The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A message to America on this July 4, 2019
A sunny day greeted all 5,000+ sailors, marines, and military contractors as we were towed into the Norfolk Naval base port in 2007. I can almost guarantee there were no billionaires to greet America’s patriots, which I was (and still am). I bet the last billionaire I’d been in proximity to was in Dubai, a dystopia of indoor ski slopes, industrial level imported Indian labor, Indian child sex slaves, and the Gold Suk. This modern chaos, best described as a mix of Bay Area technological dystopia and Dickesian levels of inequality, let’s call it the Global Gilded Age 2.0, it’s honestly so bad now we might be in level 3.0. Reform or revolution: this must end.
From 2004 to 2006 I spent my time in a job at the Ceremonial Guard in D.C. — a job where I marched at Arlington National Cemetery funerals, twirled rifles on the drill team, and served as a presidential lawn ornament to dolt and War Criminal George W. Bush and de facto President and war criminal Dick Cheney. This was a job that took more freedom from me than any I’d ever experienced, but gave me the most economic security as I’d known at any time of my life. I was 21.
After my time in D.C., but before riding the USS Eisenhower into Norfolk’s Navy port in May 2007, I realized something: The War on Terror is bullshit. I worked nights for seven and a half months on cruise. I tracked parts for F-18s. By the end of cruise, I had spent countless hours sitting on the side of the ship next to a 50 caliber machine gun mount. I spent many mornings after my shift listening to water splash up against the side of the fast moving ship as I watched flying fish push themselves out of the water and into the air briefly before diving below the surface. Memory would take me back to an eight-year-old me on Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, in awe of sea horses, star fish, and flying fish.
I sat and asked, what is this? What is this ship, designed for WWII, actually doing in 2007? Fighting wars? Am I just caught up in a powerful institution’s habit? Was I simply a speck of dust caught up in what President Eisenhower called the Military-Industrial Complex? Twenty-four-year old me sure wanted to be eight-year old me much more than I wanted to be sitting on a defunct instrument of war. Guess it’s fitting I had the realization of how deep the war complex went while sitting next to a gun deck that had probably served its original purpose forty years before I was born in 1983.
I walked off that boat in 2007 puzzled. I received my Honorable Discharge less than a year later. The Financial Collapse of 2007/2008 fueled by Wall Street fraud and corruption brought the global economy to the brink of meltdown shortly after the ink dried on my DD-214 (official discharge document). To say I’d become disillusioned with the American Oligarchy is an understatement. No fear though. Obama told me as I sat in a Virginia Beach audience in early 2008 that he would take on “fat cat” bankers, that he would end the wars, that he would fight for Universal Healthcare in America.
At that time, I didn’t realize how much of a fraud he was. It began to sink in as his administration gave a trillion dollars in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) to bail out bankers in 2009. He then let them keep their bonuses, because well, that’s what Wall Street — one of his 2008 presidential campaigns largest donors — paid Obama to do. His administration then proceeded to give Wall Street trillions over a period of years from 2008 to 2014 through the Quantitative Easing overseen by the Federal Reserve. What did the rest of the country get? Declining lifespans, endless war, a failing economy, and a drug epidemic, just to name a few things. The bankers got trillions, poor and working American’s got robbed of money, labor, hope, and dignity.
From 2008–16, D.C. propped up West Coast technology monopolies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter while Obama let Silicon Valley sell the country on their bullshit of innovation, disruption, and libertarianism. All lies. There are few bigger recipients of state welfare than West Coast technology monopolies. They are probably only seconded today by Wall Street (which must be reined in) and the modern Oil Oligarchs (which must be crushed).
I spent these years living on my G.I. Bill and Illinois Veteran’s Grant, while the real box store economy around me in Southern Illinois was showing the sand it’s built on. The corporate nerve centers, those that plop their insidious extractive franchises in small and medium sized towns across America, yeah, they don’t care at all about the towns they put their extractive box stores in. They’ll shut them down and leave them vacant as soon as the nerve center see’s the building and its merchandise is no longer profitable — the town’s local population be damned. This is modern America. There is no meritocracy.
After a decade spent jostling between higher education and bullshit jobs, I’d reached a conclusion by 2014 that American Meritocracy wasn’t just dead…it’d died years ago and was now weaponized by the Billionaire Class. It remains an idea pushed in corporate owned media like MSNBC, CNN, FOX NEWS, and others, but trust me: It’s dead. The problem is that not everyone knows it because of the power these dominant oligarchic media outlets hold.
So, on this July 4, 2019, I’m asking anyone whose eyes roll over these words, and perhaps internalizes a few of them: Where does America sit today “in the course of human events”? What truths do we hold to be “self-evident”? One truth not self-evident, but true nonetheless, is that one of the primarily credited authors of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, wasn’t a slave holder by chance. No, the author of many of 1776’s phrases of freedom was a cold, calculated slave holder with many of his descendants from sexual relations with slaves still with us today. Jefferson’s story is as full of denial as screaming America the Free today.
Americans cannot claim to be spokespeople for freedom with half its population living in economic bondage, as our government continues to spend trillions on imperial, asymmetric wars, while two million people languish unjustly behind bars in American prisons in the name of profit, when three billionaires own more wealth than half the population, when oil and gas interests have such a stranglehold on D.C. that we are locked into certain planetary suicide and so, so much more. No, Americans may lay claim to aspirations of freedom, but we are not a free people.
We are slaves to corporate and profit driven industries that have robbed us of our blessed freedoms. The American Food Industry robs us with the processed foods that are poisoning us at every point of their production. Our government enslaves us with the myth that our freedom can be won in the wars supported by our Military Industrial Complex. We are slaves to dogmatic myths of money and economy that allow billionaires to knowingly impoverish and divide us in order to conquer us. Our politicians are slaves to their corporate donors that keep this entire illusion going.
America’s movement toward freedom, as it sits today, is adrift waiting to be redefined. Our country has moved from one where aircraft carriers make sense to one where they just don’t. It’s gone from a world where money was supposed to be a tool of economic freedom, to one where populations are coerced by their economic position. For example, we recruit rich kids to pay exorbitant tuition at rich universities so the offspring of the rich can then go to work at a rich, socialistic (TARP & QE) corporation, yet we recruit poor kids to enlist in the military to “serve their country” while lining the pockets of the rich.
Make no mistake: Our problems are monumental, but we must confront them. We must breakthrough the myths that have gotten us to a place where Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos control more of the US economy than half the country, a country that has been aimlessly at war for almost twenty years, a country with a drug overdose and suicide epidemic, a country in deep denial about the brutality of its economic system. We can no longer ignore the centuries long history of American brutality. We can no longer afford to be a country in denial about this very real history riddled with black marks. We must integrate the more real versions of our history with the whitewashed narratives that work to create a false nationalistic pride. Americans must be brave and confront our unpleasant history so that we can take account, deal with it and build an America that is more free for more Americans.
There’s no better time to celebrate freedom than on July 4. However, we must become more self-reflective and ask ourselves deeper questions about American freedom. We must ask ourselves: What type of people have we really been? What type of people do we want to be? Hopefully the answer to these questions aligns you with the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy, anything else is a sure road to near term economic turmoil, ecofascism, or some other, new beast, one so ugly we can’t even properly name it yet.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump must be defeated democratically and deprived of a second term. So, too, must any corporate owned Democrat be democratically defeated, as fascism-lite is not an aspirational place to go, but it is where incrementalism will take us. Just as incrementalism is likely to kill 7,000,000 people in Yemen, it will lead to similar catastrophes in other places throughout the world if left intact.
Make no mistake, we must do nothing less than build real people power — grassroots power — to take on corporate power at the federal, state, and local level. Mass movements are the only thing standing between democracy today and authoritarianism tomorrow. The choice is up to all of us. We have time to organize. We must do so. Our goal should be to make sure that never again is there a young person putting their life on the line for something they don’t believe in. Let us engage in a monumental political struggle to achieve this reality: Home of the Free.
Smedley Butler told the world almost one hundred years ago all it needs to know about modern warfare, and it’s as true, maybe even more so today, than in his own day: War is a Racket. Yes it is General Butler. Yes. It. Is. It has been since Butler wrote those words.
