Remembering JFK for being shot is as wrong as remembering Jesus for being crucified. On this sad anniversary, we need to widen the focus from bullets and wounds and Dealey Plaza to see where the country has gone in the 50 years since Dallas. (And to implicitly compare that to the 30 years before Dallas, when much good was done despite the Great Depression and WW2.)
Unfortunately, the sociopathy on display in the 1960s (nuclear warmongers like Generals LeMay, Walker, and Lemnitzer; corrupt, racist blackmailers like J. Edgar Hoover; murderous racist organizations like the KKK; the Italian Mafia at its peak; and sociopathic intelligence operatives like the anti-Castro Cubans) seems like amateur night compared to what we have today.
Today, the sociopathy is entrenched; it is "structural". Bad actors hold the commanding heights of our politics, our economy, our foreign policy, our energy policy, etc. But, despite the change in scale, 50 years on, it's still the Terrible Trinity of drugs, weapons, and money that forms the engine of the sociopathic challenge to democracy; and its still secrecy, both official and cabal-istic, that cloaks its actions.
As those of us who have seen the documentary "The Corporation" may remember, large corporations analyzed as persons via the DSM-IV would fully meet diagnostic criteria of psychopaths (ie. self-interested, amoral, incapacity to experience empathy and guilt, callous deceitfulness, disregard for safety of others and rule of law to get its way, etc).
- Reid Mukai Breaking the Corporate Trance
Step by step, as corporations and billionaires removed the restraints of the New Deal, they have taken our money, our government, and our rights. The JFK anniversary reminds us of how much we lost when three "peace-mongers" were assassinated in the the 1960s.
This diary chronicles that slow, steady strangulation of American democracy and the American middle class. My purpose is to recite for you (yeah, TLDR) all the really terrible things that have happened since Dallas; things that have never been put right; things that continue to happen. My purpose is to puncture the Pollyanna-ish faith in two non-existent things: am honest political process and an un-bought Democratic party. In other words, my purpose is to look clearly at how screwed we are.
As a preview, don't expect me to recite anything good that has happened. IMHO, it has been downhill all the way. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster; but always down.
1963-1973: Chaos
After JFK, we endured the further assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and the near assassination of George Wallace. We had the murder of Fred Hampton by the Chicago PD. We had a police riot in Chicago, and a National Guard massacre at Kent State. We had anti-war demonstrations, race riots, Weathermen bombings, and Black Panthers walking down the street with guns. We had Nixon sabotaging the Vietnamese peace talks to get elected (see Anthony Summers on this); Nixon running a secret war in Cambodia; Nixon instigating enemies lists, burglaries, buggings, and bag jobs - ultimately ending in Watergate.
Ten years after JFK, both political parties establishments' were wreckage. The country was angry and adrift.
1973-1983: The Rollback from the right
Into this political vacuum stepped organized right-wing money.
“Winner-Take-All Politics” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describes the political funding evolution that has taken place since the mid-1970s.
Hacker and Pierson report that prior to 1980, the Democratic Party had an organizing advantage which offset traditional Republican fund raising superiority. During the 50s, 60s and early 70s, a progressive social agenda was put in place. But then came costly television and a few Republican billionaires funded massive efforts to organize big business donations and establish conservative ‘think tanks.’ The result was the 1982 Congressional election, in which the Democrats were predicted to sweep, turned into a Republican rout due to Republicans outspending Democrats as much as 5 to 1.
Hacker and Pierson show “how” - a review of Winner Take-All Politics
Setting the tone, we had the Big Lie of "an excess of democracy" from Samuel Huntington of the Trilateral Commission. We had the secret Powell memo to take back the government. The CIA stage-managed the right-wing takeover of South America (Operation Condor), where the Chicago Boys first tried out their hideous neoliberal program of austerity imposed by police state. We had the "Southern Strategy" of Nixon which is to this day the strategy of the GOP. We began the futile War on Drugs, and the mass incarceration of minorities, called the New Jim Crow. We had the Buckley vs Valeo decision, which began the march of Big Money through our political process.
In 1976, instead of a JFK or an LBJ, we got the well-meaning, but naive and clueless peace-monger, Jimmy Carter, who was led around by Zbigniew Bresizinski and sabotaged by everyone else. Carter was way more conservative than either of his Democratic predecessors. He appointed Paul Volcker and started the intervention in Afghanistan, as well as the deregulation of industry. He lost in 1980, in part, due to the suspicious behavior of various GOP agents in the so-called "October Surprise" scandal, which reprised Nixon's dirty dealings with the South Vietnamese.
1983-1993: Beyond the Prosecutorial Event Horizon
The pre-senile Ronald Reagan had long been the creature of General Electric, a right-wing MIC corporation. In office, he was the kindly figurehead, while immense corporate, financial, and MIC power was deployed behind the scenes.
We had the first wave of looting by Wall St. - Michael Milken and the hostile-takeover crowd destroyed large swaths of American industry. While most of the country was being made poorer by massive inflation, the stock market boomed until it crashed massively in 1987; and the S&Ls were looted until a real estate bust ensued and a Federal bailout was required. In other news, the Third World fell off a cliff financially in the 1980s.
At the end of this time frame, we had the Iran-Contra scandal; and the avoidance of prosecution by its principals - the beginning of the double standard that dominates American politics today. (Since then, any prosecutor or reporter who tries to get these guys winds up in a black hole.) We had the strange truce between Clinton and Bush Sr. about the Ollie North-supervised, massive arms/drug-running operation through Mena, Arkansas. That scandal included "The Enterprise" of General Richard Secord, and a host of former CIA types. Not to mention the infamous drug-runner, Bobby Seale, the classmate of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Louisiana Air Patrol. Nothing to see here. Move Along.
We had the BCCI scandal, which exposed the network of ex-CIA crooks and cronies and their secret international money flows. We had the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of Rush Limbaugh and hate radio. After the end of the Cold War, we had the frantic search for new enemies (Panama, Iraq) by the Bush Administration.
1993-2003: The DLC takeover of the Democratic Party and the SCOTUS coup
Bill Clinton, the only charismatic and successful member of the neoliberal DLC, presided over the aftermath of the Cold War. But, there was NO "peace dividend". Pentagon budgets stayed barely dipped, only to massively increase after 911. Clinton gave us NAFTA, telecomm deregulation, and the end of welfare. Clinton triangulated away the core of the Democratic Party, and sadedled Al Gore with the soon-to-be-traitor-to-his-party, Holy Joe Lieberman. Worst of all, Clinton brought Wall St. into the heart of the government, in the form of Robert Rubin - and all of his successors and cronies who have populated Obama's administration. As a closer, Clinton signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagel.
Meanwhile, raised to power in the 1994 elections, the GOP showed signs of its violent senility almost immediately. Newt Gingrich tried and failed to shut down the government. Then, after a three year $70 M fishing expedition, the House impeached Clinton, who emerged unscathed. It was the beginning of the "who the hell is on my side" era of American politics, where the GOP were awful, but the Democrats were also skeevey and on the corporate payroll.
We had the mass media consolidated by the corporate rightwing and reduced to tabloid trash coverage. We had the rise of the propaganda network known as Fox "News". We had Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" expose of how the CIA fueled the crack epidemic trashed by the NYT and ignored by the corporate media, resulting in Webb's tragic suicide. Another victim in the long line of investigative journalists lost in action.
Finally, we had the un-protested, illegal intervention of the SCOTUS to hand the election to Bush. True to form for the GOP, massive, budget-wrecking tax cuts for the rich were handed out within six months; and we were at war within 9 months. A massive buildup of military and intelligence assets began.
2003-2008: The Bustout
The Cheney/Bush administration behaved like gangsters from day one. They consumed the budget surplus and ran the country deeply into debt to profit their cronies in the MIC and the oil industry. They trashed regulations, including the SEC, which allowed Wall St. to commit massive fraud. They trashed the army with continuous deployments, while handing a fortune to private contractors. (This is the classic mob "bustout", where you take over a legitimate company, max out its credit, and run away with everything you can steal, leaving a disaster behind.)
In the end, it all blew up; and we got to "choose" Obama over "get off my lawn" John McNasty and his idiotic but dangerous running mate, Grifterella.
2008-2013: The Grand Betrayal
The corporate media and the Obama cheerleaders want you to listen to his pretty speeches and his empty, unfulfilled promises. I want you to look at the facts.
Wall St. funded Obama's two-year primary fight against HRC to the tune of tens of millions of dollars when he was an unknown. In return, he filled his Cabinet and the White House with Goldman-Sachs alumni. He also received early support from union-busting (and sub-prime mortgage innovating) Chicago billionaire, Penny Pritzger whom he later made his Secretary of Commerce.
In office, Obama bailed out Wall St. to somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 Trillion while failing to break up TBTF banks. International regulators estimate that the top 0.1% has stashed somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 Trillion in offshore banks. Funny how the shorrtfall amounts to more than half of what was off-shored.
At the level of grand political strategy, indicting anyone for war crimes in Iraq has ALWAYS been off the table for Obama. Obama has NEVER prosecuted one head of a TBTF bank as an individual (see Judge criticizes lack of prosecution against Wall Street executives for fraud). He NEVER addresses the strategic issue of ALEC, or the slow-motion, one-law-at-a-time secession of red states, or the increasingly ugly War on Women's healthcare. Environmentally, his negotiators helped scuttle the latest round of climate talks; and he has spent four years avoiding killing the Keystone pipeline.
Tactically, Obama walked away from supporting unions and the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. He spent four years trying to be bipartisan when his opponents were using scorched earth and racist dogwhistles. He allowed himself to get rolled on the budget process and judicial appointments time after time. But, he has always been proactive about privatizing education (another Wall St. scam) and doesn't care that the Post Office is being destroyed.
In foreign policy, he allowed Hillary to organize and encourage the fratricidal mess that is the Syrian civil war. He did nothing during coups in Honduras and Paraguay. He has presided over more increases in the already bloated defense budget. And he is a huge user of drone warfare.
His only significant accomplishment for the 99% is a warmed-over version of Romneycare that has been crippled by insurance company lobbyists and sabotaged by GOP governors. His former chief of staff, Mayor 1%, called the progressive wing "retards". Rahm has spent his time as mayor of Chicago breaking unions and privatizing schools over massive protests. Meanwhile, Obama has been negotiating the corporate coup d'etat (aka TPP) in secret with 600 corporate lawyers and to the exclusion of Congress for years. He continues to push for a "Grand Bargain" that will rob and ruin the independent and solvent Social Security system.
This political agenda is not what the majority of Americans thought they were voting for in 2008. Instead, it is the same old Terrible Trinity: money, weapons, and drugs. Plus secrecy.
Money increasingly ruins our politics. Obama gives one speech and quits, leaving the rest of us to fight Citizens United. The Congress is busy gutting the already toothless Dodd-Frank law to re-deregualte derivatives trading. Our foreign policy is 100% military, and we continue to support a lot of scum, like the al Quida-hijacked Syrian resistance movement. At home, gun massacres are completely out of control and simultaneously treated as events beyond human control. Obama gave it a try; I will give him that. On the drug front, the Obama DOJ continues to prosecute medical MJ in the face of increasing numbers of states decriminalizing ALL uses.
As for secrecy, the electorate are the last people to be told the truth about what is really going on in this country. If it weren't for Wikileaks, we wouldn't have the text of the TPP. If it weren't for Edward Snowden, no one could prove anything about the abuse of surveillance by the MIC. Without Snowden, we would be as blind as the 1970s Congressional assassination investigators. Missing from their investigation were the RFK's hotel's bullet-riddled kitchen doors (destroyed by the LAPD), J. Edgar Hoover's and Richard Helm's personal files (destroyed as they left their positions), and many key witnesses (Giancana, Rosselli, deMorganschild, Prio) who were murdered or suicided just before they were supposed to testify .
2013-...: Through a Glass Passively
According to the serious people, it is Hillary vs Christie in 2016. I guess all us FDR Democrats should crawl into a corner and quietly expire when the cat food runs out. Seriously - how can anyone have lived through the last 50 years and think Hillary is the answer? More corporatism, more warmongering, more triangulation, more coddling Wall St. while ramming through the TPP.
But, as Ray Pensador points out in The Abuses will not only continue..., we are beyond outrage. I hope this diary answers the question as to why people might have good reason to be too exhausted to be outraged.