Toward an American RevolutionExposing the Constitution and other IllusionsJerry FresiaPart 2A System of Injustice
Chapter 4 The Lie
James Baldwin's warning is not specific to racism. It can and should be made applicable to a more general claim. Racism is one form of domination and subordination and in 1787 domination by a few and the subordination of the many was made the law of the land. A battle was waged by the Framers to maintain between themselves as property owners and common people as non-property owners a political separation which could not be bridged. We call this relationship democracy and it is this vision of the world that is dangerously inaccurate. This is not a widely held interpretation, to be sure. In fact, most of us believe quite the reverse, that in 1787 a political system of, for, and by the people was given life. It is somewhat odd, however, that the more sympathetic view is so strong. It is odd because many of the same people who accept this view will complain, if given the opportunity, that they feel powerless. How often do you hear people say in one way or another, “Voting doesn't really do anything?” Or, “Why bother, you really can't change anything. Look at the 60s.” Or, the famous, “You can't change city hall.” Most revealing is the fact that those of us who are really outraged by what our government is doing in our name spend quite a bit of time asking the question, “But what can we do?” This is hardly the refrain of an empowered people who believe that they govern themselves. A theme which I shall draw out in this chapter is that far from being a government of “the people,” ours is a government which rests on the assumption that “the people,” especially when they become politically excited, interested, and alive, are thought of as subversive. Any serious student of political surveillance and repression in this country knows this to be true.1 But we seem to prefer to protect our moral high-mindedness by permitting elites, virtually at every chance they get, to persist in the lie that it is “we the people,” and not “we the largest property owners,” who govern this country. In so doing we risk weakening our understanding of the ways in which our lives are systemically made subordinate to the interests of the rich and politically powerful. And in so doing, we invite our own destruction. “We the People”The most familiar part of the Constitution is the preamble:
Since the bicentennial year, the preamble appears on postage stamps and is everywhere raised up as evidence of this nation's “democratic” beginnings. Yet the “ordaining” and “establishing” of the Constitution was perhaps one of our history's most un-democratic moments. Remember many common people openly resisted the principles which were to be embodied in the Constitution and most had no idea that the Constitutional Convention meant to scrap the Articles of Confederation. While the Preamble did not reflect the truth, it did serve two important political goals for the Framers. One is it signaled that the Articles had been replaced by a national system. If the confederation had been left alone, it may have begun “We the States.” The committee of detail had suggested a preamble which read as follows: “We the People of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts...and Georgia, do ordain, declare and establish the following Constitution for the government of ourselves and our posterity.” However, Gouverneur Morris, who was the chair of the committee of style, went over the entire first draft and gave the Constitution the style that it has today. He was responsible for the preamble's final form. And although it was intended to signal to its readers that a national system had been established, the word “national” was never used (much in the same way Madison, as slaveowner, saw to it that the word “slave” was never used). Secondly, Morris, the undisputed champion of aristocracy, anticipated the broad opposition to the Constitution and sought to begin the document with a little phrase that might give the document broader appeal. There is multiple irony in this. Morris, the great egalitarian phrase-maker, may have had more contempt for the common person than anyone at the convention. The phrase which is most well known and which is used to color the Constitution is legally meaningless and it falsely suggests that the Framers were either common people themselves or identified with them to the degree that they respected, even celebrated their political wisdom. The suggestion is totally false. However, perhaps the greatest irony stemming from this almost mythic phrase is that it was originally coined by the Iroquois, a people against whom the Framers were committing genocide. For the Iroquois, the concept of “the people” meant something very different from what the Framers had in mind. Their law and custom provided for the relatively equitable distribution of wealth, universal suffrage, and a confederation of states similar to the one described in the Articles. An observer in 1727 noted, they “allow no kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” Iroquois leaders were regarded as servants of their people and were generally “poorer than the common people, for they affect to give away and distribute all the presents or Plunder they get in their Treaties or War, so as to leave nothing for themselves.” The Framers, who approved the enslavement of human beings and who sought to prevent the political participation of the poor, women, and Native Americans, are considered by many as terribly progressive for the eighteenth century.2 Ideological managers would have us forget that the phrase borrowed from the Iroquois by the Framers, and exploited, (“We, the people, to form a union, to establish peace, equity and order...”) was taken from the Iroquois Treaty of 1520.3 The Bill of RightsFollowing the colonial experience, both the Framers and the common people shared a fear of tyranny or oppressive government and the tyranny of an imperial power which exploited the productive and trade opportunities of its colonies. It is upon this fear that the Bill of Rights rests. The Bill of Rights guarantees individuals protection from the government but it is the kind of protection that individual entrepreneurs, merchants, creditors, property owners, and speculators sought after having escaped the grip of British capitalists. As Staughton Lynd reminds us, “The First Amendment was not intended to protect the rights of wage workers...Rather the amendment sought to safeguard the rights of property-owning middle-class citizens to read, speak, meet and publish, prior to the formation of public policy.”4 Therefore, once the Framers had created a government that protected their interests as property owners, it seemed to many of them that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary. “Why, for instance,” argued Hamilton, “should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?” But some of the Framers, particularly as property owners, still feared the potential power of government. In a republic, the threat posed to private power by common people could not, apparently, be overstated. After all, argued Madison, if there were to be an invasion of private rights, the injury would result “not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents [owners of property], but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument” of a popular majority. Jefferson seemed to share this view when he said that he appreciated the “legal check it [the Bill of Rights] puts into the hands of the judiciary.”5 In addition, there was support in the House of Representatives for a Bill of Rights. Remember that some anti-federalists endorsed the Constitution believing that their suggested amendments were to be taken up by the House of Representatives. But several of the proposed amendments, because they challenged private power, clearly ran counter to the purpose of the Constitution. In Massachusetts, for example, a proposed amendment urged that no monopolistic “company with exclusive advantages of commerce” be erected by Congress. In Maryland, a proposed amendment suggested that “in all actions on debts or contracts and controversies respecting property, trial of the facts shall be by jury if either party choose; and that it be expressly declared that state courts have concurrent jurisdiction...”6 In order to keep decision making regarding contracts and property in private hands and out of the hands of the people, a motion in the House to consider all proposals of the states during the ratification process was defeated. The first ten amendments to the Constitution that were eventually adopted, or the Bill of Rights, did encompass many of the proposals regarding protection that had been put forward by anti-federalists during the ratification process. Proposals which attempted to make private power accountable, even in limited ways, however, were rejected. Consequently, while we have protection as individuals from the government (in principle but not in practice),* the Bill of Rights does not protect us from corporations or from our employers. The point here is that the Bill of Rights is quite consistent with the enhancement of private power intended by the Constitution. Corporations, themselves considered individuals (given a 1943 ruling by the Supreme Court), are often shielded by the Bill of Rights from public demands. The recent effort by the tobacco industry to prevent the government from prohibiting their advertisements in magazines by pointing to the Bill of Rights is a case in point.7
While few would disagree that the Bill of Rights affords certain individuals important protection from the government and therefore ought to be celebrated and carefully guarded, one could also argue that there is more to citizenship than protection. The Bill of Rights says not a word about guaranteeing participation. This is especially true with regard to investment decisions, the use of national resources, and workplace practices (there is no right to strike, for example). It is also true with regard to simple political participation. Despite all the talk about our “right to vote,” voting is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution. It is a privilege granted by the state for which we must qualify, and much of U.S. political history has been the struggle of the underclasses to do just that. As Sheldon Wolin points out, the Bill of Rights is “couched in such a language that was less suggestive of what a citizen might actively do than what government was prohibited from doing. (`Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...' `No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...')”8 Indeed, the protection afforded by the Bill of Rights is quite conditional as we shall see in a moment. First let us put all the parts together. A political-economic document, the Constitution was supposedly designed to “preserve the spirit and form of popular government” (Madison) even as the substance of popular government was taken away and the participatory politics flourishing at the local level was weakened. This was done out of fear and distrust of the political tendencies of common people or what Madison called an “unjust and interested majority.” Having established the political supremacy of property owners, the Constitution was then able to authorize the state to encourage economic expansion through the regulation of commerce, the protection of industry, trade, and private property the guarantee of contracts, and the development of a capital market. In other words the state was placed at the service of private elites and made an instrument of private power. The token usage of such egalitarian phrases as “we the people,” as Wolin correctly points out, was “a formula to give the Constitution a legitimate basis, not to encourage an active citizenry.” The vitality of the state would come not from a politically astute and engaged citizenry but from a highly productive and efficient economy. “Getting the economy moving again,” not “liberation,” would become the slogan of candidates running for political office. And here we come to the heart of the crisis which infects our political order. The concept of a reflective, politically active and community oriented citizen (a Ben Linder) must be displaced by the concept of the responsible citizen (a Lee Iacocca): one who gives “a due obedience to its [the federal government's] authority” (Hamilton) and who appreciates and longs for the imperial reward for obedience: material wealth and protection.9 What does this mean? It means that as long as we value the accumulation and protection of property, and a judiciary to protect us from the government more than we value playing a meaningful role in the decisions that affect our lives, we obey. We don't ask questions. We learn to care more about how much we earn than about what we do and even less about the impact that our work has on others. In fact, obedience implicitly means that when we go to work we leave our conscience at home. It also means that we agree not to care so much about the details of politics as long as the form of popular government and the appearance of democracy is maintained. We agree when we consider political issues to think primarily in terms of self-interest and consumer sovereignty. The Middle-East? That means the price of oil. Central America? There is the potential for more Spanish-speaking refugees to pour across our border. Social programs? Unless I am a recipient, they have a bad effect on my taxes and interest rates. We learn to admit that we are selfish and materialistic, as though it could not be otherwise, and then take pride for being honest in this admission. But notice: it is in the context of this obedience that I may claim my rights as a responsible citizen and expect the government to deliver to me as a responsible citizen the real opportunity to acquire affluence and comfort. It is in this context of obedience that my freedom of speech is protected. For if I don't obey, if I persist in valuing real democracy and community higher than the opportunity to obtain private power and affluence, then I am a subversive and my freedom of speech cannot be protected. The truth is that if we insist that we, the homeless, people of color, women, Native Americans, and workers - the majority - must govern ourselves, or, for example, if we agree that we are willing to do with less in order that we might genuinely share economic resources and power with the peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds or in order that we might live in a cleaner environment, then we threaten the privilege and power of the few who have it as well as the entire system that makes their privilege possible. The Framers understood this levelling tendency, this distaste of empire. In 1798, the Sedition Act was passed which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish...any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States or the President...with intent...to bring them...into contempt or disrepute.” A mechanic was sentenced to eighteen months in jail and a $400 fine for writing the following: “Here is the 1,000 out of 5,000,000 that receive all the benefit of public property and all the rest no share in it. Indeed all our administration is as fast approaching to the Lords and Commons as possible - that a few men should possess the whole Country and the rest be tenants to the others...[the few have] invented every means...to destroy the labouring part of the Community...”10 When the administration of Thomas Jefferson took power in 1801, the repression of political opponents continued. Over 2,000 were prosecuted including a minister who criticized Jefferson in a Thanksgiving Day sermon. Many served substantial prison terms. A worker who put up a sign that protested the tax laws and urged “peace and retirement to the president” served two years.11 Historian Leonard Levy has stated that the Framers “assumed that...freedom should be available only to believers,” a kind of quid pro quo. One hardly expects free speech to be absolute; as former Supreme Court Justice Vincent has stated, “The societal value of free speech must, on occasion, be subordinated to other values and considerations.” Yes, but what values and what considerations? Former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas helped answer this question when he declared that the government was permitted by the Constitution to prevent speech which “[interferes] with the preparation of the nation's defense or its capacity to wage war...[damages] property...[or disrupts] work.” Yet Howard Zinn points out, the Supreme Court has restricted speech even more severely than that. The symbolic act of burning one's draft card in 1968, for example, was forbidden.12 David Kairys points out that “the founding fathers were an economic and political elite who were more interested in promoting commerce and restraining the democratic impulses of the public than in any new notions of free speech. Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Franklin - even Jefferson and Paine - all supported criminalization of seditious libel.”13 The Constitution, it is clear, was erected upon the fear of levelling tendencies. The claim that common people govern ourselves in the United States is a false claim. And the claim that common people can freely and fundamentally criticize our political and economic system and work to build one that is more democratic without risking reprisal is a lie. The Citizen As SubversiveIn 1950, George Kennan, head of the State Department planning staff, gave a briefing to Latin American ambassadors in which he said that a major concern of foreign policy must be “The protection of our raw materials” - in fact, more broadly, the material and human resources that are “ours” by right, require that we combat a dangerous heresy which has been spreading through Latin America, namely “the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people.”14 This “heresy ” is simply and most often referred to as “communism,” whether it bears any relationship to that particular ideology or not. This condemnation of the idea that government has a direct responsibility for the welfare of the people captures wonderfully the legacy of the vision of empire and the Lockean notion of rights: 1) The globe is up for grabs. It is all potentially private property, suitable for development. You are free to try and acquire it and if you do, you own it. And what you do with it once you own it is up to you. It's your right, unless, that is, 2) a group of people, Church-based groups, unions, or popular coalitions who believe in community more than in free enterprise, gain control of a government and define limits to acceptable individual activity in accord with ethical standards. 3) The greatest threat to private power (free enterprise, the market system, contracts, production for profit and private ownership of productive property) has primarily been public power (a government controlled by common people for the welfare of the common people in the interest of community). Noam Chomsky has made the point well: “If segments of the usually irrelevant and apathetic public begin to organize and try to participate in some meaningful fashion in shaping affairs of state, that is not democracy, that is called a crisis of democracy as liberal elites in fact call it and it's a crisis that must be overcome by various means.”15 The common person then who is not responsibly obedient but who is politically active, who is a citizen, is subversive. And to an important degree the crisis of democracy has been confronted by elites in the United States, as in many other countries, through reform and through political repression. Political RepressionKairys states that, “Our glorification of the history and modern reality of free speech has masked the lack of substantial participation in the decisions that effect our lives...The mythic version of freedom of speech is a central element of our national identity. It can be easily manipulated to legitimize the lack of adequate means of expression or participation, enlarged power for the already powerful and even military intervention abroad.”16 There are two issues, then. One is the clarification of the nature and degree of political repression in the United States and the second is the suggestion that our belief that we live in a country free from political repression is itself a necessary condition of political repression. Our discussion, like all politically engaged intellectual work, must be seen not only as a process of discovery, but as a process of self-discovery, of liberation. Political repression in the United States, also contrary to popular myth, has been constant and widespread. And the depth and persistence of political repression in the United States, in light of our nation's self-understanding as a free and innocent people, is, in a word, shocking.17 According to Robert Justin Goldstein, “Political repression contributed significantly to the failure of the labor movement as a whole to achieve major power until the 1930s, the destruction of radical labor movements, the destruction of radical political movements, and the continuing self-censorship which Americans have imposed upon their own exercise of basic political freedoms.” According to Robert Justin Goldstein, “Political repression contributed significantly to the failure of the labor movement as a whole to achieve major power until the 1930s, the destruction of radical labor movements, the destruction of radical political movements, and the continuing self-censorship which Americans have imposed upon their own exercise of basic political freedoms.”18 According to Robert Justin Goldstein, “Political repression contributed significantly to the failure of the labor movement as a whole to achieve major power until the 1930s, the destruction of radical labor movements, the destruction of radical political movements, and the continuing self-censorship which Americans have imposed upon their own exercise of basic political freedoms.” Let us look briefly at each of these themes. The repression of American labor from 1870 to the mid-1930s, which was “massive and continuous,” took the form of government toleration of company towns, private police, private armies and private arsenals, the denial of basic political freedoms to millions of workers, the abuse of force by local police, state militia, and federal troops, and used techniques of harassment, mass arrests, and court injunctions. The most severe repression was directed at workers organizing within key sectors of the economy such as in the railroad, steel, textile, mining, lumber, and agricultural industries. In certain instances, such as in the Pullman strike of 1894 and the Steel Strike of 1919 where these major strikes could not have been broken without repressive measures, political repression prevented labor from becoming “a major power in American society” for at least twenty to forty years.19 Radical unions were “literally smashed by political repression or severely adversely affected by it, at the peak of their strengths.” Four of the leaders of the communist-anarchist movement which had achieved considerable strength in Chicago by 1886, for example, were hanged “without any reasonable proof” that they were involved in an alleged bombing. The Western Federation of Miners, a socialist-oriented industrial union which by the early twentieth century had 50,000 members was “physically decimated by arbitrary arrests and deportations.” The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which had a membership of 100,000 workers by 1917 had its entire top leadership jailed due to government raids and conspiracy prosecutions. Goldstein describes the repression of the IWW as “vicious” and states, “Indeed, the entire history of the IWW is simply a history of political repression....” The union movement affiliated with the Communist Party (CP) elicited a legislative response that was openly repressive: the “1947 Taft-Hartley requirement that all union officers swear non-Communist oaths to qualify for Wagner Act benefits, the 1954 Communist control act provisions removing Wagner Act benefits from `communist-infiltrated' organizations, and the 1958 Landrum-Griffin ban on CP members serving as union officers were all designed to completely destroy CP strength among American workers. Combined with CIO ousters (under strong government pressure) of CP-dominated unions, these measures decimated communist influence in the American labor movement.”20 Goldstein points out that not just labor movements but basic political movements as well have been damaged because of political repression. The Socialist Party (SP) during World War I suffered intense political repression in the form of “arrests of party leaders, post office bans on SP publications, and physical attacks on party members by police and vigilantes.” This repression completely destroyed about 30 percent of local party organizations and generated divisions within the party which led to its demise. The Communist Party, also during the post-World War I era, was driven underground by means of raids and mass arrests, deportations, and criminal syndicalism prosecutions. When it showed signs of renewed strength in the mid-1930s, the CP was targeted by the 1940 Smith Act (the first peacetime sedition act since 1789), and during the 1940 elections, the CP “was barred from the ballot in fifteen states.” During 1939-1941, the party was investigated by Congress and three state legislatures. The FBI's counter-intelligence program or COINTELPRO, the program of repression with which most contemporary activists are familiar, was created to destroy the CP in 1956, even though the party was already decimated. Goldstein notes that given the threat posed, “the American repression of the CP exceeded that of any other democratic nation.”21 During the Vietnam Era, with citizens becoming involved in a very broad range of issues that extended well beyond traditional left/labor oriented frameworks (some of which were environmentalism, animal liberation, gay and lesbian liberation, a multi-faceted feminism, new forms of black nationalism, American Indian liberation, anti-nuclear power, anti-nuclear weapons, and spiritualism) and with citizens often moving from the language of “rights” to the language of “power” and “liberation,” the government's response at one level was massive covert surveillance and the use of agents provocateurs and burglaries in attempts to foster division and discord within protest organizations.22 By the mid-1970s the FBI maintained intelligence files on an estimated 6.5 million individuals and groups. The CIA launched domestic surveillance on roughly 10,000 citizens and more than a 100 groups, and kept an index on more than 300,000 citizens and organizations. By the mid-1970s the FBI maintained intelligence files on an estimated 6.5 million individuals and groups. The CIA launched domestic surveillance on roughly 10,000 citizens and more than a 100 groups, and kept an index on more than 300,000 citizens and organizations. By the mid-1970s the FBI maintained intelligence files on an estimated 6.5 million individuals and groups. The CIA launched domestic surveillance on roughly 10,000 citizens and more than a 100 groups, and kept an index on more than 300,000 citizens and organizations.23 Goldstein believes that political repression in the United States has destroyed the continuity of American radical movements, especially during the 1917-1920 and 1947-1954 periods. He also believes that it has chilled political debate and narrowed the range of acceptable ideas: “One of the most startling aspects of American political life is the virtual exclusion of socialism from any serious consideration as a possible solution to American economic or other problems.” Proposals for public control of credit and monetary policy which emerged for a time out of the People's Party 100 years ago (echoing the policy proposals of Shayites 100 years before that) were derailed24 and their advocates purged in much the same way that today's red-baiting and harassment of citizens working in solidarity with the people of Central America helps to legitimize the present Congressional unwillingness to recognize the validity of socialist movements in that region of the world. “The fear of being investigated by the FBI, wiretapped, hauled before legislative committees, deported or prosecuted for sedition has not been unrealistic,” notes Goldstein. But it is a reality the obedient and responsible citizen does not know and, perhaps, does not wish to know.25 The Ultimate Check: Secret PoliceConsider briefly the experience of blacks in this country. The enslavement of human beings continued for seventy-six years after the signing of the Constitution. In 1865 the Black Codes, which were the slave codes revived, legally restored white supremacy as southern states rejoined the union. In the presidential election of 1876, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden received more popular votes than the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, but the Democrats agreed to allow the electoral commission to declare Hayes the winner so that they could retain political control and white supremacy in southern states. Following that historic “compromise,” blacks were disenfranchised and the most severe and extended period of racist violence, excepting slavery itself, began. Between 1882 and 1930, a system of state sponsored terror was in operation that resulted in the lynching of 3,386 blacks. Racism, of course, still continues. The median household net worth for whites in 1984 was $39,135. For blacks, it was $3,397. The poverty rate for whites was 11.5 percent while for blacks it was 33.8 percent. Infant mortality rate in 1982 for whites was 10.1 percent while for blacks it was 19.6. The male murder rate for blacks that year was four times that of whites. Blacks have been victims of medical experimentation, particularly in prison but not always. The state of Georgia during the early 1970s, for example, sterilized several “mentally deficient” black girls.26 Numerous other data, measure, and personal testimony could be wheeled into place to further make the case that the systematic denial of the humanity of people of color is taking place in our society. And similar claims could be advanced, and are done so regularly, that other categories of people in our society experience systematic oppression. The key word here is systematic. That is, the oppression in question is linked to the web of ideas, values, beliefs, assumptions, and practices that help to make up the social relationships in which we are all implicated. Or has Hegel has stated, the world which is outside us has its threads in us to such a degree that it is these threads which make us what we really are. The problem is not just that there is systematic racism and/or massive inequality in an otherwise free society. If there is systematic racism and/or massive inequality in a society that is believed by most of its members to be basically free, it means that the humanity of the non-oppressed, as well as the oppressed, is diminished. One can hardly be thought of as a healthy person if one has lost the ability to understand (and act on that understanding) the oppression of another. The legacy of the Framers in this regard, in addition to the remarkable achievement of ideological mangers who have followed them, needs to be highlighted here. We have unreflectively accepted the idea that freedom means the right of a few individuals to control the lives of millions of people by virtue of their private ownership of community, national, and international resources. We have unreflectively accepted the idea that democracy refers to a political system in which the marginal participation of common people is designed to protect the political and economic power of the propertied class. The key political values that emerge from the Constitution are frozen in the ice of eighteenth-century elitism. We allow the privileged to rest comfortably in a set of social relations that call exploitation freedom and the empowerment of the rich democracy. Given these conceptual blinders, the oppression of others becomes harder to see and the corruption of our own humanity, particularly if we are among the privileged, becomes invisible. Lies about who we are and what we do become more palatable than the truth, denial more palatable than confrontation. In this context, those people who want to expose corruption or who attempt to challenge power are perceived by guardians of the order as very dangerous, as threats to freedom and democracy and the “good life” we share. The voices of blacks and other marginalized but active and critically minded citizens need to be silenced, if the hierarchy of privilege and power in this country is to be preserved. Correspondingly, it is their voices that need to be heard if fundamental change is to come about. It is not surprising, then, that even the reformist, anti-communist black organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was infiltrated by the FBI for a twenty-one year period. The government's response to more militant, radical black organizations, such as the socialist Black Panther Party (BPP), suggests that movements by oppressed people that have a real chance of ending that oppression simply is not tolerated. The BPP which attempted to build “survival” or community service programs which included health clinics, children's breakfast programs, busing, as well as police patrols on which BPP members brandished legally-acquired firearms, was smashed by the government in a manner which Donner describes as “all-out warfare” and a “reign of terror.” Twenty-eight BPP members were assassinated by the FBI and/or various local police departments.27 In addition to attacks made by the FBI (which was later found to be “criminally complicit in violence” - including assassination),28 Internal Revenue Service harassment, CIA surveillance, Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice grand jury abuse, and the harassment of lawyers defending the BPP by federal urban intelligence teams or “red squads” were all brought into play in the government's campaign to eliminate the BPP. The strategy behind this repression tells us a good deal about the purpose of the repression itself. “The effectiveness of the BPP newspaper, the eloquence of its leaders, the appeal of its children's breakfast program, and the emergence of a sympathetic white constituency, placed a high priority on actions to...discredit them through unfavorable publicity,” notes Donner. In other words, they posed the threat of a good example or of an alternative community in which common people demonstrate clearly that they are capable of governing themselves. Similarly Fred Hampton was targeted and then murdered by the FBI because he was a “highly effective leader, his charisma enabled him partially to overcome the Bureau's divisive efforts....He had instituted a number of successful community welfare, medical, and educational programs...he was slated for national leadership.” Or sample the remarks made about Martin Luther King, Jr. by William Sullivan, head of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division:
Sullivan had Samuel Pierce in mind, currently Reagan's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who has been accused of racism by other blacks in the government. It is clear the government did not want blacks to demonstrate the capacity of self-government, or the converse, to expose the pervasiveness and hideousness of white supremacy. More importantly, the government did not want the lie that we live in a free country to be revealed. In a FBI communication dated March 4, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover stated, in reference to black nationalism and black leaders, that there is a need to “pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them.” The names of black leaders discussed in this particular communication have been deleted, but as Perkus notes, the names of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. “fit perfectly in the spaces censored by the bureau.” The communication issued one month before the King assassination “raises questions about the FBI complicity in the murders” of both black leaders. It also raises questions of our identity as U.S. citizens and our unreflective acceptance of a way of life and a set of ideas which are celebrated for their encouragement of free expression.30 The BPP was just one of 1,100 groups spied on by the FBI in 1975. The FBI's effort to create internal violent disruption within the BPP also was not an isolated effort. Between 1956 and 1971 there were 2,340 COINTELPRO operations. One-third of them were intended to either disrupt the functioning of a particular group or promote conflict between groups. And it has not been just the labor or civil rights movements that have been considered dangerous. J. Edgar Hoover, in the early 1970s, identified a new target, the “WLM.” Wrote Hoover, it is “absolutely essential that we conduct sufficient investigations to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the WLM and to determine the potential for violence presented by the various groups connected with their movement as well as any possible threat they may represent to the internal security of the United States.” The WLM was the women's liberation movement.31 The women's liberation movement and other political movements pose a threat to the legitimacy of the Constitution. Women, after were not thought of as “people” by the Framers, nor were people of color, nor were wage laborers, or anyone for that matter who did not demonstrate their worth by having accumulated specified amounts of property. Even though the concept of “the people” has been broadened since 1787 and the franchise extended, the essential features of the Constitution (centralized power at the national level, a system of checks and balances which strengthens private power, a system of separation of power which prevents simple majority rule, a Bill of Rights which protects property and individuals in their pursuit of property but which fails to guarantee participation) still cohere in a way that continues to express in 1987 terms one fundamental purpose of the Constitution of 1787 which was to effect a “national political system in which commercial and financial interests were assured that new and potentially unpopular rules and practices would nevertheless be enforced reliably and consistently....”32 Moreover, since the Constitution several steps have been taken to further insulate political and economic policymaking processes from public pressure. According to Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Linda Medcalf, Alexander Hamilton “placed the reins of power as far from the people as he could” through the creation of a “centrally guided financial and development system that would be as hard to identify as it would be to reach and change” and by “transferring as much policymaking as possible into the far less visible and apparently neutral and mechanical hands of courts and lawyers.” Dolbeare and Medcalf identify several other steps such as the passage of the Federal Reserve Act which shifted monetary policy out of the public arena into the hands of private bankers that serve to update the Framers' design, frustrate popular movements, and protect private power. And once “this system was consolidated in World War I, participation could actually be encouraged because there was little chance that popular majorities could do much damage.”33 We may read “We the People” convinced that the Framers were truly democrats, but our political institutions are locked within an eighteenth-century celebration of empire. The most important of our public policies are fashioned by private elites and have their origin in impenetrable boardrooms and in places which lie deep within the bowels of a huge and distant bureaucracy. Therefore, ideas or systems of thought which “steer Negroes in a proper direction” (and undermine the privilege of “better” people) or which suggest that workers should control their work lives (and undermine the privilege of “better” people) or which confront the many forms of patriarchy (and undermine the privilege of “better” people) do, indeed, threaten the security and power of privileged elites who define our needs for us. Of course such ideas are subversive. J. Edgar Hoover made the point in 1938: “Subversive alien theories and `isms' are not only a drastic contrast to American ways of thinking, feeling and acting, but they stand for a complete overthrow of established ideas of American life and philosophy of government to which America is dedicated.”34 Elites cannot combat citizenship openly any longer. The “We the People” lie has become too big. Thus, the FBI and other governmental agencies slip quietly and covertly away from their jurisdiction, in this case crime fighting, into intelligence gathering and thought control operations, replete with dirty tricks, violence, and assassination.35 In other words, the Constitutional imperative that a few “better” people rule in the interest of economic development today requires the establishment of covert military operations to check the threat of democracy. The FBI began domestic surveillance during the 1930s when the leftist orientation of many labor unions alarmed J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt. By 1953, 13.5 million persons (or one out of every five workers) were required to pass loyalty/security tests. Today, the new FBI building in Washington devotes 35,000 linear feet to domestic intelligence files. The rest of the FBI's work takes up 23,000 linear feet. Crime fighting, in the case of the FBI one could argue, is a front for political surveillance and repression. It is ironic but understandable that because we are supposed to be a government of the people, much the work of our government's “secret police” is concerned with making sure that the people do, in fact, support what the government is doing. The early FBI “countersubversive” campaign during the post-World War I era was part of a “public relations” or “educational” effort (which involved working with the press to distribute false information about subversives) to simultaneously rally support for countersubversive operations. The strategy of using thought control emerged out of the government's propaganda campaign during World War I. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, who served on the government propaganda commission during World War I wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” During the same period, Walter Lippmann devised the term “manufacture of consent” which he also called an essential “art” in “the practice of democracy.”36 Donner states that it was no accident that the congressional anti-subversive committees following World War I “uniformly singled out `propaganda' as their target...The spoken and written word...became a prime intelligence target...” “Educational” institutions themselves have become centers of indoctrination. From 1952 to 1966, the CIA spent $3,300,000 on the National Student Association in an attempt to favorably influence the student community toward CIA policies. The CIA monitored faculty members under consideration for grants and recruited professors, administrators, and other covert allies within the university community for purposes of political control. The CIA also funneled $12,442,925 to labor, business, church, and cultural groups. One million dollars was directly given over to “intellectuals, writers, and artists.” Between 1949 and 1972, the CIA spent $25,000,000 on mind-control and brain-washing experiments. The CIA has recruited journalists, including correspondents for the New York Times, “CBS News,” Time magazine, and other organizations, in order to plant stories (many of which are false) and popularize policies which might otherwise enjoy little public approval.37 John Stockwell, who worked for the CIA thirteen years, was Chief of the Angolan Task Force in 1975-1976. In that position he was a subcommittee member of the National Security Council as well as manager of CIA covert operations in Angola. He has stated that one-third of his staff of over 140 personnel consisted of professional propagandists who fed false stories about Cuban and Soviet aggression to the press, the State Department spokesperson, and Ambassador to the United Nations (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now U.S. Senator from New York). Stockwell, referring to information revealed by the Church Committee investigations of the CIA, noted that the “CIA had co-opted several hundred journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business, to pump its propaganda stories into our media, to teach us to hate Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh and the Chinese and whomever...Leslie Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe to print stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb...Freedom of the press doesn't mean that the New York Times is required to print the truth, it means that they have the freedom to print lies if they want to.”38 That the entire political structure of the United States, including the Bill of Rights, is located within a swamp of contempt by elites for the general public is amply revealed by the MK Ultra Program. This was not a program which targeted specific political constituencies but one which dealt with the development of general social control techniques and one which used the general public, again and again, as guinea pigs. For example, during a twenty year period, the CIA, working through 200 medical schools and mental hospitals including those at Harvard and Georgetown universities, experimented with disease and drugs on citizens without their knowledge. “They [the CIA] dragged a barge through San Francisco Bay,” stated Stockwell, again basing his claims on congressional testimony, “leaking a virus to measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb to see what would it would do to the community if all the kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the two or three with weak constitutions who might die in the process...”39 The secret police operations under the Reagan administration have moved us a step closer to the actual implementation of government run by the military. On April 6, 1984, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive #52 authorizing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to initiate a secret, nationwide, “readiness exercise” called REX 84. This exercise would test the readiness of a plan to enlist the personnel of the Department of Defense, all fifty state National Guard units, and many state-based “State Defense Force” units (which were to be created at the behest of FEMA by state legislatures) in the event that President Reagan chose to declare a “State of Domestic National Emergency” following a nuclear war, violent dissent or, most probably, national opposition to a military invasion abroad. The exercise also included a plan to take into custody some 400,000 undocumented Central American refugees throughout the United States and to intern them in ten detention centers, already prepared or under construction. Louis Guiffreda, while at the Army War College in Pennsylvania in 1970, had written a paper advocating martial law in the event that resistance by black militants escalate nationally. The 1970 scenario also included the roundup and transfer to “assembly centers or relocations camps” of at least 21 million “American Negroes.” Directive #52, of course, is the 1970 plan modified to provide current readiness for martial law. An alarmed and active citizenry always poses the threat of democracy and majority rule.40 The Tendency of “Better People”As we have seen, concepts such as “better” people, or “more virtuous,” or “more established” people and other judgments of superiority were concepts shared by the Framers. The design of the Constitution and its attendant rights expresses the notion that only the “better” few are fit to govern themselves and the rest of the people are fit to participate in meaningful political decisions, primarily, in indirect and carefully checked ways. The responsible citizen obeys. The democratic citizen is subversive. The concept of “better” people, of course, did not begin with the United States. It is a concept which is necessary whenever a society, such as ours, accepts massive inequality as normal. The term “better” people is not used today in just the same way it was when George Washington was the richest man in America. Today we come up with different criteria of “better” - IQ test scores, education levels, credentials, competency and merit tests, various measures of efficiency, productivity, and accumulation, and so on. It follows, obviously, that when there are “better” people (and remember .5 percent own 35 percent of the nation's wealth), there are less than “better” people. That is why our own political history has consisted of repeated and explicit attempts to “purify” the electorate. To mention one example, by the 1920s, when the FBI was being created, many dissidents were called reds (reds are not “better” people) and reds in turn were “attacked as godless, bestial, dirty, and depraved...” Attorney General Palmer, in 1920, referred to his program of illegal mass deportation as the removal of “alien filth.” J. Edgar Hoover referred to radicals as “termites.”41 As Governor of California, Ronald Reagan called political activists “mad dogs.” We find that citizens with critical ideas are easily described in terms that cast them as enemies of the “freedom” and “democracy” and make their elimination seem natural and desirable. The Constitution, while at one level is designed to protect the citizen from arbitrary authority, embodies within it values, assumptions, and procedures which insure that the government will come down ruthlessly upon those who wish to challenge what the Framers understood as “self-evident” truths. Donner, in reference to the FBI operations directed against blacks, suggests that they “plunge us into a den of horror, a nativist Final Solution, justified as violence prevention and bureaucratically programmed in a stunning gloss on Hannah Arendt's `banality of evil.'” In spite of the bicentennial celebrations of our political freedom, it appears that we are a nation where citizens who disturb, upset, disrupt, and challenge the Framers' definition of freedom and democracy are people whose existence is ultimately regarded as an insufferable provocation. NotesChapter 41. The literature, fortunately, is voluminous in this area. For those who are new to the subject I would suggest going to the nearest good library and looking under the heading “United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation.” A good general overview is provided by David Wise, The American Police State (New York: Random House, 1976). 2. Clinton Rossiter, in 1787: The Grand Convention (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 138, notes that several newspapers at the time expressed great praise of the Framers for their forward thinking such as they were the “collective wisdom of the Continent.” The French charge d'affaires stated that they were “the most enlightened men of the continent.” Charles M. Lee, Jr. in his Genius of the People (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 4, provides us with an example of a contemporary tribute: the Framers were “representative of what they themselves often referred to as the genius of the people - that cumulative body of knowledge and intuition formed by living for centuries under the legacy of the Magna Carta and the rule of common law.” 3. For a discussion of the Iroquois and their relation to the Framers see Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders (Ipswich, Massachusetts: Bambit Incorporated, 1982). 4. Staughton Lynd, “The Constitution and Union Rights,” In These Times, Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 1987, 13; Lynd goes on to say that such rights are also critical for workers but they are not all the rights that workers need given their dependency in the workplace. 5. Edward Dumbauld, The Bill of Rights (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), 8,9. 6. Dumbauld, 14-16. 7. The Philip Morris Magazine recently sponsored an essay contest (first prize, $15,000) that asked for essays which explored “First Amendment's application to American business<193>and questions the ramifications of a tobacco advertising ban.” 8. Sheldon S. Wolin, “What Revolutionary Action Means Today,” in Democracy, Fall 1982, 21. 9. For a discussion of the concept of citizen as it relates to the intention of the Framers see Sheldon S. Wolin, “The People's Two Bodies,” Democracy, January 1981; Madison, Federalist No. 10; Hamilton, Federalist No. 27. 10. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. I, New York: International Publishers, 1975), 88, 89. 11. David Kairys, “The Tortured History of Free Speech,” In These Times, Aug. 5-18, 1987, 12. 12. Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 77; Kairys, 12. 13. Kairys, 12. 14. The example is used by Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 50. 15. Delivered in a talk at the University of Colorado at Bolder, December 1986. 16. Kairys, 13. 17. I shall present a very rough overview, but I encourage you to explore two rather comprehensive studies, one by Frank Donner and the other by Robert Justin Goldstein, upon which this, admittedly thin, overview is based: see Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America (New York: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1978). 18. Goldstein, 548. 19. Goldstein, 548. 20. Goldstein, 547-551. 21. Goldstein, 553-555. 22. Cathy Perkus, ed., COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Monad Press, 1975). 23. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy (New York: Penguin Books Ltd, 1984), 41. 24. See Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 25. Goldstein, 556-557. 26. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, Rules of the Game: American Politics and the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1986), 12; Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: William Styron, 1978), 54. 27. Donner, 231. Also see, Arnold Rogow, The Dying of the Light (New York: Putnam, 1975); and Assata Shakur, Assata, (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1987). 28. Fred Hampton, a leader of the BPP, was assassinated by police on 4 December 1969 when a fusillade of between eighty-three and ninety-nine shots were fired into his Chicago apartment at 4:00 AM; see Donner, 226-230. 29. Cohen and Rogers, 42. The rest of Sullivan's is interesting in that it reveals the degree to which the federal government attempts to manipulate movement leadership. It continues: “For some months I have been thinking about this matter. One day I had an opportunity to explore this from a philosophical and sociological standpoint with [name deleted] whom I have known for some years<193>I asked him<193>if he knew any Negro of outstanding intelligence or ability<193>[He] has submitted to me the name of the aboveİcaptioned person. Enclosed with this memorandum is an outline [deleted] biography, which is truly remarkable<193>On scanning this biography, it will be seen that [deleted] does have all the qualifications of the kind of a Negro leader to overshadow Martin Luther King. If this thing can be involved, I think it would be not only a great help to the FBI, but would be a fine thing for the country at large.” See David Wise, The American Police State (New York: Random House, 1976), 303. 30. Donner, 226-230; Cohen and Rogers, 42, 43; Perkus, 22 31. Cohen and Rogers, 41,42. 32. Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Linda Medcalf, “The Dark Side of the Constitution,” in John F. Manley and Kenneth M. Dolbeare, eds., The Case Against the Constitution (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,1987), 128. 33. Dolbeare and Medcalf, 138. 34. Donner, 55. 35. In his televised debate with Walter Mondale, President Reagan acknowledged the “Assassination Manual” and attributed it to the CIA station chief in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. One of the best sources for documentation of U.S.İsponsored assassinations abroad is the Hearings Before The Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, First Session, 1975, Volumes I-VII. Perhaps the most infamous involvement of the U.S. government in domestic assassinations was in the murder of JFK. I refer you to The Final Assassination Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives, 1979 and to an unpublished work, “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal,” by Torbitt, available at Tom Davis Books, P.O. Box 1107, Aptos, CA 95001-1107. 36. Chomsky, 235. 37. Donner, 49, 269, 270. 38. John Stockwell, in a talk delivered at the University of California, at Santa Barbara, 8 April, 1986. The tape is available through The Other Americas, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA. 39. For a complete discussion of the MK Ultra Program see John Marks, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate (New York: New York Times Books, 1979). Also see the documents in the appendix of George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left (Boston: South End Press, 1987). 40. Because Congress forbids the use of military personnel for domestic law enforcement purposes, FEMA planned to deputize military personnel. This information was drawn from several sources: an affidavit prepared by the Christic Institute which was filed for a federal civil lawsuit (available from The Christic Institute, 1324 North Capitol Street, Washington, DC 20002); Miami Herald, July 5, Alexander Cockburn, “Ashes & Diamonds,” In These Times, July 22-August 4, 1987, 17; Stockwell. 41. Donner, 17-20. 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