By John Johnson
There always has been wars between economic interest, in fact other than religion, this has been the prime reasons for war.
In the United States one of the most vicious war was in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century of monopoly industries and robber barons in the new Industrial/Gilded Age.
There was a very small middle class and conditions for most workers was abdominal. 14 hour work days, in dark, polluted factories. There was a boom in child labor. Young girls were cramped in dark sewing factories.
Workers were imported from Asia and Europe and forced to work and live in even worst conditions. In the later part of the 19th Century workers started to organize in earnest. Labor started to become a power on its own. Then there developed an anti-immigrant campaigns meant to break the growing labor movements.
The 1920’s saw a post war and Wall Street boom but as some of that began to filter down, Wall Street self-emploded giving us the Great Depression. Which motivated another mass protest movement, made up of labor, political groups like the Communist Party, and other radicals. They were able to push Roosevelt to start developing programs for the working/middle class, such as Social Security, job programs, etc.
Then with the massive economic investment for WWII and the GI Bills etc., a new working/middle class was developing. But by the early Fifties the corporate powers saw dangers in this, so instigated a social conformity/anti-communist crusade to stifle any larger ideas that might develop. By the Sixties with the large college enrollment, the draft, the civil-rights movement, John Kennedy, and drugs, it brought in a whole new social order in the world.
For the next 20 years the corporate classes were in a retreat of sorts, so they ran with a B Actor and began to destroy this newly freed middle-class. Taxes for the rich was reduced greatly, unions were busted, a phony new cultural was trotted out and a war against the working classes and peasants of Central America was launched. Students were encouraged to forsake the humanities, philosophy, ethics, history and the arts, and major in business so they could be stock brokers. Many did, becoming Hedge Fund mangers and proceded to bankrupt the world.
Clinton was no great help, his NAFTA destroy the Mexican economy and help start the Drug Wars and his repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, eventually brough on the economic disaster of 2010.
That ethic has continued until today. Obama may be an improvement in some ways, seems to have some human understandings, unlike his predecessor, but in essence is just another clog in the corporate agendas. People demanded health care reform, we got one that gave more money to the so-called Health Care Industry. Financial and Bank Reform was demanded and last week a new bill just forgave the trillions they were given in loans and the rest of us were are a lot poorer.
The Banks looted pensions funds around World, put Greece and other countries into desperate states thus destroying vast areas of their middle-classes.
Civil Liberties, the end of torture were demanded, Obama has a terrible record. He got the right to kill American citizens, he is jailing whistleblowers, he continues the secret prisons, not ruling against Bush’s massive spying, etc.
The corporate media is a major problem. Rarely does honest reportage get out. Ever watch the Sunday morning news shows, a wealth of disinformation. They are incapable of telling truths because they are corporations and their corporate sponsors won’t allow it.
Corporations are not human, they are constructs, machines. They have no morality or ethics and thus deserve none. They violate every bit of human life. They are paying off practically every legislature in the Country and World to do their bidding but their bidding is not human. The Gulf Oil mess was in part caused by corporate corruption which may destroy the planet. They are not human persons and the corrupt Supreme Court cannot change that. In fact, it is the duty of us humans to take control of these machines and assign them to some distance memory. Businesses can of course exist but they have to exist for the benefit of all, of use for the workers, consumers, and society.
The lessons of the Thirties, of the Sixties have to be relearned and renovated for today, hopefully before the corporations enslave and destroy us all.
Thanks to Thom Hartmann.
