Treason
the New World Order
by GurudasChapter IX
Rise of the Transnational Corporations
“There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity
remains.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“The corporations...have successfully leveraged economic power into political
power that undercuts the Constitution.”
Charles Reich
The growth of modern transnational or multinational corporations has created
many problems for our constitutional form of government. These changes have
come upon us almost unannounced and with little recognition by the general
public, although in recent years more people are examining the implications of
this development. From trade and banking to tourism, human rights, and environmental concerns many activities are now global in outlook and influence.
These cross-border economic, social, cultural, and political interactions are increasingly being directed and controlled by large corporations not by governments.
Especially with the end of the cold war, economic not military competition rules
supreme. Globalization represents the radical transformation of the global economy to benefit large corporations.
Nations have lost the power to control their economics, and financial markets
often determine the success or failure of government programs. The Boston Globe,
on April 11, 1994, said: “Corporate taxes are crumbling in many industrial countries as companies move their booked profits from one locale to another, telling
different stories to different tax collectors.” In 1993, the General Accounting Office
told Congress that 40 percent of corporations with assets of at least $250 million
paid under $100,000 in U.S. income taxes. Dateline, on August 18, 1995, said the
U.S. government isn't properly taxing foreign corporations in the U.S., because
U.S. corporations would then be forced to pay higher taxes overseas. About 75
percent of foreign corporations with U.S. operations pay no U.S. taxes.
Large corporations now can compete on equal terms with governments. They
are accountable to no one, as the BCCI scandal demonstrated. Multinational
corporations can move their production to countries where wage and production
costs are much lower. Until recently, this could not be done easily because of
political considerations and a lack of capital and technology. However, there has
been an increased fusion of economic and political power because of increased
capital flows and technological advances. There is now one global work force,
with labor far cheaper in third world nations. National interest is determined by
what industry, not the people, wants. In 1973 George Ball told the House
Committee on Foreign Affairs: “The multinational corporation not only promises the most efficient use of world resources, but as an institution, it poses the
greatest challenge to the power of a nation-state since the temporal position of the
Roman Church began to decline in the 15th century.”
The rise of the corporate state has given transnational corporations the power
to threaten the very existence of democratic institutions throughout the world.
Local political movements and regulations have been weakened, while international organizations like the World Bank are beyond democratic control. Steve
Solomon, in The Confidence Game, said many governments are transferring power
to central banks. Institutions and agreements like the World Bank, GATT,
NAFTA International Monetary Fund (IMF), UN, Inter-American Development
Bank, World Economic Forum, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were established
by the corporate elite “to create a new, highly undemocratic governing structure for
the global economy. These institutions are imposing a global corporate agenda
designed to extract wealth and resources from poorer countries and communities
and concentrate them among the global elite.”1
Representing the corporate elite, the
World Bank supports programs that increase trade at the expense of social stability, the environment, and worker welfare. 2
Under the guise of free trade, corporate
control over our lives increases while national sovereignty is weakened. The goal
is global economic union to create political union and a one world government.
Henry Kissinger, on July 18, 1993 in the Los Angeles Times, said: “What Congress will have before it is not a conventional trade agreement but the architecture
of a new international system...a first step toward a new world order.” NAFTA
represents “the vital first step for a new kind of community of nations.”
As economic power grew and expanded overseas, the multinational corporations received government assistance to manage their economic empires.
Greater corporate involvement and interaction with the government required greater
secrecy to maintain the myth of democracy to keep the people quiet. Meanwhile
corporate control over the people grows, labor unions continue to weaken,
disillusionment with government grows, and free market ideology rules. With
little accountability to workers or the public, multinational corporations now have
tremendous political power in the U.S. 3
Accompanying this transformation has
been a growing transfer of bad corporate debt to the government. [Actually to us DC]
James Morgan, in the London Financial Times, described the “de facto world
government” now forming in the “new imperial age.” This world government will
represent and serve the multinational corporations, preferably with the consent of
the ignorant masses, but, if necessary, force and terror have and will continue to be
used. The military arm of the coming one world government, for now, is money
and capital flows. In the immediate years ahead, the growing UN army, its armed
agent NATO, and the disarmament of individual nations will make countries powerless to protect their rights and sovereignty.
The West has used international institutions, military power, and economic
resources to maintain political and economic dominance over third world nations.
Democracy through a manipulation of market forces is being used as a weapon to
promote the profits of transnational corporations. Foreign aid increasingly represents the corporate agenda. The goal of U.S. foreign policy is to promote
capitalism, not democracy. Especially in China, Africa, and Latin America political reform is cosmetic because of the growing influence of multinational corporations. 4
Trade with China is no longer limited because of human rights, but a trade
war almost developed when China illegally reproduced patented goods. Charles Lane, in The New Republic, recently said he might be denied some lunches at the
CFR because he supported what many Republicans and the people demand: sharp
cuts in foreign aid. Lane even called the arguments of those defending foreign aid
acts of desperation. Foreign aid has often been an extension of the national security state and part of the vast corporate welfare programs of the federal government.
It has for too many years been used to promote dictators who have nothing to do
with our moral values. Foreign aid should end or be sharply reduced and be used
primarily where the people actually benefit.5
U.S. government agencies, such as the U.S. Information Agency and the
Agency for International Development, promote false or “low intensity democracy” around the world. 6
It costs the U.S. less to do this than to support an open
and often unstable dictatorship, and social stability is more important in the global
economy. The Trilateral Commission called for flexible methods to increase social
control with less coercive methods. 7
A small group of elites legitimatize their rule
with carefully controlled elections. The goal is stability, preferably through
persuasion, for economic gain. 8
These ideas were promoted by Joseph Schumpeter,
who said democracy only means that people have the opportunity to accept or
refuse the men who rule them. 9
Third world governments are usually controlled by a ruling elite who may
terrorize or kill those who interfere with official policy. Multinational corporations are relatively free to operate in these countries with favorable terms that
included cheap labor, low taxes, and limited social programs, while local poverty
grows as income distribution becomes more unequal. Local elites are bribed to
control the people and prevent unions and dangerous popular movements. The
welfare of the people is irrelevant. Democratic dialogue interferes with corporate
efficiency. Examining how transnational corporations act in third world countries
offers a clue to what is planned for the U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, and
Australia. In a one world government, transnational corporations wouldn't have to
worry about inconveniences like strong labor unions, grass root revolts, or environmental issues. People who raised these issues will simply disappear.
Different countries strive to bring new corporations into their region by offering numerous benefits in bidding wars. Nations are forced to compete with each
other for foreign investment and aid, which lowers the business costs of the
multinational corporations but also lowers incomes and weakens the social and
economic fabric of many nations. The result is increased unemployment, lower
wages, more debt, weakened infrastructure, and slower economic growth. “The
world is being moved by state-corporate policy towards a kind of third world
model, with sectors of great wealth, a huge mass of misery, and a large superfluous population, lacking any rights because they contribute nothing to profit making for the rich.”10
Consumers in third world countries are sold inferior products by the multinationals through sophisticated marketing techniques that include Western logos and
brand names. 11
More expensive Western medical drugs replace native folk
medicines that are much cheaper and often more effective. Providing large scale
food aid to third world nations has damaged their agriculture base and made them
dependent on western bankers and corporations to survive. We spend billions to
provide food aid, yet for decades far less aid was provided to make these nations
self sufficient in food production. This dependency made it easier to control and
exploit the natural resources of third world nations.
There is growing resistance to the expanding power of the corporate elite and
Western cultural dominance of globalization, as the world's living standards drop.
In Bangalore, India, 500,000 farmers protested GATT provisions that allowed corporations to limit their freedom to use certain seeds. Hundreds of thousands of
farmers protested against GATT in the Philippines. The urban slums of third
world nations, like Brazil, were made much worse during the Green Revolution.
Overly efficient farming drove people off the land into the cities weakening families, destroying social stability, and leaving people unable to support themselves.
Over 3.1 billion people live off the land. If farming productivity in the third world
matches Western nations, at least two billion people will become unproductive.
Between 1980 and 1992, Mexican manufacturing productivity rose 41 percent,
and real wages fell 32 percent as Mexico entered the international market place.
The result was a revolt in Chiapas, Mexico partly because NAFTA helped the
ruling elite but not the people. The Mexican rebels called NAFTA “the death
certificate for the indigenous people of Mexico.” In Mexico perhaps 800,000 small
farmers will be forced off their land and have to move into the cities unemployed.
Hundreds of U.S. corporations have established factories along the U.S./Mexican
border. People trying to unionize are fired or assaulted, environmental conditions
are among the poorest in the world, and wages remain low with the active support
of the Mexican government.
The Mexican economic collapse shows how our government continues to
represent the bankers, not the American people. William Seidman, past chairman
of the FDIC and of the RTC, said Wall Street stood to lose $10-15 billion from
the Mexico collapse, so it naturally turned to Washington to be saved. Desperate
to protect Wall Street and stop people from saying NAFTA was a disaster, Clinton, without congressional approval, violated the Constitution by committing $9
billion and then a further $20 billion credit line to help Mexico. Over 90 percent
of the funds available in the Exchange Stabilization Fund, an emergency agency
established in 1934 only to defend the dollar, was illegally used. In July, 1995, the
House voted 245 to 183 to halt further disbursement of the remaining $8.5 billion
in the Clinton loan, but the House leadership blocked implementing this vote.
Numerous domestic projects are slashed or cancelled yet, at least $29 billion was
available to rescue Wall Street, and The Nation said Mexico had secretly receive
$12 billion in credits from the U.S., Japan, and Europe in the months before the
late 1994 debt crisis. While these loans were meant to support Mexico and the
peso, much of the money actually went to Mexican and foreign elites. 12
As the weakened dollar demonstrates, there is no way paying such large sums
of money could be justified as being in America's national interests. Patrick
Buchanan said: “The looting of America on behalf of the new world order has
begun.” According to The Economist, by June, 1994 U.S. banks had Latin American loans totaling $50 billion. Time magazine said that 380,000 jobs will be lost
in the next four years from NAFTA, and there will be between $13-28 billion in
lost output. 13
Now that NAFTA has passed many corporations have broken their
promises and moved more jobs outside the U.S. Current laws often provide tax
incentives to corporations when they close plants and export jobs.
The Mexico crisis also exemplifies how our news is managed. The “experts”
the national media used to speak about Mexico often came from financial firms
with large investments in Mexico. Between 1992 and 1994 the largest holder of
Mexican stocks and bonds was Goldman Sachs, which is the firm Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin worked for. He played a major role in arranging the
Mexican bailout. Ralph Nader said Rubin should have recused himself from the
Mexico loan because of his obvious conflict of interest. Goldman Sachs has also
been a major financial supporter of Clinton. When the Mexican president visited
the U.S. in October, 1995 the press praised Mexico for repaying $700 million due
on the loan; however, the press ignored the fact that $2 billion was then due, but
Mexico lacked the money to repay that on time. Today Mexico's debt is $153
billion, which is much more than in 1982.
Dr. Felipe Arismendi, a UN economist, and certain Mexican officials, such as
Hugo del Valle, who work for the UN in New York, said Wall Street firms were
warned in advance by the Federal Reserve Bank about the collapsing Mexico
economy, so they withdrew about $30 billion. Newsday headlined: “Surprise
Profits for Top N.Y. Banks.” The Mexican bailout was a bank relief act. Citibank,
Chase Manhattan, and Chemical Bank all made considerable profits, despite having
large holdings in Mexico. Mexico spent most of its foreign reserves throughout
1994, and the Federal Reserve was aware of what was happening.
In late 1993 the director of the Ethos Capital Management Inc. in New York
said: “There are things that would disturb any investor when you talk about redefining income distribution.” Wall Street does not want the Mexican people to
increase their wealth. A leaked Chase Manhattan memo on January 13, 1995
warned that the Chiapas uprising should be crushed to calm the international
investment community, and the ruling party should consider committing electoral
fraud to maintain control and stability. According to the memo it would be
frivolous to have social and economic reforms and improve people's lives, because
it was more important to repay international investors. This memo was sent to
100 major investment groups. John Sweeney, of the Heritage Foundation, in a
January 25, 1995 report also called for stopping the Chiapas rebellion to restore
investor confidence. On February 9, 1995 the Mexican government responded by
conducting military operations against the rebels. 14
In the future, how many hundreds of billions of dollars will U.S. taxpayers
have to pay to bailout Wall Street in other failed business ventures. Other nations
with unsound fiscal policies will figure they can also be rescued by American
taxpayers. Already the Wall Street Journal reported May 4, 1995 that the previous
week the U.S. Treasury Department had made a loan to Argentina via the Exchange Stabilization Fund. 15
Walker Todd, ex-attorney for the Federal Reserve,
reported in the Sacramento Bee that U.S. officials were planning to rescue
Japanese banks by having the Federal Reserve, supported by the Treasury Department, purchase up to $50 billion worth of U.S. securities from Japanese banks.
Details of this scam were leaked to Todd by government officials. Since Japanese
voters are unwilling to pay for the mistakes of their banks the U.S. will help. Part
of this scam was discussed by Rep. Leach on October 16, 1995. 16
The IMF said 10 nations could have trouble similar to Mexico's. For markets
to work, investors must also suffer for their mistakes partly to prevent worst
mistakes from occurring. Risk and reward must be preserved. On the same day the
$40 billion Mexican loan was proposed by Clinton, the Democrats said the party
needed to get back to its roots with labor and the minorities. How stupid they
think the people are!
Despite the Mexican fiasco, Clinton is proceeding to expand NAFTA
throughout Latin America. 17
The book, Western Hemisphere Economic Integration, which is dedicated to David Rockefeller, explains why the Western Hemisphere should be joined in an economic union. Negotiations are underway for the
entrance of Chile into NAFTA, although attempts to fast track such legislation in
Congress failed. Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, and others want a North
American and European union called a North Atlantic Free Trade Area (FTA), and
said it should merge with NAFTA. 18
Naturally The Economist 19 and Secretary of
State Warren Christopher 20
support this next step towards a one world government. On March 3, 1996 Christopher was in Brazil urging adaptation of the FTA.
The May/June, 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs contained an article by Charles A.
Kupchan promoting a “transatlantic union” between Europe and the U.S, and
Forbes on July 1, 1996 had an article promoting a transatlantic union, partly
because this would limit American protectionism.
Plans to create one European currency by January 1, 1999 are part of the one
world agenda to have a united Europe. At a 1983 economic summit, Ronald Reagan said: “An integrated world economy needs a common monetary standard....But,
no national currency will do—only a world currency will work.” In 1984 Foreign
Affairs called for creating a single common world currency and “a pooling of
monetary sovereignty.” 21
In an editorial, The Economist said creating one European currency was part of the “broader designs for Europe's political future” that
included plans for one police force and one foreign policy. 22
Bernard Connolly, a
17-year career Eurocrat, wrote The Rotten Heart of Europe, harshly attacking the
single currency and the hidden political objectives to promote the corporate elite at
the expense of the people. Promoters of one European currency will attempt to
establish one central bank, which will damage each nation's sovereignty.
Sir James Goldsmith said GATT will be a disaster for the industrial nations
because unemployment will greatly increase and wages will drop sharply. 23
On
November 15, 1994 Goldsmith spoke before the Senate Committee on Commerce. He said: “What we are witnessing is the divorce of the interests of the
major corporations and the interests of society as a whole....We have a system
...being proposed...which will result in massive unemployment, massive hemorrhaging of jobs and capital, but which will increase corporate profits....There is
absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a
major diminution of sovereignty....GATT, the global free trade, is the replacement
utopia for Marxism. It is another one of these mad utopias.”
24
On June 10, 1994 Rep. Gingrich testified before the House Committee on
Ways and Means about GATT. He said: “We need to be honest about the fact that
we are transferring from the U.S. at a practical level significant authority to a new
organization. This is a transformational moment. I would feel better if the people
who favor this would just be honest about the scale of the change....This is not
just another trade agreement....We have to be very careful, because it is a very big
transfer of power....(and) We are not likely to take (our authority) back.” 25
Just
before Gatt was ratified, Senator Hollings said: “This Gatt agreement is being
pushed by David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission.”
The New York Times on May 23, 1992 included an article entitled “The End
of Sovereignty” promoting the new European system. However, after 20 years, the
Common Market has been a disaster for social stability and the economic wellbeing of many Europeans. In the last 20 years, the GNP of France has grown by
80 percent while unemployment has grown from 400,000 to over five million.
Over four million are jobless in Germany. This is what awaits the industrial world with GATT. 26
Goldsmith called for replacing global free trade with regional free
trade. Instead of specialized economies, there should be diversified economies with
the free movement of capital and managed trade to protect jobs, social stability,
and small businesses. Too often experts rely on Wall Street, forgetting about the
rest of the nation. Wall Street and Main Street are not the same.
Sharply increased long-term unemployment and slowed growth in Europe
developed partly because jobs were exported as tariffs came down with international trade agreements. Corporations say the solution is to reduce the role of
government in business, cut taxes, and privatization to make businesses more
efficient. However, expanded trade can benefit all only if it also protects labor
rights and wage standards. Working closer with workers and having better relations
in the work place can enhance productivity. Economic growth should be used to
increase social stability and the happiness of the people.
In America wages have been dropping for over 20 years, while corporate profits continue to grow as globalization expands. The traditional lie between corporate profits and better wages for workers no longer exists in the U.S. or Europe. The manufacturing base is being exported with millions of jobs lost. M.I.T. economist Lester Thurow said: “No country without a revolution or a military defeat has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America in the last generation.” Using the media the large corporations have engineered a silent revolution.
Many highly trained and educated people cannot find work, or they are forced to take low paying service jobs. Once unemployment benefits end, after about six months, these people are removed from the unemployment statistics. Many more people are unemployed than what the government and press admit. This is partly why so many people are nervous about their jobs, despite claims that the economy is booming. Workers increasingly have no value except to increase corporate profits and power. The third worldization of the U.S. is making many people poor with a small elite in control. The better off the people are, the harder it is to control them. When people are kept poor and are forced to work harder for less money, they have less time and energy for politics. Even Time admitted that the middle class is shrinking while the poor and very rich increase. 27 In October 24, 1994 Time said the U.S. has the largest gap between the rich and poor of any major industrial nation. Upward mobility for U.S. workers is no longer assured. 28
Since 1992 Congress has permitted U.S. corporations to hire over one million foreigners in two programs. The Permanent Alien Certification and H-1B visa programs allows companies to replace U.S. employees with cheap foreign workers. The companies are supposed to first try to hire capable U.S. workers but this is usually a farce, and many high-tech jobs go to foreign workers. It is easier and cheaper for the corporations to import trained foreigners, instead of educating Americans. Taxpayers pay $60 million a year to administer this corporate welfare. Even the White House and other government agencies hire foreign workers. The New York Times admitted that tens of thousands of highly skilled professionals have been laid off so the large corporations can import this cheap labor supply. 29 Senator Simpson's recent attempt to limit this influx of foreign workers was defeated by the corporate onslaught.
Charles Lasch, in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, described the contempt, arrogance, and scorn the corporate elite feel towards the American people. They no longer believe in the Constitution, so the elite act irresponsibly. We are heading towards a two-class society, with the ruling elite feeling little loyalty or responsibility towards the U.S. The new patriotism is corporate profits and self-aggrandizement. Civic responsibility is sacrificed for profits in the global market. Traditional public institutions like political parties are used to increase power and control over the people. United to an “international culture of work and leisure” our elite rulers feel “indifferent to the prospect of national decline.” 30 The ruling elite have more in common with their counterparts in Hong Kong and Frankfurt than with the American people.
Leaders of multinational corporations represent their businesses; they do not act in the best interests of the U.S. or of other nations within which they reside. The U.S. has for years contributed tens of billions of dollars to the IMF, so banks could collect on their loans to third world nations. Robert B. Reich said that, increasingly, U.S. owned corporations have no special relationship with Americans, so it makes no sense to trust these corporations with our national competitiveness. “The interests of American-owned corporations may or may not coincide with those of the American people.” 31 A vice-president of Colgate-Palmolive said: “The U.S. does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.” 32 The U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics said 20 percent of all U.S. imports come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. firms. Many large U.S. corporations like Citicorp (51 percent), Chevron (55 percent), and Gillette (66 percent) have shifted much of their assets overseas. In the past, wealth was usually concentrated in a region or nation and a particular industry. Today, wealth is more purely financial and easily shifts between nations.
The ability of money to move quickly between nations has created job insecurity, falling incomes, rising debt, and a weakened middle class. Lasch, in describing the collapse of the middle class in third world nations, said this same fate may await the U.S. The existence of a trading and manufacturing class has been crucial to establishing a stable nation state for hundreds of years. Aristotle said a large middle class “has a great steadying influence and checks the opposing extremes” of the rich and poor. Once a large and stable middle class develops, there is always a demand for self-government. Unrestrained market forces destroy communities and traditional family and spiritual values, which ultimately weakens national sovereignty. “The revolt of the elites against time-honored traditions of locality, obligation, and restraint may yet unleash a war of all against all.” 33
There is a need for more community action to mobilize people to counteract corporate power. Ralph Nader said: “Societies rot from the top down. They reconstruct from the bottom up.” We should help people mobilize at the community level, not ask what Washington will do for the people. The U.S. should promptly leave GATT and NAFTA. H.R. 499 to withdraw from NAFTA should be supported. Committing $29 billion or more to save Wall Street in Mexico and defend a poorly constructed trade agreement is ridiculous. We should protect our sovereignty, workers jobs, and use trade to improve our standard of living.
All parties can benefit from international trade agreements but only if they are properly structured. NAFTA and GATT represent attempts to use trade as a weapon to destroy national sovereignty to establish the one world government. In 1974 Foreign Affairs, the voice of the CFR, published an article slating: “The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than the top down....An end run around sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” Richard Gardner, a CFR member and past assistant deputy secretary of state, called for world government, surrender of U.S. sovereignty, strengthening the central role of the UN, increased use of UN troops, and changing “the ground rules for the conduct of international trade” such as with GATT. Strengthening international agencies such as the World Bank and UN Development Programs was seen as strengthening international agencies and weakening the influence of individual nations in world affairs. These new policies “will subject countries to an unprecedented degree of international surveillance over up to now sacrosanct 'domestic' policies.” Gardner believes this approach “can produce some remarkable concessions of sovereignty that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis.” 34
The GATT agreement regulates governments much more than businesses; governments must adjust their policies so corporations can grow. Under GATT, the WTO is creating panels to review and reject the laws of member states that interfere with international trade. Nations must comply or face sanctions. Before GATT passed, 42 state attorney generals told Clinton GATT was unconstitutional and it would cancel many state laws. Already Europe, Japan, and Canada have issued reports attacking U.S. federal and local laws as unfair barriers to free trade. Pesticide regulations, nutritional food labels, nuclear licensing, the Marine Mammal Protection Act involving tuna and dolphins, and court agreements allowing native Americans to protect their natural resources are called unfair non-tariff trade barriers. Based on U.S. ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, British lawyers tried to stop Texas from executing a convicted rapist-killer. Under NAFTA, Mexico has filed a complaint over a labor dispute with Sprint in San Francisco. This type of intervention in our internal affairs will become normal under GATT and NAFTA. Even small nations can now challenge and change U.S. laws.
U.S. Clean Air Act discriminates against foreign oil refiners and this decision was upheld on appeal. Hundreds of consumer protection laws will be lost in this manner, which will also increase corporate profits. The corporations will say it is the fault of a foreign body, and the people will have no real recourse as they have already been sold out by their representatives. Phony politicians like Dole who voted for GATT complained about this decision but many similar decisions are now inevitable.
Nations should join together and demand an international corporate code of conduct, with labor, health, and environmental rights and enforcement procedures. Unions should be allowed to organize. International organizations like the World Bank should be closed. Groups from different nations should work together to counterbalance the actions of the multinational corporations. Governments should adapt monetary policies that raise the people's economic standards and lessen the gap between the rich and poor. 35 When a corporation closes U.S. factories to move jobs overseas, it should face a special tariff to import their products into the U.S.
In America wages have been dropping for over 20 years, while corporate profits continue to grow as globalization expands. The traditional lie between corporate profits and better wages for workers no longer exists in the U.S. or Europe. The manufacturing base is being exported with millions of jobs lost. M.I.T. economist Lester Thurow said: “No country without a revolution or a military defeat has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America in the last generation.” Using the media the large corporations have engineered a silent revolution.
Many highly trained and educated people cannot find work, or they are forced to take low paying service jobs. Once unemployment benefits end, after about six months, these people are removed from the unemployment statistics. Many more people are unemployed than what the government and press admit. This is partly why so many people are nervous about their jobs, despite claims that the economy is booming. Workers increasingly have no value except to increase corporate profits and power. The third worldization of the U.S. is making many people poor with a small elite in control. The better off the people are, the harder it is to control them. When people are kept poor and are forced to work harder for less money, they have less time and energy for politics. Even Time admitted that the middle class is shrinking while the poor and very rich increase. 27 In October 24, 1994 Time said the U.S. has the largest gap between the rich and poor of any major industrial nation. Upward mobility for U.S. workers is no longer assured. 28
Since 1992 Congress has permitted U.S. corporations to hire over one million foreigners in two programs. The Permanent Alien Certification and H-1B visa programs allows companies to replace U.S. employees with cheap foreign workers. The companies are supposed to first try to hire capable U.S. workers but this is usually a farce, and many high-tech jobs go to foreign workers. It is easier and cheaper for the corporations to import trained foreigners, instead of educating Americans. Taxpayers pay $60 million a year to administer this corporate welfare. Even the White House and other government agencies hire foreign workers. The New York Times admitted that tens of thousands of highly skilled professionals have been laid off so the large corporations can import this cheap labor supply. 29 Senator Simpson's recent attempt to limit this influx of foreign workers was defeated by the corporate onslaught.
Charles Lasch, in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, described the contempt, arrogance, and scorn the corporate elite feel towards the American people. They no longer believe in the Constitution, so the elite act irresponsibly. We are heading towards a two-class society, with the ruling elite feeling little loyalty or responsibility towards the U.S. The new patriotism is corporate profits and self-aggrandizement. Civic responsibility is sacrificed for profits in the global market. Traditional public institutions like political parties are used to increase power and control over the people. United to an “international culture of work and leisure” our elite rulers feel “indifferent to the prospect of national decline.” 30 The ruling elite have more in common with their counterparts in Hong Kong and Frankfurt than with the American people.
Leaders of multinational corporations represent their businesses; they do not act in the best interests of the U.S. or of other nations within which they reside. The U.S. has for years contributed tens of billions of dollars to the IMF, so banks could collect on their loans to third world nations. Robert B. Reich said that, increasingly, U.S. owned corporations have no special relationship with Americans, so it makes no sense to trust these corporations with our national competitiveness. “The interests of American-owned corporations may or may not coincide with those of the American people.” 31 A vice-president of Colgate-Palmolive said: “The U.S. does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.” 32 The U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics said 20 percent of all U.S. imports come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. firms. Many large U.S. corporations like Citicorp (51 percent), Chevron (55 percent), and Gillette (66 percent) have shifted much of their assets overseas. In the past, wealth was usually concentrated in a region or nation and a particular industry. Today, wealth is more purely financial and easily shifts between nations.
The ability of money to move quickly between nations has created job insecurity, falling incomes, rising debt, and a weakened middle class. Lasch, in describing the collapse of the middle class in third world nations, said this same fate may await the U.S. The existence of a trading and manufacturing class has been crucial to establishing a stable nation state for hundreds of years. Aristotle said a large middle class “has a great steadying influence and checks the opposing extremes” of the rich and poor. Once a large and stable middle class develops, there is always a demand for self-government. Unrestrained market forces destroy communities and traditional family and spiritual values, which ultimately weakens national sovereignty. “The revolt of the elites against time-honored traditions of locality, obligation, and restraint may yet unleash a war of all against all.” 33
There is a need for more community action to mobilize people to counteract corporate power. Ralph Nader said: “Societies rot from the top down. They reconstruct from the bottom up.” We should help people mobilize at the community level, not ask what Washington will do for the people. The U.S. should promptly leave GATT and NAFTA. H.R. 499 to withdraw from NAFTA should be supported. Committing $29 billion or more to save Wall Street in Mexico and defend a poorly constructed trade agreement is ridiculous. We should protect our sovereignty, workers jobs, and use trade to improve our standard of living.
All parties can benefit from international trade agreements but only if they are properly structured. NAFTA and GATT represent attempts to use trade as a weapon to destroy national sovereignty to establish the one world government. In 1974 Foreign Affairs, the voice of the CFR, published an article slating: “The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than the top down....An end run around sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” Richard Gardner, a CFR member and past assistant deputy secretary of state, called for world government, surrender of U.S. sovereignty, strengthening the central role of the UN, increased use of UN troops, and changing “the ground rules for the conduct of international trade” such as with GATT. Strengthening international agencies such as the World Bank and UN Development Programs was seen as strengthening international agencies and weakening the influence of individual nations in world affairs. These new policies “will subject countries to an unprecedented degree of international surveillance over up to now sacrosanct 'domestic' policies.” Gardner believes this approach “can produce some remarkable concessions of sovereignty that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis.” 34
The GATT agreement regulates governments much more than businesses; governments must adjust their policies so corporations can grow. Under GATT, the WTO is creating panels to review and reject the laws of member states that interfere with international trade. Nations must comply or face sanctions. Before GATT passed, 42 state attorney generals told Clinton GATT was unconstitutional and it would cancel many state laws. Already Europe, Japan, and Canada have issued reports attacking U.S. federal and local laws as unfair barriers to free trade. Pesticide regulations, nutritional food labels, nuclear licensing, the Marine Mammal Protection Act involving tuna and dolphins, and court agreements allowing native Americans to protect their natural resources are called unfair non-tariff trade barriers. Based on U.S. ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, British lawyers tried to stop Texas from executing a convicted rapist-killer. Under NAFTA, Mexico has filed a complaint over a labor dispute with Sprint in San Francisco. This type of intervention in our internal affairs will become normal under GATT and NAFTA. Even small nations can now challenge and change U.S. laws.
U.S. Clean Air Act discriminates against foreign oil refiners and this decision was upheld on appeal. Hundreds of consumer protection laws will be lost in this manner, which will also increase corporate profits. The corporations will say it is the fault of a foreign body, and the people will have no real recourse as they have already been sold out by their representatives. Phony politicians like Dole who voted for GATT complained about this decision but many similar decisions are now inevitable.
Nations should join together and demand an international corporate code of conduct, with labor, health, and environmental rights and enforcement procedures. Unions should be allowed to organize. International organizations like the World Bank should be closed. Groups from different nations should work together to counterbalance the actions of the multinational corporations. Governments should adapt monetary policies that raise the people's economic standards and lessen the gap between the rich and poor. 35 When a corporation closes U.S. factories to move jobs overseas, it should face a special tariff to import their products into the U.S.
Drastic steps must be taken to restore balance to our trade with China and
Japan. For too long we have been played like fools by these nations, especially
since certain corporations benefit from this sharp trade imbalance. Secret stock
ownership of many Japanese corporations by Wall Street is one reason why
nothing has been accomplished to end the huge balance of trade deficit with Japan.
“American Big Business was found at the time of the first World War to be linked
to Japanese Big Business through the Harvey cartel....” Companies with investments in Japanese firms from early this century included GM, GE, Standard
Oil, Westinghouse, Eastman Kodak, and Singer Sewing Machine. After World
War II, Rockefeller agents bought into more Japanese companies at a sharp
discount. This quiet interaction between Japanese and American corporations
continues today. 36
With Japan, free trade means unfair trade. Now that GATT has passed, Japan refuses to even negotiate with the U.S. about the huge trade imbalance. Instead they have turned to GATT mechanisms for protection. After 27 years, it is time to recognize that we must have managed trade with Japan. Even some commentators said the recent auto agreement with Japan was managed trade. We should sit down with Japan and China and develop a program over several years to restore an almost equal balance of trade. It is time to end the vast transfer of our economic wealth to other nations. The huge trade imbalance is more evidence that the Washington politicians represent economic interests not the American people.
Historically Holland, England, and now America have shown that free trade causes serious problems for developed nations as wages are lowered and the manufacturing base is exported. The working classes benefited when foreign competition was controlled, as in early nineteenth century England and in the U.S. after World War II. Open immigration into the U.S. weakens U.S. sovereignty, keeps wages low, and limits the ability of unions to grow. This is partly why the national media supports immigration and attacks as racists those who want it limited. With open borders, corporate profits raise while U.S. wages drop. U.S. corporations go overseas for cheap labor while foreigners immigrate to the U.S. seeking higher wages.
From the time of George Washington until World War II, except during the first world war, we had a policy of isolationism. However, while this policy kept us from foreign political alliances it also included managed trade, usually done to benefit America. As Benjamin Franklin said: “No nation was ever ruined by trade.” Our economy and manufacturing base developed with economic treaties between various nations. In recent decades the corporate controlled press falsely claimed that the choice is only for free trade or isolationism and strict limits on trade. This is disinformation used to increase corporate profits and surrender U.S. sovereignty to the planned world government. Rep. Duncan Hunter, in a letter published in the March 18, 1996 Business Week, noted that free trade is a recent policy with a poor track record. We should return to our historical policy of managed trade which means that American jobs and sovereignty will again be protected.
New Zealand has shown how populist policies and free-market reforms can benefit an entire nation, including the people and large corporations. After 10 years of reforms, New Zealand has a government surplus, low unemployment, and 59 percent of all government employees have been fired. 37 American corporations must be forced, through tax incentives and penalties, to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. This would make it easier to remove more people from public welfare and unemployment compensation, which would also bring down taxes. There would also be improved social stability and less crime as more people worked. If the manufacturing base of the nation is destroyed, the middle class will be severely weakened. It is time to remind American multinational corporations that they have responsibilities to America.
Part of the strategy to increase federal power and destroy state authority has
been to shift from a Republic to a nation state with increased nationalism and an
aggressive foreign policy. When is the last time you heard a politician refer to
America as a Republic. The shift from a Republic to a nation state with an empire
is part of the age-old battle of the few to control the many. Emotional appeals,
however irrational, have historically been used to increase loyalty to the government. Appeals to nationalism and war provide a rationale to direct and control the
people, to justify and promote the goals of the ruling elite. War discourages
dissent and encourages conformity. External threats of communism provided an
excuse for huge military expenditures and increased control of the people.
The seeds of the national security state and our moral decline started with the Spanish American War in 1898. That war allowed both political parties to control rampaging populism, as people were diverted from criticizing the corporate elite and urged to rally around the flag. There had been a recent depression, the frontier was filling up, and as America's manufacturing base increased, the ruling elite felt foreign bases were needed to increase foreign exports. The people paid to develop an empire, while the ruling elite reaped the economic rewards from these foreign adventures.
War was a logical continuation of America's imperialistic manifest destiny as the continental U.S. was fully occupied. In 1895 an editorial in the New York Journal of Commerce, then one of Americas main newspapers, criticized “the artificial patriotism being worked up at the present time” including “the fashion of hanging the flag from every schoolhouse and giving the boys military drill.” The first time the pledge of allegiance to the flag look place in a schoolroom was in 1892. The original pledge of allegiance was formulated by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. Today only the U.S. and the Philippines have an oath to their flag. 1 Only gradually was it thought proper to hang flags at every school. While I am not criticizing saluting the flag, surely no one will challenge the patriotism of our forefathers, who for over a hundred years, did not feel it necessary or proper to pledge allegiance to the American flag as an emblem of their patriotism.
Development of the national security state intensified during and after World War I, as the policy of isolation from involvement in foreign conflicts ended. Before the U.S. entered World War I, some agitated for entry into the war to “forge a national soul” for the country. They felt war would give rise to “a new religion of vital patriotism...of consecration to the State,” and that a foreign war would fill people with “a strong sense of international duty.” Instead of protecting our rights and freedoms with as little government as possible, the emphasis in the new America was to have more respect for a strong national government that we were indebted to
The new religion of the market economy was joined with the new religion of nationalism. We were no longer a Republic, with a strong independent people who relied on themselves with as little government as possible. Reverence for the Constitution was gradually replaced by a cull of the nation. 2 Some understood that the interventionists wanted to replace the Republic with a feared nation state that would destroy the Republic. Senator William J. Stone said if we entered the European war “We will never again have this same old Republic.”
Indeed, this period was filled with mass arrests with protest equated with disloyalty. Publications with unpatriotic ideas were banned from the mail, and there was little freedom of the press. The two political parties worked together, and people deemed radical were brutally suppressed. In 1917 the Attorney General said he had several hundred thousand citizens watching others to protect us from radical elements. Various immigrants, especially if they were union organizers, were deported as threats to the state. The red menace was equated with labor unrest, especially after Russia turned communist. The threat of communism was a convenient excuse to attack the labor movement. By 1920 the government had files on two million people.
America has been in a continuous state of war since 1941. Historically wars have played a key role in increasing the state's power, size, and fiscal spending, and that has certainly been true in America. We have been at war during 20 percent of our history, yet all but five of the federal government cabinet posts and most federal agencies were established during a war. 3 James Madison said: “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded....War is the parent of armies, from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few....No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” 4 At the constitutional convention Madison also said: “A standing military force with an overgrown executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Tocqueville warned that “All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.” 5 Centralized power is essential to establish a dictatorship, and power is most easily centralized by war or by the expectation of war. “This centralizing tendency of war has made the rise of the state throughout much of history a disaster for human liberty and rights.” 6
Many people called it a coup d'etat when President Kennedy was assassinated. It is more accurate to say the coup d'etat took place when the national security state was established in the late 1940's. “The cynicism of this coup d'etat was breathtaking. Officially we were doing nothing but trying to preserve freedom for ourselves and our allies from a ruthless enemy that was everywhere monolithic and all-powerful. Actually, the real enemy were those national security statesmen who had so dexterously hijacked the country, establishing military conscription in peacetime, overthrowing governments that did not please them, and finally keeping all but the very rich docile and jittery by imposing income taxes that theoretically went as high as 90 percent. That is quite an achievement in a country at peace.” 7
While the cold war often did not involve actual fighting, this period has had a major negative impact on basic American beliefs and institutions. The cold war was partly manufactured by the U.S. to maintain control over the people. The American people were lied to to create a vicious enemy, the Soviet Empire, to justify the cold war and arms race. According to R. Buckminster Fuller, during 1947-1950 the invisible government decided to start the cold war to keep capitalism in business and to prevent the Soviet Union from producing a higher standard of living then that which existed in the U.S. 8 In 1950 Einstein said: “The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.”
The view that the Soviets caused the cold war is wearing thin. In 1967 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. claimed in Foreign Affairs that the West had to act against the Soviet Union because Stalin was paranoid. Although many non-therapists believe this, the historian William A. Williams demonstrated the fallacy of this view. For instance, there is no evidence that U.S. policy was ever based on such an opinion of Stalin. Instead, as Schlesinger acknowledged, Stalin took many actions hostile to the West only after the U.S. intervened in Eastern Europe and throughout the world. 9
Especially since the 1960s, people like Walter LaFeber and Waller Karp have increasingly said the U.S., not the Soviet Union, mainly initialed the cold war. Truman reneged on various Yalta agreements. The U.S. exaggerated the Soviet threat, calling most Soviet moves an attempt at world conquest, and unnecessarily spent the nation almost into bankruptcy by creating a permanent war economy. H. W. Brands said: “The cold war had resulted largely from the efforts of the U.S. to export capitalism across the globe. American leaders, concerned that a repetition of the depression of the 1930s would trigger the collapse of the American way of life, and convinced that preventing a repetition required opening foreign markets to American products, sallied forth to bring as much of the world as possible into the American economic sphere.” 10 Barton J. Bernstein said there is evidence that “American policy was neither so innocent nor so non-ideological....By overextending policy and power and refusing to accept Soviet interests, American policy-makers contributed to the Cold War....There is evidence that Russian policies were reasonably cautious and conservative, and that there was at least a basis for accommodation.” 11
One of the best documented books on the cause of the cold war is Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 by Frank Kofsky. Immediately after World War II, the corporate elite and many intellectuals were very concerned that a depression with mass unemployment would develop without an arms race. The trauma of the 1930s was still fresh in the minds of many. I don't suggest that communism wasn't a serious threat. Godless communism was and is completely anathema to values we as a people hold dear, but it could have been confronted without the cold war and might have been, except that the bankers wanted to enhance their power, profits, and control over the people.
The aircraft industry would have collapsed without large government procurement orders after the war. Business Week said: “The aircraft builders, even with tax carrybacks, are near disaster....Right now the government is their only possible savior—with orders, subsidies, or loans.” 12 GE, Westinghouse, GM, the DuPont family, Chase Bank, and the Rockefellers were heavily invested in the aircraft industry. They used their influence to promote the war scare and rearm America to protect their investments and increase profits.
Truman's war scare was supported by press propaganda. After the war there was a massive campaign to promote capitalism to counteract the communist menace and damage the unions. In 1950, U.S. News & World Report said: “Government planners figure they have found the magic formula for almost endless good times....Cold War is the catalyst. Cold War is an automatic pump primer. Turn the spigot and the public clamors for more arms spending.” Threats of war were good for business.
According to Business Week, sharply increased military spending was a strong prop for business, there would be less unemployment, and increased war spending would limit the growth of welfare spending. While military spending doesn't alter the economy, growing “welfare and public-works spending,” in contrast “does alter the economy.” Welfare programs “create new institutions” and, even worse, they “redistribute income.” 13 Better to spend the country into bankruptcy and have tens of thousands of Americans die in needless foreign wars than risk the people gaining more economic and political power. With an arms race and a permanent war economy, it was much easier to control the people and to further enrich the corporate elite. Self aggrandizement of the ruling class and ideological concerns replaced practical considerations of America's national interest.
The reality was that, while Stalin and the Soviet Union were not easy to deal with, it was in the national interest of the East and West to maintain peace to recover from the devastation of the recent war. The actions of the Soviet Union after the war gave cause for alarm, but there were better ways to deal with that threat. It would have been possible to develop a policy of mutual tolerance without massive rearmament, but even the possibility of this was rejected. “Regardless of how outlandish or nonsensical most 'conspiracy theories' may be, the fact of the matter is that members of the ruling class and the power elite in the late 1940s showed themselves ready to resort to conspiratorial machinations whenever they deemed it necessary.” 14 The ruling elite in America found it in their interests to create a permanent war economy and the cold war.
In 1948 the historian Thomas Bailey wrote: “Because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their long-run interests.” Of course lying to the American people was hardly new. It was just that the stakes were higher, but then so were the profits. In 1978 Carl Bernstein interviewed Clark Clifford, who as a close aide, saw Truman every day. Clifford said: “The President didn't attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney....It was a political problem. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria.” 15
It is difficult for us now to look back and appreciate the climate of hysteria, fear, and panic that our government created. Washington created an impression that the Soviets were imminently going to start a war by invading Western Europe. There was a constant barrage of concern about the Soviet threat and the need to spend billions of dollars to stop the communist menace. Truman used deceit and manipulation with baseless claims of an imminent Soviet military threat. By deliberately misrepresenting Soviet intentions and using highly inflammatory language, the Truman administration manipulated Congress and the people creating an atmosphere of crisis. “We are compelled to conclude that, more often than not, there was no real connection between the military and foreign policy programs the Truman administration urged on Congress on the one hand and the dangers to which the administration claimed to be responding on the other. Instead, expediency and improvisation ruled the day: the administration first decided what it wished to extract from Congress and the electorate, and then, as events during the spring of 1948 illustrate, reached for the nearest available pretexts to justify its demands.” 16
Not everyone accepted this analysis. In February, 1948 General Eisenhower in a speech before the National Press Club expressed strong doubts that the Soviet Union intended to start a global war with the West. “The Soviet Union is in no position to support a global war,” he said. 17 The Wall Street Journal in an editorial complained about this emotional and factless government policy. “Yet we have not been told precisely what this crisis is, what form of danger we are to prepare against. Nevertheless we are told, it is a tremendous crisis and Congress ought to do all the things the President asks without slopping to debate them....To get these programs approved Congress is bombarded with alarums and excursions ....We have a right to expect more than that from our leaders.” 18
The most difficult problem that Truman faced during the 1948 war scare was that the Soviets tried to improve relations. The Soviets desperately wanted to avoid serious conflict with the West, and they initiated aggressive actions as a defensive measure after being sharply rebuffed in their attempts at reconciliation. There is evidence suggesting that the Soviets blockaded Berlin to force the West into serious negotiations to avoid an arms race they could ill afford. On May 10 in a letter to the U.S. ambassador and on May 17 in a letter to Henry Wallace, Stalin attempted to negotiate with the U.S. At the very least you can negotiate with another state to see if there is any basis for improved relations. Instead Washington promptly rejected these peace feelers referring to the dangerous Soviet threat. When Stalin died in 1953 the Soviets again put out feelers to improve relations. Although even Winston Churchill asked the U.S. to at least attempt to negotiate with the Soviets, our response was no. The cold war was too good for business.
The U.S. was so bellicose towards the Soviet Union in the late 1940s partly because only the West had nuclear weapons, and it realized the Soviet Union had sustained so much damage in World War II that it had no interest in a prolonged fight with the West. Kofsky spent considerable time studying the archives of the Truman administration and found no evidence of a serious fear that the Soviets intended to attack the West. Instead evidence suggested that Stalin feared being invaded by the West. After World War II intelligence estimates of the Soviet Union almost universally supported the view that, while the Soviet Union was hostile towards the West and in the long term hostilities might be initiated, there was no immediate intent to start a war. This analysis did not change during the 1948 war scare.
Little consideration has been given to the effect on the captured nations after the cold war began. The leaders of the U.S. military government in Germany,Lucius Clay and Robert Murphy, initially opposed German partition partly because of the effect it would have on the East Germans. While Soviet rule had been established, many noncommunist elements were allowed to remain in society and the real terror of the police state only began with the start of the Marshall Plan, as Melvyn P. Leffler in A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War noted. Stalin constantly ordered communist parties in the West to work within the system and not to initiate revolutionary actions. Except in Greece and Czechoslovakia this policy was followed.
Even when a communist insurgency started in Greece in 1946, Soviet aid was non-existent and U.S. officials were well aware of this. Our Secretary of State acknowledged “the present Soviet and satellite attitude in withholding a firm commitment” to the Greek communists. In 1947 when the Soviet Union established a new international organization, the Communist Information Bureau, Greek delegates were kept out. And no communist nation ever recognized the communist government established in northern Greece.
The Czechoslovakian communists were quite popular, partly because of the traditional relations and trade between Russia and Czechoslovakia and the great fear Czechoslovakia had of a resurgent Germany. The communists already controlled much of the government including the police, and it was obvious that there would be little serious internal opposition to a full take-over. Internal documents showed that the CIA at the time found no evidence that the Czechoslovakian takeover was part of a grand design to conquer all of Europe, as Truman proclaimed in support of rearmament.
The National Security Act of 1947 was more fully implemented in 1950, with edict NSC-68 outlining the policies of the U.S. in the cold war. This document was declassified in 1975 during the post-Nixon attempt to clean up government. It demonstrates how we never really intended to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The objective was to greatly increase conventional forces and nuclear power, develop foreign alliances, sharply increase taxes, and mobilize the entire American society through fear and terror to stop communism. This radical new policy was never openly debated. Our original Constitution was secretly replaced with the national security state, and few noticed.
There was one other reason why the elite wanted to create the cold war. Except for a few years during World War I, the U.S. had followed George Washington's advice to avoid foreign political entanglements. George Washington said: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances.” Thomas Jefferson declared we should have “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” A strong isolationist movement kept the U.S. out of the League of Nations, and most of the country was very isolationist during the 1930s. The corporate elite feared that after the war the country would once again turn inward, so the cold war was needed to create a need for foreign political alliances.
An active external threat kept Americans involved in world affairs. The State Department was very concerned that Americans would not persist in being interested in international relations. In September 1945 an aide warned Secretary Forrestal that Americans would not support a “complete realignment of government organizations...to serve our national security in the light of our new world power and position.” Yet active participation in world affairs was crucial to support the long term goals of the corporate elite to destroy national sovereignty and through international trade and foreign alignments, to establish a one world government.
Accompanying the new cold war was the signing of the NATO alliance in 1949, which represented a sharp break with our past. Senator Robert Taft, a leading politician in the late 1940s, recognized what a change it was for us to enter the NATO alliance. He criticized our being tied to the actions of 11 other nations. “The history of these obligations has been that once begun, they cannot easily be brought to an end....There is no limit to the burden of such a program or its dangerous implications.” How right he was! 19 Taft said he was “More than a bit tired of having the Russian menace invoked as a reason for doing any—and every—thing that might or might not be desirable or necessary on its own merits.” Ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson said the government overcame rising isolationist sentiment to internationalism because the Korean War “came along and saved us.”
In 1950, in National Security and Individual Freedom, Harold Lasswell warned that continuing war may create “garrison states,” political systems obsessed with national security, where perpetual war or the perceived threat of war leads to the concentration of all political power in the hands of an elite devoted to violence. Ultimately this condition leads to a totalitarian state. “Overzealousness in the cause of national defense weakens rather than strengthens total security....To the extent that intimidation is threatened or applied at home, we have a police state.” 20 “Here in truth, lay the supreme merit of the new Cold War gospel. It allowed America's leaders to wage unceasing war against the American people.” 21
To maintain our external involvement supposedly meant there was a strong need for stability in the U.S. which a strong security state would ensure. Liberties had to be sacrificed because of dangerous external menaces. Threats of a communist menace served the purpose of our corporate masters. “It creates a climate of opinion and a political atmosphere that makes it easier to discredit and repress labor militancy and progressive and anti-capitalist viewpoints at home and abroad.” 22 In 1953 I. F. Stone said: “The young were taught to distrust ideas which had been the gospel of the Founding Fathers.”
Repressive activities of the federal government continued throughout the cold war. Many artists were blacklisted, and background checks on federal employees, uniformed service personnel, and people in industries connected to national defense became the norm. By 1958, 9.8 million Americans had been investigated and millions had taken a loyalty oath. The easiest way to justify increased federal authority was by appealing to national security.
In response to the cold war, our government was altered so the country would be protected against communism. Congress created a separate national security state within the executive branch of the federal government. This included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the National Security Council (NSC) There was no peacetime precedent for the powers conferred on these organizations. They had the power to classify and to determine who would be told what was being done, and they were authorized to function with little real oversight from the elected officials. The cold war allowed the president and executive branch to assume increased unilateral powers. The president had almost unlimited power to define national security.
Especially towards the end of his administration, Eisenhower became more concerned about the nuclear arms race. He realized that even he had no real knowledge of what was being done and it might not be possible to stop the wild growth of nuclear arms. Eisenhower was deeply shocked when he saw how the Pentagon planned to conduct a nuclear war. It is partly for this reason that he said at his farewell address, “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the U.S. had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required make swords as well. But now...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience....We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
Over the years many respected commentators have warned how the cold war has negatively altered our form of government. Stewart Udall, former Secretary of Interior for JFK and congressman, said: “During President Truman's administration, obsessions about national security altered the relationship of the American people to their government by constricting the openness that had been a hallmark of American democracy....My experiences and observations told me that the cold warriors contempt for restraint had poisoned our politics....I was dismayed when, although the contest with Communism ended without violence, Cold War attitudes and values continued to dominate American policies and policy making.” Udall concluded: “As I look back in the 1980s, it was painfully evident that ...we...paid a heavy moral and political price by ignoring the open-government commands of our Constitution....We must dismantle the national security state we created to combat Communism and return to the constitutional principles and ethical values that animated our democracy's evolution....If our society is to regain the resilience and openness that once made our democracy a model for other countries, we must reaffirm our cherished political ideals and institutions....” 23
In 1973 Senator Fulbright said: “War and conditions of war are incompatible and inconsistent with our system of democracy. Our democratic system is bound to be eroded, and an authoritarian system is bound to take its place. We are in that process now....” Senator Mike Gravel said the cold war created a new culture in America “a national security culture, protected from the influences of American life by the shield of secrecy.”
According to Lewis Lapham, “Under the pretext of rescuing people from incalculable peril, the government over the last fifty years has claimed for itself enormously enhanced powers of repression and control. The obsession with security in all its forms...national, personal, and municipal—has shifted the balance of the American equation....Without the operatic stage set of the cold war, the American national security state was hard pressed to define its purpose, and the American people were beginning to understand how much money and poetic imagination had been invested in the making of the Communist menace.” 24
Bill Moyers said: “I find it stunning, looking back, how easily the cold war enticed us into surrendering popular control of government to the national security state....For 40 years a secret government has been growing behind...stately tributes to American ideals, growing like a cancer on the Constitution....The secret government has no Constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up....How does it happen that to be anti-communist we become undemocratic, as if we have to subvert our society in order to save it. In the name of national security much is kept secret and the president can do whatever he wants in secret to preserve national security while destroying our civil rights....Government was supposed to protect society against lawlessness; now it became a lawbreaker, violating the Constitution in effect, in order to save it.
“The people who wrote this Constitution lived in a world more dangerous than ours. Yet they understood that even in perilous times, the strength of self government was public debate and public consensus....They left us safeguards against men whose appetites for power might exceed their moral wisdom. To forget this—to ignore the safeguards, to put aside our basic values out of fear, to imitate the foe in order to defeat him—is to shred the distinction that makes us different....An open society cannot survive a secret government. Constitutional democracy is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us....The principle of accountable power is now...repeatedly violated in the name of national security.” 25
According to Gore Vidal: “The unloved American empire is now drifting into history on a sea of red ink....Thanks to money wasted in support of the national religion (corporate national security state), our quality of life is dire, and although our political institutions work smoothly for the few, the many hate them....” This is why politicians now run against the federal government although they continue to support it. During the years of the national security state “corporate America not only collected most of the federal revenue for 'defense' but, in the process,” greatly reduced its share of federal taxes. 26
William Greider asked: “How can the nation begin to restore a peaceable economic balance and evolve toward a society that is not so relentlessly organized around the machinery of war?....After four decades in place, the national-security state is not going to go away any time soon....If nothing much changes, there will be a continuing political imperative to seek out new conflicts that justify the existence of the national-security state. The CIA, if it remains independent and secretive, will keep churning out its inflated assessments of new 'threats.'” 27
The cold war kept Americans united by fear, but now that the cold war is over the government still remains on a war footing. “The permanent mobilization has altered the democratic relationships profoundly, concentrating power in remote and unaccountable places, institutionalizing secrecy, fostering gross public deception and hypocrisy. It violated the law in ways that have become habitual. It assigned great questions of national purpose to a militarized policy elite. It centralized political power in the presidency at the expense of every other democratic institution. The question is: Now that the enemy has vanished, is it possible that democratic order can be restored?”28
Along with the development of a vast national security establishment came an unchecked intelligence bureaucracy. The system of classifying thousands of documents only really started during and after World War II. Before World War II there was never such widespread use of security with dozens of bureaucratic agencies classifying millions of documents. This unprecedented process is a dangerous abuse of power to control information and mislead the public. Truman issued Executive Order (EO) 10290 extending the secrecy system to civilian departments on September 24, 1951. Congress never approved this classification system. While it is reasonable to keep some documents secret, few would accept the need to keep so many documents classified and for so many years.
In a free society, real national security depends on an informed electorate. Secrecy in government represents a loss of democratic participation in government. Millions of people are disgusted with the political process partly because government has become one big secret. We can no longer openly and freely debate important issues. The key issues of our time are decided behind closed doors by a few people who often aren't even elected to office. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution allows each House to keep certain items secret, but it was never the intent of the Founders to have secrecy become the norm in running the government. James Madison said: “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” Excessive government secrecy shows how the government distrusts the people.
David Wise in The Politics of Lying said: “The government has increasingly gained control over channels of information about military, diplomatic, and intelligence events. Frequently the press and public, unable to check the events independently, can only await the appearance of the President on the television screen to announce the official version of reality....Because of official secrecy on a scale unprecedented in our history, the government's capacity to distort information in order to preserve its own political power is almost limitless.” 29 Secrecy often covers up fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Secrecy and crisis enhanced executive power and increased the role of law enforcement agencies. Instead of Congress and the public having a say in policies, we are presented with completed events done because of the superior information the president has. Examples include the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Even many in the executive branch do not get important information to do their jobs because of the insane drive to keep documents secret. “Secrecy is one of the President's most important tools of power for it permits him to control information about crucial foreign policy decisions and events, and to filter the truth before it reaches Congress and the voters.”30
“The excuse for secrecy and deception most frequently given by those in power is that the American people must sometimes be misled in order to mislead the enemy. This justification is unacceptable on moral and philosophic grounds, and often it simply isn't true....The elitists who make national security policy ...feel that they alone possess the necessary information and competence to deal with foreign policy crises and problems. Government deception, supported by a pervasive system of official secrecy and an enormous public relations machine, has reaped a harvest of massive public distrust.” 31
CBS Evening News on June 15, 1994 said in 1993 Congress finally discovered that it costs over $16 billion to keep documents secret, with about 32,400 people employed. Congress couldn't find out the CIA costs because that was considered a secret The total annual bill in the same period to run the State and Justice Departments was 16.5 billion dollars. Even the Department of Education paid for secure phone lines.
The present classification system is very influenced by President Reagan's EO 12356 issued April 6,1982. It states that “Information may nol be classified under this Order unless its disclosure reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security,” and that government agencies should err on the side of secrecy. The result has been that more officials have the authority to classify documents and more documents are now classified. The organized declassification of documents started by President Eisenhower in 1953 stopped. History is a menace to national security.
When the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was set up in 1966 the intent was to allow anyone to see any government document except for specific exemptions, like military secrets or sensitive financial data. It was supposed to take 10 days to get a response for a FOIA request. Since the early 1980s the FOIA has been considerably weakened, and government agencies became quite resistant to FOIA requests after EO 12356 was signed. Documents already released under the FOIA could again be classified under EO 12356. When in doubt, classify a document or withhold it on any technicality. The will of Congress in passing the FOIA law was partially negated by this presidential edict which violates the Constitution. Also, a 1985 presidential directive ordered the transfer of government information to private industry. Then these companies charged whatever they wanted, which is one more technique used to keep information from the people.
A 1986 amendment to the FOIA was supposed to case the costs involved in making an FOIA request, but instead that act has been used to force people to show that FOIA requests are in the public interest. It is now often necessary to sue the government to get information released through the FOIA, and documents are often withheld because of political embarrassment. Different agencies use different strategies to prevent the release of documents, and the entire process has become very capricious. It now often takes two years or more, to get information released under the FOIA, which makes it hard for reporters with a deadline. Some agencies respond quickly to FOIA requests, while it is very difficult to get documents from military and intelligence agencies. In 1990 the FBI closed 78 percent of the FOIA requests by saying the requests were flawed or the records requested weren't available. 32
Former U.S. ambassador to Germany Kenneth Rush held secret meetings with the Soviet Union in 1971. After retiring he gave his notes to the State Department. Later when he tried to get the notes back while writing his memoirs he was turned down because they were classified. A historian wrote a study on why a Pentagon project failed. The Pentagon later said the study was so secret that the author couldn't read it. At his Senate confirmation hearing future head of the CIA Woolsey was asked how the CIA could be less secretive. He said that he'd rather discuss that in a secret hearing.
The courts usually support government attempts to make it harder to get documents from the FOIA. 33 This is especially true with the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals which reviews most FOIA cases. When national security is claimed to withhold documents, the courts usually agree with the government. The CIA won one case when it refused to release documents concerning the use of mind-control drugs on unwilling subjects. In Washington Post v. U.S. Department of Defense (1991) the court, citing national security concerns, withheld information based on “little more than a showing that the agency's (CIA) rationale is logical.” 34
In 1990 the Congressional Research Service concluded that by the year 2,000 75 percent of all federal government transactions will be handled electronically. The Clinton Justice Department supported the Bush view that it wasn't necessary to preserve electronic records as is required with paper documents. Fortunately, on August 13, 1993 a court ruled against the federal government. Clinton also fought legal attempts to publish the records of secret meetings over health care under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. And the administration claims it has broad authority to keep records from being released under the FOIA by labeling records presidential instead of agency records.
Today, even though the cold war is supposedly over, there are now more documents then ever kept classified. Clinton pledged to have a more open policy, but the government was classifying more papers than under Bush. In April, 1993 Clinton set up a task force to review ways to reduce excessive overclassification of documents with a new EO. Part of the problem is that the head of this task force, Steven Garfinkel, headed the Information Security Oversight Office for Reagan and Bush. Many key players in the national security state have been kept in place by Clinton. Garfinkel was quoted in several publications as staling that he feels most Americans don't care about excessive secrecy in government and that a new EO would “put a fresh coat of paint on” the order he would have given George Bush. 35
On November 10, 1994 Clinton released EO 12937 36 which declassifies 43.9 million pages of classified files including 22.9 million pages from after 1945. EOs have been proposed to automatically declassify documents after 25 years and to release much material obtained from satellite intelligence. People who want to study this field should read the Secrecy and Government Bulletin put out by the Federation of American Scientists. 37 On April 17, 1995 Clinton released EO 12958 which replaced EO 12356. This furthers the process of declassifying more government documents.
While these EOs are an improvement, little will change as long as the Democratic/Republican party controls the government. EO 12937 only releases one percent of all classified cold war documents. A new system is needed so that far fewer documents get classified, and over the years most documents are automatically declassified. Congress should establish strict standards as to what can be classified, and when the executive bureaucracy tries to subvert the will of Congress, there should be strict civil and criminal fines. Congress should also establish an agency with the authority to look at any government documents to see that its will is being fulfilled.
Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress between 1939 to 1945 and former Assistant Secretary of State, understood how far we had diverged from the teachings of the Founding Fathers. The dignity of the individual with God given rights has been overwhelmed by a “faithless materialism.” In the 20lh century we have gone from being a free society that protects individual rights to having massive state intervention in our lives. In fighting communism we copied it, as the power of the state grew and the rights of the individual weakened. “By putting the hatred and fear of Russia first we opened the sacred center of our lives...the freedom of mind and thought—to those among us who have always hated those freedoms and who know well how to use our fear of Russia as a mask to cover their disguised attacks. The spread of legalized thought control...across the country is not the work of chance. It is the work of freedom-hating men....What has been happening to the people of the U.S. in the last few years is something that can destroy the inward vitality of the nation if we let it go on.” 38 If we continue to separate ourselves from the teachings of the Founding Fathers, we as a people will be lost. MacLeish said that terms like revolution and freedom had developed new limited meanings. Today terms like militia and patriot are also vilified, although such people established our Republic. We must find the moral courage to restore the dignity of the individual by restoring constitutional government in America.
We sacrificed the ideals of the Republic, human decency, and the rule of law in the war against communism. Many foreigners turned against America because we turned against the principles that led to the founding of this Republic. In the name of stopping communism, anything was acceptable. President Eisenhower said in 1954: “If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered.” Cold war myths and misconceptions have warped our national ethos. In the process of winning the cold war, we lost our moral integrity as a nation. 39
John Le Carre said: “The fight against Communism diminished us....It left us in a state of false and corrosive orthodoxy. It licensed our excesses and we didn't like ourselves the better for them. It dulled our love of dissent and our sense of life's adventures.” According to Felix Morley, former editor of the Washington Post, “The underlying issue for Americans is whether we shall continue the controlled central government that was designed, or slip unconsciously into one of the forms of dictatorship encouraged by the profound upheavals of two world wars.” 40
An edited book, National Security and the U.S. Constitution, constantly attacked the problems of maintaining national security in a democracy. Some of the authors said national security can be better maintained without a democracy. It is difficult reaching a consensus, especially when speed is essential with so many participants in national policies. “The US . constitutional system so constrains the executive that the nation is now unable to respond to international threats and challenges....Covert action and democratic accountability are incompatible....The pluralism of the American political process has impeded rationalized intelligence organization.” 41 Patrick Kennon, a CIA agent for many years, said “The police state became the ideal if not the norm” as more complex societies develop. Kennon sees a “credible threat of force” as necessary for the modern nation state. 42
Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost the cold war. Along with the loss of civil rights, the economics of each nation were seriously damaged. The arms race increased the national debt and weakened most social service programs. While we fought the cold war, our allies modernized their economics to their competitive advantage. The military budget provided important benefits for scientific research and development which created many jobs, but military priorities have weakened our economic development, with the cold war economy actually displacing more jobs than it created. Much of the national debt is from the defense spending in the 1980s. 43 If our defense budget was cut to around $150 billion it would still be larger than what Western Europe and Japan spend on defense. 44 Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, demonstrated that typically nations become leading states through war and then decline when they become overextended.
More money should be spent on conversion of industry from military to nonmilitary production. Most jobs in the defense industry could be preserved if there was a major shift to environmental protection and clean-up and a major investment in renewable energy development. Such a move would also provide ample opportunities for research and development companies, while the jobs created in these new industries would generally be higher paying skilled labor. New jobs in solar energy, fuel cells, electric cars, and high energy appliances would employ many people in high paying jobs. Such an approach would also lessen industry concerns that environmental issues are hurting jobs and business growth while greatly improving our quality of life. The benefits of such a policy are obvious, but it won't happen while the Democrats and Republicans control Congress and the White House. The invisible government will not allow the security state to be dismantled. And “the political and economic elite will support deficits that finance the military and enrich the wealthy, but not deficits that support social spending, full employment and downward income distribution.” 45
Many large defense contractors are not interested in conversion to nonmilitary production and research. They feel that new threats will develop that will expand military procurement. While Clinton as a candidate spoke glowingly of cutting the defense budget after he was in office there were limited cuts and recently the defense budget has grown. 46 We should restore the rights protected in the Constitution and also rebuild our infrastructure and improve Americas competitive position in world markets. Our national security has been threatened by our weakened economic position, which developed partly because the government concentrated on security and defense issues.
One of the best kept secrets of the 20th century is that World War II is over. We should today declare World War II and the cold war over, close our overseas military bases, and bring the troops home. There is no longer any serious military threat to Europe, and it is completely unnatural for the U.S. to remain the dominant European military power. Not only does having thousands of our troops overseas weaken America's economy, but leaving thousands of American troops overseas will ultimately turn our allies against us. Many times while in Europe, I watched the controlled anger of Germans looking at American troops in German restaurants and gas stations. If large numbers of foreign troops were stationed in America for 50 years there would be deep resentment. American troops remain overseas today because our power hungry leaders refuse to end the national security state not because of any vital American interest. The overemphasis on national security has been counterproductive on all levels. We must not allow the secret government to use propaganda to create numerous new enemies to justify the continued existence of the national security state.
next
The CIA and the Intelligence Community
notes
Chapter IX Rise of the Transnational Corporations
1 Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, “The Lilliput Strategy: Taking on the Multinationals,” The Nation, December 19, 1994, p. 757-760; Edward S. Herman, “The End of Democracy?” Z Magazine, VI (September, 1993), 57-62; Edward S. Herman, “Economists Versus Democracy,” Z Magazine, VI (Dec, 1993), 54-58.
2 Bruce Rich, “Fifty Years of World Bank Outrages,” Earth Island Journal, IX (Winter 1993-1994), 34-35; Jude Wanniski, “An IFI Question: Are Multilaterals the Solution...Or Part of the Problem?” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 1995, p. A22; Patricia Adams, “A Troubling Deposit at World Bank,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 1995, p. A14.
3 Richard J. Barnet, “Stateless Corporations: Lords of the Global Economy,” The Nation, December 19, 1994, p. 754-757; Richard J. Barnet, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
4 Keith B. Rickburg, “A Line of 'Big Men' Has Thrown Democracy For A Loss,” The Washington Post National Weekly, XII January 9-15, 1995, p. 18.
5 Charles Lane, “Rabble Rousing,” The New Republic, June 12, 1995, p. 15-16. 282 Treason The New World order
6 William I. Robinson, “Low Intensity Democracy: The New Face of Global Domination,” Covert Action, Number 50 (Fall, 1994), 40-47.
7 Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (N.Y: New York University Press, 1975). 8 Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
9 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2nd edition (N.Y: Harper & Row, 1947).
10 Noam Chomsky, “Rollback IV: Towards a Utopia of the Masters,” Z Magazine, VIII (May, 1995), 18-24.
11 “Soft-soaping India,” New Statesman & Society, January 13, 1995, p. 24-25.
12 Walker F. Todd, “Mexican Handout: Bailing Out the Creditor Class,” The Nation, February
13, 1995, p. 193-194. 13 George J. Church, “Mexico's Troubles Are Our Troubles,” Time, March 6, 1995, p. 34-40.
14 Martin Espinoza, “Mexico's Next Revolution,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 22, 1995, p. 22-23, 25; Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn, “Who Broke Mexico: The Killers and the Killing,” The Nation, March 6, 1995, p. 306- 308, 310.
15 David Asman, “Don't Cry For Argentina,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 1995, p. A14.
16 Walker F. Todd, “Guess Whose Banks We're Planning to Bail Out Next,” Sacramento Bee, December 31, 1995, Forum p. 1,6.
17 “NAFTA's Progress Next Stop South,” The Economist, February 25, 1995, p. 29-30.
18 Henry Kissinger, “For U.S. Leadership, a Moment Missed,” Washington Post, May 12, 1995, p. A26.
19 “In Need of Fastening,” The Economist, May 27, 1995, p. 15-16.
20 Steven Greenhouse, “Christopher Backs Free Trade Willi Europe,” New York Times, June 3, 1995, p. A5.
21 Richard N. Cooper, “A Monetary System For the Future,” Foreign Affairs, 63 (Fall, 1984), 166-184.
22 “A Question of Motive,” The Economist, September 30, 1995, p. 16; Rob Norton, “There Go Those Eurocrats Again,” Fortune, September 18, 1995, p. 51.
23 James Goldsmith, The Trap (N.Y: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1994).
24 U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee On Commerce, Science, and Transportation, GATT Treaty, Hearings, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 495, 498, 503.
25 U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, GATT Treaty, 103d Cong., 2nd Sess. June 10, 1994, (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 131.
26 James Goldsmith, “The GATT Trap,” Earth Island Journal, X (Winter, 1995), 32-34.
27 George J. Church, “Are We Better Off?” Time, January 29, 1996, p. 36-40.
28 Aaron Bernstein, “Is America Becoming More of A Class Society?” Business Week, February 26, 1996, p. 86-91.
29 “Cheap Labor,” Mother Jones, XXI (January/February, 1996), 13; John Greenwald, “Cutting Off the Brains,” Time, February 5, 1996, p. 46; Michael S. Notes 283 Teitelbaum, “Too Many Engineers, Too Few Jobs,” New York Times, March 19, 1996, p. A17.
30 Christopher Lasch, “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” Harpers, 289 (November, 1994), 47.
31 Robert B. Reich, “Who Is Us?” Harvard Business Review, 90 (January/February, 1990), 59.
32 William Greider, “The Global Marketplace: Closet Dictator,” In The Case Against Free Trade GATT, NAFTA, and the Globalization of Corporate Power, ed. Ralph Nader et al (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1993), p. 209.
33 Lasch, op. cit., Note 30, p. 49.
34 Richard G. Gardner, “The Hard Road to World Order Foreign Affairs”, 52 (April, 1974), 558-560. 35 Jeremy Brecher, “After NAFTA: Global Village or Global Pillage?” The Nation, December 6, 1993, p. 685-688; Jeremy Brecher and John B. Childs, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
36 George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (N.Y: In fact, Inc., 1943), p. 49-50; “Japanese Fascism: Its Structure and Significance For Contemporary Americans,” Archives on Audio, radio telecast, October 2, 1988. M26. Produced by Dave Emory.
37 Laxmi Nakarmi, “The Kiwis Are Open for Business,” Business Week, September 25, 1995, p. 117-118; Franklin Winchester, “New Zealand From Welfare State to Utopia?” Perceptions, II (September/October, 1995), 10-12.
Chapter X Rise of the National Security State: The Cold War and Democracy
1 John W. Baer, “The Strange Origin of the Pledge of Allegiance,” Propaganda Review, Number 5 (Summer, 1989), 36-37.
2 Walter Karp, Buried Alive (N.Y: Franklin Square Press, 1992), p. 13-26.
3 Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (N.Y: Macmillan, 1994), p. 292- 3.
4 James Madison, “Political Observations,” in Letter and Other Writings of James Madison, Vol. IV (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1865), p. 491-2.
5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, Vol 2 (N.Y: Vintage, 1990), p. 269.
6 Porter, op. cit., Note 3, p. xv.
7 Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (Berkeley: Odonian Press, 1992), p. 30.
8 R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (N.Y: St Martin's Press, 1981), p. 116.
9 William A. Williams, “The Cold-War Revisionists,” The Nation, November 13, 1967, p. 492-495.
10 H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (N.Y: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. vi.
11 Barton J. Bernstein, “American Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold War,” in Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration, ed. by Barton J. Bernstein (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 16-17.
12 “Aviation RFC,” Business Week, January 31, 1948, p. 28, 30, 32.
13 “From Cold War to Cold Peace,” Business Week, February 12, 1949, p. 19- 20. 284 Treason The New World order
14 Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (N.Y: St. Martin's Press, 1993), p. 308.
15 Carl Bernstein, Loyalties: A Son's Memoir (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 197-198.
16 Kofsky, op. cit., Note 14, p. 246.
17 Harold B. Hinton, “Eisenhower Scoffs at Fears of a War Started By Russia,” New York Times, February, 6 1948, p. 1, 12.
18 “Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1948, p. 4.
19 Brands, op. cit., Note 10, p. 23-24.
20 Harold D. Lasswell, National Security and Individual Freedom (N.Y: McGrawHill Book Co., Inc., 1950), p. 23, 47.
21 Karp, op. cit., Note 2, p. 111.
22 Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (N.Y: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 126.
23 Stewart Udall, The Myths of August (N.Y: Pantheon, 1994), p. xi-xii, 7, 344, 346, 354, 357.
24 Lewis Lapham, Wish for Kings (N.Y: Grove Press, 1993), p. 157, 177.
25 Bill Moyers, The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis (Washington, D.C: Seven Locks Press, 1988), p. 16, 27, 54, 78, 89, 100, 101, 117.
26 Vidal, op. cit., Note 7, p. 50, 63.
27 William Greider, Who Will Tell the People (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 374-5.
28 Ibid., p. 360.
29 David Wise, The Politics of Lying (N.Y: Random House, 1973), p. 343.
30 Ibid., p. 64.
31 Ibid., p. 342, 344, 345.
32 Peter Montgomery and Peter Overby, “The Fight to Know,” Common Cause Magazine, (July/August, 1991), 17-21.
33 Lyle Denniston “Court Nibbles Away at FOIA,” Washington Journalism Review, XIV (March, 1992), 64.
34 Robert P. Deyling, “Judicial Deference and De Novo Review in Litigation Over National Security Information Under the Freedom of Information Act,” Villanova Law Review,
37 (1992), 67-112.
35 Janine Jackson, “Top Secret: What the Government Isn't Telling You,” Extra, VI (November/December, 1993), 14-16, 19.
36 EO 12937 Federal Register Nov. 15, 1994 p. 59097.
37 This publication can be ordered from: Federation of American Scientists 307 Mass. Ave., N.E. Washington, D.C. 20002.
38 Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981), p. xx.
39 George Edwards, III and Earl W. Wallace, eds., National Security and the U.S. Constitution (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 68, 324.
40 Patrick Kennon, The Twilight of Democracy (N.Y: Doubleday and Co., 1995), p. 125.
41 Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy (N.Y: Harper Collins Publications, Inc., 1992).
42 William Greider, “The Country that Stayed Out in the Cold,” Rolling Stone, Number 622 January 23, 1992, p. 19-20.
43 Robert Pollin, “Dismantling Defense: Use Conversion to Create Jobs,” The Nation, July 12, 1993, p. 66-68.
44 David Moberg, “Conversion Inexperience,” In These Times, December 26, 1994, p. 14-19.
45 Archibald MacLeish, “The Conquest of America,” The Atlantic Monthly, 184 (August, 1949), 17-22.
46 Brands, op. cit., Note 10, p. 224-228.
With Japan, free trade means unfair trade. Now that GATT has passed, Japan refuses to even negotiate with the U.S. about the huge trade imbalance. Instead they have turned to GATT mechanisms for protection. After 27 years, it is time to recognize that we must have managed trade with Japan. Even some commentators said the recent auto agreement with Japan was managed trade. We should sit down with Japan and China and develop a program over several years to restore an almost equal balance of trade. It is time to end the vast transfer of our economic wealth to other nations. The huge trade imbalance is more evidence that the Washington politicians represent economic interests not the American people.
Historically Holland, England, and now America have shown that free trade causes serious problems for developed nations as wages are lowered and the manufacturing base is exported. The working classes benefited when foreign competition was controlled, as in early nineteenth century England and in the U.S. after World War II. Open immigration into the U.S. weakens U.S. sovereignty, keeps wages low, and limits the ability of unions to grow. This is partly why the national media supports immigration and attacks as racists those who want it limited. With open borders, corporate profits raise while U.S. wages drop. U.S. corporations go overseas for cheap labor while foreigners immigrate to the U.S. seeking higher wages.
From the time of George Washington until World War II, except during the first world war, we had a policy of isolationism. However, while this policy kept us from foreign political alliances it also included managed trade, usually done to benefit America. As Benjamin Franklin said: “No nation was ever ruined by trade.” Our economy and manufacturing base developed with economic treaties between various nations. In recent decades the corporate controlled press falsely claimed that the choice is only for free trade or isolationism and strict limits on trade. This is disinformation used to increase corporate profits and surrender U.S. sovereignty to the planned world government. Rep. Duncan Hunter, in a letter published in the March 18, 1996 Business Week, noted that free trade is a recent policy with a poor track record. We should return to our historical policy of managed trade which means that American jobs and sovereignty will again be protected.
New Zealand has shown how populist policies and free-market reforms can benefit an entire nation, including the people and large corporations. After 10 years of reforms, New Zealand has a government surplus, low unemployment, and 59 percent of all government employees have been fired. 37 American corporations must be forced, through tax incentives and penalties, to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. This would make it easier to remove more people from public welfare and unemployment compensation, which would also bring down taxes. There would also be improved social stability and less crime as more people worked. If the manufacturing base of the nation is destroyed, the middle class will be severely weakened. It is time to remind American multinational corporations that they have responsibilities to America.
Chapter X
Rise of the National Security State:
The Cold War and Democracy
“No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter
the facade of democratic institutions.”
Murray B. Levin
“The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale
destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty.”
Gandhi
The seeds of the national security state and our moral decline started with the Spanish American War in 1898. That war allowed both political parties to control rampaging populism, as people were diverted from criticizing the corporate elite and urged to rally around the flag. There had been a recent depression, the frontier was filling up, and as America's manufacturing base increased, the ruling elite felt foreign bases were needed to increase foreign exports. The people paid to develop an empire, while the ruling elite reaped the economic rewards from these foreign adventures.
War was a logical continuation of America's imperialistic manifest destiny as the continental U.S. was fully occupied. In 1895 an editorial in the New York Journal of Commerce, then one of Americas main newspapers, criticized “the artificial patriotism being worked up at the present time” including “the fashion of hanging the flag from every schoolhouse and giving the boys military drill.” The first time the pledge of allegiance to the flag look place in a schoolroom was in 1892. The original pledge of allegiance was formulated by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. Today only the U.S. and the Philippines have an oath to their flag. 1 Only gradually was it thought proper to hang flags at every school. While I am not criticizing saluting the flag, surely no one will challenge the patriotism of our forefathers, who for over a hundred years, did not feel it necessary or proper to pledge allegiance to the American flag as an emblem of their patriotism.
Development of the national security state intensified during and after World War I, as the policy of isolation from involvement in foreign conflicts ended. Before the U.S. entered World War I, some agitated for entry into the war to “forge a national soul” for the country. They felt war would give rise to “a new religion of vital patriotism...of consecration to the State,” and that a foreign war would fill people with “a strong sense of international duty.” Instead of protecting our rights and freedoms with as little government as possible, the emphasis in the new America was to have more respect for a strong national government that we were indebted to
The new religion of the market economy was joined with the new religion of nationalism. We were no longer a Republic, with a strong independent people who relied on themselves with as little government as possible. Reverence for the Constitution was gradually replaced by a cull of the nation. 2 Some understood that the interventionists wanted to replace the Republic with a feared nation state that would destroy the Republic. Senator William J. Stone said if we entered the European war “We will never again have this same old Republic.”
Indeed, this period was filled with mass arrests with protest equated with disloyalty. Publications with unpatriotic ideas were banned from the mail, and there was little freedom of the press. The two political parties worked together, and people deemed radical were brutally suppressed. In 1917 the Attorney General said he had several hundred thousand citizens watching others to protect us from radical elements. Various immigrants, especially if they were union organizers, were deported as threats to the state. The red menace was equated with labor unrest, especially after Russia turned communist. The threat of communism was a convenient excuse to attack the labor movement. By 1920 the government had files on two million people.
America has been in a continuous state of war since 1941. Historically wars have played a key role in increasing the state's power, size, and fiscal spending, and that has certainly been true in America. We have been at war during 20 percent of our history, yet all but five of the federal government cabinet posts and most federal agencies were established during a war. 3 James Madison said: “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded....War is the parent of armies, from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few....No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” 4 At the constitutional convention Madison also said: “A standing military force with an overgrown executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Tocqueville warned that “All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.” 5 Centralized power is essential to establish a dictatorship, and power is most easily centralized by war or by the expectation of war. “This centralizing tendency of war has made the rise of the state throughout much of history a disaster for human liberty and rights.” 6
Many people called it a coup d'etat when President Kennedy was assassinated. It is more accurate to say the coup d'etat took place when the national security state was established in the late 1940's. “The cynicism of this coup d'etat was breathtaking. Officially we were doing nothing but trying to preserve freedom for ourselves and our allies from a ruthless enemy that was everywhere monolithic and all-powerful. Actually, the real enemy were those national security statesmen who had so dexterously hijacked the country, establishing military conscription in peacetime, overthrowing governments that did not please them, and finally keeping all but the very rich docile and jittery by imposing income taxes that theoretically went as high as 90 percent. That is quite an achievement in a country at peace.” 7
While the cold war often did not involve actual fighting, this period has had a major negative impact on basic American beliefs and institutions. The cold war was partly manufactured by the U.S. to maintain control over the people. The American people were lied to to create a vicious enemy, the Soviet Empire, to justify the cold war and arms race. According to R. Buckminster Fuller, during 1947-1950 the invisible government decided to start the cold war to keep capitalism in business and to prevent the Soviet Union from producing a higher standard of living then that which existed in the U.S. 8 In 1950 Einstein said: “The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.”
The view that the Soviets caused the cold war is wearing thin. In 1967 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. claimed in Foreign Affairs that the West had to act against the Soviet Union because Stalin was paranoid. Although many non-therapists believe this, the historian William A. Williams demonstrated the fallacy of this view. For instance, there is no evidence that U.S. policy was ever based on such an opinion of Stalin. Instead, as Schlesinger acknowledged, Stalin took many actions hostile to the West only after the U.S. intervened in Eastern Europe and throughout the world. 9
Especially since the 1960s, people like Walter LaFeber and Waller Karp have increasingly said the U.S., not the Soviet Union, mainly initialed the cold war. Truman reneged on various Yalta agreements. The U.S. exaggerated the Soviet threat, calling most Soviet moves an attempt at world conquest, and unnecessarily spent the nation almost into bankruptcy by creating a permanent war economy. H. W. Brands said: “The cold war had resulted largely from the efforts of the U.S. to export capitalism across the globe. American leaders, concerned that a repetition of the depression of the 1930s would trigger the collapse of the American way of life, and convinced that preventing a repetition required opening foreign markets to American products, sallied forth to bring as much of the world as possible into the American economic sphere.” 10 Barton J. Bernstein said there is evidence that “American policy was neither so innocent nor so non-ideological....By overextending policy and power and refusing to accept Soviet interests, American policy-makers contributed to the Cold War....There is evidence that Russian policies were reasonably cautious and conservative, and that there was at least a basis for accommodation.” 11
One of the best documented books on the cause of the cold war is Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 by Frank Kofsky. Immediately after World War II, the corporate elite and many intellectuals were very concerned that a depression with mass unemployment would develop without an arms race. The trauma of the 1930s was still fresh in the minds of many. I don't suggest that communism wasn't a serious threat. Godless communism was and is completely anathema to values we as a people hold dear, but it could have been confronted without the cold war and might have been, except that the bankers wanted to enhance their power, profits, and control over the people.
The aircraft industry would have collapsed without large government procurement orders after the war. Business Week said: “The aircraft builders, even with tax carrybacks, are near disaster....Right now the government is their only possible savior—with orders, subsidies, or loans.” 12 GE, Westinghouse, GM, the DuPont family, Chase Bank, and the Rockefellers were heavily invested in the aircraft industry. They used their influence to promote the war scare and rearm America to protect their investments and increase profits.
Truman's war scare was supported by press propaganda. After the war there was a massive campaign to promote capitalism to counteract the communist menace and damage the unions. In 1950, U.S. News & World Report said: “Government planners figure they have found the magic formula for almost endless good times....Cold War is the catalyst. Cold War is an automatic pump primer. Turn the spigot and the public clamors for more arms spending.” Threats of war were good for business.
According to Business Week, sharply increased military spending was a strong prop for business, there would be less unemployment, and increased war spending would limit the growth of welfare spending. While military spending doesn't alter the economy, growing “welfare and public-works spending,” in contrast “does alter the economy.” Welfare programs “create new institutions” and, even worse, they “redistribute income.” 13 Better to spend the country into bankruptcy and have tens of thousands of Americans die in needless foreign wars than risk the people gaining more economic and political power. With an arms race and a permanent war economy, it was much easier to control the people and to further enrich the corporate elite. Self aggrandizement of the ruling class and ideological concerns replaced practical considerations of America's national interest.
The reality was that, while Stalin and the Soviet Union were not easy to deal with, it was in the national interest of the East and West to maintain peace to recover from the devastation of the recent war. The actions of the Soviet Union after the war gave cause for alarm, but there were better ways to deal with that threat. It would have been possible to develop a policy of mutual tolerance without massive rearmament, but even the possibility of this was rejected. “Regardless of how outlandish or nonsensical most 'conspiracy theories' may be, the fact of the matter is that members of the ruling class and the power elite in the late 1940s showed themselves ready to resort to conspiratorial machinations whenever they deemed it necessary.” 14 The ruling elite in America found it in their interests to create a permanent war economy and the cold war.
In 1948 the historian Thomas Bailey wrote: “Because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their long-run interests.” Of course lying to the American people was hardly new. It was just that the stakes were higher, but then so were the profits. In 1978 Carl Bernstein interviewed Clark Clifford, who as a close aide, saw Truman every day. Clifford said: “The President didn't attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney....It was a political problem. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria.” 15
It is difficult for us now to look back and appreciate the climate of hysteria, fear, and panic that our government created. Washington created an impression that the Soviets were imminently going to start a war by invading Western Europe. There was a constant barrage of concern about the Soviet threat and the need to spend billions of dollars to stop the communist menace. Truman used deceit and manipulation with baseless claims of an imminent Soviet military threat. By deliberately misrepresenting Soviet intentions and using highly inflammatory language, the Truman administration manipulated Congress and the people creating an atmosphere of crisis. “We are compelled to conclude that, more often than not, there was no real connection between the military and foreign policy programs the Truman administration urged on Congress on the one hand and the dangers to which the administration claimed to be responding on the other. Instead, expediency and improvisation ruled the day: the administration first decided what it wished to extract from Congress and the electorate, and then, as events during the spring of 1948 illustrate, reached for the nearest available pretexts to justify its demands.” 16
Not everyone accepted this analysis. In February, 1948 General Eisenhower in a speech before the National Press Club expressed strong doubts that the Soviet Union intended to start a global war with the West. “The Soviet Union is in no position to support a global war,” he said. 17 The Wall Street Journal in an editorial complained about this emotional and factless government policy. “Yet we have not been told precisely what this crisis is, what form of danger we are to prepare against. Nevertheless we are told, it is a tremendous crisis and Congress ought to do all the things the President asks without slopping to debate them....To get these programs approved Congress is bombarded with alarums and excursions ....We have a right to expect more than that from our leaders.” 18
The most difficult problem that Truman faced during the 1948 war scare was that the Soviets tried to improve relations. The Soviets desperately wanted to avoid serious conflict with the West, and they initiated aggressive actions as a defensive measure after being sharply rebuffed in their attempts at reconciliation. There is evidence suggesting that the Soviets blockaded Berlin to force the West into serious negotiations to avoid an arms race they could ill afford. On May 10 in a letter to the U.S. ambassador and on May 17 in a letter to Henry Wallace, Stalin attempted to negotiate with the U.S. At the very least you can negotiate with another state to see if there is any basis for improved relations. Instead Washington promptly rejected these peace feelers referring to the dangerous Soviet threat. When Stalin died in 1953 the Soviets again put out feelers to improve relations. Although even Winston Churchill asked the U.S. to at least attempt to negotiate with the Soviets, our response was no. The cold war was too good for business.
The U.S. was so bellicose towards the Soviet Union in the late 1940s partly because only the West had nuclear weapons, and it realized the Soviet Union had sustained so much damage in World War II that it had no interest in a prolonged fight with the West. Kofsky spent considerable time studying the archives of the Truman administration and found no evidence of a serious fear that the Soviets intended to attack the West. Instead evidence suggested that Stalin feared being invaded by the West. After World War II intelligence estimates of the Soviet Union almost universally supported the view that, while the Soviet Union was hostile towards the West and in the long term hostilities might be initiated, there was no immediate intent to start a war. This analysis did not change during the 1948 war scare.
Little consideration has been given to the effect on the captured nations after the cold war began. The leaders of the U.S. military government in Germany,Lucius Clay and Robert Murphy, initially opposed German partition partly because of the effect it would have on the East Germans. While Soviet rule had been established, many noncommunist elements were allowed to remain in society and the real terror of the police state only began with the start of the Marshall Plan, as Melvyn P. Leffler in A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War noted. Stalin constantly ordered communist parties in the West to work within the system and not to initiate revolutionary actions. Except in Greece and Czechoslovakia this policy was followed.
Even when a communist insurgency started in Greece in 1946, Soviet aid was non-existent and U.S. officials were well aware of this. Our Secretary of State acknowledged “the present Soviet and satellite attitude in withholding a firm commitment” to the Greek communists. In 1947 when the Soviet Union established a new international organization, the Communist Information Bureau, Greek delegates were kept out. And no communist nation ever recognized the communist government established in northern Greece.
The Czechoslovakian communists were quite popular, partly because of the traditional relations and trade between Russia and Czechoslovakia and the great fear Czechoslovakia had of a resurgent Germany. The communists already controlled much of the government including the police, and it was obvious that there would be little serious internal opposition to a full take-over. Internal documents showed that the CIA at the time found no evidence that the Czechoslovakian takeover was part of a grand design to conquer all of Europe, as Truman proclaimed in support of rearmament.
The National Security Act of 1947 was more fully implemented in 1950, with edict NSC-68 outlining the policies of the U.S. in the cold war. This document was declassified in 1975 during the post-Nixon attempt to clean up government. It demonstrates how we never really intended to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The objective was to greatly increase conventional forces and nuclear power, develop foreign alliances, sharply increase taxes, and mobilize the entire American society through fear and terror to stop communism. This radical new policy was never openly debated. Our original Constitution was secretly replaced with the national security state, and few noticed.
There was one other reason why the elite wanted to create the cold war. Except for a few years during World War I, the U.S. had followed George Washington's advice to avoid foreign political entanglements. George Washington said: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances.” Thomas Jefferson declared we should have “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” A strong isolationist movement kept the U.S. out of the League of Nations, and most of the country was very isolationist during the 1930s. The corporate elite feared that after the war the country would once again turn inward, so the cold war was needed to create a need for foreign political alliances.
An active external threat kept Americans involved in world affairs. The State Department was very concerned that Americans would not persist in being interested in international relations. In September 1945 an aide warned Secretary Forrestal that Americans would not support a “complete realignment of government organizations...to serve our national security in the light of our new world power and position.” Yet active participation in world affairs was crucial to support the long term goals of the corporate elite to destroy national sovereignty and through international trade and foreign alignments, to establish a one world government.
Accompanying the new cold war was the signing of the NATO alliance in 1949, which represented a sharp break with our past. Senator Robert Taft, a leading politician in the late 1940s, recognized what a change it was for us to enter the NATO alliance. He criticized our being tied to the actions of 11 other nations. “The history of these obligations has been that once begun, they cannot easily be brought to an end....There is no limit to the burden of such a program or its dangerous implications.” How right he was! 19 Taft said he was “More than a bit tired of having the Russian menace invoked as a reason for doing any—and every—thing that might or might not be desirable or necessary on its own merits.” Ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson said the government overcame rising isolationist sentiment to internationalism because the Korean War “came along and saved us.”
In 1950, in National Security and Individual Freedom, Harold Lasswell warned that continuing war may create “garrison states,” political systems obsessed with national security, where perpetual war or the perceived threat of war leads to the concentration of all political power in the hands of an elite devoted to violence. Ultimately this condition leads to a totalitarian state. “Overzealousness in the cause of national defense weakens rather than strengthens total security....To the extent that intimidation is threatened or applied at home, we have a police state.” 20 “Here in truth, lay the supreme merit of the new Cold War gospel. It allowed America's leaders to wage unceasing war against the American people.” 21
To maintain our external involvement supposedly meant there was a strong need for stability in the U.S. which a strong security state would ensure. Liberties had to be sacrificed because of dangerous external menaces. Threats of a communist menace served the purpose of our corporate masters. “It creates a climate of opinion and a political atmosphere that makes it easier to discredit and repress labor militancy and progressive and anti-capitalist viewpoints at home and abroad.” 22 In 1953 I. F. Stone said: “The young were taught to distrust ideas which had been the gospel of the Founding Fathers.”
Repressive activities of the federal government continued throughout the cold war. Many artists were blacklisted, and background checks on federal employees, uniformed service personnel, and people in industries connected to national defense became the norm. By 1958, 9.8 million Americans had been investigated and millions had taken a loyalty oath. The easiest way to justify increased federal authority was by appealing to national security.
In response to the cold war, our government was altered so the country would be protected against communism. Congress created a separate national security state within the executive branch of the federal government. This included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the National Security Council (NSC) There was no peacetime precedent for the powers conferred on these organizations. They had the power to classify and to determine who would be told what was being done, and they were authorized to function with little real oversight from the elected officials. The cold war allowed the president and executive branch to assume increased unilateral powers. The president had almost unlimited power to define national security.
Especially towards the end of his administration, Eisenhower became more concerned about the nuclear arms race. He realized that even he had no real knowledge of what was being done and it might not be possible to stop the wild growth of nuclear arms. Eisenhower was deeply shocked when he saw how the Pentagon planned to conduct a nuclear war. It is partly for this reason that he said at his farewell address, “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the U.S. had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required make swords as well. But now...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience....We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
Over the years many respected commentators have warned how the cold war has negatively altered our form of government. Stewart Udall, former Secretary of Interior for JFK and congressman, said: “During President Truman's administration, obsessions about national security altered the relationship of the American people to their government by constricting the openness that had been a hallmark of American democracy....My experiences and observations told me that the cold warriors contempt for restraint had poisoned our politics....I was dismayed when, although the contest with Communism ended without violence, Cold War attitudes and values continued to dominate American policies and policy making.” Udall concluded: “As I look back in the 1980s, it was painfully evident that ...we...paid a heavy moral and political price by ignoring the open-government commands of our Constitution....We must dismantle the national security state we created to combat Communism and return to the constitutional principles and ethical values that animated our democracy's evolution....If our society is to regain the resilience and openness that once made our democracy a model for other countries, we must reaffirm our cherished political ideals and institutions....” 23
In 1973 Senator Fulbright said: “War and conditions of war are incompatible and inconsistent with our system of democracy. Our democratic system is bound to be eroded, and an authoritarian system is bound to take its place. We are in that process now....” Senator Mike Gravel said the cold war created a new culture in America “a national security culture, protected from the influences of American life by the shield of secrecy.”
According to Lewis Lapham, “Under the pretext of rescuing people from incalculable peril, the government over the last fifty years has claimed for itself enormously enhanced powers of repression and control. The obsession with security in all its forms...national, personal, and municipal—has shifted the balance of the American equation....Without the operatic stage set of the cold war, the American national security state was hard pressed to define its purpose, and the American people were beginning to understand how much money and poetic imagination had been invested in the making of the Communist menace.” 24
Bill Moyers said: “I find it stunning, looking back, how easily the cold war enticed us into surrendering popular control of government to the national security state....For 40 years a secret government has been growing behind...stately tributes to American ideals, growing like a cancer on the Constitution....The secret government has no Constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up....How does it happen that to be anti-communist we become undemocratic, as if we have to subvert our society in order to save it. In the name of national security much is kept secret and the president can do whatever he wants in secret to preserve national security while destroying our civil rights....Government was supposed to protect society against lawlessness; now it became a lawbreaker, violating the Constitution in effect, in order to save it.
“The people who wrote this Constitution lived in a world more dangerous than ours. Yet they understood that even in perilous times, the strength of self government was public debate and public consensus....They left us safeguards against men whose appetites for power might exceed their moral wisdom. To forget this—to ignore the safeguards, to put aside our basic values out of fear, to imitate the foe in order to defeat him—is to shred the distinction that makes us different....An open society cannot survive a secret government. Constitutional democracy is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us....The principle of accountable power is now...repeatedly violated in the name of national security.” 25
According to Gore Vidal: “The unloved American empire is now drifting into history on a sea of red ink....Thanks to money wasted in support of the national religion (corporate national security state), our quality of life is dire, and although our political institutions work smoothly for the few, the many hate them....” This is why politicians now run against the federal government although they continue to support it. During the years of the national security state “corporate America not only collected most of the federal revenue for 'defense' but, in the process,” greatly reduced its share of federal taxes. 26
William Greider asked: “How can the nation begin to restore a peaceable economic balance and evolve toward a society that is not so relentlessly organized around the machinery of war?....After four decades in place, the national-security state is not going to go away any time soon....If nothing much changes, there will be a continuing political imperative to seek out new conflicts that justify the existence of the national-security state. The CIA, if it remains independent and secretive, will keep churning out its inflated assessments of new 'threats.'” 27
The cold war kept Americans united by fear, but now that the cold war is over the government still remains on a war footing. “The permanent mobilization has altered the democratic relationships profoundly, concentrating power in remote and unaccountable places, institutionalizing secrecy, fostering gross public deception and hypocrisy. It violated the law in ways that have become habitual. It assigned great questions of national purpose to a militarized policy elite. It centralized political power in the presidency at the expense of every other democratic institution. The question is: Now that the enemy has vanished, is it possible that democratic order can be restored?”28
Along with the development of a vast national security establishment came an unchecked intelligence bureaucracy. The system of classifying thousands of documents only really started during and after World War II. Before World War II there was never such widespread use of security with dozens of bureaucratic agencies classifying millions of documents. This unprecedented process is a dangerous abuse of power to control information and mislead the public. Truman issued Executive Order (EO) 10290 extending the secrecy system to civilian departments on September 24, 1951. Congress never approved this classification system. While it is reasonable to keep some documents secret, few would accept the need to keep so many documents classified and for so many years.
In a free society, real national security depends on an informed electorate. Secrecy in government represents a loss of democratic participation in government. Millions of people are disgusted with the political process partly because government has become one big secret. We can no longer openly and freely debate important issues. The key issues of our time are decided behind closed doors by a few people who often aren't even elected to office. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution allows each House to keep certain items secret, but it was never the intent of the Founders to have secrecy become the norm in running the government. James Madison said: “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” Excessive government secrecy shows how the government distrusts the people.
David Wise in The Politics of Lying said: “The government has increasingly gained control over channels of information about military, diplomatic, and intelligence events. Frequently the press and public, unable to check the events independently, can only await the appearance of the President on the television screen to announce the official version of reality....Because of official secrecy on a scale unprecedented in our history, the government's capacity to distort information in order to preserve its own political power is almost limitless.” 29 Secrecy often covers up fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Secrecy and crisis enhanced executive power and increased the role of law enforcement agencies. Instead of Congress and the public having a say in policies, we are presented with completed events done because of the superior information the president has. Examples include the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Even many in the executive branch do not get important information to do their jobs because of the insane drive to keep documents secret. “Secrecy is one of the President's most important tools of power for it permits him to control information about crucial foreign policy decisions and events, and to filter the truth before it reaches Congress and the voters.”30
“The excuse for secrecy and deception most frequently given by those in power is that the American people must sometimes be misled in order to mislead the enemy. This justification is unacceptable on moral and philosophic grounds, and often it simply isn't true....The elitists who make national security policy ...feel that they alone possess the necessary information and competence to deal with foreign policy crises and problems. Government deception, supported by a pervasive system of official secrecy and an enormous public relations machine, has reaped a harvest of massive public distrust.” 31
CBS Evening News on June 15, 1994 said in 1993 Congress finally discovered that it costs over $16 billion to keep documents secret, with about 32,400 people employed. Congress couldn't find out the CIA costs because that was considered a secret The total annual bill in the same period to run the State and Justice Departments was 16.5 billion dollars. Even the Department of Education paid for secure phone lines.
The present classification system is very influenced by President Reagan's EO 12356 issued April 6,1982. It states that “Information may nol be classified under this Order unless its disclosure reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security,” and that government agencies should err on the side of secrecy. The result has been that more officials have the authority to classify documents and more documents are now classified. The organized declassification of documents started by President Eisenhower in 1953 stopped. History is a menace to national security.
When the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was set up in 1966 the intent was to allow anyone to see any government document except for specific exemptions, like military secrets or sensitive financial data. It was supposed to take 10 days to get a response for a FOIA request. Since the early 1980s the FOIA has been considerably weakened, and government agencies became quite resistant to FOIA requests after EO 12356 was signed. Documents already released under the FOIA could again be classified under EO 12356. When in doubt, classify a document or withhold it on any technicality. The will of Congress in passing the FOIA law was partially negated by this presidential edict which violates the Constitution. Also, a 1985 presidential directive ordered the transfer of government information to private industry. Then these companies charged whatever they wanted, which is one more technique used to keep information from the people.
A 1986 amendment to the FOIA was supposed to case the costs involved in making an FOIA request, but instead that act has been used to force people to show that FOIA requests are in the public interest. It is now often necessary to sue the government to get information released through the FOIA, and documents are often withheld because of political embarrassment. Different agencies use different strategies to prevent the release of documents, and the entire process has become very capricious. It now often takes two years or more, to get information released under the FOIA, which makes it hard for reporters with a deadline. Some agencies respond quickly to FOIA requests, while it is very difficult to get documents from military and intelligence agencies. In 1990 the FBI closed 78 percent of the FOIA requests by saying the requests were flawed or the records requested weren't available. 32
Former U.S. ambassador to Germany Kenneth Rush held secret meetings with the Soviet Union in 1971. After retiring he gave his notes to the State Department. Later when he tried to get the notes back while writing his memoirs he was turned down because they were classified. A historian wrote a study on why a Pentagon project failed. The Pentagon later said the study was so secret that the author couldn't read it. At his Senate confirmation hearing future head of the CIA Woolsey was asked how the CIA could be less secretive. He said that he'd rather discuss that in a secret hearing.
The courts usually support government attempts to make it harder to get documents from the FOIA. 33 This is especially true with the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals which reviews most FOIA cases. When national security is claimed to withhold documents, the courts usually agree with the government. The CIA won one case when it refused to release documents concerning the use of mind-control drugs on unwilling subjects. In Washington Post v. U.S. Department of Defense (1991) the court, citing national security concerns, withheld information based on “little more than a showing that the agency's (CIA) rationale is logical.” 34
In 1990 the Congressional Research Service concluded that by the year 2,000 75 percent of all federal government transactions will be handled electronically. The Clinton Justice Department supported the Bush view that it wasn't necessary to preserve electronic records as is required with paper documents. Fortunately, on August 13, 1993 a court ruled against the federal government. Clinton also fought legal attempts to publish the records of secret meetings over health care under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. And the administration claims it has broad authority to keep records from being released under the FOIA by labeling records presidential instead of agency records.
Today, even though the cold war is supposedly over, there are now more documents then ever kept classified. Clinton pledged to have a more open policy, but the government was classifying more papers than under Bush. In April, 1993 Clinton set up a task force to review ways to reduce excessive overclassification of documents with a new EO. Part of the problem is that the head of this task force, Steven Garfinkel, headed the Information Security Oversight Office for Reagan and Bush. Many key players in the national security state have been kept in place by Clinton. Garfinkel was quoted in several publications as staling that he feels most Americans don't care about excessive secrecy in government and that a new EO would “put a fresh coat of paint on” the order he would have given George Bush. 35
On November 10, 1994 Clinton released EO 12937 36 which declassifies 43.9 million pages of classified files including 22.9 million pages from after 1945. EOs have been proposed to automatically declassify documents after 25 years and to release much material obtained from satellite intelligence. People who want to study this field should read the Secrecy and Government Bulletin put out by the Federation of American Scientists. 37 On April 17, 1995 Clinton released EO 12958 which replaced EO 12356. This furthers the process of declassifying more government documents.
While these EOs are an improvement, little will change as long as the Democratic/Republican party controls the government. EO 12937 only releases one percent of all classified cold war documents. A new system is needed so that far fewer documents get classified, and over the years most documents are automatically declassified. Congress should establish strict standards as to what can be classified, and when the executive bureaucracy tries to subvert the will of Congress, there should be strict civil and criminal fines. Congress should also establish an agency with the authority to look at any government documents to see that its will is being fulfilled.
Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress between 1939 to 1945 and former Assistant Secretary of State, understood how far we had diverged from the teachings of the Founding Fathers. The dignity of the individual with God given rights has been overwhelmed by a “faithless materialism.” In the 20lh century we have gone from being a free society that protects individual rights to having massive state intervention in our lives. In fighting communism we copied it, as the power of the state grew and the rights of the individual weakened. “By putting the hatred and fear of Russia first we opened the sacred center of our lives...the freedom of mind and thought—to those among us who have always hated those freedoms and who know well how to use our fear of Russia as a mask to cover their disguised attacks. The spread of legalized thought control...across the country is not the work of chance. It is the work of freedom-hating men....What has been happening to the people of the U.S. in the last few years is something that can destroy the inward vitality of the nation if we let it go on.” 38 If we continue to separate ourselves from the teachings of the Founding Fathers, we as a people will be lost. MacLeish said that terms like revolution and freedom had developed new limited meanings. Today terms like militia and patriot are also vilified, although such people established our Republic. We must find the moral courage to restore the dignity of the individual by restoring constitutional government in America.
We sacrificed the ideals of the Republic, human decency, and the rule of law in the war against communism. Many foreigners turned against America because we turned against the principles that led to the founding of this Republic. In the name of stopping communism, anything was acceptable. President Eisenhower said in 1954: “If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered.” Cold war myths and misconceptions have warped our national ethos. In the process of winning the cold war, we lost our moral integrity as a nation. 39
John Le Carre said: “The fight against Communism diminished us....It left us in a state of false and corrosive orthodoxy. It licensed our excesses and we didn't like ourselves the better for them. It dulled our love of dissent and our sense of life's adventures.” According to Felix Morley, former editor of the Washington Post, “The underlying issue for Americans is whether we shall continue the controlled central government that was designed, or slip unconsciously into one of the forms of dictatorship encouraged by the profound upheavals of two world wars.” 40
An edited book, National Security and the U.S. Constitution, constantly attacked the problems of maintaining national security in a democracy. Some of the authors said national security can be better maintained without a democracy. It is difficult reaching a consensus, especially when speed is essential with so many participants in national policies. “The US . constitutional system so constrains the executive that the nation is now unable to respond to international threats and challenges....Covert action and democratic accountability are incompatible....The pluralism of the American political process has impeded rationalized intelligence organization.” 41 Patrick Kennon, a CIA agent for many years, said “The police state became the ideal if not the norm” as more complex societies develop. Kennon sees a “credible threat of force” as necessary for the modern nation state. 42
Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost the cold war. Along with the loss of civil rights, the economics of each nation were seriously damaged. The arms race increased the national debt and weakened most social service programs. While we fought the cold war, our allies modernized their economics to their competitive advantage. The military budget provided important benefits for scientific research and development which created many jobs, but military priorities have weakened our economic development, with the cold war economy actually displacing more jobs than it created. Much of the national debt is from the defense spending in the 1980s. 43 If our defense budget was cut to around $150 billion it would still be larger than what Western Europe and Japan spend on defense. 44 Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, demonstrated that typically nations become leading states through war and then decline when they become overextended.
More money should be spent on conversion of industry from military to nonmilitary production. Most jobs in the defense industry could be preserved if there was a major shift to environmental protection and clean-up and a major investment in renewable energy development. Such a move would also provide ample opportunities for research and development companies, while the jobs created in these new industries would generally be higher paying skilled labor. New jobs in solar energy, fuel cells, electric cars, and high energy appliances would employ many people in high paying jobs. Such an approach would also lessen industry concerns that environmental issues are hurting jobs and business growth while greatly improving our quality of life. The benefits of such a policy are obvious, but it won't happen while the Democrats and Republicans control Congress and the White House. The invisible government will not allow the security state to be dismantled. And “the political and economic elite will support deficits that finance the military and enrich the wealthy, but not deficits that support social spending, full employment and downward income distribution.” 45
Many large defense contractors are not interested in conversion to nonmilitary production and research. They feel that new threats will develop that will expand military procurement. While Clinton as a candidate spoke glowingly of cutting the defense budget after he was in office there were limited cuts and recently the defense budget has grown. 46 We should restore the rights protected in the Constitution and also rebuild our infrastructure and improve Americas competitive position in world markets. Our national security has been threatened by our weakened economic position, which developed partly because the government concentrated on security and defense issues.
One of the best kept secrets of the 20th century is that World War II is over. We should today declare World War II and the cold war over, close our overseas military bases, and bring the troops home. There is no longer any serious military threat to Europe, and it is completely unnatural for the U.S. to remain the dominant European military power. Not only does having thousands of our troops overseas weaken America's economy, but leaving thousands of American troops overseas will ultimately turn our allies against us. Many times while in Europe, I watched the controlled anger of Germans looking at American troops in German restaurants and gas stations. If large numbers of foreign troops were stationed in America for 50 years there would be deep resentment. American troops remain overseas today because our power hungry leaders refuse to end the national security state not because of any vital American interest. The overemphasis on national security has been counterproductive on all levels. We must not allow the secret government to use propaganda to create numerous new enemies to justify the continued existence of the national security state.
next
The CIA and the Intelligence Community
notes
Chapter IX Rise of the Transnational Corporations
1 Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, “The Lilliput Strategy: Taking on the Multinationals,” The Nation, December 19, 1994, p. 757-760; Edward S. Herman, “The End of Democracy?” Z Magazine, VI (September, 1993), 57-62; Edward S. Herman, “Economists Versus Democracy,” Z Magazine, VI (Dec, 1993), 54-58.
2 Bruce Rich, “Fifty Years of World Bank Outrages,” Earth Island Journal, IX (Winter 1993-1994), 34-35; Jude Wanniski, “An IFI Question: Are Multilaterals the Solution...Or Part of the Problem?” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 1995, p. A22; Patricia Adams, “A Troubling Deposit at World Bank,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 1995, p. A14.
3 Richard J. Barnet, “Stateless Corporations: Lords of the Global Economy,” The Nation, December 19, 1994, p. 754-757; Richard J. Barnet, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
4 Keith B. Rickburg, “A Line of 'Big Men' Has Thrown Democracy For A Loss,” The Washington Post National Weekly, XII January 9-15, 1995, p. 18.
5 Charles Lane, “Rabble Rousing,” The New Republic, June 12, 1995, p. 15-16. 282 Treason The New World order
6 William I. Robinson, “Low Intensity Democracy: The New Face of Global Domination,” Covert Action, Number 50 (Fall, 1994), 40-47.
7 Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (N.Y: New York University Press, 1975). 8 Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
9 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2nd edition (N.Y: Harper & Row, 1947).
10 Noam Chomsky, “Rollback IV: Towards a Utopia of the Masters,” Z Magazine, VIII (May, 1995), 18-24.
11 “Soft-soaping India,” New Statesman & Society, January 13, 1995, p. 24-25.
12 Walker F. Todd, “Mexican Handout: Bailing Out the Creditor Class,” The Nation, February
13, 1995, p. 193-194. 13 George J. Church, “Mexico's Troubles Are Our Troubles,” Time, March 6, 1995, p. 34-40.
14 Martin Espinoza, “Mexico's Next Revolution,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 22, 1995, p. 22-23, 25; Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn, “Who Broke Mexico: The Killers and the Killing,” The Nation, March 6, 1995, p. 306- 308, 310.
15 David Asman, “Don't Cry For Argentina,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 1995, p. A14.
16 Walker F. Todd, “Guess Whose Banks We're Planning to Bail Out Next,” Sacramento Bee, December 31, 1995, Forum p. 1,6.
17 “NAFTA's Progress Next Stop South,” The Economist, February 25, 1995, p. 29-30.
18 Henry Kissinger, “For U.S. Leadership, a Moment Missed,” Washington Post, May 12, 1995, p. A26.
19 “In Need of Fastening,” The Economist, May 27, 1995, p. 15-16.
20 Steven Greenhouse, “Christopher Backs Free Trade Willi Europe,” New York Times, June 3, 1995, p. A5.
21 Richard N. Cooper, “A Monetary System For the Future,” Foreign Affairs, 63 (Fall, 1984), 166-184.
22 “A Question of Motive,” The Economist, September 30, 1995, p. 16; Rob Norton, “There Go Those Eurocrats Again,” Fortune, September 18, 1995, p. 51.
23 James Goldsmith, The Trap (N.Y: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1994).
24 U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee On Commerce, Science, and Transportation, GATT Treaty, Hearings, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 495, 498, 503.
25 U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, GATT Treaty, 103d Cong., 2nd Sess. June 10, 1994, (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 131.
26 James Goldsmith, “The GATT Trap,” Earth Island Journal, X (Winter, 1995), 32-34.
27 George J. Church, “Are We Better Off?” Time, January 29, 1996, p. 36-40.
28 Aaron Bernstein, “Is America Becoming More of A Class Society?” Business Week, February 26, 1996, p. 86-91.
29 “Cheap Labor,” Mother Jones, XXI (January/February, 1996), 13; John Greenwald, “Cutting Off the Brains,” Time, February 5, 1996, p. 46; Michael S. Notes 283 Teitelbaum, “Too Many Engineers, Too Few Jobs,” New York Times, March 19, 1996, p. A17.
30 Christopher Lasch, “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” Harpers, 289 (November, 1994), 47.
31 Robert B. Reich, “Who Is Us?” Harvard Business Review, 90 (January/February, 1990), 59.
32 William Greider, “The Global Marketplace: Closet Dictator,” In The Case Against Free Trade GATT, NAFTA, and the Globalization of Corporate Power, ed. Ralph Nader et al (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1993), p. 209.
33 Lasch, op. cit., Note 30, p. 49.
34 Richard G. Gardner, “The Hard Road to World Order Foreign Affairs”, 52 (April, 1974), 558-560. 35 Jeremy Brecher, “After NAFTA: Global Village or Global Pillage?” The Nation, December 6, 1993, p. 685-688; Jeremy Brecher and John B. Childs, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
36 George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (N.Y: In fact, Inc., 1943), p. 49-50; “Japanese Fascism: Its Structure and Significance For Contemporary Americans,” Archives on Audio, radio telecast, October 2, 1988. M26. Produced by Dave Emory.
37 Laxmi Nakarmi, “The Kiwis Are Open for Business,” Business Week, September 25, 1995, p. 117-118; Franklin Winchester, “New Zealand From Welfare State to Utopia?” Perceptions, II (September/October, 1995), 10-12.
Chapter X Rise of the National Security State: The Cold War and Democracy
1 John W. Baer, “The Strange Origin of the Pledge of Allegiance,” Propaganda Review, Number 5 (Summer, 1989), 36-37.
2 Walter Karp, Buried Alive (N.Y: Franklin Square Press, 1992), p. 13-26.
3 Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (N.Y: Macmillan, 1994), p. 292- 3.
4 James Madison, “Political Observations,” in Letter and Other Writings of James Madison, Vol. IV (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1865), p. 491-2.
5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, Vol 2 (N.Y: Vintage, 1990), p. 269.
6 Porter, op. cit., Note 3, p. xv.
7 Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (Berkeley: Odonian Press, 1992), p. 30.
8 R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (N.Y: St Martin's Press, 1981), p. 116.
9 William A. Williams, “The Cold-War Revisionists,” The Nation, November 13, 1967, p. 492-495.
10 H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (N.Y: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. vi.
11 Barton J. Bernstein, “American Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold War,” in Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration, ed. by Barton J. Bernstein (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 16-17.
12 “Aviation RFC,” Business Week, January 31, 1948, p. 28, 30, 32.
13 “From Cold War to Cold Peace,” Business Week, February 12, 1949, p. 19- 20. 284 Treason The New World order
14 Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (N.Y: St. Martin's Press, 1993), p. 308.
15 Carl Bernstein, Loyalties: A Son's Memoir (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 197-198.
16 Kofsky, op. cit., Note 14, p. 246.
17 Harold B. Hinton, “Eisenhower Scoffs at Fears of a War Started By Russia,” New York Times, February, 6 1948, p. 1, 12.
18 “Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1948, p. 4.
19 Brands, op. cit., Note 10, p. 23-24.
20 Harold D. Lasswell, National Security and Individual Freedom (N.Y: McGrawHill Book Co., Inc., 1950), p. 23, 47.
21 Karp, op. cit., Note 2, p. 111.
22 Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (N.Y: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 126.
23 Stewart Udall, The Myths of August (N.Y: Pantheon, 1994), p. xi-xii, 7, 344, 346, 354, 357.
24 Lewis Lapham, Wish for Kings (N.Y: Grove Press, 1993), p. 157, 177.
25 Bill Moyers, The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis (Washington, D.C: Seven Locks Press, 1988), p. 16, 27, 54, 78, 89, 100, 101, 117.
26 Vidal, op. cit., Note 7, p. 50, 63.
27 William Greider, Who Will Tell the People (N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 374-5.
28 Ibid., p. 360.
29 David Wise, The Politics of Lying (N.Y: Random House, 1973), p. 343.
30 Ibid., p. 64.
31 Ibid., p. 342, 344, 345.
32 Peter Montgomery and Peter Overby, “The Fight to Know,” Common Cause Magazine, (July/August, 1991), 17-21.
33 Lyle Denniston “Court Nibbles Away at FOIA,” Washington Journalism Review, XIV (March, 1992), 64.
34 Robert P. Deyling, “Judicial Deference and De Novo Review in Litigation Over National Security Information Under the Freedom of Information Act,” Villanova Law Review,
37 (1992), 67-112.
35 Janine Jackson, “Top Secret: What the Government Isn't Telling You,” Extra, VI (November/December, 1993), 14-16, 19.
36 EO 12937 Federal Register Nov. 15, 1994 p. 59097.
37 This publication can be ordered from: Federation of American Scientists 307 Mass. Ave., N.E. Washington, D.C. 20002.
38 Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981), p. xx.
39 George Edwards, III and Earl W. Wallace, eds., National Security and the U.S. Constitution (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 68, 324.
40 Patrick Kennon, The Twilight of Democracy (N.Y: Doubleday and Co., 1995), p. 125.
41 Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy (N.Y: Harper Collins Publications, Inc., 1992).
42 William Greider, “The Country that Stayed Out in the Cold,” Rolling Stone, Number 622 January 23, 1992, p. 19-20.
43 Robert Pollin, “Dismantling Defense: Use Conversion to Create Jobs,” The Nation, July 12, 1993, p. 66-68.
44 David Moberg, “Conversion Inexperience,” In These Times, December 26, 1994, p. 14-19.
45 Archibald MacLeish, “The Conquest of America,” The Atlantic Monthly, 184 (August, 1949), 17-22.
46 Brands, op. cit., Note 10, p. 224-228.
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