The Myths that Drive America’s Love of Guns

Americans love their guns – love them so much there are actually more guns in this country than there are people. Love them so much that, when dozens of people – mostly children – were slaughtered at an elementary school in Newtown, CT,  the media became filled with politicians and gun nuts defending lax gun control laws by claiming guns are an American heritage, an inherent right – why, even a God-given right. (I must have missed the part in the Bible about the Arsenal of Eden.)

Americans love their guns, though, not because it’s a right or heritage. They love their guns because of a mythology that has grown around them, a mythology inspired by cheap novels and cheaper movies. Most of what Americans think they know of their history is pure myth, and no where else in American history is there more mythology than the history of guns in this country.

Myth #1: The Second Amendment was written to protect the right to own guns.

Fact: The original intention of the Second Amendment was not to protect gun ownership, but to prohibit a standing army. Many of our Founding Fathers felt a standing army would tempt future leaders to indulge in foreign adventurism. In this they were right. Just think about Iraq.

Originally, the first line of the Second Amendment was worded something like, “Congress will make no provision for a standing army, but will rely on the militia of the states for the country’s defense.” Because of this reliance on militias, it continued, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The amendment, as originally written, was strongly opposed by George Washington and his lieutenants. Washington was well aware of the failings of the militia. In 1754, when Washington was a colonial militia officer, undisciplined militiamen under his command killed a French envoy, setting off the French and Indian War. Nor did the performance of rebel militia during the Revolution change his mind.

Because of Washington’s opposition, the wording prohibiting a standing army was removed from the Second Amendment, leaving just the last enigmatic line: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In the end, the Founders believed each state would maintain its own militia by requiring each male citizen to serve a certain number of years in the organized militia. It was essentially a military draft of sorts. Today, however, there is no mandatory military service in the United States. Less than one percent of Americans ever serve in the military, so a “well regulated Militia” cannot be the answer to America’s love for guns.

Myth #2: A ragtag Patriot militia beat the most powerful fighting force in the world, the British Army.

Fact: After the battles at Lexington-Concord and Bunker Hill, the militia played at best a minor role in the Revolution. It was a well-trained, professional Continental Army led by George Washington – and backed up by the French army and navy – that defeated the British.

Contrary to popular belief, Minutemen were not born of the American Revolution, but were part of colonial forces since the mid-1650s. They were not ordinary militia, but an elite force of well-trained military reservists capable of responding instantly to attacks from hostile Indians or Frenchmen. Some American rebel militia usurped the name “Minutemen” in the months leading up to the Revolution, but the real pre-Revolution Minutemen actually ended up on both sides of the war.

Most Americans are unaware there were both rebel and loyalist militia in the Revolution. According to Thomas B. Allen, author of “Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War,” both sides had roughly equal numbers of militiamen at their disposal, though the Tory militiamen were better armed, uniformed and trained. One of the best-known Tory militia units was the British Legion, a vicious, rampaging force commanded by the British officer Banastre Tarleton and, ironically, portrayed in Mel Gibson’s movie “The Patriot” as a British army troop.

The Patriot militia, on the other hand, was much less effective. In a 1776 letter to the president of the Congress, Washington wrote: “To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill ... makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows.”

And fly they did – frequently. At the Battle of Camden, the militia that made up half the Patriot force broke and ran at the first shot, causing a defeat for Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates. Such performance was so much the norm that in the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan used it to lure British forces, including Tarleton’s legion, into a trap.

Morgan placed his greenest militia at the front of his lines and, knowing they would break and run, pleaded with them to fire just two volleys before retreating. Tarleton’s forces chased the militia into the teeth of Morgan’s lines, composed of Continental soldiers, including the general’s famed Morgan’s Rifles, and more experience militia. Tarleton’s forces were annihilated.

In his article, “Militia or Regular Army,” published in the European Journal of American Studies, historian Tal Tovy points out that Washington’s early strategy of hit-and-run tactics was based entirely on his need to rely on militia with unreliable fighting abilities. It was only after he had time to develop a professionally-trained Continental Army that Washington began confronting the British head-on.

It was that Continental Army, with the backing of several thousand French troops, which brought about the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown, VA.

Myth #3: Our Founding Fathers believed an armed citizenry was needed to defend liberty against a tyrannical government.

Fact: As discussed earlier, Washington and his lieutenants convinced Congress that militias could not be relied on alone to defend the country against foreign invaders. Why then would they think the same unreliable force would be able to defend the Constitution against their own government, tyrannical or otherwise?

Furthermore, when the Whiskey Rebellion erupted in 1791 – just three years after the Constitution was ratified – it was harshly put down by an army composed of federalized state militia led by President George Washington. The harsh response to the rebellion was applauded by Americans and proved the new U.S. government would brook no unrest among the states.

Several more such rebellions were similarly suppressed. Most notable was John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, also put down by well-trained federal forces (U.S. Marines) led by U.S. Army Col. Robert E. Lee.

Myth #4: Gun control is a modern liberal plot to take weapons away from honest citizen gun owners.

Reenactment of the Gunfight at OK Corral.
(c. James G. Howes, 2008)

Fact: Gun control laws date back to at least the 1820s, and they were widespread in the western frontier.  In fact, gun violence was far less tolerated in the Old West than most people think. After all, shootouts were not good for business.

Far fewer cowboys carried guns on the trail than you might expect. In fact, many cattle barons prohibited their cow hands from carrying personal weapons to avoid violence among their workers, and also to prevent an accidental gunshot that could stampede the cattle.

Still, it was conceivable that out on the range, a gun might be a necessity. But once in town those guns had to be turned into the local sheriff’s office. Even in towns without gun control laws, saloons normally wouldn’t serve you until you first turned over your gun to the bartender.

Gunfights, in fact, were relatively rare in the not so Wild West because of these strict gun control laws. The most famous shootout, the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ, ironically was fought over Tombstone’s gun control law. The Clanton gang refused to turn in their guns and the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday set out to force the issue.

Gun laws in old Tombstone, in fact, were stricter than they are in Arizona today where citizens are allowed to carry handguns nearly everywhere they go. It makes you wonder if the Clanton gang hadn’t actually won the OK Corral gunfight.

So where did all this Old West gun lore come from? Dime novels written in the late 1800s to entertain tenderfoots in the East were notorious for exaggerating the myth of the cowboy and his six shooter. Self-serving books written by or about legendary lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett added to the mythology. A fledgling Hollywood added to it by making idealized cowboy movies a mainstay of its early films.

But the worst perpetrator of these gun myths is the National Rifle Association. The NRA and the gun manufacturers it represents have pushed these myths down the throat of Americans for decades. They call weapons like the Colt .45 revolver and the Winchester repeating rifle the guns that won the West. And the massive amounts of money they give to politicians make many a lawmaker a true believer.

In fact, relatively few people in the Old West owned handguns. They were expensive and hard to shoot accurately. Repeating rifles were also too expensive for most folks. Rejected by the U.S. Army, repeating rifles largely ended up in the hands of hostile Native American warriors. The most widely used gun the in the Old West, in fact, was the unglamorous double-barrel shotgun.

But the NRA has succeeded in making too many Americans believe you can’t be a good American unless you’re heavily armed at all times. And that puts the lie to the last great gun myth.

That the good guys always win.

Why the South Cannot Rise Again

I have often argued that had the Confederacy successfully seceded from the Union, the American South today would be part of Mexico. The South was never in a strong position for war. It was an agricultural region with little capability for manufacturing war materiel. Had it been sprung from the Union, the French Army occupying neighboring Mexico would have marched into the South in such a way as to make Sherman’s March to the Sea look like an afternoon hike.

In the aftermath of President Barrack Obama's election, a bunch of Obama-hating post-election dead-enders passed around petitions in all 50 states calling for secession from the Union. Most of the action, of course, was in the Red states, those that vote most often for Republicans. And most of those Red states are in the Old South. Since Donald Trump took up domicile in the White House, his racist-bating rhetoric has only encouraged those same dead-enders.

I stand by my conjecture above. If secession succeeded today, the result would be the same as it would have a century and a half ago—the South would still end up part of Mexico.

But it won’t succeed. It won’t even get a start. Bigotry might still be alive in Dixie, but the sociological

conditions that allowed the secession of the South in 1860 simply don’t exist today.

A Rich Man’s Movement

The southern secession movement in the mid-1800s was largely a rich man’s movement. The South has always been more oligarchic than the North. Plantations owners wielded great political power. They used their wealth to finance “filibusters,” mercenaries armies sent to take over Latin American countries to turn them into future slave states. Abolition threatened their cheap source of labor and that, in turn, threatened their profit margins.

The average southern man, however, was simply poor and ill-educated. He had little knowledge of the Union, or anything beyond a few square miles of the state in which he lived. Typically, he had no concern about slavery one way or another. To him, his state was his country. The idea of blue coats marching into his state was simply an act of aggression against his country. As a result, southern men were easily fooled into becoming cannon fodder for slave owners looking to save their profits.

To begin with, African Americans are no longer an enslaved people in the South. Minorities of all races are becoming the majority in the United States. Unlike the 1800s, they have a voice—a strong voice. And they vote.

The populace of the South today is also much better educated and much more aware of the rest of the country, if not the world. Far more of them were raised in other states, or studied in other states. They have a world view that just didn’t exist in the 19th century.

Moreover, those better educated Southerners are well aware that their very livelihoods depend on spending from Washington, D.C.

Dependent on Washington

Federal spending on such programs as defense, aerospace, agriculture, energy, Social Security, and Medicare is heaviest in the Red states. As much as some of their citizens might think of themselves as independent and self-reliant, they are actually the biggest “takers,” receiving far more federal funds per person than they send to Washington in taxes.

According to research conducted by the business website 24/7 Wall St., Red states make up eight of the top 10 states receiving the most federal dollars: North Dakota, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, Maryland, Virginia, and Alaska. Connecticut and Hawaii were the only Blue states in the top 10. Research by the Washington Post found similar results.

The fact is this Union is held together by an economic spider web of federal spending. Any attempt by a state to break away would result in an immediate economic collapse in that state. Large corporations with federal contracts – whose only loyalty lies with the source of their profits – would quickly pull up roots and relocate to a loyal state to keep those contracts. Subcontractors working for those corporations would do likewise or wither. Housing markets in secession states would collapse as workers moved to Union states to keep their jobs, and construction jobs would soon disappear.

Breakaway states where the economy relies on imported and exported products would be unable to do either. The federal government not only controls all the air corridors crisscrossing the nation, but also all the intrastate waterways. Without the FAA to regulate air traffic, or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to maintain ports or rivers like the Mississippi and the Missouri, commerce would come to a standstill.

Defenseless

Seceding states would be left defenseless from outside aggression. In 1860, state militias were funded entirely by the states. When the Civil War started, they were able to raise an army from state-funded militia. But it didn't last. The Confederate states were unable – perhaps unwilling – to raise enough tax revenue to fund the rebel army. By the end of the war, the Confederate Army was short of everything needed by its troops—clothing, shoes, food, ammunition. Johnny Reb fought much of the war barefoot and starving.

Had the South successfully seceded, its army would have been no match for the French army in Mexico. Napoleon III was keen on recapturing land the first Napoleon reluctantly sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Throughout the Civil War, French troops stood ready to invade the American south had the opportunity arose.

Today, Washington, DC pays 95 percent of the costs to maintain each state’s National Guard, the modern day organized state militia. Since Red states today are as reluctant to raise taxes as their Civil War predecessors, it would be impossible for them to maintain their state militias. Any border state that secedes from the Union would see its state militia fall apart, leaving the state vulnerable to invasion from more powerful countries such as Mexico, Canada or, in the case of Alaska, Russia.

When our Founding Fathers created this country in the 18th century, they originally founded a confederation of states. The loose bounds of that confederacy made governance nearly impossible, so our Founders created the Union.

In 1860, the seceding states also created a confederation. It worked no better than the original confederation. Despite early rebel battle victories, the Confederacy could not support its army or maintain itself as a country.

There is no reason to believe a third try would be the charm.

 

The Myth of Republican National Security Prowess

Each election year, Americans are bombarded with Republican claims that the Democrats are weak on defense, and only the GOP can protect America. Historically, however, the Republican Party has been pathetically weak on national security – so bad in fact, we came close to losing more than one war.

After the end of the American Civil War, the Republican Party opposed maintaining an  army of any appreciable strength. As soon as the war ended, the GOP-controlled Congress reduced the U.S. Army to a bare shadow of its wartime strength. They did this despite the fact that a very clear and present danger existed at the country’s southern border. At that point in history, the much larger French Army occupied Mexico. French dictator, Napoleon III, openly harbored  a desire to wrestle control of France’s former Louisiana Territory back from the United States. 

Nevertheless, Republicans repeatedly cut the army’s strength. Throughout the late 1800s, during which the GOP held virtual one-party rule, the American army’s strength dropped to 27,000 regular troops. What troops we did have were poorly trained and poorly armed. While the rest of the world’s armies were adopting modern magazine-fed repeating rifles, the U.S. Army was still armed with archaic single-shot Springfield “Trapdoor” rifles, many of them simply remanufactured from Civil War muzzle loading guns. 

During the Indian Campaigns of that period, many of the Native American tribes were better armed than the average army regiment. Col. George Custer and the men who met their fate with him at the Little Bighorn did so not only because they were outnumbered, but they were out-gunned, too. Armed with their single-shot Springfields, Custer’s men could not match the intensity of fire offered by Sitting Bull’s forces, many of whom were armed with repeating rifles like the Henry, the Spencer, and the Winchester. 

Out Gunned by the Spaniards 

Many of our troops were still armed with Trapdoors during the Spanish American War in 1898. Those who were issued modern Krag-Jorgensen magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles complained that because of the lack of funds for ammunition, the army had  disabled the magazines, requiring soldiers to reload the weapon after each shot. The rifles also still used black power, which revealed the shooter’s position with a massive cloud of smoke. 

The Spanish Army, on the other hand, was armed  with state-of-the-art Mauser repeating rifles and rapid firing Maxim machine guns, both firing smokeless powder. The only rapid fire weapon our troops had were Civil War-vintage Gatling Guns. 

The American Navy didn’t fare much better under Republican rule. In 1881 the London humor magazine Puck described the U.S. Navy as a force of "three mud-scows supplemented by a superannuated canal-boat." It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. 

The GOP-controlled Congress funded a naval shipbuilding program that began in 1890 and continued throughout the end of the century. But the funding they provided for training ship crews was so meager, sailors were rarely able to practice their gunnery. As a result, during the Spanish American War, U.S. naval gunnery was pathetic.  At the Battle of Manila Bay, American ships fired a total of 4,959 shells of various sizes. They scored only 72 hits. At the Naval  Battle of Santiago de Cuba, the U.S. Navy fired 1,300 shells; only 25 found their mark. 

In his memoir of the Spanish American War, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican himself, condemned his own party’s failure to support the army and navy with adequate funding. In the end, the U.S. won the Spanish American War only by  the courage of its soldiers and sailors, and the fact the Spanish never wanted to fight a war over Cuba in the first place. 

TR tried to improve American military power during his presidency, but his policies were largely reversed by his own party after he left  the White House. 

When a European war broke out in 1914, it was the isolationist Republican Party that led the movement to keep America out of it. It would be up to a peace-loving Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, to see the dangers posed to this country by a collapse of Britain and France and build up our military in preparation to sending them “over there.” Still, America’s military equipment was so limited that the bulk of U.S. troops in WWI were armed with British Enfield rifles, French-made Chauchat machine guns, and French- and British-built aircraft. 

When Republicans again controlled the government in the interwar years, U.S. military strength again shrank and stagnated. Important legislation passed in 1920 established the framework for an improved, professional army. However, because Republicans controlled both houses from 1920 to the early 1930s, lack of appropriate funding prevented the reforms from being fully implemented. The U.S. Army so stagnated that some career officers remained junior officers like lieutenants and captains for nearly their whole careers. 

Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats in Congress began the  rebuilding of the American military in the early 1930s, despite  opposition from isolationist – and in many cases, pro-fascist – Republican legislators. 

Establishment of the Defense Industry 

World War II was followed by years of decline in conventional forces, as the atomic bomb  was considered the weapon of the future.  Outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, however,  brought with it the need for a massive buildup of conventional American forces and equipment. When US manufacturers balked at retooling for war, President Harry Truman made a momentous decision that would impact the U.S. for the rest of history – with passage of the Defense Production Act of 1950,  he created the defense industry. 

Once the defense industry became a permanent form of business in the  United States, the Republican attitude to military spending changed. From that point on, the pro-corporation Republican Party would push as much money as possible to the defense contractors. 

But spending on the defense industry doesn’t necessarily equate to making America strong.  Massive defense spending during the Reagan administration did little more than triple our national debt and turn the U.S. from a creditor nation to a debtor nation.  With defense manufacturers overcharging  million of dollars for such follies as “crash-proof” coffee makers and the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system, there was literally little money left for maintenance. 

As a result, some older Navy ships were unable to leave port due to mechanical breakdowns. Entire squadrons of aircraft reportedly were cannibalized for spare parts. At the time, I served in a Navy reserve ground combat unit that, despite being part of the country’s Rapid Response Force, had no weapons; Reagan had sent them to El Salvador and there was no money to  buy replacements. 

Defense from Terrorists 

In 1999, the Clinton administration received a single warning of a pending Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. President Bill Clinton immediately placed the country’s entire law enforcement apparatus on alert. As a result, the so-called Millennium Plot was thwarted when the intended bomber was caught trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada. 

In 2001, the Bush administration received some 40 separate warnings from American and foreign intelligence agencies that Al Qaeda was planning an imminent attack. George Bush ignored all of them.  On September 11, more than 2,000 Americans paid the price for Bush’s national security incompetence. 

Less than two years later, in March of 2002, Bush told reporters he was no longer concerned with finding the organizer of that attack, Osama Bin Laden. Bush eventually closed down the CIA office dedicated to tracking and capturing or killing Bin Laden. Two useless and unnecessary wars later, the Al Qaeda mastermind was still at large when Bush left office in 2008. 

It would be left to Bush’s Democratic successor, Barack Obama, to reopen the search for Bin Laden and launch the covert operation that finally made him pay for his treachery. 

So much for Republican prowess on national security.

 

Jesus Hates Us, This I Know...

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Matthew 19:24

 Apparently, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker credits God in his war on the working class in his state. While running for governor, Walker did what all Republicans do these days – he announced he is a Christian. In an interview with a so-called Christian broadcasting station, Walker said God told him to make many of the decisions in his life. One of those decisions was leaving college to take a job with IBM. I never knew God ran an employment service. More likely, Walker is using God to bury the fact the governor was a sub-average student who became a college drop out.

 The implication of Walker’s testament is that everything he’s doing in Wisconsin – handing out $140 million in tax cuts for wealthy corporations, then claiming the state is facing bankruptcy; denying state workers their bargaining rights; taking millions of dollars away from the public school system to finance vouchers for private schools for the rich – all this, he says, God and Jesus told him to do.

 

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The only prophets these self-styled disciples of Christ follow are the ones preceded by dollar signs. In my opinion, they epitomize those Jesus accused of turning places of worship into “dens of thieves.”

 

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It amazes me how many Republicans claim God talks directly to them. How does he it do it? Does he call them collect? Does he send them videos like Osama Bin Laden? In Walker’s case, how does he know he’s really talking to God and not getting punk’d by another liberal blogger?

Moreover, how does a man who claims to be a follower of Christ’s teachings of love, charity, tolerance and forgiveness reconcile his actions of taking money from the poor and working class citizens of his state and giving it to its richest residents?

 Certainly, it helps if you are a cynical sociopath. No doubt that’s the case with Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former Republican House leader who, with a straight face, recently told a Christian news show that his love of country caused him to work so hard it destroyed two of his three marriages. In Gingrich’s mind his habitual womanizing had nothing do with those failed marriages, or with his forced resignation from Congress.

But what if Walker actually believes he is doing God’s work?

We have become a nation in which rich people who got rich by lying, stealing and cheating, are getting elected to leadership positions in state and federal government. Walker’s own reputation as a corrupt county administrator was so bad he lost the county he used to run. Rick Scott, the new governor of Florida, was CEO of the health care corporation convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history. U.S. Rep. Darryl Issa, the California congressman now planning a series of investigations into what he claims are crimes committed by the Obama administration, has an arm’s-length rap sheet including grand theft auto and arson for profit.

Jesus Loves the  Rich

How do these men face the electorate when they should be hanging their heads in shame? How do they call themselves men of God and followers of Jesus Christ’s teachings? I’ll tell you how. Because they know something you and I don’t: They know Jesus hates us. He hates us because we’re not rich.

One of the fastest growing sects of Christianity in this country is called the Gospel of Prosperity. Dating back to the 1930s – during the Republican-caused Great Depression – the Gospel of Prosperity believes the Bible got it wrong. Christ wasn’t sent by God to minister to the poor and downtrodden. He was sent to aid the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Under this form of Christian belief, the rich have no problem getting through the Gates of Heaven. It is the poor and middle class who will have a harder time getting through the Pearly Gates than a camel has getting through a needle’s eye. You can do whatever you need to do to become rich – lie, cheat, steal – because you are doing God’s work. Who could argue with that kind of missionary work? But it also involves destroying the lives of other people.

If you think this is just hype, consider this: dozens of conservative members of Congress – both Republicans and Democrats – live nearly rent-free in a Washington, DC condominium project owned by The Family. If you’ve followed the sexual scandals of Sen. John  Ensign and South Carolina  Gov. Mark Sanford, you’ve heard of The Family. Also known as the Fellowship, the Family has been criticized by mainstream Christian churches as being a cult-like congregation of the rich and elite that caters to their appetite for power and wealth.

Gospel of Prosperity

The best known apostle of the Gospel of Prosperity is Oral Roberts, the televangelist who in 1987 invoked his viewers to send him $8 million or he would be called to Heaven by God. I never understood why a man of religion would fear being called to meet his Maker. But apparently, Roberts’ viewers felt compelled to save him from his just reward by sending him their life savings. Roberts was spared, temporarily. He died in 2009 in an exclusive enclave of Newport Beach, California, after he was forced to sale off his homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills, as well as three of his Mercedes. 

Another who preaches the prosperity gospel is TV cleric Pat Robertson, who has financed his lavish lifestyle with his viewers’ donations to his church and its shady disaster relief programs. Robertson’s belief that God wants him to find a gold mine led the televangelist to make a business deal with Liberia’s dictator Charles Taylor to look for gold in that African country.

Now deposed, Taylor is standing trial before an international criminal court for crimes against humanity involving his attacks on neighboring Sierra Leon, motivated by Taylor’s coveting of that country’s mineral riches. Robertson, who claimed Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake were God’s vengeance (apparently because the victims were poor), continues to defend Taylor to this day.

You can also count George W. Bush in this category, too. When Bush, whose family business – the Carlyle Group – reaped a fortune from the war in Iraq, said he was a Christian, the Gospel of Prosperity was the Christianity he was referring to.

The only prophets these self-styled disciples of Christ follow are the ones preceded by dollar signs. In my opinion, they epitomize those Jesus accused of turning places of worship into “dens of thieves.”

With such a belief system, one can commit any reprehensible, even criminal, act to gain power and wealth – lie, steal, betray, even start a war – because you’re doing God’s will. With this corrupt moral compass, you can commit any sin; as long as you say you accept Jesus into your heart, you’ll be forgiven. To me, this gospel’s idea of Christ smells more like the Antichrist. In the meantime, the rest of us are just so much flotsam left in the wake of God’s miraculous work.

I am certain Gov. Walker considers himself a good Christian as well as a patriot. But then history is filled with evil men who cloaked themselves in patriotism and Christ. “When fascism comes to America,” Sinclair Lewis prophesized in 1935, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” If there is a hell, then I believe there is special place there for Gov. Walker and his phony “Christians.” They, in turn, would consider me a heretic for suggesting God and Jesus were interested in such heathens as the unwashed masses. So be it. I will remain, as Jackson Browne wrote, “a heathen and a pagan on the side of the Rebel Jesus.”

 

 

The Myth of Corporate Leadership

I cringe every time someone says government should be run like a business. A former business journalist, I have had the opportunity to study the inner workings of Corporate America, and I know the one secret that businessmen and conservative politicians would rather you not know: Most American businesses fail. They fail due to poor leadership at the top.

Yet only two years after Wall Street led the country into the worst economic collapse since the Great Recession, California voters seriously considered electing two former CEOs – Ebay’s Meg Whitman and Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina – to the governorship and the U.S. Senate. Not yet four years after the economic collapse, U.S. voters are considering electing another CEO, Mitt Romney, to the White House. That would only recreate the same mistake voters made 12 years ago with the election of George W. Bush as president.

 

Bush, after all, took great pride in calling himself the “CEO president.” He proudly referred to his days as chief executive officer of an oil drilling company called Abusto, Spanish for “bush.” What he never mentioned was that Abusto – as well as every other business Bush was involved with – went bust.

 

Nor was he the only failed CEO in his administration. As chief executive officer of Halliburton, Dick Cheney drove the oil drilling equipment giant to the brink of bankruptcy. He saved Halliburton only by appointing himself Bush’s vice-president and steering billions of dollars of government contracts to the company – at great cost to the taxpayer.

 

The myth of corporate leadership – that business executives could run government better than politicians – is just that, a myth, a fable that makes good bedtime reading for Ayn Rand fans but has little basis in reality.

Failed Corporate Leadership

 

In his book, “Built to Fail,” business author Jonathan I. Klein concludes “failure claims an overwhelming majority of businesses within five years [of start up] and almost all businesses within ten years.”  Despite claims of conservatives that most business failures stem from government interference, Klein concludes that these failures are rooted directly in the internal leadership of the failed companies.

 

Bush and Cheney, in fact, are splendid examples of  the modern CEO. Gone are the Horatio Alger days when a young man worked his way up from the mail room to the board room. Most CEOs today land in the big office with the help of their rich father (like Bush) or with the help of  personal publicists who make sure their clients get the credit for anything that goes right, and deflect the blame for anything that goes wrong.

 

As a result, CEOs often begin to think they can do no wrong.  By believing themselves infallible, CEOs turn a deaf ear to nay Sayers or any other harbingers of reality who might disagree with them. In his book, “Why Smart Executives Fail,” Sidney Finklestein points to this  “executive mindset” as well as  “protective mechanisms and delusional attitudes” as the cause for the growing number of corporate leadership failures.

 

Klein came to similar conclusions. The genesis of such failures, he says, came not from without but from within the corporation, and “included inappropriate motives for entrepreneurship, disdain for procedure, underestimation of resource needs, insensitivity to the environment, infatuation with the product, and unrealistic projections of the future.” In other words, poor judgment.

 

Bush showed this quality before Sept. 11, 2001, when he refused to listen to more than 40 separate warnings of an impending attack from Al Qaida – including two personal phone calls from the presidents of France and Russia. He showed it again when he refused to accept intelligence reports that refuted his belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and was harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.

Short-Sighted Leadership

 

Governing requires a long-term view of the needs of the population and the nation. American business executives, however, are notoriously short-sighted. In the American business world, everything revolves around the quarterly profit statement. Bonuses are based on the degree of profit seen in each three-month business cycle. This produces extreme myopia. Decisions are made to close plants, layoff workers, outsource jobs, etc., based entirely on how it will look on the next balance sheet. As a result, American businesses tend to suffer in the long run.

 

The Bush administration’s entire war strategy showed this kind of short-sightedness. When the United Nations refused the administration’s call for an immediate invasion of Iraq, the president did what too many CEOs would do: He plunged ahead without any plans for the long-term occupation or rebuilding of Iraq. His infamous landing aboard an aircraft carrier to announce “Mission Accomplished,” got him what he wanted – a jump in the polls – but his failure to plan ahead left our troops and the Iraqis in an ever bloodier quagmire.

 

Similar corporate leadership failures are leading to a volatile business environment. In the last decade, CEO turnover in the United States jumped from around 10 percent during the 1990s to nearly 50 percent, according to Chief Executive magazine. Not all those turnovers were firings, of course, but it shows a terrible instability in today’s corporate leadership.

 

Both Fiorina and Whitman were part of that volatility. Like Bush, both candidates boast of their CEO experience, yet neither candidate left behind a legacy that would promote confidence in their leadership skills. Fiorina, after all, was fired by HP’s board in 2005 because they lacked confidence in her abilities. Whitman resigned in 2008 amid demands from shareholders she be fired for driving the company stock value into the ground. Since her departure, most of Whitman’s business decisions at eBay have been reversed by her successor.

 

CEO candidates invariably claim they know how to create jobs. Unfortunately for  American workers, their legacies prove otherwise. Despite his vaunted “trickle down” tax cuts, CEO President Bush reigned over the worst U.S. job growth since WWII – and that was before his policies tanked the economy in late 2008, resulting  the loss of 700,000 U.S. jobs.

 

Fiorina personally helped Bush’s legacy by cutting nearly 30,000 U.S. jobs at HP and shipping thousands of them overseas  in an attempt to make up for massive financial losses at HP caused by her ill-conceived acquisition of computer maker Compaq. Whitman helped as well, outsourcing 40 percent of eBay’s workforce to other countries. Her corporate leadership failures also resulted in 1,000 eBay workers losing their jobs.  Despite their failure, both Fiorina and Whitman left their posts with expensive golden parachutes.

Romney, born rich, made himself richer at Bain Capital by buying up perfectly good American companies, firing their employees, and shipping the jobs overseas. Of course, that tactic didn't always work: twice while Romney was CEO of Bain, the company nearly went insolvent and Romney had to arrange for federal bailouts amounting to tens of millions of dollars.

 

This is one of the biggest failures in corporate leadership. Too often the CEO’s solution for every problem is handing out pink slips, and making their remaining employees work harder and longer. As a result, American workers put in longer hours than their European counterparts (50 to 60 hours compared to 30 to 40 hours in Europe) with less time off (one to two weeks of vacation compared to four to six weeks for Europeans). This, business leaders tell us, makes America more productive. Coincidentally, it also makes CEOs richer.

 

The last place you want to see this sort of  “do more with less” CEO mentality is in government, where doing more with less usually means fewer police, prosecutors, firefighters, paramedics – the very government workers we need to protect our property and lives. We saw the impact of doing more with less in Iraq and Afghanistan where our armed forces, stripped down by the Bush administration in the months preceding the 9/11 attacks, where stretched to the breaking point.

Corporate Welfare

 

Yet nearly every CEO candidate chants the same mantra: cut taxes and reduce government spending. Their religiosity in this regard would be more convincing if the corporations which spawned these same candidates weren’t the largest recipients of government welfare spending. In 1998, TIME magazine reported the federal government spent $125 billion a year on corporate welfare, and this undoubtedly doubled if not tripled under Bush’s CEO presidency.

 

This largess – which typically goes to the richest corporations in the country – includes cash subsidies, free or below-cost government services and products, tax-payer subsidized loans to foreign countries to buy U.S. goods, and tax breaks, including credits for outsourcing U.S. jobs overseas. This also does not count the subsidies and tax breaks given large corporations by state and local governments.

 

Despite such aid from the government, these corporations and their leaders continue to fail, miserably and repeatedly. Which is what makes me cringed when people say government should be run like business, and when failed CEOs like Mitt Romney want to run our government.

Class Warfare, Slavery and Company Towns

"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” 

– Multi-millionaire Warren Buffet

Listening to GOP leaders, one might think the Democrats were waging nuclear class warfare. Because progressive Dems wants the richest one percent of Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, multi-millionaires Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, along with their cohorts in Congress, want Americans to think the Democrats are preaching the “politics of envy.”

Nothing is further from the truth. The fact is the Republicans have been waging a vicious, no-holds-bar war against the American worker for the past 30 years, since the election of their vaunted leader, Ronald Reagan.

Company scrip token.
Photo: Jerry Adams

In school, we are taught that America is the Land of Opportunity. America, in fact, has been the Land of Opportunity for many years of its existence – for some. In the 1700 and 1800s, yes, migrants from Europe had a chance to make something of themselves – assuming you weren’t Irish or Italian. God help you if you were Chinese – or African.

Even though slavery supposedly ended after the Civil War with the adoption of the 13^th Amendment, involuntary servitude did, in fact, continue in this country in the form of the truck system. Under the truck system, workers were paid in company scrip rather than real money. That scrip could only be used in company-owned stores to buy over-priced goods, or to pay excessive rent in company-owned housing in what came to be called “company towns.”

Also known as debt bondage, the truck system resulted in workers becoming indebted to the very companies they worked for, forcing them to stay in the company’s employ to pay off their debt. This, the companies contended, produced employee “loyalty.” Workers felt otherwise, as Tennessee Ernie Ford lamented when he sang:

“Load sixteen tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

St. Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go.

I owe my soul to the company store.”

The truck system was ruled slavery by the U.S Supreme Court in the early 1900s, but the concept hasn’t died. In 2008, Wal-Mart’s Mexican subsidiary was blocked by the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice for trying to pay its employees, in part, with company vouchers. The Mexican court ruled the vouchers were scrip, and in violation of Mexico’s prohibition of the truck system.

Debt Bondage Today

The concept of debt bondage hasn’t died in the United States either. One of the foundations the Founding Fathers conceived for this country was accessible higher education for its citizens. Thomas Jefferson’s pride in creating the tuition-free University of Virginia in 1819 surpassed his pride in being the third president of the United States. So much so, he made sure the epitaph on his head stone after he died would identify him as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of the University of Virginia.

Today, the idea of a free college education is merely a memory for those of us old enough to remember what the education system of this country was like before Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California and, after destroying that state’s education system, being elected to the U.S. presidency to do the same nationwide. These days college graduates are so deeply in debt, they are largely incapable of movement up the class ladder – unless they happen to be another George W. Bush or Mitt Romney.

Keeping Americans in debt – and under control – has been the battle plan for conservative politicians of both parties and their oligarch overlords for the past 30 years. During that time, labor union membership – the greatest way to level the economic playing board – has declined as much as 30 percent, thanks to Reagan’s war on labor and GOP legislation making it harder to recruit members. That continues today with the anti-labor legislation being seen in states like today’s Walkerstan (Wisconsin) and Kasichstan (Ohio), where Tea Party governors and legislatures are passing repressive anti-middle-class measures.

Republicans would like you to believe that capitalism is synonymous with freedom. It isn’t. Recent history is rife with authoritarian governments ruling over capitalistic systems – Argentina under Peron, Spain under Franco, the Philippines under Marcos, Italy under Mussolini and, last but not least, Germany under Hitler. In each case, these dictators were put in power by industrialists and financiers. After all, fascism by definition is an authoritarian form of capitalism. For that matter, many economists argue that communism is simply a form of state capitalism.

Contrary to what many have been taught, capitalism is not synonymous with free enterprise and a free market place. Free enterprise is the provision of a service or product in exchange for a price. Capitalism is simply the accumulation of wealth and the power it brings.

To be truly successful, free enterprise requires two things, the free movement of money and a level playing field. Money is like blood to the economic body; if it doesn’t flow freely, the body dies. When the bulk of the wealth of a country is held by a small percentage of individuals – as it is in this country today – it doesn’t flow freely and the economy stagnates, contracts and dies, at least for the rest of us.

Taxation stimulates the excessively wealthy to spend their money through investment in new companies and the workforce. Taxes force the wealthy to convert the form of their wealth from offshore accounts to U.S. holdings, circulating that money through the economic body. Taxes paid to the government are reinvested in public infrastructure and public services, further encouraging the circulation of wealth.

A Level Playing Field

Along with circulating wealth, free enterprise requires a level playing field to allow those with enterprising abilities to rise to well-deserved levels of success. That can only be done by legislation that prohibits the kind of Mitt Romney vulture capitalism that destroys U.S. companies for the sake of short term benefits; legislation that prohibits exporting U.S. jobs for the same reason; legislation that regulates the business environment so predator corporations can’t wantonly destroy their competitors to establish anti-competitive trusts.

Yet for 30 years, Republicans and conservative Democrats have pushed through legislation that has torn middle class and worker rights to shreds, gave tax breaks to corporations that shipped U.S. jobs abroad, destroyed true competition, and left the burden of paying off the national debt that quadrupled under Reagan and Bush Jr. on the middle class.

Over the past 30 years, American wages have declined roughly a percentage point each year, while the wealth of the richest Americans – people like Romney – has grown exponentially. Republicans say the middle class has to carry the brunt of the tax burden because taxing the wealthy – the so-called “job creators” – would cost the country jobs.

That, as I’ve said, is nonsense. The economic engine of this country is small business, the mom and pops which are responsible for 95 percent of this county’s job growth. In other words, large corporations and mega-naires don’t have that much impact on the economy.

Don’t believe that? Then ask yourself this: George W. Bush and his Republican-controlled Congress gave every tax break they could to Big Business and the rich, yet the Bush administration was already suffering a net loss of millions of American jobs long before the recession hit us in 2007.

If high taxes destroyed jobs, then Germany, with Europe’s highest taxes, should have the Continent’s highest unemployment rates instead of its lowest. In fact, German unemployment is lower than any other industrialized nation. On the other hand, every European country that adopted neo-conservative “trickle down” tax policies is now experiencing extremely high unemployment rates and economic collapse.

In fact, when one looks at taxation vs. employment among industrialized nations, there is a distinct converse relationship – the higher the tax rate, the lower the unemployment. The United States, with one of the lowest tax rates in the world, also has one of the highest unemployment rates.

What more do Americans need to understand that they are, and have been, engaged in class warfare for three decades? And as Warren Buffet said, we, the middle class, are losing.

Distrust of Corporate Power Is an American Tradition

To hear Republicans, President Barack Obama distrusts American businesses and corporations. This, of course, makes the president an un-American socialist or, worse, a communist. I seriously doubt Obama is anti-corporation, but if it were true, historically he would be in good company.

 Our Founding Fathers were no fans of corporations. The Boston Tea Party, after all, was not a reaction to high taxation, as right-wing myth contends, but to the Tea Act’s nearly tax-free status it gave to the British East India Company, the largest corporation of its time, which threatened to destroy smaller colonial businesses.

  So abhorrent was the idea of large corporate interests to our Founders, that they purposefully left any mention of them out of the Constitution. Yet, even in the earliest days of our nation, many of our Founders were already growing appalled by the growth of corporations.

 "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations,“ wrote Thomas Jefferson, “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

 Loathsome Bankers

 Financial institutions were particularly loathsome to Jefferson. "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies," he said.
  
 Jefferson’s foresight was eerily precise when he predicted that “the banks, and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

 Wow. It’s like the author of the Declaration of Independence was looking into the future and saw how banks and corporations destroyed the U.S. economy in the 1930s and again in 2007.

 John Adams, Jefferson’s long-time friend and sometime political adversary, was also wary of financial institutions. "Banks,” he said, “have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good."

 Hard to believe Adams was the founder of what is today the Republican Party.

 President Andrew Jackson was well known for his distrust of financial institutions and corporate monopolies. “Unless you become more watchful in your states,” he warned, “and check the spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that … the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.”

 Enemy at the Rear

 As president, Abraham Lincoln had many things on his mind. He was fighting a war to preserve the nation. But Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee weren’t his only concerns.

 “The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity,” he said. “The banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe."

 Let’s see, “denounce as public enemies all who question their methods.” Would that be the same as the Republicans calling Obama a socialist, a communist, or a secret radical Muslim?

 As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln was eyeing his “greatest foe” as the next major threat to the country.

 "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country,” he said. “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

 Unfortunately, Lincoln’s fears were well grounded. In the decades following the Civil War, the country saw the growth of the Republican “Gilded Age,” when most of the country’s wealth was held by a handful of so-called “barons,” most of whom acquired that wealth by corrupting government officials.

 Citizens United

 President Teddy Roosevelt came into office at the height of the Gilded Age. From his bully pulpit, he saw the same threat to the country Lincoln did four decades earlier. That pulpit must have been awfully high, because Roosevelt was able to see all the way to 2012.

Like a man prescient of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision giving corporations “citizen hood” and all the free speech money could buy, Teddy warned: "The Constitution does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty Commercial forces which they have called into being."

 Unlike any Republican you’ll hear today, Roosevelt also said, “Laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes. Corporate expenditures for political purposes have supplied one of the principle sources of corruptions in our political affairs."
 Roosevelt, of course, went on to break up the “trusts” – large corporations – to reduce their political power, and gave Americans the “Square Deal, which helped create the middle class in this country.

 TR’s distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, took this further, with legislation that controlled how financial institutions and corporations can operate and, of course, the “New Deal,” the greatest expansion of the middle class in U.S. history.

So I wonder how TR would respond to see his former party, the GOP, running a corporate multi-millionaire as their 2012 presidential nominee? Or if he knew that corporate interests like the Koch brothers or the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council were financing Republican candidates and writing their policies and legislation? Would he agree with current members of the Republican Party that President Obama is too distrusted of Big Business?

 Let’s let TR speak for himself: "… [T]o befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."

Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching on to Theocracy

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” 

 Sinclair Lewis, American Writer (1885-1951)

Many years ago, when I was young police reporter, a cop friend of mine told me: “Never trust a man who wears his patriotism or his religion on his sleeve,” he said. “They’re hiding something.”

I took that advice to heart, and found it never to be wrong. The self-righteous hypocrisy of today’s flag-waving, Bible-thumping right-wing only reinforces my belief in my friend’s advice. All that preaching and pontificating is hiding something, something dark and terrible, something they don’t want you to know.

We’ve seen it before. In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the first religious broadcasters, used his cloak of religion to preach an anti-Semitic and pro-fascist theology. Coughlin closely associated himself with the Christian Front, one of many “cross and flag” organizations that wrapped their theology of anti-communism, anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism in the American flag and the Bible. We’d all be seig-heiling today if this country knelt before Coughlin’s alter.

Rick Santorum, running for the Republican presidential nomination, is doing his best to fit into Coughlin’s cassock. His recent rant that President Barrack Obama follows a “phony theology,” not only echoes Father Coughlin’s dogma but also that of the “birthers” bigotry. Moreover, his recently uncovered 2008 speech in which he claimed Satan was attacking the United States shrieks the same rhetoric espoused by Al Qaida and the Taliban.  

Disgraced House Speaker and outed philanderer Newt Gingrich has been marching down that same path of self-righteousness, using his born-again Catholic conversion to claim President Obama is waging a war on religion. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, wears his Mormon religion like his sacred underwear. He doesn’t show it, but you know it’s there.

When attacking the president’s religion or what they perceive as his anti-religion policies is not enough, the candidates and their cohorts attack each other’s religion. In his 2008 speech, Santorum, a Catholic, said Protestantism is “gone from the world of Christianity.” On the other hand, right-wing Protestant evangelicals call Catholicism a cult. Neither side has much nice to say about Mormons ... or Jews. 

 Is this where we’re going in this country? Are the Catholics and Protestants and Mormons and whoever else going to line up against each other like the Sunnis and Shiites of the Muslim religion? Is that what we want in this country—sectarian warfare? 

These Taliban Christians who blot the airways with their venal pontification are obsessed with sin, both doing it and being forgiven for it. Their idea of Christianity is simply accepting Jesus Christ as your savior and your sins will be absolved. They don’t see the fault of that philosophy; that if all you need for salvation is to “accept” Christ, you can do anything you want—steal, murder, pillage, it will all be forgiven.

Because Santorum has accepted Christ into his heart, is he to be forgiven for being a corporate shill when he was senator and afterward? God may have forgiven Gingrich for his past indiscretions as a wife-cheater and corrupt politician, but what about his more recent sins as a lobbyist for corrupt corporations and as a race-baiter in the primaries?

Should Romney be forgiven for his vulture capitalism, wantonly destroying American companies and the lives of their laid-off workers, all in search of profit? Are the Virginia state legislators who voted to punish women seeking an abortion by forcibly raping them with sonogram probes to be forgiven? 

Christ’s gospel was all about a loving and forgiving God. He preached love, forgiveness, tolerance and charity. He trod a path others were suppose the follow—helping the poor, the sick, the downtrodden—things the right-wing seems to consider un-American. Preaching a self-righteous gospel of hate, greed and intolerance doesn’t make you a Christian. If anything, it makes you an Anti-Christ. 

Our Founding Fathers were very bright. Far from a group of “white Christian men” who founded this country for “white Christian men,” as the right-wing contends, our Founding Fathers were a diverse collection of nationalities, races and religions—Protestants, Catholics and, yes, Jews. Most, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were deists, believing in a Supreme Being, admiring Jesus Christ as a philosopher, but wary of the church’s influence. 

Our Founding Fathers were wary because the age of theocratic monarchies was not ancient history to them as it is to us. They lived it as subjects of King George III. When they declared independence for England, they were declaring independence from a theocracy in which the king derived his right to rule from God and the church. 

It was with this in mind that they wrote the First Amendment. It not only promised Americans the right to believe as they wished, it was also a promise to keep religion out of government, to keep religion from being a requisite for patriotism. They knew a government ruled by any one religion would lead to intolerance, and intolerance would lead to suppression, and suppression would lead to some form of authoritarian government. They were right.

My cop friend understood that. So did Sinclair Lewis. I sincerely hope American voters do as well.