putting up candidates who blatantly lack appeal, openly supporting the other party's man, putting up no one at all, or spewing constituent-insulting "gaffes"… these and many other tactics of the party leadership are described extensively in Karp's book, and can be readily seen all around us if we only look.

Like Satan, who thought it better to rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven, the losing party apparatus in a given state, municipality, or indeed nation, would rather keep on top of the scraps, and be consulted on every decision, than opt out of the game entirely by running an honest race-- perhaps even losing control to a real insurgent candidate. When that does rarely occur, the party oligarchs gang up on the insurgent in the legislatures to make sure he or she can't reform a thing.

Yes, the two Parties regularly throw each other seats. In fact, with gerrymandering, barely 10% of congressional seats are even competitive. And you can bet the overall tally of "red" and "blue" is closely regulated by the Big Chiefs, both at the state and national level, in order to keep them in relative stasis.

For the idea is to play Punch against Judy, with the ultimate goal that nothing gets done. Nothing, that is, for the health and well being of ordinary citizens.

Why? Because if people actually caught wind of their own power, and acquired even the slightest degree of meaningful control over the process, they would become so energized with their ability to make things happen, they would eventually shake off the oligarchy like so many flies from the backside of a donkey. This is the ruling class's greatest fear, and it leads them to commit astonishing acts of mendacity and, indeed, treason.

And like all demagogues past, Barack H. Obama is their guy. With help from the kept press, they placed him on the mountaintop. After eight years in the darkness, they gave us Hope, as they periodically appear to do (think Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). Yes, it's of a nebulous variety, and when you scratch the surface the tiniest bit, not only is there no difference between Obillary and Hibama's stated positions, they don't really sound so different from Bush's and McCain's. The whole lot of them, for instance, are committed War on Terrorists.

Mr. Obama even openly admired Bush I for his conduct of Iraq War I (the one where they incinerated 100,000 fleeing Iraqis and urged thousands of others to rise up against Saddam only to leave them high and dry, subject to imprisonment and execution).

So how will they break our hearts this time, eradicate all this built up hope? Here's a likely script: after a few more hair-raising twists and turns, the nominating "fight" goes to the floor of the convention. The Revered Wright and other engineered issues of electability will be made to come around in the service of Hillary, as they are already.

Here's another one, from Monday's New York Times: according to Shar'ia and Edward Luttwak, Obama's an Islamic apostate!

The Superdelegates, to whom we were conspicuously re-introduced in this campaign, will make the final, anti-democratic determination. (It's like the movies: if you want to figure out what will figure prominently in a future scene, note the close-ups and cutaways early on).

Disappointment and Demoralization, Part One, for so many: She, another Clinton, will emerge the candidate. And the consolation prize, delivered to all those newly energized political animals? He'll get the number two slot. A crushing blow to some, but --sigh--something.

After more twists and turns, they'll beat old man McCain, as arranged. And then the real fun will begin, as they busy themselves "obliterating Iran," after that old- reliable Indispensable Enemy attacks Israel, or "sponsors" an attack on an American city.

Demoralization, Stage Two. I sure hope I'm wrong, but some version of this evil drama is most likely in store for us, for as the crisis of world capital comes to a head, the wars must continue.

And so where's the Hope? I mean the real hope, the change we can really "believe in"? Here's a hint: it's never to be found among the party hacks, no matter how nicely they deliver their speeches. Give up? Don't. It's in you.

The Trouble with Obillary vs. Hibama

As we wrap up the eight-year psychological warfare campaign against the American people known as the Bush Administration, it's time to look forward to the wars of the future, those which will be waged against us under the likely management of the Democratic Party.

But to catch the view ahead, we must take a new look behind:

It's easy to forget, after the many traumas of the past three thousand or so days, just how discontented the country was in the Clinton years.

By the end of Bubba's run, it had become clear to millions of Americans that the "Center-Democratic Third Way" was really just a fancy pronunciation of "corporate rule." We discovered that "Globalization" was the new lingo for "You are unemployed or working a double shift at the IHOP."

And the environment was, as ever, available for despoliation to the highest bidder, despite the presence of the bestselling author of Earth in the Balance in the vice-presidency.

Notwithstanding the distracting figure of Monica Lewinsky on the Oval Office carpet, Americans were starting to smell the coffee, and it wasn't Fair Trade Mochachino. For the Ruling Class, it was high time -once again-to relegitimize the system.

Enter George W. Bush, Super Good Ole' Boy Cowboy Freak Eastern Establishment Republican Man, a self-professed friend to the monied interest and a "stupid" and "incompetent" warmonger.

It was almost as though the Oligarchy was teaching us a perverse civics lesson: "Don't think there's any difference between the Parties, huh? Vote for Ralph Nader, will ya? We'll learn ya! Heeere's Dubya!"

Here's eavesdropping and secret energy deals, here's 9-11 "incompetence" and that invasion where the Pentagon somehow couldn't find the WMD they had sold to the mad dictator just a few short years before. We had George II dead to rights, didn't we?

But I would argue that we grossly "misunderestimated" Mr. Bush, though he warned us not to. You see, he wasn't the one who we should have been "estimating" in the first place. What we must always consider, to the extent we can, is the more or less permanent government, the one that doesn't change every four to eight years, the one comprised of the machine politicos, bankers, intelligence bureaucrats, admirals and generals and CEO's.

That bunch has behaved, within the limits that we the people set on them by our vigilance, just as they have since our country was founded: as badly as they can. And even as we are getting swifter at figuring out the con, they are getting better at conning the swift.

Bush was too obvious a bad guy, people! The mainstream media has sounded suspiciously like a Marxist rag for many years now, with its extraordinary renditions of crony capitalism, evil military contractors, torture and "Where's the WMD?"

Why didn't the Bushies just plant the WMD? It was done all the time in Vietnam, and it would have been easy-- the boys at the Pentagon carry that stuff in their overnight bags.

From the Stolen Election to Katrina, the Administration seemed to go out of its way to play the idiotic villain, and the media forwarded the press releases.

Why? Why so much effort on the Establishment's part to prove that Bush is a Very Bad, Very Stupid Guy? The short answer, in my view, is a campaign on the part of Oligarchy to re-delineate the "difference" between the two parties. If an election is worth stealing, then the two parties must truly be at odds, right?

Along the way, these "exposures" boosted our waning faith in the Fourth Estate, our ever-more-ironically named Free Press. The President may be incompetent and corrupt, but at least we can read all about it!

My friends, they have fooled us again. "Incompetence" is the oldest cover story in the book. Reconsider all the "mismanagement" in Iraq. If you're a Pentagon contractor, the occupation has been managed very well, hasn't it?

Where would the military brass be without their indispensable enemies? Is it too much to imagine that the occupation was designed to cause chaos and civil war, as in divide and conquer? That among the many goals of the Military-Industrial-Complex is to "create more terrorists"?

Which brings us around to Obillary Vs. Hibama. When one or the other or both of them take office, how will they dash our hopes, as they invariably must, given that they both serve the same group that Bush (and Bill Clinton, and Bush I, and Reagen, and Carter, etc.) served before them?

Let me make a prediction. There will be a reduction of the 400% over-the-top-crazy-war mongering rhetoric, by say, 35%, and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief.

Then around the time of the first hundred days or the next "terrorist attack", whichever comes first, will come the sad news from President Obillary or VP Hibama: "We're really sorry about not having affordable health care for y'all, and the deplorable state of our public education system, and the fact that we are still not using readily available electric cars. But you see, the previous administration has made such a mess of things--the economy, the environment, Iraq--we have more than enough to do just to keep our heads above the rapids...."

Did anyone catch that little moment in the last debate when Senator Obama promised that, as president, he would send more troops to Afghanistan? Of course both he and Hillary are of the conventional opinion that the war in Iraq has distracted us from our real war, war "A," the War on Terror, (an abstract noun currently taking cover in a cave in Waziristan).

Obama counts among his foreign policy advisers Zbigniew Brezinski, the man who admitted in the pages of Paris Match to creating the Mujahedeen, the forerunners to Osama's Al-Qaeda, six months before the Soviet invasion, in order to provoke the Russians to invade and so "bleed the Bear." Just the man we want guiding the "change" crusade, Barack. Hillary's people are as bad or worse.

And that's the trouble with Obillary vs. Hibama, isn't it? It's the same trouble with Republicrat vs. Demublican, Coke vs. Pepsi, and War "A" vs. War "B"-no matter how they try to dress it up, its really no choice at all.

I think I'm going to vote this year, though. There's a ballot initiative in the works in New York to hold a new 9-11 Commission, one that's not quite so obviously a white-wash. And I look forward to voting for Ralph Nader, just so I can proudly say I did. And after that? In the great tradition of Henry David Thoreau: war-tax resistance. Because what General Alexander Haig said back in the Reagen years still holds true: "Let them march [or vote] all they want, as long as they pay their taxes…" We're starting to catch on again, General.

How The Ruling Class Thwarts Democracy

Published on Friday, June 1, 2007 by The Providence Journal (Rhode Island)

How The Ruling Class Thwarts Democracy

by John Kirby

With the 2008-presidential-election cycle already in full swing, it seems a good time to revisit a perennial question in our country’s political life, namely, “Who really rules America?”

So many of us Americans, for so long now, seem to feel as though we no longer have a government “of and by the people.” Some would argue that we’ve never truly had one.

Then who does in fact have the power?

Is it the corporations, the banks, or ultra-rich individuals? Do America’s rulers tend to live in a particular region or share an ethnicity? Is it some combination, such as the “Liberal Media” or Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex?”

And where do the president, Congress and the political parties fit into all this?

This past year I finished a film, The American Ruling Class, with Lewis Lapham, the long-time editor of Harper’s Magazine, in which we set out to ask many of these questions. More importantly, we wondered how we should respond to the answers.

To spice things up and have some fun along the way we decided to go beyond the standard documentary format. After long deliberation, my producer, Libby Handros, and I hit upon what we think is an interesting new genre: the “dramatic-documentary-musical.”

We gave Lewis charge of two real-life Harvard graduates, slightly changed their trajectories (they play Yale men, for instance), and set the three of them on a journey through the fabled “corridors of wealth and power.”

Every now and again there’s an opportunity for a song — at a Yale garden party, a series of low-wage workplaces, a “Camp Thoreau” for kids, and even at a Pentagon press conference.

Along their journey our two young heroes meet a sampling of people that seemed to us to fulfill a few essential Ruling Class criteria: They’ve enjoyed careers that span the highest levels of the public and private sectors, and in most cases they belong to organizations that have long been associated with establishment power, such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission.

We were pleased and surprised to secure interviews with a dozen people from our extensive list: former Secretary of State James Baker, now running the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., investment banker and former Sen. Bill Bradley, former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, now a partner and financial analyst at Pincus Warburg, former World Bank Chief Economist and then-Harvard University President Larry Summers, to name a few.

Every one of the men with a “former” in their title now occupies a position in a major law firm, a powerful consulting concern, a private equity bank, or a major university. And some of them regularly travel back to Washington, as James Baker recently did as co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group.

Though our list included both those who consider themselves Democrats and those who identify as Republicans, we noticed little real difference in their general outlook on policy matters. And interestingly, they all made the same claim: There is no such thing as a ruling class in America.

The family backgrounds of our interview subjects varied widely. Significant inherited wealth or a famous political lineage was the exception, not the rule. It began to seem to us as if the only true requirement for ruling-class entrance was the ability to serve the status quo well and faithfully.

The two young graduates also run into an interesting assortment of characters from what might best be termed the “other side of the tracks.” They meet Barbara Ehrenreich (author of the book Nickel and Dimed) in a chain restaurant, folk singer Pete Seeger on a country road, the late great Kurt Vonnegut on the steps at a New York soirée, the late great Robert Altman outside of a movie theater, and populist historian and activist Howard Zinn on a tour bus that travels back in time to the founding of the country.

Through all these encounters we try to piece together the nature of power in America, how it replenishes itself, and what its ambitions are.

Former State Department spokesman Hodding Carter tells the story of the selection of Jimmy Carter — no relation — by the Eastern Establishment for the post of president of the United States. “But just banging on the door will not get you entrance into these things,” he tells one of the young men. “It’s . . . the brights.”

By virtue of their school background, the two young men at the center of our story are well positioned to be tapped for admission. In fact, all of the establishment figures we met had attended an Ivy League college.

So by something resembling a meritocratic process, almost anyone white and male (there were very few women and minorities on our list) who can scrape together the loans for tuition can theoretically achieve not just wealth but real influence in the United States.

The question our graduates then must ask themselves is: “Should they?” Should they join the winning side in what the economist Doug Henwood calls in our film a “one-sided class war?” A war whose object seems to be to concentrate more and more money and political power in the hands of fewer and fewer Americans?

And if that wasn’t bad enough, should they participate in a domestic economic war the cover for which is the constant preparation for and execution of foreign wars?

Since President McKinley and the Spanish-American War, overseas adventures have been the oligarchy’s response to the public’s demand for reform. Whether it was Populists or Progressives, rank-and-file Republicans or Democrats leading the charge for domestic change, the major party bosses and their partners on Wall Street have worked together in “collusive harmony,” in the words of political historian Walter Karp, to divert the country from its just demands by embroiling them in deadly foreign entanglements.

Reform movements are an ever-present worry for both parties’ bosses, because any successful reform put forward by regular citizens and insurgents in Congress tends to excite the electorate with the possibility of actually controlling their own government. The ruling class well understands that as the engagement of the citizenry waxes, their own power wanes. And it is war and the threat of war that provide the best excuse for not passing social-welfare legislation, and calling anyone who demands it “unpatriotic.”

The tactic of imperial expansion as domestic diversion, begun in Cuba and the Philippines a century ago, has achieved its ultimate expression in the “War on Terror” and the over 130 countries where our military presence is felt.

The cost to Americans is not just measured in our thousands of dead and wounded child soldiers, but in the persistent lack of national health care, decent schools, adequate housing, fair wages and a livable environment.

Our dear old republic, the hope of a New World free of aristocracy and injustice, has now fallen so low into the muck of corrupt privilege and imperial pretension that it rivals the excesses of the worst European autocracies. Though we posses powers and riches undreamed of by the Sun King himself, as of the early 21st Century our rulers have done virtually nothing to raise the great mass of Americans out of ignorance and poverty, and much to ensure that they stay there.

In our film, former Secretary of State James Baker tells us that he “doesn’t buy this argument that the defense budget takes too large a percentage of our gross national product.”

But one might fairly ask: Does the defense budget, 51 percent of discretionary federal spending, take too large a percentage of our national hope and promise?

How will our two young graduates answer this overwhelming question? Will they try to rule the world... or save it? Can they do it from the inside, as Walter Cronkite urges? Or does there need to be a “revolt of the guards,” as Howard Zinn insists?

The answers our heroes and the rest of their generation provide will have the greatest imaginable consequences for us all.

John Kirby is director and editor of The American Ruling Class.

© 2007 The Providence Journal