Americans like to see their country as "the land of the free", "The Greatest Country on Earth", "The beacon of democracy for the world". It's a self-image most Americans will preserve at almost any cost, and an image that almost nobody other than Americans believes. What the average comfortable American does not see because he refuses to see are all the ways that America murders, disables, disenfranchises, impoverishes, exploits, and outright oppresses billions of people around the globe and millions within its own borders. For a growing number of people, including American citizens, real structural change to America is literally a matter of life and death.
Unjust Warfare
Unjustified warfare has been a central feature of the American system since before the country was independent. Beginning with the first arrivals and continuing through the end of the nineteenth century, the Americans waged a continuous war of conquest and extermination against the aboriginal inhabitants of the land. In the 1840s the Mexican-American War stole Texas, California and the southwest as a whole from Mexico. The Spanish-American War of the 1890s marked the United States' entrance into the global Great Power Games with the European nation-states.
The first half of the twentieth century saw some exceptions to unjustified American militarism when we happened to wind up with the least nakedly murderous and oppressive alliance three times: the First World War where Germany and its allies were first arguably more execreable than the western allies; the Second World War when Germany and Japan were genuinely in the grip of a genocidal mass insanity; and in Korea where the Soviet Union attempted to subject the entire Korean Peninsula to its client's rule by force.
But by 1960, the American ruling class was back full-time to its normal warfare dedicated to subjecting people of various shades of brown to white rule by stepping in for the French when they got kicked out of Vietnam. With this move the United States had completed the transition from first anti-colonial revolutionary to colonialist oppressor. It was also the first conflict where the United States descended unequivocally into the category of international war criminal. Nobody knows how many millions of Vietnamese died unnecessarily thanks to the criminality of the American ruling class and the credulousness of the comfortable middle class.
The sound ass-kicking the Vietnamese dealt the American military chastened it for 20 years, and after Vietnam the US military limited itself to small-scale oppression of tiny Carribean and Central American nations, until Saddam Hussein gave them the perfect excuse to try out all these new weapons and tactics they'd been developing and practicing for years against a reasonable facsimile of a live opponent. What the military sold and the uncritical American public bought as Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm and I called from the beginning Operation Desert Sham was one of the most charmingly cynical machinations in American history. The United States had supported Hussein in his disastrous war against Khomeini's Iran, and the Bush Administration and Saddam's people were old, good friends. When Saddam decided he needed to add Kuwait to his state, the United States diplomatic representative clearly signaled him that - wink wink - the U.S. would be just fine with that move. When Saddam moved in, President George the First drew his "line in the sand" and deployed the American military to "protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi aggression."
It was 100% horseshit. Had Saddam had any intention of invading Saudi Arabia - a Sunni monarchy as alarmed by shiite Iran as was Saddam - his tanks could have kept going straight through Kuwait to Riyadh and been changing the oil in the Saudi king's garage before the first American units in "Desert Shield" could have boarded their planes at Fort Bragg. Saddam seemed genuinely surprised when the Americans reacted the way they did, but as the whole charade played itself out, I came to suspect that George and Saddam had worked it all out in advance, a hypothesis supported by the ultimate conclusion of the whole affair: with Saddam's domestic opposition and the Kurds having made an uprising at Bush's urging then been slaughtered by the intact Iraqi Republican Guards while the Americans looked on and Bush wrung his hands, saying "I didn't mean for you to try to overthrow the government. So sorry you misunderstood me." But whether done in collusion with or at the expense of Hussein, Operation Desert Sham was nothing more than a massive training maneuver played out as entertainment for American TV audiences. It was, you could say, the first Reality TV show in history.
Not to be outdone by Daddy, President George II went to even greater lengths to vilify Hussein and use him as an excuse for corporate murder on a mass scale. This time it was with the active participation and cheerleading of future Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, who unlike poor Colin Powell gleefully and knowingly sold the fraud of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" or "WMD" to the American public. While we don't know for sure what Biden thought at the time, he did recently say that he knew at the time there were no WMDs. Poor Joe thought he was campaigning for peace by urging war on Iraq. With a new generation of weapons and tactics to test out, the American military completed the job of destroying Saddam Hussein's military and government, resulting in a completely predictable and certain dissolution of what had been a functioning civic order into ungovernable chaos, as American "nation-building" once again revealed itself as plunder and society destruction. Iraq War II was the pinnacle of cynical hubris that was either astonishingly delusional or dishonest, or paradoxically both. The Middle East literally might never recover.
American war-mongering and international crime has proceeded unabated under Presidents Obama and Trump, with Libya, Syria and probably others I am forgetting added to the list of victims. I cannot let this section pass without noting documented atrocities perpetrated by American forces that are as depraved, horrific and outright evil as any actions committed by any other people: My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Also, George Bush II has been convicted of war crimes by the World Court, and I'm sure he's not the only American leader to be so adjudicated.
Coups, Blockades and Massacres
Going back to the 1950s, if not further, the United States government has taken it upon itself to enforce the global Capitalist order. Whenever a small nation has democratically elected a non-Capitalist government, the United States has used the CIA to destroy that government and install a pro-Capitalist junta. CIA-backed coups have been documented in Iran, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and more. Almost no Latin American nation has escaped. The U.S. has supported unsuccessful anti-government militias in Nicaragua and Cuba (exiled).
When no group can be found to overthrow the government, the United States leads the international Capitalist order in a blockade of the country, destroying its economy and ensuring that “socialism” is seen by all as a failure. It has done this to many of the nations it couped, but continues to blockade Cuba and Venezuela simply for the international crime of seeking to care about their people and not the profits of international Capital.
When a pro-Capitalist junta is threatened by a people’s movement, the United States is there to assist the junta in applying “The Jakarta Method” to the problem. Look it up. It is named after Indonesia, where the government murdered hundreds of thousands of people to put down a “Communist insurgency.” The people of El Salvador endured this method in the 1980s.
Wanton Exploitation
Even before the articulation of Capitalism as an economic doctrine, the American system operated under the principles of private ownership of the means of production with tendencies to monopoly, government in the service of the private property-owning class, and exploitation of land, resources and the labor of less-powerful people. The Revolution was fought in large part because the colonists objected to the monopolies the king granted to English companies and the exclusion of the colonists from areas of trade. After the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention was convened because state legislatures were exercising democracy to cancel debts and in some cases threaten to seize large estates. Farmers, veterans, and laborers were objecting to their economic debasement, and the "Framers" began to panic. The Articles of Confederation made for a weak central authority that could not compel military force. The Convention was legally chartered to "recommend reforms" to the Articles, but the first thing the delegates did when they convened was to chuck their charter out the window and begin hammering out a replacement. They needed a strong central authority to protect themselves from the out-of-control democracy in the states. They specifically designed the federal system to frustrate majority rule and protect minorities. But the minorities they had in mind for protection were not blacks and gays; the minority they designed the system to protect was the landed elite.
You won't learn this in Civics class, and Americans will fight you if you try to tell them this, but the Constitution was designed to protect the rich from the poors.
Alexander Hamilton, who has been cast as a sexy champion of the working man in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Obama-backed Broadway fantasy was anything but. He was in fact America's first monopolist and big banker. He led American troops against demonstrating American farmers and ordered them to open fire. Men were killed. Think Michael Bloomberg meets Jamie Dimon. Hamilton wanted an American king, but that was too much for even his friends. We have the Bill of Rights and a tradition of government caring about working people thanks to Thomas Jefferson, who hated Hamilton and wanted a society of small farmers.
From the beginning, America was built on the ruthless exploitation of under-compensated labor. The first African slaves arrived around the same time as the first indentured servants, around a decade after the Jamestown settlement was established. The indentured servant was better off than the slave, but not by a lot. He at least would be free to either start charging whatever he could for his labor or go off and try to make his way after 1 to 7 years. But for the time of his service, he may as well have been a slave. The American system to this day has adapted its systems of labor exploitation to the conditions of the times, culminating in the present day where globalization and now the internet allow Capitalists to chase cheap labor wherever they can find it. When the price of labor in one market starts to rise above subsistence level, they simply move to another country where the mass of the people are completely impoverished and set up their factories there.
For a while, unions and an activist government that supported them imposed limits on exploitation and led to the creation of a strong middle class, amply compensated and with humane working conditions, but then the Reagan Revolution and technology made it possible to manufacture overseas for the American and global markets and the Capitalists with the assistance of a compliant government were able to break the unions and return labor to an unorganized mass that could be exploited. The Reagan Age reversed the protections that forced a relative sharing of wealth and built a strong middle class: unions, anti-trust, and progressive taxation. This left Capital free to combine and keep an ever-increasing share of the economic rewards of production for itself.
Globalization and the free flow of capital across national borders allow the capital class to pit the labor of all countries against each other. The destruction of anti-monopoly protections allows capital to combine and stifle meaningless competition with itself. Elimination of progressive income and inheritance taxation enables the capitalists to keep what they exploit and transmit it intact intergenerationally. The inflation of the 1970s that was caused by a quadrupling in the price of oil - the basic resource of the economy - and finance system shenanigans was blamed on wages and that was used to justify the union-busting and a monetary policy that stimulates the economy until wages begin to rise, then constricts the money supply to "control inflation", by which it means eliminate wage growth. All the while exploiting control of the means of production of ideas to promote in the masses the myth that "you too could be rich some day" and the ethos of "they earned everything they have and should be able to keep it." Government is the enemy and nobody should have to pay for what he doesn't use. Look out for number one, every man for himself. Easy personal credit allows the masses to share in just enough of the creature comforts and mindless entertainment of economic growth to blind them to the reality that their income is not keeping up with the underlying costs of living and the price of entry into the market, that capital is appropriating to itself all of the economic growth.
Two charts will illustrate what the Reagan Revolution of the Elite has done, the degree to which Capitalist exploitation has intensified in the globalized economy:
Until Reagan took office, all classes shared equally in rising income. But then it all changed. Under Reagan, Clinton and Obama, the median income and the income of the bottom 20% actually fell. The line as a whole went flat. The top 5% have continued to see uninterrupted income growth over the last 40 years while the masses have absorbed all the impacts of Capitalist busts. This has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the capital class.
Again, in 1980 the bottom HALF received TWICE the share of national income as did the TOP ONE PERCENT. Of course, when 1% of the people make 10% of the money and 50% of the people make 20%, there is still inequality and disproportionate reward. But in the 40 years since the Revolt of the Elites, the distribution of income has flipped. Now the 1% command almost twice the share of national income as the bottom 50%. Now the 1% share over 20% of national income while the bottom half fight over a mere 10%.
In addition to exploitation of labor, the capitalist system requires exploitation of natural resources. Through use of various techniques I do not understand, the Capitalists manipulate the commodities markets to suppress the costs of metals needed for industrial production. The mineral-rich continent of Africa is kept weak and divided to keep resource prices low. The multinational corporations extract the added value and the most resource-rich nations ironically are unable to profit off their resources. If they were able to, it would impact prices in the United States. For the sake of a few dollars on an iPhone, or a few cents on a fork, the people of Africa are kept destitute, while celebrities donate small shares of their income to build wells and deliver medicines, assuaging their consciences but doing nothing to impact the balance of power, or actually help with economic organization.
Racism and Contempt for Human Rights
The ruling class generally is not racist, per se. Racism is a tool it uses to keep the lower classes under control. The ruling class thinks EVERYBODY not themselves is inferior, sub-human, and worthy of contempt. But racism was necessary to justify slavery, to gain the participation of the people who had to actually make the system work: the white people who transported the slaves, conducted the auctions, controlled them, etc. Racism also suppresses the resistance of the slave; he or she comes to internalize their own inferiority.
Racism also serves the ruling class by dividing the workers against each other. Sexism, religious and ethnic chauvinism, and especially nationalism, all of these also serve to keep the working classes divided, fighting amongst themselves and distracted from their exploitation and their common enemy - their real enemy.
Racism is one way the ruling class enforces compliances and suppresses opposition to the warmongering and exploitation detailed above. Racism also informs and fortifies the other way the elite controls the working classes: the denial and suppression of human rights. The same rights that were enunciated by the elite in their own struggle against the King, and that were enshrined in the Bill of Rights to ensure that THEY would always have access to them, first are limited to those considered fully human - white males - then the exercise of those rights by the lower classes is discouraged, limited, suppressed and, as much as the lower classes tolerate, made subject to suspension for "national security" or "law and order." The rights of property are made inviolate while the rights of persons are compromised.
An integral part of the Reagan Revolution of the Elite was furthering division of the working classes against themselves, even within family units, and the normalization of intensive surveillance of individuals by the corporate and governmental power structure. First through the War on Drug Users, under which the bulk of the American electorate which had been heavily propagandized for decades about "the evils of drugs" (heavily reliant on racial stereotypes of blacks, Mexicans and Chinese) approved a total assault on the rights of the populace including search and seizure, counsel, self-incrimination, confrontation of accusers, and more. "Drugs" were the code word that persuaded the Supreme Court to approve any repressive measure the government requested. Americans were told to inform on family members. Mass incarceration of young black males was justified by the threat of "drugs" and resulted in the unemployability of one-third of young black males. When demographic changes started to undermine the electoral consensus for drug-justified oppression, Al Qaeda came along and gave the ruling class a new, even better excuse for expanding the police state. Expect coronavirus to be used as pretext for the further militarization of civil society.
Suppression of human rights is important to maintaining the system of exploitation and eternal warfare because it is only through exercise of their rights that the working classes can resist, protect themselves from, and even occasionally reduce exploitation or end a war.
The ruling class enforces its exploitation of the population through a political system that they control and manipulate to provide legitimacy for their rule. This political system will be exposed and dissected in the next section.
Next: The Political System of Class Warfare