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