ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my valued friend Sally Soriano for the assistance and
unswerving support she has furnished in the writing of this book.
Also an expression of appreciation to Jane Scantlebury for
suggesting useful changes in the manuscript.

I owe a special debt to Peggy Noton who encouraged me to embark

upon this project and helped to organize the initial undertaking. She
also painstakingly edited the entire manuscript, bringing needed
improvements to it. In addition, she co-authored one of the articles.

Over the years, Kathleen Lipscomb has offered critical comments on

earlier versions of a number of the selections herein and for this she
has my gratitude.

Once again I had the benefit of working with Nancy J. Peters, editor
at City Lights Books. My thanks to her and other members of the City
Lights staff who helped produce the final product.
INTRODUCTION
I call these writings Dirty Truths because they deal with the kind of
undiluted information and ideas largely excluded from our
corporate-dominated media, schools, and mainstream political life,
views that are studiously ignored or strenuously denounced, so much
so as to take on the appearance of something improper. They are not
merely dissident but "dirty," as it were, lacking the unexamined
repetition and aura of respectability that are bestowed upon more
conventional opinions.

Some truths are considered so dirty as to reflect poorly on those who

utter them. The propagators of iconoclastic thoughts risk being
shunned by persons of the Right and Center and even by many who
profess to be of the egalitarian Left; that is, who claim to be critical of
exploitative wealth and undemocratic power.

Thus forewarned, the reader should proceed with caution yet without
fear of being sullied, for truths no matter how uncomfortable are
better than the imprisonment of lies we endure whenever ordained
leaders and pundits open their mouths. An exposure to the
information and ideas herein will, I hope, prove to be a refreshing
departure from the predominating ideological pap that is fed to us
time and again about such things as poverty and wealth, fascism and
free markets, media and culture, consciousness and class power.

Many of these selections have been written especially for this book
and are presented here for the first time. Most of the articles that
appeared earlier have been subjected to sufficient rewriting and
rethinking as to be considered new versions. These selections cover a
wide range of ideas and experience, moving from the

political to the personal in an attempt to show the links between

social forces and individual experience. In pursuit of that, I have
included two previously published autobiographical accounts. Also
included are three poems, an indulgence my editor did not have the
heart to deny me.
— Michael Parenti

Politics and Issues

Hidden Holocaust
"I've had grown men wet this floor with tears, begging for a job. We
have to pray with some to keep them from killing themselves. So
many say they just want to die," says Charlie Tarrance, a director of a
private social agency. His task is to deal with growing lines of
despairing people looking for jobs, housing, and food. The place is
Gadsden, Alabama, but it could be anywhere in the United States.

It could be Washington, D.C., at a Safeway supermarket a mile or so

from the White House where an elderly man is crying and holding a
can of dog food. When asked what's wrong, he says, "I'm hungry. I'm
hungry."

It could be New York City, where a woman begins screaming at the

landlord who evicts her and her several children. The Bureau of
Child Welfare takes her children, which distresses her all the more.
She herself is transported to a New York mental hospital crying
angrily—only to be diagnosed and committed by the all-knowing
psychiatrists as a "paranoid schizophrenic."

There is misery and cruelty in the land. As U.S. leaders move

determinedly toward their free-market Final Solution, stories
abound of hunger, pain, and desperation. Such things have existed
for a long time. Social pathology is as much a part of this society as
crime and capitalism. But life is getting ever more difficult for many.

Some Grim Statistics

Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy,

prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of
country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people
who live in it. To their ears the anguished cries of the dispossessed
sound like the peevish whines of malcontents. They denounce as
"bleeding hearts" those of us who criticize existing conditions, who
show some concern for our fellow citizens. But the dirty truth is that
there exists a startling amount of hardship, abuse, affliction, illness,
violence, and pathology in this country. The figures reveal a casualty
list that runs into many millions. Consider the following estimates.
In any one year

• 27,000 Americans commit suicide.

• 5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.

• 26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.

• 23,000 are murdered.

• 85,000 are wounded by firearms.

• 38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.

• 13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed

robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.

• 135,000 children take guns to school.

• 5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic
violations).

• 125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.

• 473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of

these are nonsmokers victimized by secondary smoke inhalation.

• 6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine, or some other

hard drug on a regular basis.

• 5,000-plus die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious

debilitations.
• 1,000-plus die from sniffing household substances found under the
kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth graders have "huffed"
toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.

• 31,450,000 use marijuana, 3,000,000 of whom are heavy users.

• 37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use

emotion-controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women.
The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical
companies; the profits are stupendous.

• 2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful mind-

control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."

• 5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.

• 200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are

injurious to the brain and nervous system.

• 600 to 1,000, mostly women, are lobotomized.

• 25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from

psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and
emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually. 6,800,000
turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and
social counselors for help with emotional troubles. In all, nearly
80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in
their lifetimes.

• 1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at

hospitals.

• 2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of

whom die from the surgery.

• 180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more

than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.

• 14,000-plus die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.

• 45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are
being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is
reduced.

• 1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but

150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.

• 126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to
insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental
toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.

• 2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or

abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.

• 5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.

• 30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled

from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts
more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and
infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment,
incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.

• 1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive

treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults. Of
the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent
come from white families.

• 150,000 children are reported missing. 50,000 of these simply

vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to
the New York Times, "Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the
John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified
kids."

• 900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in

child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands,
dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours
a day in violation of child labor laws.

• 2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is

the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to
U.S. women.

• 700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.

• 5,000,000 workers are injured on the job, 150,000 of whom suffer

permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis,
impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.

• 100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including

black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.

• 14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are men.

• 100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.

• 60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or

contaminants in food, water, or air.

• 4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.

• 20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant

bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong
physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat
inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of
contamination — so would vegetarianism.

At present

• 5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole; 2,700,000 of

these are either locked up in county, state, or federal prisons or
under legal supervision. Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than
leave. The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since
1980. Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug
related crimes. African Americans constitute 13 percent of drug users
but 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74
percent of prison sentences. For nondrug offenses, African
Americans get prison terms that average about 10 percent longer
than Caucasians for similar crimes.
• 15,000-plus have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing rapidly;
10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large
numbers among the economically deprived or addicted.

• 10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism is

on the rise.

• 16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as

Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated,
diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure, and nerve damage.

• 160,000 will die from diabetes this year.

• 280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental

retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of
mind-control drugs.

• 255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in

recent years. Many of the "deinstitutionalized" are now in flophouses
or wandering the streets.

• 3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps

including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A
disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities
could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with
better living conditions.

• 2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously

incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome.

• 10,000,000-plus suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of

145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly
polluted quality of the air we breathe. 40,000,000 or more are
without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.

• 1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to

serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and
beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and
other close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions
worsen.
• 1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but
undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth,
and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest
possible profit.

• 1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories,

and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions
or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process.
Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to
beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind-
control drugs, and, in some cases, psychosurgery.

• 1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000

have died of that disease.

• 950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind control

drugs for "hyperactivity" every year—with side effects like weight
loss, growth retardation, and acute psychosis. 4,000,000 children
are growing up with unattended learning disabilities.

• 4,500,000-plus children, or more than half of the 9,000,000

children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer
brain damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.

• 40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and more than

one of every ten men, are estimated to have been sexually molested
as children, most often between the ages of nine and twelve, usually
by close relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always
extends into their early teens and is a part of their continual memory
and not a product of memory retrieval in therapy.

• 7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary with the

business cycle. Increasing numbers of the chronically unemployed
show signs of stress and emotional depression.

• 6,000,000 are in "contingent" jobs, or jobs structured to last only

temporarily. About 60 percent of these would prefer permanent
employment.
• 15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time "contract"
workers who need full-time jobs and who work without benefits.

• 3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted

because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never
qualified for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they
joined the armed forces because they were unable to find work.

• 80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department of

Labor as below a "comfortable adequacy"; 35,000,000 of these live
below the poverty level.

• 12,000,000 of those at poverty's rock bottom suffer from chronic

hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living at or
below the poverty level experience hunger during some portion of
the year.

• 2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the streets or in

makeshift shelters.

• 160,000,000-plus are members of households that are in debt, a

sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago. A
majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for
necessities. Mounting debts threaten a financial crack-up in more
and more families. All the above figures are gleaned from the U.S.
Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the United States (1975, 1992,
1994.); FBI Crime Reports; U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of
Justice Statistics; U.S. Bureau of Mortality Statistics; World
Almanac; SCAN/INFO April 1995; and Journal of the American
Medical Association; also reports provided by National Institute of
Health Statistics; House Select Committee on Aging; U.S. Center for
Disease Control; U.S. Public Health Service; and University of
California, Berkeley, School of Public Health; and studies
summarized in Science magazine, the Washington Post, Los Angeles
Times, New York Times, San Francisco Examiner, and numerous
monographs and books on poverty, suicide, crime, child abuse, and
the aged, and studies of mental and medical institutions and
occupational safety. For many of these specific citations see my
Democracy for the Few, 6th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995),
pp. 24-32, 106-111, 130-132.

A Happy Nation?

Obviously these estimates include massive duplications. Many of the

20 million unemployed are among the 35 million below the poverty
level. Many of the malnourished children are also among those listed
as growing up with untreated learning disabilities and almost all are
among the 35 million poor. Many of the 37 million regular users of
mind-control drugs also number among the 25 million who seek
psychiatric help.

Some of these deprivations and afflictions are not as serious as

others. The 80 million living below the "comfortably adequate"
income level may compose too vague and inclusive a category for
some observers (who themselves enjoy a greater distance from the
poverty line). The 40 million who are without health insurance are
not afflicted by an actual catastrophe but face only a potential one
(though the absence of health insurance often leads to a lack of care
and eventually a serious health crisis). We might not want to
consider the 5.5 million arrested as having endured a serious
affliction, but what of the 1.5 million who are serving time and what
of their victims? We might want to count only the 150,000 who
suffer a serious job-related disability rather than the five million on-
the-job injuries, only half of the 20 million unemployed and
underemployed so as not to duplicate poverty figures, only 10
percent of the 1.1 million institutionalized elderly as mistreated
(although the number is probably higher), only 10 per cent of the 37
million regular users of medically prescribed psychogenic drugs as
seriously troubled, only 5 per cent of the 160 million living in
indebted families as seriously indebted (although the number is
probably higher).

If we consider only those who have endured physical or sexual abuse,

or have been afflicted with a serious disability, or a serious
deprivation such as malnutrition and homelessness, only those who
face untimely deaths due to suicide, murder, battering, drug and
alcohol abuse, industrial and motor vehicle accidents, medical
(mis)treatment, occupational illness, and sexually transmitted
diseases, we are still left with a staggering figure of over 19,000,000
victims. To put the matter in some perspective, in the twelve years
that saw 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, several million died
prematurely within the United States from unnatural and often
violent causes.

Official bromides to the contrary, we are faced with a hidden

holocaust, a social pathology of staggering dimensions. Furthermore,
the above figures do not tell the whole story. In almost every category
an unknown number of persons go unreported. For instance, the
official tabulation of 35 million living in poverty is based on census
data that undercount transients, homeless people, and those living in
remote rural and crowded inner-city areas. Also, the designated
poverty line is set at an unrealistically low income level and takes
insufficient account of how inflation especially affects the basics of
food, fuel, housing, and health care that consume such a
disproportionate chunk of lower incomes. Some economists estimate
that actually as many as 46 million live in conditions of acute
economic want.

Left uncounted are the more than two thousand yearly deaths in the
U.S. military due to training and transportation accidents, and the
many murders and suicides in civilian life that are incorrectly judged
as deaths from natural causes, along with the premature deaths from
cancer caused by radioactive and other carcinogenic materials in the
environment. Almost all cancer deaths are now thought to be from
human-made causes.

Fatality figures do not include the people who are incapacitated and
sickened from the 1,000 potentially toxic additional chemicals that
industry releases into the environment each year, and who die years
later but still prematurely. At present there are at least 51,000
industrial toxic dump sites across the country that pose potentially
serious health hazards to communities, farmlands, water tables, and
livestock. One government study has concluded that the air we
breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are now perhaps the
leading causes of death in the United States.
None of these figures include the unhappiness, bereavement, and
long-term emotional wounds inflicted upon the many millions of
loved ones, friends, and family members who are close to the victims.

Public Policy, Personal Pain

If things are so bad, why then has the U.S. mortality rate been
declining? The decline over the last half-century has been due largely
to the dramatic reduction in infant mortality and the containment of
many contagious diseases, largely through improvement in public
health standards. Furthermore, years of industrial struggle by
working people, especially in the twentieth century, brought a
palpable betterment in certain conditions. In other words, as bad as
things are now, in earlier times some things were even worse. For
example, about 14,000 persons are killed on the job annually, but in
1916 the toll was 35,000, with the labor force less than half what it is
today.

The growth in health consciousness that has led millions to quit

smoking, exercise more regularly, and have healthier diets also has
reduced mortality rates, especially among those over 40. The 55-
mile-per-hour speed limit and the crackdown on drunken driving
contributed by cutting into highway fatalities. But the cancer death
rate and other pathologies and life-diminishing conditions continue
in an upward direction. Small wonder the climb in life expectancy
has leveled off to a barely perceptible crawl in recent years.

When compared to other nations, we discover we are not as Number

One-ish as we might think. The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher
than in thirteen other countries. And in life expectancy, twenty-year-
old U.S. males rank thirty-sixth among the world's nations, and
twenty-year-old females are twenty-first. The additional tragedy of
these statistics is that most of the casualties are not inevitable
products of the human condition, but are due mostly to the social
and material conditions created by our profits-before-people
corporate system. Consider a few examples.

First, it may be that industrial production will always carry some

kind of risk, but the present rate of attrition can be largely ascribed
to inadequate safety standards, speedup, and lax enforcement of
safety codes. Better policies can make a difference. In the chemical
industry alone, regulations put out by the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) — at a yearly cost to industry of $140
per worker—brought a 23 percent drop in accidents and sickness,
averting some 90,000 illnesses and injuries.

OSHA's resources are pathetically inadequate. It has only enough

inspectors to visit each workplace once every eighty years. Workplace
standards to control the tens of thousands of toxic substances are
issued at the rate of less than three a year. Even this feeble effort has
been more than business could tolerate. Under the Reagan and Bush
administrations, OSHA began removing protections, exempting most
firms from routine safety inspections, and weakening the cotton
dust, cancer, and lead safety standards, and a worker's right to see
company medical records.

Second, it may be that in any society some children will sicken and
die. But better nutrition and health care make a difference. The
Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC) did cut
down on starvation and hunger. On the other hand, years after
passing a law making some thirteen million children eligible for
medical examination and treatment, Congress discovered that
almost 85 percent of the youngsters had been left unexamined,
causing, in the words of a House subcommittee report, "unnecessary
crippling, retardation, or even death of thousands of children."

Third, it may be that medical treatment will always have its hazards,
but given the way health care is organized in the United States,
money often makes the difference between life and death. Many sick
people die simply because they receive insufficient care or are treated
too late. Health-insurance premiums have risen astronomically and
hospital bills have grown five times faster than the overall cost of
living. Yet it is almost universally agreed that people are not
receiving better care, only more expensive care, and in some areas
the quality of care has deteriorated.

Some physicians have cheated Medicaid and Medicare of hundreds

of millions of dollars by consistently overcharging for services and
tests; fraudulently billing for nonexistent patients or for services not
rendered; charging for unneeded treatments, tests, and hospital
admissions—and most unforgivable of all—performing unnecessary
surgery. Meanwhile, private health insurance companies make
profits by raising premiums and withholding care. So people are
paying more than ever for health insurance while getting less than
ever.

Fourth, it may be that automobile accidents are unavoidable in any

society with millions of motor vehicles, but why have we become
increasingly dependent on this costly, dangerous, and ecologically
disastrous form of transportation? In transporting people, one
railroad or subway car can do the work of fifty automobiles.
Railroads consume a sixth of the energy used by trucks to transport
goods.

These very efficiencies are what make railroads so undesirable to the

oil and auto lobbies. For over a half-century, giant corporations like
General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tires
bought up most of the nations clean and safe electric streetcar
networks, dismantled them, and cut back on all public
transportation, thereby forcing people to rely more and more on
private cars. The monorail in Japan, a commuter train that travels
much faster than any train, has transported some three billion
passengers without an injury or fatality. The big oil and auto
companies in the U.S. have successfully blocked the construction of
monorails here.

In ways not yet mentioned corporate and public policies gravely

affect private lives. Birth deformities, for instance, are not just a
quirk of nature, as the heartbroken parents of Love Canal or the
thalidomide children can testify. Many such defects are caused by
fast-buck companies that treat our environment like a septic tank.
Unsafe products are another cause; there are hundreds of hair dyes,
food additives, cosmetics, and medicines marketed for quick profits
that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and other illnesses.

The food industry, seeking to maximize profits, offers ever-

increasing amounts of highly processed, chemicalized, low-nutrition
foods. Bombarded by junk-food advertising over the last thirty years,
TV viewers, especially younger ones, have changed their eating
habits dramatically. Per capita consumption of vegetables and fruits
is down 20 to 25 per cent while consumption of cakes, pastry, soft
drinks, and other snacks is up 70 to 80 per cent. According to a U.S.
Senate report, the increased consumption of junk foods "may be as
damaging to the nations health as the widespread contagious
diseases of the early part of the century." All this may start showing
up on the actuarial charts when greater numbers of the younger
junk-food generation move into middle age.

In 1995-96, a Republican-controlled Congress pushed for further

cuts in environmental and consumer safety standards and in the
regulation of industry, cuts in various public health programs, and
cuts in nutritional programs for children and pregnant women. State
and local governments are also cutting back on public protection
programs and human services in order to pay the enormous sums
owed to the banks and to compensate for reductions in federal aid.
Thus New York City took such "economy measures" as closing all of
its venereal disease clinics and most of its drug rehabilitation and
health centers.

We are told that wife-beating, child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse,

and other such pathologies know no class boundaries and are found
at all income levels. This is true but misleading. The impression left
is that these pathologies are randomly distributed across the social
spectrum and are purely a matter of individual pathology. Actually,
many of them are skewed heavily toward the low-income, the
unemployed, and the dispossessed. As economic conditions worsen,
so afflictions increase. Behind many of these statistics is the story of
class, racial, sexual, and age oppressions that have long been among
the legacies of our social order, oppressions that are seldom
discussed in any depth by political leaders, news media, or
educators.

In addition, more and more middle-income people are hurting from

the Third Worldization of America, suffering from acute stress,
alcoholism, job insecurity, insufficient income, high rents, heavy
mortgage payments, high taxes, and crushing educational and
medical costs. And almost all of us eat the pesticide-ridden foods,
breathe the chemicalized air, and risk drinking the toxic water and
being exposed to the contaminating wastes of our increasingly
chemicalized, putrefied environment. I say "almost all of us" because
the favored few live on country estates, ranches, seashore mansions,
and summer hideaways where the air is relatively fresh. And, like
President Reagan, they eat only the freshest food and meat derived
from organically fed steers that are kept free of chemical hormones—
while telling the rest of us not to get hysterical about pesticides and
herbicides and chemical additives.

All this explains why many of us find little cause for rejoicing about
America the Beautiful. It is not that we don't love our country, but
that we do. We love not just an abstraction called "the USA" but the
people who live in it. And we believe that the pride of a nation should
not be used to hide the social and economic disorder that is its
shame. The American dream is becoming a nightmare for many. A
concern for collective betterment, for ending the abuses of free-
market plunder, is of the utmost importance. "People before profits"
is not just a slogan, it is our only hope.

CREATING THE POOR

We are taught to think of poverty as an unfortunate but inevitable
condition visited upon some portion of the population. And we tend
to think of the poor as a breed apart who, if not exactly deserving of
their situation, are an unfortunately predictable component of the
social landscape. This view is as old as antiquity. In Matthew 26:11
(and similarly in Mark 14:7), when a woman anoints Jesus' head, the
apostles protest, "for this ointment might have sold for much and
given to the poor." But Jesus praises the woman for her "good work"
in tending to him and assures the apostles that "ye have the poor
always with you," suggesting that since poverty is so persistent, there
is no compelling need to trouble ourselves about it.

Indifference to indigence has incurred the ire of those compassionate

people who, like the apostles, believe that poverty is a matter of some
urgency. I recall how Martin Luther King Jr. soundly castigated the
rich and powerful for their lack of concern for the needy. More
recently I have come to the conclusion that the rich and powerful are
anything but indifferent. They always "look to the poor" as both a
troublesome lot and an essential adjunct to the accumulation of
wealth. And they have a real if seldom articulated concern that the
mass of working poor do not become too successful or elevated in
their collective class condition. Indeed, the owning class sees such a
development as threatening to its own vital interests.

Blaming the Poor

Throughout the ages, the affluent have argued that the poor are the
authors of their own poverty, that indigence is caused by the
profligate and demoralized ways of the indigent. In seventeenth-
century England, impoverished people were thought to be not the
victims of circumstances but of their own "idle, irregular and wicked
courses." Little has changed since then. In 1995, in the time-honored
manner of all reactionary elites, right-wing Republican leader Newt
Gingrich reduced poverty to a matter of personal inclination: "I am
prepared to say to the poor, 'You have to learn new habits. The habits
of being poor don't work.'"

Meanwhile Gingrich tirelessly pursued policies to enlarge the ranks

of the poor. As House Speaker he fought to shift still more of the tax
burden onto low- and middle-income people; he fought to eliminate
the minimum wage, to cut spending for public housing, and to
abolish school lunches, food stamps, and aid to families with
dependent children (welfare). He supported enormous tax cuts for
the corporate rich, for deregulating business activities, downgrading
jobs, downsizing workforces, and breaking unions—all policies that
have led to both deeper and more widespread poverty and more
concentrated accumulations of wealth.

For affluent persons, the poor are less than human; they are
demoralized creatures who seem to prefer squalor and misery,
freeloaders who live off the rest of us. When they do work, they want
to be paid too much for too little effort. And when they organize into
unions, they become troublesome encumbrances to productivity and
prosperity. All this we hear again and again.
Some persons of modest means embrace the denigrating opinions
about the poor circulated by political leaders and opinion makers.
Yet, during the 1995 budget debate, there was no mass support for
the mean-spirited cuts imposed by a Republican Congress. A survey
by the Center for the Study of Policy Attitudes (Washington, D.C.,
December 1994) found that 80 percent of respondents felt that
society and government have a moral obligation to alleviate poverty.
About the same number reject the right-wing argument that poverty
is the outcome of inferior culture among the impoverished rather
than material economic causes. But thanks to conservative
disinformationists like Rush Limbaugh, who claims that 90 percent
of government anti-poverty funds fail to reach the poor, respondents
thought the programs were poorly administered with much waste. In
fact, as economist Doug Henwood notes, the exact opposite is true.
Only about 10 percent of the funds are spent on administrative costs
with the rest going to recipients.

Another bit of conservative disinformation frequently mouthed by

right-wing members of Congress and other commentators is that
"$5.3 trillion has been spent on welfare in the past thirty years," a bit
of fiction that is seldom challenged by their poorly informed media
hosts or liberal adversaries. In fact, the actual figure is less than a
tenth of that, about $400 billion, or what the Pentagon spends in a
year and a half.

In contrast to right-wing Republicans, those of more liberal bent see

poverty as a problem created by hard times, a tight job market,
substandard schools and housing, deteriorating neighborhoods, a
lack of much needed public programs, broken families, crime, and
drugs. While well-meaning enough, this view sometimes confuses
effect with cause, for most of the aforementioned conditions are
really just symptoms. Substandard housing, crime, drugs, and
deteriorating neighborhoods do not cause poverty but are part of its
results. (This is not to deny that such effects can themselves have a
demoralizing impact upon deprived people.) The question remains,
what in the system brings about such results?

The liberal view tends to treat poverty as an outcome of impersonal

forces. The differences between rich and poor are accepted as a
natural given, a reflection of happenstance and circumstance. This
view fails to recognize that poverty and wealth do not just coexist but
are causally linked to each other. The notion propagated by
conservatives and some liberals is that the more wealth accumulates
in society, the better it is for all of us: as the pie gets bigger, we all get
more. Supposedly it is not a zero-sum system. In fact, for most
working people it is. More for one interest usually does mean less for
another. What matters is not only the size of the pie but how it is
sliced.

Wealth as the Cause of Poverty

Does wealth cause poverty? Certainly the converse is true.

Throughout history, in societies where no great amount of wealth
was accumulated by the few, there was no great poverty. Most
hunting and food-gathering societies and early horticultural
communities lived modestly under a rough social equality. When the
herds disappeared and the crops failed, everyone bore the brunt of
the deprivation.

During normal times, most of these societies enjoyed levels of

consumption, health standards, and longevity rates that would
compare favorably to their descendants in the present era. The
diseases of "advanced" societies, such as cancer, typhoid, heart
ailments, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, diabetes, diptheria,
syphilis, and gonorrhea were nonexistent or relatively rare—as were
the combined conditions of poverty, poor sanitation, and
overcrowding that produced them. Nor did the people work from
dawn to dusk, as is popularly thought. Modern research has revealed
that there was a great deal of free time for recreation and community
gatherings.

The poverty of so much of the Third World is not an original historic

condition. It was created by the expropriation of European and
North American colonizers who stole the peoples land and enslaved
their labor, driving them into destitution. Thus under British
imperial rule, the per capita income level in India plummeted 65
percent between 1830 and 1900. As the colonizing leaders grew
richer, the colonized grew poorer.
If land and resources were used for social need instead of private
greed, there would be enough for everyone in just about every
society. Every country in the world has sufficient land to feed its
population. Many poor ones export more agricultural products than
they import. In India, the number of hungry people is conservatively
estimated at 300 million, more than any other nation. Yet India's
wheat and rice surplus in 1991 was about fourteen million tons,
mostly in the hands of big producers and exporters. A fairly modest
portion of this surplus would be a sufficient supplement for that
nation's malnourished millions. The problem is not supply but
distribution.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty. When
large surpluses are accumulated by the few, then want and
deprivation will be endured by the many who have created the
surplus. Slaveholders lived in luxury and opulence because slaves
toiled from dawn to dusk creating the slaveholder's wealth while
consuming but a meager portion for subsistence. Lords and ladies
lived in great castles amidst splendid finery with tables laden with
food because there were servants and serfs laboring endless hours to
sustain them in the style to which they were accustomed.

Today, wherever there are great landholdings and latifundios, so

there will be landless, destitute peasants crowded onto the dusty
infertile hills, forced to work the agribusiness fields for something
close to starvation wages—when work is to be had. Wherever there
are rich factory owners and bankers who extract enormous profits
from production and investment, so are there workers who put in
long hours while paid but a small fraction of the value they produce.

The correlation is not a mere coincidence. How else is wealth

accumulated save from the labor of those who produce far more than
they are allowed to consume? Did the slaveholders or feudal lords,
who spent their days hunting, riding, fighting, feasting, and drinking,
create the abundance they enjoyed? Do the big shareholders, who
spend their time boating, traveling, partying, attending charity balls,
or running for public office, create the fortunes that accumulate from
their investments? In reality, class systems of accumulation are zero-
sum.
Those who toil at the lower rungs of the social ladder are not
"neglected" or "overlooked." They are harnessed into the toughest,
meanest, least-rewarding, lowest-paying work. In the early 1960s we
heard that the residents of Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in
the United States, were a forgotten people left behind by history. In
fact, Appalachia is a rich region, having produced vast fortunes for
the Mellons, Morgans, and Rockefellers. Only its people are poor.
But their poverty is not an accidental condition. It is directly linked
to the wealth extracted from their land and labor. The people of
Appalachia were driven from the choice lands by the coal companies.
They were overworked and underpaid; thousands were killed or
maimed in the mines or broken in health by harsh occupational
conditions. Their unions were threatened and attacked and their
lives put at risk by company gun thugs, Pinkertons, state militia,
police, and the U.S. Army. Their community needs were regularly
betrayed by local, state, and federal politicos and courts in the service
of the big coal companies. The Appalachian poor are not "forgotten"
by history. They long have been the focus of keen ruling-class
attentions, of strenuous deception, repression, and exploitation.
Their poverty is not a natural or inevitable condition nor a reflection
of their own lack of effort. When masses of people labor so hard and
end up with so little at such a cost to their own well-being, while so
much is accumulated by a privileged few, then it is time to stop
blaming the poor and direct our critical attention to the politico-
economic powers that systematically impoverish them.

Wealth and Labor

By now it should be clear that when talking about wealth, we should

also talk about labor, for the two are interrelated. Where does wealth
come from? First of all, from the natural resources of our planet: the
land, minerals, forests, and seas, which offer valuable life-sustaining
materials. The other source of wealth is the human labor that
extracts and transmutes these materials into marketable products.
What transforms a tree into a salable commodity like timber is the
labor that goes into harvesting it. Human labor also transforms the
timber into lumber, another commodity, then into salable furniture.
Of itself, capital cannot create anything. It is the thing created by
labor, the value accumulated by the living process of labor. It can
only increase by being mixed with more labor. This is what is meant
when people say they are "putting their money to work." The value
accumulated is preserved in the form of money, gold, stocks, and
bonds. Of themselves, all these forms of wealth could not produce
the book you now are reading; only human labor can do that. But
what of productive capital such as machinery and technology, do
they not produce value? Marx would argue that machines only
transfer value that is created by living labor. To be sure, it is human
labor that creates, maintains, and operates machinery and other such
productive capital. The ruling powers present themselves as the
creators of wealth, to whom we are beholden. They would have us
think they produce the milk when all they do is skim the cream.

Labor is the ultimate source of all commodity value. Adam Smith,

one of capitalism's founding theorists, wrote in 1776: "Labor is alone
the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities
at all times and places can be estimated and compared. It is their real
price, money is their nominal price only." The first Republican
president, Abraham Lincoln, said: "Labor is prior to and
independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could not
have existed had not labor first existed. Labor is the superior of
capital and deserves much the higher consideration."

All of humanity can be categorized into three groups. Group A

consists of that tiny portion of people who usually do not work
because they do not have to. The people in group A receive the bulk
of their money from dividends on stock investments; interest
payments on bonds and securities; the sale of appreciated holdings
in commodity futures, real estate, and other ventures; rents on
income property; payments on privately financed loans or mortgage
notes that they hold as creditors; government business subsidies and
other giveaways; royalties from oil and other mineral deposits; and
various other investments. Some prominent tycoons who preside
over vast financial empires may work, but they do so out of personal
choice, not economic necessity. And the workday they put in does not
explain the source of their immense wealth nor the pace at which it
accumulates. The far greater portion of their fortune comes from the
ownership of assets that directly or indirectly engage the labor of
others.

Most of humanity, group B, consists of those who live principally off

wages, salaries, bonuses, fees, commissions, and pensions. To be
sure, group B includes a wide income spread, from affluent
professionals who have to work because they cannot live exclusively
off their investment earnings, to working poor who have no net
assets and endure real deprivations. Generally what the people in
groups A and B have in common is that they both live principally off
the labor of the people in group B.

Group C comprises the most desperate millions throughout the

world who have been forced off the labor market and who live in
absolute destitution. Their political function is to be castigated and
scapegoated as social parasites. Their economic function is to
provide a surplus of needy workers at home and abroad who help
glut the labor market and depress wages. They make up what Marx
called, "the reserve army of labor."

Two studies conducted in 1995 respectively by the Rand Corporation

and the Brookings Institution do their best to muddy our
understanding of wealth in the United States. They find that
individuals typically achieve affluence not from inheritance but by
maintaining their health and working hard. Most of their savings
comes from earnings and has nothing to do with inherited wealth,
the researchers conclude.

In typical social science fashion, the investigators prefigure their

findings by limiting the scope of their data. Both studies fail to note
that the capacity to achieve a high income is itself in large part due to
inherited advantages, determined by the income level of one's
parents. The socioeconomic status of one's family is the greatest
single determinant of one's own life chances. Those coming from the
upper strata have a far better opportunity to maintain their health
and develop their performance, attend superior schools, and achieve
the advanced professional training, contacts, and influence needed to
land the higher paying positions.
More significantly, neither the Rand nor Brookings study actually
includes the rich, the people in group A, the top one or two percent
who control the lion's share of the nation's wealth largely through
inheritance. Both studies instead concentrate on upper-middle-class
professionals and managers, who are labeled as "rich" —which
indicates that the researchers have no idea how rich the rich really
are. The investigators explain that there is a shortage of data on the
wealthiest Americans. Being such a tiny percentage, "they're an
extremely difficult part of the population to survey," admits James P.
Smith, a Rand economist. That they're difficult to survey should not
cause him or us to overlook the fact that their existence refutes the
findings of these studies. Smith seems to admit as much when he
says, "This [study] shouldn't be taken as a statement that the
Rockefellers didn't give to their kids and the Kennedys didn't give to
their kids." (New York Times, 7/25/95) Indeed, most of the really big
money is inherited—and by a portion of the population that is so
minuscule as to be judged statistically insignificant by some
economists.

The Growing Gap

While asserting that the poor create their own poverty, ruling elites
pursue policies that take from the needy and give to the greedy. So
we have lower wages and salaries for the people in group B, with
greater earnings for top corporate executives, shareholders,
bondholders, and others in group A; a growing and more regressive
tax burden for group B, with multibillion dollar tax cuts for group A;
draconian reductions in human services for groups B and C; but
ever-increasing government services, protections, and contracts for
big business in group A.

In the United States most of the people living below the poverty level,
including many homeless people, actually work. If they are poor, it is
not because they are lazy but because they are being paid poverty
wages while facing exorbitant rents, regressive taxes, and other high
costs. In our society the line between the poor and the working class
is becoming increasingly blurred. High-paying blue-collar
employment has all but disappeared. In its place are millions of new
low-paying jobs. Often the wife in the family now brings in a second
low income to make up for the male breadwinner's drop in earnings.

In addition, numerous white-collar occupations have been

eliminated or downgraded, including medical personnel, middle
managers, technicians, and other professionals. When employees are
deskilled, they are also disempowered, being more replaceable and
thus less able to negotiate conditions of employment.

From 1990 to 1995, as profits achieved record levels and stock prices
surged, the great mass of working people saw their wages stagnate or
fall, while many of their benefits were reduced or eliminated. In the
last twenty years the real income of a U.S. male worker with a high
school diploma plunged by 30 percent. Many have lost their health
insurance, homes, and savings. About one fourth of the workforce is
now doing contract labor, hired on a daily basis, paid hourly with few
or no benefits, no job security or collective bargaining.

The ten largest corporations alone have terminated more than

500,000 jobs from 1991 to 1994. Nearly one-third of the workforce is
now employed part time. More than 4.5 million part-time employees
want full-time jobs. About 75 percent of the workforce has
experienced wage stagnation or decline since 1989. Hundreds of
thousands of occupations have been downgraded so that fewer than
one in five jobs pays enough to support a family of four (U.S. News &
World Report, 4/3/95).

Meanwhile the gap between haves and have-nots grows still greater.
In the United States, between 1973 and 1994, corporate profits
jumped 389 percent while real wages fell 21 percent. From 1977 to
1993, the top one percent enjoyed over a 100 percent growth in
income. Corporate CEO salaries and benefits jumped from 35 times
what the average worker earns to almost 150 times. Today the richest
one percent earn as much after-tax income as the bottom 40 percent.

The higher one goes up the income scale, the greater the rate of
capital accumulation. Economist Paul Krugman notes that not only
have the top 20 percent grown more affluent compared with
everyone below, the top 5 percent have grown richer compared with
the next 15 percent. The top one percent have become richer
compared with the next 4 percent. And the top 0.25 percent have
grown richer than the next 0.75 percent.

More than ever, wealth is being funneled upward. The causal

relationship between accumulation at the top and decline among the
lower strata is clearly demonstrated when various top corporate
executives lay off thousands of workers, impose speedups and wage
cuts on those remaining, and then—with this increase in productivity
and profit to show—vote themselves record salaries, bonuses, and
stock options. The leap in CEO and shareholder wealth comes
directly at the expense of the workforce.

Keeping the Poor in Their Place

When the poor try to fight for a larger slice of the pie, they are met
with the full force of the capitalist state. All over this country, for
decades on end, those African Americans, Latinos, and others who
have exercised any kind of protest leadership in their communities
have been railroaded into jail on trumped-up charges or murdered
by the police or subjected to legal lynchings.

Along with the surveillance and suppression by local, state, and

federal agencies, social control is exercised by the mass trafficking in
drugs, in which the police and other law-enforcement agencies play
an active role. The Knapp Commission investigation found that at
least half of New York City's police were accepting payoffs, many of
them drug-related. It is common knowledge on the inner-city streets
that the cops are among the biggest distributors of narcotics. The
Reagan and Bush administrations talked a tough line on drugs but
drastically cut the Drug Enforcement Agency's investigative staff and
halted law-enforcement efforts to keep narcotics out of the United
States. Nor did things change much under the Clinton
administration.

In addition, as several congressional investigations have discovered,

the CIA has been involved in the heroin trafficking from Southeast
Asia and the cocaine smuggling from Latin America. Legislation to
stop U.S. companies from selling precursor chemicals needed in
cocaine production remains unenforced, as do the laws designed to
stop the laundering of drug money through established financial
institutions. In 1993, Richard Held resigned as head of the FBI's San
Francisco office, commenting: "There's never been any war on
drugs," just so much manipulation of appearances "to give the public
the impression something is being done" (San Francisco Examiner,
5/24/93).

The war on drugs is principally a war on drug victims and even more
vigorously a war against those in the inner-city communities who
attempt to resist the traffickers. African American leaders like Martin
Sostre, Frank Shuford, Hurricane Carter, and members of Black Men
against Crack were all railroaded into jail on trumped-up charges for
trying to resist, among other things, the drug inflow into their
communities.

Presiding over all this suppression and drug trafficking are the
federal, state, and local agencies whose task is to destroy the militant
protest organizations that arise in poor communities. With low
wages, lay-offs, high prices, inflated rents, and other "impersonal"
forces of the market, the poor are kept poor, no matter how hard
they toil. Government imposes the additional burdens of deficient
services and regressive taxes that fall unfairly upon lower-income
people. Private-sector corporations tend to shun poor
neighborhoods. The exception is the waste disposal business, which
does much of its toxic dumping near poor communities, taking
advantage of their vulnerability and lack of organization resources.
And should low-income people try to mobilize their forces, they often
are treated to direct applications of force and violence from agencies
of the state. The individuals who most persistently denounce the
poor for failing to improve their lot are the first to act against them
when they attempt to do so.

Poverty deepens when labor is in retreat to capital. When the power

of capital is increasingly untrammeled, all of us are put at risk: the
environment, the sacred forests, the beautiful and mysterious
creatures of the sea, the ordinary people who with their strength and
brains and inventiveness create community and give to life so much
that is worthy of our respect.
The goal of ruling interests is to keep this society and the entire
world open for maximum profitability regardless of the human and
environmental costs. The real burden to society is not the poor but
the corporate rich. We simply no longer can afford them.

FASCISM IN A PINSTRIPED SUIT

If fascism came to America, some say, it would be an unbearable
nightmare drastically disrupting the everyday pattern of our lives.
And since our lives seem to retain their normal pattern, it follows
that fascism has not taken over. In actuality, however, the fascist
state, like all states, has no need to make nightmarish intrusions into
the trivia of every citizen's life.

The Orwellian image of Big Brother commanding an obscure citizen

to do his morning exercises via two-way television leaves us with a
grossly exaggerated caricature of the authoritarian state. Rather than
alerting us to more realistic dangers, novels like 1984 cloud our
vision with fanciful horrors of the future, thereby making the present
look not all that bad in comparison and leaving us the more
convinced that there is no cause for alarm.

The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly
horrible. I once asked some Iranian businesspeople to describe what
life had been like under the Shah's police state. "It was perfect," they
responded. Workers and servants could be cheaply procured, profits
were high, and they lived very well. To be sure, fascism is not perfect
for everyone. Mussolini's Italy and Hitlers Germany inflicted a great
deal of intentional hardship upon working people, including the
destruction of labor unions, the loss of job benefits, and a shift in
national income from the lower and middle classes to the upper
class. Many among the petty bourgeoisie in Germany, who generally
supported the Nazi party, suffered the loss of their small businesses
and the dread slippage into working-class ranks—with jobs in the
armaments factories when they were lucky enough to find
employment. The number of Germans who lived in poverty and want
increased substantially as wages were cut by as much as 40 percent.
Those who equate fascism with the horrors of Auschwitz are correct
in their moral condemnation but mistaken in their sense of
sequence. The worst of Auschwitz did not come until the war years.
As late as 1939, the Nazi state was still pursuing a policy of
encouraging, and more often forcing, the emigration of Jews to other
lands. Mass liquidation as a "final solution" was not seriously
considered and was in fact opposed until Hitlers order came
(sometime after March 1941, most historians believe).

The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the
average gentile German. Unless one was Jewish, or poor and
unemployed, or actively leftist or otherwise openly anti-Nazi,
Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish
place. All the "good Germans" had to do was obey the law, pay their
taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political
heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and
troublesome people disappeared.

Since many "middle Americans" already obey the law, pay their
taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of
political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and
troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without
too much personal torment in a fascist state—some of them certainly
seem eager to do so. Orwell's imaginings to the contrary, what is so
terrifying about fascism is its "normality," its compatibility with the
collective sentiments of substantial numbers of "normal" persons—
though probably never a majority in any society.

We might do well to stop thinking of fascism as being a simple

either-or condition. The political system of any one country
encompasses a variety of uneven and seemingly incongruous
institutional practices. To insist that fascism does not obtain until
every abomination of the Nazi state is replicated and every vestige of
constitutional government is obliterated is to overlook, at our peril,
the disturbingly antidemocratic, authoritarian manifestations
inherent in many states that call themselves democracies. In 1971
Bertram Gross and I got into a debate on this point. Gross argued
that fascism was a possible but future thing in the United States; it
could happen here. I argued that fascistic features already inhered in
the state structure of most capitalist democracies including this one.
We each wrote an article outlining our positions, he in Social Policy, I
in Transactions. Years later he wrote Friendly Fascism, a book in
which he adopted my argument. In a subsequent panel he said my
article convinced him—though I looked in vain in his book for a
citation.

Selective Repression

It is sometimes argued by those who deny the imminence of

American fascism that we are more free today than ever before.
One's ability to accept such reassurance partly depends on the class
conditions and life chances that one confronts. The affluent
individual whose views fit into that portion of the American political
spectrum known as the "mainstream" (from rightist Republican to
centrist Democrat) and whose political actions are limited to the
standardized forms of participation—informal discussion, television
viewing, newspaper reading, and voting — is apt to dismiss the
contention that America is fascistic. But those who oppose the
existing political orthodoxy and who find themselves under
surveillance and subjected to the intimidations, harassments, and
sanctions of the U.S. national security state have a less sanguine
view.

Over the last several decades just about every African American
protest leader who achieved any local or national prominence
eventually ended up either under indictment, in jail, on appeal, in
hiding, in exile, or murdered by the forces of "law and order." Most
of the killings went unreported in the national press. Few if any of
the law officers involved were ever convicted of murder by the
predominantly white, middle-American juries that pass judgment on
these matters.

The leniency displayed by authorities toward those on the right side

of the political spectrum stands in marked contrast to the relentless,
punitive justice meted out to people of color, the poor, and radicals
of all stripes. While the guardians go unguarded, political activists
are arrested on trumped-up charges and end up serving astronomical
sentences for crimes they never committed or for relatively minor
offenses. For a detailed discussion and documentation of this point,
see my Democracy for the Few, 6th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1995), chap. 9.

The last decade or so has seen a growth in reactionary and racist

groups. Yet the government does little about them. In the first half of
1995 alone, a county employee in California who refused a demand
by rightist anti-tax activists to remove an IRS lien imposed on one of
them, was beaten by two men and slashed with a knife. A judge in
Montana was terrorized, threatened with kidnapping, and had a
murder contract put out on her by a militia group that claimed she
had no jurisdiction over them. A federal wildlife worker received a
threat that his wife and children would be bound in barbed wire and
stuffed down a well. During a forum on Capitol Hill, government
workers, environmentalists, and abortion rights activists described
incidents of harassment, intimidation, and violence perpetrated by
paramilitary groups (Washington Post, 7/13/1995). A number of
these groups are financed by shady individuals of affluent means. In
1995, the Republican-controlled Congress refused to hold hearings
on these paramilitary groups. Meanwhile, the Justice Department
has done next to nothing about the menacing arms caches, threats,
and openly violent actions these organizations have delivered upon
others.

At the same time however, the government's repressive mechanism

is geared up against leftist dissenters. The FBI and local police Red
squads are once again spying, burglarizing, disrupting, and otherwise
targeting various organizations that work for social justice, peace and
disarmament, or environmentalism. During the 1980s almost two
hundred organizations were labeled, not communist fronts as during
the repressive McCarthy era of the 1950s, but "terrorist fronts,"
including Martin Luther King Jr.'s own Southern Leadership
Conference and various church and student organizations. President
Clinton lifted not a finger to undo this new round-up list and in 1995
supported a repressive counterterrorist act that gives the president
the power to arrest and detain without benefit of evidence or trial or
even formal charges individuals deemed to be aiding any group
designated as "terrorist" by the president. (The bill passed the Senate
by a large majority but was voted down by the House.)
Political Law

In the last two decades one of the fastest growing markets has been
in guns, clubs, helmets, bulletproof vests, and other items of
domestic warfare sold to law enforcers, and the fastest growing area
of public employment has been police and prison guards. The prison
populations in most states have grown exponentially, mostly with
small-time drug users. By 1995-96, California was spending more on
prisons than on education.

This is not to assume that the police are busy fighting crime. For all
their new equipment and personnel, they do little if anything to stop
the big drug traffickers, slumlords, sweatshop operators, mobsters,
corrupt politicians, spouse beaters, child abusers, rapists, muggers,
hate mongers, and others who prey off the most vulnerable among
us.

The real function of the police is social control. Their job is to keep in
line those elements that might prove potentially troublesome to the
powers that be. Take a look at the TV documentary cop shows that
are in such abundant supply. What repeatedly comes across is how
the police deal not with the victimizers but the victims: the down-
and-outs and panhandlers, the homeless, the poor and unemployed,
the prostitutes, illegal immigrants, alcoholics and drug addicts,
victims who are represented as criminals to the viewing audience.

The social control function of law enforcement operates on three

levels within inner-city communities and among potentially
"troublesome" populations. First, there is the street-level repression
provoked and perpetrated by too many police officers, who use their
badges and guns as a cover for venting their racist animosities and
personal distortions. All this is a matter of public record, with case
after case of police brutality and case after case of settlements. And
for every brutality victim who wins damages there are many who
never make it into court.

Second, there is the mass trafficking in narcotics, in which the police

play an active role as distributors along with federal agencies, such as
the CIA, that are linked directly to overseas traffickers. This too is a
matter of public record, with findings by three different
congressional committees and sworn testimony by pilots who have
flown narcotics and weapons shipments for the CIA.

On the third level are the coordinated systematic efforts by federal,

state, and local authorities to undermine community protest
organizations, because the powers that be prefer demoralized,
divided, disorganized, and drug-ridden populations to people who
are politicized and who mobilize for collective action and radical
change.

Members of various African American and Latino groups, such as the

Young Lords, the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Black Men Against
Crack, and the Cripps and Bloods (after these gangs became
politicized), can testify that when they were involved in crime they
had less trouble from the police than when they became politically
mobilized against drugs, police brutality, and exploitative social
relations within the inner-city communities. In attacks conducted
jointly by local authorities and federal agents, Black Panther offices
across the country were raided and destroyed, their funds stolen, and
their occupants arrested or shot. At least thirty-four Panthers
perished in the repression of the 1970s. Hundreds of others were
incarcerated, many on trumped-up charges. Some, like Geronimo
Pratt, are still in prison over twenty years later.

These three levels of political repression operate symbiotically with

each other. The racist cops and the drug traffickers get an implicit
green light from higher up, and the officials are served in their larger
agenda by the racist cops and the drug pushers. In addition, the
police themselves are often politicized, identifying with a right-wing
application of the law, taking their encouragement from the
pronouncements of elected officials who pander to popular fears
about crime.

Familiarity and the "Moderate" Center

It seems that the ability of most middle-class whites to perceive the

fascist features of American society is seriously blunted not only by
their class experiences but by the aura of familiarity and legitimacy
that enshrouds the established political culture. In making
comparisons between their society and others, they tend to employ a
double standard. Thus the organized forms of police violence in
America are seen as isolated, aberrant happenings— on the
infrequent occasions they are publicized—rather than as inherent
manifestations of our social order. But the same practices in certain
other lands are treated as predictable components of totalitarian
systems.

The Nazi invasion of Poland is fascism in action; the American

invasion of Vietnam is a "blunder" or at worst an "immoral
application" of power. The indoctrination of children in Nazi
Germany into the myths and rituals of the nation-state is seen as
characteristic of fascism; but our own grade-school indoctrination
replete with flag salutes, national anthems, and history books
espousing the myths of American superiority is "education for
citizenship." Many social arrangements and happenings that would
evoke strongly negative sentiments if defined as products of a
totalitarian state become, by their proximity and cultural familiarity,
no cause for alarm when practiced at home.

The political mainstream is frequently characterized, by those who

occupy it, as a democratic force fighting a war on two fronts against
the extremes of Right and Left. However, a closer reading of history
tells us that the Center has been more inclined to make common
cause with the Right against the Left rather than oppose both with
equal fervor. Far from being a blameless victim when fascism
emerges triumphant, the Center is an accomplice. In Germany, as
early as 1918, the Social Democratic leader Ebert entered an alliance
with Field Marshal von Hindenburg "in order to fight Bolshevism."
Throughout the Weimar Republic, as Franz Neumann records in his
book, Behemoth, "every law aimed supposedly against both
Communists and National Socialists [Nazis] was invariably enforced
against the Socialist party and the entire left, but rarely against the
right." Those leftists who were critical of the illegal rearmament of
Germany found themselves charged and tried for treason, while
rightist assassins and putschists "were either not prosecuted at all or
were dealt with lightly."
The collusion between Center and Right is understandable. Despite
their differences in emphasis and methods (differences that are not
always to be dismissed as insignificant) the Center and Right share a
common commitment to the ongoing corporate class structure, and
conservative institutional authority.

While capable of extensive repressive actions at home and abroad,

centrists continue to think of themselves as incapable of the
extremism ascribed to the Right and Left. Indeed, the very linear
model they apply to politics (extreme-Left/ Left/ Center/ Right/
extreme-Right), like any line or spectrum, can extend itself at both
ends to allow for limitless extremes but makes no spatial provision
for an extreme Center. The extreme, according to Webster's, is "the
utmost part, the utmost limit, an extremity." Therefore, the very
notion of an extreme Center is a contradiction in terms. The
extremes of the Center on a linear political spectrum, to the extent
they can be imagined, are nothing more than the beginnings of a
moderate Left and moderate Right.

But extreme has another meaning, to quote Webster's, "an excessive

or immoderate degree, condition or measure." Implicit in the second
definition is the image of the intransigent, dogmatic, and violent
extremist, and in common political parlance this second meaning is
often conflated with the first so that the linear relationship, the
spectrum, takes on a moral quality of its own. By virtue of a pun,
then, the Center becomes incapable of political extremism.

Yet, in truth, it does not follow that those who occupy the extremes of
a linear model (a placement made in accordance with beliefs about
changing the established social order) must perforce be extremists in
the pejorative sense. Those of us designated as "extreme leftists"
actually want rather moderate and civil things: a clean environment,
a fair tax structure, use of social production for social needs,
expansion of public sector production, serious cuts in a bloated
military budget, affordable housing, decently paying jobs, equal
justice for all, and the like. There is nothing morally extreme about
such things. They are "extreme" only in the sense of being extremely
at odds with the dominant interests of the status quo. In the face of
such gross injustice and class privilege, considerations of social
justice and betterment take on the appearance of "extreme"
measures.

Nor does it follow that those who occupy the center of any political
spectrum are thereby incapable of the kind of brutal, repressive,
destructive, intransigent actions usually associated with fascist
extremists. It was not the John Birch Society that tried to bomb
Indochina into the Stone Age, nor was it the American Nazi Party
that perfected napalm and put thalidomide in the defoliants used
throughout Indochina. And today it is not the skinheads and Klan
that maintain the death squads and other homicidal operations
throughout so much of the Third World. It is the best and the
brightest of the political Center (with plenty of help from rightists).

Searching for Scapegoats

The way the mainstream shades off into the fascist Right can be seen
quite clearly in the Republican party. The GOP socioeconomic
agenda is not much different from the kind pushed by Mussolini and
Hitler: break the labor unions, depress wages, impose a rightist
ideological monopoly over the media, abolish taxes for the big
corporations and the rich, eliminate government regulations
designed for worker and consumer safety and environmental
protection, plunder public lands, privatize public enterprises, wipe
out most human services, and liberal-bait and race-bait all those
opposed to such measures.

Regarding that last point, one of the main tactics of fascism is to

direct the legitimate grievances of the populace toward irrelevant
foes: Jews, communists, gypsies, labor unions. So today, in the
United States, we witness middle Americans beset by real economic
difficulties and social frustrations as taxpayers, wage earners, and
citizens but too well indoctrinated and too committed to the
conventional social order to make any realistic indictment of the
multinational corporate system. They are told that the military and
the big corporations are the mainstays of Americanism. And they are
invited to turn their anger toward irrelevant and often imaginary
foes, such as African Americans, Latinos, Jews, the poor, "welfare
chiselers," immigrants, feminists, gays, advocates of legal abortions,
atheists, the supposedly "liberal" media and other "cultural elites"
(whoever they are), the hidden United Nations army that is secretly
occupying the USA, and various real and imagined violators of law
and order.

While U.S. rulers and the corporate-owned major media regularly

ignore the legitimate and pressing grievances of socially deprived
groups, there seems no limit to the sympathetic attention they give to
angry Klan members, troubled Nazis, and anguished militiamen—
almost all of whom are rightist, racist, and armed to the teeth. And
rarely if ever do they invite the public to consider whether it actually
is the welfare mothers or illegal immigrants who bring us record
deficits, war, swollen military budgets, high taxes, poverty, urban
blight, inflation, crime, unemployment, and environmental
devastation.

As when fascism first emerged in Italy and Germany, the Center

shows a tender tolerance for the ultra-Right while seeking to exercise
an intimidating and repressive control over the Left. Not
surprisingly, many of the same people who support these autocratic,
statist measures against democratic dissenters are the first to deny
that fascism is a threat in the United States. But growing numbers of
us have lost our skepticism. What we fear is not the cataclysm but the
drift. In fact, it is less a drift toward fascism than a concerted push by
the purveyors of state power. Not only do the higher circles attack
the standard of living of the populace, they attack the democratic
rights that enable us to launch any kind of counterattack to defend
ourselves from being plunged into Third Worldom. In the final
analysis, the danger of fascism comes not from the handful of
skinheads or militia but from the various enforcement agencies of
the national security state, those who would divest us of whatever
remains of our livelihoods and democratic rights under the guise of
"doing what is best for America."

ROLLBACK
For years U.S. political and economic leaders saw themselves in
mortal combat with communist nations for the allegiance of peoples
at home and abroad. Time and again, the argument was made that
U.S. workers enjoyed a higher standard of living than their opposite
numbers who lived under communism. Statistics were rolled out to
show that Soviet workers had to toil many more hours than our
workers to buy various consumer goods. (No comparisons were
offered in regard to medical care, rent, housing, education,
transportation, and other services that are heavily subsidized by
communist governments). The pressure of being in competition with
an alternative economic system set limits on how thoroughly
Western politico-economic leaders dared to mistreat their working
populations.

To maintain an appearance of "capitalism with a human face,"

corporate leaders occasionally were compelled to make substantive
concessions. All sorts of important victories were won in the better
organized sectors of the workforce: the eight-hour day, seniority
rights, a minimum wage, social security, unemployment and
disability insurance, vacation and health benefits, a guaranteed
annual wage, maternity leave, and the like.

The concern about communism also helped the civil rights struggle.
Since we supposedly were competing with Moscow for the hearts and
minds of nonwhites in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it was
considered imperative that we rid ourselves of Jim Crow here at
home and grant equality to our own people of color. Many of the
arguments made against segregation were couched in just that
amoral opportunistic rhetoric: not racial equality for its own sake but
because it would improve America's image in the cold war.

The Third World Comes Home

The overthrow of communism in the Soviet Union and other Eastern

European nations caused much rejoicing among the higher circles in
this country. Except for a few minor holdouts like Cuba and North
Korea, multinational corporate capitalism now seemed to have its
grip on the entire globe. Yet, an impatient plaint soon could be
detected in conservative publications. It went something like this: "If
everywhere socialism is being rolled back by the free market, why is
there no rollback here in the United States? Why do we have to
continue tolerating all sorts of collectivist regulations and liberal
services?"

By 1992, it became clear to many conservatives that now was the

time to cast off all restraint and sock it to the employee class. The
competition for their hearts and minds was over. There was no
alternative system, no place else for them to think of going. Big
Capital had scored a total victory and now would be able to write its
own ticket at home and abroad. Tolerance toward opposing interests
does not increase with a sense of ones own growing power. There
would be no more accommodation, not with blue-collar workers, nor
even with white-collar professionals or middle management.

Throughout history there has been only one thing that ruling
interests have ever wanted—and that is everything: all the choice
lands, forests, game, herds, harvests, mineral deposits, and precious
metals of the earth; all the wealth, riches, and profitable returns; all
the productive facilities, gainful inventiveness, and technologies; all
the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all
public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the
protections of the law with none of its constraints; all the services,
comforts, luxuries, and advantages of civil society with none of the
taxes and costs. Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the
rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a
lot; we can get more; we want it all.

With the rollback of communism, the politico-economic circles that

preside over this country no longer feel they need to tolerate any
modus vivendi with those who work for a living. Instead of worrying
about lowering unemployment, as during the cold war, corporate
elites now seek to sustain a relatively high level of joblessness in
order to weaken unions, curb workers, and attain growth without
inflation.

Growth without inflation sounds pretty good. But meanwhile we are

witnessing the Third Worldization of the United States, the economic
downgrading of a relatively prosperous population. Corporate circles
see no reason why millions of working people should be able to enjoy
a middle-class living standard, with home ownership, surplus
income, and secure long-term employment. They also see no reason
why the middle class itself should be as large as it is.

As the haves would have it, people must lower their expectations,
work harder, and be satisfied with less. The more they get, the more
they will expect and be able to demand, until we will end up with a
social democracy—or worse. Better to keep them down and hungry
with their noses to the grindstone. For the ruling interests, it is time
to return to nineteenth-century standards, the kind that currently
obtain throughout the Third World— specifically, an unorganized
working populace that toils for a bare subsistence; a mass of
unemployed, desperate poor who help to depress wages and serve as
a target for the misplaced resentment of those just above them; a
small, shrinking middle class that hangs on by its bleeding fingers;
and a tiny, obscenely rich owning class that has it all.

The haves are pulling out the stops. For them, its time to cutback
drastically on such luxuries as education, medical care, libraries,
mass transportation, and other publicly funded human services, so
that people will have the opportunity to learn how to take care of
themselves. Time to do away with unions, business regulations,
minimum-wage laws, occupational safety, consumer safety,
environmental protections, and taxes on investment income. All
these things cut into profits. Every dollar that goes into the public
sector is one less for the private sector. And the haves want it all.

The reactionary offensive in the United States is being replicated

throughout most of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, where we witness repeated moves toward deregulation and
privatization and an upward redistribution of income. While the
overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the decline of
social-democratic and communist parties in Western industrial
countries has been hailed by some commentators as "the end of class
struggle" and even "the end of history," the global corporate elites are
in fact waging class war more determinedly than ever.

The Fourth World Comes to the Third World

Along with the decline in working and living conditions in the United
States and other Western nations, there has come an economic
collapse in many Third World nations. This development too has
been accelerated by the collapse of communism.

During the cold war era, U.S. policymakers sought to contain

communism by ensuring the economic growth and stability of
anticommunist regimes. But Third World development began to
threaten U.S. corporate profitability. By the late 1970s, governments
in Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, and other nations were
closing off key sectors of their economies to U.S. investment. In
addition, exports from these countries were competing for overseas
markets with U.S. firms, including within the United States itself. At
the same time, growing numbers of Third World leaders were calling
for more coordinated effort to control their own communication and
media systems, their own resources, markets, air space, and seabeds.

By the 1980s, U.S. policymakers were rejecting the view that a more
prosperous, economically independent Third World would work to
the interests of U.S. capitalism. Instead, they sought to subordinate
the economies of Third Word nations by rolling back development
programs and weakening the political efficacy of their governments.
The goal has been to create a world free for maximizing profits
irrespective of the human and environmental costs. And there no
longer is a competing communist world to which Third World
leaders might threaten to turn.

One rollback weapon is the debt. Third World governments are

burdened with huge debts and desperately strapped for funds. In
order to meet payments and receive new credits from the U.S.-
dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF),
these governments have had to agree to heartless "structural
adjustments;" including reductions in social programs, cuts in wages,
the elimination of import controls, the removal of restrictions on
foreign investments, and the privatization of state enterprises.

Such measures are ostensibly designed to curb inflation, boost

exports, and strengthen the fiscal condition of the debtor nation. By
consuming less and producing more, debtors supposedly will be
better able to pay off their debts. In fact, these structural adjustments
work wonderfully for the transnational corporations by increasing
the level of exploitation and boosting profit rates. They also leave the
economies and peoples of these various countries measurably worse
off. Domestic industries lose out to foreign investors. There is a
general deindustrialization as state enterprises fall by the wayside or
are handed over to private owners to be milked for profits. Many
small farmers lose their import protections and subsidies and are
driven off the land. Unemployment and poverty increase along with
hunger, malnutrition, and various attendant epidemics and diseases.

In time, Third World countries like the Philippines, Brazil, and

Mexico slip deeper into the desperately absolute poverty of what has
been called the "Fourth World," already inhabited by countries like
Haiti and Zaire. Thus, in the first ten months of 1995, malnutrition in
Mexico City increased sixfold. As many as one-fifth of Mexico's
ninety million people are now considered "severely undernourished,"
while the incidence of cholera, dengue, and other diseases related to
malnutrition is nearly ten times higher in 1995 than in the previous
year. The Mexican public health system that began to improve
markedly in recent years is now at the point of complete collapse,
with overcrowded, underfinanced, and understaffed hospitals no
longer able to provide basic medicines. Much of this thanks to
financial "restructuring."

As a further blow, the richer industrial nations, following the United

States' lead, have been making substantial cuts in nonmilitary
foreign aid to poor countries. These include sharp reductions in
funds for education, environmental protection, family planning, and
health programs. As noted in the Los Angeles Times (6/13/95),
"With the decline of the Soviet threat, aid levels fell off. . . ."
Measured as a percentage of gross national product, the United
States gives the least assistance of all industrialized nations, less than
.02 percent.

Reformist governments that try to protect their resources, develop

their economies, and raise their minimum wages are finding these
efforts undermined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), whose latest round of agreements refashioned the
international trade structure to give a free hand to the transnational
corporations and bypass the sovereignty of individual nations on
many essential matters. Not only are Third World economies now
more successfully penetrated but the governments themselves are
being undermined and marginalized by GATT and the whole process
of economic globalization. Thus attempts by Third World
governments to institute import protections, public health and
insurance services, consumer protections, and environmental
regulations are being overruled by GATT's executive arm, the World
Trade Organization, as "restraints of trade" and "unfair competition."

Reformist governments are attacked not only economically but, if

need be, militarily, as in the case of Libya, Panama, Iraq, and a dozen
revolutionary nations like Grenada, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. In
some cases, they are subjected to dismemberment as with Yugoslavia
or obliteration as with South Yemen. Yugoslavia's advancing
industrial base could no longer be allowed to compete with Germany
or France. Secession and war accomplished the goal of breaking up
that nation-state into small right-wing client states that are falling
under the economic suzerainty of the Western corporations.

The road to development is the road of economic nationalism, and

economic nationalism will no longer be tolerated in the New World
Order. The nations of the world face a comprehensive, cohesive
strategy pursued by U.S. politico-economic elites, whose goal has
been to create a world free for maximizing profits irrespective of the
human and environmental costs.

Who's Left to Buy It All?

The question is often asked, if the workforces of the world are being
downsized and wages are stagnating, where will purchasing power
come from? Who will buy all the goods and services produced by
overworked and underpaid employees? The elites are cutting their
own throats, the argument goes, and will sooner or later have to
reverse their policies as consumption diminishes. But there are
several mitigating factors.
First, though people may be working for less money in the USA,
more of them are working. Despite all the downsizing, millions of
new but poorer-paying jobs are being created every year. In many
households, the male breadwinner has been joined in the job market
by his wife and even oldest child, adding to the nation's aggregate
wage.

Second, people are working longer hours. Economists say that the
average work week is close to record levels. We not only have the
two- and three-job family but the two- and three-job person.

Workers are still buying commodities and services but they have to
work harder and longer to do so.

Third, for the big ticket items like cars, refrigerators, and homes,
there's installment buying. The consumer debt is climbing
precipitously. Those with lots of extra money need to do something
with it, so they lend it to those in need—at a price. Among those in
need is the government itself. Deficit spending converts savings into
consumption and consumption into investment profits. And on it
goes.

Fourth, demand is increasing among the rich and the very rich. Even
during recent recession years, the sales of jewelry, antiques, art work,
executive apartments, mansions, vacation homes, yachts, luxury
cars, and fabulous excursions abroad boomed among upper-class
clientele.

Fifth, there will always be some sort of middle class that buys an
ample share of goods and services. In the United States there are
some ten million professionals, upper and middle corporate
managers, government bureaucrats, small investors, and small but
successful entrepreneurs who do well enough. Even in an
impoverished country like India, with a population of about 900
million, there are some 80 million who might be designated as
middle class, constituting a consumer market numerically larger
than in most other countries.
Sixth, it should be noted that the present forced economic decline in
the United States started from an exceptionally high level of
prosperity. With downsizing, the pie may expand at a slower rate or
even get a little smaller, but if the people at the top get a larger and
larger slice, they are not much troubled about sluggish demand.

Guidance From Above

While they plunder the planet and impoverish the world's

population, those at the top proffer a good deal of stern advice for
those who fight back. To give only one example: in April 1995, one of
the world's leading ruling-class mouthpieces, Pope John Paul II,
resplendent in embroidered white robes and a gold-encrusted miter,
used his Easter Sunday address to denounce "selfishness and the
desire for power" and "all who are tempted to place their hope in
weapons" (New York Times, 4/17/95). Was he referring to the brutal
right-wing plutocrats and militarists who rule and ruin so many
nations? Or the CIA-supported bloodletting forces that have
slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Mozambique, Angola,
Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Guatemala, and scores of other countries?
Or the corporate elites who regularly plunder and pollute the planet?

No, not an unkind word for any of them. Instead, the Pope pointed
the accusing finger at the Kurds, Palestinians, and indigenous
populations of Latin America—those who number among the poorest
and most cruelly dispossessed people in the world. If we are to
believe John Paul, it is they who should relinquish the use of force,
rid themselves of "selfishness," and turn to "dialogue as the only way
to promote . . . reciprocal acceptance." Suffering no material miseries
of his own, the Pope is able to counsel an admirable forbearance to
those who do. In this respect, he differs little from other prominent
members of his advantaged class, a class that is not much troubled
by the many at home and abroad who are increasingly racked by
hardship and want.

Those who pretend to be our leaders are running the crudest scam in
history. There will be hope for the world only when people begin to
see that the conditions they face are not the outgrowth of
happenstance or "hard times" but the result of concerted and
intentional rapacity, the creation of poverty by wealth, the creation of
powerlessness by the powerful.

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR

HYPOCRISY
Why has the United States government supported counterinsurgency
in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and many other places around
the world, at such a loss of human life to the populations of those
nations? Why did it invade tiny Grenada and then Panama? Why did
it support mercenary wars against progressive governments in
Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Indonesia,
East Timor, Western Sahara, South Yemen, and elsewhere? Is it
because our leaders want to save democracy? Are they concerned
about the well-being of these defenseless peoples? Is our national
security threatened? I shall try to show that the arguments given to
justify U.S. policies are false ones. But this does not mean the
policies themselves are senseless. American intervention may seem
"wrongheaded" but, in fact, it is fairly consistent and horribly
successful.

The history of the United States has been one of territorial and
economic expansionism, with the benefits going mostly to the U.S.
business class in the form of growing investments and markets,
access to rich natural resources and cheap labor, and the
accumulation of enormous profits. The American people have had to
pay the costs of empire, supporting a huge military establishment
with their taxes, while suffering the loss of jobs, the neglect of
domestic services, and the loss of tens of thousands of American lives
in overseas military ventures.

The greatest costs, of course, have been borne by the peoples of the
Third World who have endured poverty, pillage, disease,
dispossession, exploitation, illiteracy, and the widespread
destruction of their lands, cultures, and lives.

As a relative latecomer to the practice of colonialism, the United

States could not match the older European powers in the acquisition
of overseas territories. But the United States was the earliest and
most consummate practitioner of neoimperialism or neocolonialism,
the process of dominating the politico-economic life of a nation
without benefit of direct possession. Almost half a century before the
British thought to give a colonized land its nominal independence, as
in India—while continuing to exploit its labor and resources, and
dominate its markets and trade—the United States had perfected this
practice in Cuba and elsewhere.

In places like the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and when

dealing with Native American nations, U.S. imperialism proved itself
as brutal as the French in Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the
Spaniards in South America, the Portuguese in Angola, the Italians
in Libya, the Germans in Southwest Africa, and the British almost
everywhere else. Not long ago, U.S. military forces delivered a
destruction upon Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that surpassed
anything perpetuated by the older colonizers. And today, the U.S.
counterinsurgency apparatus and surrogate security forces in Latin
America and elsewhere sustain a system of political assassination,
torture, and repression unequaled in technological sophistication
and ruthlessness.

All this is common knowledge to progressive critics of U.S policy, but

most Americans would be astonished to hear of it. They have been
taught that, unlike other nations, their country has escaped the sins
of empire and has been a champion of peace and justice among
nations. This enormous gap between what the United States does in
the world and what Americans think their nation is doing is one of
the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political
mythology. It should be noted, though, that despite the endless
propaganda barrage emanating from official sources and the
corporate-owned major media, large sectors of the public have
throughout U.S. history displayed an anti-interventionist sentiment,
an unwillingness to commit U.S. troops to overseas actions—a
sentiment facilely labeled "isolationism" by the interventionists.

The Rational Function of Policy Myths

Within U.S. ruling circles there are differences of opinion regarding
interventionist policy. There are conservatives who complain that
U.S. policy is plagued by weakness and lacks toughness and guts and
all the other John Wayne virtues. And there are liberals who say U.S.
policy is foolish and relies too heavily on military solutions and
should be more flexible and co-optive when protecting and
advancing the interests of the United States (with such interests
usually left unspecified).

A closer look reveals that U.S. foreign policy is neither weak nor
foolish, but on the contrary is rational and remarkably successful in
reproducing the conditions for the continued international
expropriation of wealth, and that while it has suffered occasional
setbacks, the people who run the foreign policy establishment in
Washington know what they are doing and why they are doing it.

If the mythology they offer as justification for their policies seems

irrational, this does not mean that the policies themselves are
irrational from the standpoint of the class interests of those who
pursue such policies. This is true of domestic myths and policies as
well as those pertaining to foreign policy. Once we grasp this, we can
see how notions and arrangements that are harmful, wasteful,
indeed, destructive of human and social values— and irrational from
a human and social viewpoint—are not irrational for global finance
capital because the latter has no dedication to human and social
values. Capitalism has no loyalty to anything but itself, to the
accumulation of wealth. Once we understand that, we can see the
cruel rationality of the seemingly irrational myths that Washington
policy makers peddle. Sometimes what we see as irrational is really
the discrepancy between what the myth wants us to believe and what
is true. But again this does not mean the interests served are stupid
or irrational, as the liberals like to complain. There is a difference
between confusion and deception, a difference between stupidity and
subterfuge. Once we understand the underlying class interests of the
ruling circles, we will be less mystified by their myths.

A myth is not an idle tale or a fanciful story but a powerful cultural

force used to legitimate existing social relations. The interventionist
mythology does just that, by emphasizing a community of interests
between interventionists in Washington and the American people
when in fact there is none, and by glossing over the question of who
pays and who profits from U.S. global interventionism.

The mythology has been with us for so long and much of it

sufficiently internalized by the public as to be considered part of the
political culture. The interventionist mythology, like all other cultural
beliefs, does not just float about in space. It must be mediated
through a social structure. The national media play a crucial role in
making sure that no fundamentally critical views of the rationales
underlying and justifying U.S. policy gain national exposure. A
similar role is played by the various institutes and policy centers
linked to academia and, of course, by political leaders themselves.

Saving Democracy with Tyranny

Our leaders would have us believe we intervened in Nicaragua, for
instance, because the Sandinista government was opposed to
democracy. The U.S.-supported invasion by right-wing Nicaraguan
mercenaries was an "effort to bring them to elections." Putting aside
the fact that the Sandinistas had already conducted fair and open
elections in 1984, we might wonder why U.S. leaders voiced no such
urgent demand for free elections and Western-style parliamentarism
during the fifty years that the Somoza dictatorship — installed and
supported by the United States—plundered and brutalized the
Nicaraguan nation. Nor today does Washington show any great
concern for democracy in any of the U.S.-backed dictatorships
around the world (unless one believes that the electoral charade in a
country like El Salvador qualifies as "democracy").

If anything, successive U.S. administrations have worked hard to

subvert constitutional and popularly accepted governments that
pursued policies of social reform favorable to the downtrodden and
working poor. Thus the U.S. national security state was instrumental
in the overthrow of popular reformist leaders such as Arbenz in
Guatemala, Jagan in Guyana, Mossadegh in Iran, Bosch in the
Dominican Republic, Sukarno in Indonesia, Goulart in Brazil, and
Allende in Chile. And let us not forget how the United States assisted
the militarists in overthrowing democratic governments in Greece,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Turkey. Given this record,
it is hard to believe that the CIA trained, armed, and financed an
expeditionary force of Somocista thugs and mercenaries out of a
newly acquired concern for Western-style electoral politics in
Nicaragua.

In defense of the undemocratic way U.S. leaders go about "saving

democracy," our policy makers offer this kind of sophistry: "We
cannot always pick and choose our allies. Sometimes we must
support unsavory right-wing authoritarian regimes in order to
prevent the spread of far more repressive totalitarian communist
ones." But surely, the degree of repression cannot be the criterion
guiding White House policy, for the United States has supported
some of the worst butchers in the world: Batista in Cuba, Somoza in
Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, Salazar in Portugal, Marcos in the
Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, Zia in Pakistan, Evren in Turkey, and
even Pol Pot in Cambodia. In the 1965 Indonesian coup, the military
slaughtered 500,000 people, according to the Indonesian chief of
security (New York Times, 12/21/77; some estimates run twice as
high), but this did not deter U.S. leaders from assisting in that
takeover or from maintaining cozy relations with the same Jakarta
regime that subsequently perpetuated a campaign of repression and
mass extermination in East Timor. For a more detailed account of
Indonesia and East Timor, see "The Invisible Bloodbaths" p. 126.

U.S. leaders and the business-owned mainstream press describe

"Marxist rebels" in countries like El Salvador as motivated by a lust
for conquest. Our leaders would have us believe that revolutionaries
do not seek power in order to eliminate hunger; they simply hunger
for power. But even if this were true, why would that be cause for
opposing them? Washington policy makers have never been
bothered by the power appetites of the "moderate" right-wing
authoritarian executionists, torturers, and militarists.

In any case, it is not true that leftist governments are more repressive
than fascist ones. The political repression under the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua was far less than what went on under Somoza. The
political repression in Castro's Cuba is mild compared to the
butchery perpetrated by the free-market Batista regime. And the
revolutionary government in Angola treats its people much more
gently than did the Portuguese colonizers.

Furthermore, in a number of countries successful social

revolutionary movements have brought a net increase in individual
freedom and well-being by advancing the conditions for health and
human life, by providing jobs and education for the unemployed and
illiterate, by using economic resources for social development rather
than for corporate profit, and by overthrowing brutal reactionary
regimes, ending foreign exploitation, and involving large sectors of
the populace in the task of rebuilding their countries. Revolutions
can extend a number of real freedoms without destroying those
freedoms that never existed under prior reactionary regimes.

Who Threatens Whom?

Our policy makers also argue that right-wing governments, for all
their deficiencies, are friendly toward the United States, while
communist ones are belligerent and therefore a threat to U.S.
security. But, in truth, every Marxist or left-leaning country, from a
great power like the Soviet Union to a small power like Vietnam or
Nicaragua to a minipower like Grenada under the New Jewel
Movement, sought friendly diplomatic and economic relations with
the United States. These governments did so not necessarily out of
love and affection for the United States, but because of something
firmer—their own self-interest. As they themselves admitted, their
economic development and political security would have been much
better served if they could have enjoyed good relations with
Washington.

If U.S. leaders justify their hostility toward leftist governments on

the grounds that such nations are hostile toward us, what becomes
the justification when these countries try to be friendly? When a
newly established revolutionary or otherwise dissident regime
threatens U.S. hegemonic globalists with friendly relations, this does
pose a problem. The solution is to (1) launch a well-orchestrated
campaign of disinformation that heaps criticism on the new
government for imprisoning the butchers, assassins, and torturers of
the old regime and for failing to institute Western electoral party
politics; (2) denounce the new government as a threat to our peace
and security; (3) harass and destabilize it and impose economic
sanctions; and (4) attack it with counterrevolutionary surrogate
forces or, if necessary, U.S. troops. Long before the invasion, the
targeted country responds with angry denunciations of U.S. policy. It
moves closer to other "outlawed" nations and attempts to build up its
military defenses in anticipation of a U.S.-sponsored attack. These
moves are eagerly seized upon by U.S. officials and media as
evidence of the other country's antagonism toward the United States,
and as justification for the policies that evoked such responses.

Yet it is difficult to demonstrate that small countries like Grenada

and Nicaragua are a threat to U.S. security. We remember the cry of
the hawk during the Vietnam war: "If we don't fight the Vietcong in
the jungles of Indochina, we will have to fight them on the beaches of
California." The image of the Vietnamese getting into their PT boats
and crossing the Pacific to invade California was, as Walter Cronkite
noted at the time, a grievous insult to the U.S. Navy. The image of a
tiny ill-equipped Nicaraguan army driving up through Mexico and
across the Rio Grande in order to lay waste to our land is equally
ludicrous. The truth is, the Vietnamese, Cubans, Grenadians, and
Nicaraguans have never invaded the United States; it is the United
States that has invaded Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua, and
it is our government that continues to try to isolate, destabilize, and
in other ways threaten any country that tries to drop out of the global
capitalist system or even assert an economic nationalism within it.

Remember the Red Menace

For many decades of cold war, when all other arguments failed, there
was always the Russian bear. According to our cold warriors, small
leftist countries and insurgencies threatened our security because
they were extensions of Soviet power. Behind the little Reds there
supposedly stood the Giant Red Menace. Evidence to support this
global menace thesis was sometimes far-fetched. President Carter
and National Security Advisor Brzezinski suddenly discovered a
"Soviet combat brigade" in Cuba in 1979— which turned out to be a
noncombat unit that had been there since 1962. This did not stop
President Reagan from announcing to a joint session of Congress
several years later: "Cuba is host to a Soviet combat brigade. . . ."

In 1983, in a nationally televised speech, Reagan pointed to satellite

photos that revealed the menace of three Soviet helicopters in
Nicaragua. Sandinista officials subsequently noted that the
helicopters could be seen by anyone arriving at Managua airport and,
in any case, posed no military threat to the United States. Equally
ingenious was the way Reagan transformed a Grenadian airport,
built to accommodate direct tourist flights, into a killer-attack Soviet
forward base, and a twenty-foot-deep Grenadian inlet into a
potential Soviet submarine base.

In 1967 Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued that U.S. national

security was at stake in Vietnam because the Vietnamese were
puppets of "Red China" and if China won in Vietnam, it would
overrun all of Asia and this supposedly would be the beginning of the
end for all of us. Later we were told that the Salvadoran rebels were
puppets of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua who were puppets of the
Cubans who were puppets of the Russians. In truth, there was no
evidence that Third World peoples took up arms and embarked upon
costly revolutionary struggles because some sinister ringmaster in
Moscow or Peking cracked the whip. Revolutions are not push-
button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exits a reservoir of
hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.
Revolutions are made when large segments of the population take
courage from each other and stand up to an insufferable social order.
People are inclined to endure great abuses before risking their lives
in confrontations with vastly superior armed forces. There is no such
thing as a frivolous revolution, or a revolution initiated and
orchestrated by a manipulative cabal residing in a foreign capital.

Nor is there evidence that once the revolution succeeded, the new
leaders placed the interests of their country at the disposal of Peking
or Moscow. Instead of becoming the willing puppets of "Red China,"
as our policy makers predicted, Vietnam found itself locked in
combat with its neighbor to the north. And, as noted earlier, almost
every Third World revolutionary country has tried to keep its options
open and has sought friendly diplomatic and economic relations with
the United States.

Why then do U.S. leaders intervene in every region and almost every
nation in the world, either overtly with U.S. military force or covertly
with surrogate mercenary forces, death squads, aid, bribes,
manipulated media, and rigged elections? Is all this intervention just
an outgrowth of a deeply conditioned anticommunist ideology? Are
U.S. leaders responding to the public's longstanding phobia about
the Red Menace? Certainly many Americans are anticommunist, but
this sentiment does not translate into a demand for overseas
interventionism. Quite the contrary. Opinion polls over the last half-
century have shown repeatedly that the U.S. public is not usually
supportive of committing U.S. forces in overseas engagements and
prefers friendly relations with other nations, including communist
ones. Far from galvanizing our leaders into interventionist actions,
popular opinion has been one of the few restraining influences.

There is no denying, however, that opinion can sometimes be

successfully manipulated by jingoist ventures. The invasion of
Grenada and the slaughter perpetrated against Iraq are cases in
point. The quick, easy, low-cost wins reaffirmed for some Americans
the feeling that we were not weak and indecisive, not sitting ducks to
some foreign prey. But even in these cases, it took an intensive and
sustained propaganda barrage of half-truths and lies by the national
security state and its faithful lackeys in the national media to muster
some public support for military actions against Grenada and Iraq.

In sum, various leftist states do not pose a military threat to U.S.

security; instead, they want to trade and live in peace with us, and
are much less abusive and more helpful toward their people than the
reactionary regimes they replaced. In addition, U.S. leaders have
shown little concern for freedom in the Third World and have helped
subvert democracy in a number of nations. And popular opinion
generally opposes interventionism by lopsided majorities. What then
motivates U.S. policy and how can we think it is not confused and
contradictory?
The answer is that Marxist and other leftist or revolutionary states do
pose a real threat, not to the United States as a national entity and
not to the American people as such, but to the corporate and
financial interests of our country, to Exxon and Mobil, Chase
Manhattan and First National, Ford and General Motors, Anaconda
and U.S. Steel, and to capitalism as a world system.

The problem is not that revolutionaries accumulate power but that

they use power to pursue substantive policies that are unacceptable
to U.S. ruling circles. What bothers our political leaders (and
generals, investment bankers, and corporate heads) is not the
supposed lack of political democracy in these countries but their
attempts to construct economic democracy, to depart from the
impoverishing rigors of the international free market, to use capital
and labor in a way that is inimical to the interests of multinational
corporatism.

A New York Times editorial (3/30/83) referred to "the undesirable

and offensive Managua regime" and the danger of seeing "Marxist
power ensconced in Managua." But what specifically is so dangerous
about "Marxist power?" What was undesirable and offensive about
the Sandinista government in Managua? What did it do to us? What
did it do to its own people? Was it the literacy campaign? The health
care and housing programs? The land reform and development of
farm cooperatives? The attempt at rebuilding Managua, at increasing
production or achieving a more equitable distribution of taxes,
services, and food? In large part, yes. Such reforms, even if not
openly denounced by our government, do make a country suspect
because they are symptomatic of an effort to erect a new and
competing economic order in which the prerogatives of wealth and
corporate investment are no longer secure, and the land, labor, and
resources are no longer used primarily for the accumulation of
corporate profits.

U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned press would have us believe

they opposed revolutionary governments because the latter do not
have an opposition press or have not thrown their country open to
Western style (and Western-financed) elections. U.S. leaders come
closer to their true complaint when they condemn such governments
for interfering with the prerogatives of the "free market." Similarly,
Henry Kissinger came close to the truth when he defended the fascist
overthrow of the democratic government in Chile by noting that
when obliged to choose between saving the economy or saving
democracy, we must save the economy. Had Kissinger said, we must
save the capitalist economy, it would have been the whole truth. For
under Allende, the danger was not that the economy was collapsing
(although the U.S. was doing its utmost to destabilize it); the real
threat was that the economy was moving away from free-market
capitalism and toward a more equitable social democracy, albeit in
limited ways.

U. S. officials say they are for change just as long as it is peaceful and
not violently imposed. Indeed, economic elites may sometimes
tolerate very limited reforms, learning to give a little in order to keep
a lot. But judging from Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and a number of
other places, they have a low tolerance for changes, even peaceful
ones, that tamper with the existing class structure and threaten the
prerogatives of corporate and landed wealth.

To the rich and powerful it makes little difference if their interests

are undone by a peaceful transformation rather than a violent
upheaval. The means concern them much less than the end results. It
is not the "violent" in violent revolution they hate; it is the
"revolution." (Third World elites seldom perish in revolutions. The
worst of them usually manage to make it to Miami, Madrid, Paris, or
New York.) They dread socialism the way the rest of us might dread
poverty and hunger. So, when push comes to shove, the wealthy
classes of Third World countries, with a great deal of help from the
corporate-military-political elites in our country, will use fascism to
preserve capitalism while claiming they are saving democracy from
communism.

A socialist Cuba or a socialist North Korea, as such, are not a threat

to the survival of world capitalism. The danger is not socialism in any
one country but a socialism that might spread to many countries.
Multinational corporations, as their name implies, need the entire
world, or a very large part of it, to exploit and to invest and expand
in. There can be no such thing as "capitalism in one country." The
domino theory—the view that if one country falls to the
revolutionaries, others will follow in quick succession—may not work
as automatically as its more fearful proponents claim, but there
usually is a contagion, a power of example and inspiration, and
sometimes even direct encouragement and assistance from one
revolution to another.

Support the Good Guys?

If revolutions arise from the sincere aspirations of the populace, then

it is time the United States identify itself with these aspirations, so
liberal critics keep urging. They ask: "Why do we always find
ourselves on the wrong side in the Third World? Why are we always
on the side of the oppressor?" Too bad the question is treated as a
rhetorical one, for it is deserving of a response. The answer is that
right-wing oppressors, however heinous they be, do not tamper with,
and give full support to, private investment and profit, while the
leftists pose a challenge to that system.

There are those who used to say that we had to learn from the
communists, copy their techniques, and thus win the battle for the
hearts and minds of the people. Can we imagine the ruling interests
of the United States abiding by this? The goal is not to copy
communist reforms but to prevent them. How would U.S.
interventionists try to learn from and outdo the revolutionaries?
Drive out the latifundio owners and sweatshop bosses? Kick out the
plundering corporations and nationalize their holdings? Imprison
the militarists and torturers? Redistribute the land, use capital
investment for home consumption or hard currency exchange
instead of cash crop exports that profit a rich few? Install a national
health insurance program and construct hospitals and clinics at
public expense? Mobilize the population for literacy campaigns and
for work in publicly owned enterprises? If U.S. rulers did all this,
they would have done more than defeat the communists and other
revolutionaries, they would have carried out the communists'
programs. They would have prevented revolution only by bringing
about its effects—thereby defeating their own goals.
U.S. policy makers say they cannot afford to pick and choose the
governments they support, but that is exactly what they do. And the
pattern of choice is consistent through each successive
administration regardless of the party or personality in office. U.S.
leaders support those governments, be they autocratic or democratic
in form, that are friendly toward capitalism and oppose those
governments, be they autocratic or democratic, that seek to develop a
noncapitalist social order.

Occasionally friendly relations are cultivated with noncapitalist

nations like China if these countries show themselves in useful
opposition to other socialist nations and are sufficiently open to
private capital exploitation. In the case of China, the economic
opportunity is so huge as to be hard to resist, the labor supply is
plentiful and cheap, and the profit opportunities are great.

In any one instance, interventionist policies may be less concerned

with specific investments than with protecting the global investment
system. The United States had relatively little direct investment in
Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada—to mention three countries that
Washington has invaded in recent years. What was at stake in
Grenada, as Reagan said, was something more than nutmeg. It was
whether we would let a country develop a competing economic order,
a different way of utilizing its land, labor, capital, and natural
resources. A social revolution in any part of the world may or may
not hurt specific U.S. corporations, but it nevertheless becomes part
of a cumulative threat to private finance capital in general.

The United States will support governments that seek to suppress

guerrilla movements, as in El Salvador, and will support guerrilla
movements that seek to overthrow governments, as in Nicaragua.
But there is no confusion or stupidity about it. It is incorrect to say,
"We have no foreign policy" or "We have a stupid and confused
foreign policy." Again, it is necessary not to confuse subterfuge with
stupidity. The policy is remarkably rational. Its central organizing
principle is to make the world safe for the multinational corporations
and the free-market capital-accumulation system. However, our
rulers cannot ask the U.S. public to sacrifice their tax dollars and the
lives of their sons for Exxon and Chase Manhattan, for the profit
system as such, so they tell us that the interventions are for freedom
and national security and the protection of unspecified "U.S.
interests."

Whether policy makers believe their own arguments is not the key
question. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Sometimes presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush,

and Bill Clinton were doing their hypocritical best when their voices
quavered with staged compassion for this or that oppressed people
who had to be rescued from the communists or terrorists with U.S.
missiles and troops, and sometimes they were sincere, as when they
spoke of their fear and loathing of communism and revolution and
their desire to protect U.S. investments abroad. We need not ponder
the question of whether our leaders are motivated by their class
interests or by a commitment to anti-communist ideology, as if these
two things were in competition with each other instead of mutually
reinforcing. The arguments our leaders proffer may be self-serving
and fabricated, yet also sincerely embraced. It is a creed's congruity
with one's material self-interest that often makes it so compelling.

In any case, so much of politics is the rational use of irrational

symbols. The arguments in support of interventionism may sound
and may actually be irrational and nonsensical, but they serve a
rational purpose. Once we grasp the central consistency of U.S.
foreign policy, we can move from a liberal complaint to a radical
analysis, from criticizing the "foolishness" of our government's
behavior to understanding why the "foolishness" is not random but
persists over time against all contrary arguments and evidence,
always moving in the same elitist, repressive direction.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European
communist governments, U.S. leaders now have a freer hand in their
interventions. A number of left reformist governments that had
relied on the Soviets for economic assistance and political protection
against U.S. interference now have nowhere to turn. For a discussion
of this point, see "Rollback," p. 44. The willingness of U.S. leaders to
tolerate economic deviations does not grow with their sense of their
growing power.
Quite the contrary. Now even the palest economic nationalism, as
displayed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein over oil prices, invites the
destructive might of the U.S. military. The goal now, as always, is to
obliterate every trace of an alternative system, to make it clear that
there is no road to take except that of the free market, in a world in
which the many at home and abroad will work still harder for less so
that the favored few will accumulate more and more wealth.

That is the vision of the future to which most U.S. leaders are
implicitly dedicated. It is a vision taken from the past and never
forgotten by them, a matter of putting the masses of people at home
and abroad back in their place, divested of any aspirations for a
better world because they are struggling too hard to survive in this
one.

THE TERRORISM HYPE

The U.S. national security state and its faithful lackeys in the news
media designate as "terrorist" those dissident political or nationalist
groups that operate against Western governments or against the
established interests of global corporations. While applied to the lone
gunman or the small circle of conspirators who plant a bomb,
"terrorism" is never used to describe the acts of massive repression
and destruction perpetrated against whole populations by U.S. forces
or by the armies of CIA-supported client states. A bomb planted in a
pub by a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) is a terrorist
act, but not the U.S. aerial bombing of whole working-class
neighborhoods in Panama City, or the U.S. bombing of civilian
populations in Bagdhad, or the burning of 660 villages in Guatemala
by U.S.-supported forces, or the roundups and mass executions of
democratic supporters in Chile, Indonesia, Afghanistan, South
Yemen, and other countries.

State-supported, right-wing terrorism, as practiced by U.S. client

states, is never defined as terrorism, though it is conducted on a far
greater scale than the isolated bombings carried out by any Basque,
Arab, or IRA group. Also left uncounted is the massive terrorism
perpetrated by U.S.-supported "guerrilla" mercenaries, as in Angola,
Mozambique, Nicaragua, and several other countries, in which entire
countrysides are devastated and massive numbers of people
slaughtered.

The Larger Terrorism

As critics of U.S. interventionism have pointed out, what is reported

as "terrorism" in the press is "retail terrorism." What goes unnoted is
"wholesale terrorism," the massive U.S.-backed, state-supported
kind. By any measure other than the peculiar one used by
Washington policy makers and propagandists, the U.S. national
security state is the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the world today
and has been for some time.

Tallying only the death toll inflicted by U.S. armed forces or U.S.-
backed surrogate forces around the world, the estimates are as
follows: 3,000,000 in Vietnam, 1,000,000 in Cambodia, 1,000,000
in Mozambique, 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia, 600,000 in
Angola, 300,000 in Laos, 250,000 in East Timor, 200,000 in Iraq,
200,000 in Afghanistan, 150,000 in Guatemala, 100,000 in
Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and tens of thousands in Chile,
Argentina, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil,
Panama, Somalia, South Yemen, Western Sahara, and other
countries.For details and documentation on the U.S.-imposed
postwar holocaust in the Third World, see my The Sword and the
Dollar (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); Edward Herman, The
Real Terror Network (Boston: South End Press, 1982); William
Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World
War //(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).

Against the blowing up of a building or an airliner, how do we

measure this U.S.-sponsored terrorism? To be sure, we must not
dismiss or make light of individual acts of terror. Yet we might
wonder why they are the only ones that warrant publicity and
condemnation. The wholesale terrorism of aerial massacres, death
squads, mass executions, torture, and intimidation orchestrated by
the U.S. national security state either goes unreported altogether or
is represented as the legitimate activity of governments defending
themselves from insurgencies and terrorists.
Even on those rare occasions when atrocities are reported, the
corporate-owned media never make the link between such horrific
events and the policies of intervention and repression directed from
Washington. The question is never asked: "Why do successive U.S.
governments support the kind of elements that are capable of
committing such acts? What interests are bolstered and what
interests retarded when whole villages of men, women, and children
are slaughtered by a military that is supplied and trained by the U.S.
government?

Those isolated acts of violence the press defines as terrorist are

subjected to a highly slanted mode of reportage. Consider that the
White House charged Libya with orchestrating the destruction of
Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, an incident
resulting in the loss of 270 lives. In fact, there were strong signs
pointing to terrorist groups in Syria and Iran. No matter,
Washington wanted to target Libya. Two Libyan "intelligence agents"
were named in the U.S. media as having committed the act of
terrorism. In fact, all we really knew about them was that they were
Libyan airline employees, yet they were repeatedly identified as
"secret agents." The New York Times ran an editorial demanding
that they be brought to justice and that the Libyan government,
particularly its leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, be held accountable.
The Libyans understandably refused to hand over the two men
because no evidence was ever presented linking any Libyan to the
Pan Am bombing.

Everybody, Here Come the Assassins!

Libya has been targeted on other occasions. In 1981, U.S. planes

attacked that country and shot down two Libyan training jets. In
1985, U.S. planes bombed two cities, killing a number of people,
including Qaddafi's young daughter. (They were aiming for Qaddafi.)
Neither of these terrorist attacks was condemned in the U.S. press.

An incident of terrorism hype that had the U.S. press hot and
bothered for the better part of two months, occurred in late 1981,
when the U.S. government announced that a Libyan team of
assassins, assisted by "East German terror experts," under orders
from Colonel Qaddafi, had entered the United States. Supposedly
armed with surface-to-air missiles, they were intending to kill
President Reagan and ten or so top officials including the secretary
of state and the secretary of defense.

The media's response to this fantastic tale was to treat it as solid fact.
On ABC-TV evening news (11/26/1981) Frank Reynolds stated that it
was "known" that Libyan agents were "in this country for the
purpose of assassinating the highest officials in the U.S.
government." CBS anchor Dan Rather announced on December 4, "A
squad of terrorists infiltrated the United States on a mission to kill
the president and his top aides. It sounds like the stuff of a suspense
novel... but American security officials tonight are taking the word of
an informant seriously."

That same evening, NBC began its report by asking, "Is it true?" and
then promptly treated it as if it were. An NBC correspondent asked
President Reagan if he was "worried about the assassination plot."
"Yes, of course," said Reagan. The camera cut to Secret Service men
leaping out of cars and racing around the president's limousine—an
image which itself suggested that the president was under imminent
attack.

ABC's "Nightline" (12/4/1981) presented a special on the "Libyan

Assassination Plot," featuring Ray Cline, a former deputy director of
the CIA, who claimed that Libyan terrorist groups were organized
"basically and initially by the Soviet Union," and that our "open
society" made our officials "sitting ducks" because "we have been
busy handcuffing the CIA and FBI for a number of years, and only
President Reagan is trying to turn them loose a bit to deal with these
threats."

For the sake of balance, the right-wing Cline was joined by right-
wing journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, introduced as a "terrorism
expert." He, too, assured viewers that the Libyans were working for
the Soviet Union and that Qaddafi, whom de Borchgrave claimed to
have interviewed "five times in my life," was a "pathological liar."
For added political diversity the panel included the right-winger
Marvin Zonis, a Likud cheerleader described as a "Mideast expert,"
who said that "Colonel Qaddafi had a conversation with another
leader of a Middle Eastern country in which he discussed very coolly
and in a rational way how he intended to go about assassinating
President Reagan." No one questioned Zonis about his source or
asked how it was possible that a leader of one nation would openly
discuss his plans to assassinate the U.S. president with the leader of
another nation who might impart this information to others. No one
appeared on the show to inject a cautionary note or question the
remarkable statements made by these three cold warriors.

The networks did their share to keep the White House's conspiracy
fantasy alive, running no less than twenty-four evening news reports
about the hit teams in one month. Viewers were told there were
three, five, ten, twelve, or thirteen hit men, depending on what
network and what evening you watched. The assassins had entered
the U.S. from Canada (ABC, CBS), from Mexico (CBS), and not from
Mexico (ABC). The hit squad was composed of three Libyans (ABC,
NBC), three Iranians (CBS, NBC), two Iranians (ABC), and three
Syrians (NBC). All three networks agreed that there was one
Palestinian, one Lebanese, and one East German. By the third week
there was said to be two hit squads. Never before had assassins
received such advanced billing. It should have been enough to deter
all but the wildest publicity hounds among them.

The national media were filled with accounts of FBI agents fanning
out across the country to hunt the assassins and heavily armed
security teams roosting on the White House roof. In addition, there
was film footage of Libyan soldiers firing "Soviet missile launchers"
to shoot down helicopters "such as the one the president used."
Police composite sketches of six would-be assassins, looking like
sinister, comic-book Third World characters, were carried by
newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post and
the New York Times, and flashed repeatedly across the TV screen.

The sketches were allegedly composed from descriptions provided by

an unidentified informant, who somehow was privy to the whole plot
and endowed with an exceptional memory for facial detail. They
were distributed to the media by columnist Jack Anderson who later
regretted doing it and wrote that he had been set up by an unnamed
"intelligence agency."

Needless to say, the nonexistent hit team(s) never materialized. It

remained for TV Guide (6/12/1986) to admit, in a cover story
entitled: "Why American TV Is so Vulnerable to Foreign
Propaganda," that the "assassination plot" consisted of nothing but
wild conjectures. TV Guide then disinformed its millions of readers
by asserting that the whole incident was probable evidence of a KGB
campaign to use alarmist rumors "to destabilize public opinion in the
West." Or perhaps the story was planted by Qaddafi himself, who "is
no madman" but "a shrewd Bedouin" "who is sitting back and
laughing over this." Thus TV Guide accused Qaddafi of deliberately
planting stories that implicated him in assassination plots against
the president of the United States, presumably so that he might give
U.S. leaders an excuse to deliver another murderous military
retaliation upon him and his country.

In our "open society," continued TV Guide, where "anything can get

reported," the press should be more wary of the false stories floated
by "Soviet intelligence sources." This assertion was as outlandish as
the original story itself. It ignored the fact that the assassination-
team fairy tale emanated from the White House rather than from any
foreign source. Indeed the press had been once again willingly duped
—by Washington, not Moscow.

The White House learned some things after it floated the

"assassination plot" story of 1981. In regard to the Pan Am bombing,
it came up with the names of two specific Libyan "agents," Abdel
Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, so that no
embarrassment need be suffered when imaginary assassins fail to
materialize. The White House also learned that it can inflict more
durable pain and punishment with economic sanctions than with a
few air strikes. So Libya has been repeatedly hit with trade sanctions.

Qaddafi's Real Sins

Still, we might ask what motivates all this hostility against Libya?
Why has a country of three million inhabitants with a ragtag army of
55,000 been singled out by U.S. leaders and media as a major threat
to U.S. national security? And why is Libya still targeted today with
oil and trade embargoes? Is it because U.S. policy is just stupid or
mean? More likely, the attacks have been motivated by Washington's
concern that Libya is one of those renegade countries that refuses
client-state status, not unlike Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas),
Islamic Iran, nationalist Iraq, and communist Cuba and North
Korea.

There are countries that do not want to be an integrated part of the

global free-market system. They do not want to open their land,
labor, markets, and natural resources to U.S. investors, saying in
effect, "Come on in, it's all yours. There are no occupational safety
laws, no corporate taxes, no environmental standards, no limit to
what you can carve out of our land at outrageously low prices, no
minimum wage, no real labor unions. And if the workers or peasants
get out of line, our police and military, who are trained and equipped
by your military, will take care of them, for there are no
constitutional protections either. You give us oligarchs a generous
cut and the rest is all yours. You make this society safe for us and we
will open it completely to you." The nations that refuse this contract
with America run the risk of being targeted as "terrorist states."

After Qaddafi took power in the 1969 colonels' rebellion, he

nationalized Libya's oil industry and set about transforming a
country that resembled Saudi Arabia into a more egalitarian society,
using a larger portion of its capital and labor for popular needs
rather than corporate profits, building health clinics, schools, and
public housing, and implementing massive reforestation programs.

Independent, reform-minded Third World leaders like Qaddafi have

a chancy future in the New World Order. They do not have the right
politics. They do not represent the right class interests. For that
reason we, the American people, ought to get to know more about
what they are doing and find out how we too can produce leaders
who do not worship at the altar of global free-market corporate
capitalism, "dangerous" leaders who put public need before private
greed.

Meanwhile we are not likely to see a swift end to the terrorism hype.
Indeed, in 1995, President Clinton sponsored the "Omnibus Counter-
terrrorism Act," which the U.S. Senate passed by a vote of ninety-one
to eight. Among other things, the bill authorized the president to
unilaterally designate as "terrorist" any group anywhere in the world
—without offering a shred of evidence. Any challenge to the
president's declaration would have been a criminal offense. Any
donation of money or aid or other kind of support to the "terrorist
group" would have been punishable with ten years in prison and a
$50,000 fine. The bill would also have allowed the FBI to infiltrate,
wiretap, and investigate groups and individuals with no previous
proof of criminal activity.The bill was voted down in the House of
Representatives in December 1995 by a coalition of civil-liberties
minded Democrats and conservative Republicans, the latter
concerned that the bill would infringe on the rights of ultra-rightist
groups and the gun lobby.

With the overthrow of most communist states, U.S. leaders face a

shortage of adversaries needed to justify U.S. global interventionism.
"Fighting terrorism" now takes the place of "fighting communism" as
the rationale for a huge military state and a repressive national
security apparatus at home and abroad, the true function of which is
to keep the world safe for those who own it. The real danger we face
is not from terrorism but from what is being done under the pretext
of fighting it.

FREE SPEECH—AT A PRICE

What does it mean to say we have freedom of speech? Many of us
think free speech is a right enjoyed by everyone in our society. In
fact, it does not exist as an abstract right. There is no such thing as a
freedom detached from the socioeconomic reality in which it might
find a place.
Speech is a form of interpersonal behavior. This means it occurs in a
social context, in homes, workplaces, schools, and before live
audiences or vast publics via the print and electronic media. Speech
is intended to reach the minds of others. This is certainly true of
political speech. But some kinds of political speech are actively
propagated before mass audiences and other kinds are systematically
excluded.

Ideologically Distributed

In the political realm, the further left one goes on the opinion
spectrum the more difficult it is to gain exposure and access to larger
audiences. Strenuously excluded from the increasingly concentrated
corporate-owned media are people on the Left who go beyond the
conservative-liberal orthodoxy and speak openly about the negative
aspects of big capital and what it does to people at home and abroad.
Progressive people, designated as "the Left," believe that the poor are
victims of the rich and the prerogatives of wealthy and powerful
interests should be done away with. They believe labor unions should
be strengthened and the rights of working people expanded; the
environment should be rigorously protected; racism, sexism, and
homophobia should be strenuously fought; and human services
should be properly funded.

Progressives also argue that revolutionary governments that bring

social reforms to their people should be supported rather than
overthrown by the U.S. national security state, that U.S.-sponsored
wars of attrition against reformist governments in Vietnam,
Nicaragua, Angola, and a dozen other countries are not "mistakes"
but crimes perpetrated by those who would go to any length to
maintain their global privileges.

To hold such opinions is to be deprived of any regular access to the

major media. In a word, some people have more freedom of speech
than others. People who take positions opposing the ones outlined
above are known as conservatives or right-wingers. Conservative
pundits have a remarkable amount of free speech. They favor
corporations and big profits over environmental and human needs,
see nothing wrong with amassing great wealth while many live in
poverty, blame the poor for the poverty that has been imposed upon
them, see regulations against business as a bureaucratic sin, and
worship at the altar of the free market. They support repressive U.S.
interventions abroad and pursue policies opposed to class, gender,
and racial equality.

Such rightists as Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley Jr., John

McLaughlin, George Will, and Robert Novak enjoy much more
exposure to mass audiences than left liberals and populists like Jim
Hightower, Jerry Brown, or Ralph Nader. And all of them,
conservatives and liberals, enjoy more exposure than anyone on the
more "radical" or Marxist Left.

It is the economic power of the rich corporate media owners and

advertisers that provides right-wingers with so many mass outlets,
not the latter's wit and wisdom. It is not public demand that brings
them on the air; it is private corporate owners and sponsors. They
are listened to by many not because they are so appealing but
because they are so available. Availability is the first and necessary
condition of consumption. In this instance, supply does not merely
satisfy demand; supply creates demand. Hence, those who align
themselves with the interests of corporate America will have more
freedom of expression than those who remain steadfastly critical.1

People on the Left are free to talk to each other, though sometimes
they are concerned their telephones are tapped or their meetings are
infiltrated by government agents and provocateurs— as has so often
been the case over the years. Leftists are sometimes allowed to teach
in universities but they usually run into difficulties regarding what
they say and write and they risk being purged from faculty
positions.2 Leftists are free to work for labor unions but they
generally have to keep their politics carefully under wraps, especially
communists. People on the Left can even speak publicly, but usually
to audiences that seldom number more than a few hundred. And
they are free to write for progressive publications, which lack the
promotional funds to reach mass readerships, publications that are
perennially teetering on the edge of insolvency for want of rich
patrons and corporate advertisers.
1 For further discussion of this, see "The 'Liberal Media' Myth," p. 97.

2 For an account of my own experiences with repression in

academia, see "Struggles in Academe," p. 235.

In sum, free speech belongs mostly to those who can afford it. It is a
commodity that needs to be marketed like any other commodity.
And massive amounts of money are needed to reach mass audiences.
So when it comes to freedom of speech, some people have their
voices amplified tens of millions of times, while others must cup
their hands and shout at the passing crowd.

The Freedom of Power

We are taught to think of freedom as something antithetical to

power. And there is something to this. The peoples hard-won
democratic rights do sometimes act as a restraint on the arbitrary
power of rulers. But to secure our freedom we have to mobilize
enough popular power to check state power. In other words, freedom
and power are not always antithetical; they are frequently symbiotic.
If one has no power, one has very little freedom to protect one's
interests against those who do have power. Our freedoms are
realities only so far as we have the democratic power to make them
so.

People on the Left have freedom only to the extent they have rallied
their forces, have agitated, educated, and organized strikes, boycotts,
and demonstrations, and have fought back against the higher circles.
They have no freedom to reach mass audiences because popular
power and iconoclastic opinion have not penetrated the corporate
citadels that control the mass communication universe.

We were never "given" what freedoms we do have, certainly not by

the framers of the Constitution. Recall that the Bill of Rights was not
part of the original Constitution. It was added after ratification, as
ten amendments. When Colonel Mason of Virginia proposed a Bill of
Rights at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, it
was voted down almost unanimously (Massachusetts abstained).
Popular protests, land seizures by the poor, food riots, and other
disturbances made the men of property who gathered in Philadelphia
uncomfortably aware of the need for an effective central authority
that could be sufficiently protective of the propertied classes. But
such popular ferment also set a limit on what the framers dared to
do. Belatedly and reluctantly they agreed during the ratification
struggle to include a Bill of Rights, a concession made under threat of
democratic agitation and in the hope that the amendments would
ensure ratification of the new Constitution.

So the Bill of Rights was not a gift from that illustrious gaggle of rich
merchants, land and currency speculators, and slaveholders known
as our "Founding Fathers." It was a product of class struggle. The
same was true of the universal franchise. It took mass agitation from
the 1820s to the 1840s by workers and poor farmers to abolish
property qualifications and win universal white male suffrage.
Almost a century of agitation and struggle was necessary to win the
franchise for women. And a bloody civil war and subsequent
generations of struggle were needed to win basic political rights for
African Americans, a struggle still far from complete.

During the early part of the twentieth century a nationwide union

movement in this country called the Industrial Workers of the World
(the "Wobblies") struggled for the betterment of working people in
all occupations. To win gains, the Wobblies had to organize, that is,
they had to be able to speak out and reach people. To speak out, they
had to confront the repressive tactics of local police who would beat,
arrest, and jail their organizers. The Wobblies discovered that if they
went into a town with five hundred people instead of five, then the
sheriff and his deputies could do little to stop them from holding
public meetings.

The right to free speech was established de facto during the course of
class struggle. The Wobblie free speech fights were simultaneously a
struggle for procedural democracy impelled by a struggle for
substantive economic democracy. This fight continued into the Great
Depression, as mass organization and agitation brought freedom of
speech to hundreds of local communities, where police had
previously made a practice of physically assaulting and incarcerating
union organizers, syndicalists, anarchists, socialists, and
communists.

So it went with other freedoms and democratic gains like the eight-
hour day, Social Security, unemployment and disability insurance,
and the right to collective bargaining. All such democratic economic
rights, even though they may be seriously limited and insufficiently
developed, exist to some degree because of popular struggle against
class privilege and class power.

Freedom for Criminal Intelligence Agencies?

Like other freedoms, free speech is situational. It exists in a social

and class context, which is true of democracy itself. Once we
understand that, we can avoid the mistaken logic of a news columnist
like Nat Hentoff who repeatedly attacks left activists who commit
civil disobedience protesting CIA campus recruiters and military
recruiters. Hentoff says they interfere with the freedom of speech of
those students who want to talk to the recruiters (as if students had
no other opportunity to do so). Hentoff also is worried that the CIA
was having its rights abridged.

Such a view of freedom of speech has no link to the realities of

human suffering and social justice, no connection to the realities of
class power and state power, no link to the democratic struggle
against the murderous force of the CIA, no acknowledgment that the
CIA routinely suppresses the basic rights of people all over the world
in the most brutal fashion. With a $25 billion yearly budget, with its
tens of thousands of operatives unleashing death squads and wars of
attrition against democratic forces and impoverished peoples around
the world, with its control of hundreds of publications, publishing
houses, and wire services, with thousands of agents pouring out
disinformation, the CIA has more "free speech" than all those who
protest its crimes— because it is backed by more money and more
power.

With his tendency to treat rights as something apart from

socioeconomic realities, Hentoff would have us think that the CIA is
just another participant in a democratic campus dialogue. In fact, the
CIA is itself one of the greatest violators of free speech both at home
and abroad. Those who take the one-dimensional Hentoff approach
say nothing about the freedom of speech that millions might gain by
shutting down the CIA and all such agencies of violence and
repression, nothing about the lives that would be saved and the
freedom salvaged in Third World countries that feel the brunt of the
CIA onslaught.

By coercively limiting CIA recruitment, the campus demonstrators

made a statement that goes beyond discourse and becomes part of
the democratic struggle. By dramatically— through direct
confrontation—questioning the CIA's legitimacy on college campuses
and thereby challenging (even in a small way) its ability to promote
oppressive political orders around the world, the demonstrators were
expanding the realm of freedom, not diminishing it.

Of course, this has to be measured against the violations these same

protestors commit, specifically the inconveniencing of some upper-
and upper-middle-class students who don't want to have to travel off
campus in order to ask CIA recruiters about pursuing a career of
political crime. This latter right seems to weigh more heavily in
Hentoff's mind than all the attendant misdeeds perpetrated by the
CIA.

If we take Hentoff's position, there can be no direct actions, no civil

disobedience by the powerless against the established powerful
because these would constitute infringements on the recruitment
efforts of the CIA. Hentoff's failure to deal with the context of power
and wealth in free speech issues leaves him in the ridiculous position
of defending the CIA's freedom of speech—and worse, its freedom of
action. It is the same position that led to the overthrow of the
Fairness Doctrine: the corporate media bosses were being limited in
their free speech because they had to grant it to others.

Struggle for More Democracy

If the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years have taught us anything, it is that

our freedoms are neither guaranteed nor secure—unless we agitate
and show our strength. If democratic struggle has taught us
anything, it is that our rights are not things that must be "preserved."
Rather, they must be vigorously used and expanded. As with the
physical body, so with the body politic: our capacities are more likely
to grow if exercised and developed. Freedom of speech needs less
abstract admiration and more militant exercise and application. Use
it or lose it.

Democracy is not a "precarious fragile gift" handed down to us like

some Grecian urn. Rather, it is a dynamically developing process that
emerges from the struggle between popular interests and the
inherently undemocratic nature of wealthy interests.

Rather than fear an "excess of democracy" (A term used by, among

others, Harvard political scientist and cold war apologist Samuel P.
Huntington.) as do some of our media pundits and mandarin
academics, we must struggle for more popular power, more victories
for labor and human services, more victories against racism, sexism,
and militarism, and against capitalism's apparent willingness to
destroy the environment. And we need to muster more opposition to
U.S. interventions around the world. (On U.S. interventionism, see
"Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy," p. 55.)

We must push for more not-for-profit economic development, more

democratic ownership of productive forces and services, more
ideological variety and dissidence in the mainstream media, more
listener-controlled access to radio and television stations. In every
field of endeavor we must learn to see the dimensions of the struggle
that advances the interests of the many and opposes the interests of
the outrageously privileged, overweening few; in other words, a
struggle for more democracy, of the kind that brings an advance in
social conditions for everyone, a socially conscious allocation of
community resources for the sake of the community rather than for
the greed of private investors, and an equalization and improvement
of life standards that in effect brings less freedom for the CIA and the
interests it serves but more freedom for the rest of us. Essential to
such an agenda is a freedom of speech that is not limited to media
moguls and their acolytes but is available to persons of all ideological
persuasions.
TERM LIMITS: TRICK OR TREAT?
There is much urgent talk about the need to limit incumbency in the
U.S. Congress, most of it coming from the Right. In California and a
number of other states, things went further than talk. The liberal
leadership of the state legislature was forced out of office after voters
passed a proposition limiting Assembly tenure to six years and
Senate tenure to eight years. During the 1990 campaign, President
Bush and Vice President Quayle made a point of journeying to
California to support term limits.

Unfortunately, a number of people of progressive persuasion are

standing shoulder to shoulder with the right-wingers on this issue.
The appeal is understandable. Term limits supposedly would rid the
Congress of entrenched oligarchs who long ago sold their souls to the
moneyed interests. Competition would improve the quality of
candidates and limit the influence of PACs. Infusions of fresh blood
would also bring fresh and creatively progressive ideas and a more
democratic performance.

A Conservative Scheme

If all that were true, why would right-wingers like George Bush, Dan
Quayle, and George Will favor term limits and a swifter turnover of
congressional occupants? Is it because they are desirous of seeing the
entrenched moneyed interests routed and a more democratic and
progressive Congress emerging? I suspect they have a different
agenda.

Conservatives have nothing against incumbency when it is their

people who are filling the slots. Some conservatives, most notably
President Nixon and, more vehemently, President Reagan during his
last days in office, have wanted to abolish the 22nd Amendment,
which places a two-term limit on presidential incumbents.
Conservatives feel they have the inside track on the presidency for
several reasons. First, the defection of the South into the GOP
column has given the Republicans a built-in head start in the
electoral college, the very same head start once enjoyed by the
Democratic Party when the South was solidly Democratic. Second,
the electoral college gives two extra votes to each state regardless of
population, thereby padding the number of electors claimed by
numerous smaller and more conservative states.

Third, and most important of all, it takes hundreds of millions of

dollars to win a presidential nomination and election. The presidency
has been priced out of the reach of any progressives. The decline of
grassroots party organizations and the domination of national
campaigns by television has only increased the need for big money
and decreased popular input. No wonder the Republicans would like
to get rid of term limits in regard to the presidency.

To my knowledge, no conservative has uttered a word favoring a

constitutional amendment that would limit the terms of Supreme
Court justices or federal judges. Judges must be "independent" from
politically partisan pressures, they argue, so that they may remain
judiciously objective in their judgments. The dirty truth is that the
judiciary was thoroughly packed during the Reagan and Bush
administrations with hundreds of relatively young, conservative
ideologues, who will be handing down decisions into the third decade
of the next century. The Clinton appointees to the federal courts are
mostly people of conventional or unpronounced political orientation,
who are more or less at home with the conservatives on most issues.

Why do many conservatives, who see nothing wrong with limitless

terms for presidents and lifelong appointments for judges, want
limited terms for Congress? (As far as I know, only one prominent
conservative, Pat Buchanan, has come out for term limits for federal
judges, as of October 1995. And he does not push the issue very
strongly.) Ronald Reagan gave us the answer. Just before leaving
office he commented that the executive and judiciary "are fine" but
the legislature still remains "a problem." He meant that a substantial
liberal political formation still survived in Congress. These liberals
occasionally favor the democratic interest over moneyed interests.
They call, albeit weakly, for taxing the rich. They have passed
(watered-down) laws for occupational safety, public housing, public
transportation, clean air, clean water, and bigger cuts in military
spending. They support at least minimum levels of human services
for the indigent and stricter regulations of the banking industry, the
timber industry, and other plunderers. And many of them keep
getting reelected. Though pitifully inadequate in terms of what is
really needed, all this is enough to annoy any right-winger.

For decades political scientists pointed out that the congressional

seniority system allowed for the entrenchment of conservatives of
both parties. They presided like petty tyrants over their committee
satrapies and accumulated power over the legislative process by
virtue of being repeatedly elected. For decades such criticisms were
ignored. Today the seniority system isn't what it used to be but it is
still operative. And for the first time, when liberals and even some
left progressives like Ron Dellums and John Conyers moved into
committee chairs, suddenly the issue of incumbency was targeted by
conservatives and publicized in the national media. It became an
issue for the corporate mainstream media because it had become a
conservative crusade.

An Amateur Congress

With term limitations we will be faced with a rotating amateur

Congress, one perpetually populated by freshmen and sophomores,
who must leave office after their second or third stint, facing off
against a well-entrenched national security state, a large professional
bureaucracy, and corporate lobbyists who are elected by no one but
who will be far more experienced and long-lived than the term-
limited legislators.

The legislative amateurs will still need large sums of money to get
elected and will be even more vulnerable than before to powerful
professional lobbyists. They will also be increasingly dependent on
congressional staffers, who are elected by no one. And when one
recalls that it takes many years and sometimes decades of struggle to
pass major legislation that could offer some protection of public
interests, we might wonder who in Congress will be able to stick
around long enough to see things through.

I suspect that is why conservatives suddenly became so enthusiastic

about rotation of legislative office. A more rapid turnover would wipe
out any potential seniority of the Democratic liberals in Congress and
would pit short-term transient legislators against an entrenched and
increasingly conservative state power. Unlike some liberals, people
like Reagan and Bush do not treat process and performance as if
existing in a social vacuum. They are keenly aware of how ongoing
institutional arrangements advance or retard their political interests.
They understand power because they have so much of it and have so
much to protect with it.

In 1994, for the first time in decades, the Republicans won a majority
in both houses of Congress. Most of the conservative ideologues
among them still remained committed to term limits. A bill
proposing term limits was defeated after a close vote. In the years
since, feeling they have a good chance to retain control of Congress,
conservatives seem to have quieted down about the issue.

In any case, before progressive people jump on any bandwagon to

"throw the rascals out," they better check on who else is going along
for the ride.

MEDIA AND CULTURE

THE "LIBERAL MEDIA" MYTH
It is a widely accepted belief in this country that the press suffers
from a liberal bias. Television pundits, radio talk-show hosts, and
political leaders, including presidents of both parties, help propagate
this belief. And their views are widely disseminated in the media. In
contrast, dissident critics, who maintain that the corporate-owned
press exercises a conservative grip on news and commentary, are
afforded almost no exposure in the supposedly liberal media.

Consider the case of David Horowitz. When Horowitz was a radical

author and editor of Ramparts, the mainstream press ignored his
existence. But after he and former Ramparts colleague Peter Colliers
surfaced as new-born conservatives, the Washington Post Magazine
gave prominent play to their "Lefties for Reagan" pronunciamento.
Horowitz and Colliers soon linked up with the National Forum
Foundation, which dipped into deep conservative pockets and came
up with hundreds of thousands of dollars to enable the two ex-
radicals to do ideological battle with the Left. Today Horowitz is a
rightist media critic, who has his own radio show and who appears
with dismaying frequency on radio and television to whine about
how radio and television shut out the conservative viewpoint.

Then there is the multitude of talk-show hosts, of whom Rush

Limbaugh is only the best-known, who rail against the "pinko press"
on hundreds of local television stations and thousands of radio
stations owned by wealthy conservatives and underwritten by big
business firms. To complain about how the media are dominated by
liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour
on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.

There are well-financed, right-wing, media-watch organizations,

such as Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media (AIM). In a syndicated
column appearing in over one hundred newspapers and a radio show
aired on some two hundred stations, Irvine and his associates
complain that conservative viewpoints are frozen out of the media.
Many left critics would like to be frozen out the way AIM, Limbaugh,
and Horowitz are.

Not to be overlooked is National Empowerment Television (NET), a

new cable network available in all fifty states, offering round-the-
clock conservative political commentary. In the words of its founder
Paul Weyrich, NET is dedicated to countering media news that "is
riddled with a far-left political bias" and "unacceptable" notions
about "gender norming, racial quotas, global warming, and gays in
the military."

Political leaders do their share to reinforce the image of a liberal

press. During the Iran-contra affair, President Reagan likened the
"liberal" media to "a pack of sharks." More recently President Clinton
complained that he had "not gotten one damn bit of credit from the
knee-jerk liberal press." Clinton is confused. Almost all the criticism
hurled his way by the so-called liberal press is coming from
conservatives.
He Who Pays the Piper

There is no free and independent press in the United States. The

notion of a "free market of ideas" is as mythical as the notion of a free
market of goods. Both conjure up an image of a bazaar in which
many small producers sell their wares on a more or less equal
footing. In fact—be it commodities or commentary—to reach a mass
market you need huge sums of money to buy exposure and
distribution. Those without big bucks end up with a decidedly
smaller clientele, assuming they are able to survive at all.

Who owns the big media? The press lords who come to mind are
Hearst, Luce, Murdoch, Sulzberger, Annenberg, and the like,
personages of markedly conservative hue who regularly leave their
ideological imprint on both news and editorial content. The boards
of directors of many print and broadcast news organizations are
populated by representatives from Ford, General Motors, General
Electric, Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, ITT, IBM, and other
corporations in a system of interlocking directorates that resembles
the boards of any other corporation. Among the major stockholders
of the three largest networks are Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, and
Citibank. NBC is owned outright by General Electric, a corporation
that frequently backs conservative causes and candidates. In 1995,
CBS was bought up by Westinghouse for $5 billion and Time Warner
prepared to take over Ted Turner's CNN. ABC is owned by Disney,
another politically conservative multinational firm, which ranks
among the top Fortune 500 corporations.

Not surprisingly, this pattern of ownership affects how news and

commentary are manufactured. Virtually all chief executives of
mainstream news organizations are drawn from a narrow, high-
income stratum and tilt decidedly to the right in their political
preferences. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was once asked in an
interview: "You're considered to be politically conservative. To what
extent do you influence the editorial posture of your newspapers?"
He responded with refreshing candor: "Considerably... my editors
have input, but I make the final decisions." In 1995, Disney bought
ABC and all other Capital Cities media holdings for $19 billion, then
wasted no time moving the network's editorial policies still further to
the right, firing one remaining liberal editor and populist
commentator, Jim Hightower, and forcing ABC to recant its expose
of how cigarette manufacturers manipulate nicotine levels to
increase addiction.

Corporate advertisers exercise an additional conservative influence

on the media. They cancel accounts not only when stories reflect
poorly on their product but when they perceive liberal tendencies
creeping into news reports and commentary.

As might be expected from business-dominated media, the concerns

of labor are regularly downplayed. Jonathan Tasini, head of the
National Writers Union, studied all reports dealing with workers'
issues carried by ABC, CBS and NBC evening news during 1989,
including child care and minimum wage: it came to only 2.3 percent
of total coverage. No wonder one survey found that only 6 percent of
business leaders thought the media treatment accorded them was
"poor," while 66 percent said it was "good" or "excellent."

Religious media manifest the same gross imbalance of right over left.
The fundamentalist media—featuring homophobic, sexist,
reactionary, televangelists like Pat Robertson—comprise a $2-
billion-a-year industry, controlling about 10 percent of all radio
outlets and 14 percent of the nation's television stations. In contrast,
the Christian Left lacks the financial backing needed to gain major
media access.

The Petroleum Broadcasting System

A favorite conservative hallucination is that the Public Broadcasting

System is a leftist stronghold. In fact, more than 70 percent of PBS's
prime-time shows are funded wholly or mostly by four giant oil
companies, earning it the sobriquet of "Petroleum Broadcasting
System." PBS's public affairs programs are underwritten by General
Electric, General Motors, Metropolitan Life, Pepsico, Mobil, Paine
Webber, and the like. One media watchdog group found that
corporate representatives constitute 44 percent of program sources
about the economy; activists account for only 3 percent, while labor
representatives are virtually shut out. Guests on National Public
Radio (NPR) and PBS generally are as ideologically conservative as
any found on commercial networks. Even "Frontline" and Bill
Mover's "Listening to America"—favorite GOP targets—use
Republicans far more frequently than Democrats.

Conservatives like Horowitz make much of the occasional

muckraking documentary that is aired on public television. But most
PBS documentaries are politically nondescript or centrist.
Progressive works rarely see the light of day. Documentaries like
Faces of War (revealing the brutality of the U.S.-backed
counterinsurgency in El Salvador), Building Bombs (on nuclear
weapons proliferation), Coverup (on the Iran-Contra conspiracy),
Deadly Deception (an Academy Award-winning critique of General
Electric and the nuclear arms industry) and Panama Deception (an
Academy Award-winning expose of the U.S. invasion of Panama)
were, with a few local exceptions, denied broadcast rights on both
commercial and public television.

A rightist perspective dominates commentary shows like NBC's

"McLaughlin Group," PBS's "One on One" (with McLaughlin as
host), CNBC's "McLaughlin Show" (with guess who), PBS's "Firing
Line" with William F. Buckley, CNN's "Evans and Novak" and
"Capital Gang," and ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley." The
spectrum of opinion on such programs, as on the pages of most
newspapers, ranges from far right to moderate right or center, in a
display of false balancing. Facing Pat Buchanan on CNN's
"Crossfire," Michael Kinsley correctly summed it up: "Buchanan is
much further to the right than I am to the left."

On foreign affairs the press's role as a cheerleader of the national

security state and free-market capitalism seems almost without
restraint. Virtually no favorable exposure has ever been given to
indigenous Third World revolutionary or reformist struggles or to
protests at home and abroad against U.S. overseas interventions. The
media's view of the world is much the same as the view from the
State Department and the Pentagon. The horrendous devastation
wreaked upon the presumed beneficiaries of U.S. power generally
goes unmentioned and unexplained—as do the massive human rights
violations perpetrated by U.S.-supported forces in dozens of free-
market client states.

Why Do Conservatives Complain?

If news and commentary are so preponderantly conservative, why do

rightists blast the press for its supposedly left bias? For one thing,
such attacks help create a climate of opinion favorable to the Right.
Railing against the press's "liberalism" is a way of putting the press
on the defensive, keeping it leaning rightward for its respectability,
so that liberal opinion in this country is forever striving for
credibility within a conservatively defined framework.

Ideological control is not formal and overt as with a state censor but
informal and usually implicit. Hence it works with imperfect effect.
Editors sometimes are unable to see the troublesome implications of
one or another story. As far as right-wingers are concerned, too
much gets in that should be excluded. Their goal is not partial
control but perfect control, not an overbearing advantage (which
they already have) but total dominance of the communication
universe. Anything short of unanimous support for a rightist agenda
is treated as evidence of liberal bias. Expecting the press corps to be a
press chorus, the conservative ideologue, like an imperious maestro,
reacts sharply to the occasionally discordant note.

The discordant notes can be real. The news media never challenge
the free market ideology but they do occasionally report things that
might put business and the national security state in a bad light:
toxic waste dumping by industrial firms, price gouging by defense
contractors, bodies piling up in Haiti, financial thievery on Wall
Street, and the like. These exposures are more than rightists care to
hear and are perceived by them as a liberal vendetta.

The problem faced by conservatives is that reality itself is radical.

The Third World really is poor and oppressed. The U.S. usually does
side with Third World oligarchs. Our tax system really is regressive.
Millions of Americans do live in poverty. Public services are really
being ruthlessly cut. Our children do face a less promising economic
future than did we. The corporations do plunder and pollute the
environment. Real wages for blue-collar workers have declined. And
the rich have dramatically increased their share of the pie. Despite its
best efforts, there are limits to how much the press can finesse these
realities.

The limits of reality sometimes impose limits on propaganda, as Dr.

Goebbels discovered when trying to explain to the German public
how invincible Nazi armies could win victory after victory while
retreating on both fronts in 1944 and 1945. Although it sees the
world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and
government elites, the press must occasionally report some of the
unpleasantness of life—if only to maintain its credibility. On such
occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.

Rightist ideologues object not only to what the press says but to what
it omits. They castigate the press for failing to tell the American
people that federal bureaucrats, "cultural elites," gays, lesbians,
feminists, and abortionists are destroying the nation, that the U.S.
military and corporate America are our only salvation, that there is
no health care problem, that eco-terrorists stalk the land, that the
environment is doing just fine—and other such loony tunes.

Self-Censorship

Reporters often operate in a state of self-censorship and anticipatory

response. They frequently wonder aloud how their boss is taking
things. They recall instances when superiors have warned them not
to antagonize big advertisers and other powerful interests. They can
name journalists who were banished for turning in the wrong kind of
copy. Still, most newspeople treat these incidents as aberrant
departures from a basically professional news system and insist they
owe their souls to no one. They claim they are free to say what they
like, not realizing it is because their superiors like what they say.
Since they seldom cross any forbidden lines, they are not reined in
and they remain unaware that they are on an ideological leash.

While incarcerated in Mussolini's dungeons from 1928 to 1937,

Antonio Gramsci wrote about politics and culture in his prison
notebooks. But he had to be careful to disguise his references to
capitalism, class power, and class conflict so as not to antagonize the
fascist censor. (The fascists knew what class they were working for.)
Today most of our journalists and social commentators exercise a
similar caution. However, unlike Gramsci, they are not in prison.
They don't need a fascist censor breathing down their necks because
they have a mainstream one implanted in their heads.

These internalized forms of self-censorship are far more effective in

preserving the dominant ideology than any state censor could hope
to be. Gramsci knew he was being censored. Many of our newspeople
and pundits think they are free as birds—and they are, as long as they
fly around in the right circles.

For conservative critics, however, the right circles are neither right
enough nor tight enough. Anything to the left of themselves,
including moderate rightist and establishment centrist, is defined as
"leftist." Their campaign against the media helps to shift the center of
political gravity in their direction. By giving such generous publicity
to conservative preachments and pronouncements, while amputating
everything on the Left, the press limits public debate to a contest
between Right and Center, including the debate about bias in the
media.

On the American political scene, the Center is occupied by

conservative Democrats like Bill Clinton, who are happy to be
considered the only alternative to the ultra-Right. This Center is then
passed off and attacked as "liberal." Meanwhile real liberalism and
everything progressive remain out the picture—which is just what the
mainstream pundits, publishers, politicians, and plutocrats want.

FABRICATING A "CULTURAL
DEMOCRACY"
In the United States and most other countries, the movie and
television entertainment industry is controlled by transnational
corporations. These corporations are highly concentrated capital
formations whose primary functions are (a) making a profit for their
investors and (b) supporting an opinion climate favorable to
corporate economic dominance. Big companies and banks have had
a stake in the movie industry since its earliest days. By 1936, all the
major studios had come under the suzerainty of either the Morgan or
Rockefeller financial empires.

Today, the majors no longer dominate production. Independent

producers have proliferated and some have become the source of
politically aware quality films like Missing, Executive Action,
Sounder, Silkwood, Reds, and The Milagro Beanfield War. Still,
independent production does not guarantee support for independent
ideas. Film making remains an enterprise open only to a relatively
select few. In 1995, the average cost of producing a movie was over
$35 million, not counting promotional expenses—which sometimes
equal production costs. Investment support, even for most
independent films, still comes from the major studios and from the
corporations that own the studios and the banks that finance the
corporations. Not all that much has changed since the days of the
Hollywood mogul.

The major studios still finance the promotion and distribution of

films. An independent usually has no way of gaining access to a
national audience without dealing with the majors. Hundreds of
films are made that never are released because the majors decide
they lack "commercial viability," or because they contain
controversial political content. Sometimes it is a combination of
both, as industry bigwigs presume to equate political controversy
with lack of commercial appeal.

What is true of films is equally true of television. The three networks

CBS, ABC, and NBC enjoy a dominant position, selling over 86
percent of all TV advertising intended for a national audience. To the
extent that their hegemony is challenged, it is by other highly
financed networks like Fox, owned by billionaire reactionary Rupert
Murdoch. The dramatic giant mergers of 1995 make it still clearer
that our "free and independent" entertainment media are in the grip
of ever more concentrated wealthy conservative interests. The mass
media are class media.

Nothing Too Critical

Do the big owners and advertisers determine the media's ideological
content? Isn't this done by politically liberal directors, scriptwriters,
actors—and you, the viewing audience? An investigation of the
hundreds of films and television shows offered each year suggests
that a truly leftist movie or teleplay, offering a class analysis of power
and wealth, is something rarely to be expected from the major media.

While persons of left persuasion often have worked in the film

industry, they rarely have been able to insert much, if any, of their
politics into the movies they created. Films that deviate from the
mainstream political credo usually have to be toned down, rewritten,
and larded with stars in order to be funded. Once made, they are
accorded limited publicity and distribution, as was true of Reds,
Matewan, and Bertolucci's 1900. The dissident Romero, the story of
the Salvadoran archbishop who was murdered by a death squad, was
denied funding by major studios and networks. It saw the light of day
only because funds were forthcoming from sympathetic Catholic
agencies, and even then it received scant distribution.

Television scripts that offer a critical perspective fare no better. For

years, TVs biggest advertiser, Proctor and Gamble, imposed an
editorial policy on its shows that read in part:

There will be no material that may give offense either directly or

by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There
will be no material on any of our programs which could in any
way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking
all sentimental or spiritual motivation. . . . Members of the
armed forces must not be cast as villains. If there is any attack
on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the
same show.

Television shows are often prescreened by advertisers. Eastman

Kodak noted: "In programs we sponsor on a regular basis, we do
preview all scripts before the airing of the program. If we find a script
is offensive, we will withdraw our commercials from the program."

The TV movie Shootdown, which showed that the Korean passenger

plane shot down over the Soviet Union had been intentionally sent
that way by U.S. authorities to test Soviet defense responses, was
subjected to drastic cuts. According to the show's producer Leonard
Hill, NBC censors "played the role of grand inquisitor. It was quite a
relentless interrogation and it turned into a war of attrition." And the
TV movie Roe vs. Wade, dealing with the struggle for safe, legal
abortions, was subjected to seventeen rewrites because network
censors did not want the final product to seem too pro-choice.

Ideological Sanitizers

On one of the rare occasions it has acknowledged the existence of

media censorship, the New York Times (11/27/88) noted that while
network "production and standards" departments have reduced their
policing of sexual and other cultural taboos, "the network censors
continue to be vigilant when it comes to overseeing the political
content of television films."

Censorship is far more widespread than the few publicized incidents

suggest. According to a poll conducted by the Writers Guild of
America, 86 percent of the writers who responded found from
personal experience that censorship exists in television. Many claim
that every script they have written, no matter how seemingly
innocuous, has been censored. And 81 percent believe that
"television is presenting a distorted picture of what is happening in
this country today—politically, economically and racially."

Even more common is precensorship. In the early 1980s the word

was out in Hollywood that politically controversial film and TV
scripts were not welcome. Studio and network bosses and corporate
advertisers are almost all politically conservative, as are their
financial backers. By defining beforehand what are the salable
subjects, media chiefs predetermine the kind of scripts they will get.
In short time, writers and producers bury dissident story ideas
before they ever get on paper.

There are other censors: the U.S. military censors scripts for the
many shows and movies that use its equipment and bases. The FBI
has censored scripts and TV series about the FBI. Ultra-conservative
censors like the Moral Majority and the Coalition for Better
Television have exercised a censorial influence far out of proportion
to their numbers because they can win support from conservative
advertisers and network bosses.

The dissident views that manage, in one form or another, to survive

the maulings perpetrated by investors, studio moguls, insurance
underwriters, government officials, right-wing watchdogs, corporate
advertisers, and network bosses must then face another group of
ideological gatekeepers: the TV and film critics who do the reviews. If
they treat progressive story lines too favorably, their employers may
charge them with diverging from their roles as objective cultural
evaluators. Generally, there is little need to rein them in, since they
already have been ideologically preselected and are not likely to take
unacceptable positions.

The entertainment industry's definition of a political film is itself

political. The dissident political offering is readily identified
disparagingly as "agitprop" and "preachy." In contrast, films and
teleplays laden with political values and images that are well within
acceptable parameters are less likely to be perceived as ideologically
inspired. Thus the various films that glorify state-sponsored high-
tech terrorism and militarism are seen as pure entertainment.

Creating Mass Audiences

Representatives from the entertainment industry maintain that

media offerings are determined democratically through consumer
sovereignty. In their quest for profits, corporate broadcasters and
film makers strive for the largest possible audiences by giving the
public what it wants. If entertainment media are filled with violence,
authoritarianism, superpatriotism, materialism, militarism, sexism,
and racism, its because that's what the public prefers. Thus millions
flocked to the Rambo movies, while only some thousands view a film
like Salvador, a drama about the US-backed, counterrevolutionary
repression in El Salvador. In effect, what we have is a free-market
"cultural democracy." So the argument goes.

It should be noted, however, that Salvador was turned down by every

major Hollywood studio. One of them described it as "a hateful piece
of work." Such a vehement rejection had less to do with market
considerations than with political convictions. The film was
eventually financed by British and Mexican investors and achieved
only limited distribution in a handful of theaters around the country.
In contrast, each of the Rambo flicks opened in over 2,000 movie
houses.

Salvador was gripping and action-packed, just the things the public
supposedly wants. Is it really the public that is not interested in
seeing films like Salvador —or Romero, Burn, 1900, Gaijin, and other
such well-made politically dissident movies? Or is it that, given their
conservative ideological biases, studio bosses and financial backers
are not interested in producing and distributing them?

The entertainment industry does not merely give the people what
they want: it is busy shaping those wants. If a Rambo film had a
naturally vast audience, it would not be necessary to spend $20
million on a pre-release publicity hype. Conversely, it is misleading
to say that dissident films fail to appeal to large audiences when in
fact they are kept from the general public by poor distribution,
limited publicity, and politically hostile reviewers.

In sum, it is not simply a matter of demand creating supply. Often it

is the other way around: supply creates demand. The first condition
for all consumption is accessibility to the product. The whole
advertising industry is predicated on the notion that the public can
be taught or at least influenced to want certain things and that—be it
movies, cars, or soft drinks—consumption will depend in large part
on how available and well-hyped the product is. Prime-time TV
shows, along with movies that open in every shopping mall in
America, win large audiences not because there is a spontaneous
wave of popular demand carrying them to the top, but because there
is a lot of strenuous pulling from the top.

"Giving people what they want" is too simple an explanation of what

the media do. Shows that are ideologically conservative will
sometimes get vigorous publicity and distribution no matter what
their box-office draw. The Pentagon/John Wayne production of The
Green Berets, a movie filled with militaristic and superpatriotic hype,
appeared at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War when
there was no great public demand for that kind of film. Though it
flopped, it was given wide distribution, playing to sparsely attended
theaters in just about every mainstream movie chain in America.
Likewise, shoot-'em-ups like Cobra, Rambo 3, and The Dead Pool
were box-office disappointments despite multimillion-dollar
publicity campaigns. This suggests that even people who have been
conditioned to consume junk begin to tire of the same old junk.

What Does the Public Want?

Media production involves a lot more than just satisfying the public.
The first audience a producer must please consists of the show's
financial backers, its would-be corporate sponsors, and studio and
network bosses. Because most movies and television series are
completed before they are shown to the public, they cannot be
altered to reflect audience feedback. Letters from individual viewers
are usually not considered representative of the general public.
Market research and rating services also are not that helpful, since
they seldom tell anything about reactions to specific content. The
only direct feedback is from the people who preside over the
productive process, hardly a representative sample of the public.

Those who claim to give us what we like do everything they can to

make us like what they give. In the early 1980s, the network brass,
having decided that the public was in a conservative mood, produced
a number of law-and-order television series like "Walking Tall,"
"Today's FBI," and "Strike Force," all of which suffered dismal
ratings and died early deaths.

Usually producers give us what they like. Les Brown notes that, in
defiance of the usual market criteria, golf receives more television
exposure than other more popular sports. Since golf is a favorite
recreation of media executives, agency men, and corporate sponsors,
they assume "everyone" wants the game regularly televised.

When media bosses actually do try to ascertain what the public

wants, the outcome can be surprising. Various surveys, including one
conducted by the National Association of Broadcasters and
suppressed for many years, reveal that though people watch a lot of
television, they rate it poorly. One Roper poll reported that only 8
percent of viewers felt "very satisfied" with TV entertainment shows,
and a majority wanted "more relevant" programs. A survey in Great
Britain yielded similar results. Coverage of the royal family—thought
to be close to the hearts of most British viewers—held an attraction
for only 22 percent. Over 55 percent of the British public wanted
serious news and documentaries, while 35 percent preferred game
shows.

Shows that win substantial audiences may nevertheless be canceled

because of ideological considerations. In 1982 the series "Lou Grant"
came under right-wing attack because of its consistently liberal
themes and the outspokenly progressive political activities of its star,
Ed Asner. Though "Lou Grant" was sixth from the top among some
ninety shows and its supporters launched letter-writing campaigns
and public rallies, the network replaced it with a show that had a
lower rating.

Media bosses tell us that most people desire to escape reality, not
confront it. In fact, there exist large interested publics that respond
positively to quality real-life dramas. The TV miniseries Roots lacked
all the usual promotional glamour yet it reached record audiences,
including many people who normally do not watch television. Other
quality made-for-television movies with socially relevant messages
have won impressive viewing audiences, including The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Matter of Sex, The Burning
Bed, Shootdown, and Roe vs. Wade. Quality movies containing
politically progressive themes have been box-office successes, such
as Julia (winner of three Oscars), Reds (winner of one Oscar), Norma
Rae, Missing, JFK, and Malcolm X. Contrary to what network and
studio bosses think, audiences do not eschew controversial themes.

Free-Market Democracy?

Much of what has been said about entertainment is true of the entire
political universe. Political consciousness does not evolve in a social
vacuum. Often it is shaped by a communication universe that
regularly disinforms the public on crucial issues, offering a severely
limited range of candidates and policies. Supply so thoroughly
preempts demand that people often are unable to articulate the
nature of their grievances. Public life devolves into increasingly
irrelevant, sensationalist, or downright reactionary levels of
discourse.

Be it "cultural democracy" or "political democracy," be it mental

production or commodity production, in monopoly capital's "free
market" the offerings consist of thoroughly processed and selectively
distributed products. What we end up with is an illusion of choice
with little of the substance. When exposed to nothing better, people
are inclined to seek diversion in whatever is offered. And as already
noted, this preconditioned consumption is then treated as evidence
that the public is getting what it wants.

What is remarkable is that, despite all their exposure to trash,

millions are still interested in quality productions that go beyond
apolitical idiocy or mainstream orthodoxies. As the success of issue
oriented films suggest, much of the public responds with alacrity to
politically iconoclastic themes in ways that the mass-market
hucksters never anticipated. In both the entertainment world and the
arena of political struggle, there exist large interested publics that
want something better than what is being offered. Many of them
organize and agitate around vital issues and themselves can be the
source of creative ideas and choices. Therein lies some cause for
hope.

As of now the dirty truth is that we are being more than entertained.
The entertainment media are no less free from conservative political
bias and ideological control than the news media. Of this we must
become aware if we are going to fight back in any kind of organized
way. And fight back we must. The struggle for cultural hegemony is
an important part of the struggle for political democracy itself.

GIVING LABOR THE BUSINESS

Why do so many people have a negative view of workers and labor
unions? In part, it is because of what is fed to them by the corporate-
owned news media. A 1990 City University of New York study found
that programs devoted to "elite" personages consumed "nearly ten
times more PBS prime-time programming hours than programs
devoted to workers." Less than half of one percent of the
programming dealt with workers—and it was mostly with British
rather than American ones. A Los Angeles Times survey found that
newspaper editors favored business over labor by 54 to 7 percent. My
reading of this nation's newspapers leaves me to wonder who the 7
percent might be.

The media's pro-business bias is pronounced enough for anyone to

see. The major newspapers and weeklies have no labor section to go
along with their business section. They have whole staffs reporting
on business news but not more than one labor reporter, if that. And
usually "labor" reporters, judging from the ones I have met, show no
special grasp of labor's struggles or sensitivity toward workers'
issues. If they did, they would not last at that assignment and would
be judged as "getting too close" to their subject.

The media's devotion to corporate America is manifested in the

many TV and radio commentary shows that are glutted with
conservatives. Public affairs programming is crowded with offerings
like "Wall Street Week," "American Enterprise," "Adam Smith's
Money World," "Nightly Business Report," and "Marketplace."

The network evening news regularly reports the Dow Jones average
but offers no weekly tabulations on lay-offs, industrial accidents, and
long-term occupational illness. When the stock market has a good
day, for some reason this is treated as good news for all of us. The
press seldom refers to the politico-economic power of corporations.
The economy itself is presented as something government and
business attend to, while organized labor tags along at best as a very
junior and often troublesome partner.

Selfish Strikers

Labor news is seldom reported except when there is a major strike.

Even then coverage is minimal and usually favors management. The
press regularly presents labor as unwilling to negotiate in good faith
when in fact management—in pursuit of high-profit policies—is
usually the side that refuses a contract and forces a strike.
Frequently, the workers do not walk out because they don't like
management's offers but because management refuses to negotiate
an acceptable contract and seeks to destroy the union and the
collective bargaining process—a fact seldom noticed by the press.
Instead, the union is depicted as making "demands" and
management as making "offers."

The news media's anti-labor bias is never more pronounced than

during contract disputes. To offer one example among many: In
1989, members of the United Mine Workers took over a coal
processing plant owned by Pittston in southwest Virginia. It was the
first major plant takeover since the historic Flint, Michigan, sit-down
strike by auto workers in 1937. "The event had every element of a
good journalistic story: conflict, drama, colorful characters and, for
television, tremendous footage," commented Jonathan Tasini. "Yet,
as far as the national media were concerned the historic action did
not occur."

While the long and bitter strike against Pittston was receiving scant
exposure, the networks and newspapers were lavishing sympathetic
coverage on a coal miners' strike in the Soviet Union. During a nine-
day period, the Soviet miners received a total of over 37 minutes of
prime-time news coverage on the major networks. Contrasts were
made between the living standards of Soviet bosses and coal miners
—something the media never thought of doing in regard to the
Pittston owners and miners. The Soviet strikers also were portrayed
glowingly as fighters for self-betterment and social justice—a kind of
representation never accorded U.S. workers.

Finally, in July of 1989, CBS's weekly television news show "48

Hours" did devote an entire hour to the Pittston strike. Reporters
interviewed company executives who said they wanted to resume
production but they couldn't get the union to cooperate. Scabs said
they wanted to work and didn't need a union to tell them what to do;
they spoke at length of threats and mistreatment from strikers. State
troopers were portrayed as neutral peacekeepers just doing their job,
clearing the roads as they arrested strikers who tried to keep
"replacement workers" (scabs and strikebreakers) from entering the
mines.

In a show of balanced reportage, CBS also interviewed strikers who

said they were struggling for a contract and had to stick together
until victory was theirs. Strikers were shown at home, at rallies, and
on the picket lines. Never were they shown telling the viewers what
the strike was about, what actually was at stake. Missing from the
entire program was any reference to the issues, the content of the
conflict. Why were the miners striking? Not once did CBS mention
that Pittston wanted to make deep cuts in wages and benefits. Nor
did CBS mention that Pittston was facing serious charges of unfair
labor practices.

A few such pertinent facts would have put the whole conflict in a
different light. As presented by the network, the strike seemed to be
a mindless contest of wills, pitting the stubborn, shrill, and rather
foolish miners against patient, soft-spoken managers who only
wanted to resume production, "neutral" police who only wanted to
keep the peace, and "replacement workers" (scabs) who only wanted
the freedom to work without union interference.

Likewise, national coverage of the 1990 Greyhound bus strike offered

little opportunity for the public to ascertain what was on the minds
of striking workers. Company officials were afforded ample
opportunity to comment, but union leaders and rank-and-file drivers
received almost no exposure. Management's offer consisted of a
moderate wage increase and drastic cuts in benefits—which taken
together amounted to a real-wage deduction. Yet the press treated
management's proposal, riddled as it was with selective arithmetic,
as a generous one. The union's proposals were accorded almost no
media attention. Management was depicted as using "replacement
workers" to "rebuild its fleet" and maintain services for the public
when in fact it was trying to break the strike and destroy the union.
Throughout the strike, the images were of a besieged, responsible
management versus violent, angry strikers, the latter showing a
selfish indifference to the disruptive effects their strike was having
on the economy and the public.
The media's anti-labor biases should come as no surprise. Media
owners themselves are among the most exploitative, antiunion
employers and strikebreakers. Over the years, the Washington Post,
the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the New York Daily News, CBS,
NBC,and numerous other news organizations have been locked in
bitter strikes that ended with unions being seriously weakened or
totally crushed. As Washington Post owner Katharine Graham is
reportedly fond of saying: "Unions interfere with freedom of the
press."

When not on strike, unions and workers practically vanish from the
national media. Issues that concern them—occupational safety,
declining real-wages, seniority, job security, underemployment,
health benefits, workplace racism and sexism, consumer safety,
affordable housing, tax reform, and human services— are routinely
ignored or given paltry exposure.

Taboo Topics

The media treat labor-management disputes as isolated incidents

having no linkage to larger economic forces. Strikes are treated as
aberrant disruptions of normal life, not as systemic conflicts endemic
to industrial capitalism. The mutual support that strikers provide for
each other and the aid that unions sometimes extend to other unions
is usually ignored by the news media. During past coal strikes there
was almost nothing on how farmers were bringing food to the
miners. By ignoring instances of worker solidarity and mutual
assistance within and between occupations, the press denies the class
dimensions of the strike and underplays the support strikers have
among other sectors of the public.

While the media will talk about "management," they have little to say
about capital little about the enormous wealth accumulated by
owners. The billions paid out in stock dividends and interest on
bonds represent a hugely inequitable upward distribution of the
productive earnings of labor, a transfer of wealth from those who
work to those who live mostly off those who work. Such exploitative
arrangements go unnoticed or are implicitly accepted as the natural
order of things.
Nor is the media much bothered by the damage done to labor and
job opportunities in general as big companies export jobs to cheap
Third World labor markets, where the margin of profit is several
times higher than at home.

Also left untouched are the anti-union biases written into the laws.
Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, employees won the
right to organize and bargain collectively. Union membership grew
dramatically. But the passage of the Taft-Hartley Law in 1947 and
various right-to-work laws passed by the states imposed drastic
restrictions on strikes, boycotts, and labor organizing, resulting in a
decline in union membership from 35 percent of the work force in
1950 to 15 percent today. Union busting has become a major industry
with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how
to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing
unions. Lacking adequate support from the pro-business Clinton
administration, a bill that would have protected striking workers
from being permanently replaced by scabs failed to win
congressional approval. Most of these anti-labor developments go
unheralded in the pro-business media.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency

intended to protect labor's right to organize and deal with grievances
against management, was stacked during the Reagan-Bush years
with pro-business appointees who refused to act on complaints and
move against the many unfair, anti-labor practices and who delayed
decisions for years. The NLRB has failed to protect employees from
being illegally fired for union activities and has imposed only token
fines on management for serious violations. The media has had
almost nothing to say about these things.

Instead, the press treats the government as a neutral arbiter acting

on behalf of the "national interest" in the struggle between
management and labor. It is assumed that the public's interest is best
served by avoiding strikes or getting strikers back into production as
soon as possible, regardless of the terms of settlement. The police—
along with the courts, the president, and the rest of the state
apparatus—are presented as guardians of the peace, defenders of the
public interest, rather than as protectors of corporate property and
bodyguards for strikebreakers.

Invisible Workers

Like the news media, the entertainment media of Hollywood films

and TV dramas also under-represent or misrepresent working
people. With few exceptions, such as the movie Norma Rae, blue-
collar workers of both genders and whatever ethnic background play
minor walk-on roles as waiters, service people, gas station
attendants, and the like in an affluent, upper-middle-class, media-
created world. When they do make a more substantial appearance,
they are portrayed as emotional, visceral, simple-hearted and
simple-minded, incapable of leadership or collective action. Given
the hostility that network and studio bosses have manifested toward
organized labor in the entertainment industry, it is no wonder that
labor unions are almost always portrayed in an unsympathetic light,
as doing the workers more harm than good.

Generally speaking, whether its a movie about factory workers, cops

and crime, or the invasion of galactic monsters, it is individual
heroics rather than collective action that save the day. Solutions and
victories are never won by good ordinary people struggling for
mutual betterment but by the hero in combat, defying the odds and
sometimes even the authorities to vanquish the menace and let
justice triumph.

No wonder the American people (including many otherwise liberal

individuals) have a somewhat negative image of organized labor. No
wonder some persons who are critical of racist, sexist, and anti-gay
attitudes still harbor anti-working-class and anti-union sentiments
of the kind propagated by the business-oriented media.

The situation is so bad that even the U.S. Congress felt obliged to
take note. House Report 102-363, accompanying the Public
Telecommunications Act of 1991, calls on the public broadcasting
community to stop ignoring "class differences and the plight of
American working people" and to make greater efforts to meet its
"obligation to encourage diversity in programming, including
programming which addresses the lives and concerns of American
workers and their families, in documentaries, dramas, and public
affairs programs." The report also noted that "public television
station boards typically are dominated by business interests, even
though working Americans are key supporters of public television."
Unfortunately the report had little to say about the media's
treatment of labor unions, an omission that itself may be a reflection
of the anti-union bias that permeates the business-dominated
political culture.

With its monopoly over mass communication, business has been able
to present a largely unchallenged picture of "Big Labor" as an
avaricious and narrowly self-interested force that does itself, the
economy, and the public no good, driving up prices with its incessant
demands, serving only itself while creating costs that must be passed
on to the rest of us. Labor has no direct means of countering this
negative image among the general public. If there exists for labor a
free market of ideas, it is not to be found in the corporate-owned
mass media.

THE INVISIBLE BLOODBATHS

A common method of deception practiced by U.S. leaders and the
U.S. news media is omission. Rather than outright lying, rather than
twisting and embellishing the truth, leaders and their faithful flacks
in the mainstream media frequently just ignore or greatly downplay
events that might prove too troublesome for officialdom and too
edifying for the U.S. public.

This is especially true when it comes to matters relating to the

national security state. Reports can appear now and then in the news
regarding an irresponsible business firm, a catastrophic oil spill too
large to keep hidden, a corrupt banker or broker, an incident of
sexism in the armed services, and so forth. Out of bounds are the
fundamental questions about the use of state power in the service of
corporate class interests at home and abroad. Critical discussions of
global capitalism and what it is doing to the world are not likely to be
countenanced by either U.S. leaders or the corporate-owned media.
The various methods of U.S. interventionism in other countries
include both the overt forms of military invasion and the covert
actions of the CIA and other counterinsurgency agencies; they
include everything from bribes and rigged elections to death squads
and mass slaughter. The purpose of these actions is to eliminate
individual leaders, political parties, social movements, and
governments that in any way challenge the existing global politico-
economic arrangements that advocate egalitarian social change, be it
toward a social democracy or socialism or even a conservative
economic nationalism that strives for some kind of independent
development.

Acceptable Holocaust

Consider the case of Indonesia. In the period following World War II,
after a successful war of independence against the Dutch, Indonesia
adopted an anti-imperialist stance on foreign policy and pursued
progressive domestic programs. Among President Achmed Sukarno's
supporters was the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). One of the
largest communist parties in the world, with a broad political
organization right down to the village level, the PKI built schools,
libraries, clinics, cooperatives, and day-care centers. It sponsored
literacy and health programs, and encouraged democratic
participation by villagers and others. When the Indonesian army
overthrew Sukarno in 1965, it embarked upon a campaign to
eradicate the PKI and the entire left, slaughtering about one-half
million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in what was
the greatest genocidal action since the Nazi Holocaust.

The massacre went on for weeks, but U.S. leaders murmured not a
word of protest, though they were well aware of what was happening
and even played a strategic hand in the events, supplying the
generals with arms, tactical assistance, and money. It was over two
months before the story broke in the U.S. press, in Time (12/17/65),
which gave a matter-of-fact account of the massacres, complete with
a description of rivers clogged with bodies. A month later the New
York Times carried a relatively brief report. Spotty accounts
appeared elsewhere over the ensuing weeks.
As with the overthrow of democracy in Guatemala, Chile, and a score
of other countries, aided and abetted by the U.S. national security
state, this mass atrocity by the fascist Right against the progressive
Left was treated, if at all, in a fatalistic tone, with a striking lack of
official indignation in Washington or critical editorial comment in
the press. It was as if the victims were just the personae in some
messy incident preordained by destiny. Thus the New York Times
(7/6/66) quoted, without any reference to the moral horror of it all,
the late Prime Minister of Australia, Harold Holt, who happily told
the River Club of New York City that "with 500,000 to 1,000,000
Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a
reorientation has taken place." Not a hint that these "Communist
sympathizers" were human beings trying to build a more egalitarian
democratic life for masses of people.

Some press commentary was blatantly upbeat in tone. James Reston,

writing in the New York Times (6/19/66), saw the "savage
transformation" from a leftist Sukarno government to "a defiantly
anti-Communist policy under General Suharto" as one "of the more
hopeful political developments ... in Asia." Reston's column, entitled
"A Gleam of Light in Asia" praised the U.S. government for the aid
and assistance it gave to the coup. Except for one or two passing
references, the press as usual had almost nothing to say about the
critical role played by the CIA and the U.S. military in assisting the
Indonesian generals before, during, and after the bloody takeover.
The admission by State Department official George Aldrich that
"roughly 90 percent" of the Indonesian military equipment and
supplies were provided by the United States was treated as no cause
for official comment or editorial condemnation.

Also deemed too trivial to earn much exposure was the plight of the
several hundred thousand political prisoners rounded up in the coup,
many of whom committed suicide or sickened and died under
unspeakably inhumane conditions of captivity. Subsequent
references in the news turned truth on its head and depicted the
communists as the instigators of the massacre. Thus the Los Angeles
Times (11/15/78) reported in retrospect that the Indonesians had
broken relations with China in 1965 "when the Mao-inspired
Communist Party, now outlawed, attempted to seize power and
subjected the country to a bloodbath."

The press had little to say about developments in Indonesia after the
military coup: the abolition of Sukarno's land reform program, the
massive dispossession of peasants, the widening gap between village
rich and poor, and the return of Dutch and Japanese corporations.
Not a word about Indonesia's reentry into the International
Monetary Fund, the power exercised by the "Tokyo Club" of
financiers who rescheduled Indonesia's debts in exchange for more
exploitative investment terms, and the U.S. and other Western firms
that took hold of Indonesia's mineral resources.

What happened in Indonesia was no different from what has

happened in scores of other countries: a populist, reformist
government overthrown by a reactionary military armed and abetted
by the U.S. national security state, accompanied by massive
executions, murders, torture, and imprisonment of those deemed
guilty of reformist inclinations, massive corruption by the new
military autocrats, privatization of public properties, widespread
plunder of natural resources and ecological preserves, the
suppression of wages, a surge in unemployment, the reintroduction
of foreign finance and loans, and an explosion of the national debt
under arrangements worked out by the International Monetary Fund
and related institutions.

Repeat Performance

The subsequent slaughter perpetrated by the Indonesian military in

East Timor from 1976 on is another terrible story suppressed by
official Washington and underplayed by the U.S. press. When East
Timor, a Portuguese island colony at the edge of the Indonesian
archipelago was granted independence by Lisbon in 1975, a brief
struggle ensued between Timorese elites and a left-populist
organization called Fretilin, with the latter swiftly gaining a popular
base and emerging triumphant. Western observers, including
Australian reporters, parliamentarians, and members of an
Australian aid mission, reported that the reformist Fretilin
government enjoyed strong support from the population.
This was enough reason for the CIA-sponsored Indonesian military
to invade East Timor, engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign
that included crop destruction, defoliation, and the systematic
annihilation of whole villages. Thousands of Timorese starved to
death or died of disease in concentration camps.

In 1977 Australian journalist James Dunn testified that when the

Indonesian army captured the villages of Remexic and Aileu, all the
inhabitants, except children under the age of three, were shot—
because they were considered to be "infected with the seeds of
Fretilin." After an extensive investigation of the evidence, an
Australian political scientist, Pat Flanagan, concluded: "There can be
no question that, if the articles of the 1948 United Nations Geneva
Convention defining genocide' are applied, what we have in East
Timor is precisely that." (Monthly Review, May 1980)

The Indonesian intervention destroyed about half of the Timorese

people. In 1974 the diocese of Dili, the capital of East Timor, placed
the nation's population at 690,000. In 1978, Jakarta's security chief
in East Timor reported a surviving populace of 330,000.

How did U.S. leaders and their media flunkies respond to genocide
in East Timor? Hardly at all. Reports about the Indonesian military
campaign trickling out of that unhappy land, mostly from Australian
journalists and Timorese refugees, were ignored or downplayed by
the White House and State Department. The index to the New York
Times gave six full columns of citations to Timor in 1975, when the
fate of the Portuguese colony was of great concern to the State
Department and the CIA, and the left-oriented Fretilin was emerging
victorious. (By left-oriented, I mean Fretilin was dedicated to land
reform and public programs directed toward public needs rather
than private investment.) But through 1977, when the Indonesian
army's war of annihilation had reached awesome proportions, the
Times index gave Timor only five lines.

Normally tireless in seeking out refugee reports alleging atrocities in

countries not under Western capitalist domination, the U.S. press
failed to interview any of the many Timorese refugees in Portugal
and elsewhere. The New York Times (4/19/78) reported that Fretilin
consisted only of "scattered groups" that were losing their hold over
most of the Timorese people who had been "forced" to live "under
their control" and that many Timorese were now fleeing into areas
controlled by the Indonesian invaders. The image was a familiar one.
As in the press's treatment of Vietnam, the Timorese were not fleeing
the Indonesian invaders' slash-and-burn campaigns, they were not
forcibly evacuated by the military. As the Times would have us
believe, they were choosing to leave their lands and ancestral
birthplaces to live in Indonesian-run internment camps because of
their dislike of the "totalitarian guerrillas" and their own love of
freedom.

The Times reported that Fretilin's only outside support was "limited
to highly vocal groups of Australian leftwing students." Not true. As
the Times should have known, the United Nations General Assembly
and also the Nonaligned Nations group had for several years in a row
adopted resolutions supporting self-determination for East Timor,
and anti-imperialist organizations on several continents supported
the Timorese independence struggle.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. government, being one of the perpetrators

and movers of the suppression, was determined to leave these
momentous events unnoticed. Predictably, the U.S. media followed
the official line, to wit: East Timor was a matter of no great moment;
the Indonesians had "stabilized" the situation; and nothing much —
and certainly nothing terrible—was happening there.

Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a

common practice in high places. Meanwhile the horror, torture,
slaughter, grief, and misery inflicted upon dedicated people in
Indonesia and East Timor over the last thirty years remain one of the
great atrocities of history, made no less horrendous in the scales of
human suffering for being studiously downplayed by its sponsors,
who would have us believe they are defending democracy at home
and abroad.

YELTSIN'S COUP AND THE MEDIA'S

ALCHEMY
One seldom hears about capitalism in the capitalist-owned media.
For decades we were told that the cold war was a contest between
freedom and communism, without any references to the interests of
global capitalism. But with the collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders began intimating that
there was something more on their agenda than just free elections
for the former "captive nations"—namely free markets. Of what use
was political democracy, they seemed to be saying, if it allowed the
retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social
democratic? So they publicly acknowledged that a goal of U.S. policy
was to restore capitalism in the former communist nations.

The propaganda task was to treat capitalism as inseparable from

democracy (while ignoring the many undemocratic capitalist regimes
from Guatemala to Indonesia to Zaire). However, "capitalism" still
sounded, well, too capitalistic, so the preferred terms were "free
market" and "market economy" concepts that appeared to include
more of us than just the Fortune 500. So President Clinton
announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: "Our
overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world's
community of market-based democracies." In a similar vein, the New
York Times (10/5/93) noted that "[President Boris] Yeltsin remains
the best hope for democracy and a market economy in Russia."

Far from being wedded to each other, capitalism and democracy are
often on a fatal collision course—as demonstrated by the horrific
events in Russia during the autumn of 1993. Multiparty electoral
democracy is useful when it can be used to destabilize one-party
socialism. But when it becomes a barrier to an untrammeled
capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. The first ominous signs
came in 1992, when the presidents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Russia demanded that their parliaments be suspended and they be
allowed to rule by ukase. On cue, the U.S. media started making
sympathetic noises about obstructionist legislators, letting us know
that parliamentary democracy was getting in the way of "democratic
market reforms." Washington threw its full support behind
repressive executive leaders like Boris Yeltsin, a champion of the free
market.
Orwell Lives

Those of us who have repeatedly challenged the outrageous

misrepresentations perpetrated by that gaggle of concubines who
compose "our free and independent press" still must marvel at the
media's newspeak and doublethink treatment of Yeltsin's bloody
coup in Russia in 1993. I had thought that George Orwell's model of
propaganda as reality-in-reverse was crudely overdone.

Propaganda is most effective when it relies on emphasis, tones, and

overall framing rather than when it blatantly inverts reality. But the
U.S. media's treatment of Yeltsin's bloody coup is a real-life
replication of Orwell's model: "tyranny is freedom," the blatant
reversal of reality, the unblinking propagation of the crassest lies.
Here we have an executive leader who tears up his country's
constitution, disbands parliament, abolishes the Constitutional
Court, launches an armed attack upon the parliamentary building,
kills hundreds of resisters and demonstrators, jails opposition
leaders without bail, arrests and detains tens of thousands, puts
hundreds of elected and appointed officials under investigation,
expels thousands of non-Russians from Moscow, bans labor unions
from political activities, exercises monopoly control over all
broadcast media, suppresses dozens of publications and television
shows, and permanently outlaws fifteen political parties— and who is
hailed by U.S. leaders as a savior of democracy.

With self-confirming momentum, the news media did not merely

excuse the repression as a necessary evil but celebrated it as a step
forward. This transformation of a violent putsch into a heroic
salvation of democracy was truly one of the marvels of modern
propaganda. Here is how it was done.

The Unconstitutional Constitution

It is a rare democracy in which conflicts do not arise between the

executive and the legislature. What often happens is that a
compromise is worked out. But compromise was just what Yeltsin
and his Western allies were not interested in. "I will not agree to any
compromise with any bodies. Categorically not." he is quoted as
saying (New York Times, 9/28/93). Yet from the beginning he was
portrayed as the moderate and compromising proponent while his
adversaries were described (Times, 9/22/93) as "communists and
nationalists who have blocked [his] legislation at every turn."

Once Yeltsin tore up the constitution, that document was seen as

seriously defective. Appearing on "One on One" (10/3/93), Zbigniew
Brzezinski falsely dismissed the Russian Constitution as "the old
Brezhnev one." The next day, NPR's "All Things Considered"
interviewed a member of Yeltsin's party in parliament who called it
"the Stalin Constitution," another false assertion that went
unchallenged by the NPR host.

The New York Times (9/22/93) approvingly repeated Aleksander

Solzhenitsyn's untruthful charge that "this was less a parliament in
Western terms than a gang of party hacks, more selected than elected
in 1989, when the Soviet Union still existed and the Communist
Party held sway." A front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times
(10/3/93) announced: "Bill of Wrongs: Constitution in Mess in
Russia." The accompanying story stated, "The weakest link in the
legal structure is the constitution itself, enacted in its most recent
incarnation in 1978, under Soviet power."

Truth peeked through only once in the New York Times. In an op-ed
piece (10/2/93), historian Robert Daniels pointed out that every
member of parliament had been freely elected in 1990. The Russian
parliament was not operating under a Brezhnev or Stalin
constitution but under the fully democratic reforms of 1989. It was
not to be confused with the earlier Soviet parliament, which did have
some nonelective seats but went out of existence two years before.

When not faulting the constitution, the Times berated the Russian
people themselves: "There was nothing in the upbringing of these
people that would equip them to appreciate the notion that above the
laws there could be principles, that a constitution itself could be
'unconstitutional' if it served only a small clique" (9/26/93). Russia's
democratic institutions were undermined because "they were created
. . . before the fledgling businessmen learned to defend their interests
through politics" (10/10/93). Russia is populated by a "people
steeped in socialist propaganda" who "are outraged by the vulgar
display of the new rich" (10/5/93) —certainly not the right attitude
for building capitalism.

Unlawful Lawmakers

Most of the Russian legislators were noncommunists and erstwhile

Yeltsin allies. Yet they were repeatedly labeled by the press as
"communists and ultranationalists," "communist holdovers,"
"unrepentant communists," "armed fascist-communist rebels," "the
old elites," and "die-hard communists." In contrast, Yeltsin's former
Communist Party affiliation was rarely mentioned. To be sure, some
of the legislators were communists. That they were freely elected to
office was of no matter; they still were considered anti-democratic
simply by virtue of being communists.

The lawmakers were depicted as opposed not only to reforms but to

democratic reforms and therefore to democracy itself. The Times
(9/22/93) told us "this remains at its heart a battle between those
who broke early with the totalitarian, centralized state and those who
are trying to maintain its essence." In fact, the repressive
centralization was being carried out by Yeltsin and his
administration, not his opponents in parliament.

The largest formation in the Russian parliament, the Civic Union,

favored slowing down the pace of privatization and retaining public
ownership of those plants and collectives that were showing a profit.
In this, they were moving contrary to capitalist state policy, which
normally nationalizes sick industries at public expense and hands the
profitable ones to private corporate interests, also at public expense.
Far from being "hardliners," the Russian legislators were charting a
mixed-economy course between total collectivization and Yeltsin's
hardline free-market policy. Their real sin was that they were neither
dismantling the public sector swiftly enough nor putting the interests
of capitalist investors above all other considerations.

Minimizing the Slaughter

Yeltsin was given a generous rewrite when he abolished not only
parliament but every other elected representative body in the
country, including many city councils and the regional councils or
Soviets. The New York Times (10/10/93) dismissed the Soviets as
"creatures of the early Bolshevik era." Left unmentioned was that the
councils had been recently democratically elected and that the
president had no authority to abolish or restructure them.

The armed attack launched by President Yeltsin against the

parliament earned a complete whitewash from the U.S. press. In
what sounded like a replay of the Waco assault on the Branch
Davidians, CNN commentators (10/4/93) tirelessly referred to the
"very heavy weaponry inside the White House [the Russian
parliamentary building]," including perhaps "rocket propelled
grenades and anti-tank weaponry" and even "surface-to-air
missiles." No evidence of such heavy weaponry ever materialized.
The only footage we saw of those who occupied the White House
showed only a makeshift collection of light arms.

There supposedly was a "very heavy exchange of fire from both

sides." The "exchange" was actually a one-sided slaughter caused by
a bombardment of the parliament building by Yeltsin forces, using
125mm and 75mm artillery shells, fragmentation bombs, and heavy-
caliber machine-gun fire.

The U.S. press accepted the official count of 144 dead. But the
president of the Kalmyk Republic, who spent all of October 4 in the
parliament building, reported seeing hundreds of bodies and
estimated the final toll at 1,000. His observations were reported by
Moscow correspondent Mike Davidow in the Peoples Weekly World
(10/30/93) and nowhere else in the U.S. press. Davidow noted that a
number of Russian publications, including the pro-Yeltsin
Komsomolskaya Pravda (10/15/93), reported 1,000 deaths and mass
cremations. The New York Times (11/11/93) finally acknowledged
that "many Russians" believe that 1,052 people were killed but
assured its readers that these reports were unconfirmed.

The Violent Renegades versus Boris the Gentle

During CNN's October 4 daylong live coverage of the assault, the
anti-coup legislators were described as "very hardline communists"
who "have nothing to lose" and "renegade lawmakers." CNN reporter
Ailene O'Conner turned instant psychiatrist, noting that many of the
rebels were "social misfits" and some were "definitely mentally ill." A
New York Times report (10/5/93) informed us that "the
parliamentary plot jumped right out of the communist textbook on
revolution." That same issue admiringly described the attack on the
parliament as "a textbook example of the decisive application of
military power."

The perpetrator of the coup, Boris Yeltsin, was portrayed as a leader

who "seems to rely on popularity not brute force" (Times, 9/26/93)
and who shows "commendable restraint" (Times, 10/5/93). As the
parliament building was going up in flames and dead and wounded
were being carried out, CNN's Bob Cain concluded with a straight
face that we were witnessing "a measured action by Yeltsin forces,
not an all-out assault." Cain and other CNN commentators assured
us that Yeltsin "really doesn't want to fire on his countrymen." They
noted the "relatively restrained response from the government," and
claimed falsely that "Yeltsin made an attempt to reach a negotiated
settlement but was rebuffed."

Final Solution

The U.S. press failed to point out that "market reforms" have brought
disaster to Russia. The lifting of price controls spurred an inflation
that dissolved real wages and reduced the majority of the population
to virtual penury. By 1993, Russia's health system was crumbling; the
education system was deteriorating; cholera, diphtheria, and
tuberculosis were spreading, as was poverty, hunger and
homelessness; and crime, corruption, and prostitution were
flourishing. Whatever economic democracy the communists had
managed to put together—including the guaranteed right to a job,
medical care, and education, and subsidized food, housing, and
utilities—was being scuttled. Russia became a juicy chunk of the
Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure
of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway
prices.
Yeltsin did what other desperate defenders of capitalism-in-crisis
have done, he suppressed all opposition. This tyranny was given its
fig leaf in the form of a rigged constitution and a showcase electoral
system that poses no real challenge to executive state power. The
Duma was reduced to a debating society, while Yeltsin went on to
rule largely by executive decree. One thing is certain, U.S. leaders
and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media will always be there,
cheering on the Yeltsins of the world.

NOW FOR THE WEATHER

The media's most common method of distortion is omission. We are
misled not only by what is reported but by what is left unmentioned.
This is true even with weather reports.

Impending Disaster

There are catastrophic things happening with the weather, one of

which is ozone depletion. Damage to the earth's protective ozone
layer causes skin cancer, cataracts, crop damage, and climatic
aberrations. Some 2.6 billion pounds of ozone-depleting chemicals
are emitted into the air every year. Some of the biggest polluters are
military-industrial contractors who are also among the biggest TV
advertisers. One of the worst, General Electric, owns NBC.

Another potentially calamitous development is global warming. Auto

exhaust, industrial air pollution, and other fossil fuel emissions act
like a blanket to create and trap heat close to the earth's surface,
causing it to warm. Every day the number of vehicles spewing
emissions into the atmosphere increases. In 1950, the United States
had 75 percent of the world's automobiles. Today it has only 25
percent even though the actual number of vehicles in this country
has more than doubled in that period. Now the car is everywhere in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America, wreaking its devastation on the land,
ground water, and air.

The nine warmest years (average global temperature) ever recorded

in the last century were during the last fifteen years. Every year, in
various cities and other locales, "record temperatures" are
announced. We have discovered that the earth's capacity to absorb
heat from energy consumption is limited. We face an ecological crisis
whose momentous dimensions we are just beginning to grasp. One
effect of global warming is drought: from California to Vermont to
England to Russia to New Zealand. Unless reversed, drought leads to
starvation, as Africa has been the first to know.

When the evening news tells us "what's happening with the weather,"
these potentially cataclysmic developments are not mentioned.
"Weather" is defined in a limited way: cloudy and clear, cold and
warm. The weather is reported the way politics is reported: isolated
daily particulars unconnected to the larger structural forces that help
create them.

Sunny Disinformation

Worse still, the ill effects of global warming and ozone depletion are
actually celebrated by TV weather reporters, who operate by an
unwritten code: "sunny" and "warm" are good, "rainy" and "cold" are
bad. Weathercasters in various locales get absolutely rhapsodic over
the strangely mild winters we have been having in recent years. They
exult over the "beautiful spring-fever weather" that now seems to
come in December and January. We are told to "get out there today
and catch some of these lovely rays." Not a word about watching out
for skin damage because of ozone depletion. Not a word about
drought—or if drought is mentioned, not a word about the global
warming that is causing it and not a word about the commercial
industrial base and mode of vehicular transportation that are causing
the global warming.

Conversely, weathercasters frown when "the weather is bad," when

temperatures drop and January begins to resemble January. We are
told "the outlook is not good" because rain "threatens." Another
winter with very little snow? "That's good news," said one
announcer, good for all of us except "you skiing fans." Forget that
snow is a major source of our water supply, that it shields the topsoil
from the sun, helping it to retain its sponginess. Forget that the
scarcity of snow is making it increasingly difficult for forests in
northern climes to renew themselves.

In California, where a six-year drought threatened to devastate

agribusiness, there was at least some belated awareness among
weather reporters that endless sunny days were not good news. But
even there, the reportage was misleadingly upbeat. Thus the rain that
finally came to Northern California in early 1991 was cheerfully
greeted as raising reservoir levels, with no acknowledgment of how
dangerously insufficient such levels remained. And even after the
rains filled the reservoirs, as happened in 1993-94 and the water
emergency was declared over, no mention was made that the state's
water-storage facilities, even at full capacity, were insufficient for
growing population and business needs. In other words, the
emergency was not over.

On rare occasions, the threat of environmental catastrophe is

obliquely acknowledged only to be denied. Thus TV weathercasters,
who usually never mention global warming, were quick to assert that
the record-breaking high temperatures for May 1991 in our nation's
capital were not an indication of global warming, since other parts of
the country had been cooler than usual that same month and "it all
averaged out." What the weather people do not seem to understand
is that temperature increase is only a part of the global warming
problem. Even more ominous is the carbon dioxide buildup that
causes such unusual weather aberrations as record storms, floods,
hurricanes, and drought; hot and sunny winter days in Seattle and
San Francisco, snow in Los Angeles one day and record freezing
temperatures in Florida another.

During an ABC weather report in Washington, D.C. (10/5/91), an

announcer asked if the increasing number of days with temperatures
over 90 degrees was indicative of global warming. The weathercaster
replied: "The record is too short. You've got to look over hundreds of
years to get a perspective." In effect, he was treating the question of
global warming as untestable and unprovable in anyone's lifetime or
any one era, leaving us with the soothing assumption that we have
the luxury of "hundreds of years" to study the problem. The dirty
truth is that every leading scientific body in the world now recognizes
global warming to be a dangerous fact of life on this planet and that
human causes are a major factor.

During the Gulf War, bias in weather coverage showed forth in a new
unabashedly political way, as evening reports began to feature aerial
weather maps of the Gulf region. When the skies were clear over
Iraq, announcers would look pleased. When cloudy, they looked
concerned; as one of them said, "It's gonna interfere with our air
strikes."

Conservatives say that left critics deny "the autonomy of culture."

Not true. Most of us recognize that culture does not operate in
perfect harmony with the dominant socioeconomic order. We
understand that dissident cultural forces can arise and have a self-
generating impact. But when it comes to the kind of mass culture
manufactured by the media, I want to plead guilty to the charge.
There is little autonomy to speak of. Be it entertainment, news,
advertising, sports, or weather, it is all subject to various degrees of
political bias. And no one is more political than those who
instinctively know how to avoid politically troubling realities.

SOME CALL IT CENSORSHIP

Our "free and independent" news media are actually controlled by
publishers and network bosses who see to it that their own preferred
views prevail. They will refuse to run letters, guest columns, and
occasionally even their regularly syndicated features and comic strips
if the material does not suit their political proclivities. They punish
editors and journalists by passing them over for promotion,
transferring them to remote posts, and even firing them if they don't
learn soon enough what is and is not ideologically fit to print or
broadcast. Such actions should be exposed for what they are:
censorship. But news organizations are the last to publicize their own
transgressions. Instances of censorship are simply not treated as
newsworthy.

The hardest kinds of censorship to detect are the preemptive forms.

In a profession that is literally awash with right-wing pundits, there
are few, if any, progressives who appear regularly as TV
commentators or as nationally syndicated columnists in the major
dailies. The Left does not have to be censored; it is excluded from the
start. It does not have to be reined in; it is never even put into
harness.

Here I would like to recount two incidents of media suppression

drawn from my own experience. These events hardly exhaust my
encounters with political censorship but they illustrate a kind of
suppression that is seldom publicized.

Overruled

Some years ago, when I lived in Washington, D.C., an acquaintance

urged me to call upon the editor of City Paper and suggest to him
that I write a weekly column for his publication. It seemed worth a
try. City Paper is a handout "alternative" weekly that affects a kind of
Village Voice stylistic and cultural liberalism. It treats various taboo
subjects with more candid detail than would be allowed in the
mainstream media and it offers—or used to offer in those days—an
occasional liberal muckraking article. It claims a readership of
50,000 and is picked up by a lot of people both in local government
and on Capitol Hill.

The editor greeted me warmly in his office. Professing to be an

admirer of my writing, he responded most positively to my offer to
do a column. He was delightedly surprised that someone with my
"credentials" would be willing to become a regular contributor for a
local publication like City Paper. Would I consider doing a media
watchdog column, one that could eventually be syndicated in other
alternative weeklies? I said yes. He would call me within a week with
a final go-ahead.

Three weeks later, having not heard from him, I telephoned his
office. He sounded like a different person. Whereas before he had
been ebullient and enthusiastic, now he spoke in a flat, dismissive
tone, saying only: "Uh, no, we're not going to do it." No explanation,
no regrets. The conversation went no further. He abruptly hung up.
Later on, I heard from someone who used to write for City Paper that
he had been overruled by his publishers.

Cokie, Kevin, and Michael?

The second incident involves a national media organization. In

February 1990 I received a telephone call from the senior editor of
National Public Radios "Morning Edition." She said words close to
these: "We have been thinking of broadening our range of
commentary on 'Morning Edition,' and your name keeps coming up.
Would you be interested in becoming one of our regular
commentators along with Cokie Roberts and Kevin Philips?" She
went on to tell me that along with the commentaries I might expect
to participate in an occasional weekend retreat with Kevin and Cokie
and a few of the senior staff to exchange ideas and impressions. A
whole weekend listening to Cokie Roberts do her spin analyses was
my idea of purgatory. Still I said okay. The editor said she would get
back to me soon.

Friends asked me why I wasn't more enthusiastic about the pending

offer from NPR; I replied, "Because it will never happen." Our "free
and independent" media can harbor all sorts of conservative and
reactionary pundits but would never have a progressive like myself
as a regular commentator. Indeed, the "Morning Editon" senior
editor never got back to me. I later learned she was no longer at that
post.

Seven months later I received another call from another senior editor
of "Morning Edition." "We haven't forgotten about you," she said.
She asked if I had something they could use as a commentary. (There
was no further mention of weekend retreats or becoming a regular
third member of the Cokie-Kevin team.) I suggested a short
commentary drawn from an article I had just written on the U.S.
armed assault against Iraq, entitled "Bush's Splendid Little War." I
sent the script—maximum allowed length of 400 words—to her.
After a few changes by her, we taped it at the NPR studio.

Canceled
My commentary was hardly a class analysis of imperialism but it did
make some pointed criticisms of Bush's intervention in the Gulf
region — of a kind I had not heard on NPR or any other mainstream
outlet. I noted that the president had a taste for splendid little wars,
that the invasion of Panama had brought dire results for the
Panamanians, and that an attack against Iraq (the fighting had not
yet begun) would be disastrous for the Iraqi people. I said: "One
wonders what this military venture is all about. Saddam Hussein is
not a Sandinista, a Castro, a Qaddaffi, nor even a Noriega. By that I
mean, he doesn't have leftist or populist leanings. He doesn't
advocate the kind of economic equality that rich conservatives like
Bush find so loathsome. Hussein is a right-wing dictator, who like
other such autocrats, has received U.S. aid .... So why is Bush now
coming down so hard on him?" I stated that the intervention had a
self-serving purpose for the president. It distracted the public from
the sagging economy and the savings-and-loans scandal. It secured
oil profits for the big corporations. It bolstered the case for military
spending and boosted Bush's opinion poll ratings.

The editor was pleased with the taping and told me it would run the
next morning. As I left, she asked if I had anything else I would like
to do. I mentioned an idea I had about the Supreme Court, and she
indicated a desire to start on it in the next few days.

The following morning I listened to NPR's "Morning Edition" but did

not hear my commentary. Later I called the senior editor. She told
me that the executive producer Bob Ferrante had listened to my tape
and had canceled it because, as he put it, "I'm not hearing anything
new." Nothing new? What previous "Morning Edition" commentary
had touched on Bush's hidden agenda in the Gulf war, especially his
dedication as a wealthy conservative to economic inequality and oil
profits? "No," I said to her, "your boss vetoed that tape because there
was something new in it." She responded: "I only work here."

She added that she wouldn't mind having me try another

commentary but she feared it might again be canceled—and that
would be a waste of my time. So ended my career with National
Public Radio.
There were questions I could have asked that editor, such as: Is it a
regular practice to have the executive producer exert prior
censorship over the commentaries? Had he killed any other
contributions? If so, how many? whose? and for what reasons? Did
he ever cancel one that seemed too conservative? Did he really hear
something new in every Kevin and Cokie commentary? Hadn't he
run numerous commentaries that offered the same old predictable
notions, the same perspective and familiar information?

If the above incidents tell us anything, it is that editors and reporters

are not as free and independent to invite a variety of opinions as they
might think. They are free to say what they like only as long as their
bosses like what they say. They are free to produce what they want if
their product remains within acceptable political boundaries. You
will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the
peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.

I can draw one consolation from the above incidents: they support
the Left's critical analysis of the press as being neither free nor
independent but highly controlled by its corporate owners and their
faithful lieutenants. In the stories and commentary they run or
refuse to run, and the people they hire or refuse to hire, the mass
media demonstrate the accuracy of what we progressive critics say
about them.

THE JFK ASSASSINATION I:

DEFENDING THE GANGSTER STATE
Much of history is a chronicle of immense atrocities. Whenever
surplus wealth accumulates in any society, whenever people emerge
from a cooperative subsistence economy, some portion of the
population will do everything it can to exploit the labor of the rest of
the people in as pitiless a manner as possible. This is true whether it
be the slaveholders of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the
antebellum American South; or the feudal aristocracy of medieval
Europe; or the financial moguls of modern capitalist society. Today,
throughout much of the capitalist Third World and increasingly in
the United States and other industrialized nations, people are being
driven into desperation and want, made to work harder for less,
when able to find work.

The Gangster State

The state is the instrument used in all these societies by the wealthy
few to impoverish and maintain control over the many.

Aside from performing collective functions necessary for all societies,

the state has the particular task of protecting the process of
accumulating wealth for the few. Throughout our country's history,
people have fought back and sometimes gained a limited degree of
self-protective rights: universal suffrage, civil liberties, the right to
collective bargaining, the eight-hour day, public education, social
security, and some human services. While these democratic gains are
frequently violated and prove insufficient as a restraint against state
power, their importance should not be denied.

Today in the much-vaunted western democracies there exists a great

deal of unaccountable state power whose primary function is to
maintain the existing politico-economic structure, using surveillance,
infiltration, sabotage, judicial harassment, disinformation, trumped-
up charges and false arrests, tax harassment, blackmail, and even
violence and assassination to make the world safe for those who own
it.

There exists a state within the state, known as the national security
state, a component of misgovernment centering around top officers
in the various intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and policy makers
in the Executive Office of the White House. These elements have
proven themselves capable of perpetrating terrible crimes against
dissidents at home and abroad. National security state agencies like
the CIA, in the service of dominant economic interests, have enlisted
the efforts of mobsters, drug traffickers, assassins, and torturers,
systematically targeting peasant leaders, intellectuals, journalists,
student leaders, clergy, labor union leaders, workers, and community
activists in numerous countries. Hundreds of thousands of people
have been murdered to prevent social change, to destroy any
government or social movement that manifests an unwillingness to
reduce its people to economic fodder for the giant corporations that
rule the world's economy. 1

JFK, the Media Mugging

Occasionally an incident occurs that reveals in an unusually vivid

manner the gangster nature of the state. The assassination of
President John Kennedy in November 1963 is such an occasion. The
dirty truth is that Kennedy was heartily hated by right-wing forces in
this country, including many powerful people in the intelligence
organizations. He had betrayed the national interest as they defined
it, by refusing to go all out against Cuba, making overtures of
rapproachment with Castro, and refusing to escalate the ground war
in Vietnam. They also saw him as an anti-business liberal who was
taking the country down the wrong path. Whether Kennedy really
was all that liberal is another matter. What the national security
rightists saw him to be was what counted.

To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call

into question the state security system and the entire politico-
economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the
corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have
suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder
unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale
Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers, Philip
Melanson, Jim Garrison, Cyril Wecht, Jim Marrs, Gaeton Fonzi,
Sylvia Meagher, Michael Canfield, James DiEugenio, and many
others.

1 Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a military intelligence chief closely

connected with the CIA, tells of his visit to "a special village' in the
Mediterranean where a highly select group of stateless 'mechanics' in
the CIA are hit-men, assassins, and other related specialists. They
are absolutely anonymous"; see his introduction to Mark Lane's
Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). For a
further discussion on U.S. repression abroad, see "Making the World
Safe for Hypocrisy," p. 55; also my two books Against Empire (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995); and The Sword and the Dollar
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
These investigators have been described as "assassination buffs." The
term "buff" is a diminishing characterization, describing someone
who pursues odd hobbies. For the same reason that we would not
refer to "Holocaust buffs," so should we not refer to these serious
investigators as "assassination buffs." Their efforts reveal a
conspiracy to assassinate the president and an even more extensive
conspiracy to hide the crime.

While ignoring their revelations, the media have given fulsome

publicity to the likes of Gerald Posner, author of a grotesque
whitewash of the assassination. Posner's book was not a sloppy,
confused work but a deliberate contrivance that used outright
untruths to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was a disgruntled lone
leftist who killed Kennedy. Posner could get away with his
misrepresentations because those who have written systematic
exposures of his book were either ignored by the corporate-owned
media or roughed up by unsympathetic reviewers and editors. (For
telling critiques of Posner's Case Closed, see Peter Dale Scott,
"Gerald Posner and the False Quotation Syndrome," Prevailing
Winds, premiere issue, 1995 (published by Prevailing Winds
Research, Santa Barbara, Calif.), 58-63; also Scott's review of
Posner's book in that same issue; George Costello's critique in
Federal Bar News and Journal, May 1994; Gary Aguilar, "Gerald
Posner and the Evidence," Open Secrets, November 1995; Dan
Beckman and Wallace Milam, Loss of Faith: A Critique of the
Warren Report, Case Closed and the Single Assassin-Theory
(forthcoming); Stewart Galanor, Coverup (forthcoming); Harold
Weisberg, Case Open: The Omissions, Distortions and Falsifications
of Case Closed (New York: Carroll & Graff Publishers, 1994)

An end run around the media blackout was achieved by Oliver

Stone's movie JFK, a film that directly reached millions of viewers
with an accurate account of the specifics of the assassination. The
movie could not be ignored because it was reaching a mass audience.
So the press savaged it. As far as I know, JFK is the only movie in
film history that was attacked, six months before it was released, in
just about every major broadcast and print outlet. The Washington
Post, for instance, gave George Lardner Jr. the whole front page of its
Sunday "Outlook" section (5/19/91) to slam Stone for "chasing
fiction." Lardner was an interesting choice to review this particular
movie, being the Post reporter who covered the CIA and who never
wrote a harsh word about that agency.

The media's ideological gatekeepers threw restraint to the wind when

dealing with Stone's film. Conservative news columnist George Will,
not known for writing movie reviews, penned a rant against JFK,
calling it "a cartoon history" and "a three-hour lie." Will describes
Stone as "an intellectual sociopath, combining moral arrogance with
historical ignorance ... a specimen of the sixties' arrested
development. Intellectually, Stone is on all fours ... part of a long
fringe tradition . .. banally venal, reckless, cruel" (Washington Post,
12/27/91). By relying on invective, Will avoided the more difficult
task of rebutting the points made in Stone's film.

Shoulder to shoulder with conservatives like Will stood liberal

centrists like Daniel Schorr, the NPR radio commentator who
attacked Stone three times on the air, always in sarcastic and general
terms, without ever coming to grips with the information proffered
by the movie.

Then there was Tom Wicker, a syndicated columnist who also had
never done a movie review, but when JFK came out, he wrote one
that covered a whole page, complete with photos (New York Times,
12/15/91). In it, Wicker said something revealing:

If the wild assertions in Oliver Stone's movie are taken at face

value, Americans will have to accept the idea that most of the
nation's major institutions conspired together and carried out
Kennedy's murder. In an era when mistrust of government and
loss of confidence in institutions—the press not the least—are
widespread and virulent, such a suggestion seems a dubious
public service.

In so many words Wicker was disclosing the basic reason why such a
merciless attack had been launched against Stone's movie. A full
exposure of the assassination conspiracy would invite serious
discredit upon the legitimacy of the dominant institutions of state
and class. Playing before mass audiences, JFK did not accuse a cabal
of malevolent perpetrators, but pointed to the national security state
itself, inviting millions of viewers to question the kind of state system
under which they lived.

JFK is the only movie I know that continues to be attacked four years
after its run. Reviewers and commentators persist in making
gratuitous references, describing Oliver Stone as "the man who
reinvented history with movies such as JFK" (Oakland Tribune,
10/13/95), referring to "Oliver Stone's near-pathological monkeying
with history" (East Bay Express, 12/14/95), and describing him as "a
man who makes his living being a ranting maniac" and a "dangerous
fellow" (San Francisco Examiner 1 /9796). If anyone is ranting, it's
the press.

Sociologist David Simone compiled a study of the books published

on the Kennedy assassination, some 600 titles, and found that 20
percent of them blamed either a lone assassin or the mafia or the
Cubans or Russians. The other 80 percent ascribed the assassination
to a conspiracy linked to U.S. intelligence agencies; some of these
also said that mobsters were involved at the operational level.
Ignoring this 80 percent of the literature, publications like the New
York Times and Washington Post have listed the various theories
about the JFK assassination as follows: (a) lone assassin, (b) mafia,
(c) Cubans/Soviets, and (d) the "Oliver Stone movie theory." In other
words, they ignore the existence of a vast literature from which the
movie is derived and ascribe the critical theme presented within the
film solely to the imagination of a film maker. The press would have
us believe that the notion of a state-sponsored assassination
conspiracy and cover-up came out of a movie—when actually the
movie was based on a rich and revealing investigative literature.

Like the Warren Commission, the press assumed a priori that

Oswald was the killer. The only question it asked was: Did Oswald
act alone? The answer was a loudly orchestrated yes. Meanwhile,
almost every in-depth investigator had a different conclusion:
Oswald did not act at all. He was not one of the people who shot
Kennedy, although he was involved in another way, as a fall guy, in
his own words "just a patsy."
The media have been tireless in their efforts to suppress the truth
about the gangster state. In 1978, when a House Select Committee
concluded that there was more than one assassin involved in the
Kennedy shooting, the Washington Post (1/6/79) editorialized:

Could it have been some other malcontent who Mr. Oswald met
casually? Could not as much as three or four societal outcasts
with no ties to any one organization have developed in some
spontaneous way a common determination to express their
alienation in the killing of President Kennedy? It is possible that
two persons acting independently attempted to shoot the
President at the very same time?

It is "possible," but also most unlikely and barely imaginable. Instead

of a conspiracy theory the Post creates a one-in-a-billion
"coincidence theory" that is the most fanciful of all explanations.

Ignored Evidence, Unanswered Questions

David Garrow, author of a biography of Martin Luther King,

condescendingly says: "A large majority of the American people do
believe in assassination conspiracies. That allows events to have
large mysterious causes instead of small idiosyncratic ones."
Contrary to Garrow, the question of whether a conspiracy exists in
any particular situation has to be decided by an investigation of
evidence, not by patronizing presumptions about the public mind.
Investigators who concluded there were conspiracies in the Kennedy
and King murders did not fashion "large mysterious causes" but
came to their conclusions through painstaking probes of troubling
discrepancies, obvious lies, and blatant cover-ups. They have been
impelled not by the need to fashion elaborate theories but by the
search for particular explanations about some simple and compelling
truths.

Many people talk about finding the "smoking gun" behind this or
that mystery, the one evidentiary item that dramatically resolves the
case and puts to rest all further questions. Unlike fictional mysteries,
in real life there usually is no smoking gun. Historians work by a
process of accretion, putting piece by piece together until a picture
emerges. In the Kennedy murder, the pieces make an imposing
picture indeed, leaving one with the feeling that while there may not
be a smoking gun there is a whole fusillade of impossibilities
regarding the flight of bullets, the nature of the wounds, the ignored
testimony of eye witnesses, the sudden and mysterious deaths of
witnesses, the disappearance and deliberate destruction of evidence,
and the repeated acts of official cover-up that continue to this day
regarding the release of documents.

Let us focus on just a small part of the immense brief that has been
assembled by investigators. Consider the background of Lee Harvey
Oswald. During the week of the thirtieth anniversary of the JFK
assassination, one repeatedly heard on television that Oswald was an
incompetent "loner" and not very bright. Gerald Posner,
transforming himself into an instant psychiatric expert, announced
that Oswald "had a very disturbed childhood, and he was a passive-
aggressive." A passive-aggressive assassin? He was also repeatedly
labeled a "loner" and a "leftist." The truth is something else.

Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lone drifter
but directly linked to the U.S. intelligence community. All of his IQ
tests show that he was above average in intelligence and a quick
learner. At the age of eighteen in the U.S. Marines he had secret
security clearance and was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi
Air Force base in Japan, a top-secret location from which the CIA
launched U2 flights and performed other kinds of covert operations
in China. The next year he was assigned to El Toro air station in
California with security clearance to work radar.

Strange things began to happen. While at El Toro, Oswald emerged

as a babbling Russophile and a "communist." He started playing
Russian-language records at blast level in his barracks and
addressing his fellow Marines in Russian, calling them "comrade."
He read Russian books and hailed Soviet Communism as "the best
system in the world." If Oswald was a Soviet or a Cuban spy, as some
people now claim, he certainly had a novel way of building a cover.

Philip Melanson, author of Spy Saga, a book about Oswald's links to

intelligence, reminds us that the U.S. Marine Corps in 1958 was not
exactly a bastion of liberal tolerance and freethinking. But in this
instance, for some strange reason, Oswald's Marine commanders did
not seem to mind having a ranting commie sympathizer in their
midst. He kept his security clearance and retained access to a wealth
of sensitive radar information and classified data from secret
facilities.

Other odd things happened. In February 1959, he failed the Marine

Corps proficiency test in Russian. Six months later he had developed
some fluency in that language. In 1974, a document classified by the
Warren Commission—and dislodged mostly by Harold Weisberg's
legal efforts—revealed that Oswald had attended the U.S. Army's
School of Languages at Monterey. Monterey is not open to just
anyone who happens to have a language hobby. One is sent by the
government, for training in a specific language pertaining to a
specific assignment. Oswald learned Russian at Monterey.

Another curious thing: Oswald applied for an early dependency

discharge from the Marines because his mother had injured her foot
—the accident had occurred a year earlier. He was released one week
after putting in his request, a decision so swift as to astonish his
fellow Marines.

Oswald then "defected" to the USSR, but how? Melanson notes that
such a trip would have cost at least $1,500 in those days, but
Oswald's bank account showed a balance of $203. And how did he
get from London to Helsinki on October 11,1959, when no available
commercial flight could have made it in one day? He must have had
some kind of private transportation to Helsinki.

Once in Russia, he went to the U.S. embassy and openly renounced

his U.S. citizenship, declaring that he was going to give military
secrets to the Soviets. Embassy officials made no effort to detain him.
As the KGB files opened in 1991 show, the Soviets kept him under
constant surveillance. KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who had been
responsible for investigating every contact Oswald made in the
USSR, reported that the young American had never been associated
with Soviet intelligence and that the KGB suspected he was
connected with U.S. intelligence.
While in Russia Oswald belonged to a gun club at the factory in
which he worked, though he showed no interest in guns. He
reportedly used to join in rabbit shoots but could never score a hit.
Someone would have to stand behind him and shoot the rabbit while
he was firing. His performance became something of a joke among
his co-workers. His marksmanship in the U.S. Marines had been no
better.

U.S. intelligence mysteriously departed from normal procedure and

made no damage assessment of Oswald's "defection," or so they
claimed. Another odd thing: after two-and-a-half years, Oswald's
sudden request to return to the United States was immediately
granted by U.S. officials—all this after he had threatened to give away
state secrets to the Soviets. Instead of being arrested for treason,
Oswald was accepted with open arms by U.S. authorities.

The CIA claimed it had no record of debriefing him and was never
near him. Their explanation before the Warren Commission was that
there were so many tourists coming in and out and there was nothing
particularly unusual about Oswald that would have caught their
attention. One might wonder what was needed to catch the CIA's
attention.

Yet, CIA officials claimed they had suspected all along that he was a
Soviet spy—which makes it even more curious that they did not
debrief him. In fact, they did debrief him in Holland. But being so
eager to cover up any association with Oswald, they could not
recognize how in this instance the truth would have been a less
suspicious cover than the improbable lie they told about not noticing
his return.

State Department officials also behaved strangely. They paid all

travel and moving expenses back to the United States for Oswald and
his wife. Without a moment's delay they gave him back his passport
with full rights to travel anywhere in the world. Another curious
thing: his wife was exempted from the usual immigration quotas and
granted immediate entry. Years earlier she had belonged to the
Soviet Komsomol, the Communist youth organization, which
automatically would have barred her from the United States. Yet in
violation of U.S. immigration laws, she was allowed into the country.

In Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald settled under the wing of White

Russian emigre and former cavalry officer George de Mohrenschildt,
an associate of oil millionaires H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchinson and
other Dallas economic elites. In de Mohrenschildt's telephone book
was found the name of George "Pappy" Bush. A correspondence
existed between Bush and de Mohrenschildt indicating that they
were personal acquaintances.

De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne were identified by the Warren

Commission as the people closest to Oswald just before the
assassination. An investigator for the House Select Committee,
Gaeton Fonzi, noted, "Given his background, it seemed strange that
de Mohrenschildt would have spontaneously befriended someone
with the look of a working-class drifter like Lee Harvey Oswald."
That was not the only strange thing about de Mohrenschildt. He also
was part of a network of ex-Nazis contracted by the CIA.

A CIA memorandum written not long after Oswald returned from

Russia advised de Mohrenschildt on how to handle the young
"defector." De Mohrenschildt also had a close friendship with J.
Walter Moore, who was an agent of the CIAs Domestic Contacts
Division. As de Mohrenschildt told one investigator just before his
sudden death, it was Moore who encouraged him to see Oswald.
Investigator Jim Marrs observes in his book Crossfire:

"The CIA memos, Moore's closeness, and de Mohrenschildt's

own testimony all confirm that a certain relationship existed
between the CIA and the man closest to Oswald in early 1963.
While this does not necessarily involve the Agency in a plot to
kill Kennedy, it raises questions about what Agency officials
might have known regarding such a plot."

Oswald embarked on a series of short-lived public forays as a

"leftist." He started a one-person Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New
Orleans, without ever bothering to recruit another member. He never
met with a single member of the Communist Party or any other left
organization, although he wrote friendly letters to the Communist
Party and to the Socialist Workers Party—two groups that were not
even talking to each other—supposedly asking for instructions.
Again, all this was a novel way for a Soviet agent and would-be
assassin to act.

He blazed a highly visible trail as a "leftist" agitator: managing to get

exposure on local TV in New Orleans after getting involved in some
fistfights while leafleting. One of the leaflets he distributed showed
that his organization was on Camp Street in the very same building
that a former FBI bureau chief, Guy Banister, had his office. Banister
retained close working relations with emigre Cuban right-wing
groups and with Lee Harvey Oswald.

When he wasn't playing the communist agitator, Oswald spent most

of his time with rabid anticommunists, including emigre Cubans and
CIA operatives. Besides Banister and de Mohrenschildt, there was
David Ferrie. (In his book First Hand Knowledge, Robert Morrow, a
conservative businessman and CIA operative, tells how he served as
a pilot on CIA missions with Ferrie.) Oswald also knew businessman
Clay Shaw who was CIA, as later confirmed by the agency's director
Richard Helms. These were hardly the sort of friends we would
expect for a loud-mouthed "Marxist revolutionary" just returned
from giving away classified secrets in the USSR.

The attorney general of Texas, Waggoner Carr, told the Warren

Commission that Oswald was an FBI informant or contract agent,
with assigned number S-172 or S-179. For his services, Oswald was
paid two hundred dollars a month by the FBI. (The Warren
Commission reacted with extreme alarm toward Carr's testimony. Its
general counsel, J. Lee Rankin said that evidence linking Oswald to
the FBI "is very damaging to the agencies that are involved in it, and
it must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this
commission." The "wipe out" consisted of a statement from Hoover
reassuring the commission that Oswald never worked for the FBI. In
the New York Times edition of the Warren Commission report,
Waggoner Carr's testimony is nowhere to be found.) Orest Pena, a
Cuban emigre and FBI informant, told Mark Lane that Oswald
worked for the FBI and met with FBI personnel from time to time.
If not paid by security agencies, how did Oswald support himself
during his forays into New Orleans and Dallas? He was employed for
a brief time in 1962 by a printing company in Dallas that specialized
in highly classified government work, including the making of secret
maps of the Soviet Union for U.S. Army Intelligence—again hardly
the sort of job to assign an openly Russophilic communist agitator.
Oswald's overall employment record and income sources remain
something of a mystery. To this day, the government refuses to
release his tax returns, with no explanation as to what issue of
national security is at stake.

We are asked to believe that Oswald just happened to get a job at the
Texas School Book Depository five weeks before the assassination,
when it had not yet been publicized that Kennedy's limousine was
going to pass in front of that building. In fact, George de
Morenschildt got him the job.

We are asked to believe that Oswald, who could not hit the side of a
barn, chose a Mannlicher-Carcano to kill the president, a cheap,
poor-performance Italian rifle that the Italians said never killed
anyone on purpose and caused them to lose World War II. Dallas
District Attorney Henry Wade initially announced that the murder
weapon was a German Mauser. Later informed that Oswald owned a
Manlincher-Carcano, Wade declared that the murder weapon was an
"Italian carbine."

We are asked to believe that Oswald would forgo shooting President

Kennedy when he had a perfect target of him as he rode right down
Houston Street directly toward the Texas School Book Depository.
Instead he supposedly waited until the car had turned down Elm
Street and was a half-block away. With the President's head and
shoulders barely visible through a tree, Oswald supposedly fired
rapidly, getting off three shots in record time, one missing the
limousine by twenty-five feet and the other two hitting their target
with devastating accuracy and record rapid succession, a feat the best
marksmen in the country found impossible to emulate even after
much practice and after the sights on the Mannlicher-Carcano were
properly reset in a laboratory. (In his political memoirs, Speaker of
the House Tip O'Neil writes that Kenneth O'Donnell, a top JFK aide,
said he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the
fence on the grassy knoll. "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they
said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been
imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to." O'Neil
reports that another top Kennedy aide, Dave Powers, who was
present when O'Donnell made this statement, said he had the same
recollection of the shots.)

We are asked to believe that Oswald then left his rifle at the window,
complete with a perfect palm print and, they now say, his
fingerprints (but no fingerprints on the clip or handloaded
cartridges), along with three spent shells placed on the floor neatly in
a row, in a manner no spent shells would fall.

We are asked to believe that a bullet would go through John

Kennedy, pause in mid-air, change direction, and wound Governor
Connally in several places—something Connally never believed—and
reappear perfectly intact wedged into the flap of a stretcher in
Parkland Hospital, supposedly having fallen out of Connally's body
but obviously pushed into the flap by hand.

We are asked to believe that only three shots were fired when in fact
six bullets were noted: one that entered the president's throat and
remained in his body; the second extracted from Governor
Connally's thigh; a third discovered on the stretcher; a fourth found
in fragments in the limousine; a fifth that missed the president's car
by a wide margin, hitting the curb according to several witnesses,
and wounding onlooker James Thomas Tague on his face; a sixth
found in the grass by Dallas police directly across from where the
president's vehicle had passed.

The Secret Service took possession of the presidential limousine,

ignored reports in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (12/1/63) that there
was a bullet hole in the windshield, and rejected all requests to
inspect the vehicle. We are asked to believe that the inside of
limousine, a trove of physical evidence, was then quickly torn out
and rebuilt, with no thought of covering up anything.
We are asked to believe that Kennedy's autopsy was innocently
botched and his brain just accidentally disappeared. The X-ray
purporting to be Kennedy's head now shows a rear entry wound,
different from the rear exit wound all the pathologists saw. Someone
cropped the jaw out of the picture, so there is no opportunity to
determine by dental identification if the X-ray really is the
president's.

We are asked by people like Max Holland, writing in the Nation, to

believe that the "infamous picture of Oswald posing with rifle in
hand" is not a forgery. Actually there are two pictures, both proven
composites, with bodies of different sizes but with the identical head
that matches neither body, and with shadows going in incongruous
directions. Who fabricated these photos?

"The lone leftist assassin" Oswald was a friend of Jack Ruby, a

gangster with links to Cuban exiles and the FBI. Ruby once worked
for Congressman Richard Nixon and the House Un-American
Activities Committee in Chicago when his name was still Jack
Rubenstein. He also worked for the FBI in Dallas during the years
before the JFK assassination. Ruby claimed he was just an ordinary
private citizen, moved to kill Oswald in order to avenge the suffering
Oswald had inflicted upon the Kennedy family. (At a Washington,
D.C. conference in October 1995, assassination investigator John M.
Williams reported on an interview he had with Robert Morrow,
March 10, 1994. Morrow said that on the day after JFK's
assassination, Marshall Diggs, the man who recruited Morrow as a
CIA operative, confided to him a warning of Oswald's impending
assassination: "He won't be around to testify for his trial.")

While in prison Ruby pleaded with the Warren Commission to be

taken to Washington where he could tell the whole story. He feared
for his life and claimed "they are killing me here." Indeed, he died in
jail, supposedly of natural causes.

We are asked to believe that when twenty-four persons who had

information related to the case met violent deaths, this was a colossal
coincidence. (See Penn Jones, Jr., Pardon My Grief Vols. 1 and 2 for
details about the death of these twenty-four.) In 1978, after the
House Select Committee investigation got underway, Anthony
Summers records that another sixteen connected to the case died
violently. This, too, supposedly was just a coincidence. This latter
group included George de Mohrenschildt, killed by a gun blast to the
head three hours after a House Assassinations Committee
Investigator had tried to contact him. De Mohrenschildt had been
worried that he would be murdered. His daughter Kressy Keardon
believes it "impossible" that he shot himself. The sheriff's office in
Palm County, Florida, found the shooting "very strange." But it was
ruled a suicide. Generally, people who voice fears that they might be
killed do not then kill themselves.

William Sullivan, number-three man in the FBI, was secretly on the

CIA payroll, according to CIA operative Robert Morrow. He was
scheduled to appear before the House Select Committee but before
he could do so, he was shot outside his home by a man who claimed
to have mistaken him for a deer. The killer was charged with a
misdemeanor and released in custody of his father, a state
policeman.

While under government protection, mobster Sam Giancana was

shot dead one day before he was to testify before the House Select
Committee about mob and CIA connections. One of the things that
emerges from this whole story is the widespread linkages between
the CIA and organized crime, between the gangster state and the
gangsters.

When the House committee was putting its staff together, it was
heavily pressured to employ only persons acceptable to the CIA, the
very agency it was supposed to investigate. In his book Plausible
Denial, Mark Lane reports that when Bernard Fensterwald, an
independent-minded Washington lawyer, was offered the job of
general counsel, a CIA representative called on him and said that the
Agency would hand him "his head on a platter" if he took the
assignment. Fensterwald turned it down.

Is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy just a lot of hoopla kicked

up by "conspiracy buffs?" Most of the independent investigators I
have met seem to be serious politically literate people. Their struggle
to arrive at the truth is not impelled by a love of conspiracies but by a
concern for the political and historic importance of the case. They
seek the truth no matter how dirty it might be. That process of
confronting the machinations of the national security state is not a
conspiracy hobby. It is an essential part of the struggle for
democracy.

THE JFK ASSASSINATION II:

CONSPIRACY PHOBIA ON THE LEFT
Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that
conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations.
To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who
believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United
Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is
secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists
or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically
follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or

more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral
end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts.
Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real
political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as
was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon's downfall. Iran-
Contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still
uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the
Justice Department as "a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and
bribery," the greatest financial crime in history.

Conspiracy or Coincidence?

Often the term "conspiracy" is applied dismissively whenever one

suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic
power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests.
Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who
deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal
Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to
maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against
"overheating" the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a
deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this
to friends, he was greeted skeptically, "Do you think the Fed bankers
are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?" In fact, not only
did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press.
Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he
ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a

participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement
of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, "Do you
really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?" I pointed
out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly
announced their commitment to seeing that "free-market reforms"
are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled
almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for
the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995,
"more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold
because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a
program to privatize state-owned companies" (New York Times
11/25/95).

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you
actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room
plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so
patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would
people of power get together—on park benches or carousels? Indeed,
they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command
rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best
restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference
rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes,
they consciously plot—though they call it "planning" and
"strategizing"—and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all
efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than
political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the
world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the
owning class have created a national security state that expends
billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous

smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret
agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other
about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to
say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to
working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they
infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always
immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new
situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing
their vast interests than most other social groups.

The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are
somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and
privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide
even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary
people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy
elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence
around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that
when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous
countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is
because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it
is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state
so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations
and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world.

Kennedy and the Left Critics

In the winter of 1991-92 Oliver Stone's film JFK revived popular

interest in the question of President John Kennedy's assassination.
As noted in part I of this article, the mainstream media launched a
protracted barrage of invective against the movie. Conservatives and
liberals closed ranks to tell the public there was no conspiracy to
murder the president for such things do not happen in the United
States.
Unfortunately, some writers normally identified as on the Left have
rejected any suggestion that a conspiracy occurred. While the
rightists and centrists were concerned about preserving the
legitimacy of existing institutions and keeping people from seeing the
gangster nature of the state, the leftists had different concerns,
though it was not always clear what these were.

Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others challenge the

notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw
from Vietnam or for threatening to undo the CIA or end the cold war.
Such things could not have led to his downfall, they argue, because
Kennedy was a cold warrior, pro-CIA, and wanted a military
withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory. Chomsky claims that the
change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no
appreciable effect on policy. In fact, the massive ground war ordered
by Johnson and the saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Laos ordered by Nixon represented a dramatic departure from
Kennedy's policy. On some occasions, Chomsky says he refuses to
speculate: "As for what JFK might have done [had he lived], I have
nothing to say." Other times he goes on to speculate that Kennedy
would not have "reacted differently to changing situations than his
close advisers" and "would have persisted in his commitment to
strengthen and enhance the status of the CIA" (Z Magazine y 10/92
and 1/93).

The evidence we have indicates that Kennedy observed Cambodian

neutrality and negotiated a cease-fire and a coalition government in
Laos, which the CIA refused to honor. We also know that the
surviving Kennedy, Robert, broke with the Johnson administration
over Vietnam and publicly stated that his brother's administration
had committed serious mistakes. Robert moved with the tide of
opinion, evolving into a Senate dove and then a peace candidate for
the presidency, before he too was murdered. The two brothers
worked closely together and were usually of like mind. While this
does not provide reason enough to conclude that John Kennedy
would have undergone a transition comparable to Robert's, it still
might give us pause before asserting that JFK was destined to follow
in the direction taken by the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
In the midst of this controversy, Chomsky wrote a whole book
arguing that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam
without victory. Actually, Kennedy said different things at different
times, sometimes maintaining that we could not simply abandon
Vietnam, other times that it ultimately would be up to the
Vietnamese to fight their own war. (Kennedy's intent to withdraw is
documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased
Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It refers
to "the Accelerated Model Plan ... for a rapid phase out of the bulk of
U.S. military personnel" and notes that the administration was
"serious about limiting the U.S. commitment and throwing the
burden onto the South Vietnamese themselves." But "all the
planning for phase-out. . . was either ignored or caught up in the new
thinking of January to March 1964" (p. 163)—the new thinking that
came after JKF was killed and Johnson became president.)

One of Kennedy's closest aides, Kenneth O'Donnell, wrote that the

president planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964
elections. According to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who headed
military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA, Kennedy
dictated "the rich parts" of NSAM 263, calling for the withdrawal not
only of all U.S. troops but all Americans, meaning CIA officers and
agents too. Prouty reflects that the president thereby signed "his own
death warrant." The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes ran a
headline: "President Says—All Americans Out by 1965." According to
Prouty: "The Pentagon was outraged. JFK was a curse word in the
corridors."

Concentrating on the question of withdrawal, Chomsky says nothing

about the presidents unwillingness to escalate into a ground war. On
that crucial point all Chomsky offers is a speculation ascribed to
Roger Hilsman that Kennedy might well have introduced U.S.
ground troops in South Vietnam. In fact, the same Hilsman, who
served as Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern
Affairs, the officer responsible for Vietnam, noted in a long letter to
the New York Times (1/20/92) that in 1963 "President Kennedy was
determined not to let Vietnam become an American war—that is, he
was determined not to send U.S. combat troops (as opposed to
advisers) to fight in Vietnam nor to bomb North Vietnam." Other
Kennedy aides such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and General Maxwell
Taylor made the same point. Taylor said, "The last thing he
[Kennedy] wanted was to put in our ground forces. ... I don't recall
anyone who was strongly against [the recommendation], except one
man and that was the President." Kennedy opposed the kind of
escalation embarked upon soon after his death by Lyndon Johnson,
who increased U.S. troops in Vietnam from 17,000 to approximately
250,000 and committed them to an all-out ground war.

Kennedy and the CIA

Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for
wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counter-insurgent
cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that
the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today.
But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world
the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky's assumptions we would
need a different body of data from that which he and others offer,
data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration's
interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private
sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in
1963.

To offer a parallel: We might be of the opinion that the New Deal did
relatively little for working people and that Franklin Roosevelt
actually was a tool of the very interests he publicly denounced as
"economic royalists." From this we might conclude that the
plutocrats had much reason to support FDR's attempts to save big
business from itself. But most plutocrats damned "that man in the
White House" as a class traitor. To determine why, you would have
to look at how they perceived the New Deal in those days, not at how
we think it should be evaluated today.

In fact, President Kennedy was not someone the CIA could tolerate,
and the feeling was mutual. JFK told one of his top officials that he
wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the
winds" (New York Times, 4/25/66). He closed the armed CIA camps
that were readying for a second Bay of Pigs invasion and took a
number of other steps designed to bring the Agency under control.
He fired its most powerful and insubordinate leaders, Director Allen
Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for
Plans Richard Bissell. He tried to reduce its powers and jurisdiction
and set strict limits as to its future actions, and he appointed a high-
level committee to investigate the CIA's past misdeeds.

In 1963, CIA officials, Pentagon brass, anti-Castro Cuban emigres,

and assorted other right-wingers, including FBI chief J. Edgar
Hoover, hated JFK and did not believe he could be trusted with the
nation's future. They referred to him as "that delinquent in the White
House." Roger Craig records the comments of numerous Dallas
police officers who wanted to see Kennedy done away with. Several
years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I heard a
listener call in as follows: "This is the first time I'm saying this. I
worked for Army intelligence. In 1963 I was in Japan, and the
accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed
because he was messing with the intelligence community. When
word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted comments like
'We got the bastard.'"

In his book First Hand Knowledge, CIA operative Robert Morrow

noted the hatred felt by CIA officers regarding Kennedy's "betrayal"
in not sending the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One high-
level CIA Cuban emigre, Eladio del Valle, told Morrow less than two
weeks before the assassination: "I found out about it last night.
Kennedy's going to get it in Dallas." (Del Valle's name came up the
day after JFK's assassination when Dallas District Attorney Henry
Wade announced at a press conference that Oswald was a member of
del Valle's anti-communist "Free Cuba Committee." Wade was
quickly contradicted from the audience by Jack Ruby, who claimed
that Oswald was a member of the leftish Fair Play for Cuba
Committee. Del Valle, who was one of several people that New
Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought out in connection
with the JFK assassination, was killed the same day that Dave Ferrie,
another suspect met a suspicious death. When found in Miami, del
Valle's body showed evidence of having been tortured, bludgeoned,
and shot.) Morrow also notes that CIA director Richard Helms,
"knew that someone in the Agency was involved" in the Kennedy
assassination, "either directly or indirectly, in the act itself—someone
who would be in a high and sensitive position.... Helms did cover up
any CIA involvement in the presidential assassination."

Several years after JFK's murder, President Johnson told White

House aide Marvin Watson that he "was convinced that there was a
plot in connection with the assassination" and that the CIA had
something to do with it (Washington Post, 12/13/77). And Robert
Kennedy repeatedly made known his suspicions that the CIA had a
hand in the murder of his brother.

JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his
refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness
to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion
guarantee to Khrushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement
with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with
different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his
atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University
speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward
the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his
curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over
price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's
multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency, °The
bankers of the Federal Reserve System print paper money, then lend
it to the government at an interest. Kennedy signed an executive
order issuing over S4 billion in currency notes through the U.S.
Treasury, thus bypassing the Fed's bankers and the hundreds of
millions of dollars in interest that would normally be paid out to
them. These "United States Notes" were quickly withdrawn after
JFK's assassination. his warm reception at labor conventions, and
his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough
for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the
Right.

Left Confusions and the Warren Commission

Erwin Knoll, erstwhile editor of the Progressive, was another left

critic who expressed hostility toward the conspiracy thesis and Oliver
Stone's movie in particular. Knoll admitted he had no idea who killed
Kennedy, but this did not keep him from asserting that Stone's JFK
was "manipulative" and provided false answers. If Knoll had no idea
who killed Kennedy, how could he conclude that the film was false?

Knoll said Stone's movie was "a melange of fact and fiction"
(Progressive, 3/92). To be sure, some of the dramatization was
fictionalized—but regarding the core events relating to Clay Shaw's
perjury, eyewitness reports at Dealey Plaza, the behavior of U.S. law
officers, and other suspicious happenings, the movie remained
faithful to the facts unearthed by serious investigators.

In a show of flexibility, Knoll allows that "the Warren Commission

did a hasty, slipshod job" of investigation. Here too he only reveals
his ignorance. In fact, the Commission sat for fifty-one long sessions
over a period of several months, much longer than most major
investigations. It compiled twenty-six volumes of testimony and
evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its
disposal, along with its own professional team. Far from being hasty
and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward a
foreordained conclusion. From the beginning, it asked only a limited
set of questions that seemed to assume Oswald's guilt as the lone
assassin.

The Warren Commission set up six investigative panels to look into

such things as Oswalds background, his activities in past years and
on the day of the assassination, Jack Ruby's background, and his
activities on the day he killed Oswald. As Mark Lane notes, there was
a crying need for a seventh panel, one that would try to discover who
killed President Kennedy. The commission never saw the need for
that undertaking, having already made up its mind.

While supposedly dedicated to bringing the truth to light, the

Warren Commission operated in secrecy. The minutes of its
meetings were classified top secret, and hundreds of thousands of
documents and other evidence were sealed for seventy-five years.
The Commission failed to call witnesses who heard and saw people
shooting from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It falsely
recorded the testimony of certain witnesses, as they were to
complain later on, and reinterpreted the testimony of others. All this
took careful effort. A "hasty and slipshod" investigation would show
some randomness in its errors. But the Commission's distortions
consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured
hypothesis.

Erwin Knoll talks disparagingly of the gullible U.S. public and says
he "despises" Oliver Stone for playing on that gullibility. In fact, the
U.S. public has been anything but gullible. It has not swallowed the
official explanation the way some of the left critics have. Surveys
show that 78 percent of the public say they believe there was a
conspiracy. Both Cockburn in the Nation and Chomsky in Z
Magazine dismiss this finding by noting that over 70 percent of the
people also believe in miracles. But the fact that people might be
wrong about one thing does not mean they are wrong about
everything. Chomsky and Cockburn are themselves evidence of that.

In any case, the comparison is between two opposite things.

Chomsky and Cockburn are comparing the public's gullibility about
miracles with its unwillingness to be gullible about the official line
that has been fed to them for thirty years. If anyone is gullible it is
Alexander Cockburn who devoted extra column space in the Nation
to support the Warren Commission's tattered theory about a magic
bullet that could hit both Kennedy and Connolley while changing
direction in mid-air and remaining in pristine condition.

Chomsky says that it is a "curious fact that no trace of the wide-

ranging conspiracy appears in the internal record, and nothing has
leaked" and "credible direct evidence is lacking" (Z Magazine, 1/93,
and letter to me, 12/15/92). But why would participants in a
conspiracy of this magnitude risk everything by maintaining an
"internal record" (whatever that is) about the actual murder? Why
would they risk their lives by going public? Many of the participants
would know only a small part of the picture. But all of them would
have a keen sense of the immensely powerful and sinister forces they
would be up against were they to become too talkative. In fact, a
good number of those who agreed to cooperate with investigators
met untimely deaths. Finally, what credible direct evidence was ever
offered to prove that Oswald was the assassin?
Chomsky is able to maintain his criticism that no credible evidence
has come to light only by remaining determinedly unacquainted with
the mountain of evidence that has been uncovered.

There has even been a decision in a U.S. court of law, Hunt vs.
Liberty Lobby, in which a jury found that President Kennedy had
indeed been murdered by a conspiracy involving, in part, CIA
operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and FBI informant
Jack Ruby.See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial; Was the CIA Involved in
the Assassination of JFK? (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991).
For testimony of another participant see Robert Morrow, First Hand
Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of
President Kennedy (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992).

Nixon advisor H. R. Haldeman admits in his memoir: "After

Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic coverup." And "In a
chilling parallel to their cover-up at Watergate, the CIA literally
erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the
CIA."

Indeed, if there was no conspiracy, why so much secrecy and so

much cover-up? If Oswald did it, what is there to hide and why do
the CIA and FBI still resist a full undoctored disclosure of the
hundreds of thousands of pertinent documents? Would they not be
eager to reveal everything and thereby put to rest doubts about
Oswald's guilt and suspicions about their own culpability?

The remarkable thing about Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, Alexander

Cockburn, and others on the Left who attack the Kennedy conspiracy
findings is they remain invincibly ignorant of the critical
investigations that have been carried out. I have repeatedly pointed
this out in exchanges with them and they never deny it. They have
not read any of the many studies by independent researchers who
implicate the CIA in a conspiracy to kill the president and in the even
more protracted and extensive conspiracy to cover up the murder.
But this does not prevent them from dismissing the conspiracy
charge in the most general and unsubstantiated terms.

Let's Hear It for Structuralism

When pressed on the matter, left critics like Cockburn and Chomsky
allow that some conspiracies do exist but they usually are of minor
importance, a distraction from the real problems of institutional and
structural power. A structural analysis, as I understand it, maintains
that events are determined by the larger configurations of power and
interest and not by the whims of happenstance or the connivance of a
few incidental political actors. There is no denying that larger
structural trends impose limits on policy and exert strong pressures
on leaders. But this does not mean that all important policy is
predetermined. Short of betraying fundamental class interests,
different leaders can pursue different courses, the effects of which
are not inconsequential to the lives of millions of people. Thus, it was
not foreordained that the B-52 carpet bombing of Cambodia and
Laos conducted by Nixon would have happened if Kennedy, or even
Johnson or Humphrey, had been president. If left critics think these
things make no difference in the long run, they better not tell that to
the millions of Indochinese who grieve for their lost ones and for
their own shattered lives.

It is an either-or world for those on the Left who harbor an aversion

for any kind of conspiracy investigation: either you are a structuralist
in your approach to politics or a "conspiracist" who reduces
historical developments to the machinations of secret cabals, thereby
causing us to lose sight of the larger systemic forces. As Chomsky
notes: "However unpleasant and difficult it may be, there is no
escape from the need to confront the reality of institutions and the
policies and actions they largely shape." (Z Magazine, 10/92)

I trust that one of the institutions he has in mind is the CIA. In most
of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert
actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory
kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same
time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national
security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy.

As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and

Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy
and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural
analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking
at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national
security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use
both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating
procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from
electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death
squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing
one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger
agenda of making the world safe for those who own it.

The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which

the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people
realize what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what
it does around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy,
researchers are not looking for an "escape" from something
"unpleasant and difficult," as Chomsky would have it, rather they are
raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is
supposed to be a democracy.

A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency

in history. Institutions are not self-generating reified forces. The
"great continuities of corporate and class interest" (Cockburn's
phrase) are not disembodied things that just happen of their own
accord. Neither empires nor national security institutions come into
existence in a fit of absent-mindedness. They are actualized not only
by broad conditional causes but by the conscious efforts of live
people. Evidence for this can be found in the very existence of a
national security state whose conscious function is to recreate the
conditions of politico-economic hegemony.

Having spent much of my life writing books that utilize a

structuralist approach, I find it ironic to hear about the importance
of structuralism from those who themselves do little or no structural
analysis of the U.S. political system and show little theoretical grasp
of the structural approach. Aside from a few Marxist journals, one
finds little systemic or structural analysis in left periodicals including
ones that carry Chomsky and Cockburn. Most of these publications
focus on particular issues and events—most of which usually are of
far lesser magnitude than the Kennedy assassination.
Left publications have given much attention to conspiracies such as
Watergate, the FBI Cointelpro, Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, CIA drugs-
for-guns trade, BCCI, and savings-and-loans scandals. It is never
explained why these conspiracies are important while the JFK
assassination is not. Chip Berlet repeatedly denounces conspiracy
investigations while himself spending a good deal of time
investigating Lyndon LaRouches fraudulent financial dealings,
conspiracies for which LaRouche went to prison. Berlet never
explains why the LaRouche conspiracy is a subject worthy of
investigation but not the JFK conspiracy.

G. William Domhoff points out: "If 'conspiracy means that these

[ruling class] men are aware of their interests, know each other
personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to
hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events
and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR [the
Council for Foreign Relations], not to mention the Committee for
Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security
Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency." After providing this
useful description of institutional conspiracy, Domhoff then conjures
up a caricature that often clouds the issue: "We all have a
tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that
there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world."
Conspiracy theories "encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad
people, everything will be well in the world."

To this simplistic notion Peter Dale Scott responds: "I believe that a
true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a
few bad people but to the institutional and parapolitical
arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically
governed." In sum, national security state conspiracies are
components of our political structure, not deviations from it.

Why Care About JFK?

The left critics argue that people who are concerned about the JFK
assassination are romanticizing Kennedy and squandering valuable
energy. Chomsky claims that the Nazi-like appeals of rightist
propagandists have a counterpart on the Left: "Its the conspiracy
business. Hang around California, for example, and the left has just
been torn to shreds because they see CIA conspiracies .. . secret
governments [behind] the Kennedy assassination. This kind of stuff
has just wiped out a large part of the left" (Against the Current 56,
1993). Chomsky offers no evidence to support this bizarre statement.

The left critics fear that people will be distracted or misled into
thinking well of Kennedy. Cockburn argues that Kennedy was
nothing more than a servant of the corporate class, so who cares how
he was killed (Nation (3/9/92 and 5/18/92). The left critics' hatred of
Kennedy clouds their judgment about the political significance of his
murder. They mistake the low political value of the victim with the
high political importance of the assassination, its implications for
democracy, and the way it exposes the gangster nature of the state.

In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a conservative militarist.

Clemenceau once conjectured that if the mans name had not been
Dreyfus, he would have been an anti-Dreyfusard. Does that mean
that the political struggle waged around l'affaire Dreyfus was a waste
of time? The issue quickly became larger than Dreyfus, drawn
between Right and Left, between those who stood with the army and
the anti-Semites and those who stood with the republic and justice.

Likewise Benigno Aquino, a member of the privileged class in the

Philippines, promised no great structural changes, being even more
conservative than Kennedy. Does this mean the Filipino people
should have dismissed the conspiracy that led to his assassination as
an event of no great moment, an internal ruling-class affair? Instead,
they used it as ammunition to expose the hated Marcos regime.

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran

aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church
hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks
about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was
assassinated. If he had not been murdered, I doubt that Salvadoran
history would have been much different. Does this mean that
solidarity groups in this country and El Salvador should not have
tried to make his murder an issue that revealed the homicidal
gangster nature of the Salvadoran state? (I posed these questions to
Chomsky in an exchange in Z Magazine, but in his response he did
not address them.)

Instead of seizing the opportunity, some left writers condescendingly

ascribe a host of emotional needs to those who are concerned about
the assassination cover-up. According to Max Holland, a scribe who
seems to be on special assignment to repudiate the JFK conspiracy:
"The nation is gripped by a myth . . . divorced from reality," and
"Americans refuse to accept their own history." In Z Magazine
(10/92) Chomsky argued that "at times of general malaise and social
breakdown, it is not uncommon for millenarian movements to arise."
He saw two such movements in 1992: the response to Ross Perot and
what he called the "Kennedy revival" or "Camelot revival." Though
recognizing that the audiences differ, he lumps them together as "the
JFK-Perot enthusiasms." Public interest in the JFK assassination, he
says, stems from a "Camelot yearning" and the "yearning for a lost
Messiah."

I, for one, witnessed evidence of a Perot movement involving

millions of people but I saw no evidence of a Kennedy revival,
certainly no millenarian longing for Camelot or a "lost Messiah."
However, there has been a revived interest in the Kennedy
assassination, which is something else. Throughout the debate,
Chomsky repeatedly assumes that those who have been troubled
about the assassination must be admirers of Kennedy. In fact, some
are, but many are not. Kennedy was killed in 1963; people who today
are in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties—most Americans—
were not old enough to have developed a political attachment to him.

The left critics psychologize about our illusions, our false dreams, our
longings for Messiahs and father figures, our inability to face
unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing
admonitions about our "conspiracy captivation" and "Camelot
yearnings." They urge us not to escape into fantasy.

They are the cognoscenti who guide us and out-left us on the JFK
assassination, a subject about which they know next to nothing and
whose significance they have been unable to grasp. Having never
read the investigative literature, they dismiss the investigators as
irrelevant or irrational. To cloak their own position with intellectual
respectability, they fall back on an unpracticed structuralism.

It is neither "Kennedy worship" nor "Camelot yearnings" that

motivates our inquiry, but a desire to fight back against manipulative
and malignant institutions so that we might begin to develop a
system of accountable rule worthy of the name of democracy.

THE WONDERFUL LIFE AND STRANGE

DEATH OF WALTER REUTHEROur
thanks to William J. Gallagher, news
investigator at WJBK-TV, Detroit, for
sharing his extensive files on Reuther.
(co-authored with Peggy Noton)
In recent decades, organized labor has endured a serious battering
from conservative interests in both government and the corporate
world. As progressives in the AFL-CIO try to rally their forces, they
would do well to remember those few especially dedicated and gifted
union leaders who understood the broader social and political
dimensions of the labor struggle. Among such leaders looms the
great figure of Walter Reuther. Rising from the ranks to spearhead
the creation of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Reuther brought a
special blend of unfaltering progressivism and efficacy to the U.S.
political scene. For this he earned the wrath of powerful corporate
and political interests.

On the evening of May 9, 1970, Reuther, along with his wife, two
close UAW associates, and the planes two-man crew, were killed
when their chartered Lear jet crashed near the Emmet County
Airport in northern Michigan. The brief flight had originated in
Detroit and was coming in through the mist on an instrument
landing when it plowed into the treetops and burst into flames. There
were no survivors. A year and a half earlier, in October 1968, Reuther
and his brother Victor had barely escaped death in a remarkably
similar incident while flying into Dulles Airport, again in a small
private plane. On that night the sky was clear enough for the pilots to
realize that their altimeter was malfunctioning, and at the last
moment they managed a crash landing that smashed a wing of the
plane but left no one seriously injured. Years later, Victor Reuther
told us: "I and other family members were convinced that both the
fatal crash and the near-fatal one in 1968 were not accidental." Any
number of highly placed persons might have wanted Walter Reuther
out of the way. Indeed, as we shall see, there was evidence of foul
play against him through much of his public life and evidence of
sabotage relating to the fatal crash itself.

The Early Struggle

Eight months before his death, Reuther reflected on the broader

dimensions of labor's struggle: "The labor movement is about
changing society. . . . What good is a dollar an hour more in wages if
your neighborhood is burning down? What good is another week's
vacation if the lake you used to go to, where you've got a cottage, is
polluted and you can't swim in it and the kids can't play in it? What
good is another $100 pension if the world goes up in atomic smoke?"
Reuther was the kind of labor leader who unsettled the higher
circles: militant, incorruptible, and dedicated both to the rank-and-
file and a broad class agenda.

The son of a German immigrant who was a lifelong socialist and

labor organizer, Reuther devoted his life to the labor struggle. In
1932, after being fired from his job at a Ford plant because of his
unionizing efforts, he departed with his brother Victor on a three-
year trip around the world. Their itinerary included a prolonged stint
as workers in a Ford plant in the Soviet Union. Writing to a friend
back in the states, Victor described Soviet society in enthusiastic
terms. The letter, which he signed "Vic and Wal," later was doctored
in a number of places. Most notably, its closing comment, "Carry on
the fight" was changed to "Carry on the fight for a Soviet America."
The FBI possessed the original letter in its internal files but
circulated only the forged one to political leaders, corporate heads,
and rival unionists in an attempt to show that the Reuthers were
communist tools.
Returning to Detroit in late 1935, Walter and Victor emerged as
leaders in the often bloody struggle against the automotive bosses,
winning landmark victories against Chrysler, GM, and Ford. In May
of 1937, during a major leafleting effort, Reuther and dozens of other
UAW organizers were brutally assaulted by Ford's thugs. Testifying
at a federal hearing, Reuther described how he and his fellow
organizers were repeatedly punched, kicked, and slammed against
the concrete floor, then thrown down several flights of stairs—while
the police stood by doing nothing.

Murder Attempts

In April 1938, two masked gunmen forced their way into Reuther's
Detroit home during a party and attempted to abduct him. While
they were trying to beat Reuther into submission, one guest managed
to flee and summoned help. The assailants were eventually arrested,
but their trial proved to be a sham. Facing a jury packed with Ford
sympathizers, the defense argued that Walter had staged the whole
event as a publicity stunt. The state prosecutor conveniently
neglected to mention that Reuther's organizing activities had made
him a target at Ford and that both of the accused recently had been
working for Ford's security chief Harry Bennett. The jury acquitted
them.

No one could claim that the attack ten years later was staged. In
April 1948, Reuther was nearly killed by a shotgun blast fired
through his kitchen window. He suffered chest and arm wounds and
never recovered the full use of his right arm and hand.

In 1949, an attempt on Victor Reuther's life suggests outright

complicity by law enforcers. Victor began receiving calls from the
Detroit police telling him that neighbors (whom the police refused to
name) were complaining about his dog's barking. In fact, the dog had
occasionally barked at night. When Victor went to see why, he would
see a parked car start up and speed away. After the police issued a
"final warning," the family reluctantly gave their pet to some friends.
The very next evening Victor was shot in the head as he sat reading
in his home. The bullet took out his right eye and parts of his jaw. A
neighbor who volunteered a detailed description of the assailants to
the police was never contacted for follow-up questioning and began
receiving anonymous phone calls warning him to shut up. 2

Two days after Victor was shot, the U.S. Senate, in an unprecedented
move, unanimously adopted a resolution requesting the FBI to
investigate both attacks. U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark, the
governor of Michigan, and the UAW itself also demanded an
investigation. Although Attorney General Clark—FBI chief J. Edgar
Hoovers putative superior—pointed out that there were possible
violations of the Fugitive Felon Act and several other federal statutes,
Hoover refused to move, claiming a lack of jurisdiction because no
federal laws had been broken. 3

2 In December 1957, Ralph Winstead's body was recovered from

Lake St. Clair. Winstead had been investigating the Reuther
shootings for the UAW for eight years and, according to Victor, was
the greatest source of worthwhile information on the case. His death
was declared "accidental" and no investigation was made.

Neither the FBI nor the Detroit police followed any of the leads
uncovered by UAW investigators. Nor did they come up with any of
their own. No corporate officials were ever questioned. Ford
strongman Harry Bennett, who had been implicated in the 1938
attempt against Walter, was never interrogated. In fact, Bennett was
Hoover's golfing buddy and was considered a valuable ally who gave
the FBI access to his files on "communist" activity, consisting mostly
of dossiers on labor activists.

At the end of 1949, an attempt to bomb UAW headquarters in

Detroit was foiled by an anonymous call to a Detroit Times reporter.
According to the caller, the explosive was "planted when the big guy
[Walter] was in the building." Needless to say, investigations
conducted by the police and the FBI led nowhere.

On the National Scene

By the 1950s Reuther and the UAW had reached an uneasy modus
vivendi with the auto bosses. According to Victor Reuther, the
relationship was marked by an absence of rancor in the last years of
Walter's life. Under Walter's leadership, the UAW not only grew into
the largest union in the Western world with 1.2 million members but
became a powerful political organization. By 1952, as president of
both the UAW and the entire CIO, Reuther had become, in the
opinion of many, the most influential labor figure in the country.

3 Clark told UAW attorney Joseph Rauh, "Edgar says no. He says
he's not going to get involved every time some nigger woman gets
raped": Elizabeth Reuther Dickmeyer, Reuther: A Daughter Strikes
(Southfield, Mich.: Spelman, 1989), 9; also Hoover to Tolson, Ladd
and Harbo, memorandum May 26, 1949, FBI archives, 61-9556. On
the demands for an investigation, see FBI archives 61-9556, section
4, passim).

Reuther used his position to promote progressive stances on a wide

range of domestic and foreign policy issues. UAW locals around the
country formed political action committees that lobbied lawmakers
and helped elect candidates friendly to organized labor. At the same
time, Walter and his brother Roy were building alliances between
labor, church, and civic groups and ethnic minorities.

Throughout the sixties, the UAW lent financial and moral support to
the civil rights movement. Reuther worked closely with Martin
Luther King Jr., joining him in all the great civil rights marches and
serving as a longtime member of the NAACP's board of directors—
whose meetings the FBI routinely bugged.

Reuther sparked the creation of a Citizen's Board of Inquiry into

Hunger and Malnutrition. The board's findings that millions of
Americans were not getting enough to eat spurred Congress into
enacting reforms. The UAW leader pioneered a variety of innovative
programs, including employer-funded health and pension plans,
cost-of-living allowances, and a guaranteed annual wage. He fought
for federally funded affordable housing, nationalized health care,
government ownership of monopolistic industries, worker
participation in economic planning, and other proposals for
redistributing power and wealth, all of which were taken as threats to
ruling-class interests — as indeed they were.
Under Walter and Victor's leadership, the UAW became one of the
strongest proponents of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. UAW
members marched in peace demonstrations and voted funds to
support antiwar campaigns. Abroad, Reuther was the USA's best-
known and best-liked labor leader in a number of nonaligned
countries. In India, he told an appreciative audience that U.S. foreign
policy in Asia placed undue emphasis on military power and
"doubtful military allies" to the neglect of "reliable democratic
friends."

By the 1950s because of these kinds of activities, Reuther had earned

a number of powerful political enemies on the national scene. During
the 1956 presidential campaign, Vice President Richard Nixon told
Republican stalwarts that the UAW leader, not Democratic
presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, was "the man to beat"
because of his organizing power and "big money." In 1958, at a GOP
fundraiser, Senator Barry Goldwater declared that "Walter Reuther
and the UAW-CIO are a more dangerous menace than . . . anything
Soviet Russia might do to America." Other members of Congress
warned of Reuther's "dream of establishing a Socialist labor
government in the United States." A two-page ad in the Wall Street
Journal (9/22/58) ran an inch-high headline: "WILL YOU LET
REUTHER GET AWAY WITH IT?" The ad warned: "Walter Reuther
is already within reach of controlling your Congress. The American
Labor movement has now become a political movement with the
objective of establishing a socialist labor government in control of
the economic and social life of this nation." For his activities at home
and abroad, as Victor recalled, "the right wing never lost its violent
bitter taste against Walter."

Hoover's Vendetta

FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover certainly never lost his violent bitter taste,
stalking Walter for some forty years, using undercover informants
and illegal bugging equipment. Reuther was on friendly terms with
several Democratic presidents who submitted his name for positions
on presidential boards and commissions. In each instance, Hoover
successfully blocked Reuther's appointment by secretly circulating
disinformation packets to the White House and members of
Congress, featuring the doctored "For a Soviet America" letter and
testimony by individuals falsely accusing Walter of communist
affiliations.

Both the CIA and the FBI monitored Reuther's foreign travel, taking
note of public comments of his that "might be construed as contrary
to the foreign policy of the United States." During World War II,
Hoover made preparations to put all three Reuther brothers in
custodial detention. He was ultimately dissuaded from doing so by
John Bugas, chief FBI agent in Detroit.

In his early Detroit days, Walter had formed an alliance with

communists within the union in order to combat conservative labor
factions and company bosses. In 1938 he severed this association
and some years later, after gaining control of the UAW board, he
launched a purge of dedicated UAW organizers who were
communists or close to the party. In 1949, he played a key role in the
expulsion of eleven unions accused of being communist-led.

Over the years, Reuther denounced communism at every

opportunity, seeking thereby to legitimate his own status as a loyal
American. Like so many on the Left then and now, he did not realize
that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged
elements of society are abhorred by conservative elites whether they
be communists or not. For the industrialists, financiers, and leading
politicos, it made little difference whether their wealth and power
was challenged by "communist subversives" or "loyal Americans."
The communist label was used in attempts to smear and delegitimize
Reuther. But it was not an obsession with communism that caused
them to hate and fear Reuther but an obsession with maintaining
their privileged place in the politico-economic status quo.

At the same time, Reuther was critical of right-wing radicalism. In

1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked him, Victor, and
Joseph Rauh, an attorney for the UAW, to investigate the ultra-
Right. (Reuther was a close friend and advisor to the Kennedys.) The
resulting report warned of radical right elements inside the military
and urged the president to dismiss generals and admirals who
engaged in rightist political activities. The report also faulted J.
Edgar Hoover for exaggerating "the domestic Communist menace at
every turn" thus contributing "to the public's frame of mind upon
which the radical right feeds."

Though initially confidential, the report later became public. One can
imagine the negative impact it had on Hoover and top circles in the
Pentagon.

Final Break

From the first days of the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, irreconcilable

political differences existed between Reuther and AFL-CIO president
George Meany, a cold-war hawk. Under Meany, the AFL-CIO entered
into an unholy alliance with the CIA in order to bolster conservative,
anticommunist unions in other countries. These unions, as Victor
Reuther describes them, were run by people who were "well soaked
with both U.S. corporate and CIA juices. It was, in effect, an exercise
in trade union colonialism."

In early 1968 the UAW withdrew from the AFL-CIO and joined
forces with the Teamsters and two smaller unions to form the
Alliance for Labor Action (ALA), with a membership totaling over
four million. The Teamsters gave Reuther a free hand on political
and social issues. With Nixon in the White House and the bombings
in Indochina escalating to unprecedented levels, Reuther ran ads in
the national media and appeared before congressional committees to
denounce the war and call for drastic cuts in the military budget.
While the AFL-CIO was proclaiming its support for Nixon's
escalation of the war and his anti-ballistic missile program, the ALA
was lobbying hard against both.

Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent

State University prompted Reuther—the day before his death—to
send a telegram to the White House condemning the war, the
invasion, and "the bankruptcy of our policy of force and violence in
Vietnam." By 1970, Reuther was seen more than ever as a threat to
the dominant political agenda, earning him top place on Nixon's
enemy list.
The Fatal Crash: Some Disturbing Evidence

The struggles of Walter Reuther's life should cause us to give more

than cursory attention to the questionable circumstances of his
death. Here are some things to consider:

First, as president of the largest union in the country, Reuther had

the resources for advancing his causes on the national scene as did
few others. He was an extraordinarily effective proponent of
socioeconomic equality and an outspoken critic of the military-
industrial complex, the arms race, the CIA, the national security
state, and the Vietnam war. For these things he earned the enmity of
people in high places.

Second, in the years before the fatal crash there had been
assassination attempts against Walter and Victor. (Victor believes
the attempt against him was intended as a message to Walter.) In
each of these instances, state and federal law-enforcement agencies
showed themselves at best lackadaisical in their investigative efforts,
suggesting the possibility of official collusion or at least tolerance for
the criminal deeds.

(In this context, it might be noted that in January 1970, only three
months before the fatal plane crash, the Nixon White House
requested Reuther's FBI file. The call came from Egil Krogh, a Nixon
staff member who was later arrested as a Watergate burglar. The file
documented Reuther's leadership role in progressive and antiwar
organizations. In 1985, when Detroit newsman William Gallagher
asked why Nixon had wanted the file, Krogh was evasive, claiming a
lack of memory.)

Third, like the suspicious near-crash that occurred the previous year,
the fatal crash also involved a faulty altimeter in a small plane. It is a
remarkable coincidence that Reuther would have been in two planes
with the exact same malfunctioning in that brief time frame.

Fourth, the investigation conducted by the National Transportation

Safety Board (NTSB) of the fatal crash of May 1970 turned up some
disturbing evidence, to say the least. When the investigators
disassembled the captain's altimeter, they found no fewer than seven
abnormalities.

Most significantly, they discovered a brass screw lying loose in the

instrument case. The report notes that with a loosened screw, "the
altimeter would have read high by 225 to 250 feet." The screw "locks
the movable aluminum calibration arm in place when the instrument
is calibrated. The threads within the screw hole were torn and
ragged. Deposits of aluminum particles were observed on the threads
of the screw Examination of the X-rays revealed that the locking
screw was in place prior to disassembly." 4 The report does not
speculate as to who or what might have loosened the screw.

Testing to see if the heat of the crash might have disassembled the
screw, investigators placed a similar calibration arm mechanism in
an oven and heated it for two hours at 1,100 degrees F. "This screw
was found to be tight when examined." When the test screw was
removed, "aluminum deposits were found on its threads. The hole
from which it was removed displayed torn and broken threads
similar to those of the accident calibration arm," suggesting that the
loose screw in Reuther's plane had not been disassembled by the
heat of the crash but had been removed or loosened by deliberate
human effort.

4 National Transportation Safety Board, Aircraft Accident Report,

Executive Jet Aviation, Inc. Lear Jet L23A N434EJ Near the Emmet
County Airport, Pellston, Michigan, May 9, 1970 Adopted: December
22, 1970, Report no. NTSB-AAR-71-3), Washington, D.C. All
subsequent materials and quotations relating directly to the crash
are from this report, unless otherwise indicated.

Further examination revealed six other unusual defects in the

altimeter:

—An incorrect pivot was installed in one end of a rocking shaft.

—An end stone was missing from the opposite end of the rocking
shaft.
—A ring jewel within the mechanism was installed off center.

—A second rocking shaft rear support pivot was incorrect. —The

wrong kind of link pin, which holds a spring clip in place at the
pneumatic capsule, was installed.

—An end stone, which supports a shaft within the mechanism, was
installed upside down.

That these many abnormalities could accidentally and coincidentally

appear in a single altimeter are close to impossible. With notable
understatement, the investigators concluded that "such conditions
undoubtedly caused excessive friction [in the altimeter mechanism].
. . . The board believes that while the evidence is not conclusive, the
captains altimeter was probably reading inaccurately."

There were other problems. The pilots chose runway 5, the only
approach that was lit. But it lacked both runway end identifier lights
and a visual approach path indicator (VAPI). The VAPI gives pilots
their proper flight angle and helps them determine whether they are
too high or too low. The principal approach, runway 23, was
equipped with a VAPI, but one of the runway lights was out.
Normally, pilots are given notification if a light is out on the main
runway. This was not done, suggesting that perhaps the light had
been broken close to landing time. Why did runway 5 lack identifier
lights and a VAPI? Why was such a deficient approach the only one
that was lit, inviting the pilots to chose it? Why was the light on
runway 23 not operating and why was no notice sent out? The NTSB
report neither asks nor answers these questions.

In its opening synopsis, the NTSB report emphasized the "lack of

visual cues" as a cause of the accident. The body of the report,
however, placed more emphasis on the faulty altimeter, noting that
in the absence of sufficient visual cues "use of the altimeter is a
necessity." An "altimeter which read too high" could have caused the
pilot mistakenly to think he had sufficient altitude for a safe landing.
"In view of the condition of the captains altimeter, such a situation is
highly possible."
Aside from the altimeter, the report found no other defects in the
aircraft. The Lear jet "was properly certificated and airworthy" and
"there was no malfunction of the aircraft prior to the accident."

Nor was there evidence of crew incapacity or error. Previous medical

records and post mortem examination of the pilot and first officer
did not reveal any disease or physical disability that would have
affected their performance. Captain George Evans had logged more
than 2,000 hours of flight time on Lear jets, and more than 140
hours in the previous three months. And both pilots had flown into
Pellston Airport many times under far worse conditions.

An Associated Press story carried in the New York Times (7/16/

1970) under the headline, "NO SABOTAGE FOUND IN REUTHER
CRASH," stated that the NTSB "said today that it had found no
indication of sabotage to explain the jet air taxi crash." The Times
story is seriously misleading. In fact, the final NTSB report utters not
a word about sabotage one way or the other. It notes how numerous
unusual defects in the altimeter may have caused a malfunction, but
it says nothing about what caused the defects themselves (except to
rule out heat as a factor in disassembling the locking screw). The
report never questions whether the altimeter was tampered with—yet
it proffers a good deal of evidence to suggest that it was. In effect, the
investigators ignored their own findings, leaving it for the press to
announce there were no suspicious findings.

Earlier on the day of the fatal crash, the same ill-fated Lear jet,
carrying popular singer and outspoken right-winger Glen Campbell,
had flown into Detroit with no report of a faulty altimeter. Victor
Reuther noted that there was sufficient time between flights for
tampering with the altimeter. He also pointed out that because they
have so many clients and different pilots, rental planes are inspected
with unusual care and frequency. The pilots demand as much. In a
July 27, 1995, interview, a spokesperson for the Aircraft Owners and
Pilots Association stated that civil aircraft used for commercial
purposes undergo rigorous mandatory inspection programs. In sum,
it is inconceivable that an altimeter with seven defects would have
gone undetected if properly inspected before the flight.
Was there such an inspection? If so, by whom? If not, why not? The
NTSB report never asks these questions. It makes no inquiry about
when the altimeter had been last inspected. Victor Reuther
commented: "I was never convinced that there had been a thorough
investigation by federal authorities. . . . There had been too many
direct attempts on [Walter's] life and there was too much evidence of
tampering with the rental plane." 5

In a follow-up interview with us, Victor further noted:

Animosity from government had been present for some time

[before the fatal crash]. It was not only Walter's stand on
Vietnam and Cambodia that angered Nixon, but also I had
exposed some CIA elements inside labor, and this was also
associated with Walter.... There is a fine line between the mob
and the CIA. There is a lot of crossover. Throughout the entire
history of labor relations there is a sordid history of industry in
league with Hoover and the mafia. . . . You need to check into
right-wing corporate groups and their links to the national
security system.

Checking into such things is no easy task. The FBI still refuses to
turn over nearly 200 pages of documents regarding Reuther's death,
including the copious correspondence between field offices and
Hoover. And many of the released documents—some of them forty
years old—are totally inked out. It is hard to fathom what national
security concern is involved or why the FBI and CIA still keep so
many secrets about Walter Reuther's life and death.

Reuther's demise appears as part of a truncation of liberal and

radical leadership that included the deaths of four national figures:
President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and
Senator Robert Kennedy, and dozens of leaders in the Black Panther
Party and in various community organizations. Whether Reuther's
death was part of a broader agenda to decapitate and demoralize the
mass movements of that day, or whether such an agenda existed at
all, are questions that go beyond the scope of our inquiry.

5 Victor Reuther, interview, January 30, 1992.

Suffice it to say that Victor's belief, shared by Walter's daughter
Elizabeth Reuther Dickmeyer and other members of the family, that
the crash was no accident sounds disturbingly plausible. Despite the
limited investigation, there is enough evidence to suggest that foul
play was involved. The untimely death of this dedicated and effective
progressive labor leader raises disquieting questions about the
criminal nature of state power in what purports to be a democracy.

POLITICAL THEORY AND

CONSCIOUSNESS
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
Some observers hold that whatever people define as being in their
interest at any given time must be taken as such. To postulate that
individuals may often pursue goals that do not really serve their
personal, group, or class interest is to presume to know better than
they what is best for them. Thus, in order to avoid superimposing
one's ideological perspectives or expectations on others, the neutral
observer should take people's identification of their interest as the
only actually existing interest—so the argument goes.

This "neutral" position, however, rests on an unrealistic and

deliberately crude view of the way people arrive at their beliefs. It
denies the incontrovertible fact that people's awareness of issues and
events is often subject to social control. In judging what is in their
interest they are influenced by many factors, including the impact of
social forces greater than themselves. In C. Wright Mill's words:
"What people are interested in is not always what is to their interest;
the troubles they are aware of are not always the ones that beset
them. ... It is not only that [people] can be unconscious of their
situations; they are often falsely conscious of them."

For example, if the U.S. public manifests no mobilized opposition to

the existing social order or some major aspect of it, this is treated as
evidence of a freely developed national consensus. What is ruled out
a priori is the possibility of a manipulated consensus, a controlled
communication universe in which certain opinions are given
generous play and others—such as many of the ones found in this
book—are systematically ignored, suppressed, or misrepresented.

To deny the possibility of false consciousness is to assume there has

been no indoctrination, no socialization to conservative values, no
control of information and commentary, no limitation of the topics
to be considered in the national debate, no predetermination of issue
agendas, and that a whole array of powers have not helped
prestructure how we see and define our own interests and options.

In fact, if no overt conflict exists between rulers and ruled, this may
be because of one or more of the following reasons:

Consensus satisfaction: Citizens are content with things because

their interests are being served.

Apathy and lack of perception: People are indifferent to political

matters. Preoccupied with other things, they do not see the link
between issues of the polity and their own well-being.

Discouragement and fear: People are dissatisfied but acquiesce

reluctantly because they do not see the possibility of change or they
fear that change will only make things worse or they fear the
repression that will be delivered upon them if they become active.

False consciousness: People accept the status quo out of lack of

awareness that viable alternatives exist and out of ignorance as to
how their rulers are violating their professed interests or out of
ignorance of how they themselves are being harmed by what they
think are their interests.

Those who are enamored with the existing order of things would
have us believe that of the above possibilities only the first three,
relating to consensus, apathy, and fear, are conditions of
consciousness that can be empirically studied because they are
supposedly the only ones that exist.
In fact, there exist two kinds of false consciousness. First, there are
the instances in which people pursue policy preferences that are
actually at odds with their interests—as they themselves define those
interests. For instance, there are low-income citizens who want to
maximize their disposable income but then favor a regressive sales
tax over a progressive income tax because of a mistaken
understanding of the relative effects of each type on their
pocketbooks. The sales tax actually costs them more. A limited level
of information or a certain amount of misinformation leads people to
pursue policy choices that go directly against their self-defined
interests. Public support for term limits is an example of false
consciousness. People perceive correctly that many of their political
leaders do not serve them. This perception is manipulated by
conservatives, who have no interest in serving them, to induce people
to get rid of some of those who do try to represent their interests. See
"Term Limits: Trick or Treat?" p. 91.

In the second instance of false consciousness, the way people define

their interests may itself work against their well-being. Thus, they
may think that supporting the actions of U.S. troops in Vietnam or
Panama or Iraq may be furthering their interest in maintaining the
United States as the world's leading superpower. But the superpower
nation-state, with its huge arms expenditures, heavy taxes, gigantic
national debt, neglected domestic services, and economic military
conscription, may actually be lowering rather than enhancing the
security and quality of their lives and the nation's vitality.

It is possible to demonstrate that many people support positions or

candidates that violate their own professed interests and that many
people profess interests that violate their actual well-being.

We who believe that false consciousness is a reality argue that

people's preferences may be themselves a product of a socio-political
system that works against their interests, and that their interests can
only be legitimately identified when they are fully aware of their vital
choices and free and able to choose.

The rejection of false consciousness as being an "ideological" (read:

"Marxist") superimposition leads mainstream social scientists and
other opinion makers to the conclusion that no distinction should be
made between perceptions of interest and what might be called real
or objective interest.

If we accept the view that a preference expressed by any individual

must be accepted as his or her real interest, then there is no
distinction to be made between our perceived interests (which might
be ill-informed and self-defeating) and our real interests (which
might be difficult to perceive because of a lack of accurate, honest,
and readily accessible information). Thus the development of one's
own interests and political consciousness in general may be stunted
or distorted by misinformation, disinformation, and a narrow but
highly visible mainstream political agenda that rules out feasible
alternatives. The reduction of interest to a subjective state of mind
leads us not to a more rigorous empiricism but to a tautology:
"people act in their own interest" becomes "people act as they are
motivated to act." Whatever individuals are motivated to do and
believe, or not do and not believe, is taken as being in their interest
because, by definition, their interest is their motivational condition.

The point, then, is that without making judgments about people's

beliefs we can still inquire as to how they came to their preferences
rather than treat these preferences as an irreducible and
unchallengeable given. For instance, Americans are not congenitally
endowed with loyalty to a particular order of competitiveness,
consumerism, militarism, economic inequality, and environmental
devastation. The definition they give to their interests is shaped in
large measure by the social forces determining their life chances.
And their life chances may be limited by all sorts of still larger forces
acting well beyond their awareness, especially when the so-called
impartial information being circulated is actually profoundly biased
and manipulative in favor of corporate power and conservative
values.

One can see instances of false consciousness all about us. There are
people with legitimate grievances as employees, taxpayers, and
consumers who direct their wrath against welfare mothers but not
against corporate welfarism, against the inner city poor not the outer
city rich, against human services that are needed by the community
rather than regressive tax systems that favor the affluent. They
support defense budgets that fatten the militarists and their
corporate contractors and dislike those who protest the pollution
more than they dislike the polluters.

In their confusion they are ably assisted by conservative

commentators and hate-talk mongers who provide ready-made
explanations for their real problems, who attack victims instead of
victimizers, denouncing feminists and minorities rather than sexists
and racists, denouncing the poor—rather than the rapacious
corporate rich who create poverty. So the poor are defined as "the
poverty problem." The effects of the problem are taken as the
problem itself. The victims of the problem are seen as the cause,
while the perpetrators are depicted as innocent or even beneficial.

Does false consciousness exist? It certainly does and in mass

marketed quantities. It is the mainstay of the conservative
reactionism of the 1980s and 1990s. Without it, those at the top, who
profess a devotion to our interests while serving themselves, would
be in serious trouble indeed.

DIVIDENDS ARE NOT ROYALTIES

It has been frequently noted that IQ examinations, while professing
to measure innate intelligence, are riddled with racial, gender, and
class biases. Thus a low-income, inner-city youth, confronting a
seemingly innocuous phrase like "behind the sofa" on an IQ test, may
find it unfathomable, not realizing that it is simply a middle-class
way of saying "in back of the couch."

Along with IQ exams, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has come
under fire. Going through my file, I came across a story, clipped
years ago from the Washington Post (4/28/89), noting that the
Center for Women Policy Studies found that the SAT was biased
against women. The center reported that about one out of every
seven questions favored males over females, specifically questions
about sports, science, war, and business. A more recent story in the
New York Times (5/26/93) reiterated the charge of gender bias.
One claim made for the SAT is that it is designed to predict a
student's college performance. Not true. Men consistently outscore
women on the SAT, yet women earn higher grades both in high
school and college. But, because of the gap in SAT scores, women are
less likely to win scholarships or gain entry to certain schools and
programs.

While agreeing that there is gender bias in the SAT, we might also
wonder about the test's unexamined politico-economic bias. What
caught my eye was an example offered in the Post article of the
questions that favored males. Males are more likely to answer
correctly the comparison: "Dividends is to stock as royalties is to
writer." According to the SAT, the correct answer is "true."
Presumably, both dividends and royalties are seen as income, while
stock and writer are the respective income producers.

Wait a minute, I thought. What is so correct about that parallel? It is

just such thinking that leads some people to accuse me of being a
"capitalist" because I earn royalties on my books. But income
accrued from stock ownership is something apart from salary or
wages or royalties earned from hard work. ("Royalties" are analogous
to dividends only when they refer to profits on land, oil, and mineral
rights that go to the landowners, something quite different from the
royalties that go to writers.)

Dividends from stock represent profits from capital investment,

money you make without having to work. The author of a book does
not make profits on his or her book. She or he earns an income from
the labor of writing it, proportionately much less than the sum going
to those who own the publishing house and who do none of the
writing. Likewise, those who do the other necessary labor of editing,
proofing, printing, and marketing the book do not receive profits.
They are paid a portion of the money that the book will make and,
like the writer, that portion will be less than the value added to the
book by their labor.

The sum going to the owners is profits, the dividends on the stock
they own in the publishing house. It is a portion of the value added to
the commodity by the labor power of others. It is what federal tax
forms used to call "unearned income" and with good reason. Again—
it cannot be said too often—profits are what you make when not
working. This explains why, in most instances, the secret to getting
rich is not to work hard but to get others to work hard for you.

While corporations are often called "producers," the truth is they

produce nothing. They are organizational devices for the
expropriation of labor and for the accumulation of capital. The real
producers are those who apply their brains, brawn, and talents to the
creation of goods and services. Capitalists like to say that they are
"putting their money to work," but money as such cannot create
more wealth. Of itself, not all the money in the world can build a
house or harvest a crop. Even in regard to what is called "productive
capital," machines and other mechanisms and technologies cannot of
themselves produce anything. They need human labor to become
productive and are themselves the products of previous human
labor.

What capitalists really mean when they talk about "putting their
money to work" is that they are putting human labor to work, paying
workers less in wages and salaries than they produce in value,
thereby siphoning off the surplus for themselves. "Surplus value" is
not only a Marxist concept but a reality of life—so much so that the
capitalists themselves talk about "value added," meaning more or
less the same thing as surplus value: the value that the workers add
to the product over and above the wages they are paid and other
costs of production.

This expropriation of the value created by labor is the biggest rip-off

that working people (including writers) endure. While it is easy for
all of us to see the money taken from us by the government, in the
form of taxes deducted from our paychecks, it is less easy to see the
far greater wealth taken from us in the form of the value created by
our efforts and pocketed by those who do not work.

Typically, in an eight-hour workday, the value of the products that

workers create in the first two hours of labor will equal their wages.
For the remaining six hours, they are performing surplus labor time,
creating surplus value that is taken in by the shareholders,
bondholders, and others who do not work. It is from this surplus
value (or "added value" as management would say) that the
corporate capitalists make their profits, after paying off overhead
costs, interest on loans, advertising fees, and what little taxes they
sometimes pay.

Consider the U.S. Census Bureaus Census of Manufacturers, which

reported that in 1987 workers in twenty manufacturing industries
produced an average $95,519 worth of product per worker a year, or
$1,837 a week. Yet the wage paid averaged only $394 a week. So the
$64 subsequently taken from the worker's paycheck in taxes was far
less than the $1,443 in surplus value pocketed by the owners. This
constant and massive transfer of wealth from those who produce it to
those who pocket it explains why the net assets of the four hundred
richest Americans is $300 billion, while the net assets of the one
hundred fifty million poorest Americans is zero.

This process of expropriation of value explains why the owners of big

commercial publishers of books, newspapers, and other publications
enjoy such immense wealth while most of their writers live at the
subsistence level. In 1975, when I published an oped piece in the New
York Times, I was paid $150. Eight years later I published another in
the Times and, despite the intervening inflation, I again was paid
only $150. Today, almost two decades since I first appeared in that
illustrious publication, the fee is still $150. I got the same munificent
sum for an Op-ed piece I published in the Los Angeles Times.
Furthermore, neither of these newspapers—nor most other major
publications—pay permission fees or reprint fees to authors. That
means the piece might get picked up by various other newspapers
who then pay a fee to the Times —but the author sees not a penny of
it. Some of the major magazines, known as the "big slicks," not only
have frozen their fees but have reduced them over the years. Forget
about trying to keep up with inflation; freelance writers are not even
keeping up with the nominal earnings of the 1970s—even without
accounting for inflation.

To get an idea of how poorly paid writers are, consider the following.
At a meeting of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the National Writers
Union, the chair asked for a show of hands of those who had earned
over $5,000 from their writing in the previous year. Of about thirty
persons, I was the only one who raised his hand—and that's only
because I had a textbook that had enjoyed some college course
adoptions.

Writers will tell you about their many grievances, about publishers
who lie about sales figures and withhold royalties, about manuscripts
accepted then never published, about book publication dates that are
postponed for as much as three or four years, about books that are
published only to have their distribution deliberately and completely
aborted — "privished" it is called — usually because the publisher
decides the book is politically unacceptable. Writers will tell you
about payments and kill fees never collected, about articles
completely rewritten and distorted by clunky-styled editors, about
having no say regarding framing, titling, headlining, and rewrite.
And they will tell you about major magazines and big publishing
houses that have grown rich off their labor.

So a correct analogy would be: "Dividends is to stock as profits is to

publisher." Leave the writer out of it, unless you want to say: "Wages
is to workers as royalties is to writers." To repeat: Authors make
money off their own hard work, and usually not all that much. Unlike
the publisher, they make nothing from the capital investment on
their books because they don't have any capital invested. Like the
proofreaders, editors, printers, and sales representatives, writers
create value through the direct application of their mental and
physical labor. A portion of the value they create goes to them. The
rest goes to the investors.

What the Washington Post article and the study it reported on both
missed was the political and class bias in that particular SAT
question. The "correct" answer is true only if we accept the capitalist
ideological presumption that treats the pocketing of value by
investors as identical to the creation of value by writers. Both
investor and writer supposedly are "working" in partnership to
create "earnings." Tell it to Forbes, not to us underpaid scribes.

The Post quotes a New York state judge: "After a careful review of the
evidence, this court concludes that SAT scores capture a student's
academic achievement no more than a student's yearbook
photograph captures the full range of her experience in high school."
Well said. All I would like to add is that at least one of the SAT
questions captures the ideological biases and disinformation of a
capitalist system all too well, biases that are so thoroughly ingrained
as to go undetected and unchallenged in the very investigations that
purport to expose bias.

POLITICAL SCIENCE FICTION

Science is something more (and less) than the dispassionate pursuit
of knowledge. How scientific information is shaped is often
predetermined by the prevailing ideological climate. For centuries
scientists have paid dearly for maintaining iconoclastic views. Their
oppressors often have been other scientists working in tandem with
the established powers of society.

Likewise with the study of politics and society, established views

preempt the field of discourse, pushing alternative perspectives to
the margins, thereby allowing important scientific questions to
remain unexamined or be settled by injunction rather than by a free
exchange of evidence and ideas. To be sure, orthodoxy has not gone
unchallenged. In the house of political science, for instance, there are
many windows. But some of them are easier to open than others.
And those dissident political scientists who have sought an
aggiornamento have had to struggle.

Today there exists more diverse fields of study in political science

than ever before—which isn't saying much. For if orthodoxy no
longer goes unchallenged, it still rules. What follows is my
understanding of the major disputes that have emerged in political
science. Much of what is said here also holds for sociology,
economics, psychology, and other social sciences.

Looking Backward: From Traditionalism to

Behavioralism
In the period before World War II, the predominant orientation in
political science, and to a lesser extent other social science
disciplines, might be described as nontheoretical and nonsystematic.
Concepts were seldom operationalized, and methods and data were
rather haphazardly treated. The goal of the research was often left
unclear. Generally, the burden of one's research was descriptive and
informational rather than abstracted and theoretical. The focus
usually was on specific institutions rather than on processes that cut
across them. For this reason, the practitioners of this approach were
sometimes described as "institutionalists."

Political scientists studied particular political leaders, events, issues,

and policies with little thought to constructing theories of leadership,
decision making, or other generalizable subjects. Similarly in
sociology and anthropology, or in the earlier ethnology, one usually
studied a group or tribe with the hope of reporting something
interesting about its ways, usually with little attention afforded the
broader social relations or culture. In short, the major focus was on
the ideographic, that is, the concrete and particular, rather than on
the nomothetic, the generalizable phenomena, the kind that modern
science is supposed to uncover in order to advance our theoretical
understanding and our ability to generalize and predict.

To be sure, more than half a century ago there were scholars like
political scientists Arthur Bentley and Charles Merriam and
sociologist W. I. Thomas who by word and example showed
colleagues how to be empirical in approach and theoretical in intent.
But they were the exceptions. In the prewar era, as behavioralist
critics would later claim, the theorists were of the armchair kind,
their game being "theory spinning" rather than theory building.

The Eisenhower era of the 1950s witnessed the emergence and rather
swift triumph of what has been called the "behavioralist" approach in
political and social science. The emphasis was now on moving from
the ideographic to the nomothetic, from description to systematic
analysis and theory building. Political and social phenomena were to
be studied not primarily for their intrinsic interest but for the
purpose of extracting scientific hypotheses and theories that might
be useful for further research and for an overall understanding of
political phenomenon. Cross-disciplinary approaches were
encouraged, and political scientists learned to draw from other fields
and place greater emphasis on quantification and on the rigorous
testing of hypotheses so that subjective impressions might be
minimized.

Behavioralists were to avoid making value judgments about their

subjects. Their task was not to judge or criticize the world but to
study it. Outstanding traditionalist political scientists like James
MacGregor Burns and E. E. Schattschneider could still write books
entitled, respectively, Congress on Trial and The Semi-Sovereign
People, but behavioral studies of Congress and interest groups would
contain no such muckraking overtones and would concentrate on a
systematic delineation of process as such. Questions about the
normative worth of the phenomena studied were to be left to the
moral philosophers. Behavioral scientists might wish to speak out on
these subjects but they could do so only as private citizens and not in
their capacity as scientists.

Behavioralism's impact was soon to be felt throughout the

profession. In the academic journals, plodding exegeses written, as if
with patience and quill pen gave way to schematized, quantified,
formula-ridden studies produced by computerized research teams.
The same trend could be observed in sociology. If in the 1940s a
study of a Boston street gang was entitled—as was William Foote
Whyte's book— Street Corner Society, now an investigation of street
gangs was more apt to be called: "Net Theory, Interactional Patterns,
Status Resolution and Role Accession Conflicts: The Case of the
Street Gang as a Small Group Paradigm."

By the early sixties the behavioralists came to occupy the high

ground in the discipline. In short time it seemed every political
science department had to have a "quantifier." It would be wrong to
assume that this ascension was achieved purely by intellectual
means. Many factors having nothing to do with scholarly dialogue
exercised a decisive effect, most notably the enormous financial
support given to the behavioral persuasion by foundations,
government, corporations, and other interests who saw the
behavioral sciences as useful to them.
By the early 1960s the Pentagon alone was spending about $25
million a year on what it designated as "social science research."
About $14 million went to such defense think tanks as the Rand
Corporation, the Institute for Defense Analysis, and the Research
Analysis Corporation. Another $10 million went each year to the
universities and their related research organizations. And
approximately $500,000 went to the "social science" sectors
maintained by industrial firms. Added to this were the millions given
by the foundations and the lesser but still substantial sums that came
directly from university sources, individual donors, and private
business.

Spurred by this largesse, a vast array of "centers," "institutes,"

"projects," "councils," and "programs" arose, offering the kind of
research money the lonely traditionalist scholar had never
envisioned. The money went to cross-disciplinary teams of
behavioralists who produced elaborate studies on such subjects as
the American soldier, voting behavior at home and abroad,
community decision making, the lures of communism, social
deviancy, student protestors, urban riots, management systems,
savings bond sales campaigns, military recruitment campaigns,
lobbying techniques, cultural systems of Southeast Asia, and
insurgency and counterinsurgency at home and abroad.

Whether it was a question of developing new techniques for making

the tax burden less visible, or consumers more responsive, or
assembly-line workers, inner-city residents, and Latin American
villagers more compliant, the social science teams—with
behavioralist political scientists among them—were there with bright
and often ruthless ideas, never challenging the ideological premises
and interests of their patrons but always serving the objectives
desired by those who paid so well for their talents. Their task was not
to change the world but to help those in power control it. As the
Advisory Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral
Sciences proudly reported in 1968: "The behavioral sciences are an
important source of information, analysis and explanation about
group and individual behavior, and thus an essential and
increasingly relevant instrument of modern government."
Writing in PS (spring 1983), one of the house journals of the
American Political Science Association (APSA), Joseph
LaPalombara, a Yale political scientist, noted that academics could
be useful to banks and corporations, helping them determine how
political conditions in foreign lands might affect the safety and
profitability of their investments. "The day is past when banks and
corporations operating abroad could call on their national
governments, on their diplomats and/or gunboats to keep the
restless natives in line," he wrote. Now they must deal with "the
restless natives" on a "well informed basis," hence the burgeoning
field of "political risk analysis." If political scientists were to be of use
to those whom LaPalombara described admiringly as "intelligent,
harried bankers and corporate managers," they must be prepared to
apply their theories about political upheaval, stability, and policy
implementation in ways that served the profit needs of the
transnationals. For such services big business was willing "to spend
hard cash." "It is a heady challenge," LaPalombara breathlessly
announced.

Corporations and banks were not the only ones interested in the
technical skills of behavioralist analysis. In the January 1983 APSA
Personnel Service Newsletter, the CIA advertised for "analysts to
work in the areas of political change in the Third World. . . . They
should have an interest in social change, revolutionary organizations
and regime responsiveness and capabilities."

While composing less than a majority of the profession, the

behavioralists were the ones who, with their research, outside
funding, advisory council positions, and control over graduate
training and over the APSAs offices and journals, defined the
direction of the profession, its subject matter, implicit ideological
limits, and standards of professional success.

The "Post-Behavioralist" Challenge

In the late 1960s, a time of political ferment, dissident political

scientists began complaining that important happenings were being
ignored by the discipline. The more active of the "post-behavioral"
critics, as David Easton called them, organized themselves into the
Caucus for a New Political Science. Some of them wanted the
behavioral sciences to be used as an instrument of the poor and
powerless rather than the rich and powerful. Others were simply
Luddites who wanted to smash the fancy new research computers
and statistical jargon and return to plain English. Some complained
that political scientists should give serious attention to value
questions. Others felt that the behavioral sciences were already too
riddled with hidden values, and conservative ones at that. The
following are what I consider some of the more important criticisms
of behavioralism made by the post-behavioralists.

First, in their search for the nomothetic, behavioralists tend to place

undue emphasis on process and show a disregard for the content of
political events and systems. Processes abstracted from their content
tend to be treated in an ahistorical reductionist fashion. Hence, it
may be true that both Napoleon and his valet engaged in the
decision-making process, one for the Empire and the other for the
Emperor's household. Both organized staffs, set priorities, allocated
scarce resources, and saw that things got done. Perhaps one might
come up with a model that could apply to the activities of both, but in
doing so one would obscure differences in historical substance that
were of far greater significance than the generalizable patterns of
process. A theory of decision making abstracted in this fashion would
be a somewhat meaningless accomplishment. Indeed, there is a
question of whether the process itself is being properly understood
when so utterly divorced from the context of interest and power,
purpose, and substantive policy.

Second, as the behavioral methodologies became increasingly

elaborate and complex, the problems studied seemed to get ever
more narrow and insignificant. The very demand for precision of
method imposed limits on the kinds of subjects that could be dealt
with. So it seemed that the methodological mountain brought forth
an intellectual mouse, a proliferation of what in graduate school we
used to call "the-greater-the-turnout, the-larger-the-vote" studies.

Third, having adopted the accoutrements of science, behavioralists

leave the impression that their approach is more rigorous than it
actually is. Anyone who has worked with statistical models and other
such materials should appreciate the often ambiguous, elastic, and
inconclusive quality of most "hard data." The precision and
objectivity of behavioralism is more an appearance than a reality.

Fourth, in their desire to maintain the appearance of scientific

neutrality, the behavioralists often have selected neutral,
noncontroversial subjects to study. If politics, as Marx said, is
concerned with "the Furies of private interest," we would never guess
it from the kinds of dreary articles published in what are supposed to
be the leading academic journals. Instead of neutralizing the
investigator, the behavioralists succeeded in neutralizing their
subject matter. Highly abstracted jargon leaves the impression that
the observer is detached and neutral when, in fact, it is the subject
matter that has been diluted, often at a cost to its indigenous
meaning.

Fifth, the emphasis on process causes behavioralists to overlook the

social effects of many policies. Frequently they think of outputs as
inviting value judgments of a kind they say they do not wish to make.
But most of their critics have not been asking them for evaluations
but for systematic descriptions of policy repercussions: Who benefits
and who pays? Why and how? What does this say about the
distribution of power and the functioning of democracy? What is the
relationship of economic to political power, of democracy to
capitalism, and other such questions. There is, after all, a difference
between making value judgments about empirical phenomena and
studying value-laden political activities in an empirical way. The
desire to avoid the first should not lead us to neglect the second.

Sixth, there are in fact all sorts of value judgments hidden in

behavioralist research. Much of their literature assumes that the
overall political system is a benign one. A smoothly functioning
system therefore is presumed to be desirable. The eagerness of
behavioralists to put their science at the service of government,
military, and business rests on this unexamined assumption.
Anything that increases the systems ability to predict and control
social behavior that is troublesome for ruling interests becomes a
plus.
The behavioralist persuasion, then, is anything but value free. This
unacknowledged acceptance of the presumably beneficial qualities of
our politic-economic system allows the behavioralist to dismiss
important kinds of critical empirical investigations as ideological
departures from science.

Radicals versus Centrists

Not long after the Caucus for a New Political Science was formed, it
became clear that the post-behavioral critique was really a radical
one, directed less at a particular research mode than at the orthodox
ideology shared by many behavioralists and traditionalists alike. It
was not the behavioral methodology that prevented political
scientists from studying the undemocratic and plutocratic features of
the U.S. polity (although, as already noted, certain behavioralist
techniques did encourage a narrow and, in effect, conservative
research approach). Rather it was the unexamined centrist political
persuasion of those who applied the methodology. Statistical
methods should not be discredited but why were they used only for
questions that fit within the confines of the centrist ideology? Case
studies were useful but why were only certain kinds of cases studied?
A cross-disciplinary approach was helpful but why draw so much
from psychology while ignoring economics? Why leave political
economy to centrist economists who in turn relegated that subject to
the realm of politics? The net effect was that essential questions in
both politics and economics—especially those relating to class power
—remained untouched.

Today centrist ideological preconceptions still prefigure the research

agenda of the social sciences. In foreign policy analysis, the
assumptions about the benevolent intent of U.S. interventions
remain largely unquestioned. It is assumed that "democratic
capitalism" has an actual empirical referent and is not an ideological
or propaganda term. Most features of the politico-economic social
order are taken as neutral givens, having no relation to the realities
of class power.

The radicals do not complain that the centrists are evading the
important value questions but that their work is riddled with
unexamined values that are treated as empirical truths, while the
empirical hypotheses introduced by radicals that discomfort the
centrists are dismissed as polemics or value judgments.

The centrists claim to be nonpartisan and nonpolitical. But the

determination of what is nonpartisan is itself a highly partisan
matter. Radicals argue that mainstream political scientists are
"nonpartisan" only in that their ideological commitment to liberal
capitalism and to their own self-interested position within that
system are seldom explicated. Indeed, their ideological interests are
best served by denying the existence of such interests.

In turn, the centrists charge the leftists with failing to maintain a

proper distance from political affairs and with being motivated by
partisan concerns. In truth, the centrists themselves have been up to
their ears in partisan affairs. We already noted LaPalombaras
unapologetic invitation to political scientists to help big business
investors deal with troublesome overseas situations. For years,
eminent members of the profession boasted about how political
scientists served the interests of the high and mighty. At ceremonies
for the Pi Sigma Alpha Award—given to political scientists who make
significant contributions "to strengthening the relationship between
political science and public service" —speakers proudly list the many
colleagues who occupy public office, work for political campaigns, or
occupy other such positions of responsibility. It seems there is
nothing wrong with political activism as long as it is the mainstream
variety rather than the critical kind.

The centrists never bother to justify this double standard. They also
never explain how they themselves are able to avoid injecting politics
into their science while so assiduously and proudly injecting their
science into politics. What they fail to acknowledge is that working to
maintain the status quo is as activist and partisan a position as
working to alter it.

Radicals would not deny that they want to change the world. Social
research of any importance is rarely neutral in its effects. Either it
challenges or supports the status quo. But they also want to study the
world. That is why they became scholars rather than community
organizers. In any case, it can be argued that activism can often
furnish insights and experience that will enrich scholarly work, and
that ideology in itself is not a bad thing, only unexamined ideology. It
is important to have research of a wider ideological scope so as to
open unexamined questions and put the centrist orthodoxy to the
test. Indeed, the times demand it. One does not have to be a Marxist
to know there is something very wrong with this society. Neither
mainstream economists nor political scientists will come up with
new answers until they start asking new questions.

Scholars with dissenting viewpoints may have their blind spots but
they also are likely to be free from conventional blind spots. It is no
accident that it is Marxist scholars who are giving us studies of the
relationship between capitalism and the political system, a subject
left largely untouched by centrists. It is no accident that feminist
social scientists are uncovering women's contributions to culture and
history and are exploring gender-related issues that their male
counterparts never imagined were fit subjects for study. It is no
accident that African American scholars see much of history, power,
and social reality as defined from a white perspective, while their
white colleagues have preferred to think of such subjects as colorless.
In sum, a critical ideology can awaken us to things overlooked by the
established orthodoxy.

Radical scholars, especially Marxist ones, have been keenly

interested in theoretical questions, notably the kind that deal with
political oppression and systemic conflict, and with the relationship
of wealth to power and class to democracy. Marxists are interested
both in current political issues and in the underlying forces that give
coherence and generality to seemingly disparate phenomena. This is
certainly a genuine scientific dedication. Yet most mainstream
political scientists judge Marxism as beyond the pale of scientific
scholarship, so much so that they feel little obligation to sound like
scholars themselves when criticizing Marxism. Our academic
literature, book reviews, and discussions are cluttered with facile
swipes at unspecified "Marxists" who supposedly say things I have
never heard Marxists utter. Such forays are usually unburdened by
any first-hand familiarity with the subject that is being disparaged.
Marxism is dismissed but not for a moment is it forgotten.

Declared "simplistic," "dogmatic" and "irrelevant" it remains very

much on the minds of the centrists. It is the other great paradigm
that haunts the bourgeois scholarly world like a specter, repeatedly
acknowledged in gratuitous asides that seek to contain it without
having to confront it.

The competition of ideas between centrists and leftists, as with most

class-related ideational conflicts, is greatly influenced by underlying
material factors. It is the centrists who control most of the
foundations, funds, professional journals, fellowships, graduate
programs, faculty appointments, and promotions. The result is that
there are only a handful of colleges with more than one or two
Marxists on their faculties—if that. And it is common for leftist
scholars to encounter serious difficulties when seeking employment
or tenure. 1 In the last two decades, financial exigencies have
provided a convenient opportunity to purge younger and more
heterodox scholars, although they have not been the only victims.

There are many who prefer the sedative of orthodoxy to the

stimulant of heterodoxy, relying on position to settle questions of
science. Meanwhile, from beyond the confines of the ivory tower,
politico-economic realities threaten to intrude rudely upon academic
paradigms. Virulent forces put democracy and the environment itself
at risk. Time is running out. The scientistic pretenders fiddle while
the planet burns.

1 See "Struggles in Academe," p. 235, for a detailed account of my

own case.

MISCELLANY AND
MEMORABILIA
STRUGGLES IN ACADEME: A
PERSONAL ACCOUNT
Amidst the cornfields of central Illinois there stands that congestion
of graceless brick buildings known as the University of Illinois,
Champaign-Urbana (UI). This story begins in the spring of 1970,
during the Vietnam War, when I was a visiting associate professor at
the UI campus.

Repression in Illinois

Save for a few peace marches, there had been little antiwar activity at
UI until one day in early March 1970 when some two hundred people
demonstrated against a General Electric recruitment team that was
conducting job interviews on campus. Several of the protesters were
beaten and arrested by the police while attempting to force their way
into the building. A few hours later it was announced that the board
of trustees had voted in an emergency session to bar William
Kunstler, one of the defense attorneys at the Chicago 7 conspiracy
trial, from speaking on the campus.

In the eyes of many students, the university was revealing the true
nature of its commitments. A corporation like GE with its extensive
involvement in the war machine was being granted privileged access
to the campus for recruitment purposes, while Kunstler and his
audience were denied their rights to an open forum. Angered by the
actions of the police and the trustees, a crowd of more than one
thousand took to the streets that evening, blocking traffic, stoning
the windows of several of the more overpriced and unpopular
campus stores, as well as the windows of the administration building
and the armory buildings where ROTC was housed. This was
followed by two more nights of demonstrations, rallies, and minor
trashing.

A curfew was enforced with numerous arrests and much unnecessary

police brutality. Students caught in the streets after curfew were
chased and clubbed by police in what looked at times like a primitive
rabbit hunt. From the window of a campus building, I witnessed a
young woman beaten over the head and then dragged, apparently
unconscious, to a police car. In the days to follow, it was a cause of
dismay to some of us that UI Chancellor Jack Peltason (later to serve
the powers that be as President of the University of California) issued
statements of praise for the police, undiluted by a single critical or
restraining word.

For the next two months, the administration weeded out the activist
students, many of whom had not been arrested in the March
disturbances but who were known to be radicals. In violation of the
university's own procedure, the chancellor bypassed the faculty-
student committee that had been established to deal with
disciplinary cases and invited a prominent Illinois lawyer (whose
firm was on retainer with the university) to preside as an ostensibly
disinterested investigator over suspension hearings involving some
forty students.

Other measures were taken in the name of security. The campus

police, notoriously inept at protecting students from the many
robberies, assaults, and rapes that plagued the campus community,
devoted their main efforts to protecting the UI administration from
its own populace. Elaborate and detailed dossiers were kept on
hundreds of students and scores of faculty members. News clippings
in which one's name appeared in association with a controversial
issue, statements one made at public or organizational meetings as
reported by police agents, photographs documenting one's presence
at a rally, teach-in, or demonstration—such were the kinds of things
to be found in an individual's campus security file.

The campus police knew the names and faces of the "troublemakers"
and of many others who would have been surprised to discover
themselves deserving such attention. For weeks after the March
events, university police were busy taking snapshots of people on
campus, issuing suspension warrants and filing complaints in
criminal court. Scores of students were arrested, held for bail, then
released. In most cases, charges were dropped months later for lack
of evidence, indicating that the purpose of the arrest was
intimidation, not prosecution. After being released, some students
were arrested a second and third time in their homes or dormitories
on vaguely stated charges.

A Killing and a Beating

Not long after this reign of repression seemed to have run its course,
President Nixon invaded Cambodia. National Guardsmen killed four
Kent State students. And a day later, a local Champaign police officer
killed an African American man named Edgar Hoults. From all
evidence, Hoults, a bookstore employee, was innocent of any crime
except driving without a license—and DWB (Driving While Black).
Hoults made the mistake of taking flight when police approached his
car and was shot in the back without warning. The culpable officer
was indicted for voluntary manslaughter, later reduced to
involuntary manslaughter, released on $5,000 bond and eventually
found "not guilty" by an all-white middle-American jury.

On the evening after the Hoults murder and the Kent State killings, a
crowd of more than three thousand attended a rally called by student
leaders. Several students and faculty, including myself, spoke in
support of an immediate strike to protest Cambodia, Kent State, the
Hoults murder, police brutality, and the presence of ROTC and the
Illiac IV Pentagon supercomputer on campus. The next day, May 6,
1970, the strike gathered momentum. Pickets appeared in front of
the major buildings and thousands of students boycotted classes.

That afternoon, I joined a group of students and faculty who were

standing in a service driveway arguing with campus police. It seemed
the police had ordered a garbage truck to be backed into a crowd of
striking students without making any effort to clear the driveway.
Luckily no one had been hurt. The exchange ended when
approximately fifty club-swinging state troopers charged the crowd
without warning. Several students were knocked down. Others were
pushed into the shrubbery. One had his front teeth bashed out by a
police club. I was clubbed full force over my left eye and on the back
of my head. After being knocked to the ground, I was clubbed on the
legs and kicked and beaten on the back, chest, and neck by state
troopers. A colleague and close friend of mine, the late Philip
Meranto, raced into the knot of police surrounding me, shouting at
them to leave me alone. Professor Meranto threw himself on me in a
courageous attempt to absorb some of the punishment, only to be
dragged off, kicked, and held face down in the driveway. While the
crowd was restrained by troopers and university police, Meranto and
I were handcuffed and driven to the campus police station along with
several students arrested in the same incident.

I was held without medical care for approximately an hour, my face,

head, and neck soaked with my own blood. Outside the station, a
crowd of about one thousand angry students faced a ring of police
armed with shotguns. In the adjacent hallway, I heard an officer say,
"If I had gotten a clean first lick on that fella [me], he'd be a dead
man now." Three men in plainclothes, standing more directly in my
view, began a conversation in low but audible tones. I heard one
remark excitedly, "That's Parenti, the one who made the speech last
night. Now the chancellor will want us to throw the book at him."

A moment later, a man entered the room to examine my wounds. He

began questioning me while making a great show of friendly concern.
His inquiries invited inquiries of my own, and he eventually
admitted that he was not a doctor but an FBI agent. In response to
my refusal to provide him with any details, he made a point of
saying, "That's okay, we know all about you, Michael John." The use
of my middle name doubtless was intended to impress me with the
intimacy of his knowledge.

Eventually, I was taken to the hospital where I received twelve

stitches on my face and head and X-rays for internal injuries. I was
then transported to a state jail, booked, fingerprinted, and held in a
cell for some thirty sleepless hours with my head burning and my
body shivering, without knowledge of the charges against me, and
having been denied repeated requests to see a doctor. I was released
the next day on a $10,000 bond—by the same judge who had placed
only a $5,000 bond on the policeman who had killed Edgar Hoults.
Much to my surprise, I was charged with five counts including
aggravated battery. A state trooper testified during my preliminary
hearing that I had chipped his tooth with my "hand." Earlier he had
reported to university officials that I had struck him with a "hard
object." On a later occasion he said he was hit by a "fist." Whatever
his claims, I and other eyewitnesses knew his story to be either a
fabrication or a case of mistaken identity.

Professor Meranto, who had been arrested with me, was arrested
again the next day while appearing in court for his arraignment. The
same state trooper told the court that Meranto's knee had "brushed
against" his leg. A complaint of aggravated battery was filed against
Meranto, and he, too, was released under a $10,000 bond by the
same judge.

Needless to say, Chancellor Jack Peltason offered no assistance to

the two of us who had been beaten, kicked, arrested, and falsely
charged. He did not call for an investigation of the incident to
ascertain whether justice had been done. He made no effort to
determine whether his security officers were dangerous fools in
ordering the garbage truck to back into the crowd of students. In fact,
it was his office that filed the complaints against Meranto and me.
On the day of our release, Peltason announced to the press that the
status of our positions at the university was under review. In glowing
terms, he voiced confidence in the security officer who had so
determinedly protected the rights of a garbage truck. Students were
demanding that the officer be fired.

Rallies and Purges

The beating and arrests further galvanized the students. As at

Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere, great numbers seemed ready to
set aside their political differences and close ranks when their own
people were being attacked by police. In response to the beatings and
arrests, some ten thousand students, faculty, and community people
rallied the next day. Most seemed intent upon violating that
evening's curfew, despite the presence of a National Guard
contingent, an act of defiance that moved civil authorities to lift the
curfew. The strike, now involving the great majority of the students,
continued for the next week or so, replete with pickets,
demonstrations, "liberated classes," and over one hundred more
arrests and numerous beatings by the club-happy, lawless forces of
law and order.
During the strike, fifteen political scientists formed a "Faculty for
Resistance" and promulgated a statement condemning President
Nixon, the Cambodian invasion, the Vietnam War, the Kent State
killings, the systematic murder of black militants, and the increasing
repression of dissent. They vowed to devote their time to teaching
students how to "intellectually arm" and protect themselves from
"the encroachments of a criminal regime."

These events were followed by the usual threats and retributions.

Some graduate students who had been active in the strike found
themselves faced with loss of fellowships and teaching
assistantships. At least two teaching assistants were dismissed
outright. Philip Meranto, who previously had been assured of tenure
and promotion because of his teaching abilities and publications, and
whose only crimes were being an outspoken radical critic and trying
to protect a colleague from physical harm, was informed that he
would be wise to begin searching for a new position. At the same
time, young instructors in various departments were informed that
any future "strike activities" would be grounds for cancellation of
contract. Chancellor Peltason sent a letter asking all department
heads to have their faculty account for their time during the week of
the strike.

In a letter to me, Peltason stated that the "allegations" against me

(which he assumed to be true) were grounds for dismissal, but that
since I was soon departing anyway, he decided that a report of the
entire matter was to be placed in my "permanent record file," and
made available to any university, public agency, or prospective
employer wanting information on me. He also informed me that for
the duration of my stay he would see that I "be reassigned to the
extent necessary to eliminate any further interaction with students in
[my] teaching or research functions." In response, I informed him
that I disliked being judged guilty on a matter pending before the
courts, that the threat to make a dossier available to other
prospective employers savored of blacklisting, and that any attempt
to interfere with my interaction with students would further infringe
on my civil liberties.
In the weeks after the strike, I found myself undergoing a trial by
newspaper and radio. One local talk show kept referring to "that
violent Professor Parenti" who "stuffed a brick in a policemen's face"
and who "stirred up the students to riot." Meranto and I were
informed by a sympathetic news reporter that we were on an
"elimination list" compiled by a coterie of local police and that we
had better take precautions. Two students also reported separate
conversations they had with campus police who spoke of their intent
to "get Parenti." Another student reported that a campus cop had
told him that "Parenti has a Swiss bank account" containing secret
funds from the Russians and Chinese. Facing possible imprisonment
because of a marijuana charge, one student reluctantly had accepted
the FBI's offer to monitor all my campus speaking engagements in
exchange for having the charges against him dropped. Troubled by
the whole thing, he later asked his roommate to tell me about it.

For the first two weeks after the strike, whenever Meranto and I were
either driving or walking together, we found ourselves tailed by
police. One evening during the strike, a patrol car followed me home
and then staked out directly in front of my house for the entire night.
I left via a backyard path under the cover of darkness and spent
several days at a friend's house. The mother of a friend of mine was
visited at her Chicago residence by FBI agents who unsettled her
with the information that her daughter was in the company of a
"dangerous revolutionary," who was being kept "under constant
surveillance." They volunteered speculations about the nature of her
daughter's relationship with me.

The political scientists who signed the "Faculty of Resistance"

statement in the spring of 1970 did not fare too well. A Chicago
Tribune editorial called for their dismissal, accusing them of being
"academic vipers," guilty of "unprofessional and unethical conduct
and academic incompetence." Soon afterward, a state senator took
up the cry and the UI board of trustees demanded that the fifteen
retract their statement or face further action. One board member
suggested that their classes be monitored. Two of the original signers
wrote a fawningly conciliatory letter that the trustees were pleased to
accept.
The remaining thirteen sent a clarifying but uncompromising
response, and the trustees voted unanimously to rebuke them for
using such terms in their original statement as "official racism,"
"present societal madness," the "systematic elimination of black
militants," and "a criminal regime." One trustee called it "anarchist
language." All agreed that the thirteen were guilty of descriptions of
this country that did not reflect "the standards of scholarly and
professional expression." Thus did the business executives, corporate
lawyers, and successful speculators and investors who composed the
UI board of trustees become self-appointed arbiters of what the
faculty could say about sociopolitical conditions in the United States.

Repressive measures extended beyond the boundaries of the

University of Illinois. One of the thirteen signers, considered too
"controversial," was turned down for a job at Purdue University. One
UI political science graduate student, applying for a teaching
position at an Indiana state college, was informed by the department
chair that the school's administration already had rejected two
applicants because of their "radical propensities" and that no
interviews could be arranged with any "radical or SDS types."
Another graduate student provided me with a written account of his
job-hunting experience. I quote from his letter:

From first to last the item of highest priority was student issues,
the complaints they were raising and the trouble they caused. Of
much less importance were my qualifications for the position.
Since I generally found myself at odds with my questioners
about the major topics at hand, and since I wanted the job, I
tried to balance diplomacy and honesty, with little success.
Feigning ignorance of the facts or little concern about the
problem partially accomplished the former; trying to show
empathy (as opposed to agreement) with the students partly
accomplished the latter. Naturally, the result of all this was an
unsettling feeling that I had sold out, but not enough.

Another job seeker reflected on his experiences: "At one place I was
asked a continuous barrage of questions about student disorders and
Black militants. Perhaps my interviewers never realized they were
administering a loyalty test." A colleague of senior rank comments: "
[One school] refused me because they felt my recent involvement
with political issues showed a lack of scholarly detachment, even
though my past work was quite scholarly...." The experiences of
people at Illinois are representative of what was happening to
teachers at colleges and universities around the country.

Kangaroo Court

In September 1970, I arrived at the University of Vermont (UVM) to

begin a new teaching job only to discover that the events in Illinois
were already being widely publicized in sensationalist fashion by the
local right-wing newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, which
regularly branded me a "violent agitator" and ran letters from
readers who called me "un-American" and a "Red propagandist."

The following October, I returned to Illinois to stand trial for

aggravated battery, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Given
the climate of opinion in Champaign County, my lawyer advised that
I waive my right to a jury trial and settle for a bench trial. I
reluctantly agreed, thinking that he knew better than I. The presiding
judge, a reputed arch-conservative named Birch Morgen, heard the
testimony of two state troopers, both of whom gave widely
contradictory accounts of what transpired. The trooper with the
chipped tooth testified that he was struck by an open hand. On cross-
examination he admitted he never saw the blow struck, but was sure
I had done it while I was attempting to rise from a sitting position, a
remarkable if not impossible way of throwing a punch. The trooper
who clubbed me described me as standing upright, toe-to-toe with
the "injured" officer, delivering a succession of blows upon him with
clenched fists while he stood motionless and helpless, wearing his
helmet and face visor and holding his riot baton. (At six-foot-three
the trooper with the chipped tooth loomed almost a head taller than
I.)

My lawyer presented six witnesses who described in detail my

actions of that day. All of them testified that I struck no one and that
I at no time resisted arrest. At the close of the trial, friends who had
watched the proceedings were confident that the state had not made
a case.
The following day, Judge Morgen delivered a most remarkable
opinion. He ignored all the conflicts in the trooper's testimonies, as
well as the consistencies in the testimonies of defense witnesses.
Without benefit of evidence, he implied that I must have been the
instigator of the entire garbage truck incident. He observed that I
had "no business being there in the first place." By focusing on a few
minor discrepancies in their testimony (such as whether the garbage
truck was facing north or south), Morgen concluded that defense
witnesses were hopelessly confused. He asserted that the most
credible testimony was that of the troopers: "I can't believe a state
trooper would hit anyone for no reason." It seems the beating they
administered to me was prima facie proof of my culpability. The trial,
then, was merely a formality.

Having proclaimed the infallibility of law enforcement agents, the

judge found me "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" on all three
counts. Many students and faculty who followed the trial closely felt
that I was tried and convicted because of my highly visible political
activities. I left Illinois and went to the University of Vermont to
resume my teaching position.

In June 19711 returned to Illinois for sentencing. Because I was

already employed outside the state and because a host of academic
lights from around the country had sent in appeals on my behalf, I
was saved from having to do time. Instead, I was given two years
probation, a fine, and ordered to pay court costs. In the interim,
Meranto was tried, found guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced
to one year probation and court costs.

In early 1972 at the University of Vermont, my department voted

unanimously to renew my contract as did the faculty senate
committee on promotion and tenure, the council of deans, the vice
president and the president of the university. But as I predicted, the
UVM board of trustees, composed of affluent, conservative business-
people—as are almost all university and college boards—and a few
conservative state legislators, voted fifteen to four against me, citing
as evidence of "unprofessional conduct" my continued antiwar
activities, the Illinois conviction, and the fact I had been seen
carrying a "Vietcong" flag at a peace march in Vermont. Despite
strong faculty and student support on my behalf, the Vermont
trustees refused to renew my contract.

Lawless Guardians

Regarding the events described above, several observations are in

order. First, while the established authorities expect others to treat
regulations and procedures as inviolate, they themselves are not
above playing fast and loose with the rules. Witness the many
unlawful acts of brutality committed by the police and the
willingness of administrators like Peltason to overlook them. Then
there was Peltason's bypassing of the student-faculty disciplinary
committee at UI in favor of a hand-picked hearing officer; the
treatment meted out to Meranto who, according to the rules,
qualified for promotion because of his exceptional capabilities as
scholar and teacher; the suspension of teaching assistant contracts
and the bypassing of qualified but politically bothersome graduate
students; and the many other politically motivated hiring and firing
practices encountered throughout the profession.

There were other things. Not long after radical students at UI won
control of the student government in an election against two
competing slates and on an openly professed radical platform,
student government found certain of its supplies and funds cut off.
When some UI students attempted to establish a nondisruptive
dialogue with workers by leafleting in front of the Magnovox factory
in Urbana—and received a surprisingly sympathetic response from
employees passing through the gate—they were run off the street by
police under threat of arrest for "disorderly conduct" and "disrupting
traffic." Thus peaceful and orderly activities, as well as disruptive
ones, were suppressed.

Students stopped delivery trucks approaching the UI campus and, in

the best tradition of trade unionism, persuaded the first two
incoming truck drivers to honor the picket line. They then were
forcibly dispersed, clubbed, and arrested by police, who follow their
own traditions in such matters. At no time did the striking students
seek to block any other student from going to class. Pickets, teach-
ins, "liberation classes," and spontaneous discussions were the
various means utilized by radical activists to reach their fellow
students — and with much success. The coercion came from the
other side, from police who constantly resorted to excessive and
unnecessary force, from unsympathetic faculty who deliberately
scheduled examinations during the strike and threatened absent
students with failure, and from administrators who suspended and
expelled strike leaders and gave the police carte blanche to be as
brutal as they chose.

Dialogue, persuasion, and appealing to the minds of others, then, are

all very well until such tactics begin to generate real support for the
dissenters—which brings us back to what I call my "iron law of
bourgeois politics": When change threatens to rule, then the rules are
changed.

How do we get the guardians to abide by the law and order they
profess to uphold? In a widely publicized book that celebrated
obedience to the law and won the kudos of mainstream critics, Abe
Fortas wrote in one neglected passage that, like everyone else, the
police "are subject to the rule of law, and if they exceeded the
authorized bounds of firmness and self-protection and needlessly
assaulted the people whom they encountered, they should be
disciplined, tried, and convicted. It is a deplorable truth that because
they are officers of the state they frequently escape the penalty for
their lawlessness."

They escape the penalty because the institutional elites whose rule
they buttress are not only uncritical of police abuse but seemingly
supportive of it. Indeed, as Peltason demonstrated, they can be
downright congratulatory.

Those who are quiescent and conformist in their political views and
actions, yet fear they might have their liberties taken away by a
"backlash" repression, have a mistaken notion of how repression
works. They will almost always be left unhampered when
enunciating ideologically safe opinions and theories and remaining
inconspicuously inactive. Contrary to Orwell's 1984, a book that long
enjoyed an undeserved authority on this question, the state has no
interest in hounding obedient, compliant citizens. If acquiescence to
injustice is the freedom some people seek, they will always be free.

They suffer no repression because they repress themselves, refusing

to sign protest statements or join controversial organizations or get
involved in any manner, except to accept whatever is handed to
them. They never dream of marching in a picket line or
demonstrating, or engaging in a sit-in, or burning their draft cards,
or refusing to pay taxes. And they are careful that none of their
opinions might get them into difficulties with future employers or
public authorities.

Unsurprisingly, from the Vietnam era to the present, those

academics most fearfully anticipating the backlash of tomorrow have
tended to give less than adequate attention to the repression of
today. They counsel that the best way to preserve our freedom of
movement is to be still. But the freedoms of speech and protest are
best secured when most vigorously utilized by masses of people. The
freedom of quietude is no freedom at all. Yet, in all periods of
political struggle there are those who urge that self-policing is the
best way to "remain free." It is certainly a good way to remain in
one's profession.

Aftermath

In the years after Illinois and Vermont, I was unable to procure a

regular teaching position — except for a two-year stint in an
experimental program with a leftist bent at the State University of
New York, Albany, which was obliterated because of "fiscal
exigencies." Much is made in academia of research and scholarship.
"Publish or perish" is the academy's slogan. For me and other
dissenting scholars a new category applied: publish and perish. I
have published ten books and about 150 articles, a number of them
in leading political science journals. I have a Ph.D. from Yale,
glowing recommendations from two former presidents of the
American Political Science Association and from other prominent
members of the profession, and top evaluations as a classroom
teacher. Yet, over the next twenty years I was turned down for
positions at over one hundred colleges and universities, passed over
in many instances in favor of less qualified, but politically safe,
inactive candidates—often by departments whose entire membership
collectively had not published as much as I.

Time and again I heard from sympathetic associates who were privy
to recruitment procedures in their departments that I was rejected
because of my leftist views and political activism. On several
occasions, when a particular department manifested interest in
making an offer, my candidacy was squelched by administrators. A
notable instance occurred at Virginia Commonwealth University,
where the political science department unanimously supported me to
be chair, only to be overruled by a newly appointed dean, Elske
Smith, who summarily informed them that having a leftist for an
assistant professor was one thing but having a leftist for chairperson
was unacceptable. She did not explain to her stunned colleagues why
that was so.

In 1985-86,1 was invited to teach political science for a year at

Brooklyn College, CUNY. The department chair, Morton Berkowitz,
and most of the other department members, were enthusiastic about
having me stay on as a permanent faculty member. But their efforts
were to no avail. The administration refused to renew my contract
even though a budgetary line was available. During this time, a close
associate of mine, Professor John Lombardi, a chemist who was
teaching at City College, CUNY, happened to meet a dean from
Brooklyn College at a party. When Lombardi asked him why his
school had chosen not to retain me, the man responded, "We found
out about him." Since I had spent the entire academic year at
Brooklyn College on good terms with my colleagues and students, I
presume that what the administration "found out" was of a political
nature.

The very last academic position I ever applied for was almost comical
in its aspects. In June 1993, after I moved to Berkeley, California, an
acquaintance associated with the Institute for the Study of Social
Change at the University of California suggested that I apply for
affiliation. In my letter I pointed out that I was requesting neither
salary nor office space and that I just wanted a link with scholars
with whom I could occasionally share ideas and information. As its
name indicates, this particular institute had a reputation for
progressive views. But would they take on someone who was so
visibly engaged in ideological combat with the powers that be? It was
not until ten weeks later that I received a reply from the institute's
director, Troy Duster. Because of the continued budgetary crisis, he
wrote, there were no "support resources" available for additional
affiliates. He conveniently overlooked the fact that I had requested
an affiliation that would have cost the institute nothing in support
resources. To ask for almost nothing and get not even that—such was
my last attempt at landing a "position" in academia.

The experiences I have described above are hardly personal to me.

There are scores of other highly qualified teachers and scholars who
could write autobiographical case histories of political
discrimination. They are part of a larger pattern of purges conducted
in the "free and open" academy by those who profess a dedication to
democracy and academic freedom while practicing political
repression. 1

In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing

and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up
with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Wolfe who said
that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition—but even
more terrible to be frozen into it.

1 For an analysis of other instances, see my Against Empire (San

Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), chap. 10.

LA FAMIGLIA: AN ETHNO-CLASS
EXPERIENCE
Decades ago in the northeast corner of Manhattan, in what is still
known as East Harlem, there existed a congestion of dingy
tenements and brownstones wherein resided one of the largest
Italian working-class populations outside of Italy itself. The
backyards were a forest of clotheslines, poles, and fences. The cellars,
with their rickety wooden steps and iron banisters, opened directly
onto the sidewalks. On warm days the streets were a focus of lively
activity, with people coming and going or lounging on stoops and
chatting. Small groups of men engaged in animated discussions,
while children played ball in the streets or raced about wildly.

On certain days horse-drawn carts offered a lush variety of fruits and

vegetables trucked in from Jersey and Long Island farms. The cries
of the vendors were of a Southern Italian cadence unspoiled by
almost a half-century in the new land. Women sat at window sills
with elbows planted on pillows, occasionally calling down to
acquaintances or yelling at the children. There was always something
of interest going on in the streets but rarely anything of special
importance except life itself.

It was in this East Harlem of 1933 that I made a fitful entrance into
the world. My birth was a Caesarean because, as my mother
explained years later: "You didn't want to come out. You were
stubborn even then." Since she suffered from a congenital disease
called "enlarged heart," there was some question as to whether both
of us would survive the blessed event. At the last minute the hospital
asked my father to grant written permission to have my life sacrificed
were it to prove necessary to save his wife.

In those days during a dangerous birth, a doctor might crush the

baby's head in order to remove it from the womb and avoid fatal
injury to the mother, a procedure the Catholic Church strenuously
opposed. The Church's position was to let nature take its course and
make no deliberate sacrifice of life. This sometimes meant that the
baby came out alive but the mother died, or sometimes both
perished. Obeying his heart instead of the Church, my father agreed
to give the doctors a free hand. As it turned out, they decided on a
Caesarean, a risky operation in 1933 for a woman with a heart
condition. Happily both of us came through.

To talk of my family I would have to begin with my grandparents

who came from the impoverished lands of Southern Italy (as did
most of the Italians in America), bringing with them all the strengths
and limitations of their people. They were frugal, hardworking,
biologically fertile—and distrustful of anyone who lived more than a
few doors away.
One grandmother had thirteen children of whom only seven
survived, and the other had fourteen, also with only seven survivors.
This was the traditional pattern of high fertility and high mortality
carried over from the old country. Given the burdens of repeated
childbirth, both my grandmothers died years before my
grandfathers. Their children, however, adopted the American style of
small families. The image of the large Italian family is an
anachronism that hardened into a stereotype. By the 1930s and
1940s, Italian Americans—having discovered birth control and urban
living—were rarely having more than two or three children.

My father's mother, Grandma Marietta, was a living portrait of her

generation: a short squat woman who toiled endlessly in the home.
She shared the common lot of Italian peasant women: endless
cooking, cleaning, and tending to the family, with a fatalistic
submergence of self. "Che pu fare?" ("What can you do?") was the
common expression of the elderly women. Given their domestic
confinement, they learned but a few words of English even after
decades of living in New York. They accepted suffering as a daily
experience, rather than as something extraordinary. They suffered
while mending and washing clothes in their kitchens, or standing
over hot stoves; they suffered while climbing tenement stairs, or
tending to the children or sitting alone at the windows; and they
suffered while praying to their saints in church and burying their
dead. Most of them went through life dressed in black in an
uninterrupted state of mourning for one or another kin.

Marietta often cast her eyes up toward the kitchen ceiling and
muttered supplications to Saint Anthony of the Light Fixture. She
lived in fear of u mal'occhio, the evil eye. When younger members of
the family were sick, it was because someone had given them u
mal'occhio. Like a high priestess she would sit by my sickbed and
drive away the evil eye, making signs of the cross on my forehead,
mixing oil and water in a small dish and uttering incantations that
were a combination of witchcraft and Catholicism. Witchcraft was
once the people's religion, having been in Southern Italy centuries
before Catholicism and having never quite left. The incantations
seemed to work, for sooner or later I always recovered.
Some of the first-generation Italians were extreme in their
preoccupation with u mal'occhio. I remember as late as the 1950s a
few of the postwar immigrants would put an open pair of scissors
(with one blade broken) on top of the television set so that no one
appearing on the screen could send u mal'occhio into their living
rooms. In this way the magic of medieval times protected them from
the technological evils of the modern era, although, as we now know,
the contaminations of television are not warded off that easily.

My mothers mother, Grandma Concetta, was something of an

exception to this picture of the Italian woman. Endowed with a
strong personality and a vital intelligence, she turned to the only
respectable profession open to rural Italian women in the late
nineteenth century: she became a midwife, a skill she learned in Italy
and brought with her to New York. In those days midwives did more
than deliver babies. They advised families on the care of children,
diagnosed and treated illnesses with herbs, dietary prescriptions,
heat applications, and other natural remedies that were said to work
with far less destruction and sometimes more efficacy than the
expensive chemicalized remedies pushed by the medical and drug
industries of today.

My father spoke of Concetta, his mother-in-law, with a reverence he

seldom expressed toward his own parents. She died at the age of
sixty, a few years before I was born. I knew her only from the
testimony of others and from a few faded photographs of a woman
who gazed into the camera with a friendliness and gentle strength
that made me miss her even though I had never known her.

The men of my grandfathers' generation, like the women, were beset

by forces greater than themselves. In the old country they had toiled
like beasts of burden, trapped in a grinding poverty, victimized by
landlords, tax collectors, and military press gangs. Having fled to the
crowded tenements of New York, they found they had a little more to
live on but sometimes less to live for. My mother's father, Vincenzo,
came to the United States from Calabria in 1887. He spent his
working days in East Harlem carrying 100-pound bags of coal up
tenement stairs, a profession that left him permanently stooped over.
My father's father, Giuseppe, arrived in 1909. A landless peasant who
had worked for one of the great estates outside Bari, he was fleeing
military conscription. Like many of the immigrant men, Giuseppe
worked as a ditch-digger and day laborer in New York, managing to
raise an enormous family on subsistence wages.

These immigrant laborers were the paragons of the humble, thrifty

toilers whom some people like to point to when lecturing the poor on
how to suffer in silence and survive on almost nothing. In truth, the
immigrants were not all that compliant—at least not originally. In
fact, they had taken the extraordinary measure of uprooting
themselves from their homelands in order to escape the dreadful
oppression of the Old World. Rather than suffer in silence, they
voted with their feet. We may think of them as the virtuous poor
(although in their day they were denounced as the swarthy hordes),
but they saw themselves as lifelong victims who were somewhat less
victimized in the new land than in the old. Now they worked only
twelve hours a day instead of fourteen and were better able to feed
their children.

Still, in their hearts, most of the first-generation immigrant men

nursed a sentimental attachment to Italy. Many of them, like
Grandpa Giuseppe, never quite accepted their economic exile in the
new land. And as the years wore on they idealized the past and "the
old country" all the more. Italy became Paradise Lost. It was not
uncommon to hear the old men curse America. To them the new land
could be heartless, money-mad, and filled with the kind of lures and
corruptions that turned children against parents. They felt little
patriotic devotion. What kept them in the United States were the
loaves and fishes, not the stars and stripes.

The immigrant men drank wine made in their own cellars, and
smoked those deliciously sweet and strong Italian stogies (to which I
became temporarily addicted in my adulthood). They congregated in
neighborhood clubs, barber shops, and the backrooms of stores to
play cards, drink, and converse. They exercised a dominant presence
in the home, yet left most domestic affairs including all the toil of
child rearing to the women who exercised a greater day-to-day
influence over the children and over the domestic scene in general.
Religion was also left to the women. The immigrant males might feel
some sort of attachment to the saints and the church but few
attended mass regularly and some openly disliked the priests. In the
literal sense of the word, they were "anticlerical," suspicious of
clergymen who did not work for a living but lived off other people's
labor and who did not marry but spent all their time around women
and children in church.

The Italians who came to the United States during the great
migrations at the turn of the century, like other groups before and
since, were treated as unwelcome strangers. Considered incapable of
becoming properly Americanized, they endured various forms of
discrimination and harassment. Huddled on the margin of American
society, they often looked to Italy for solace. For many of them,
Mussolini appeared on the world stage in 1922 as something of a
redeemer. This was certainly the view reflected in the U.S. press
throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Through his exploits in Africa
and by "standing up" to other European powers, Mussolini won
"respect" for Italy and for Italians everywhere — or so many of the
immigrant men believed.

"When Mussolini came along," an elderly Italian once told me, "they
stopped calling us 'wop.'" The statement is pathetically inaccurate.
The admiration expressed by the U.S. establishment for Mussolini
did not generate a new respect for Italians in America. If anything it
bespoke a low regard for them. The U.S. plutocrats thought no better
of ordinary Italians than they did of their own American workers. To
them, the Italian was a vice-ridden ne'er-do-well, a disorderly
bumpkin lacking in Calvinist virtues, just the sort of person most in
need of a dictator's firm hand.

Like many other ethnic groups that have felt the sting of
discrimination, many of the immigrants developed a late-blooming
compensatory nationalism. Many became more nationalistic
regarding Italy when they were in the new country than when they
had lived in Italy. Certainly that was true of Grandpa Giuseppe.

The second generation, that is, the American-born children of the

immigrants, usually spoke of Mussolini with scorn and derision,
especially after the United States entered World War II. I recall bitter
arguments in my grandfather's house between the older and younger
men. (The women rarely voiced opinions on such matters.) As the
war progressed and Mussolini showed himself to be nothing more
than Hitler's acolyte, the old men tended to grow silent about him.
But in their hearts, I believe, they never bore him any ill-feelings.

The military performance of Italy's legions in the war proved

something of an embarrassment to those who had been anticipating
Benito's version of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. The
ordinary recruits in the Italian army had no desire to fight II Duce's
battles. Rather they manifested a decided inclination to flee or
surrender the moment they realized the other side was using live
ammunition. One of my uncles gleefully told the story of how the
entire Italian army landed one evening in Brooklyn to invade the
Navy Yard, only to be routed and driven into the sea by the nightshift
maintenance crew. Grandpa was not amused by that story. When
Italy switched sides and joined the Allies in the middle of the war,
there was much relief and satisfaction among the American-born and
probably even among many of the immigrants.

Contrary to what we have heard, the immigrant Italians were not

particularly loving toward their children. They sent their young ones
to work at an early age and expropriated their earnings. For most of
the adults there was little opportunity to face the world with ease and
tenderness. Of course, infants and toddlers were hugged, kissed,
fondled, and loved profusely, but as the children got older it would
have been an embarrassment, and in any case was not the custom, to
treat them with much overt affection. Besides, there were so many of
them, so many living and so many dead, and after a while each new
child was either an additional burden or an early tragedy but seldom
an unmitigated joy.

"La famiglia, la famiglia," was the incantation of the old Italians. The
family, always the family: be loyal to it, obey it, stick with it. This
intense attachment to the family was not peculiar to Italians but was,
and still is, a common characteristic of almost any poor rural people
—be it in the Philippines, Nigeria, India, or Appalachia—where the
family has an important survival function. More than anything the
family was one's defense against starvation, the padrone, the
magistrates, strangers, and rival families. As in any survival unit, its
strictures were often severe and its loyalties intense. And betrayals
were not easily forgiven.

The Italian family could also be a terrible battleground. "Nobody can

hate like brothers," the saying goes, especially brothers (and sisters)
who had hard childhoods ruled over by immigrant parents who
themselves saw life as a series of impending catastrophes. I
remember the many squabbles, grudges, and hurt feelings that
passed between my father, his brothers and sisters, and their
respective spouses. The series of shifting alliances and realignments
among them resembled the Balkan politics of an earlier era. Years
later, as the siblings put the deprivations and insecurities of the
immigrant family behind them and mellowed with time and
prosperity and the advent of children and grandchildren of their
own, they tended to get along much better with each other.

I enjoyed the nourishing embrace of the big family gatherings, the

outings at the beach, the picnics, parties, and holiday dinners. The
Italian holiday feast was a celebration of abundance with its platters
of antipasto, pasta, the variety of seasoned meats, the bowls of thick
tasty soups, the green salads seasoned in garlic and olive oil, the
crisp crusty bread, fresh fruits, roasted nuts, rum pastries, and the
endless bottles of homemade wine. I wonder if those feasts were a
kind of ritual performed by people who had lived too long in the
shadows of want and hunger, a way of telling themselves that at least
on certain days the good life was theirs. Whether or not there was
any larger meaning to them, the dinners were enjoyed for
themselves.

I have an especially fond memory of my maternal grandfather,

Vincenzo, a stooped, toothless, unimposing old man who was my
closest ally in early life. During his last years, finding himself
relegated to the edges of the adult world, he entered wholeheartedly
into my world, playing cards with me, taking me for walks around
the block, watching with undisguised delight as I acted out my highly
dramatized cowboy-and-Indian games. He always took my side and
despite his infirmity was sometimes able to rescue me from the
discipline of my parents—which is the God-given function of
grandparents.

Years before, when Vincenzo was still a youngster of seventy-five or

so, and a widower, he was discovered to have a girlfriend, a woman
of about fifty-five. She would steal into the house when no one was
home and climb into bed with him. The discovery of this tryst
plunged the family into a state of panic and rage. My relatives
denounced the woman as a whore of the worse sort, whose intent
was to drive Grandpa to an early grave by overexerting his heart. (He
died at age eighty-seven.) Under the threat of collective family
reprisal, the poor lonely woman dared not see Vincenzo anymore.
And my poor grandfather, after being scolded like a child, was kept
under a sort of house arrest. In those days the idea that elderly
parents might have sexual desires caused a furious embarrassment
among their grown children.

Italian grandfathers were frequently made captives by their families

after passing a certain age, as the sons, daughters, older nieces and
nephews competed to put the old man under their protective
custody. If a car came too close for comfort while the grandfather
was crossing the street, as might happen to any pedestrian, the
family would try to keep him from taking unaccompanied strolls,
convinced that he could no longer judge traffic. If he misplaced his
hat or scarf, as might anyone, he would be judged no longer able to
care for his personal articles. At the beach, if an Italian grandfather
waded into the water much above his knees, one or another of his
self-appointed guardians could be seen jumping up and down on the
shore, waving frantically at him and shouting: "Papa's gonna drown!
Somebody get him!" I read somewhere that this phenomenon of
grandfather captivity still exists in parts of Italy.

I saw the protective custody game repeated with my paternal

grandfather, Giuseppe, who in his later years presided in silence at
the head of the table during holiday meals, a titular chieftain whose
power had slipped away to his sons and sons-in-law, those who now
earned the money and commanded their own households. While a
certain deference was still paid him because of his age, more often he
found himself, much to his annoyance, a victim of overprotection—
which was a sure sign of powerlessness.

Years later in 1956, when an adult, I had occasion to have a few long
talks with him and discovered that he was a most intelligent and
engaging man—although he did have a number of opinions that were
strange for that time, namely that country air was better for one's
health than city air, canned and packaged foods were of less
nutritional value than fresh foods, and physical exertion was better
than sitting around doing nothing. Giuseppe also believed that
doctors and hospitals could be dangerous to one's survival,
automobiles were the ruination of cities, and too much emphasis was
placed on money and material things. We treated such views as
quaintly old-fashioned, having no idea that Grandpa was merely
ahead of his time.

After my birth the doctors warned my mother that another

pregnancy would be fatal. So I went through life as an only child. My
mother tended to spoil me, for which she was criticized by her older
sisters. More than once she mentioned how sorry she was that I had
no brothers and sisters to play with, and she encouraged my
playmates to come spend as much time as they wanted at our house.
But I entertained no regrets about being an only child, for why would
I want to share my lovely mother with some other little brat? My
father played a more distant parental role than my mother, as was
the usual way in Italian working-class families—and in just about any
other family where the division of labor is drawn along gender lines.
He labored long hours for meager sums, sometimes two jobs at a
time. Born in Italy, he was transported to this country at the age of
five. He did poorly in school mostly because of the burdens the
immigrant family imposes on its first-born son. When he was only
ten years old, his day went something like this: up at 6 a.m., work on
his father's ice truck until 8 a.m., then to school, then back to work
from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. to complete a thirteen-hour day. On Saturdays
he worked from 6 a.m. to midnight, an eighteen-hour day. On
Sunday he labored eight hours, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.— that was
supposed to be a half-day.
My father understandably blamed his poor academic performance on
his work burdens. As he put it: "I was too damn tired to learn to read
and write." His fatigue often overcame him and he would fall asleep
in class. On one such occasion a teacher dumped water on him. He
retaliated by taking the inkwell out of the desk and throwing it at her.
After that the teachers labeled him "a bad kid." Kicked out of school
at age fourteen, he went to work full time.

Almost sixty years later, shortly before his death, I talked to him
about his youthful days and recorded his thoughts. The things he
remembered most were the toil, the humiliation of not being able to
speak English, and the abuse he received from teachers. There was
one bright spot, as he tells it:

The only teacher that cared about me was Miss Booth because
she saw me carry ice a few times on 110th Street and she asked,
"How come you're carrying ice at your age?" I said, "I got to
work. My father can't afford a man. There's seven of us at home
to feed." So she saw I wasn't really a bad kid. She saw I was no
good in school really on account of I had to work. That Miss
Booth, she got me to wash the blackboard. Anything she wanted,
I did because she showed she cared about me.

In his adult life, my father's friends were all men. Cross-gender

friendships were not a common thing in those days. The women in a
man's life consisted of his mother, his wife, his sisters, and other
female relatives. He might know various women in the neighborhood
and stop and chat with them briefly but there was no occasion for
sustained socializing. It would have been considered inappropriate.

To illustrate the patriarchal mentality of my father's world I might

recall the time he informed me in troubled tones that Uncle Americo,
while drunk one night, had started beating his wife, Aunt Fanny (my
mother's sister). Americo's son, my cousin Eddy, forcibly intervened
and wrestled his father to the floor. What shocked my father was not
Americo's behavior but Eddy's. "I don't care what happens," he
concluded, "a son should never raise a hand to his father"—a
pronouncement that left me wondering what I would have done if I
had been in Eddy's place.
Hovering over us was the Great Depression, a mysterious but
palpable phenomenon that explained why there was never enough
money, why my father was away working all the time, why I couldn't
have this or that new toy. I remember during one unusually difficult
period my mother bought a small steak and cooked it for me as a
special treat. She sat watching as every morsel disappeared into my
mouth. When I offered her a piece she declined, saying she wasn't
hungry. Only years later did I realize with a pang that she very much
would have wanted some.

None of my relatives talked of "careers"; I don't think the word was

in vogue among us. But everyone talked about jobs—or the fear of
being without one. A high-school education was considered an
unusual accomplishment, and the one uncle who had graduated high
school was considered something of a celebrity. My mother's dream
was that I would someday get a high-school diploma, for then all
doors would be open to me. As she said, I would be able to "dress
nice every day not just Sundays" and "work in an office," a fate that
sounded more like death than salvation to a spirited street boy.

Toward the end of World War II things improved for my family. My

father got steady work driving his uncle's bread truck and my mother
found a job in a neighborhood dress shop, sitting at a machine all
day sewing buttons on children's clothes. I pledged to her that
someday I would earn lots of money so that she would never have to
set foot in that sweatshop again, a vow that heartened her more
because of its expression of concern than because she believed she
would live to see the day. As it happened, when I was seventeen she
died, at age forty-three, still employed by the same shop.

From time to time during my childhood, I would wonder about the

world outside East Harlem, about the strange American people who
inhabited parts of Manhattan we passed through on rare occasions,
the tall, pink-faced, Anglo-Protestants who pronounced all their r's,
patronized the Broadway theater, and went to Europe for purposes
other than to locate relatives. I would think of other equally strange
peoples and unexplored worlds with anticipation. This "intoxication
of experiences yet to come" left me with the feeling that East Harlem
was not my final destiny in life, a feeling that would grow with time.
When I was about twelve or thirteen I chanced upon a copy of Life
magazine that contained an article describing East Harlem as "a
slum inhabited by beggar-poor Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and
Italians," a sentence that stung me enough to remain in my memory.
Slum or not, most of the Italians, including all my relatives,
abandoned East Harlem in the late 1950s, moving to what
sociologists call "second settlement areas," leaving the old
neighborhood to the growing numbers of more recently arrived
Puerto Rican immigrants. The money they had saved during the
relatively prosperous war years and postwar period became the
down-payment passage to the mass-produced housing tracts of Long
Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey, where as proud homeowners
they could settle down to a life that better resembled the one in the
movies.

The few surviving old immigrants were taken along in this exodus,
often reluctantly, now in the isolation of suburbia to regret the loss of
both Italy and East Harlem. For Grandpa Giuseppe, who spent his
last few years in Lindenhurst, Long Island, not even the magnificent
vegetable garden he grew in the back of his daughter's house could
compensate for the sense of double displacement he now endured.

The new prosperity and lifestyle took its toll of the second
generation, too. One uncle, who used to have huge parties for friends
and relatives in his home on Third Avenue complete with mandolins,
accordions, and popular and operatic songs—drawn from the
amateur talents of the guests themselves—now discovered that no
one came to visit him on the outer edge of Queens. An aunt of mine,
who had lived all her life within shouting distance of at least three of
her sisters, tearfully told my mother how lonely she was way out in
Staten Island.

In time, I went off to graduate school and saw far less of my extended
family, as they did of each other. Years later in 1968 I got a call from
my cousin Anthony asking me to attend a family reunion. It took
place in Anthony's home in Queens, a crowd of cousins and their
fourth-generation children, the latter being youngsters whom I was
meeting for the first time and for whom East Harlem was nothing
more than a geographical expression, if that.
Time had brought its changes. The women wore coiffured hairdos
and stylish clothes, and the men looked heavier. There was much talk
about recent vacations and a slide show of Anthony's travels to
Europe, also a magnificent buffet of Italian foods that made the slide
show worth sitting through. And there were a lot of invitations to
"come visit us." Much to my disappointment the older surviving
aunts and uncles had decided to stay away because this was an affair
for the younger people, an act of age segregation that would have
been unthinkable in earlier times. In all, we spent a pleasant evening
joking and catching up on things. It was decided we should get
together more often. But we never did have another reunion.

In the late 1970s I began to have recurring dreams, one every couple
of months or so, continuing for a period of years. Unlike the
recurring dreams portrayed in movies (in which the exact same
footage is run and rerun) the particulars and fixtures of each dream
in real life—or real sleep—differ, but the underlying theme is the
same. In each dream I found myself living in a lovely newly done
apartment; sometimes it had spiral stairwells and bare brick walls
and sometimes lavish wood panelling and fireplaces, but it always
turned out to be a renovation of 304 East 118th Street, the old
brownstone in East Harlem where I had spent most of my early life.

We might think of recurring dreams as nightmarish, but these were

accompanied by sensations of relief and yearning. The life past was
being recaptured and renovated by the life now accomplished. The
slum was being gentrified. The working-class Italian youth and the
professional-class American academic were to live under the same
roof. I had come home to two worlds apart. Never quite at home in
either, I would now have the best of both. Once I understood the
message, the dreams stopped.

THE BLESSINGS OF PRIVATE

ENTERPRISE
Years ago, my father drove a delivery truck for the Italian bakery
owned by his uncle Torino. When Zi Torino returned to Italy in 1956,
my father took over the entire business. The bread he made was the
same bread that had been made in Gravina, Italy, for generations.
After a whole day standing, it was fresh as ever, the crust having
grown hard and crisp while the inside remained soft, solid, and
moist. People used to say that our bread was a meal in itself.

The secret of the bread had been brought by my Zi Torino all the way
from the Mediterranean to Manhattan, down into the tenement
basement where he had installed wooden vats and tables. The bakers
were two dark wiry men, paisani from Gravina, who rhythmically
and endlessly pounded their powdery white hands into the dough,
molding the bread with strength and finesse. Zi Torino and then my
father after him, used time and care in preparing their bread, letting
it sit and rise naturally, turning it over twice a night, using no
chemicals and only the best quality unbleached flour. The bread was
baked slowly and perfectly in an old brick oven built into the
basement wall by Zi Torino in 1907, an oven that had secrets of its
own.

Often during my college days, I would assist my father in loading up

the bread truck at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings. We delivered in
the Bronx to Italian families whose appreciation for good bread was
one of the satisfactions of our labor. My father's business remained
small but steady. Customers, acquired slowly by word of mouth,
remained with us forever. He would engage them in friendly
conversations as he went along his route, taking nine hours to do
seven hours of work. He could tell me more than I wanted to know
about their family histories.

In time, some groceries, restaurants, and supermarkets started

placing orders with us, causing us to expand our production. My
father seemed pleased by the growth in his business, but I felt a
vague uneasiness about making commercial deliveries to such
unconsecrated places as the Jerome Avenue Supermarket. I began to
wonder where it would all lead.

Some months after my father had begun to build his new clientele, as
if to confirm my worst qualms, the Jerome Avenue Supermarket
manager informed him that one of the big companies, Wonder
Bread, was going into the "specialty line" and was offering to take
over the Italian bread account. As an inducement to the
supermarket, Wonder Bread was promising a free introductory offer
of two hundred loaves. With that peculiar kind of generosity often
found in merchants and bosses, the supermarket manager offered to
reject the bid and keep our account if only we would match Wonder
Breads offer at least in part, say a hundred loaves.

"Their bread is paper compared to mine," my father protested.

Indeed, our joke was: the reason they call it Wonder Bread is because
after tasting it, you wonder if its bread. But his artisan's pride proved
no match for the merchant's manipulations, and he agreed to deliver
a hundred free loaves, twenty-five a day, in order to keep the
supermarket account, all the while cursing the manager under his
breath. In the business world, this arrangement is referred to as a
"deal" or an "agreement." To us it seemed more like extortion.

In response to "deals" of this sort, my father developed certain tricks

of his own. By artfully flashing his hands across the tops of the
delivery boxes he would short-count loaves right under the noses of
the store managers: "Five and five across, that's twenty-five, Pete,"
he would point out, when in fact it was only twenty-three. We would
load 550 loaves for the morning run, and he would sell 575. Not since
the Sermon on the Mount had the loaves so increased.

"Pop," I said to him after one of his more daring performances,

"You're becoming a thief."

"Kid," he said, "It's no sin to steal from them that steal from you."
[Individual competition in the pursuit of private gain brings out the
best of our creative energies and thereby maximizes our productive
contributions and advances the well being of the entire society.
Economics 101]

I left for a few years to go to graduate school, only to return home in

1959 without a penny in my pocket. I asked my father to support me
for a semester so that I could finish writing my dissertation. In
return, I offered to work a few days a week on the bread truck. My
father agreed to this but he wondered how he would explain to
friends and neighbors that his son was twenty-five years old and still
without full-time employment.

"Kid, how long can you keep going to school and what for?" he asked.
"All those books," he would warn me, "are bad for your eyes and bad
for your mind."

Well," I said, "I'm getting a Ph.D." To this he made no response. So I

put in a few days a week of hard labor on the truck. Nor did he
complain. In fact, he needed the help and liked having me around (as
he told my stepmother who told me).

When the bakers asked him how come, at the age of twenty-five, I
was working only part-time, he said: "He's getting a Ph.D." From
then on they called me "professor," a term that was applied with
playful sarcasm. It was their way of indicating that they were not as
impressed with my intellectual efforts as some people might be.

On the day my dissertation was accepted and I knew I was to receive

my Ph.D., I proudly informed my father. He nodded and said, "That's
good." Then he asked me if I wanted to become a full-time partner in
the bread business working with him on the truck every day. With all
the education out of the way, now maybe I would be ready to do
some real work.

I almost said yes.

One day the health inspectors came by and insisted we could not
leave the bread naked in the store aisles in open display boxes,
exposed to passers-by who might wish to touch or fondle the loaves
with their germ-ridden fingers. No telling what kind of infected
people might chance into a supermarket to fondle the loaves. So my
father and I were required to seal each loaf in a plastic bag, thus
increasing our production costs, adding hours to our labor, and
causing us to handle the bread twice as much with our germ-carrying
fingers. But now it looked and tasted like modern bread because the
bags kept the moisture in, and the loaves would get gummy in their
own humidity inside their antiseptic plastic skins instead of forming
a crisp, tasty crust in the open air.
Then some of the bigger companies began in earnest to challenge our
restaurant and store trade, underselling us with an inferior quality
"Italian bread." At about this time, the price of flour went up and the
son of the landlord from whom Zi Torino had first rented the bakery
premises a half century before raised our rent substantially.

"When it rains it pours," my father said. So he tried to reduce costs

by giving the dough more air and water and spending less time on
the preparation. The bakers shook their heads and went on making
the imitation product for the plastic bags.

"Pop," I complained, "the bread doesn't taste as good as it used to.

It's more like what the Americans make."

"What's the difference? They still eat it, don't they?" he said with a
tight face.

But no matter what he did, things became more difficult. Some of

our old family customers complained about the change in the quality
of the bread and began to drop their accounts. And a couple of the
big stores decided it was more profitable to carry the commercial
brands.

Not long after, my father closed the bakery and went to work driving
a cab for one of the big taxi fleets in New York City. In all the years
that followed, he never mentioned the bread business again.

SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER, MY LOVE

Speak truth to power, my love, and watch their sleek smiles
disappear. The gatekeeper's face hardens from the unaccustomed
exposure and those who should feel only shame are filled with
righteous puffery.

Meanwhile, the loyal oppositionists and labor dealers, academic

acolytes and kept scribes all sniff the wind and test the Times,
trimming their sails, ready about!

With elaborate casualness,

they flash their ideological credentials.

With earnest asides,

they counsel self-censorship,

urging you to a smaller voice

to gain a bigger audience,

as they twist themselves in a tighter circle,

twisting for their credibility.

They know how to show courage

against easy targets.

Waiting for an approving glance,

they demand faultless standards

from besieged infant revolutions.

A critical distance they keep

when victims fight back and win.

They do mainstream imitations

Responsible Critics from Pragmatics, Inc.

and flash their anti-Menace pose

as they seek entry through the reception gate.

But you, my love, standing outside under the chill glare of mean eyes,
you just speak truth to power and feel your power rise. Your life itself
an unsung testimony to fightback and fightforward against their steel
and gossamer.
Moving quietly in a raucous history,

the trickle becomes a tide

until one day the soldiers

look the other way or melt into the crowd,

drawn by the padding of a million footsteps.

M'lords squawk urgent commands to stop the insolent dance.

M'lords sit in their bayonet temples, calling upon the Furies of
private interest hurling their incantations.

And you,

you stand there like a thousand legions

and speak truth,

remembering how the tides

can break down walls.

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT

Young people are different. Hostages in their own homes, kept alive
by the telephone, fully animated only when taking flight in rough
formation.

They rebel

so better to submit

to their totalitarian peerage.

Worshipping stereophonic gods spirits gyrating to an endless beat

from Memphis to Moscow from Tokyo to Tanzania moving in unison
regiments of youth bonded to their cassette cults beeped to each
other wanting it both ways.
Stacey, Tracey, Buffy, and Tiffy Kevin, Brian, Ryan, and Jamie Dione,
Tyrone, Dawne, and Fawne incorporated for angst with a genius for
unhappy crisis giggling at every mishap a passion for the irrelevant
green hair and evasive eyes.

Worse still,

unwilling to drink from your fountain with no loyalty to your

struggles no applause for your past glories not terribly impressed by
your words seeing you only in the present the sacrifices of yesterday
mean little against the opportunities of today.

Don't be too harsh on them for they have struggles of their own and
sacrifices for our planet's dwindling legacy. Our young people, Yuri
Andropov said, are not bad only different.

Would we could say as much about the world we leave them.

TO MY SON AS I CONTEMPLATE MY DEATH

Upon my departure grieve not too fiercely, for casting across that
spaceless light like Saturn's orbit dimmed by distance, waiting to
touch you, I shall be transformed— only that.

After a life answering its call,

fretting over shadows on the cave wall

for vain promises not really desired,

yet with sense enough to pit a middling talent

against majestic goals, a small walk-on part for a better world.

Now to find beyond the dark passage

a world of luminous wonder and joyful comprehension of things you

and I pondered

when you were scarcely ten years old,

surmising that the personality cannot capture the soul,

but the joyful soul remembers the personality.

I'll not hesitate to re-enter

but shall move in another time,

urging your guardians to perfect diligence,

cheering you on from across a mute universe.

Yet grieve a little,

for who knows what deposit of love

can survive that distance?

When even the prodigy of your metaphysics

and the protective ferocity of a father's heart

cannot produce certitude,

when one's composition is immolated by time,

never to recompose, never again these hands, these eyes, a dreadful

certitude that creates the pain of doubt.

So I ask you, in your later years,

in a quiet moment,

to keep the memory of our company and our struggle,

and the loyal unfinished love,

each for the other.

Ciao bambino
In the fading cosmic light

two little boys embrace good night.

About the Author

MICHAEL PARENTI is considered one of the nation's leading

progressive thinkers. He received his Ph.D. in political science from
Yale University in 1962, and has taught at a number of colleges and
universities. His writings have been featured in scholarly journals,
popular periodicals, and newspapers. Dr. Parenti lectures around the
country on college campuses and before religious, labor, community,
peace, and public interest groups. He has appeared on radio and
television to discuss current issues or ideas from his published
works. Tapes of his talks have played on numerous radio stations to
enthusiastic audiences. Audio and video tapes of his talks are sold on
a not-for-profit basis; for a listing, contact People's Video, P.O. Box
99514, Seattle WA 98199; tel. 206 789-5371. Dr. Parenti lives in
Berkeley, California.

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Lamantia, Philip. BED OF SPHINXES: SELECTED POEMS

Lamantia, Philip. MEADOWLARK WEST

Laughlin, James. SELECTED POEMS: 1935-1985

Laure. THE COLLECTED WRITINGS

Le Brun, Annie. SADE: On the Brink of the Abyss

Mackey, Nathaniel. SCHOOL OF UDHRA

Mackev, Nathaniel. WHATSAID SERIF

Masereel, Frans. PASSIONATE JOURNEY

Mayakovsky, Vladimir. LISTEN! EARLY POEMS

Mehmedinovic, Semezdin. SARAJEVO BLUES

Morgan, William. BEAT GENERATION IN NEW YORK

Mrabet, Mohammed. THE BOY WHO SET THE FIRE

Mrabet, Mohammed. THE LEMON

Mrabet, Mohammed. LOVE WITH A FEW HAIRS

Mrabet, Mohammed. M'HASHISH

Murguia, A. & B. Paschke, eds. VOLCAN: Poems from Central

America

Murillo, Rosario. ANGEL IN THE DELUGE

Nadir, Shams. THE ASTROLABE OF THE SEA

Parenti, Michael. AGAINST EMPIRE

Parenti, Michael. AMERICA BESIEGED

Parenti, Michael. BLACKSHIRTS & REDS

Parenh, Michael. DIRTY TRUTHS

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. ROMAN POEMS

Pessoa, Fernando. ALWAYS ASTONISHED

Pessoa, Fernando. POEMS OF FERNANDO PESSOA

Peters, Nancy J., ed. WAR AFTER WAR (City Lights Review #5)

Poe, Edgar Allan. THE UNKNOWN POE

Porta, Antonio. KISSES FROM ANOTHER DREAM

Prevert, Jacques. PAROLES

Purdy, James. THE CANDLES OF YOUR EYES

Purdy, James. GARMENTS THE LIVING WEAR

Purdy, James. IN A SHALLOW GRAVE

Purdy, James. OUT WITH THE STARS

Rachlin, Nahid. THE HEART'S DESIRE

Rachlin, Nahid. MARRIED TO A STRANGER

Rachlin, Nahid. VEILS: SHORT STORIES

Reed, Jeremy. DELIRIUM: An Interpretation of Arthur Rimbaud

Reed, Jeremy. RED-HAIRED ANDROID

Rey Rosa, Rodrigo. THE BEGGAR'S KNIFE

Rey Rosa, Rodrigo. DUST ON HER TONGUE

Rigaud, Milo. SECRETS OF VOODOO

Ross, Dorien. RETURNING TO A

Ruy Sanchez, Alberto. MOGADOR

Saadawi, Nawal El. MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN DOCTOR

Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. THE CONTINUAL PILGRIMAGE:

American Writers in Paris

1944-1960

Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher, transl. THE DESTRUCTION OF

THE JAGUAR

Scholder, Amy, ed. CRITICAL CONDITION: Women on the Edge of

Violence

Schelling, Andrew, tr. CANE GROVES OF N ARM AD A RIVER:

Erotic Poems from Old India

Sclauzero, Mariarosa. MARLENE

Serge, Victor. RESISTANCE

Shepard, Sam. MOTEL CHRONICLES

Shepard, Sam. FOOL FOR LOVE & THE SAD LAMENT OF PECOS
BILL

Smith, Michael. IT A COME

Snyder, Gary. THE OLD WAYS

Solnit, Rebecca. SECRET EXHIBITION: Six California Artists

Sussler, Betsy, ed. BOMB: INTERVIEWS

Takahashi, Mutsuo. SLEEPING SINNING FALLING

Turyn, Anne, ed. TOP TOP STORIES

Tutuola, Amos. SIMBI & THE SATYR OF THE DARK JUNGLE

Ullman, Ellen. CLOSE TO THE MACHINE: Technophilia and Its

Discontents

Valaoritis, Nanos. MY AFTERLIFE GUARANTEED

VandenBroeck, Andre\ BREAKING THROUGH

Vega, Janine Pommy. TRACKING THE SERPENT

Veltri, George. NICE BOY

Waldman, Anne. FAST SPEAKING WOMAN

Wilson, Colin. POETRY AND MYSTICISM

Wilson, Peter Lamborn. PLOUGHING THE CLOUDS

Wilson, Peter Lamborn. SACRED DRIFT

Wynne, John. THE OTHER WORLD

Zamora, Daisy. RIVERBED OF MEMORY
This book made available by the Internet Archive.