On the Road to Civil War….
America was founded as a bourgeois republic of small and medium sized business owners. Our Constitution has the small ‘d’ democratic thread running through it because the only way to ‘insure domestic tranquility’ was to create a nation of Laws and not personalities. Indeed, I would argue that the Square Deal and the New Deal were politically possible ONLY because the vast business base of the country saw the emergence of Trusts and Monopolies as a threat to their existence.
All that changed in the 80s. Once we put enough time between ourselves and the rest of the world after WW II, our larger industries faced stiff completion from large ‘business working with government’ competitors in first Europe and then Japan. Far Right Republicans in the Reagan administration used this as the rationale to stop Anti-Trust enforcement. American business, with only token exceptions, could now grow just as large as they wanted. The Monopoly Genie that generations of American small-to-medium businessmen feared was out of the bottle.
There have always been ‘Special Interests’. But now, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of voices working in the open to have Congress work for their interest, a very small number of immensely powerful voices work in secret to tilt the Law heavily in their favor. The Senate has become the House of Corporate Lords, the House has become the House of Common Distraction.
Up until now, peace has been maintained by allowing the Corporate Lords to suck as much wealth as they could from the lower and middle classes. We’ve all seen the charts and graphs. The scope and speed which this process moved to completion is truly frightening.
But where next? How will these fortunes continue to grow? I think the upper crust will, for what they perceive as economic necessity, begin to cast an envious eye toward each other. If there is Civil War on the horizon, that is what future college-level history books will list as the primary case.
= new reply since forum marked as read
it would include at least a chapter on roni raygun building a trough for the pigs to fatten themselves with.
It would include at least one chapter explaining why and how draft dodgers send others to war, to die in foreign lands.
It would include at least one chapter on why people and business
vote against their own best interest.
It would include a chapter on why we vet athletes in a ping pong contest more carefully than we vet people who want to run our political system.
It would include at least one chapter on why/when we decided to let our infrastructure rot to a point of uselessness.
