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Thursday: June 7, 2007

Dear friends,

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote a book entitled Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy (HarperCollins, 2004). While the title is an indictment against President Bush, the real point of the book is that our government has become a wholly-owned subsidiary big business.

In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis. “While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business,” he writes. “My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as ‘a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.’ Sound familiar?”

He quotes Hitler’s propaganda chief Herman Goerring:

It is always simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Kennedy then adds, “The White House has clearly grasped the lesson.”

Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini’s insight that, “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Kennedy also tells us, “The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power,” and:

There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy.

What is tragic is that Kennedy thought if he could expose this civic evil we would care. Apparently, he couldn’t have been more wrong. I am convinced that the only reason we are still in Iraq, and perhaps the main reason we went there in the first place, is the ties between politicians and, what Republican President General Dwight Eisenhower warned was, the “military industrial complex.” Halliburton and its ties to the Vice President is the most obvious example. In 2003, Senator Frank Lautenberg from New Jersey said that, despite claiming that he no longer had financial ties to Halliburton, Mr. Cheney’s financial disclosure filings with the Office of Government Ethics listed $205,298 in deferred salary payments made to him by Halliburton in 2001 and another $162,393 in 2002. The filings indicated that he was scheduled to receive more payments in 2003, 2004 and 2005.

“In 2001 and 2002, Vice President Cheney was paid almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president,” Lautenberg said. The U.S. vice president's salary is $198,600 annually. The financial disclosure forms also said that Cheney continued to hold 433,333 unexercised Halliburton stock options, with exercise prices below the company’s current stock market price. Cheney’s spokeswoman said Cheney had placed these options in a charitable trust and no longer had control over them. What he has influenced, however, is that, while he has been in office and while we have been in Iraq, Halliburton has received billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts without competitive bids. A multimillionaire when he went into office, the Vice President will no doubt be a billionaire when he leaves and can again exercise his shares of Halliburton stock.

There are literally hundreds of more subtle ties to military-industrial corporations, including campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. However, if the American people don’t care about the outlandishly blatant, why would we bother with lesser ethical breaches? What has happened to our consciences, our values, our moral outrage? Have they succeeded in making us so afraid that we simply don’t care about anything else?

History, ultimately, will show that the fear mongering represented by the phrase “war on terror” caused a nearly complete abandonment of moral values by political leaders of both parties. What it also will show is how complicit the average citizen was in this. While we are hundreds of times more likely to be killed in an automobile accident, we have allowed fear to manipulate us, anesthetize us and blind us.

Do we need to be vigilant against terrorist attacks? Absolutely. Yet, we have allowed our completely disproportionate fear to cause us to abandon our values and completely neglect other critical issues. By our leaders’ manipulation and our placid response, we have surrendered what terrorists could never take: true American values.

Sincerely,

Rev. Michael S. Piazza
President