[Peace-discuss] Limits of power?

[David Green]

One group that has profited has been labor union leaders, those who formed the AFL-CIO in the 1950s and supported U.S. hegemony through Vietnam and beyond, marketing the idea to workers that they were now a "middle class." These leaders became part of the corporate establishment. This history needs to be better understood (including by me). At least workers need to begin to come to grips with the contradiction involved in their being defined as a middle class, as if the interests of labor unionists could be extracted from those of working people at large. This will, unfortunately, re-open the can of worms regarding whether workers chose to move to Levittown (writ large), or were somehow forced or tricked into doing so. Certainly, for example, auto, oil, and rubber companies were responsible in cities like Los Angeles and elsewhere for dismantling public transportation and building freeways instead. And workers in those industries benefitted, in the small and material
 meaning of that word. But in the long run, they did not "profit," for workers cannot profit, only owners.
   
  DG

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
  The Limits of Power
Andrew Bacevich interviewed by Bill Moyers, PBS, August 15, 2008

Andrew Bacevich: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people 
in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is 
concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political 
elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large - I 
mean, one could point to many individual exceptions - but, what we want, by and 
large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may 
happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. 
And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether 
or not the book’s balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal 
year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit...

============

This, I'm tempted to say (but shouldn't) is bacevich-ackwards. In the light of 
the majority opposition to Bush's war and the recent revelations about the 
fraudulence that produced support for it, it would in fact be more accurate to 
say, "Our foreign policy is ... concocted by people in Washington D.C. and 
imposed on us."

The notion that "it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what 
we want" is true only in an attenuated sense -- and on the face of it, it's 
absurd. Can we picture the "people in Washington" asking themselves what "we the 
people want" as the first step in forming foreign policy?!

In fact, the interests of the small US ruling elite and those of the large 
majority of Americans are not only different, they're actively opposed. It 
takes people with the rhetorical skill of a Barack Obama to cover that fact. 
(That is the primary purpose of his book "The Audacity of Hope.")

In its domination of the world economy since the Second World War, the US elite 
has had only one really dangerous enemy, and it wasn't the USSR, China, or 
"terrorism." It was the US working class (which contains more and less 
privileged strata) -- the majority of Americans who have to sell what makes them 
human (their work of head and hands) to the owners of capital, in order to eat 
regularly.

To pacify that enemy, some concessions had to be made in the generation 
following WWII, and (as one indication) inequality of income (measured by the 
Gini index) actually declined in the US in that period. But that was a payoff, 
a bribe, and -- once working-class institutions were largely destroyed -- it was 
reversed: in the next generation (roughly the last quarter of the 20th century) 
the US elite got its own [sic] back. As Linda Webber points out in tonight's 
"AWARE on the Air," the wealthiest 1% of Americans received 22% of the national 
income in 2006, the highest percentage since 1929.

Inequality in America has increased since ca. 1975 -- real wages have not risen 
for most Americans since then -- until now that Gini index is back where it was 
in 1929. (It didn't work out well then.)

This situation does not call for Puritan reflections on an "unending line of 
credit." It calls for an accurate account of how policy is formed in the US and 
an analysis of the institutions that form it. A good question to begin with is 
cui bono -- who actually profits? --CGE



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