Charles Derber
The Other War
Sat Aug 30 19:06:11 2003
67.1.130.179

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4039.htm
The Other War

By Charles Derber
George W. Bush is waging a war at home on the American people. Launched
with velvet economic and social weapons, this other war is already
devastating American workers and communities. Yet Bush's war against
ordinary Americans is largely invisible because the media are busy
dutifully mesmerizing the public with the official propaganda
entertainment on Iraq. It is high time to address this second front of
the Bush war regime, since there is still time to stop it.

Over the past century, the American government has evolved into a
marriage of global companies, the American political class, and the
Pentagon, with corporations increasingly the dominant partner. This new
Iron Triangle does not share a completely unified set of interests, but
the three partners increasingly work together to maximize corporate
profits and minimize popular dissent. The corporate state they are
working to create is formally based on democratic rhetoric,
constitutionalism, and free elections, but it is profoundly
anti-democratic in practice. Its aim is to shovel public wealth into the
coffers of private elites. Since the corporate state steals from
ordinary workers to enrich the wealthy, it is plagued by a chronic
crisis of legitimacy that requires the transformation of citizens into
couch potatoes.

Bush's war at home seeks to tighten the grip of the corporate state by
radically accelerating this money transfer from poor to rich,
institutionalizing it in a reverse Robin Hood system for decades to
come. His efforts in support of the corporate state take place in the
wake of the dramatic new threats to its survival. The collapse of the
financial markets after the 1990s speculative boom marked the beginning
of a sustained crisis in corporate profitability, a long term unraveling
of the current economic order that could spell the decline of American
global hegemony. The Enron crisis created a follow-on crisis of faith in
the American corporate order both at home and abroad. The Bush war plan
attacks the double crises of profitability and faith by 1) refocusing
the American public on exaggerated foreign threats and 2) creating a
"regime change" at home that dismantles the remnants of the New Deal
social contract and enshrines a new brutal state capitalism never seen
before. In the name of the "free market," the Bush regime is marshalling
all resources of the state to bail the corporate order out of the mess
that it has created for itself.

Bush's war at home has gone through its first battles, preparing the
ground for the domestic counterpart to the "battle of Baghdad," a
pending legislative campaign for the most radical socio-economic
transformation since the Civil War. The first stage of the war-launched
with massive tax breaks for the rich, radical deregulation, vast
corporate welfare, zero-budgeting for social programs, and new policies
to facilitate corporate flight abroad-is familiar from the Reagan years
and relatively benign compared to what is to come. But it has created
vast new casualties littered all over the home front. The most obvious
are the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs; Bush is the
first president in modern history to preside over a net loss of jobs, a
staggering two million net jobs "disappeared." Not surprisingly, 50
percent of Americans tell pollsters that they fear for their own job in
the next year.

The casualties on the home front are concentrated among the unemployed
and the working poor, who together now constitute close to 40 percent of
the population. Bush's giant tax cuts for the wealthy, totaling in the
trillions of dollars up to 2010, are the largest hand-out to the rich
ever. The combination of tax cuts (including a shrinking of corporate
taxes from 50 percent in 1940 to about 14 percent of the entire tax
burden now) and vast increases in corporate subsidies and defense
outlays, with 50 percent of discretionary expenses going to the
Pentagon, have already radically reduced the amount of money for social
programs, especially for the most needy. In the House-approved Bush
Budget for fiscal year 2004, cuts would eliminate health coverage for
13.6 million kids, end school lunches for 2.4 million low income
children, end benefits for 65,000 neglected and abused children, and
reduce food stamp benefits to an average 81 cents a meal from 91 cents.

To staunch the red ink of exploding fiscal and trade deficits, Bush is
drawing blood by massively heaping burdens on states and localities that
already are experiencing horrific deficits, forcing new, draconian cuts
in education, health care, and social welfare on the state and local
levels. The deficits in states from California to New York are so high
that emergency services including police, fire, and "homeland security"
are being radically cut, on top of the mass firing of teachers, health
care and social workers, and the wholesale closing of schools,
hospitals, and community shelters and services. Meanwhile, Bush's trade
and labor policies have permitted big companies to eliminate defined
benefit pensions, abolish corporate health insurance (or dramatically
cut benefits and increase co-pays), and eliminate unions themselves. The
percentage of private sector unionized workers has fallen to under 9
percent under Bush, drastically weakening workers' ability to defend
minimal protections and benefits. Bush's gift of $15 billion to the
airlines after 9/11 while offering nothing to their laid off workers is
an apt symbol of the Bush war at home.

This is all preparatory for the "mother battle" to come. The war plan
for "regime change" at home-a total transformation in the nation's
political economy beyond anything Reagan or the Gilded Age robber barons
envisioned-is outlined in a series of legislative proposals that are
buried from public view in the current carefully-nurtured obsession with
terrorism and Iraq. Bush's plan exempts wealth from taxation and public
accountability, privatizes the entire "commons," removes monopoly
restraints on global companies, morphs the social welfare budget into a
corporate welfare system, enshrines a permanent warfare state for global
profits and domestic control, and builds a permanent government of CEOs
and a regime of radical inequality that Jefferson believed would destroy
democracy.

A leading edge of the domestic "battle for Baghdad" is a series of
remarkably radical programs for restructuring the concept and taxation
of wealth. Taxation of wealth had always been based on a view that
wealth is produced from the commons and thus should be redistributed in
some measure to all who contribute to its creation. Bush has
reconceptualized wealth as the constitutionally protected fruit of
private entrepreneurship, thus negating the basis for taxing or
controlling it. In the most radical shift since the introduction of the
income tax in 1913, Bush is proposing to end the dividend tax and the
estate tax while creating astonishing tax shelters for upper income
families. The abolition of the dividend and estate taxes will benefit
overwhelmingly the top 1 percent who already control about 40 percent of
the nation's wealth and 49 percent of taxable stocks and mutual funds.
The various tax shelter proposals allow a family of four to remove
$60,000 each year from taxation over the entire lifetime of the owners;
that is, once sheltered, no taxes will ever be paid on these funds.
Rationalized as a vehicle for increasing savings and investment capital,
it is a thinly disguised move to protect wealth from the reach of the
state, a parallel to the constitutional shifts made during the Gilded
Age that defined corporations as legal private persons and sheltered
their resources from public control.

Closely related is the proposed legislation for privatizing social
security, legislation that will destroy social security as a
redistributive social contract across generations and turn it into an
entrepreneurial scheme for private investment. This is a part of the
privatization of the commons that involves not only dismantling all the
social insurance programs of the New Deal but turning public wilderness
forests over to the mining and timber companies; water resources over to
global conglomerates such as Bechtel; the air waves over to media
monopolies such as NewsCorp; educational, health, prison and social
welfare services over to corporations such as Microsoft and General
Electric; and even military services over to private military companies
such as Dyncorp and Military Professional Resources. Privatization of
the commons is embedded in the constitutionalism of the World Trade
Organization and the International Monetary Fund, both controlled
through Washington.

One of the generals leading the domestic Battle of Baghdad is Colin
Powell's son, Michael, Bush's chair of the Federal Communications
Commission. Powell is fighting for near total deregulation of media
monopolies, removing the last restraints on concentration in radio, TV,
newspapers, and other key information and entertainment companies. Ten
corporations already control 11,000 radio stations, 2,000 television
stations, and 1,800 newspapers in the United States. The Powell plan
would allow Clear Channel, the largest radio empire in the States with
over 1200 stations to go up to well above 1500 stations, a move from
already astonishing market power to what media analysts such as Bernard
Kalb regard as market domination. The consequences of monopoly in this
sector are especially obvious and alarming, as Clear Channel already is
allegedly restricting any negative reporting on Iraq and preventing the
playing of popular anti-war songs on any of its channels.

While the new global monopolies lock in control of global markets, their
size and political influence secures their control of government itself.
They are developing the capacity to turn the entire federal government
into a gigantic corporate patron, at whose ample breast they can suckle
indefinitely. Shifting federal resources from social welfare to
corporate welfare has been the key aim of both Democratic and Republican
administrations since the 1960s, with even right-wing institutions such
as the Cato institution agreeing with Ralph Nader that the cronyist
annual corporate handouts total at least $300 billion a year. The new
corporate state delivers far more expansive forms of corporate welfare
than agribusiness subsidies or pharmaceutical give-aways; Bush's plan
will shift virtually the entire social arm of the government to
corporate control while using foreign policy to secure global corporate
profits. Bush's novel contribution here is a new Orwellian empire to
increase profitability and repress dissent against the corporate state.

Military Keynsianism has always been the secret weapon of radical free
marketeers to forestall the demand-side problem in the economy. Faced
with a very serious economic crisis in the wake of the global glut and
downturn, the slide in wages, and the collapse of consumer confidence,
these so-called free marketeers turn to military conquest to supply new
demand for corporate products and services. Bush is projecting military
spending approaching half a trillion in the next fiscal year; much of
this spending, including the war on Iraq, homeland security, and Iraqi
reconstruction, are bonanzas for some of Bush and Cheney's closest
corporate cronies. One of the first and most lucrative reconstruction
contracts for fire prevention and servicing Iraq's oil fields already
has gone to Halliburton, Cheney's energy company. This initial
multi-million dollar contract is just a down payment on the longer-term
opportunity to exploit the endless riches buried in the Iraqi desert.
The almost certain early reconstruction contracts that will be given to
Bechtel, the world's largest contractor with close Bush, Cheney, and
Rumsfeld links, make clear that intimate cronies will be at the head of
the line at the Iraqi trough. Those of us not blinded by the power of
the corporate state can see that the Iraq war will do far less than
prior wars to solve the overall crisis in the economy and is more
likely, through imperial over-reach, to hasten American hegemonic
decline at the expense of rivals such as Europe and China. Bush,
however, is determined to go forward, blinded by his messianic
militarism and his passion to feed and grow the military-industrial
complex while in office.

Indeed, the Bush plan is for total militarization at home and abroad,
since it enriches his cronies in the short term and represses dissent.
Controlling populist movements was also a vital aim of the Cold War,
which split labor from other popular movements and bound it to corporate
power in a monolithic force arrayed against "the evil Empire." The war
on terrorism is the successor to the Cold War, a vehicle for building
American empire and suppressing dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.
Like the Cold War, it shamelessly exploits fear and patriotism and
splinters opponents of the corporate state. Homeland security is just
one part of the "shock and awe" campaign at home that seeks to divide
progressive groups-including labor, environmental groups, and others-who
had allied so explosively under the banner of global justice in Seattle.
Nonetheless, a pre-emptive peace movement has already struck back, not
only against the war in Iraq but against the larger imperial and
domestic aspirations of the corporate state. Bush's war at home is
meeting unexpected resistance; polls show a majority of Americans
believe Bush's domestic agenda is taking the country in the wrong
direction. Fighting Bush's unannounced war at home is and must continue
to be an integral part of the peace movement's agenda. There will be no
peace anywhere until we have created the regime change Americans need
and will increasingly demand as their own fortunes decline: our battle
must be to replace the Bush corporate state and its Republican or
Democratic successors with democracy.

Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College, is author of
The Wilding of America and the recently published People Before Profit:
The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money and Economic
Crisis.

© 2003 Tikkun Magazine


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