[Peace-discuss] Midnight Ride of the Rabble

[patton paul]

This article is a good statement of the threat to American democracy posed
by private corporate wealth.  It compares the modern day Republicans with
the Federalist party of early American history.
-Paul P.


Midnight Ride of the Rabble
by Thom Hartmann


To every Middlesex village and farm,
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear.
-- From Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1863

Emerson told us, in his lecture Angloam, that in America "the old contest
of feudalism and democracy renews itself here on a new battlefield."
Perhaps seeing our day through a crack between the skeins of time and
space, Emerson concluded, "It is wonderful, with how much rancor and
premeditation at this moment the fight is prepared."

Feudalism?

Let's be blunt. The real agenda of the new conservatives is nothing less
than the destruction of democracy in the United States of America. And
feudalism is one of their weapons.

Their rallying cry is that government is the enemy, and thus must be
"drowned in a bathtub." In that, they've mistaken our government for the
former Soviet Union, or confused Ayn Rand's fictional and disintegrating
America with the real thing.

The government of the United States is us. It was designed to be a
government of, by, and for We, the People. It's not an enemy to be
destroyed; it's a means by which we administer and preserve the commons
that we collectively own.

Nonetheless, the new conservatives see our democratic government as the
enemy. And if they plan to destroy democracy, they must have something in
mind to replace it with. (Yes, I know that "democracy" and "democratic"
sound too much like "Democrat," and so the Republicans want us to say that
we don't live in a democracy, but, rather, a republic, which sounds more
like "Republican." It was one of Newt's efforts, along with replacing
phrases like "Democratic Senator" with "Democrat Senator." But Republican
political correctness can take a leap: we're talking here about the
survival of democracy in our constitutional republic.)

What conservatives are really arguing for is a return to the three
historic forms of tyranny that the Founders and Framers identified,
declared war against, and fought and died to keep out of our land. Those
tyrants were kings, theocrats, and noble feudal lords.

Kings would never again be allowed to govern America, the Founders said,
so they stripped the president of the power to declare war. As Lincoln
noted in an 1848 letter to William Herndon: "Kings had always been
involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if
not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our [1787]
Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions;
and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold
the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

Theocrats would never again be allowed to govern America, as they had
tried in the early Puritan communities. In 1784, when Patrick Henry
proposed that the Virginia legislature use a sort of faith-based voucher
system to pay for "Christian education," James Madison responded with
ferocity, saying government support of church teachings "will be a
dangerous abuse of power." He added, "The Rulers who are guilty of such an
encroachment exceed the commission from which they derive their authority,
and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made
neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are
slaves."

And America was not conceived of as a feudal state, feudalism being
broadly defined as "rule by the super-rich." Rather, our nation was
created in large part in reaction against centuries of European feudalism.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his lecture titled The Fortune of the
Republic, delivered on December 1, 1863, "We began with freedom. America
was opened after the feudal mischief was spent. No inquisitions here, no
kings, no nobles, no dominant church."

The great and revolutionary ideal of America is that a government can
exist while drawing its authority, power, and ongoing legitimacy from a
single source: "The consent of the governed." Conservatives, however,
would change all that.

In their brave new world, corporations are more suited to governance than
are the unpredictable rabble called citizens. Corporations should control
politics, control the commons, control health care, control our airwaves,
control the "free" market, and even control our schools. Although
corporations can't vote, these new conservatives claim they should have
human rights, like privacy from government inspections of their political
activity and the free speech right to lie to politicians and citizens in
PR and advertising. Although corporations don't need to breathe fresh air
or drink pure water, these new conservatives would hand over to them the
power to self-regulate poisonous emissions into our air and water.

While these new conservatives claim corporations should have the rights of
persons, they don't mind if corporations use hostile financial force to
take over other, smaller corporations in a bizarre form of corporate
slavery called monopoly. Corporations can't die, so aren't subject to
inheritance taxes or probate. They can't be put in prison, so even when
they cause death they are only subject to fines.

Corporations and their CEOs are America's new feudal lords, and the new
conservatives are their obliging servants and mouthpieces. The
conservative mantra is: "Less government!" But the dirty little secret of
the new conservatives is that just as nature abhors a vacuum, so also do
politics and power. Every time government of, by, and for We, the People
is pushed out of administering some part of this nation's vast commons,
corporations step in. And by swamping the United States of America in debt
with so-called "tax cuts," they seek to force an increasingly desperate
government to cede more and more of our commons to their corporate rule.

Conservatives confuse efficiency and cost: They suggest that big
corporations can perform public services at a lower total cost than
government, while ignoring the corporate need to pad the bill with
dividends to stockholders, rich CEO salaries, corporate jets and
headquarters, advertising, millions in "campaign contributions," and cash
set-asides for growth and expansion. They want to frame this as the
solution of the "free market," and talk about entrepreneurs and small
businesses filling up the holes left when government lets go of public
property.

But these are straw man arguments: What they are really advocating is
corporate rule, and ultimately a feudal state controlled exclusively by
the largest of the corporations. Smaller corporations, like individual
humans and the governments they once hoped would protect them from
powerful feudal forces, can watch but they can't play.

The modern-day conservative movement began with Federalists Alexander
Hamilton and John Adams, who argued that for a society to be stable it
must have a governing elite, and this elite must be separate both in power
and privilege from what Adams referred to as "the rabble." Their
Federalist party imploded in the early 19th Century, in large part because
of public revulsion over Federalist elitism, a symptom of which was Adams'
signing the Alien and Sedition Acts. (If you've only read the Republican
biographies of John Adams, you probably don't remember these laws, even
though they were the biggest thing to have happened in Adams' entire four
years in office, and the reason why the citizens of America voted him out
of office, and voted Jefferson - who loudly and publicly opposed the Acts
- in. They were a 1797 version of the Patriot Act and Patriot II, with
startlingly similar language.)

Destroyed by their embrace of this early form of despotism, the
Federalists were replaced first in the early 1800s by the short-lived
Whigs and then, starting with Lincoln, by the modern-day Republicans, who,
after Lincoln's death, firmly staked out their ancestral Federalist
position as the party of wealthy corporate and private interests. And now,
under the disguise of the word "conservative" (classical conservatives
like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower are rolling in their graves),
these old-time feudalists have nearly completed their takeover of our
great nation.

It became obvious with the transformation of healthcare into a for-profit
industry, leading to spiraling costs (and millions of dollars for Bill
Frist and his ilk). Insurance became necessary for survival, and people
were worried. Bill Clinton was prepared to answer the concern of the
majority of Americans who supported national health care. But that would
harm corporate profits.

"Do you want government bureaucrats deciding which doctor you can see?"
asked the conservatives, over and over again. As a yes/no question, the
answer was pretty simple for most Americans: no. But, as is so often the
case when conservatives try to influence public opinion, the true issue
wasn't honestly stated.

The real question was: "Do you want government bureaucrats - who are
answerable to elected officials and thus subject to the will of 'We, The
People' - making decisions about your healthcare, or would you rather have
corporate bureaucrats - who are answerable only to their CEOs and work in
a profit-driven environment - making decisions about your healthcare?"

For every $100 that passes through the hands of the
government-administered Medicare programs, between $2 and $3 is spent on
administration, leaving $97 to $98 to pay for medical services and drugs.
But of every $100 that flows through corporate insurance programs and
HMOs, $10 to $24 sticks to corporate fingers along the way. After all,
Medicare doesn't have lavish corporate headquarters, corporate jets, or
pay expensive lobbying firms in Washington to work on its behalf. It
doesn't "donate" millions to politicians and their parties. It doesn't pay
profits in the form of dividends to its shareholders. And it doesn't
compensate its top executive with over a million dollars a year, as do
each of the largest of the American insurance companies. Medicare has one
primary mandate: serve the public. Private corporations also have one
primary mandate: generate profit.

When Jeb Bush cut a deal with Enron to privatize the Everglades, it
diminished the power of the Florida government to protect a natural
resource and enhanced the power and profitability of Enron. Similarly,
when politicians argue for harsher sentencing guidelines and also advocate
more corporate-owned prisons, they're enhancing the power and profits of
one of America's fastest-growing and most profitable remaining domestic
industries: incarceration. But having government protect the quality of
the nation's air and water by mandating pollution controls doesn't enhance
corporate profits. Neither does single-payer health-care, which threatens
insurance companies with redundancy, or requirements for local control of
broadcast media. In these and other regards, however, the government still
holds the keys to the riches of the commons held in trust for us all.
Riches the corporations want to convert into profits.

For example, an NPR Morning Edition report by Rick Carr on 28 May 2003
said, "Current FCC Chair Michael Powell says he has faith the market will
provide. What's more, he says, he'd rather have the market decide than
government." In this, Powell was reciting the conservative mantra.
Misconstruing Adam Smith, who warned about the dangers of the invisible
hand of the marketplace trampling the rights and needs of the people,
Powell suggests that business always knows best. The market will decide.
Bigger isn't badder.

But experience shows that the very competition that conservatives claim to
embrace is destroyed by the unrestrained growth of corporate interests.
It's called monopoly: Big fish eat little fish, over and over, until there
are no little fish left. Look at the thoroughfares of any American city
and ask yourself how many of the businesses there are locally owned.
Instead of cash circulating within a local and competitive economy, at
midnight every night a button is pushed and the local money is vacuumed
away to Little Rock or Chicago or New York.

This is feudalism in its most raw and naked form, just as the kings and
nobles of old sucked dry the resources of the people they claimed to own.
It is in these arguments for unrestrained corporatism that we see the
naked face of Hamilton's Federalists in the modern conservative movement.
It's the face of wealth and privilege, of what Jefferson called a
"pseudo-aristocracy," that works to its own enrichment and gain regardless
of the harm done to the nation, the commons, or the "We, the People"
rabble.

It is, in its most complete form, the face that would "drown government in
a bathtub"; that sneers at the First Amendment by putting up "free speech
zones" for protesters; that openly and harshly suggests that those who are
poor, unemployed, or underemployed are suffering from character defects.
That works hard to protect the corporate interest, but is happy to ignore
the public interest. That says it doesn't matter what happens to the
humans living in what a national conservative talk show host laughingly
calls "turd world nations."

These new conservatives would have us trade in our democracy for a
corporatocracy, a form of feudal government most recently reinvented by
Benito Mussolini when he recommended a "merger of business and state
interests" as a way of creating a government that would be invincibly
strong. Mussolini called it fascism.

In a previous Common Dreams op-ed, I pointed out how media and other
corporations will suck up to government when they think they can get
regulations that will enhance their profits. We see this daily in the
halls of Congress and in the lobbying efforts directed at our regulatory
agencies. We see it in the millions of dollars in trips and gifts given to
FCC commissioners, that in another era would have been called bribes.

These corporate-embracing conservatives are not working for what's best
for democracy, for America, or for the interests of "We, The People." They
are explicitly interested in a singular goal: Profits and the power to
maintain them. Under control, the desire for profit can be a useful thing,
as 200 years of American free enterprise have shown.

But unrestrained, as George Soros warns us so eloquently, it will create
monopoly and destroy democracy. The new conservatives are systematically
dismantling our governmental systems of checks and balances; of
considering the public good when regulating private corporate behavior; of
protecting those individuals, small businesses, and local communities who
are unable to protect themselves from giant corporate predators. They want
to replace government of, by, and for We, the People, with a corporate
feudal state, turning America's citizens into their vassals and serfs.

Only a public revolt in disgust over this unconscionable behavior will
stop these new conservatives from turning America into a corporate-based
clone of Mussolini's feudal vision. As Longfellow reminds us, "In the hour
of darkness and peril and need/The people will waken and listen to hear.."

It is again that hour, and now is the time for we, the rabble, to
re-awaken our fellow citizens.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is the author of over a dozen
books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight," and the host of a nationally syndicated daily talk show.
www.thomhartmann.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but
permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so
long as this credit is attached.