AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 14

          CONTINUING ON WITH THE REAGAN YEARS

    In January 1983, Reagan ended the embargo on military aid to Guatemala. He authorized sales of military hardware. But Congress's resistance forced Guatemala to rely on military aid primarily from from close U.S. allies Israel and Taiwan. Israel was also providing aid to El Salvadore and the Nicaragua contras.  CIA support for the Guatemalan military continued unabated. In August 1983, Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores overthrew Rios Montt in a coup, ending the period known as "La Violencia" but not the violence itself. Following the coup, the CIA and State Department reported an increase in political killings and abductions. In February 1984, Ambassador Frederic Chapin cabled Washington about what he called "the horrible human rights realities in Guatemala." The very next day, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliot Abrams and two other State Department officials approved a secret report urging Congress to resume military aid to Guatemala in light of its improved human rights record. 

   In 1986, in a secret report, the State Department acknowledged a systematic campaign by "security forces and rightist paramilitary groups" to kidnap and murder potential rural social workers, medical personnel, and campesinos dating back to 1966 and peaking in1984. Guatemala's official Historical Clarification Commission issued a report in 1999 detailing 626 massacres of Mayan villages carried out by the Guatemalan army,which it termed a "genocide ." It charged the CIA and other U.S. agencies with providing direct and indirect support for the Guatemalan slaughter, whose death toll it estimated at 200,000. 

   The United States was perpetrating atrocities of a different sort in Nicaragua. Former members of Somoza's thuggish Nicaraguan national guard had been gathering across the border in Honduras, where, with CIA Director Casey's assistance, they plotted a return to power. They called themselves the contra-revolucionarios, or "contras" for short. Here, as elsewhere, Casey transformed Carter's rudimentary covert operations into a massive undertaking.  He set up a Central America Task Force to run things. He installed Duane Clarridge to head the Latin America division. Clarridge was the perfect foil. He knew nothing about Latin America, never having worked in the region,and spoke no Spanish. 

   U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton pinpointed the start of the war for an interviewer : "The secret war began on March 15, 1982, when the CIA, using Nicaraguan agents, blew up the bridges that connected Nicaragua with Honduras." It had actually begun earlier. That December, Congress banned the use of government funds to overthrow the Sandinista government. In the administration, moderates like Shulz had little voice as hard-line right wingers increasingly set a ruthless foreign policy in Nicaragua and beyond. REAGAN LIED TO CONGRESS ABOUT WHAT THE CIA WAS UP TO. Casey lied repeatedly, deliberately misleading the House and Senate select intelligence committees. According to Gates, "Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in." Shulz later said that he had complained to National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci in January 1987 : "I told him I had no confidence in the intelligence community, that I had been misled, lied to, cut out." Congress nonetheless significantly expanded the intelligence budget, with much of the appropriation going to the CIA. 

   

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973 ----Episode 13

           REAGAN'S FOREIGN POLICY IN CENTRAL 
       AMERICA WAS CRUEL AND HE LIED ABOUT
       IT 

    Reagan met with Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cardova, who was waging his own U.S.-backed counterinsurgency war. According to the Los Angeles Times, the meeting occurred in a "drab building" at "a heavily guarded military airport in eastern Honduras. Soldiers manned anti-aircraft guns in the sugar cane field bordering the runway, and military helicopters patrolled overhead . . . The weather was hot and humid, and the pinstripe suites worn by White House officials looked conspicuously out of place."  Secretary of State George Shulz whispered to one reporter, "This is the strangest thing I've ever seen." 

   The trip had its share of unscripted moments. In Costa Rica, Sergio Erick Ardon head of the People's Revolutionary Movement, rose in the balcony of the National Theater and loudly indicted the U.S. president and his "militarization of Central America." 

   In Columbia, Reagan was blindsided by President Belisario Betancur Cuartas, who used his toast to criticize Reagan's efforts to "isolate" and "exclude" Cuba and Nicaragua from hemispheric peace and development efforts while tolerating murder by right-wing governments : "Our responsibility as heads of state does not allow us to remain unmoved by the daily opening of gravesites in the ground of our common geography : 30,000 graves in El Salvador, to mention only one nation, shock the conscience of leaders." The Reagan entourage was furious with this attack. Nor were they pleased with the riots and demonstrations in downtown Bogota or the crowds lining the streets greeting Reagan's speeding motorcade with shouts of "Fuera!" or "Yanqui go home." Unable to get all the "individual countries" straight, Reagan insulted his hosts in Brazil by saluting "the people of Bolivia." 

   Reagan's sorry spectacle of giving absolution to murderous dictators did not go unremarked back home. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis began an op-ed piece, appropriately titled "Howdy Genghis," with "Under the name of 'Anti-communism,' the President of the United States has just had a friendly meeting with a tyrant who makes a policy of mass murder. This is what has happened, in Ronald Reagan's administration, to Americans' belief that their country stands for basic human decency in the world." Lewis described reports of Guatemalan soldiers descending on rural villages in helicopters, hacking women to death with machetes, torching huts, and gouging out eyes as part of a campaign to take the countryside back from the guerillas. Lewis quoted the Boston Globe's assessment of this antiguerilla campaign as falling somewhere between a pogrom and genocide." He noted the fact that Reagan's embrace of "torturers and murderers" extended beyond the leaders of Guatemala and El Salvador to include recent visits to Washington from the dictators of South Korea and the Philippines and an upcoming one from Muhummad Zia -ul-Haq of Pakistan, who since taking power in 1977 "has eliminated the political opposition and resorted regularly to torture." Lewis ended with a poignant reminder that has rung true throughout all the decades of the American Empire : "The shame marks us all. When the economic follies of the Reagan Administration have been forgotten, its insensitivity to human cruelty will stain the name of the United States." 

   The sense of outrage so eloquently expressed by Lewis was reinforced by reports released by Amnesty International, Americas Watch, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and other human rights groups, detailing the ongoing murders and atrocities, and by remarks by a Guatemalan Jesuit priest, Reverend Ricardo Falla, S.J., at a press conference arranged by the American Anthropological Association. Falla, who was trained at Georgetown, charged that the purpose of organized massacres of Indians was to leave "no survivors" and hence "no memory" of what happened. He elaborated, "That is why babies and children are killed. It's really incredible. These children, if they survive, will avenge the death of their parents . . . These little ones are slit open with knives, or their heads are broken against rocks or beams of houses." Father Falla described a massacre at San Francisco de Nenton, which transpired over an eight-hour period and included a break for dinner : "After killing the women and children, they stopped to eat the steaks which they had roasted from a bull they killed shortly after their arrival. They laughed at the old people who cried out like sheep when the blunt knives did not cut their throats. They sang while they listened to the radios they stole from the Indians later in the evening, when the massacre was finished." 

   

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973--- Episode 12

              THE REAGAN YEARS : DEATH SQUADS FOR 

              DEMOCRACY 

  The Soviet economy also hit the skids in the late 1970s, beginning a sustained period of stagnation and decline that only worsened when oil prices collapsed in 1982. Military expenditures, which absorbed almost a quarter of the gross domestic product [GDP] , were further weakening the economy. Reagan was determined to exploit the situation. At his first press conference, on January 29,1981, he unleashed an anti-Communist diatribe that reversed almost two decades of progress in easing Cold War tensions : 

      Well, so far detente's been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims . . . the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever you want to use . . . they,at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards.

The CIA, which had largely been kept in check by Carter,  played a major role in Reagan's new anti-Communist crusade. CIA analysts had long prided themselves on professionalism and distance from the operations side of the Agency. That would not fly with the Reagan team. The assault that began via Bush's Team B reached fruition under Casey. Administration hard-liners wanted intelligence that supported their view of a dangerous, hostile, and expansion-minded Soviet Union regardless of how far such a perception departed from reality. Casey, a multibillionaire Wall Street lawyer and devout Irish Catholic, had come to the CIA, according to his deputy Robert Gates, "to wage war against the SovietUnion." According to Gates, "the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover." Casey had read Claire Sterling's The Terror Network and was convinced that the Soviet Union was the front of all international terrorism. According to Melvyn Goodman, head of the CIA's office for Soviet analysis, "Several of us met with Casey to try to tell the director that much of Sterling's so-called evidence was in fact CIA 'black propaganda,' anticommunist allegations planted in the European press." But, he added, "Casey contemptuously noted . . . that he 'learned more from Sterling than from ' " all of them. Others who touted the Sterling line included Haig, Paul Wolfowitz, State Department consultant Michael Ledeen, and State Department official Robert "Bud" McFarlane. CIA experts, however, knew that the Soviets actually discouraged terrorism. 

Casey and Gates began a purge of analysts who refused to knuckle under. If their reports failed to support the administration line, Casey just wrote his own conclusions. Goodman, wh served as a senior Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1986, observed, "The CIA caricature of a Soviet octopus whose tentacles reached the world over supported the administration's view of the 'Evil Empire'." Goodman blamed "the fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history --- the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself" --- largely on "the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate." 

While CIA intelligence was being dismantled, operations were running amok. Colonel John Waghelstein, who headed the U.S military advisory team in El Salvador, stated, "Real counterinsurgency techniques are a step toward the primitive." That description could be applied to the efforts of U.S.-backed and trained government forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and to the U.S.-run insurgency in Nicaragua. These "freedom fighters," as Reagan called them, routinely raped, castrated, mutilated, decapitated, and dismembered their victims." To harden Guatemalan soldiers to the point where they were able to kill some 100,000 Mayan peasants between 1981 and 1983, army recruits were beaten, degraded, even submerged in sewage, and forced to remain covered in shit for extended periods of time. Broken and dehumanized, they carried out brutal acts. In December 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, the army slaughtered over 160 people, swinging the 65 child victims by their feet and smashing their heads against the rocks. Just the day before, Ronald Reagan had visited Honduras as part of a tour of Latin America and complained that Guatemalan president, General Efrain Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian who had recently seized power in a military coup, had received a "bum rap," assuring reporters that the dictator was "totally committed to democracy." Reagan called him "a man of great personal integrity and commitment." In fact, he said that in light of Guatemala's improved human rights record, he was considering restoring military aid, which Carter had cut off in 1977 because of the government's deplorable human rights record. Reagan was apparently comfortable with Rios Montt's explanation that "we have no scorched-earth policy. We have a policy of scorched communists." U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin announced, "The killings have stopped . . . The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light." 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGINS TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 11

    RONALD REAGAN WAS A SHAMELESS LIAR--BEFORE 
  HE WAS POTUS AND AFTER HE WAS POTUS

   Compiling lists of Reaganisms became a national pastime. Reagan often made up apocryphal quotes from prominent individuals including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Winston Churchill. Perhaps it was fitting, therefore, that his press spokesman,  Larry Speakes, admitted that he had made up quotes and attributed them to Reagan, anticipating what he would have wanted to say. 

   For meetings with visitors and even his own cabinet officials, Reagan read from three-by-five-inch cards provided by staffers. Visitors would be mortified on those occasions when he unknowingly read from the wrong set of cards. He extrapolated from personal experience to form his views of the world. Facts could be ignored or contradicted when they didn't support his preferred narrative. When William Clark, a former California Supreme Court justice, took over as national security advisor in 1982, he was shocked to discover how little Reagan actually knew about the world. He instructed the Pentagon and CIA to produce films explaining security issues and describing the world leaders Reagan would be meeting. 

   Reagan's disengaged style and lack of foreign policy experience left the door open to palace intrigue among his subordinates, who were eager to fill the void. Vice President Bush displayed firm, if nefarious, establishment credentials, with long-standing family ties to Rockefeller, Morgan, and Harriman interests. After graduating from Yale, he had moved to Texas, become an oilman, and run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970. Richard Nixon had engineered his appointment as Republican Party chairman. 

   Jeane Kirkpatrick would also play a prominent role in shaping foreign policy. A conservative Democrat and Georgetown political scientist who supported Reagan because of his staunch anticommunism, she was rewarded with an appointment as ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick supplied the Reaganites with a justification for supporting right-wing dictatorships, calling them "authoritarian" regimes instead of "totalitarian" ones. Along with her colleague Ernest Lefever, a defender of repressive regimes from El Salvador to South Africa, became assistant secretary of state for human rights. The New York Times described him as "an ultraconservative who sneers at existing policy as sentimental nonsense and believes it is profound error to embarrass allies, however repressive, with talk about habeas corpus." He dismissed concerns about torture in Argentina and Chile because it was "a residual practice of the Iberian tradition." His center had recently been assailed for accepting a large contribution from Nestle' after conducting a study supportive of its campaign to convince mothers to replace breast-feeding with infant formula despite evidence that the switch had contributed to  tripling of infant malnutrition in underdeveloped nations. In June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejected Lefever as unqualified for the position. Five of the committee's nine Republicans joined with all eight Democrats in the vote. He was replaced by the equally objectionable Elliott Abrams. 

   Not everyone welcomed the opportunity for freelancing that resulted from Reagan's inattention. General Colin Powell, the deputy to National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci, recalled, "The President's passive management style placed a tremendous burden on us. Until we got used to it, we felt uneasy implementing recommendations without a clear decision . . . One morning . . . Frank moaned. . . 'My God, we didn't sign on to run this country!' " James Baker, who served Reagan as campaign manager, White House chief of staff, and Treasury secretary, described the resulting foreign policy structure as a "witches' brew of intrigue . . . and separate agendas." Though often at one another's throats over control o policy, Reagan's top advisors shared an enthusiasm for covert operations. Together with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Bush, they initiated operations in Central America and Africa through the National Security Planning Group, while supporting Soviet-bloc dissidents and expanding Carter's programs in Afghanistan. 

   Global economic travails made their job easier. The rapid economic growth experienced by resource-rich third-world countries in the 1960s and early 1970s ground to a halt by the mid-1970s as the worldwide economic decline undercut income earned through raw-material exports. Third-world debt ballooned, crippling the prospects for continued development and devastating already impoverished populations. Revolutionary states that had overthrown colonialist regimes and experimented with socialism were among the hardest hit, leading many to question the viability of leftist development models. Reagan saw the resulting unrest as an opportunity to topple unfriendly governments and prove the superiority of capitalism. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGINS TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 10

                           THE REAGAN YEARS 

                        DEATH SQUADS FOR DEMOCRACY 

                                             [1980----1988] 

   Ronald Reagan, the folksy, homespun actor turned General Electric pitchman, had governed California from 1967 to 1975. He espoused strong family values but was estranged from his children and was the first president to divorce. A man of limited knowledge but deep religious beliefs and strong conservative convictions, he provided little guidance on policy and had no interest in or grasp of detail. His vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, confessed to Soviet Ambassador Antoly Dobrynin that he at first found Reagan's views on international relations "almost unimaginable." Bush, Dobrynin wrote, was "simply amazed to see to what extent Reagan was dominated by Hollywood cliches and the ideas of his wealthy but conservative and poorly educated friends from California." National Security Council Soviet expert Richard Pipes admitted that at NSC meetings the president seemed "really lost, out of his depth, uncomfortable." Very early in the new administration, counterterrorism coordinator Anthony Quainton was summoned to brief the president. In Quainton's words, "I gave that briefing to the President, who was joined by the Vice President, the head of CIA, the head of FBI, and a number of National Secirity Council members.After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off. That .. . was quite unnerving." 

Jimmy Carter was deeply troubled by Reagan's complete lack of curiosity when he tried to brief the incoming president on the challenges he would face, assessments of world leaders, and command and control of nuclear weapons. Carter aide, Jody Powell recounted, "The boss thought it was really important for Reagan to know this stuff before he was sworn in and as he ran through it he couldn't believe that Reagan wasn't asking questions. He thought maybe Reagan wasn't taking notes because he didn't have a pad and pencil and finally offered him one, but Reagan said, no thanks ; he could remember it. It was just the damnedest thing."

Many of Reagan's close associates were struck by the depth of his ignorance. Upon returning from his late Latin American tour, Reagan told reporters, "Well, I learned a lot. . . You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries." Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wondered, "What planet is that man living on?" when the president told him that "the Soviets had brought an American priest to Moscow in order to send him back to be a spokesman for Actors Equity." Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill was startled when Reagan , admiring O'Neill's desk that had belonged to Grover Cleveland, told him that he had played Cleveland in the movie The Winning Season. O'Neill reminded him that the desk had belonged to President Grover Cleveland, not Grover Cleveland Alexander, the pitcher. O'Neill, who served in the House for thirty-four years, said that Reagan "knows less than any President I've ever known." 

Reagan's simplistic worldview seemed to be a pastiche stitched together from Hallmark greeting cards, Currier and Ives lithographs, Benjamin Franklin aphorisms, Hollywood epics, and Chinese fortune cookies. He wrote, "I'd always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that Americans were a moral people who . . . had always used our power as a force for good in the world." 

He often displayed a striking inability to differentiate between reality and fantasy.  In a late 1983 Oval Office meeting, he told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that as a photographer during the Second World War he had filmed the Allies liberating the Nazi death camps and had been so moved by the suffering he witnessed that he had decided to keep a copy of the film in case he ever encountered a Holocaust skeptic. Shamir was so impressed with Reagan's story that he repeated it to his cabinet and it was printed in the Israeli paper Ma' ariv. Reagan later repeated a variant of the story to Simon Wiesenthal and Rabbi Hier, telling them he had been with the Signal Corps filming the camps and had shown the film tto someone just a year after the war. Hearing the story, Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon noted that Reagan had never left the United States during or immediately after the war. The story was entirely fanciful. 

Reporters then had a field day revealing other Reagan whoppers. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, perhaps to dispel the notion that the president's flights of fancy were a product of old age or related to his diminishing mental powers, wrote that he first became aware of Reagan's habit of altering the truth in 1968 when, to highlight how lawless society was becoming, Reagan had asserted that eight Chicago police officers had been killed in one recent month alone. Royko, curious, discovered that no cops had been killed in Chicago in months and only one or two in th entire year. Reagan often repeated his story about the Chicago "welfare queen" with eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards had a tax-free income of over $150,000. The numbers would change---she sometimes had 127 names and received over one hundred different checks ---but the point --- an attack on greedy, dishonest blacks who stole from hardworking white Americans---remained the same. 

   

   

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGINS TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 9

   Halfway through the twentieth century, the historian Richard Hofstadter, in his book The American Political Tradition, examined how our important national leaders, from Jefferson and Jackson to Herbert Hoover and the two Roosevelts --- Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Hofstadter concluded that "the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise . . . They have accepted the economic virtues of a capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man. . . The culture has been intensely NATIONALISTIC. . ." 

Having left the end of the century and begun a new one, observing the last twenty-five years, we have seen exactly that limited vision Hofstadster talked about --- a capitalistic encouragement of enormous fortunes alongside desperate poverty, a nationalistic acceptance of war and preparations for war. Governmental power swung from Republicans to Democrats and back again, but neither party showed itself capable of going beyond that vision. 

After the disastrous war in Vietnam came the scandals of Watergate. There was a deepening economic insecurity for much of the population, along with environmental deterioration, and a growing culture of violence and family disarray. Clearly, such fundamental problems could not be solved without bold changes in the social and economic structure. But no major party candidates proposed such changes---until a POTUS candidate named Bernie came along in 2016. The American people continued to be entertained by national bullyism. 

In recognition of this, perhaps only vaguely conscious of this, voters stayed away from the polls in large numbers, or voted without enthusiasm. More and more they declared, if only by nonparticipation, their alienation from the political system. In 1960, 63 percent of those eligible to vote voted in the presidential election. By 1976, this figure had dropped to 53 percent. In a CBS News and New York Times survey, over half of the respondents said that public officials didn't care about people like them. A typical response came from a plumber : "The President of the United States isn't going to solve our problems. The problems are too big."

There was a troubling incongruity in the society. Electoral politics dominated the press and television screens, and the doings of presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and other officials were treated as if they constituted the history of the country. Yet there was something artificial in all this, something pumped up, a straining to persuade a skeptical public that this was all, that they must rest their hopes for the future in Washington politicians, none of whom were inspiring because it seemed that behind the bombast, the rhetoric, the promises, their major concern was their own political power. 

The distance between politics and the people was reflected clearly in the culture. In what was supposed to be the best of the media, uncontrolled by corporate interest----that is, in public television, the nightly "MacNeil---Lehrer Report," the public was uninvited, except as viewer of an endless parade of Congressmen, Senators, government bureaucrats, experts of various kinds.

On commercial radio, the usual narrow band of consensus, excluding fundamental criticism, was especially apparent. In the mid-1980s, "talk radio" had perhaps 20 million listeners, treated to tirades from right-wing talk-show "hosts " with left-wing guests uninvited. 

A citizenry disillusioned with politics and with what pretended to be intelligent discussions of politics turned its attention [or had its attention turned] to ENTERTAINMENT , to gossip, to ten thousand SCHEMES FOR SELF-HELP.  Those at its margins became violent, finding scapegoats within one's group [as with poor-black on poor-black violence], or against other races, immigrants, demonized foreigners, welfare mothers, minor criminals [standing in for untouchable major criminals] . 

There were other citizens, those who tried to hold on to ideas and ideals still remembered from the sixties and early seventies, not just by recollecting but by acting. Indeed, all across the country there was a part of the public unmentioned in the media, ignored by political leaders----energetically active in thousands of local groups around the country. These organized groups were campaigning for environmental protection or women's rights or decent health care [including anguished concern about the horrors of AIDS] or housing for the homeless, or AGAINST MILITARY SPENDING. 

This activism was unlike that of the sixties, when the surge of protest against race segregation and war became an overwhelming national force. It struggled uphill, against callous political leaders, trying to reach fellow Americans most of whom saw little hope in either the politics of voting or the politics of protest. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 8

AMERICA PREPARED FOR A POTUS ELECTION IN 1976

   As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, organized into "The Trilateral Commission," issued a report. It was entitled "The Governability of Democracies." SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, a political science professor at Harvard and long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with the United States. He called it "The Democratic Distemper" and identified the problem he was about to discuss : "The 1960's witnessed a dramatic upsurge of democratic fervor in America." In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen participation "in the form of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and 'cause' organizations." There were also "markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom became mobilized and organized in new ways. . ." There was a "marked expansion of white-collar unionism," and all this added up to "a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life." 

Huntington pointed to signs of decreasing government authority:  The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7 percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By 1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent. This seemed to reflect a change in public mood : In 1960 only 18 percent of the public said the government was spending too much on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent. 

Huntington was troubled by what he saw [ remember, he was a wing-nut]  : 

     The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents. 

All this, he said, "produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970s. . . " 

Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President. And : 

     To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the mre important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's "Establishment." 

This was probably the frankest statement ever made by an Establishment adviser. 

Huntington further said that the POTUS , to win an election, needed the support of a broad coalition of people. However : "The day after his election, the size of his majority is almost --- if not entirely --- irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions in a society and government . . . This coalition must include key people in Congress, the executive branch, and the private-sector "Establishment' ." He gave examples : 

     Truman made a point of bringing a substantial number of non-partisan soldiers, Republican bankers, and Wall Street lawyers into his Administration. He went to the existing sources of power in the country to get help he needed in ruling the country. Eisenhower in part inherited this coalition and was in part almost its creation. . . Kennedy attempted to re-create a somewhat similar structure of alliances. 

What worried Huntington was the loss in governmental authority. For instance, the opposition to Vietnam had brought the abolition of the draft. "The question necessarily arises, however, whether if a new threat to security should materialize in the future [as it inevitably will at some point] , the government will command the resources, as well as the sacrifices, which are necessary to meet that threat." 

Huntington saw the possible end of that quarter century when "the United States was the hegemonic power in a system of world order." His conclusion was that there had developed "an excess of democracy," and he suggested "desirable limits to the extension of political democracy." 

{YES, I'VE ALREADY TALKED ABOUT THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION, BUT I'M GOING TO REPEAT A LITTLE OF WHAT'S BEEN PREVIOUSLY SAID} 


Huntington was reporting all this to an organization that was very IMPORTANT TO THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES. The Trilateral Commission was organized in early 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller was an official of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a powerful financial figure in the Unite States and the world ; Brzezinski, a Columbia University professor, specialized in international relations and was a consultant to the State Department. 

    DETAILS OF THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION TO FOLLOW. 

   

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973----Episode 7

   AS A RESULT OF THE WATERGATE AFFAIR, 
  CONGRESS CONDUCTED A FLIMSY 
  INVESTIGATION INTO THE OPERATIONS OF
  THE CIA 

   The Church Committee did uncover CIA operations to secretly influence the minds of Americans :

     The CIA is now using several hundred American academics { administrators, faculty members, graduate students, engaged in teaching} who, in addition to providing leads, and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad . . . These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities and related institutions. At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use of academics on his campus . . . The CIA considers these operational relationships within the U.S. academic community as perhaps its most sensitive domestic area and has strict controls governing these operations . . . 

   In 1961 the chief of the CIA's Covert Action Staff wrote that books were "the most important weapon of strategic propaganda." The Church Committee found that more than a thousand books were produced, subsidized, or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967. 

   When Kissinger testified before the Church Committee about the bombing of Laos, orchestrated by the CIA as a secret activity, he said : "I do not believe in retrospect that it was a good national policy to have the CIA conduct the war in Laos. I think we should have found some other way of doing it." There was no indication that anyone on the Committee challenged this idea ---that what was done should have been done----that what was done should have been done, but by another method. 

   Thus, in 1974--1975, the system was acting to purge the country of its rascals and restore it to a healthy, or at least to an acceptable, state. The resignation of Nixon, the succession of Ford, the exposure of bad deeds by the FBI and CIA ---- all aimed to regain the badly damaged confidence of the American people. However, even with these strenuous efforts, there were still signs in the American public of suspicion, even hostility, to the leaders of GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, BIG BUSINESS. 

   In July of 1975 the Lou Harris poll, looking at the public's confidence in the government from 1966 to 1975, reported that confidence in the military during that period had dropped from 62 percent to 29 percent, in business from 55 percent to 18 percent, in both President and Congress from 42 percent to 13 percent. Shortly after that, another Harris poll reported "65% of Americans oppose military aid abroad because they feel it allows dictatorships to maintain control over their population." 

   Perhaps much of the dissatisfaction was due to the economic state of most Americans. Inflation and unemployment had been rising steadily since 1973 , which was the year when, according to a Harris poll, the number of Americans feeling "alienated" and "disaffected" with the general state of the country climbed [ from 29 percent in 1966] to over 50 percent. After Ford succeeded Nixon, the percentage of "alienated" was 55 percent. The survey showed that people were troubled most of all by inflation. 

   

     

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973-----Episode 6

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAD TO CONVINCE THE GOVERNMENT TO GET BACK UP OFF THE MAT AFTER THE DEFEAT IN VIETNAM AND RESUME PLAYING BULLY 

   It was a complex process of consolidation that the system undertook in 1975. It included old-type military actions, like the Mataguez affair, to assert authority in the world and at home. There was also a need to satisfy a disillusioned public that the system was criticizing and correcting itself. The standard way to conduct publicized investigations that found specific culprits but left the system intact. Watergate had made both the FBI and the CIA look bad ---- breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold,cooperating with Nixon in his burglary jobs and illegal wiretapping. In 1975, congressional committees in both the House and Senate began investigations of the FBI and CIA. 

   The CIA inquiry disclosed that the CIA had gone beyond its original mission of gathering intelligence and was conducting secret operation of all kinds. For instance, back in the 1950s, it had administered the drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans to test its effects : one American scientist, given such a dose by a CIA agent, leaped from a New York hotel window to his death. 

   The CIA had also been involved in assassination plots against Castro of Cuba and other heads of state. It had introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and the slaughter to 500, 000 pigs. A CIA operative told a reporter he delivered the virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans. 

   It was also learned from the investigation that the CIA ---with the collusion of a secret Committee of Forty headed by Henry Kissinger ---- had worked to "destabilize" the Chilean government headed by Salvadore Allende, a Marxist who had been elected president in one of the rare free elections in Latin America. ITT, with large interests in Chile, played a part in this operation. When in 1974 the American ambassador to Chile, David Popper, suggested to the Chilean junta [which, with U.S. aid, had overthrown Allende] that they were violating human rights, he was rebuked by Kissinger, who sent word :"Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures." 

   The investigation of the FBI disclosed many years of illegal actions to disrupt and destroy radical groups and left-wing groups of all kinds. The FBI had sent forged letters, engaged in burglaries [it admitted to ninety-two between 1960 and 1966] , opened mail illegally, and, in the case of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, seems to have conspired in murder. 

   Valuable information came out of the investigations, but it was just enough, and in just the right way ---moderate press coverage, little television coverage, thick books of reports with limited readership ---to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself. 

   The investigations themselves revealed the limits of government willingness to probe into such activities. The Church Committee, set up in the Senate, conducted its investigations with the cooperation of the agencies being investigated and, indeed, submitted its findings on the CIA to the CIA to see if there was material that the Agency wanted omitted. Thus, while there was much valuable material in the report, there is no way of knowing how much more there was --- the final report was a compromise between committee diligence and CIA caution. 

   The Pike Committee, set up in the House of Representatives, made no such agreement with the CIA or FBI, and when it issued its final report, the same House that had authorized its investigation voted to keep the report secret. When the report was leaked via a CBS newscaster, Daniel Schorr, to the Village Voice in New York, it was never printed by the important newspapers in the country---the Times , the Washington Post, or others. Schorr was suspended by CBS. It was another instance of cooperation between the mass media and the government in instances of "national security." 

   The Church Committee, in its report of CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, revealed an interesting point of view. The committee seemed to look on the killing of a head of state as an unpardonable violation of some gentlemen's agreement among statesmen, much more deplorable than military interventions that killed ordinary people. The Committee wrote, in the introduction to its assassination report : 

     Once methods of coercion and violence are chosen, the probability of loss of life is always present. There is, however, a significant difference between a cold-blooded, targeted, intentional killing of an individual foreign leader and other forms of intervening in the affairs of foreign nations. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973----Episode 5

THE TELEVISED WATERGATE HEARINGS DID NOT TOUCH ON GOVERNMENT WRONGDOING MORE SYSTEMIC THAN JUST THE BREAK-IN 

   One of the items not mentioned in the impeachment charges and never televised in the Senate hearings was the way the government cooperated with the milk industry.  In early 1971the Secretary of Agriculture announced the government would not increase its price supports for milk ---the regular subsidy to the big milk producers. The the Associated Milk Producers began giving money to the Nixon campaign, met in the White House with Nixon and the Secretary of Agriculture, gave more money, and the secretary announced that "new analysis" made it necessary to raise milk price supports from $4.66 to $4.93 a hundredweight. More contributions were made, until the total exceeded $400,000. The price increases added $500 million to the profits of dairy farmers [mostly big corporations] at the expense of consumers. 

Whether Nixon or Ford or any Republican or Democrat was President, the system would work pretty much the same way. A Senate subcommittee investigating multinational corporations revealed a document [given passing mention in a few newspapers] in which oil company economists discussed holding back production ofoil to keep prices up. ARAMCO ---the Arabian -American Oil Corporation, 75 percent of whose stock was held by American oil companies and 25 percent by Saudi Arabia---had made $1 profit on a barrel of oil in 1973. In 1974 it was making $4.50. None of this would be affected by who was President. 



Even in the most diligent of investigations in the Watergate affair, that of Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor later fired by Nixon, the corporations got off easy. American Airlines, which admitted making illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign, was fined $5,000 ; Goodyear was fined$5,000 ; 3M Corporation was fined $3,000. A Goodyear official was fined $1,000 ; a 3M official was fined $500. The New York Times [October 20, 1973] reported : 

     Mr. Cox charged them only with the misdemeanor of making illegal contributions. The misdemeanor, under the law, involved "nonwillful" contributions. The felony count, involving willful contributions, is punishable by a fine of $10,000 and/or a two-year jail term ; the misdemeanor by a $1,000 fine and/or a one-year jail term. 
     Asked at the courthouse here how the two executives---who had admitted making the payments ---could be charged with making non-willing contributions. Mr. McBride [ Cox's staff] replied: "That's a legal question which frankly baffles me as well." 

With Gerald Ford in office, the long continuity in American policy was maintained. He continued Nixon's policy of aid to the Saigon regime, apparently still hoping that the Thieu government would remain stable. The head of a congressional committee, John Calkins, visiting South Vietnam just around the time of Nixon's fall from office, reported : 

     The South Vietnamese Army shows every sign of being an effective and spirited security force . . . 
     Oil exploration will begin very soon. Tourism can be encouraged by continued security of scenic and historic areas and by the erection of a new Hyatt Hotel. . . 
     South Vietnam needs foreign investment to finance these and other developments . . . SHE HAS A LARGE LABOR POOL OF TALENTED, INDUSTRIOUS PEOPLE WHOSE COST OF LABOR IS FAR LESS THAN HONG KONG, SINGAPORE, OR EVEN KOREA OR TAIWAN. . . 
     I also feel there is much profit to be made there. The combination of serving both God and Mammon had proved attractive to Americans and others in the past . . . Vietnam can be the next "take off" capitalistic showplace in Asia. 

   In the spring of 1975, everything that radical critics of American policy in Vietnam had been saying ---that without American troops, the Saigon government's lack of popular support would be revealed --- came true. An offensive by North Vietnamese troops, left in the South by terms of the 1973 truce, swept through town after town. 

Ford continued to be optimistic. he was the last of a long line of government officials and journalists who promised victory. [ Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, February 15, 1963 : "Victory is in sight." General William Westmoreland, November 15, 1967 : "I have never been more encouraged in my four years in Vietnam." Columnist Joseph Alsop, November 1, 1972 : "Hanoi has accepted near-total defeat." ]  On April 16, 1975, Ford said : "I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in by the time I asked --- or sometime shortly thereafter ---the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today." 

Two weeks later, April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese moved into Saigon, and the war was over.  Tiny Vietnam defeated giant America. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 4

NIXON QUIT IN AUGUST OF 1974, BUT PROBLEMS REMAINED WITH THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY

    That Nixon would go but the power of the President to do anything he wanted in the name of "national security" would stay ------this was underscored by a Supreme Court decision in July 1974. The Court said Nixon had to turn over his White House tapes to the special Watergate prosecutor. But at the same time it affirmed "the confidentiality of Presidential communications," which it could not uphold in Nixon's case, but which remained as a general principle when the President made a "claim of need to protect military, diplomatic or sensitive national security secrets." 

The televised Senate Committee hearings on Watergate stopped suddenly before the subject of corporate connections was reached. It was typical of the selective coverage of important events by the television industry : bizarre shenanigans like the Watergate burglary were given full treatment, while instances of ongoing practice ---the My Lai massacre, the secret bombings of Cambodia, the work of the FBI and CIA ---were given the most fleeting attention. Dirty tricks against the Socialist Workers party, the Black Panthers, other radical groups, had to be searched for in a few newspapers. The whole nation heard the details of the quick break-in at the Watergate apartment ; THERE WAS NEVER A SIMILAR TELEVISION HEARING ON THE LONG-TERM BREAK-IN IN VIETNAM. 

In the trial of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans for obstruction of justice in impeding a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Robert Vesco [ a contributor to Nixon] , George Bradford Cook, former general counsel of the SEC, testified that on November 13, 1972, he crouched in a Texas rice field while on a goose hunt with Maurice Stans, and told him he wanted to be chairman of the SEC. Forthis, he would cut out a critical paragraph in the SEC charges against Vesco that referred to Vesco's $200,000 secret contribution to the Nixon campaign. 

Corporate influence on the White House is a permanent fact of the American system. Most of it is wise enough to stay within the law ; under Nixon they took chances. An executive in the meatpacking industry said during the Watergate events that he had been approached by a Nixon campaign official and told that while a $25,000 contribution would be appreciated, "for $50,000 you get to talk to the President." 

Many of these corporations gave money to both sides, so that whichever won they would have friends in the administration. Chrysler Corporation urged its executives to "support the party and candidate of their choice," and then collected the checks from them and delivered the checks to Republican or Democratic campaign committees. 

International Telephone and Telegraph was an old hand at giving money on both sides. In 1960 it had made illegal contributions to Bobby Baker, who worked with Democratic Senators, including Lyndon Johnson. A senior vice-president of ITT was quoted by one of his assistants as saying the board of directors "have it setup to 'butter' both sides so we'll be in a good position whoever wins." And in 1970, an ITT director, John McCone, who also had been head of the CIA, told Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, and Richard Helms, CIA director, that ITT was willing to give $1 million to help the U.S. government in its plans to overthrow the Allende government in Chile. 

In 1971 ITT planned to take over the $1 1/2 billion Hartford Fire Insurance Company----the largest merger in corporate history. The antitrust division of the Justice Department moved to prosecute ITT for violating the antitrust laws. However, the prosecution did not take place and ITT was allowed to merge with Hartford.  It was all settled out of court, in a secret arrangement in which ITT agreed to donate $400,000 to the Republican party. It seemed that Richard Kleindiest, deputy Attorney General, had six meetings with an ITT director named Felix Rohatyn, and the brought in the head of the antitrust division, Richard McLaren, who was persuaded by Rohatyn that to stop the merger would cause a "hardship" for ITT stockholders. McLaren agreed. He was later appointed a federal judge. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973----Episode 3

THE WATERGATE BURGLARS GOT CAUGHT IN JUNE 1973

   After the Watergate burglary, Nixon and Agnew fell swiftly. In the November 1972 presidential election, they had won 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except Massachusetts, defeating an antiwar candidate, George McGovern. By June of 1973a Gallup Poll showed 67 percent of those polled thought Nixon was involved in the Watrergate break-in and lied to cover it up. 

By the fall of 1973 eight different resolutions had been introduced in the House of Representatives for the impeachment of Nixon. The following year a House committee drew up a bill of impeachment to present it to the full House. Nixon's advisers told him it would pass the House by the required majority and then the Senate would vote the necessary two-thirds majority to remove him from office. On August 8, 1974,Nixon resigned. 

Six months before Nixon resigned, the business magazine Dun's Review reported a poll of three hundred corporation executives. Almost all had voted for Nixon in 1972, but nw a majority said he should resign. "Right now, Wall Street would cheer if Nixon resigns," said vice-president of Merrill Lynch Government Securities. When he did, there was relief in all sectors of the Establishment. 

Gerald Ford, taking Nixon's office, said : "Our long national nightmare is over." Newspapers, whether they had been for or against Nixon, liberal or conservative, celebrated the successful, peaceful culmination of the Watergate crisis. "The system is working," said a long-time strong critic of the Vietnam war, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. The two journalists who had much to do with investigating and exposing Nixon, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post wrote that with Nixon's departure, there might be "restoration." All of this was in a mood of relief, of gratitude. 

No mainstream American newspaper said what was said by Claude Julien, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in September 1974 : "The elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal." Julien noted that Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, would remain at his post --- in other words, that Nixon's foreign policy would continue."That is to say," Julien wrote, "that Washington will continue to support General Pinochet in Chile, General Geisel in Brazil, Stroessner in Paraguay, etc. . ." 

Months after Julien wrote this, it was disclosed that top Democratic and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives had given secret assurance to Nixon that if he resigned they would not support criminal proceedings against him. One of them, the ranking Republican of the Judiciary Committee, said : "We had all been shuddering about what two weeks of floor debate on impeachment would do, how it would tear the country apart and affect foreign policy." The New York Times articles that reported on Wall Street's hope for Nixon's resignation quoted one Wall Street financier as saying that if Nixon resigned : "WHAT WE WILL HAVE IS THE SAME PLAY WITH DIFFERENT PLAYERS." 

When Gerald Ford, a conservative Republican who had supported all of Nixon's policies, was nominated for President, a liberal Senator from California, Alan Cranston, spoke for his on the floor, saying he had polled many people, Republicans and Democrats, and found "an almost startling consensus of conciliation that is developing around him." When Nixon resigned and Ford became President, the New York Times said : "Out of the despair of Watergate has come an inspiring new demonstration of the uniqueness and strength of the American democracy." A few days later the Times wrote happily that the "peaceful transfer of power" brought "a cleansing sense of relief to the American people." 

In the charges brought by the House Committee on Impeachment against Nixon, it seemed clear that the committee did not want to emphasize those elements in his behavior which were found in other Presidents and which might be repeated in the future. It stayed clear of Nixon's dealings with powerful corporations ; it did not mention the bombing of Cambodia. It concentrated on things peculiar to Nixon, not on fundamental policies continuous among American Presidents, at home and abroad. 

The word was out : get rid of Nixon, but keep the system. Theodore Sorensen, who had been an adviser to President Kennedy, wrote at the time of Watergate : "The underlying causes of the gross misconduct in our law-enforcement system now being revealed are largely personal, not institutional. Some structural changes are needed. All the rotten apples should be thrown out. But save the barrel." 

Indeed the barrel was saved. Nixon's foreign policy remained. The government connections to corporate interests remained. Ford's closest friends in Washington were corporate lobbyists. Alexander Haig, who had been one of Nixon's closest advisers, who had helped in "processing" the tapes before turning them over to the public, and who gave the public misinformation about the tapes, was appointed by President Ford to be head of the armed forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. One of Ford's first acts was to pardon Nixon, thus saving him from possible criminal proceedings and allowing him to retire with a huge pension in California. 

The Establishment had cleansed itself of members of the club who had broken the rules ---but it took some pains NOT to treat them too harshly. Those few who received jail sentences got short terms, were sent to the most easygoing federal institutions available, and were given special privileges not given to ordinary prisoners. Richard Kleindiest pleaded guilty ; he got a $100 fine and one month in jail, which was suspended. 

   

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---- Episode 2

     THE WATERGATE BURGLARS GOT CAUGHT IN JUNE
   1972

   Two of those implicated, E. Howard Hunt, and James McCord, had worked for many years for the CIA. Hunt had been the CIA man in charge of the invasion of Cuba in 1961, and three of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the invasion. McCord, as CREEP security man, worked for the chief of CREEP, John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States. 

Thus, due to an unforeseen arrest by police unaware of the high-level connections of the burglars, information was out to the public before anyone could stop it, linking the burglars to important officials in Nixon's campaign committee, to the CIA and to Nixon's Attorney General. Mitchell denied any connection with the burglary, and Nixon, in a press conference five days after the event, said, "the White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident." 

What followed the next year, after a grand jury in September indicted the Watergate burglars----plus Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy --- was that, one after another, lesser officials in the Nixon administration, fearing prosecution, began to talk. They gave information in judicial proceedings, to a Senate investigating committee, to the press. They implicated not only John Mitchell, but Robert Haldeman and John Erlichman, Nixon's highest White House aides, and finally Richard Nixon himself----in not only the Watergate burglaries, but a whole series of illegal actions against political opponents and antiwar activists. Nixon and his aides lied again and again as they tried to cover up their involvement. 

These facts came out in the various testimonies : 

1. Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a secret fund of $350,000to $700,000 ---- to be used against the Democratic party --- for forging letters, leaking false news items to the press, stealing campaign files. 

2. Gulf Oil Corporation, ITT [ International Telephone &telegraph ] , American Airlines, and other huge American corporations had made illegal contributions, running into millions of dollars, to the Nixon campaign. 

3. In September of 1971, shortly after the New York Times printed Daniel Ellsberg's copies of the top-secret Pentagon Papers, the administration planned and carried out---Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddly themselves doing it ----the burglary of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for Ellsberg's records. 

4. After the Watergate burglars were caught, Nixon secretly pledged to give them executive clemency if they were imprisoned, and suggested that up to a million dollars be given them to keep them quiet.  In fact, $450,000 was given to them, on Erlichman's orders. 

5. Nixon's nominee for head of the FBI [ J. Edgar Hoover had recently died ] , L. Patrick Gray, revealed that he had turned over the FBI records on its investigation  the Watergate burglary to Nixon's legal assistant, John Dean, and that Attorney General Richard Kleindienst [Mitchell had just resigned, saying he wanted to pursue his private life ] had ordered him not to discuss Watergate with the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

6.  Two former members of Nixon's cabinet---John Mitchell and Maurice Stans ---were charged with taking $250,000 from a financier named Robert Vesco in return for their help with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Vesco's activities. 

7. It turned out that certain material had disappeared from FBI files --- material from a series of illegal wiretaps ordered by Henry Kissinger, placed on telephones of four journalists and thirteen government officials ---and was in the White House safe of Nixon's adviser John Erlichman. 

8. One of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker, told the Senate committee that he had also been involved in a plan to physically attack Daniel Ellsberg while Ellsberg spoke at an antiwar rally in Washington. 

9. A deputy director of the CIA testified that Haldeman and Ehrlichman told him it was Nixon's wish that the CIA tell the FBI not to pursue its investigation beyond the Watergate burglary. 

10. Almost by accident, Alexander Butterfield, a witness before the Senate committee, told the Senate committee that President Nixon had tapes of all personal conversations and phone conversations at the White House. Nixon at first refused to turn over the tapes, and when he finally did, they had been tampered with : eighteen and a half minutes of one tape had been erased. 

11. In the midst of all this, Nixon's Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was indicted in Maryland for receiving bribes from Maryland contractors in return for political favors, and resigned from the vice-presidency in October 1973. Nixon appointed Congressman Gerald Ford to take Agnew's place. 

12. Over $10 million in government money had been used by Nixon on his private homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne on grounds of "security," and he had illegally taken ---with the aid of a bit of forgery ----a $576,000 tax deduction for some of his papers. 

13. It was disclosed that for over a year in1969--1970 the U.S. had engaged in a secret, massive bombing of Cambodia, which it kept from the American public and even from Congress. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973 ---- Episode 1

                 THE 1970s : WHEN THE SHIT HIT THE FAN 

   In the early seventies, the system seemed out of control---it could not hold the loyalty of the public. As early as 1970, according to the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center, "trust in government" was low in every section of the population. And there was a significant difference by class. Of professional people, 40 percent had "low" political trust in the government, of unskilled blue-collar workers, 66 percent had "low" trust. 

   Public opinion surveys in 1971---after seven years of intervention in Vietnam ---showed an unwillingness to come to the aid of other countries, assuming they were attacked by Communist-backed forces. Even for countries allied to the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or Mexico, right on our southern border, there was no majority opinion for intervening with American troops. As for Thailand, if it were under Communist attack, only 12 percent of whites interrogated would send troops, 4 percent of nonwhites would do so. 

   In the summer of 1972, antiwar people in the Boston area were picketing Honeywell Corporation. The literature they distributed pointed out that Honeywell was producing antipersonnel weapons used in Vietnam, like the deadly cluster bomb that had riddled thousands of Vietnamese civilians with painful, hard-to-extricate pellets. About six hundred ballots were given to the Honeywell employees, asking if they thought Honeywell should discontinue making the weapons. Of the 231 persons who returned the ballots, 131 said that Honeywell should stop, 88said it should not. They were invited to make comments. A typical "no" comment : "Honeywell is not responsible for what the Department of Defense does with the goods it buys. . ." A typical "yes" comment : "How may we have pride in our work when the entire basis for the work is immoral?" 

   The Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan had been posing the question : "Is the government run by a few big interests looking out for themselves ?" The answer in 1964 had been "yes" from 26 percent of those polled. An article in the Political Science Review by Arthur H. Miller, reporting on the extensive polling done by the Survey Research Center, said that the polls showed "widespread, basic discontent and political alienation." He added [ political scientists often took on the worries of the Establishment ] : "What is startling and somewhat alarming is the rapid degree of change in this basic attitude over a period of only six years." 

   More voters than ever before refused to identify themselves as either Democrats or Republicans. Back in 1940, 20 percent of those polled called themselves "independents." In 1974, 34 percent called themselves "independents." 

   The courts, the juries, and even the judges were not behaving as usual. Juries were acquitting radicals : Angela Davis, an acknowledged Communist, was acquitted by an all-white jury on the West Coast. Black Panthers, whom the government had tried in every way to malign and destroy, were freed by juries in several trials. A judge in western Massachusetts threw out a case against a young activist, Sam Lovejoy, who had toppled a 500-foot tower erected by a utility company trying set up a nuclear plant. In Washington, D.C., in August 1973, a Superior Court judge refused to sentence six men charged with unlawful entry who had stepped from a White House tour line to protest the bombing of Cambodia. 

   Undoubtedly, much of this national mod of hostility to government and business came out of the Vietnam war, its 55,000 casualties, its moral shame, its exposure of government lies and atrocities. On top of this came the political disgrace of the Nixon administration in the scandals that came to be known by the one-word label "Watergate," and which led to the historic resignation from the presidency ----the first in American history ---- of Richard Nixon in August 1974. 

  It  began during the presidential campaign in June of 1972, when five burglars, carrying wiretapping and photo equipment, were caught in the act of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in the Watergate apartment complex of Washington, D.C. One of the five, James McCord, Jr., worked for the Nixon campaign : he was "security" officer for the Committee to Re-elect the President [CREEP]. Another of the five had an address book in which was listed the name of E. Howard Hunt, and Hunt's address was listed as the White House. He was assistant to Charles Colson, who was special counsel to President Nixon. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR----Episode 39

THE U. S. INCREASES ITS INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM

   Growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam was taking place against a backdrop of heightened nuclear tensions. In late February 1954, U.S. authorities evacuated islanders and cleared all vessels from a large area of the Pacific in preparation for a new series of hydrogen bomb tests. Even though the wind shifted, they decided to proceed as planned with the March 1 Bravo test, knowing that this would put many people in harm's way. To make matters worse, the bomb exploded with twice the force predicted. At 15 megatons, it was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The cloud of radioactive coral drifted toward the Marshall Islands of Rongelap, Rongerik, and Utrik, contaminating 236 islanders and 28 Americans. Unaware of the danger, children played in the radioactive fallout. Many of the islanders were not evacuated for three days, by which time they were showing signs of radiation poisoning. Twenty-three fishermen aboard a Japanese trawler, Daigo Fukuryu Maru suffered a similar fate as they were blanketed by the deadly white ash that fell from the skies for three hours. When they pulled into a port thirteen days later with their contaminated tuna, crew members were showing signs of advanced poisoning. The first died several months later. 

The world was shocked by the United States' negligence and by the incredible power of the latest generation of nuclear weapons. Panic set in when people realized that the Japanese ship's contaminated tuna had been sold in four major cities and eaten by scores of people. Many people stopped eating fish entirely. Four hundred fifty-seven tons of tuna were eventually destroyed. AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss told the White House press secretary that the boat had really been a "red spy outfit" conducting espionage for the Soviet Union, a blatant lie that the CIA quickly dispelled. Speaking at Eisenhower's press conference, Strauss emphasized the test's contribution to the United States' "military posture." blamed the fishermen for ignoring AEC warnings, and downplayed the damage to their health. The inhabitants of Utrik were allowed to return within two months. The Rongalapese did not return home until 1957. They remained in Rongelap until 1985, when scientific findings confirmed their suspicions that the island was still contaminated. 

The international community was appalled. Belgian diplomat Paul-Henri Spaak warned, "If something is not done to revive the idea of the President's speech---the idea that America wants to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes ---- America is going to be synonymous in Europe with barbarism and horror." Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said publicly that U.S. leaders were "dangerous self-centered lunatics" who would "blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy." 

Eisenhower told the NSC in May 1954, "Everybody seems to think that we are skunks, saber-rattlers, and warmongers." Dulles added, "We are losing ground every day in England and in other allied nations because they are all insisting we are so militaristic. Comparisons are now being made between ours and Hitler's military machine." 

The bomb test had other unforeseen consequences. The terrifying power of hydrogen bombs and the slightly veiled threat of nuclear war now figured much more prominently in international diplomacy. The nuclear threat influenced the behavior of the major players at the Geneva Conference more than most people realized. Shortly after the test, Churchill told Parliament that the topic occupied his thinking "out of comparison with anything else." Dulles met with him in early May, afterward telling Eisenhower that he "found the British, and particularly Churchill, scared to death by the specter of nuclear bombs in the hands of the Russians." Anthony Eden connected this fear to the proceedings at the conference. "This was the first international meeting," he noted, "at which I was sharply conscious of the deterrent power of the hydrogen bomb. I was grateful for it. I do not believe that we should have got through the Geneva Conference and avoided a major war without it." 

The Lucky Dragon incident also catalyzed a worldwide movement against nuclear testing and popularized the previously obscure term "fallout." It sparked renewed questioning of Eisenhower's New Look. 

Nowhere was the reaction stronger than in Japan, where postwar U.S. efforts to censor discussion of the atomic bombings had not succeeded in extinguishing the memory of what the United States had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A petition circulated by Tokyo housewives calling for banning hydrogen bombs gathered 32 million signatures, an extraordinary total representing one-third of the entire Japanese population. 

To counter this pervasive anti-nuclear sentiment, the NSC's Operations Coordinating Board proposed that the United States launch a "vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy" and offer to build Japan an experimental reactor. AEC Commissioner Thomas Murray applauded this "dramatic and Christian gesture," believing it "could lift all of us far above the recollection of the carnage" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Washington Post offered its hearty endorsement, seeing the project as a way to "divert the mind of man from its present obsession with the armaments race" and added, in an extraordinary admission, "Many Americans are now aware . . . that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. . . How better to make a contribution to amends than by offering Japan the means for the peaceful utilization of atomic energy. How better, indeed, to dispel the impression in Asia that the United States regards Orientals merely as cannon fodder ! " 

In what would seem the cruelest irony yet, Murray and Illinois Representative Sidney Yates proposed building the first nuclear power plant in Hiroshima. In early 1955, Yates introduced legislation to build a 60,000 kilowatt generating plant in the city that less than a decade earlier had been the first target of the atomic bomb. 

Over the next few years, the U.S. Embassy, the CIA, and the United States Information Agency waged a large-scale propaganda and educational campaign to reverse the Japanese people's deep-seated hostility to nuclear power. The Mainichi newspaper denounced the campaign : "First, baptism with radioactive rain, then a surge of shrewd commercialism in the guise of 'atoms for peace' from abroad." 

A month after the powerful Bravo test, the New York Times reported that the recent tests confirmed Szilard and Einstein's fear that the cobalt bomb could be built, leading to widespread discussion of Szilard's revised estimate that four hundred one-ton deuterium-cobalt bombs would release enough radioactivity to end all life on the planet. 

A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times two days later offered the sobering news that Japanese scientist Tsunesaburo Asada had informed the Japan Pharmacological Society that the Soviets were producing a nitrogen bomb ---a hydrogen bomb enclosed with nitrogen and helium ----so dangerous that "if 30 such bombs are detonated simultaneously all mankind will perish in several years' time." As if that weren't frightening enough, the following February, German Nobel Laureate Otto Hahn, the physicist who had first split the uranium atom, lowered the requisite number from four hundred cobalt bombs to ten in a radio broadcast that could be heard throughout most of Europe. 

Although a cobalt bomb was never built, the possibility that it could be gave shape to the decade's darkest nightmares. The Lucky Dragon crew members remained hospitalized for more than a year. While recuperating in the hospital, one issued a poignant warning : Our fate menaces all mankind. Tell that to those who are responsible. God grant that they may listen." 

   

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE COMING CLASS WAR----Episode 38

IT'S  ONLY 1954 AND THE U.S. IS ALREADY POKING ITS NOSE INTO VIETNAM 

The day before Eisenhower's "falling domino" press conference, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy had taken the floor of the Senate to oppose the proposed U.S. military intervention. He dismissed the optimistic blather with which U.S. and French officials had been regaling the public for the past three years, including recent assurances of French victory by Arthur Radford and Secretary Dulles :  "No amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, 'an enemy of of the people' which has the sympathy and covert support of the people." Senator Lyndon Johnson had recently said that he was "against sending American GIs into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man's exploitation in Asia." 

On May 7, after fifty-six days, the French garrison fell. Representatives of the United States, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China met in Geneva. Dulles attended just long enough to make his displeasure apparent. He refused to shake hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai or to sit near any Communist delegates, and he objected to everything that was proposed, causing British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden's secretary to describe his "almost pathological rage and gloom." Despite the fact that the Viet Minh controlled most of the country and believed it deserved to govern it all, Viet Minh negotiators succumbed to Soviet and Chinese pressure and accepted a proposal that would briefly defer their nationwide takeover and allow France to save face. The two sides agreed to temporarily divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with Ho's forces withdrawing to the north and French-backed forces retreating to the south. The final declaration clearly stated, "the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary." The agreement also stipulated that neither side allow foreign bases on its soil or join a military alliance. 

The Viet Minh accepted this, in large part, because a national election was scheduled for July 1956 to unify the country. The United States refused to sign the accords but promised not to interfere with their implementation. But in fact it was betraying that promise as the words were coming out of the U.S. representative General Walter Bedell Smith's mouth.

So long as Bao Dai remained in charge in the South, the United States' prospects of holding Vietnam were virtually nonexistent. Bao Dai was unknown by the peasants and scorned as a French puppet and despised by the intellectuals, while Ho was heralded as a nationalist leader and adulated as the country's savior. As French troops prepared to leave the country, Americans maneuvered to replace Bao Dai with Ngo Dinh Diem, a conservative Catholic fresh from four years in exile, whom Bao had named prime minister. With the aid of Edward Lansdale, Diem wasted no time in crushing rivals and unleashing a wave of repression against former Viet Minh members in the South, thousands of whom were executed. 

In 1955, Diem called a referendum asking the South Vietnamese to choose between Bao Dai and himself. With the assistance of Lansdale, Diem "won"98 percent of the vote. Diem's U.S. backers formed the American Friends of Vietnam. Diem enthusiasts included Cardinal Francis Spellman and Joseph Kennedy, as well as Senators Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, and John F. Kennedy. Blinded by their anticommunism and their faith that this ascetic Catholic nationalist could turn the tide against overwhelming odds, they ignored what was obvious to independent observers like University of Chicago political theorist and foreign policy expert Hans Morgenthau. After visiting Vietnam in early 1956, Morgenthau described Diem as "a man . . . who acts with the craftiness and ruthlessness worthy of an Oriental despot . . . who as statesman lives by his opposition to Communism, but who is building, down to small details, a faithful replica of the totalitarian regime which he opposes." Morgenthau outlined a situation in which nine of the eleven opposition parties dared not operate openly : "Freedom of the press does not exist," and "nobody knows how many people are shot every day by the armed forces of the regime and under what circumstances." 

With the United States' backing, Diem subverted the most popular provision of the Geneva agreement, canceling the 1956 election that would have turned control of the nation over to the Communists. Eisenhower later commented, "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai." The insurgency was soon rekindled. 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 37

IN THE 1950s, THE U.S. BEGAN POKING ITS NOSE INTO THE AFFAIRS OF OTHER COUNTRIES, TELLING THEM HOW TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS & REMOVING REGIMES THAT DIDN'T DO AS THE U.S. DEMANDED 

   In 1954, events of significance were unfolding in Vietnam. In April, Ho Chi Minh's peasant liberation army, commanded by General Vo Nguyen Giap, and peasant supporters hauled extremely heavy antiaircraft guns, mortars, and howitzers through seemingly impassable jungle and mountain terrain to lay siege to desperate French forces at Dien Bien Phu . Incredibly, the United States was then paying 80 percent of the French costs to keep the colonialists in power. Eisenhower explained in August 1953, "when the United States votes $400,000,000 to help that war, we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesia territory and from Southeast Asia." He envisioned countries in the region falling like dominoes, ultimately leading to the loss of Japan. Nixon agreed :"If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya with its rubber and tin. The same is true of Indonesia. If this whole part of Southeast Asia goes under Communist domination or Communist influence, Japan, who trades and must trade with this area in order to exist, must inevitably be oriented towards the Communist regime." And U.S News & World Report cut entirely through any rhetoric about fighting for the freedom of oppressed peoples and admitted, "One of the world's richest areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That's behind U.S, concern. . . tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really about. The U.S. sees it as a place to hold---at any cost." 

The French asked for help. Though Eisenhower ruled out sending U.S. ground forces, he and Dulles considered various options to stave off an imminent French defeat. Pentagon officials drew up plans for Operation Vulture, an air campaign against Viet Minh positions. They also discussed the possibility of using two or three atomic bombs. Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan Twining later commented : 

     what [Radford and I] thought would be ---and I still think would have been a good idea---was to take three small tactical A-bombs----it's a fairly isolated area. . . You could take all day to drop a bomb, make sure you put it in the right place. No opposition. And clean those Commies out of there and the band could play the "Marseillaise" and the French would come marching out of Dien Bien Phu in fine shape. And those Commies would say, "Well, those guys may do this again to us. We'd better be careful." 

Eisenhower discussed the use of atomic bombs with Nixon and Robert Cutler of the NSC on April 30, 1954. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault and other French officials reported that Dulles had offered them two atomic bombs one week earlier. Eisenhower and Dulles later disputed such reports, but the use of atomic bombs would certainly have been consistent with U.S. policy at the time. Neither the British nor the French thought this wise or feasible. Evidence also suggests that the "new weapons" were vetoed because the Viet Minh at Dein Bien Phu were too close to French soldiers, who would be put into harm's way. As Eisenhower told Walter Cronkite in 1961, "we were not willing to use weapons that could have destroyed the area for miles and that probably would have destroyed Dien Bien Phu." 

Many scholars believe Eisenhower's and Dulles's disclaimers, but the United States' offer is mentioned in diaries and memoirs of French General Paul Ely, Foreign Minister Bidault, and Foreign Ministry Secretary General Jean Chauvel. France's interior minister had asked Premier Laniel to request the bombs. McGeorge Bundy also thinks it likely that Dulles raised the possibility with Bidault, as Bidault claimed, in part because the alleged offer coincided precisely with Dulles's comments to NATO about the necessity of making nuclear weapons conventional. In late April, the Policy Planning Staff of the NSC again discussed the prospect of using nuclear weapons. When Robert Cutler broached the subject with Eisenhower and Nixon, the record indicates that they again considered giving a few of the "new weapons" to the French. Years later, Eisenhower's recollection was quite different. He told his biographer Stephen Ambrose that he had replied to Cutler, "You boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God." 

Although no nuclear weapons were used at this time, Eisenhower did approve the Joint Chief' recommendation that should the Chinese intervene, the United States would respond with atomic bombs, not ground troops.