Truth Bomb: American History

Popping Propaganda Bubbles with Ten Bullet Points

Ten points on American history that add up to revolution. What they tell you in school and MSM does not make sense.

The reason why this history matters is that the past is not really over. If the American people learn the truth about how completely pointless the Vietnam war was, and the massive number of people killed for no reason, then maybe there would be more resistance to the current atrocities in the Middle East. The fact that George Washington paid to have two people lose their teeth and maybe their lives so that he could have some false teeth might be nothing more than a footnote if not for the continuing state of extreme racial inequality in the United States now. The fact that after World War I most nations in the industrialized world in Europe and Canada and Australia allowed their labor parties to take a prominent role and national government while in the United States the labor movement was crushed explains the high degree of any quality in the United States today.

I make these points not as an academic enterprise but in order to open a crack in the wall of propaganda that holds us in place even today.

Let’s get started.

1) The American Revolution was mostly about stealing land.

The American Revolution was most fundamentally about the rate of land confiscation from the native people. The colonists, first and foremost, wanted to steal more land more quickly.

The issue of land theft is alluded to in the Declaration of Independence, accusing the king of England of “endeavouring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages” down upon the colonists. In 1763, a royal proclamation prohibited settlement beyond the Appalachians.

If you think about it, land does seem like something people go to war over. Higher taxes might be annoying. Your traditional rights are worth defending. But generally, over the course of history, these kinds of issues do not usually motivate war and revolution. Land, on the other hand, is the key issue in most wars. The American Revolution is fairly incompressible if you ignore the land issue. Yet, we do ignore it. Land, bread, blood, life: all deep calls to arms. But taxes? Abstract rights? Really? Naw, land.

While some colonists certainly were used to low taxation and unlimited smuggling, many certainly valued their ancient rights as Englishmen, others were offended by taxation without representation, and there was corruption and stubbornness on the British side, if the British had used the money collected in the colonies to pay troops to relentlessly remove Indians and confiscate lands at a rapid pace, there would have been no American revolution. The colonists would have remained loyal to the crown, even if taxes went up, even if the crown made them board soldiers in their houses. The English, like the Americans, wanted to steal the Indians’ land, but not as aggressively. The Americans were in a big hurry.

Indeed, from the first English colony in 1609 to the time of the Revolution in 1776, English settlement had gone no further west beyond Albany, NY, about 120 miles or so in just under 200 years. In the first 50 years after the revolution, however, after settling the land question, by 1840, a time when canals, not trains, were the dominant form of technology in terms of transport, the Oregon trail was already up and running and the population of St. Louis was already 20,000. Larger cities were up and running in Ohio.

In other words, the impetus or final key element but not the only cause that motivated the American revolution against the British Parliament and King was the lack of aggressive enthusiasm of the English to quickly remove Indians.

2) The Constitution was mostly created to protect big money.

The main factor (again perhaps not the only issue) motivating the move from the Articles of Confederation to the US Constitution was to curtail the ability of local majorities to cancel debts and challenge moneyed interests through the ballot box or rebellion. Shay’s Rebellion was the most prominent example of local democracy but Rhode Island and Georgia passed legislation to simply cancel existing debts. If there were ten debtors to every creditor, what was there in the model of government to stop the people from simply voting to void their debts and start over?

Edward J. Larson and Michael P. Winship stated in The Constitutional Convention, “In several state legislatures, a new breed of politicians, often from lower social backgrounds, was passing debt-relief measures, most notoriously by issuing inflationary paper money. Such legislative action, Madison believed, was an attack on the rights of creditors and amounted to the few being plundered by the many.” Inflation was another debtor trick to void debts at the expense of financeers and rich lenders.

While there were certainly some high-minded thinking behind the Constitution, the main impetus was to establish a system of force and law that would protect the rich from redistribution by the poor; in other words, to stymie attempts at economic democracy. If the Articles of Confederation had not represented a threat to the rich, there would have been no movement to write a new constitution with a powerful unelected, lifetime, elite judiciary, and a President and Senate not directly elected by the people. Again, other factors may have been in play, but the deciding or overriding reason to pass the Constitution was that the masses could fairly easily overwhelm any given individual state and redistribute wealth. The federal government, with courts, soldiers and layers of bureaucracy between the people and the money, was meant put a stop to that kind of thing. And, in the past 240 years, the system has worked perfectly.

3) Racism is by far the most powerful and consistent ideology in American history.

Since the beginning of the Republic until now there has been a wide gap between Black and White people in the country in terms of life expectancy and life quality, income, and wealth. There can only be two possible reasons for this discrepancy: either there is something wrong with Black people or America is racist.

If the discrepancy were closing over time, you could argue that America was racist in the past and is becoming less racist now and in the future. This is a variation of the second case as above, putting racism mostly in the past. However, to make this “improvement” argument, the discrepancies would have to be narrowing quickly and definitely. However, these differences are not closing in the important category of wealth. The differences are closing in terms of life expectancy, but only due to an unprecedented decline in White, working class life expectancy in the Obama years. The decline in life expectancy among White people with no college in the United States is the first such decline anywhere in the developed world in 100 years. Even during World War I, English life expectancy increased, for example. Despite millions of young people dying, improvements in diet and public health made up the difference in overall life span. Not so in American now.

If the reason for the difference between the races over the past 400 years is that there is something wrong with Black people, what is the “something”? Until Alfred Russel Wallace and Darwin came along in the 1860s with the theory of evolution the “something” was usually a Biblical curse on Black people or some ill-defined, pre-scientific “climate theory.” After evolution, eugenics took hold in America. The ideologies of Nazism were first developed in the US and the UK. The Passing of the Great Race, 1913, a eugenics handbook by Madison Grant, was Hitler’s bible.

When eugenics fell out of favor in the decades after the Holocaust, new ideas came into play, mostly from the 1950s to today: Black families tend to be matriarchial, a culture of poverty, drugs, crack babies, passivity, welfare queens, and so on. None of these new racist ideas is in anyway true: Black people don’t take or sell more drugs than White people; when controlling for the education and income of the parents, Black teens are more likely to graduate from high school than White teens; Black fathers are more likely to read to their children in general and Black fathers tend to stay more involved in the lives of non-custodial children than do White fathers; crack babies did not grow up into crack adults because that was a one-off, quickie racist idea that was obviously pattenly false, etc. “Crack babies” goes into the category of “nice try” racist ideas that fell flat a little too unmistakably. But, facts aside, new ideas are always in development to explain the discrepancy between White and Black people other than ongoing racism.

The eugenics argument collapsed with a better understanding of genetics. “Race is a social, not a biological construct” is a phrase many have heard, even if this news from the frontier of science has not been really processed by the society. What this understanding of genetics means is that there is no way Black and White could be different genetically because these two groups are not “populations” in the genetic sense. There is no difference between the groups in terms of diversity between/within each set of people.

Eugenics is not true because it can’t be true. Still, most people probably believe in eugenics at some level. There was a time when almost 100% of biologists in America and around the world were scientific racists. Scientists don’t like to talk about it too much, but the damage they contributed to racism is very much alive and well today. Hilter did not come up with his ideas all on his own.

If the reason for this discrepancy between races keeps changing — Bible, genes, culture — you have to suspect these reasons can’t be true. I mean, hey America, you keep changing your story. Don’t guilty people who are lying change their story a lot?

The other explanation — racism — doesn’t change from decade to decade. The mechanism of racism changes — from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining, residential segregation, and mass incarceration — but the explanation, the reason, doesn’t change. Who is the more reliable witness? The one who has a single story that doesn’t change over time (“it’s racism, your honor”) or the other guy hemming and hawing (“it’s the curse of Ham, Darwinian hierarchy, a culture of poverty, or some of one and the other, or something else, your honor”).

Racism is America’s original sin. The problem is not gradually getting better, leading to an eventual extinction of race-based discrepancies. While lynchings petered out about a hundred years ago, the number of Black people killed by the police has increased to keep the level of state-condoned violence at about the same level over many years. While Klan violence and terror have abated, millions have suffered the horror of prison for non-violent drug offences, many convictions achieved through plea bargains, with a private prison industry profiting off the exchange. The wealth gap and income gaps between the two groups considered here have not closed or narrowed in the last 40 years. There is no sign of any concerted effort to abolish racism, and without that effort, the problem will remain.

4) America has experienced more political violence related to labor organizing than comparable countries in Europe, or in Canada.

Far from being the home of the free, America has been the home of spy, the strike breaker, the vigilante, COINTELPRO and the SWAT team for centuries. Between 1850 and 1979 somewhere around 700 workers were killed in strikes or labor actions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes). Between 1870 and 1935 there was never a year when workers were not killed by the police, army, national guard or private security agents. Almost all the deaths were in these 60 some years. I have written about the Red Scare of 1919 elsewhere (https://extranewsfeed.com/forget-2016-no-remember-1919-ba3db19f8a3f). I only cite the death rate because there are no good statistics on the number of people who got beated, evicted, imprisoned, etc.

It’s interesting that after the New Deal, labor violence receded dramatically. It seems like, apparently, if you give people a minimum wage, social security, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, a federal jobs program and the right to organize and strike, you don’t need violence and death. All that earlier violence could have been avoided if workers had been treated as valuable, real people, equal citizens as were the owners. Instead of giving workers a decent life, the government and the owners conspired to beat the workers down with violence, a pattern that didn’t stop until 1935. Other countries had political violence and systematic efforts to stop labor from organizing, but these efforts were not as comprehensive and did not last as long as comparable anti-labor campaigns in the United States.

International Socialists in 1912 declared “the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” Two years after promising to remain loyal to class and resist a capitalist, nationalist war, all the socialist parties of Europe fell into line and supported their individual national war efforts. In other words, they all sold or chickened out. By necessity and as a reward, after the war, socialists and labor parties were incorporated into the political structure of European political systems.

Not so in the US. Eugene Debs spent the war in prison for resisting the capitalist war. Instead of the political system accomodating the labor party, as in Europe, in 1919 and 1920 the US saw: 1) a peaceful, well organized general strike in Seattle collapse in the face of a threat by the mayor to call in troops and attacks on strikers in mainstream press; 2) an effort to organize the police force in Boston collapse when the Massachusetts governor, Calvin Coolidge, called in the National Guard and attacks on the police in the mainstream press; 3) a steelworkers strike collapse under media criticism and an attack that left 12 strikers dead; 4) the Tulsa race riot, over 300 black people killed by a white mob with police standing by; 5) the forced deportation of immigrants if they were perceived as pro-labor in a boat called the “Soviet Arc”; 6) another racial attack in Chicago that left approximately 28 black residents dead; 7) the passage of the amendment prohibiting alcohol sales in the US as a distraction from the labor issue (workers should stop drinking, not organize, that will solve the problem… a sort of dry run for the “crack baby” story).

The fact that the workers of America were divided into hostile groups or populations is certainly related to the lack of a labor party in US history. Indeed, Black people in the South retained the right to vote long after Reconstruction ended. Black workers voted Republican and White workers voted Democratic, so elites had nothing to worry about in most places. It wasn’t until the rise of the Populous Party in the 1890s that White elites got around to denying the vote to Southern Blacks everywhere.

If we consider the history of racist massacres in the context of anti-labor violence, we would have to triple or quadruple the number of deaths in state-sponsored anti-worker terrorism. Colfax and Tulsa are two of the most chilling mass killings, race riots, but there were hundreds more attacks. Racist massacres relate to anti-labor violence, as both types of violence combined to help prevent the formation of a worker’s party in the US.

Pinkerton spies and other contractors pretending to be union members often instigated violence. Later, the FBI routinely took over the role of provocateur and spy. This state-sponsored sabotage of worker’s movements and left-wing politics never stopped. In 1971, we found out about some of the state-sponsored death squads operating in the US… but did not address the problem, which continues. You might look at this article as well (https://medium.com/@willpflaum/1971-meet-2016-afe1dcea3c2e). The Phoenix Program in Vietnam was transferred in some part to the US. Domestic spying is widespread (https://bullshit.ist/vault-7-the-russian-hacking-story-is-over-dee16d7cdc8).

5) The United States government has never gone 50 years without conducting a mass murder event that is close to genocide.

The Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Gnadenhütten massacre, the Autossee Massacre: American history does not lack for massive massacres of Native Americans. Wounded Knee in 1890 is perhaps the last big one in the series, almost 300 years after the first one on American soil. As time goes by in this story, the gratuitousness of the violence seems to grow more horrible, as the power imbalance between the sides increased. Families uprooted from their farms, villages torched, often by US troops or settlers backed by the army: for many of these nations, some fairly small, the percentage of people killed in direct violence in these single incidents is higher than the percentage of the population killed in the famous national genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.

The slave trade meant a steady stream of massacres. While the legal international slave trade ended in 1808, the domestic slave trade continued right until the end of the Civil War. Indeed, in 1807 the rush to get as many slaves into the market before the prohibition on the importation of slaves from aboard took effect in 1808 lead to a glut of slaves in Charleston, SC such that overcrowding and ships backlogged in the harbor lead to hundreds of deaths. The unburied corpses in the streets and floating in the bay were a health hazard for the city at large. Slave trading deaths from 1609 until 1865 would likely amount to hundreds of thousands within and for the US market.

During the American war to colonize the Philippines, in 1901, Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell pioneered or perhaps even invented the concentration camp. The death rate for Filipino prisoners in American custody from 1898 to 1902, at about 20% per year or perhaps 20,000 people, exceeded the rate in percentage terms of Stalin’s gulags in the 1930s.

Harry Truman authorized the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Nagasaki was bombed on August 9. Also on August 9, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. The Soviets and Mongolians terminated Japanese control of Manchukuo, Mengjiang (Inner Mongolia), northern Korea, Karafuto, and the Chishima Islands. Japan announced their surrender on August 15. Did the atomic bomb have anything to do with Japan’s decision to surrender? Probably not: rather, the Japanese leadership decided it was better to surrender to the United States than to Stalin. These bombings, the only time atomic weapons were ever used in war, were demonstrations to impress the Russians and had no strategic impact on the outcome of the war. About 200,000 were killed, combining those killed instantly and those killed from radiation. “Japan did bad stuff too!” is not particularly relevant: this essay is not about Japan.

The argument that the US had to use the bomb to avoid the loss of tens of thousands of American troops during the invasion of Japan does not make the least bit of sense and is complete propaganda. Joseph Stalin would certainly have been happy to send the Red Army into Japan and conquer the entire nation and set up a Soviety satellite, as in Eastern Europe. In the mere 6 days of war between the USSR and Japan, Stalin captured vast areas. Resistance seemed to be crumbling. Not a single American needed to lose his life to subdue Japan. Ah, but the Americans did not want the Russians to take Japan. Well, then, that’s the reason. If America had dropped no bombs on Japan, the government would have likely surrendered on August 15 anyway. In any event, the US could have packed up and gone home by August 9: Stalin was ready to take over.

America underwrote the French period of the Vietnam War 1946–54 financially, then underwrote local actors or participated directly until 1975. During this period, some perhaps 1.5 million people died. However, if the US had recognized the independent government of Ho Chi Mihn in 1945, none of these people would have died. By law, morality and even simple expediency there was never any good reason for the United States not to recognize the legitimate and popular government in 1945 or at any time after that point. The Vietnamese leaders would have welcomed good relations with the US as a counterweight to the power of China, next door, at any point in this completely unnecessary slaughter. The Vietnamese Communist party was always suspicious both the Chinese and Russians and only worked with these entities because the French and Americans did not recognize their sovereignty.

In 1954, the US backed a coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala Jacobo Árbenz. From there, the US backed with arms, training and direct military aid by US troops the forces of the right in the 36-year civil war that only ended in 1996. About 140,000–200,000 people were killed or disappeared. The overwhelming majority of those killed were victims of official-sanctioned terror by government forces. If the US had not overthrown Árbenz but stayed completely out of Guatemala politics during this period, almost none or in fact none of these people would have died. Local conflict and the need for land reform might well have been resolved peacefully through the ballot box, as in 1954. If there had been conflict outside of constitutional politics, the level of violence would have been far less sans US interference.

In 2001, the US military invaded Afghanistan. In 2018, US troops remain in the country. Over the course of this longest of American wars, a significant percentage of the population has made it quite clear that American influence is not welcome. According to the Watson Institute for International Studies Costs of War Project, roughly 31,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the war up to the middle of 2016.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. Torture and routine human rights abuses by US forces are well documented, most notoriously at Abu Ghraib. The child malnutrition rate rose to 28%. By the end of 2015, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 4.4 million Iraqis had been internally displaced, with another two million displaced internationally. The population of Iraqi Christians dropped dramatically during the war, from 1.5 million in 2003 to perhaps only 275,000 in 2016. The overall death toll is perhaps 500,000.

In each case of an atrocity, such as Mai Lai or Abu Ghraib, apologists for the US military say these events are mistakes or deviations from the norm. Yet, if you have an unbroken history of mass killing and torture, violence and lawlessness is obviously the norm. The list of killing above is abbreviated to only include a few examples with very significant loss of life.

6) Elections in the United States are not free, fair and democratic.

Let’s consider the minimum conditions for a free and fair democratic election. Every person’s vote has to count equally. In order for elections to truly represent an expression of the people’s will, a free press is a prerequisite. While majorities may rule, minority opinions have to have some kind of voice. Legislators cannot be allowed to take bribes. Rich people cannot be allowed to buy the votes from poorer people. There cannot be arbitrary criteria for vetting candidates prior to the election by some unelected body. The legislature has to have actual power and not serve as a rubber stamp for some other power, nor only pretend to debate and decide matters of public policy. The United States fails in every one of these criteria.

As to one person, one vote, the US clearly fails. Wyoming and California have the same weight in the national Senate although the population of California is 540 times greater. If this were the only deviation from one person, one vote, we might let it slide as a cute historical relic. However, in the presidential elections the “swing state” phenomenon renders the votes of 90% of the populace effectively meaningless. Further, the fact that US has almost exclusively winner-take-all elections means that minority (whether ethnic or ideological minorities) voices are vastly underrepresented in the legislature. If 51% of the people in all districts agree on something, this 51% would control 100% of the seats in Congress, to exaggerate the effect of winner-take-all elections to demonstrate the basic unfairness of this model. Next, gerrymandering even further reduces the relationship between voting and representation. Next, the number of house representatives, 435, has been fixed for a long time. When the population was much lower, congresspeople really were something like well-known people in the neighborhood. Now, even the lower house requires vast expenditures of money to reach a population of some 140,000 people.

All of this undemocratic structure would be bad enough if legislators did actually represent the people. However, the equivalent of bribery is legal in the US, as former Congresspeople get jobs as lobbyists, sit on the boards of banks, and former presidents and other officials take “speaking fees” from entities they regulate once out of office. While in office, they get “campaign contributions” and other perks. The net effect is that, as shown in the Princeton study of oligarchy in America, rich people get almost everything they want from Congress and non-rich people get almost nothing they want from Congress.

Further, the US press is not free. As income and wealth inequality is a central issue in the US, the fact that speech is expensive means that the press has an interest in suppressing any voice calling for the redistribution of wealth. This relationship is quite evident in the Podesta leak published by Wikileaks in 2016. Direct suppression of dissenting voices includes the imprisonment of Barrett Brown, possibly the murder of Gary Webb, and the illegal detention of Julian Assange.

Next, the nominating or primary process in the Democratic and Republican parties is critical to a functioning democracy. America’s winner-take-all elections almost guarantee a two-party system. Simply, building a coalition within a party makes more strategic sense in winner-take-all elections, as opposed to proportional representation, thus leading to two “big tent” parties. However, as the court just ruled in the DNC lawsuit filed by Jared and Elizabeth Beck, parties are not constrained to run free and fair elections. As Boss Tweed said, “I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.” If by law we don’t have to have fair primaries, the US is no more democratic than Iran. In Iran, candidates are vetted by a religious body. In America, a body of politicians and insiders brided by oligarchs can legally overrule the majority of a particular party and install anyone they want as a general election candidate.

Lastly, it isn’t clear that Congress can, in fact, exercise the power the body has under the Constitution in theory. James Clapper’s lies about the NSA email surveillance should have triggered contempt and perjury charges, were the Constitution relevant to actual governance. If unelected military and spy officials like Clapper can lie to Congress and read everyone’s email with no consequence, then that seems to indicate Congress is a paper Tiger with no real authority over the military and spy agencies. Congress, in theory, has the authority and responsibility to declare war and enforce treaties. Yet the torture program under George Bush Jr. clearly violates the 1987 United Nations Convention against Torture and Barack Obama’s war in Libya had no Congressional authorization of any kind. Does Congress actually matter?

7) The courts only work for the rich and powerful.

The federal court system has always been a bulwark for the powerful, enabling the powerful to run roughshod over the weak. Never in the history of the United States has the Supreme Court served as a means for repressed or persecuted minorities to achieve equal rights in a system of majority rule. Never has the Supreme Court been willing or able to protect slaves, workers, women, minorities, American Indians, or common citizens from high finance, industrialist, slaveowners, railroad companies, spy agencies, law enforcement, or the military. The Supreme Court has always been and is now the tool of the powerful to oppress the weak. I have written about this before. (https://medium.com/@willpflaum/the-supreme-court-sucks-c40c1ed56e7e)

8) The anti-Federalists were often right about the US constitution.

The fears of the anti-federalists, those that opposed the Constitution back in the 18th century, have largely come to pass such that the Constitution is not, in fact, the basis on which the government operates. In other words, the Constitution isn’t very important to what the government actually does and the forms of tyranny that the anti-federalists feared the Constitution would allow all exist right now.

The anti-Federalist worried a standing army would be a threat to liberty. We now live in a militarized, imperialist Deep State situation where the military-spies-industrial complex tells the elected government what to do, not the other way around, just as the anti-federalists feared. The FBI has spied on and murdered left-wing activists and Black Panthers who were guilty of no crimes, among other groups. The 70 billion dollar CIA budget buys them good press in the Washington Post and other outlets. The military has bases in 190 countries. This vast military empire, operating both inside and outside our borders and completely outside the control of the people through elections, is exactly what the anti-Federalists worried about. They are absolutely right.

The anti-Federalists were also worried about the federal government regulating commerce such that the big guys would have all the advantages. Well, income inequality has always been a problem since the Constitution was passed, as predicted, and there is no doubt that larger interests have an advantage in lobbying, picking judges, and buying politicians at the federal level.

The anti-Federalists were concerned that there was no Bill of Rights in the first draft of the Constitution and that individual liberty would be squashed under a strong central state. While it is true that a Bill of Rights was passed more or less at the same time as the Constitution, this list of 10 amendments has never, and does not now, protect individual liberty. For example, the tenth amendment has never been used to expand liberty and individual rights. The fourth and fifth amendments, meant to protect citizens from unfair imprisionment and overly imposing state surveillance, do not, in fact, protect us from CIA “fake off” televisions and NSA email downloads. Further, these amendments did not stop several hundreds of clearly innocent people from being falsely convicted and sent to prison for life and/or death row. The string of exonerations based on DNA and other evidence over the past ten years by the Innocence Project and others demonstrate that constitutional protections against unfair prosecution are not effective. Meanwhile, powerful elites can ignore provisions of the Constitution that get in their way. Obama and both Bushes violated the war powers provisions, ignored binding treaty obligations, including the Geneva Convention.

9) The class or caste structure of America is rigid. Asia and Europe do a better job at social mobility.

We like to say that the United States is the land of opportunity, where if you work hard you can succeed and that we have some kind of meritocracy. However, this idea is a complete and total myth. Vietnam, Germany, Korea, France, China and many other “old world” countries do far better a providing a level playing field for everyone to rise and fall based on ability and merit than does the United States. While many countries provide educational opportunities for all, or at least many, the United States has a rigid caste-like system of racial and class rank that does not allow the poor to rise and prevents the rich from ever losing their inherited fortunes, regardless of how stupid and lazy the Waltons and their ilk may be.

One measure of mobility can be found in international achievement tests. There are a number of international achievement tests: Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and others. In these tests, there is a category called “resilient learners.” These resilient students are kids from the poorest and least educated one-fourth of the population who nevertheless score the top fourth in terms of test results. This measure is just one way of looking at social mobility but it’s a pretty good little numerical window on a society. The US does terribly, the Asian countries like Korean and Vietnam do well, and Europe does mediocre.

No one should be surprised America’s terrible performance in terms of resilient learners. You don’t need a test to tell you that the schools in the rich, White suburbs are better than the schools in the poor, minority-dominated part of town, or that rural West Virginia is unlikely to get the same resources as Scarsdale, New York.

America has a unique system of private schools and universities. These institutions depend almost completely on endowments. Because of the structure of our tax law, places like Princeton are classified as “non-profit” and do not pay taxes on the earnings from their massive endowment. So, if the university turns a nice 15% profit, they can build a shiny new dorm with private rooms and individual bathrooms, to attract millionaire students who are likely to become rich adults and can donate yet more money to the endowment. Princeton does not pay taxes to the government to support the education of poor people in public schools: they get to do whatever they want with their money. Working people actually subsidize these institutions, providing infrastructure to allow these scofflaw schools to do avoid their social responsibilities through routine tax payment. Princeton could let in some students on scholarship. And they do let in a couple. But generally, they use their endowment to attract more elite attention, more unneeded donations and to pump up their prestige.

As the rich in America don’t pay much inheritance taxes, generation after generation of morons can buy their way into private schools, bribe their way into elite colleges, use their connections to get into monopoly-like corporations and organizations. They never get arrested, no matter how many laws they break. They don’t have to cram for the SAT. They can take as many drugs as they want. There is almost no social mobility. If you are born poor, your kids will die poor too.

10) The free market ideology is a fraud and a failure.

The neo-classical ideology, neo-liberal if you will, says that markets self-correct. They claim that austerity in government spending is good for the economy. The neo-liberals claim that the market operates by a system that is almost natural, like an ecosystem. These proponents of classical economics claim that governments should not regulate markets much or at all. According to this school, there is some sort of merit or logic to the distribution of wealth within society. All of these propositions are utter horseshit and even a glancing look at recent history shows these Nobel-winning economic liars are lying, as they well know.

By 2008, the neo-liberals had gotten everything they wanted: deregulation, an end to Keynesian economics, the defeat of socialism. Both political parties in the US were in their pockets. They were riding high and set the rules. Then, the market imploded. In no conceivable way did this crash have anything to do with any action by the government. The markets did the 2008 crash all on their own with no interference.

What happened? The banks and other institutions were vastly over-leveraged. Then, credit default swaps were based on mortgage-backed securities. These securities were, through fraud, rated higher than they should have been. The pre-condition of overleverage is absolutely critical: if the government had regulated the loan to asset ratio, as in the past, the crisis would not have happened. I covered the transfer of 13 trillion in private debts to the people in another article (https://medium.com/@willpflaum/back-then-is-right-now-no-progress-or-why-you-should-be-a-revolutionary-1d0c492c799b).

The moment the market went belly up, what did our brave invisible hand of the market, neo-liberals do? Come running to the state to bail them out. All of a sudden, and just for a few months, we were back to the government spending to stimulate the economy. When the banks got back on their feet, but not the people, not the homeowners and certainly not Black America, all of a sudden the crisis was over and there was no more need to stimulate the economy and we were back to neo-liberalism as if nothing had happened.

It’s kind of important to pay attention to what happened. Under Bush-Obama, they pulled a fast one on us. And in Europe, Deutsche Bank did a number on all of Southern Europe. Why are we still listening and being ruled by these guys who got it all wrong and robbed us blind?

Conclusion

So there you have it: the media and your history class are lying to you. Wake up and smell the revolution.