drawing Authority by Tom Ferguson
The CIA, since its inception in the late 1940s, has bought,
corrupted and otherwise influenced individuals and governments across the
world. Their use of money parallels the way wealth buys and otherwise corrupts
and over-influences the U.S. government, electorate and other institutions.
Wealthy individuals and corporations make money available to
candidates who serve a narrow, corporate, pro-capitalist agenda and who will
attack and otherwise undermine the efforts of those with a non-corporate,
alternative agenda.
The CIA did it in Iran, essentially buying a revolution,
over-throwing a democratically elected government, in the early 50s. Same
scenario in Guatemala, same time-frame. Gangsters were used to intimidate and
corrupt unions and political parties, in France and Italy after World War II.,
sometimes in exchange for allowing heroine smuggling into the U.S. These are
not “rogue” operations. They are deliberate policies formulated by those with
their hands on the levers of power. I risk the obvious: when certain
“interests” are at stake the U.S. consistently chooses to ally itself with
criminals against citizens practicing democracy.
Oil-rich
Texans influenced the shape of our democracy by funding right wing groups such
as ex-CIA agent William F. Buckley’s National Review, Billy Graham’s religious
taming of the masses and other modestly zanier right wingers such as the John
Birch Society. They did not restrict themselves to Texas, targeting “liberal”
senators across the nation, lavishly funding their opponents, usually staunch
embracers of the religion of anti-communism, meaning actually pro-capitalist
privilege. Wealthy activists in other parts of the country may not have been as
flamboyant but were no less persistent in their determination to undermine
democracy and advance oligarchy.
The
ideology of anti-communism is not principled opposition to the real lack of
justice and democracy in the states, China, the Soviet Union, who claimed the
mantle of socialism with warped commitments to its tenants – no, the capitalist
class objected not to its oppressive secret police, gulags etc; as is shown by
the alliances mentioned above with gangsters, and in the enthusiastic support
for brutal regimes world-wide practicing the very evils they, rhetorically,
decry. The threat of Communism to these “patriots” was not in its brutality but
in its promise of equality and condemnation of class privilege.
The
demise of the Soviet Union produced a smug superiority among the anti-communist
clergy, immediately seizing the early 90s events for their propaganda value,
claiming a victory for their market church, and moving in for what they perhaps
saw as the final triumph over the threat of democracy. The Milton Friedman
school of the “free market” spread like cancer, encountering only sporadic
resistance until the Occupy Movement emerged, a reaction as inevitable and
indicative of a genetic predisposition toward justice as its cousin the Arab
Spring. In fits and starts we awake, suffering still the remnants of thousands
of years of patriarchy but the life force instinctively seeks to survive and it
is clear to the wakeful that whatever advantages might have favored the forces
of domination in the past, they now offer only a stampede to extinction.
