Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (22 page)

In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.

It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America.
We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.

Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war.
*
It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

* The "war" FDR speaks of here was not World War II but his war against the disastrous conservative economic policies that had plunged the nation into the Great Depression.

Americans stand at a critical moment in history. Do we follow the Founders and say that we want a government of, by, and for We the People, or do we follow the cons and choose a government of, by, and for inherited wealth and the elite of a corporatocracy?

We don't need to speculate about the outcome of either choice for the middle class. History, past and present, offers a clear answer.

Compare the stories of two presidents. Both went to war against what they called an "evil empire." Both won the military battle—at least enough to declare victory. Both were then faced with an enemy whose country was completely ruined. Both promised to help the people in that country pick up the pieces and rebuild their societies.

President A chose to give money directly to the foreign country's government on the theory that when you give money to We the People, they will make good decisions about how to spend it. President B chose to give money to big business on the theory that when you give money to the corporatocracy, it will make the best decisions about how to use it efficiently. Which president made the right choice?

President A was Harry S. Truman, who created the Marshall Plan for Europe and helped rebuild Japan after World War II. President B is George W. Bush, who is busily privatizing Iraq.

When George W. Bush started bombing Iraq, he told the world that his undeclared war, Operation Iraqi Freedom (originally named Operation Iraqi Liberation until a reporter noticed the unfortunate acronym), was going to be waged as much for the Iraqi people as against Saddam Hussein.

In announcing a rather premature victory on the battleship USS
Lincoln
in April 2003, Bush said:

We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

What Bush proposed was his own version of a Marshall Plan, named after Truman's secretary of state, George Marshall. The original Marshall Plan gave money to the governments of all the European countries affected by World War II so that they could import necessary materials and rebuild their country's industries. (The Soviet Union forbade the countries under its control from taking any of the $6 billion in funds allocated, so the rebuilding in Europe was limited to the western countries.)

One of Truman's aims in creating the Marshall Plan was to prove how important government is in creating a middle class. He had had trouble passing reforms that would help the middle class in the United States. In 1947, for example, congressional Republicans shot down Truman's proposal for a national single-payer health-care plan that would cover every American, and they
weakened union protections by passing—over Truman's unsuccessful veto—the Taft-Hartley Act. In part to show Americans that national health care and a strongly unionized workforce would help build a strong middle class, Truman encouraged Germany and Japan to incorporate these concepts into their new constitutions. Both did, and the results were impressive.

With the Iraq war, however, the cons saw an opportunity to prove Truman—and his embrace of government—wrong. They'd take a country with a protected economy, a strong public sector, high taxes on business, and national health care and turn it into a con's paradise.

In 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, then the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. de facto government of Iraq, issued Order 37, which dropped Iraq's corporate income tax from more than 40 percent to a 15 percent flat tax. His Order 39 allowed multinational corporations to enter Iraq, buy up formerly Iraqi companies, fire all their Iraqi employees if they chose, and even take 100 percent of their profits out of the country. He fired a half million public employees, including teachers, doctors, and nurses, to pave the way for complete privatization of the education and health-care sectors. He approved a law banning unions and outlawing collective bargaining in most business sectors. As Naomi Klein noted in an article for
Harper's,
Bremer said: "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands is essential for Iraq's economic recovery."
¹

The foundational con theory is that selfishness is the fundamental human urge, that the greed arising from it will motivate people to go into business, and that those businesses will then—to maximize their profits—meet all the needs of the people. With all human needs thus met, there is no need for government, other than perhaps to operate an army and a police department.

So instead of giving Iraqis money or loans so that they could rebuild their own country, Bush instead gave the money to Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and a few other large, politically
connected multinational corporations. He rewrote the Iraqi constitution (in violation of international law) to turn Iraq into the world's largest free-trade zone. He nearly perfectly followed the script of the World Bank and other conservative corporatist institutions, administering "shock therapy" to the Iraqi economy. Iraq was, the cons believed, the perfect opportunity to prove the cons' belief that the corporatocracy will provide for the common good and outshine Harry Truman's "liberal Democratic" successes in Germany, Japan, and the rest of western Europe.

So, how well has privatization gone in Iraq? Almost three years after Bush's undeclared war began, an article by the
Observer
tells the story:

More than a quarter of total US funds have been swallowed up by security, and in many parts of the country, even the most basic facilities are still missing. "Government is not functioning in so many sectors," says Oliver Burch of Christian Aid, which has several partner organisations working across Iraq.

"The health budget for last year was $1 billion, but out in the provinces, doctors in hospitals and clinics are appealing to everyone they can find, because they can't get the place painted; they can't get the toilet fixed; they can't get basic drugs." He said his partner-organisations feared corruption was partly to blame. "We think it's horrendously large in scale."

The story continues.

Another problem is the gradual withdrawal of food aid. More than half of the families in Iraq still receive a monthly food parcel of basic supplies. Oliver Burch says this legacy of the oil-for-food programme in the long years of sanctions is expensive, and distorts the market. "Farmers aren't growing wheat, because there's no market for it," he says.
²

In fact, Iraq's infrastructure appears to be in a worse condition than it was before the war. For example, the electricity supply is still around 4,000 megawatts, about the prewar level. On average
there is twelve hours of supply a day. Meanwhile oil production is 1.1 million barrels a day, below prewar levels.

The
Guardian
tells us that the actual cost to the American people of the war in Iraq is going to top $2
trillion.
³
And yet the Iraqi people still experience severe shortages of food, electricity, and health care.

And it's not just the Iraqi people who've gotten screwed. The American taxpayers have footed most of the bill for this failed con demonstration project.

For example, from January 2004 to December 2005, Bechtel earned $1.8 billion in Iraq for assessing and repairing selected power, municipal water, and sewage systems; dredging, repairing, and upgrading the Port of Umm Qasr; rehabilitating selected schools, clinics, and fire stations; reconstructing three key bridges; constructing a key rail line; restoring telephone service to more than two hundred thousand Baghdad subscribers; and restoring Iraq's main 2,000-kilometer, north-south fiber-optic communications backbone. And yet Iraqis still have unreliable phone service and insufficient clinics.

Fluor Corporation, along with partner AMEC, won a $1.1 billion contract to repair Iraqi water systems in 2003 and has since won further contracts to repair electrical systems. Yet the electrical systems in Iraq are still worse than they were under Saddam.

But the big winner was Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which has earned $13.6 billion in revenue for providing security to American troops and Iraqi oil installations; its stock price has tripled since the war began, from $20 to $63 per share.

Bush's war in Iraq was a huge success for corporate America. It redistributed wealth from American taxpayers to multinational corporations at an astonishing pace while leaving the Iraqi people literally in the dark.

But as a demonstration project proving that Truman's Marshall Plan was either wrong or a fluke, Iraq has failed the cons.
True believers to the end, though, they now say they're going do the same to America. They assure us that once public assistance for health care is privatized (by doing away with Medicare and Medicaid), Social Security is privatized, the unions are finally put out of business, public schools are privatized, and religion is funded by the government to take care of any remaining social needs (Bush gave churches more than $1.4 billion by executive order without an act of Congress during election year 2004), everything, they say, will become a paradise.

Sure, and that's why things are going so well in New Orleans, where the cons have given almost all of the $18 billion allocated so far in reconstruction money to the same big corporations that benefited in Iraq: Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor. After one year all that was fixed in New Orleans was the tourist business—which means big dollars for the hotel conglomerates. Most New Orleaneans were still homeless, and most small businesses were still down. As in Iraq the dollars that poured into New Orleans are part of the biggest redistribution of wealth in our country's history, a redistribution from taxpayers to the corporate elite.

Every time such a social and economic structure has been tried in the past, it's led to the hellish world Charles Dickens characterized so well in his many books. And as we head into the third decade of the cons' economic and trade policies being imposed on America, it's becoming increasingly clear that all their talk about domestic privatization plans amounts to little more than an undeclared war on the middle class.

We don't have to sit back and allow the cons to take over. We have a model that works. It's the model Harry Truman used in Europe and Franklin Roosevelt used here to create the Golden Age of the middle class. It's based on the principles the Founders used to create democracy in this country.

Government must be of, by and for We the People. That means government institutions like the military, the prisons, and the electoral process must be publicly controlled, not in the hands of corporations or wealthy individuals. In a democracy We the People must be informed enough to make decisions about our society, which means that education in particular must be both free and public.

Democracy requires that government work for We the People. Its primary function is to define the rules of the game of business in a way that protects working people and allows a middle class to emerge. This includes regulating large predatory companies so that entrepreneurs can survive, providing a strong social safety net and national health care to make us competitive with other nations offering their citizens the same (and because it's necessary for a middle class), and protecting domestic industries (and jobs) by instituting tariffs—import taxes—on goods coming in from cheap-labor countries.