Quotations

from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

p1
Thomas Jefferson, 1786
" ... a little rebellion now and then is a good thing....It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government....God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion....The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

p2
From the early nineteenth century to the present, school textbooks have functioned as catechisms to teach a civic religion whose central article of faith is that America's government is the most perfectly functioning democracy humans have thus far devised.

p3
In colonial America the top 20 percent of wealthholders owned 68 percent of total assets, and inequality in wealth distribution was about the same in New England as inthe slave-holding South. In 1771,thetop 10percentofBoston's population held 63 percent of the wealth-and the lowest three-tenths held less than one-tenth of one percent of taxable assets. On the frontier, in contrast to the cities, a considerable equality prevailed, but this was because almost no wealthy people were living there.

p4
... the political strategies employed by elites [are] instinctive responses to threats to their political power and economic privilege rather than as conspiracies... Elites share common interests, and they likewise share perceptions about how to respond when these interests are threatened.

p5
Families in the top 10 percent income bracket own 72 percent of all stock holdings and 65 percent of all bonds; the top 2 percent of families own 50 percent of stocks and 39 percent of bonds.

p9
The Constitution was a brilliant solution to a practical problem. It legitimated aristocratic control by articulating a language of democratic participation.

p9
The idea of democracy is irresistible. It would be odd indeed-even perhaps impossible-for American politics to proceed without the manipulation of the symbols of democracy by all who take part in it. These symbols are essential to elites as a means for preserving their political hegemony.

p10
In the United States elections do not mainly serve the purpose of allowing voters to choose their political leaders. Rather, they are invested with the crucial legitimating symbols of democratic rule. They provide ritualized opportunities for people to participate, as individuals and as members of a collective citizenry, in the political process. When people vote, they reaffirm their belief that the politiqal system listens to their voice.

p12
The South's defeat in the Civil War had given blacks the vote, but by the early years of the twentieth century voter registration laws, literacy requirements, and poll taxes had effectively taken it away. Working-class and poor whites were discouraged from voting by these same reforms. In the North, voter registration and other reforms adopted during the Progressive Era reduced voting participation by foreign immigrants and by people on the lower end of the social scale. The consequences of these reforms are still felt; compared to other democratic nations, voter turnout in the United States is abnormally low.

p12
Elections have been privatized. Candidates employ a campaign industry of consultants, pollsters, and media specialists.

p12
... election campaigns have been made a straightforward extension of corporate America, a growth sector of the capitalist economy.

p13
... elections have been reduced to media-managed passion plays for the voters by professional campaign specialists and financial contributors.

p13
Presidential power has expanded partly because the presidency has become the center (or object) of a continuous, sophisticated image-making industry. Presidents do not now campaign only for election and reelection. Pollsters and image makers work full time between elections to sell presidential policies to the public. No other institution has such a capacity for organizing such a well-organized, sustained public relations campaign. When selling policy does not work, presidents are able to insulate themselves from public accountability through covert, ad hoc agencies and groups that define and implement policies without the consent or knowledge of Congress, the courts, or the public. Since the Second World War, there has been a tendency for all presidents to expand their power in this way by exaggerating threats to national security.

Congress also has become remarkably insulated from electoral decisions, an outcome of the fact that elections have become less and less competitive. More than half of the representatives in the House elected in 1870 were serving their first term. By 1900, only about one-third were newly elected, and this proportion fell to about 15 percent by the 1970s. In the 1986 congressional elections, 98 percent of incumbents who ran were reelected, and 99 percent were returned in 1988.

p14
Except as a device for legitimating their control, elites in the United States have little attachment to democracy.

p14
... on many occasions America's elites have demonstrated a distrust and disdain for democracy to the point where they have been willing to destroy it when it seemed inimical to their interests-that is, when it threatened their political hegemony and control over wealth-producing institutions.

p14
[America's elites] tolerate democratic processes only if these processes pose no significant danger to their autonomy and political hegemony.

p15
Neither liberal/conservative nor the Democratic/Republican spectrum of alternatives is sufficiently broad today to merit much confidence that competition among leaders for votes provides either meaningful political debate or a mechanism for mass influence over government. The decay of political parties and their replacement by a private-sector campaign industry has transformed elections into exercises in electronic advertising and information management. And, in any case, most of the government institutions that make both domestic and foreign policy now operate outside and beyond the reach of electoral politics.

p15
The American political system amounts to a democratic facade... The American system does respond to well-funded and highly organized mass-membership interest groups. When energetic social movements emerge, whether or not they are encouraged by some elite sectors, they can wrest important concessions. In some circumstances, elections have taken on considerable significance. But recent national elections have become little more than symbolic exercises. They function mainly as mechanisms for conferring legitimacy on the elites that "win."

p15
... American history is the story of political struggles. The symbols of democracy manipulated by elites inspire ordinary people to work for political change. The most significant reforms in our time would open up the political system so that democracy would not only legitimate government, but also keep it accountable.

p21
Generation after generation, American schools have helped to mold a compliant an quiescent citizenry.

p27
from a 1950s school textbook
The FBI urges Americans to report directly to its offices any suspicions they may have about communist activity on the part of their fellow Americans....When Americans handle their suspicions in this way...they are acting in line with American traditions.

p28
... the [1950s] textbooks were designed to convey well-defined values and interpretations, not to encourage critical or independent thinking. Viewed from this perspective, the purpose of textbooks had changed remarkably little in over one hundred years.

p32
Americans who are educated about global problems are probably less likely to accept uncritically their nation's role in world affairs.

p34
... if the cultural bond is constructed from shared myths about a past that never existed; if ethnic, racial, cultural, and political differences and conflicts are papered over with a veneer of consensus and harmony, then an intolerance for differences is promoted or, just as likely, a fatalistic cynicism emerges when students discover that what they are being taught in schools bears no relation to their actual lives.

p34
It is hardly surprising that students often find history, geography, and social studies to be dull and alienating. The safest way for teachers and textbook writers to escape censure from the right is to promote conventional patriotism and to leave critical analysis out of the classroom. This approach is producing citizens whose emotional buttons can be pushed by flag-waving politicians reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or blaring Neil Diamond's hymn, "Coming to America," but it is not likely to produce citizens capable of understanding the world.

p39
... Media in the United States convey a remarkably uniform view of the world, and it has been a politically specific one: anticommunist, pro-corporate, and nationalist.

p39
... the most important mechanism of censorship is corporate ownership and management rather than government oversight.

p39
When political discourse over fundamental political issues occurs in the United States, it proceeds in spite of, rather than because of, a technologically sophisticated, privately owned mass media that reaches into every home.

p44
The problems the press does have would be much easier to handle if there were more attention paid to the craft of journalism." Indeed, the "craft of journalism" underwent profound changes in the 1980s that have had the effect of making the media an active partner in the neoconservative revolution. The pressures that brought this about were not only applied by political groups. In the end, news lost all possibility of a critical or investigative role (what its critics called "left leaning") because of corporate pressures.

p51
... the media has substantially agreed since 1983 to censor itself when covering military actions.

p55
"[Propaganda] does not always involve distortion of the facts...it can consist of disseminating the truth to help one's cause. For this reason, at various times distinguished journalists such as Edward R. Murrow and John Chancellor have agreed to do stints in key USIA [U.S. Information Agency] jobs."

p56
A report by the International Communications Agency in 1979 noted that most foreign news reaches the United States through AP and UPI and that the U.S. television system is the second most closed to foreign programming in the world.

p78
In his analysis of the outcome of the 1984 election, Wilson Carey MacWilliams argues that media dominance marks the death of the pluralist style of campaigning. Modern presidential elections entail the manipulation of public opinion, and the "gatekeepers" for these elections are professionals in the media industry.

p79
Considering the huge resources devoted to managing information, it is remarkable that the American public is ever able to arrive at opinions that contradict the government's agenda.

p79
Elections are necessary but not sufficient to produce democracy. The reality in America is that the spectrum of choices available to voters is narrow. The information presented to voters is circumscribed by the homogeneous, superficial, and unimaginative coverage of elections in the news media. The propaganda apparatus of the advertising industry is used to manipulate and manage, not to enlighten. American electoral politics not only fails to provide for the accountability of government to the people, it has become a principal tool for elites to manage politics an~J political choices.

p84
Despite his landslide victory in 1984, for example, President Ronald Reagan received less than 30 percent of the votes of the potential electorate. The largest party in American politics is neither Democratic nor Republican; it is the party of nonvoters.

p87
Like all ritual...elections draw attention to common social ties and to the importance and apparent reasonableness of accepting the public policies that are adopted.

p88
Throughout U.S. history, elites have expended considerable resources trying to walk a fine line: They persuade citlzens that elections are meaningful political events, but they also try to make sure that the political choices made in the electoral arena are acceptable to elites.

p97
Contemporary voter registration obstacles thus function as de facto equivants of the poll tax, literacy test, and other class-and race- oriented restrictions on the suffrage of an earlier era.

p97
Most Western democracies operate on the principle that it is the government s responsibility to solicit or even enforce voter participation. Italy's registration system is administered locally, but all citizens older than eighteen are automatically enrolled registrars when moving. Austria requires registration as a matter of law; Belgium and Australia go further and mandate voting. Sweden registers voters through its national tax collection bureaucracy, and in Britain local officials are required to register voters once each year. In Canada, registrars are required to prove that a citizen is ineligible to vote, unlike the United States, where the voter must prove eligibility to a registrar if challenged.

p112
... the two-party system is a crucial means for ensuring that elections will be run within a narrowly defined public discourse. It isn't so much that the voters get what they deserve; elites go to considerable lengths to guarantee that they can get nothing else.

p120
The shift to the right in American politics ... was not preceded by shifts in public opinion on most of the items composing the conservative agenda. Conservatism has become the leading "brand name" ideology largely because liberalism has left the field of battle.

p121
Dukakis was only the latest in a line of Democratic candidates so eager to find the "center" of political opinion that they dared not stake out solid ground of their own.

p121

It is clear that in 1988 a majority of Americans favored "liberal" programs for more aggressive environmental policies, education programs, child care, gun control, access to abortion, deep cuts in nuclear weapons, and a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Yet the Bush campaign was able to use the Pledge of Allegiance, attacks on the ACLU, and Willie Horton's crimes to label Dukakis as a liberal. The images conveyed in these attacks on Dukakis were constructed of sacred cultural symbols of family, religion, and patriotism along with profane symbols of crime and radicalism.

p122
A political process designed to obscure issues cannot produce or even tolerate an informed public.

p129
[In 1980] columnist Elizabeth Drew warned

Until the problem of money is dealt with, it is unrealistic to expect the political process to improve in any other respect....The argument made by some that the amount spent on campaigns is not particularly bothersome because it comes to less than is spent on, say, advertising cola, or purchasing hair-products, misses the point stunningly....What is at stake is the idea of representative government.

p130
...money and politics are intricately linked in American politics; this point applies to honest and dishonest politicians alike. The corruption of politics that results is rooted more in the structure of campaign finance than in personal greed.

p136
The Republican party is unabashedly pro-business, whereas the Democrats embrace both corporate and labor interests. Unlike business, labor has no party of its own.

p140
Labor unions are often singled out for criticism, but they exert far less financial leverage than do corporate and wealthy contributors. In 1988, labor contributions accounted for 23 percent of all PAC contributions but only 10 percent of all the money received by House candidates. Labor's potential influence is substantially diluted because most Democratic candidates also receive corporate PAC money. GOP candidates rely almost exclusively on corporate, trade, and conservative PACs, and they attract much more money from individual contributions. Democrats, more dependent on PACs in the first place, rarely depend on labor PACs alone, and frequently their corporate contributions outweigh all other sources, including labor. This has the effect of moving Democrats to the right ...

p144
The net result of the American campaign system is that a disproportionate number of politicians either have great personal wealth or become dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. As a result, even before the first official primary of the long presidential campaign season, there is already underway a "hidden election," or "invisible primary" in which money and the support of elites, rather than votes or popular support, determine who may compete.

p147
According to the Joint Center for Political Studies, only 6.8 percent of the electorate made direct contributions to political candidates in the 1970s.

p147
In 1984, only 19 percent of House contributions came from people who contributed less than $150 a year to campaigns. Ten years earlier, these donors accounted for half of all House campaign financing.

p153
... elections in the United States have become increasingly marginal to the governmental apparatus. They have become a part of America's television culture, peopled with media stars and contrived soap opera drama.

p155
The president of the Screen Actors Guild, a Democrat named Ronald Reagan, cooperated [with the House Un-American Activities Committee] by providing the committee with the names of "security risks" in Hollywood. In Hollywood, as in other professions, to speak out against the witch hunts was a ticket to unemployment.

p156
In the late 1940s, the American Medical Association launched a campaign against public health insurance on the ground that it was "socialized medicine." Public housing barely passed Congress in 1949, even though it enjoyed widespread popular support, because the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards got a lot of mileage out of calling it "socialized housing." In such an atmosphere meaningful dialogue about domestic policies was difficult to sustain. On foreign policy, it was lost altogether and it has never been recovered. Democratic liberals embraced belligerent Cold War anticommunist rhetoric as enthusiastically as did Republican conservatives.

p156
All social welfare programs were inevitably labeled as "creeping socialism" or as part of an international communist conspiracy to weaken the rugged individualism ascribed to Americans. Liberals who favored such programs were therefore always on the defensive, trying to avoid these labels themselves. And thus the crisis of modern liberalism emerged in full bloom. Any attempt to accomplish a domestic agenda of workable social welfare programs came up against the fact that the liberals had helped to destroy their best allies on the left who would have helped mobilize electoral support from blacks, working-class and poor people, small farmers, and union members. Liberals no longer occupied the center between conservatives on the right and socialists or welfare state advocates on the left. Now they were the left, such as it existed in the context of the American two-party system.

p159
A common myth in the United States is that the blame for falling U.S. ' competitiveness in the world economy lies with overpaid workers. But productivity rose much faster than salaries during the postwar boom. Between 1948 and 1966, the average production worker's hourly output increased by $2.68 per hour, but the average hourly wage increased by only 86 cents per hour, leaving a difference of $1.82. The government took 61 cents in taxes; only 35 cents of the remaining $1.21 generated by workers was reinvested in new or better plant and equipment. The remaining 86 cents went for higher dividends paid to investors, higher profits and executive salaries, and more management employees.

To have insisted on a wiser use of the nation's wealth would have required a labor movement and leadership interested in the overall political position of labor. In an era of prosperity and anticommunism in the mass culture, and following the purge of the Left in the early 1950s, there was little chance of such a development. Labor had long given up its voice in corporate decision making and had purged the labor leaders who might have pushed hard for an influential voice in investment and production decisions.

p159
The effect of removing militant and radical labor leaders was that many of the union leaders who remained were interested less in the political and economic influence of workers than in enriching themselves by pursuing full-time careers as union bureaucrats.

p179
Political corruption is curbed from time to time mainly by the fact that when it is discovered, public officials, threatened by a crisis of legitimacy, repent and enact modest reforms.

p179
... the national government's policy-making process is more insulated from popular influence than even the Founders might have thought possible.

p196
As more domestic, as well as foreign policy problems become linked to national security justifications, both presidential power and the abuse of that power will continue to blossom.

p200
To America's economic elites, foreign policy is considered a straightforward expression of their right to control decisions about investment, growth, and profits. For more than a century, American foreign policy has been synonymous with the building of an empire. Business elites have not tolerated interference with this process. For this reason, foreign policy making has been gradually removed from domestic democratic processes. Since the Second World War, foreign policy making has involved a relatively small group that routinely operates behind a screen of secrecy and deception.

p200
Since the anticommunism hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan consensus has existed on foreign policy, with at least three consequences. First, meaningful political discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues. At election time, debates about foreign policy amount to contests to see which of the candidates is "toughest" on communism or "communist"-sponsored insurgencies in various countries. Second, as a result voters have never been presented with alternatives outside the Cold War consensus. And third, so many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public scrutiny-only surfacing periodically in public "scandals"-that almost all of what passes as official information about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for its propaganda effect.

p201
As early as 1939, political and economic elites, in collaboration with the executive branch of government, began planning the permanent expansion of the military in order to make possible systematic U.S. intervention in the Third World.

p201
In October 1940 one CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] study group bluntly declared its purpose "to set forth the political, military, territorial and economic requirements of the United States in its potential leadership of the non-German world area including the United Kingdom itself as well as the Western Hemisphere and Far East." The same memorandum indicated that from the start the policy planners considered a permanent military establishment not as an instrument to deter aggression, but as an instrument of empire building. It declared that the "foremost requirement of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power is the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament." In 1939, elites thought that German hegemony over Europe might be tolerable, but Japanese competition in the Far East was not.

p202
The elites planning postwar foreign policy conceived a world in which American interests might be compatible with a continental Europe controlled by the Nazis; after all, many U.S. leaders regarded Hitler as a useful check on the Soviet Union, and some admired him.

p202
... the Economic and Financial Study group of the CFR

If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect.

p202
... the CFR and the State Department continued to refine their plans for the postwar period. The work was carried out in secret because both the Council and the State Department recognized that public knowledge of U.S. plans to dominate the Third World (as it was later to be called) could harm America's relationships with other nations that were helping in the fight against the Axis.

p202
George Kennan - in a top-secret memorandum drafted in 1946

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population....We cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.

p203
Lt. Colonel John Bacevich, a West Point graduate and International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relataions, described the motives of U.S. foreign policy in 1986:

We can see today that the Army's primary task down to the present has continued to be precisely what it was in Korea: the application of force to maintain the global status quo that emerged from World War II. While the United States does not claim a formal empire...the Army since 1945 has played the historical role of an imperial defense force, called on repeatedly to protect far-flung American interests threatened by global brush fires by the winds of political change.

Bacevich said that the Army should plan to act as an interventionist force instead of maintaining the fiction that it existed to provide national security. But this would have to be presented to the public "inoffensively, using terms suited to American political discourse" because "an American Army proclaiming itself to be an imperial police force would have difficulty garnering public or congressional support. That statement holds as true today as it would have for the 1950s."

p204
The institutionalization of militarism under the guise of national security was a logical expression of the aspirations articulated by the Council of Foreign Relations before and during the Second World War. This development was recognized by the historian Charles Beard, who charged in 1948 that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately led the nation to war and knowingly violated the Constitution to do so. Beard warned at that time that Madisonian principles of checks and balances were in Jeopardy and that the executive branch would gain control of foreign policy and war making in the postwar period through the expansion of state secrets.

p205
... many right-wing policy makers in the United States continued to feel sympathy for the Nazis.

p205
[The Smith Act of 1940 and the InternalSecurity Act of 1950] together with the National Security Act of 1947 ... remain as the cornerstone of the government's authority to suppress internal dissent under the guise of national security.

p206
Military planners and political leaders realized that implementing this grand design would require mobilizing the American people into a permanent state of quasi-war. Accordingly, an emotional substitute for an official state of war would have to be devised. In 1944, Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and later Director of Defense Mobilization under President Truman and Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower, warned in an internal memo that

the revulsion against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For | that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy.''

p206
Almost forty years later, Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, argued that

democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of danger. And every time we create the impression that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish that sense of apprehension.

p207
in 1956, when Eisenhower agreed to establish an ad hoc committee of private citizens to study a proposal for the government to spend $40 billion over a number of years to erect shelters to protect the population from nuclear fallout. The committee, composed of businessmen and academic specialists with close ties to military personnel and large defense contractors, was chaired by H. Rowan Gaither, a lawyer who was also chair of both the Ford Foundation and the Air Force's main "think tank," the Rand Corporation in California. Almost all members of the committee were private consultants to the National Security Council.

The committee took upon itself the task of expanding its mission beyond Eisenhower's mandate by investigating other uses for the $40 billion. When finished, the "Gaither Report" used the same arguments originally advanced in NSC 68 to argue for a military buildup and to accuse the Eisenhower administration of "complacency" in the face of the Soviet "threat." It exerted pressure on the administration to maintain not only the capability to initiate a nuclear war, but to undertake covert actions against guerrilla insurgencies and to fight a large-scale conventional war. It advocated a boost in military spending to $48 billion per year, $10 billion more than the amount recommended by the Eisenhower administration. The committee said that

military "needs," irrespective of domestic priorities, should henceforth be identified as the standard for determining the Pentagon's budget.

p208
Today, over 30,000 companies are engaged in military production. During the Second World War, production was carried out in 1,600 federally owned plants; only fifty-eight currently are owned by the government. Each year, more than 15 million contracts (over 52,000 each day) are signed between government and private companies. In fiscal 1985, the United States spent almost $1,100 per person on the military, in contrast to its European allies, which spent an average of $250 per person. In the mid-1980s, about $146 billion in private military business was generated by the Pentagon each year. During the Reagan administration, spending for military research increased 62 percent above the rate of inflation, while funding for civilian research fell by 10 percent.

p209
... the militarization of the economy has created a complex system of dependence on military spending that will not easily be broken. Only nine of the 3,041 counties in the United States received less than $1,000 from the Defense Department in 1984. With so many constituents on the military payroll, few congressional representatives can afford to attack waste and fraud vigorously or to I challenge the Pentagon s priorities without fear of retribution. In 1983, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger accused Congress of tacking nearly $3 billion worth of unnecessary items onto the Pentagon budget. [1990] Roughly 3,275,000 jobs in the United States are in defense industries, up from 314,000 in 1940. There are almost 1.5 million military retirees in addition to the 3,295,000 people on the civilian and active military payrolls. The link between corporations and the military is solidified by the retention of retired officers as employees of private contractors. Employed by 157 major military contractors were 1,350 former high-ranking military officers, plus 316 former high-ranking officials of the Defense Department.

p209
The considerable influence of the military-industrial complex with Congress has been reinforced by the system of campaign financing. Political action committees representing the largest twenty defense contractors increased their contributions 225 percent during the first six years of the Reagan administration.

p210
From 1965 to 1975, the U.S. spent between $159.4 billion (DOD's estimate) and $239.6 billion (U.S. Senate estimate) on the war. The 14,392,302 tons of explosives (more than used against Japan in the Second World War) left more than 25 million craters in a country smaller than the state of California and reduced all North Vietnamese cities south of Hanoi to rubble. More than 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicides (including 11 million gallons of Agent Orange) were used to destroy the croplands and half the forests in the country. Some 58,655 U.S. troops were killed. More than 2,000,000 Vietnamese-one-ninth of the population-were killed.

p210
The [Vietnam] antiwar protests threatened to mushroom into a broader movement for social change that might have knit together civil rights activists, feminists, the youth movement, and liberal elements in the labor unions and the Democratic party. This was too high a price to pay for continuing the war.

p212
Since 1981, an avalanche of literature on so-called "low-intensity conflict" has emanated from military planners and conservative theorists. "Low-intensity conflict"-or "peaceful engagement"-the new phrase favored by the Bush administration-are euphemisms for wars conducted in Third World countries out of sight of the American public which rely on hired mercenaries clandestinely working at the direction of the CIA (this way American soldiers do not die, which upsets the public).

p213
Sam Sarkesian, an academic specialist who chairs the Interuniversity Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, asserts that revolution is inherently undemocratic and that counterrevolution must therefore "develop [its] own morality and ethics that justify any means to achieve success. Survival is the ultimate morality." This means that the United States must sometimes support sides in conflicts in which "all of the ingredients for a 'dirty', ungentlemanly, terror-oriented conflict are there; and it is likely to be protracted and increasingly costly." As a consequence, "American policy may support nondemocratic regimes in the name of democracy."

p213
In 1982, CIA operatives were caught mining Nicaraguan harbors and newspapers published the contents of a CIA manual used to train the contras to carry out sabotage and assassination against civilian targets. Congress reacted by enacting restrictions on CIA involvement in Nicaragua. The administration found a way around the law in the Special Forces, which were coordinated from the National Security Council. The Special Forces employ and train terrorists to carry out acts of violence for political purposes. The victims are not armed opponents but civilians. To prevent these victims from appearing as statistics in State Department human rights reports, civilian victims of the Salvadoran military and Nicaraguan contras were categorized as legitimate military targets in flagrant violation of international human rights treaties to which the United States is a signatory.

p214
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military had nearly collapsed as an effective institution during the Vietnam War. Over 1,000 commissioned and noncommissioned officers were "fragged"-that is, assassinated-by their troops. There were more mutinies and refusals to engage in combat than in any previous American war. According to official Army figures, 28 percent of troops in Vietnam used hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. The quality of the officer corps declined.

p215
To protect political allies in Thailand and elsewhere, the CIA guarded poppy fields and transported heroin on one of its "company" airlines, Air America.

p215
In fiscal year 1986, the four branches of the military spent over $1.8 billion on recruitment, an average of nearly $5,400 for each of 333,600 recruits, $1,400 more than the average for the previous year...There were about 15,000 military recruiters, one for every 185 high school seniors in the country. In 1986, there were 227,448 high school students enrolled in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, compared to a total of 287 twenty years earlier. The Pentagon spent $52.1 million on texts, arms, ~ and uniforms for these students.

p215
On college campuses, students must now prove that they have registered with the Selective Service to receive financial aid. With tuition rising and nonmilitary aid falling, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) becomes an increasingly attractive option.

p216
In 1977, Thomas Carr, Director of Defense Education under President Carter, asserted that military service was becoming an increasingly important means for socializing young people:

By 1984, given the involvement of such a large proportion of our young people with military service, the military will have become a major instrument for youth socialization-assuming a large portion of the role once dominated by the family, church, the school, and the civilian work setting.

p216
[In 1987] Lt. Col. Oliver North and other members of a secret Reagan administration task force had formulated a plan to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the event of either urban riots or widespread domestic opposition to a military intervention. In such a case, national government control was to be transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and military commanders would have been appointed to run state and local governments.

p217
[Oliver] North, who had begun his career in Vietnam, understood that successful prosecution of a land war in Central America would almost surely require suppression of dissent at home. Part of his plan for accomplishing the necessary repression would have involved the establishment of internment camps, similar to those used during the Second World War to incarcerate American citizens of Japanese ancestry.

p218
If In the face of an increasingly complex, well-coordinated, and insulated national security apparatus, the information available for public debate about foreign affairs becomes subject to an overwhelming degree of manipulation. Decisions are carried out in secret and the volume of state secrets has mushroomed with every presidential administration. After decisions are made behind closed doors, strategies are devised about how to manipulate mass opinion in favor of decisions or actions already undertaken. Domestic electoral decisions do not lead to governmental policies. Instead, public opinion campaigns are orchestrated to build support for decisions already reached.

p221
The overriding concern of U.S. elites has been the construction and maintenance of a system of governments that will protect inequality and class privilege at least as effectively as in the United States. When President Reagan said in 1982, "What I want to see above all else is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich and stay rich-that's the thing we have that must be preserved," he was expressing in unusually candid terms a sacred tenant of America's political tradition. The nations within the orbit of the empire have been subjected to devastating doses of violence coordinated by U.S. corporations and government officials when they have failed to demonstrate allegiance to the same principle.

p223
Major General Smedley D. Butler, 1935
I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force-the Marine Corps....I spent most of my time being a high-muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism...

Thus I helped make Mexico...safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in....I helped purify Nicaragua for the International banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903.

p243
Elites "sponsor" elections within the U.S. in a manner similar to the way they "sponsor" them abroad: to legitimate rule by the rich and well born and to preserve a system of class privilege. If elections are used for any other purpose, they are labeled as fraudulent and heavy doses of terrorism are frequently applied to nullify their results. Elites have not employed these tactics within the United States-that is, they have not overturned democratic institutions and processes, as they have so often done elsewhere. They have not found it necessary to do so because elections within their own country have never escaped their control.

p248
It should be understood that the campaign "industry," like other industries, is dominated by corporations, it runs on money, and the participants expect to make a profit. Money and politics always have been intimately entwined in American politics. In the age of electronic mass media, the relationship between money brokers and politicians is tighter, possibly, than at any previous period in our national history.

p248
The first crisis of American democracy, the privatization of electoral politics, has led to the second crisis: the privatization of the national government's policy making processes... The Defense Department and military contractors constitute perhaps the most well-known and thoroughly insulated policy subgovernment.

p249
Perhaps because America's elites find bloodthirsty policies so efficient, they are not willing to put these policies up for debate in the political arena. The public is able to exert influence in this realm mainly through protest activities such as mass demonstrations and civil disobedience.

p250
Voltaire
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

p255
Even if reforms were to open up the electoral system, it is possible that militarism in America has proceeded to the point that elites might be willing to use force, if they deem it necessary, to prevent significant social and political change. It should occasion no surprise that the government has become a significant threat to the people it is supposed to represent. The American national government has lasted for 200 years mainly because the elites who have controlled it have had a significant capacity to protect themselves from effective challenge. The degree to which they are able to use the government to protect their interests has never been greater. While nations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are embarking on historic experiments in democracy, the U.S. political system-ironically-becomes less democratic every day.

p255
Aristotle
"The real ground of the difference between oligarchy and democracy is poverty and riches. It is inevitable that any constitution should be an oligarchy if the rulers under it are rulers by virtue of riches." America has a government run by elites who use the political system to protect wealth and privilege; thus, it is accurate to say that America's oligarchy is also a plutocracy-a government run by the wealthy.

The Democratic Facade

Index of Website

Home Page