Transitioning Out of Democracy

I'm trying to remember what Simon Johnson saw as the time to the next financial crisis in a discussion with Bill Moyers two or three years ago (in what might have been one of the last editions of the Bill Moyers Journal before Moyers retired). Certainly, Johnson predicted no more than ten years to the next crisis, but my recollection is that he said something like three to seven years. That's just my recollection, but we can be sure of one thing — Barack Obama, Democrats and Republicans, despite weak public protestations to the contrary, have sent very clear substantive signals. Wall Street and megabank risk-taking, misconduct, and even criminality will be thoroughly underwritten by the United States government and, by extension, a willfully ignorant American populace.

This all fits into what a growing number (including Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini . . . I don't know about Messrs. Johnson and Kwak) have described as a large, perhaps the largest, transfer of wealth from labor to capital ever.

My own few is that the phenomenon is even broader than that, encompassing economic and legal, even constitutional, features. A transfer of wealth and economic and political power from the general population to an increasingly rapacious class of American oligarchs is underway. My view unifies developments across the economic and political spectrum:

• the Supreme Court's creeping grant of the status of personhood to corporations,
• the gross disparities in wealth and income (and all concomitant benefits, like health, education, longevity, etc.),
• Bush and Obama attacks on civil liberties (including Habeus Corpus, Posse Comitatus, whistleblower protections, protections for journalists — the few who actually investigate US government misconduct),
• the Democratic-Republican assault economic protections for elderly Americans.
• the effective criminalization of poverty,
• the cultural glorification of the New American Virtues — wealth, fame, good looks, longevity, fashion, etc.

I do not like the "tipping point" terminology, but the trends that accelerated in the Reagan years (having arguably begun in the Carter years) and that have continued through every president since may now have crossed some threshold, an increasingly formal grant of power to a tiny percentage of elite Americans. Any new bailouts will only be part of larger developments.

Income/Wealth Inequality and Social Stability

The Princeton political scientist Carles Boix argued at at length that one of the things that makes democracy possible is that the better off perceive their privilege to be protected (in some measure) against egalitarian impulses of the less-well-off. In modern industrial democracies like the US, the wealthy enjoy constitutional protections and can also move their wealth elsewhere.

Fine. But two obvious questions arise.

1. Is there a point where inequality provokes a backlash among the less-well-off? The answer in the US for decades has been no. Americans are remarkably, stunningly indifferent to the gross inequalities of the US, hands down the most unequal of all the industrial democracies. The US has one of the lowest social mobility rates in the world, even compared to non-democracies and less-developed nations. It has fares most poorly among its peers on health, longevity, education, happiness — very nearly every index of comparison. (The only country that does roughly as badly is Britain. What a surprise — the nation that has done most to parrot the American example.)

Despite this, as John Kenneth Galbraith long noted (among many others), Americans didn't seem to care.... American exceptionalism. Speaking on The Charlie Rose Show, economist Kenneth Rogoff's comment echoes something I've heard elsewhere: Americans "expect to win the lottery." Americans are generally happy to see others enjoy billions because a remarkable percentage of Americans are deluded into thinking they too will win any day now — this despite the US having a dismal degree of social mobility.

Will this change? Can it change? Can Americans develop a measure of anger? Can they rally the way the French or Greeks have? The way anybody but Americans do?

This brings us to the second question:

2. How are the US government and oligarchs suppressing American egalitarian impulses or protecting themselves against the same? I suggest that the national security apparatus/state that has been developing for years and has accelerated under Obama will be used to contain any American social upheaval — should any develop, which seems unlikely given the level of Americans' apathy and ignorance. Under Obama, domestic spying has grown. Obama has viciously sought to suppress whistleblowers, as Glenn Greenwald has described repeatedly. Moreover, we have an educational system which borders on systematic indoctrination. From grade school through university (especially university) we have a host of institutions that endlessly trumpet the unalloyed glories of both unlimited greed and the infallibility of the American way of doing things. I am frequently astonished by the extent to which extraordinarily well-educated, intelligent people show absolutely no inclination or ability to challenge American orthodoxy.

The writings of H. L. Mencken, John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Mark Twain, and many others go into this over the length of American history. Today, we have many new voices — Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald among them. Yet Americans remain impervious to even the most obvious truths.

The wealthiest and their willing slaves like Obama and Congress (those members who are not among the 1% already, that is) have obvious incentives for pressing the dogma. But why so many Americans prove so indifferent is a mystery.

As With Bailout, So With Social Security

Recall that the first attempt to bailout banks in September 2008 failed in Congress after a deluge of calls from voters in opposition. Then Congress rallied. After all, if 95% of members support policy X, how can you play one off against another?

The same is happening now. The oligarchs have ruled against Social Security. They know they will never need it, but in time there will be no one left to raise taxes on but the rich, so in time, if social programs are to be preserved, the rich will have to pay a share more closely representing the degree to which they disproportionately benefit in out society.

The solution is to kill social programs in their entirety, let the poor and middle classes suffer. Why? Congress and every president since Reagan have demonstrated repeatedly that they place a near-exclusive priority on the interests of the wealthiest (not just to the exclusion of others, but at the expense of others).

The political economist Carles Boix has argued that democracy thrives when the privileged perceive that the masses cannot vote away the wealth of those privileged. So countries with diverse and liquid assets like the U.S. can tolerate democracy. I suggest that the United States is proving Boix's argument incomplete. The rich are saying, again and again, "No!" to democracy.

It may be no more complicated than this: In a society where a huge majority show no interest in current events, politics, economics, justice, truth, government, why should power-brokers deal with democracy when they can just as easily — or more easily, given the population's passivity — deal without?

Question: What Is the Biggest Problem with American Democracy?

This has been answered very nicely by Paul Krugman, Michael Kinsley, James K. Galbraith and many others on the liberal and progressive end of the spectrum. The US is already a de facto oligarchy. Clinton, Bush and now Obama have worked diligently to formalize American Oligarchy, with the unalloyed support of Wall Street and a huge percentage of corporate boards, Democrats, Republicans and American super-rich.

I emphasize that this issue has been expressly raised by many who are far less left-leaning than I am.

It's a possibly-encouraging feature of American democracy that some who could easily ride the wave among fellow oligarchs are vocally opposed to the decline (among them, George Soros).

By contrast, a deeply discouraging feature is the absolute failure of the vast majority of American journalists to do anything even remotely resembling the work they assert they do. Here is London Times editor Robert Lowe in 1851:

The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation... The Press lives by disclosures... For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences – to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.

Similar thoughts have been voiced by H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Studs Terkel, and others. But today, we hear prominent members of the American news establishment explicitly reject this journalistic duty. The torrent of condemnation of and vile misreporting on Julian Assange is a perfect example of this (by, among others, the New York Times, including 'star reporter' John Burns).

Equally discouraging is the deeply delusional state of the American people. Economist Ken Rogoff was recently on Charlie Rose (Rose usually dismally middle-of-the-road to conservative). In response to a question on why Americans support the Republican campaign to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, Rogoff — absolutely on-target — said something to the effect, "Because everyone expects to be rich." I've heard this on the street myself — people with no prospects of any kind asserting with total confidence that they are going to win the lottery. I heard this twenty years ago in Massachusetts when it was reported, during widespread opposition to a modest tax increase proposal, that many lottery ticket buyers spent more on the lottery each year than they paid in their state taxes. (Dollar for dollar, which do you think returned more value to them? Hint: Expected gain on a one dollar lottery ticket is less than a penny.)

The US may very well have the most ill-informed, poorly-educated, deluded population of any country on Earth. (But China seems determined to best us on that count.)

This American Dream

James Kwak and Simon Johnson have parallel essays commenting on Ariana Huffington's new book, Third World America.

The title alone reminds me of what used to be said of the United Kingdom — that it was the world's wealthiest Third World country. (I remember this from the 1980s, but I don't know when it began or whether people still speak of the UK so.) Paul Krugman, speaking with Eliot Spitzer and Bill Maher on HBO in September, 2009, effectively said the US is going the way of a Third World country:

Sometimes I wake up and think I'm in a Third World country.... The American Dream is not totally dead, but it's dying pretty fast."

In his essay, James Kwak notes a couple of nice quotations Huffington pulls from Tocqueville's Democracy in America, including what struck him as "the general equality of condition among the people."

Of course, Tocqueville was missing one group — the slaves. Hardly a minor oversight. Neither was he particularly concerned with the denial to women of the vote or the right to own property. But these can be "controlled for" in a comparison of American ages.

It would be interesting to gauge at what time in American history wealth was most unequally (and at what time most equally) distributed.

If you just confine yourselves to people who were allowed to own property and allowed to vote (that is, people treated substantially equally in law), then at what time were people most unequal.

The disparities in distribution today, if not the greatest ever, must be pretty close — and getting closer. I think the following position can reasonably (and forcefully) be made:

For thirty years, since the Reagan administration, formal and substantive democracy have been under attack in the United States. Protections for the individual, especially the less advantaged "commoner" (for want of better expression) have been deliberately worn down. The government, especially the executive branch, has steadily and successfully sought more power. Obama has not departed from the pattern from Reagan through to Bush in the slightest. Indeed, government intrusions into the lives of Americans have accelerated under Obama. Far from having a tax and social policy aimed at promoting greater equality, we have seen seen the US government repeatedly act to redistribute wealth from the middle class up to the wealthiest Americans. We have an increasingly wealthy Congress. Those members who do not start among the wealthiest do whatever they can to join — witness Charlie Rangel's crimes.

Above all, the culture of separation is being institutionalized. Wealthy versus The Rest of Us. And government and corporate leaders show almost no concern about this at all. Indeed, they appear, in large measure, to be endorsing the two-state America.

The question may now be: Just how un-democratic will the US become?

Democracy's End

Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss has some comments on a current Ethan Bronner story in The New York Times. Weiss notes Bronner's effective recognition of the death of the Two State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If I read Weiss correctly, he thinks it may portend the end of the Jewish State. I think it may mark an alternative, depending on how wedded Israelis and their American champions are to Democracy. Israelis and Americans are facing, largely independently, a parallel choice between preserving two increasingly incompatible Articles of National Faith. In Israel's case, they are the notions of Democracy and Jewish Statehood (which were arguably incompatible from the start, emphasis on arguably — not necessarily in my view). In the case of the US, the two are Democracy and (unlimited acquisition of) Wealth (termed free enterprise, private property — it has several names).

If the US and Israel are not already at a Moment of Truth (drumroll), they soon will be. The Jewish State may be finished, or — if Americans and Israelis choose to junk some other cherished notion — it may continue in radically altered form.

The obvious alternative to be junked is democracy. My view is that it will be the democracy that is dumped — not explicitly, but in substance and with a widespread, unstated recognition that this is what is happening.

There are calls in the Knesset for a more systematic denial of rights to Palestinians, but this has been true for some time. Likewise, there is a systematic denial of equal rights to non-Jews in Israel. The vast majority of non-Jews are Palestinian, so that systematic denial does the work, not just of latent racism, but of preserving the "Jewish character" of the Jewish state.

A further emphasis on protecting "Jewish character" to resolve the tension between a Two State Solution and Jewish Statehood will also bring denials of democracy to Jews in Israel. This, too, is happening with the grossly disproportionate power of the religious right. Israel is also seeing some evidence of liberal-intellectual flight.

How is the de-democratization of Israel to be managed in The World's Greatest Democracy? A good deal of Orwellian linguistic construction aided by the non-quite-coincidental de-democratization of the United States. Economists, first on the left and now increasingly among liberals, are noting this. And progressives generally have been warning of this since the Reagan years, when the "Danger of Too Much Democracy" was first attacked with malice aforethought.

In an interview with Bill Maher, Paul Krugman said, "The American Dream isn't dead, but it's dying pretty fast." Dean Baker has an essay on the service Congress renders to Wall Street and corporate America — not to us. Essential to Democracy are social mobility and some ideal of socio-economic equality serving as a goal. Both are near-dead in the US. Our politicians are becoming a political class. They become wealthier, use their elected positions to ensure or promote their own wealth and, if they leave office, go to work for precisely the companies they regulated (or didn't) through legislation. Their children take office after they leave. If we haven't already, when will we see a third-generation Kennedy take office — or a Murkowsi, Paul, Cuomo, Bush . . . ?

Elections are becoming near-irrelevant in the US. The great beacon of Change and Hope — Obama — has proved to be anything but, indeed almost the opposite. Who could imagine that Obama would not just fail to address Bush crimes, but actually further some of Bush's worst?

The decline of democracy in the US — coupled crucially with Orwellian language to perpetuate the Myth of Democracy — will make it easier for Israel-idealogues in the US to maintain the pretense that Israel is a democracy.

The irony in Israel's case is that a profound change in Judaism itself may be a consequence. If Judaism is identified with the Jewish State (as it is, above all by conservatives), then as Israel becomes more right-wing, less democratic and more discriminatory, Judaism will, sadly and possibly tragically, be also so identified. Liberal Jews will seek religious solace elsewhere, some abandoning Judaism, others seeking to create a true, liberal Jewish faith. Judaism will evolve in a way exactly counter to, and as a consequence of, what conservatives intend.

What will happen in the US is anybody's guess. Legal institution of oligarchy? Perhaps that is already happening with the formal protections granted Wall Street and corporate profiteering.

What "On" the Media Really Means

New York's WNYC runs a news analysis program, On the Media, at the obscure hour of 7 in the morning . . . on Saturday — bound to get a lot of listeners then.

This morning, August 7th, On the Media had Shane Harris of The Washingtonian to prate about Wikileaks, whistleblowing and Obama's Bushian hostility to openness, transparency, democracy, rights, etc. — all the things that he endorsed during his 2008 campaign.

Below, my criticism, directly delivered to On the Media.

Pretty sad excuse for analysis on Obama and leaks, On the Media.

You utterly fail to raise key points:

1. Wikileaks says, with evidence, that it DID approach the Obama administration and Obama dismissed them.

2. No mention that there has been a steady attack on FOIA for 20 years and that Obama has joined Bush in attacking FOIA.

3. You failed to mention that by both liberal and libertarian thinking (i.e., excepting only so-called moderates and conservatives), the prevailing view is that information held by OUR government is OUR information. Pure right.

4. You clearly, but tacitly, buy into the mainstream media is right dogma. There would have been no _market_ for Wikileaks if not for the glaring, repeated, and gross failures of the New York Times, NPR, CNN and others. The Times, for example, has repeatedly buried stories until it was too late for them to have any relevant and _preventive_ effect. NPR is _worse_ -- by a long margin. And CNN -- under the 'exalted' Walter Isaacson _allowed_ the Pentagon to place what in effect were propagandists in its newsroom.

Outrageous that On the Media had not the courage or even the decency to dig any further than the shallow pandering Shane Harris.

Pathetic.

Features of Democracy's Fall

In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria writes:

Meanwhile, the central problem persists: Israel rules more than 3 million Palestinians who will never become citizens of Israel and yet do not have their own state. As they multiply, Israel’s status as a democracy becomes more and more complex; the country looks more and more like an island of rich Israelis set in a sea of Palestinian serfs.

Zakaria almost nails it . . . . Israel’s status as a democracy doesn’t “become more and more complex.” It becomes more and more a pure fiction.

People should check what Ariel Atias (Minister of Housing and Construction and behind the “fuck you” to Biden and Obama) has said. He advocates radical apartheid, not just separating Palestinians but also orthodox from non-orthodox Jews. Israel has descended into a state where — even if every Palestinian were expelled from the area west of the Jordan River (in the biggest case of ethnic cleansing since the Second World War) — Israeli Jews would soon be at war with one another.

Whatever moral sense lived in Israel has been crushed by successive waves of right-wing, religious fanaticism. Israel now depends on the Palestinians to play the role of collective enemy of the Jews (much, I am sad to say, as Jews played a comparable, though by no means identical, role in Nazi Germany). The United States, too, is headed this way with the right-wing and moderates depending on a vilified, demonized Islam — a monolithic, terrorist enemy — to galvanize public support for, or at least apathy toward, every growing state power.

Fanatics, having won whatever battle gave their petty existences meaning, must turn on each other, like a pack of half-starved wild dogs.

America's Constitutional Oligarchy

Outstanding scholar of the credit crisis, Elizabeth Warren, is on NOW on PBS this evening, Friday, 13 November 2009.



Here are some comments I made on the program:

The importance of public airing of the dissenting views of Elizabeth Warren and others like her cannot be overstated.

Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, Summers and the majority of the Harvard-Chicago School of Economics have stopped just short of damn lying. They have done the same thing with the economy of the United States that Bush & Co did with the war in Iraq: "IF you knew what we do, you would agree with us, but we can't tell you." Obama's openness and transparency is that of Orwell's 1984.

Representative Marcy Kaptur and a handful of elected officials, a number of prominent economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, and others across the US have said what is increasingly obvious. The US is no longer a democracy, it is an oligarchy. A constitutional oligarchy. We are locked into the "two-party" system that many clearly think is constitutionally mandated. The effect of this is to render our votes irrelevant. Democratic or Republican, the government will serve the oligarchs at our expense. The housing crisis, the financial crisis, health care, endless war abroad -- on all counts, first consideration (often the only consideration) is given to the demands of the oligarchs.

In an interview with Bill Maher, both Paul Krugman and Eliot Spitzer agreed that the "American dream is dying pretty fast." Krugman noted that, if the US were a third world country or one like Russia, the IMF and others -- especially the US -- would be saying "You have to stop the oligarchs."

The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

"Trying to find the most corrupt member of Congress is like trying to find the wettest fish in the ocean."

— me

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has published a report on the 15 most corrupt members in Congress. Of those 15

• 12 are under investigation
• several are under pressure to resign
• at least one is an adulterer
• one is a tax evader

• Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
• Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL)
• Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)
• Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA)
• Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)
• Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
• Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
• Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
• Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV)
• Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA)
• Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY)
• Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)
• Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-IN)
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
• Rep. Don Young (R-AK)

Barack Obama Pontificates on 'Values' (Whatever They Are)

According to the BBC, 'President' Obama has said that "the US cannot impose its values on other countries."

But he insisted that "democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion" were "universal values".

"These are values that are important, even when it's hard," he said.

Sounds like a Second Grade reader. "Even when it's hard." How hard would it be to investigate Bush-era war crimes? How hard would it be to refrain from committing more of the same crimes?

Democracy. The majority of Americans, when asked outside the push-poling of the Republicans, Democrats, New York Times, CNN and NPR, overwhelming support single-payer health care. The 'president' has categorically ruled out single-payer. The majority of Americans oppose the Obama-Geithner-Bernanke kickbacks to Wall Street. Most Americans are tired of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan. Most Americans think torturers should be prosecuted.

So much for Obama's Democracy.

Rule of Law. Torture, bombing civilians, bankrupting the United States while passing the bill on to common people of modest means.

'President' Obama has made clear his values: Serve the rich, hobble everyone else. Apologize to foreigners even as you bomb them. Cultivate the Obama Cult of Personality.

Submitted for Your Consideration: A Hypothetical Question About a Conflict of Interest Faced by Our Government — Serve the People or Serve the Elite

We are on the threshold of a drastic change in the structure of American democracy — a tipping point in economics and politics. If we reject the demands of the corporate elite, they fail, we suffer for a time, then recover and democracy may survive. If, as now appears to be happening, the corporate elite are rewarded for their attacks upon the well-being of the People, then the current decline, the "L" as some are terming it, will likely be permanent. We will see a future where much higher unemployment is permanent (masked as it has been by a careful management of the figures), the majority of those employed will see a lower but still acceptable standard of living (contentment), and real control will far more clearly reside in the hands of the American oligarchs.

GM and Chrysler are back with their hands out for more of Our money. As I write this, before markets open on Monday, 23 February, futures are up on the hope that the Obama administration will give more of Our money to Citigroup and Bank of America. Cerberus Capital Management, 80% owner of Chrysler has said that it has no intention of pumping any of its $24 billion into its car maker. No point sending good money after bad, they guess. But We the People, having little or no say in our 'democratically elected' government will stand and watch as Obama, Geithner, Bernanke and company piss more away down the drain of corporate incompetence and corruption.

All of this is, after just six months or so, old hat to the average American. But here's a question: How many among Us believe that the Obama Administration is actually acting on our behalf? How many believe that Obama & Co. actually desire our well-being, that our lot be improved after all the bailouts and stimuli are done?

Here's a hypothetical question. Let us suppose that leading government figures believed that they had a choice between two incompatible outcomes:

(1) A stimulus and bailout package that would aid the average American at the expense of the banks and corporations, and

(2) An alternative package that would aid the banks and corporations at our expense.

Let us suppose further that the a failure of American economic power would lead to a failure of American dominance around the world, a dominance already shaken by years (more than just the Bush years) of unjustified, violent actions abroad, one-sided approaches to international conflicts, and indifference to global concerns (like environmental ones) in the service of short-term American profit.

Might the government then choose to mortgage the next three or four generations of Americans' livelihoods in order to preserve the global position of the executives and companies from whose ranks have come very nearly all of Obama's cabinet officers and advisers?

A conspiracy theory, you say? No. Just the logic of interest satisfaction. The trickle-down theory expressly endorsed by Reaganites, Greenspaners, Chicago and Harvard scholars is really just a narrow restatement of the top-down economic logic that has dominated the United States for decades. For the overwhelming majority of us to live well, the highest echelons of decision makers in corporate America must live well first. That is, if We the People are living well, then it must be the case that corporate America is doing well and its decision makers are living likewise.

The opposite need not hold. Corporate executives and even their corporations can do very well without We the People doing well at all. Indeed, as events of the past year have proven, corporate executives can do very well while even their own corporations do poorly. The logic of interest satisfaction is a one-way street.

The hullabaloo about 'globalization' was certainly not about the benefits to All of Us. It was rather about the wonders of IBM or Microsoft or Pfizer or whomever doing very well by outsourcing labor to other countries. Taken to its extreme, it would be entirely possible for a corporation owned and headquartered in the US to outsource most or even all of its 'work' overseas. The corporation would do perfectly well without employing any Americans beyond the executives and their support staff.

It is no wonder that the very same advocates of 'globalization' of capital have for the most part opposed globalization of or free trade in labor. While Citigroup may outsource its customer support to India, We the People are largely barred from going here or there to find work. Why? If We the People started leaving en masse (as Europeans did from 150 to 80 years ago so so) the US might suffer a real drain, and we are still (for the time being) needed as a sink — as the consumption engin, buying up goods manufactured by so much outsourced labor. (And, by the way, labor has been outsourced since long before the removal of programming or customer service to India or Russia or where ever. Sweat shops in China or elsewhere are the outsourcing of blue collar labor, an outsourcing ignored because it was far removed from the eyes of American journalists and powerbrokers.)

We the People are dependent on the corporate structure for our commonweal. But there is no parallel dependency of the corporate hierarchy on us. So, in the near term, we can be dispensed with. If We the People see fifteen or twenty percent unemployment, so what? (And real unemployment, as measured before all Reagan and post-Reagan fudging kicked in, is already up around 18%.) The Dow is performing just fine, American Idol is still up in the ratings, and the remaining 80% of the population is buying enough to sustain executive bonuses.

Bread and circuses. Keep a threshold percentage of the population contented, or diverted, and the rest can go to hell. Moreover, if the carrot of contentment is insufficient, the suffering of that 20% will make up the difference as a stick.

We are on the threshold of a drastic change in the structure of American democracy — a tipping point in economics and politics. If we reject the demands of the corporate elite, they fail, we suffer for a time, then recover and democracy may survive. If, as now appears to be happening, the corporate elite are rewarded for their attacks upon the well-being of the People, then the current decline, the "L" as some are terming it, will likely be permanent. We will see a future where much higher unemployment is permanent (masked as it has been by a careful management of the figures), the majority of those employed will see a lower but still acceptable standard of living, and real control will far more clearly reside in the hands of the American oligarchs.

Where Are Their Kind Now?

Thomas Paine
Author of Common Sense, advocate of American independence and of the American commoner, reviled after the Revolution for his continuing advocacy of the rights of all.

Wat Tyler
Lead the English Peasant's Revolt of 1381, advocating egalitarian principles.

Queen Boudica
Lead the English tribes in an uprising against occupying Roman forces in AD 60 or 61.

Spartacus
Lead the slave uprising against Roman rule in 73 BC.

Nat Turner
Lead the slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831.

John Brown
Abolitionist who attempted in 1859 to inspire a liberation movement among slaves in Harpers Ferry, VA

Pyotr Kropotkin
Born to Russian nobility, became increasingly disillusioned with royalty and embraced anarchism.

Daniel Shays
Moved by the poverty of people in western Massachusetts, lead farmers in a revolt against the government of Massachusetts in 1786

Ned Ludd
According to legend, enraged by the loss of employment with the introduction of machinery, namely the stocking frame for knitting, he smashed two frames in 1779 and became a hero to workers.

Guy Fawkes
Sought to end Protestant oppression of Catholics in Britain in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament.

Che Guevara
Joined Fidel Castro in the 1956 revolutionary invasion of Cuba to overthrow US-sponsored dictator Batista.

Marcus Garvey
Advocated a unified African effort to the removal of European powers from Africa

Ho Chi Minh
Citing the US Declaration of Independence, petitioned Woodrow Wilson to aid in the nationalist aspirations of the Vietnamese people. Wilson ignored him.