THE ENDURING REALITY OF GOVERNMENT BY WEALTH AND SOME OF ITS
CONSEQUENCES
John Chuckman
If you really want to understand the world in which we live
– its endless wars, coups, interventions, and brutality towards great masses of
people – you need to start with a correct understanding of the political
machinery at work. Talk of liberal interventions or fighting for rights,
Western values, and democracy are hopelessly naïve and mostly deliberately
deceptive. America’s record in such matters is one of securing everything from
bananas, copper, and crude oil concessions to, at the very least, foreign
governments obedient to its mandates after removing a disliked leader, whether elected
or not. There is no concern for principles outside of their being featured in blowhard,
insincere political speeches. The interests of America’s government do not
match the interests of ordinary people, those in America or anywhere else, and,
were the informed consent of the governed genuinely involved in launching bloody
adventures, they likely never would happen.
The underlying reality of how people in the West are
governed now compared to hundreds of years ago is surprisingly unchanged, much
the way the rules governing how chemical bonds form have not changed despite a
long and great parade of events and discoveries in the visible world. Despite
all the revolts, revolutions, congresses, constitutions, and great movements
over the centuries, we are in fact governed in the same essential way people people were governed in 1600 or even earlier.
Of course to see this, you have to strip away the forms and
rituals we have constructed over the centuries, forms and rituals which create impressive
effects much like the green smoke and thunderous voice of the Wizard of Oz, a
wizened old man who worked from his curtained control room, pulling levers and
hitting buttons to create intimidating effects. Most Americans remain impressed
with the smoke and thunder and cheap magic tricks, it requiring some dedicated effort
to shake off well-done illusions, and, as I’ve written before, Americans work
extremely hard in their jobs or live a kind of marginal life trying to scrape
by on low wages or part-time work, either of which situations leaves little
time or inclination to question what government is really doing and for whose
benefit.
And so long as America remains under the rule of wealth, it
is unlikely other states, as in Western Europe, will emerge from it because
America’s establishment has such decisive influence – economic, financial,
military, and political - over many of them.
What is considered as wealth changes over time and with
economic development, and with those changes so do its interests as well as the
practices of its power. Great deposits of copper ore or crude oil In the Middle
Ages were virtually worthless. Wealth then was land for agriculture, forestry,
and hunting, with the family names of owners determined by their estates. The
revenue from that natural wealth was converted to great houses and jewels and
the implements of war. War, too, was a source of wealth with most wars being
little more than adventures for dominance and looting on a grand scale. Again, as
in our own day, they were dressed up with slogans about principles or causes which
had almost no meaning. The case of the “Christian” Crusades, which continued their
pillaging and orgy of killing, on and off, for centuries, springs to mind. Soldiers
and sailors, up until modern times, were not motivated by their paltry pay and
poor supplies, it being understood as a condition of employment that they would
enjoy a share of the bounty looted in any campaign.
Today, the forms wealth are as diverse and complex as is our
society, and many of them are not apparent to ordinary people in the way great
estates and hunting rights and obligations in war and peace to great lords were
apparent in 800. Even as late as, say, 1850, wealth in the form of belching
factories employing armies of people was often still quite apparent, but today’s
complex banking and securities and financial institutions are not well
understood by most people, although they represent immense wealth just as real
in its demands and power as estates and obligations of the 9th
century. Wealth today also comes from huge global manufacturing concerns of
every description often with operations scattered out of sight, great shipping
and transportation fleets, or electronic and communications empires. Land
itself remains an important form of wealth where it can produce industrial-scale
crops or contains deposits of valuable minerals or can generate flows of
electricity or has been developed into great cities or resorts. War remains a
source of wealth, only on a scale which could not have been imagined a few
hundred years ago, but the spoils no longer go to soldiers in professional
armies, they go to those responsible for the war, often in forms not easily
recognized, as with special rights and concessions and secret arrangements.
As the nature of wealth evolved from the Middle Ages to the
Modern Era, outward forms and rituals of government also changed. We have moved
from the near-absolute power of kings and autocrats through aristocracies and
republics with senates to a great variety of forms, parliaments and congresses,
which appear designed to yield, to one degree or another, the consent of the
governed.
But appearances, as in the case of the Wizard of Oz, can be
deceiving.
Today, a single wealthy individual cannot make the kind of
demands upon ordinary people that marked arrangements in the Middle Ages -
although that must be qualified as I’m sure anyone who has become involved in a
dispute with a wealthy neighbor or a great corporation will be happy to explain
- but the class of wealthy people can indeed make just such demands, and they
do so all the time. You will be taxed to pay for the schemes that their
lobbying establishes, your water and air will contain the pollution of their
manufacturing and mining, your children will be sent to kill and die in their
wars, the ethics or morals you were taught as a child will be trampled upon, and
virtually all important legislation will deal with the rights and interests of
wealth, and not those of the broad mass of people.
In America, once in four years you will be asked to choose
between two names, both of which have been closely vetted by the powers that be,
to elect as head of government. Not only have they been vetted, but the immense
costs of their campaigns in reaching you on television, at rallies, and with opinion
polls to regularly fine tune their words will be paid almost exclusively by
those whose real interests are at stake in every major election, the wealthy
and their important serving institutions of government. The end effect is not really
all that different than the old single-candidate Soviet elections at which the
press trained Americans to sneer.
Many of America’s founding fathers had dark suspicions about
the existence of wealth being secure in the presence of democratic government,
and that is why they created forms – mostly adapted from Britain, a place no
one regarded as a democracy then – to keep wealth safe. Over a couple of
centuries, the original arrangements were modified, the country moving from a
tiny one percent or so privileged voters – for perspective, that’s roughly the
same as the percent of voters in China’s Communist Party deciding who rules the
country – to something approaching universal suffrage, but always arrangements
were made to safeguard wealth against the assumed predations of democracy.
In elections for the American Senate, the legislative body
with real power, authority, and privilege, you again will be asked to choose
between two well-vetted and well-connected candidates. Others may run, but they
will be rendered helpless by the vetted candidates’ flood of money and
resources, you will never hear their voices, and America’s press – itself an
empire of wealth serving wealth – will waste no time on their views. In the
case of the Senate, you will be asked once in six years to vote, with the elections
staggered so that only one-third of that body faces election at any time – a
perfectly-conceived formula for keeping the old bunch in charge despite issues
which might have generated election discontent. In fact, you can never “throw
the bums out” in America. Anyway, there really isn’t much risk for Senators
running for re-election, with incumbents winning about 95% of the time. Senate
seats are so secure they sometimes become family sinecures, handed down from
father to son. After the election, unless you live in a small-population, insignificant
state, you will never see or meet your Senator, and you will certainly have no
opportunity to lobby. Virtually all seeing, meeting, and lobbying will be done
by the wealthy sponsors of the successful candidates or by their hired help.
The average American Senator is said to spend two-thirds of
his or her time securing funds for the next election, and such elections have
now been bid-up to unbelievable amounts of money. The huge costs serve as what
economists call “a barrier to entry,” a kind of high financial wall which keeps
others from entering the political market, or, if somehow they do manage to
enter, keeps them from effectively competing. Only the other wealth-vetted and
connected candidate will have any hope of collecting a big enough pot of money
to threaten an incumbent. The belief that people giving millions of dollars to
candidates expect nothing in return is not even worth discussing. What they get
– apart from goodies like important and prestigious appointments or valuable government
contracts – is access, and access is exactly what most people never enjoy.
Intimate access to politicians in high office, people always mindful of the
necessity for another overflowing campaign war chest, is genuine power.
It is not impossible to have compatibility between democracy
and wealth, but it requires a set of laws and regulations concerned with
campaign financing, lobbying, and dis-establishing a political duopoly of two
privileged parties, laws which simply cannot happen in America over our
lifetimes. In America, law makes corporations persons, and the highest court,
packed by judges appointed to serve wealth’s interests, has ruled that campaign
money is free speech. These are not things easily turned around.
The American system of campaign financing not only assures
the secure power of domestic wealth, it assures also the influence of wealthy
lobbies serving the interests of foreign states, Israel being the most
outstanding example. Other foreign states also exploit this system to varying
degrees, but no other state has more than five million American citizens in
great part keen to serve its interests. And many of them are successful,
affluent, and well-placed people enjoying a connected set of organizations and
well-funded lobbies. Other foreign states also do not enjoy having many of
their lobbyists in America being dual-citizens, free to move back and forth
between the country being lobbied and the country being lobbied for, surely an
ethical issue for politics and foreign affairs of the first magnitude. It is a
unique situation in many respects, and it has helped create a unique set of
problems in the world.
The wealthy interests of America happen to share some
important interests with lobbyists for Israel, including securing the Western
world’s supply of energy and not permitting the rise of states of any power in
the Middle East who disagree with America’s essential views. It is important to
keep in mind that “America’s essential views” are not necessarily the views of most
of the American people and that many of those “essential views” have never
received genuine informed consent. Elections conducted the way America’s
high-level elections are conducted are incapable of bestowing meaningful
consent, especially in vitally important matters.
The Israeli-American alliance is something of an unholy one
because in binding America so closely to Israel, some huge and unresolvable
conflicts have been created. Israel is associated with a long series of wars
and abuses in the region, and, ipso facto, so is America. Israel, given the
nature of its founding, expansion, and practices, is not liked by any neighboring
states, although many now cooperate secretly, and sometimes even openly, in areas
of mutual interest and have learned to tolerate its existence, the way
generally eased by large American bribes or equally large American threats.
Traditionally, states in the Middle East are not democracies.
Their often short histories have given limited opportunity for wide-spread development
and prosperity creating a strong middle-class, the sine qua non for democracy. With the United States always (insincerely)
praising democracy – including Israel’s grotesque contradiction of “democracy
for some but not others” – it has been caught in a bind between supporting what
it says it opposes and opposing what it says it supports.
Its proposed solution was a huge CIA project, nick-named
“the Arab Spring” by America’s wealth-serving and often dishonest press, a set
of manufactured uprisings intended to bring a semblance of democracy to the
region. It has been largely a failure, ending with some countries trapped in
chaos or civil war and others, notably Egypt, briefly gaining a government
Israel hated intensely, the truth being that genuine democracy in virtually any
of these countries will not be friendly to Israel’s geopolitical ambitions in
the region nor to those of its American promoter and protector. While the “Arab
Spring” was allowed to proceed in some states, in others, where it was neither
intended nor desired, such as Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, spill-over effects were
deliberately and violently suppressed with American assistance. So the
American-Israeli relationship now still locks the United States effectively in
fighting against democracy in some countries and in supporting absolute
monarchs and oligarchs in others, while in still others, such as Syria and
Iraq, it is involved literally in smashing them as states, in violation of all
international law and long-term good sense.
The entire situation is an ongoing disaster and is almost
certainly not sustainable over the long term. How do you insist a huge country like
Egypt remain a backwater without democratic rights indefinitely? How can you
justify the destruction of an ancient and beautiful country like Syria? How can
you justify supporting absolute monarchs and keeping their people in total political
darkness? How do you continue supporting Israel in its abuse of millions,
depriving them of every human right, or in its constant aggression to secure
its hegemony? The drive for regional hegemony is all that is behind Israel’s
constant hectoring of Iran, and how is that behavior different to the
aggressive wars condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal? It’s not, of course.
Further, destructive, deliberately-induced conflicts like that in Syria, by
degrading its economic advance, only slow the day for democracy’s having a real
chance to emerge.
So here is America, self-proclaimed land of the free, mired
in a vast situation where it works to suppress democracy, supports tyrants, and
supports aggressive war because its leaders, with no genuine consent of the
governed, have put it there, and this is just one of many unhealthy and
destructive consequences of wealth’s rule in the United States. Wealth has no
inherent interest in democracy, and it is entirely up to a people anywhere to
demand respect for democracy through laws.
