Militia Plots: A Rare but Serious Threat

The news shocked many Americans. The FBI announced they had thwarted an armed rightwing extremist militia plot to capture local government officials and hold them hostage.

You may think I’m talking about the October arrests of more than a dozen Michigan militia henchmen who were planning to abduct Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for the heinous crime of trying to save Michiganders from the coronavirus.

You’d be wrong if you did.

What I described above was a 1934 plot to seize control of the San Diego, CA city hall by a rightwing militia of quasi-Christian zealots called the Silver Shirts. Founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley (right), a one-time presidential candidate, the Silver Legion of America was patterned after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts with the intention of establishing a “Christian Commonwealth” in America that would exclude all Jews and nonwhites.

The Silver Legion was a pro-fascist/Nazi group, one of several that existed in the U.S. in the 1930s. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.) The local contingent of Silver Shirts concocted a plan to overthrow San Diego’s city government when they heard rumors that a group of communists was making similar plans (they weren’t). Two Marines from Camp Pendleton uncovered the plot when they infiltrated the Legion while investigating a series of weapons thefts from local military units.

Militia coup attempts like those thwarted in San Diego and Michigan might seem rare, but they aren’t unknown, and they are no laughing matter. They pose a very real threat to American citizens and to our democracy.

 The first antigovernment militia coup was the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. Contrary to the belief of many radical gunowners that the Second Amendment was intended by our Founding Fathers to provide for the overthrow the government, the Whiskey Rebellion was quickly put down by a federal force led by then-President George Washington. (See: The Myths that Drive America’s Love of Guns.)

Anti-government militia plots have been the bane of American life, particularly since the 1990s. Several militia plots were uncovered during that decade. Members of a group called the North American Militia planned to bomb several targets in Michigan, including a federal building and an IRS building, and even discussed assassinating various government officials.

In 1997, members of a Missouri militia group planned a July 4 attack on Fort Hood, Texas, as the military base hosted an annual “Freedom Festival” attended by 50,000 men, women, and children. Fortunately, the FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol thwarted the plot. (See: The Militia Movement.) And in March 2011, the FBI charged nine members of an extremist militia group in Michigan with seditious conspiracy for plotting to attack law enforcement and spark an uprising against the government. (See: Domestic Terrorism: Focus on Militia Extremism.)

These rebellions were stopped or quickly suppressed before they started. But that doesn’t mean militia coups are not dangerous. In 1898, a white supremacist militia successfully overthrew the biracial city government of Wilmington, NC. There was no response to the deadly coup from local police, the state government, or Washington, DC. Its success is having unfortunate repercussions in today’s presidential politics, as Donald Trump keeps holding up that event as a model for future coups. (See:  The White Supremacist Coup that Trump Uses as a Template.)

Many Americans like to believe Timothy McVeigh’s April 19, 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 men, women, and children was the act of a “lone wolf” terrorist, Timothy McVeigh. In fact, in addition to McVeigh, three accomplices were also charged and tried for the crime. They had hoped the bombing would initiate an uprising that would take down the U.S. government. McVeigh was also a member of Christian Identity, a rightwing, white supremacist militia, which the FBI believed may have also been involved with the plot. (See: Were There More OKC Conspirators?: The Elohim City Connection.)

The last four years saw a rise in militia activity, thanks to the hateful and extremist rhetoric of Donald Trump. Armed militia members confronted peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors and marched to protest social distancing practices implemented by local governments in the wake of the coronavirus. Even before planning to abduct Gov. Whitmer, Michigan militia gunmen marched on the state capitol in an obvious threat to state lawmakers.

Not all rightwing coup plots were the work of militia movements. In 1933, a group of wealthy conservative bankers and financiers plotted to raise a private army and use it to overthrow the American government and establish a fascist dictatorship. Called The American Putsch and The Bankers Revolt, the plot was thwarted by the man they approached to lead their army. Smedley Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, played along with the conspirators and collected evidence for the FBI. One of the alleged conspirators was a wealthy, pro-Nazi financier named Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.)

Unlike George Washington riding forth to preserve the country and democracy during the Whiskey Rebellion, Donald Trump has done nothing to mitigate the threat from these rightwing extremist groups. On the contrary, Trump appointed self-avowed pro-fascist, white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller to his staff. He’s referred to white nationalist groups as “some good people” and told the Proud Boys to “stand by.” Trump has also called for armed militia members to act as “poll watchers” during the balloting. His failure to condemn these hate groups or their malicious plots only encourages them to continue their terrorist plots. More conspiracies will be on the horizon as long as this irresponsible president remains in power.

And despite the best efforts of law enforcement, the next plot may not be stopped in time.

A Novel More Prescient Than Fiction

In 1935, American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis published a novel he meant to be a cautionary tale about the rise of an authoritarian government in the United States. But when read in today's political climate, the book seems less a work of fiction than a prescient foreboding of what was to come.

The basic plot of  It Can't Happen Here involves a pompous, blustering, populist politician who gets elected president running on a platform that is anti-woman, anti-Jew, and anti-black, by making promises he can never deliver on, by accusing the news media of spreading lies, and by proclaiming only he can cure the country's ills and "make it great again." Once he takes office, he begins issuing orders that by-pass the law-making powers of Congress and the legal review of the judiciary, and strips the rights of millions of people.

What sounds like a plot torn from today's headlines was actually written 80 years before the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

Sinclair's bitingly witty story holds so many parallels to the results of the 2016 election and its aftermath as to be unnerving. Written at a time when fascist governments were popping up throughout Europe, the book was inspired by the naïve belief of Americans at the time that what was happening across the Atlantic "can't happen here."

Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is a populist U.S. senator loosely based on the bombastic southern Senator Huey Long, whose quest for the presidency was ended by an assassin's bullet in 1935. Windrip curries the favor of Americans disgruntled over the economic blight of the Great Depression by claiming he would end unemployment, much as Trump promised to "bring jobs back" to America.

Men of Little Intellectual Curiosity

A man of little intellectual curiosity, Windrip claims his autobiography is the world's greatest book next to the Bible, the same claim made by an equally incurious Trump about his ghostwritten autobiography The Art of the Deal. Windrips' political base is a rag-tag group of agitators called The Minute Men, or MMs for short. Think of the MMs as a combination of the Tea Party radicals and Alt-Right white supremacists who helped put Trump into office.

Windrip runs for office, much as Trump did, with promises of taking power in Washington away from industrialists and bankers and giving it back to the little man. Once in power, however, Windrip begins appointing incompetent cronies to key government leadership roles.

Sound familiar? Trump, who promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington, filled his Cabinet with controversial D.C. insiders, family members, wealthy financiers, corporate CEOs, and lobbyists—most of whom were appointed to their offices without approval from Congress.

Almost immediately, Windrip by-passes Congress and begins issuing executive orders ending President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal social programs, stripping women of the right to vote, and Jews and blacks of their civil rights. He replaces key military leaders with buffoons from the Minutemen, and abolishes all regulations on businesses.

In the first few days of his administration, Trump used executive orders to strip regulations on banks, industry, and polluters; demanded the repeal of President Obama's Affordable Care Act; ordered the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (at least those who are non-Anglo); began caging Hispanic immigrant children, and removed the nation's top military and national security leaders from the National Security Council, replacing them with his Alt-Right strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon, a self-professed white nationalist, didn't last long, of course, and as of this writing he is facing federal criminal charges for fraud.

To consolidate power, Windrip sends handpicked "commissioners" to assume the leadership of local governments. The move is very similar to the Nazis use of gauleiters to take control of areas of Germany. Trump hasn't done that—yet—but several Republican governors have dispatched "emergency managers" to take over local government bodies in their states. (Two such emergency managers were charged with felonies for their roles in the Flint, Michigan drinking water fiasco.)

Windrip fails to make good on any of his campaign promises save one; he ends unemployment by sending the unemployed to labor camps. Workers from labor camps are provided to companies for a small fee. This, of course, means those companies lay off regular workers who, now unemployed, are sent to labor camps.

As one of his first acts, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order to withdraw federal prisoners from privately operated prisons, which have been criticized for bolstering their profits by outsourcing inmates as prison laborers.

Building Walls to Keep Us In

Windrip fulfills one of Trump's campaign promises when he strengthens border security to prevent illegal immigration out of the United States into Canada and Mexico. Walls, after all, keep people in as well as out. Trump has not succeeded in building his promised border wall, but his incompetence during the Covid-19 crisis forced the bulk of Europe to ban U.S. travelers from visiting their countries—essentially building a wall to keep us in. The only wall Trump succeeded in building so far is an "unscalable" wall around the White House grounds.

Eventually, as Windrip consolidates his power, he does away with all political parties except the new Corporatist Party, whose members are called Corpos. The country is now ruled by and for corporations and wealthy oligarchs, the very definition of fascism as defined by the father of fascism, Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Trump stuffed his Cabinet with wealthy and mostly incompetent corporate donors. His economic policies have benefited major corporations at the expense of American workers. His trade war with China did nothing to hurt that country while devastating a large part of the American agricultural sector. Even before the pandemic, Trump's job numbers were plunging despite burgeoning corporate profits.

Lewis narrates his story through the disbelieving eyes of Doremus Jessup, a middle-aged newspaperman who cannot believe his fellow citizens don't see the slow creep of growing totalitarianism in the country. When MMs begin to terrorize the citizenry, people assume they are just a small minority of rabble-rousers. Even when Windrip establishes concentration camps to house his enemies, many in the country simply cannot believe the United States is falling victim to corporate fascism. They continue to believe "it can't happen here." By the time they realize it has happened here, it is too late.

Trump has praised white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and QAnon conspiracy theorists. He ordered federal police and troops to attack peaceful demonstrators so he could be photographed holding a Bible outside a Washington church. His followers have attacked synagogues and mosques, and gunned down cops. Federal agents clad in unmarked military uniforms kidnapped peaceful protesters in Portland, Ore., threw them into unmarked vehicles, and held them without just cause. Alt-Right armed militia are being allowed to patrol American streets. One of those "minutemen," a 17-year-old teenager with an illegal weapons, is now accused of murdering two people.

And still too many Americans refuse to see this country's slide into authoritarianism. They still believe "it can't happen here."

Lewis's inspiration for this book was simply the time in which it was written. In the 1930s, the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. Ninety percent of the country's wealth was owned by only three percent of the population. (Today, after 30 years of Reaganomics, only one percent of Americans own the bulk of the nation's wealth).

Dissatisfaction over the slow economic recovery spawned several populist movements, many of them pro-fascist. In 1932, a group of wealthy conservatives attempted a coup to overthrow the government and establish a fascist government. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History on this blog.)

Lewis doesn't spare any political movement in this book. He views any strongly held belief system, political or religious, as potentially authoritarian. All it takes is a populace too wrapped up in their own lives to not recognize what's happening about them, or not caring what's happening as long as it doesn't happen to them.

There is no happy ending to this book. There is no great uprising of patriots; many of those who most loudly proclaimed their patriotism in the beginning of the book end up in the MMs or working for Windrip, just as the Republican Party—which initially opposed Trump's candidacy—is now his greatest enabler.

 Far more than Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale  all Americans should be reading—and heeding—today.

American Fascists: A Forgotten History

As many American cities burned in the wake of the police killing of an unarmed black man, videos taken by news crews and private citizens revealed a part of America that has been hidden—or more accurately, ignored—for decades. But since the election of Donald Trump, Americans brandishing swastikas and raising their arms in the Nazi salute have become almost a daily sight. Many patriotic Americas have asked who are they and where did they come from?

The appearance of these cretins doesn’t surprise me. Fascism, in its various forms has been part of the American underbelly for the better part of a century. The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of fascism not only in Europe, but in the United States as well.

Members of the German American Bund parade
 through Camp Norland in New Jersey. (Source: National
Archives)

Throughout Thirties brown-shirted and jackbooted thugs of the German American Bund—essentially the Nazi Party affiliate in the U.S.—marched proudly through American streets, spreading their religion of hate and racism. There were Nazi enclaves in the woods for training, and summer camps for the children of American Nazis. In 1939, 22,000 Bund members held a massive rally in New York's Madison Square Garden. The Bund also affiliated with America’s first terrorist group, the Klu Klux Klan.

They Weren't Alone.

Even before the Bund, there was the Fascist League of North America, an umbrella group composed primarily of Italian-American supporters of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, considered by many to be the father of modern fascism. Mussolini coined the word fascism, comparing the rule of government by corporations for corporations to a fascine, in which weak sticks bound together create a strong foundation.

The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts due to their uniforms' silver camp shirts, at one time boasted at least 15,000 members. They owned a militarized compound in the hills surrounding Los Angeles in which they expected Adolf Hitler to stay after the Nazis took over the U.S. In 1936, their leader, William Dudley Pelley, ran for president on a third-party ticket.

The German-American Businessmen's Association, commonly called the DAWA (the German acronym for the Deutsch Amerikanischer Wirtschaft Auscbuss), focused primarily on ruining Jewish-owned businesses. Instead using the physical brutality the Nazis in Germany did on Kristallnacht in 1938, the American DAWA used boycotts to destroy Jewish businesses.

Closely allied with these groups—particularly the Bund—was the Christian Front which, despite calling itself Christian nevertheless sowed violence throughout New York. The Front denounced Jews and other non-Christians, and praised Hitler and Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Included Members of Congress

It would be easy to dismiss these groups as simply a fanatical political fringe, but the bloody fingers of fascism reached deep into 1930s American politics. Many members of Congress—mostly Republican but also some conservative Democrats—openly supported in speeches these American fascist groups as well as the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. In 1942, mystery novelist Rex Stout published The Illustrious Dunderheads, a collection of pro-fascist speeches given by conservative American politicians during the 1930s.

There were some American fascists who chose action over words. In 1933, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, was approached by two men representing wealthy and conservative American bankers and industrialists. The men explained they had been sent to Europe to study fascism and how best to bring it to the United States. Their backers decided a coup was the best idea, and they wanted Butler to lead it.

Butler played along and gathered evidence for the FBI and a subsequent Congressional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Known by many names—The Business Plot, the Wall Street Plot, and The American Putsch—the plot was largely swept under the Capitol's rug, since so many well-known millionaires (and political contributors) were apparently involved.

In 2007, the BBC reported Prescott Bush, father, and grandfather of two American presidents, was one of those wealthy financiers involved in the American Putsch. Bush was a well-known supporter of Hitler's rise to power and was prosecuted for continuing to do business with the Nazis even after Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941.

Forgotten History

In the aftermath of WWII, many wanted to forget the exuberance with which they embraced fascism in the 1930s. The rise of the Soviet Union as the next great enemy gave many conservatives what they needed to distract Americans from the recent past. The McCarthy Era with its numerous and unsubstantiated claims of "commies everywhere" was simply a means of making voters forget the sins of the conservative right prior to the war.

Since WWII, American fascism had lain hidden in the political shadows. Certainly, over the decades, overt images of it—neo-Nazis, KKK, and so on—were occasionally seen in the media. But there also was a latent vestige of fascism that shunned the term "fascist" but cheered the concept of "nationalism"—one of the markers of fascist thought—and its memes like "American exceptionalism." Sinclair Lewis predicted this in his book, It Can't Happen Here, when he wrote: "[T]he worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

Decades ago, American writer George Santayana warned us, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

As seen at the top of this blog, those words are the motto of this site. And they are good words to live by.

References and further reading:

German American Bund: http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-nazi-organization-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/

Fascist League of North: America: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1977.tb00427.x/epdf

Silver Legion: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116684/Hitlers-Los-Angeles-bunker-planned-run-Nazi-empire-war.html

German-American Businessmen's Association (DAWA): http://archive.jta.org/1934/05/13/archive/jewish-merchants-in-yorkville-ruined-as-dawa-presses-war

Christian Front: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F04EEDF1E3EE23ABC4A51DFB766838B659EDE&legacy=true

Illustrious Dunderheads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261112-the-illustrious-dunderheads

House Committee report on the American Putsch:

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC1.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC2.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC3.pdf.

Prescott Bush and the American Putsch:

 https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a

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.”

 

 

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.