Fifty Great United States Lies

1. We Live in a Democracy.

This core myth cries out for demolition with special urgency at present thanks to constant media and political class repetition of the claim that Russia “undermined our democracy” during the 2016 presidential election. I have written at length against this claim so many times that it has become difficult to do so again without excessive self-repetition. Here are just three among a large number of reports and commentaries in which I have carefully explained why the U.S. is a corporate and imperial plutocracy and even an oligarchy, not a democracy:

“Time Is Running Out: Who Will Protect Our Wrecked Democracy From the American Oligarchy?” CounterPunch, March 21, 2018

“American Money, Not Russia, Put Trump in the White House: Reflections on a Recent Report,” CounterPunch, March 30, 2018

“Who Will Protect U.S. Election Integrity From American Oligarchs?” Truthdig, April 18, 2018

“Putin’s War on America Is Nothing Compared With America’s War on Democracy,” Truthdig, July 22, 2018

Also see my book “They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy” (2014).

2. Capitalism is About Democracy.

No, it isn’t—and one need not be an anti-capitalist “radical” like myself to know better. My old copy of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc.”

There’s nothing—nada, zero, zip—about popular self-rule (democracy) in that definition. And there shouldn’t be. “Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power,” liberal economist Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s: “One [democracy] believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man, one vote,’ while the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. … To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.” More than being compatible with slavery and incompatible with democracy, U.S. capitalism arose largely on the basis of black slavery in the cotton-growing states (as historian Edward Baptist has shown in his prize-winning study “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”) and is, in fact, quite militantly opposed to democracy.

“We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said or written: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” This statement was unintentionally but fundamentally anti-capitalist. Consistent with the dictionary definition presented above, the brilliant French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been inexorably pulled toward the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands.

3. Capitalism is About the Free Market.

Nope, it’s about the rich seizing control of the state and using it to make themselves richer and to thereby—since wealth is power and pull—deepen their grip on politics and policy. The profits system is so dependent on, and enmeshed with, governmental protection, subsidy and giveaways that one might even question the accuracy of calling it capitalism. (For elaboration, please see my recent Truthdig essay “Our ‘Rentier Capitalism’ Is One More Nail in Earth’s Coffin”). It is at the very least state capitalism, and always has been. A truly “free market,” that is fully laissez-faire capitalism, has never actually existed. At the same time, state-capitalist market forces in all forms, including their most government-free ones, have always brought widely different levels of freedom and un-freedom (including even literal slavery) for people depending on what class they belong to and how many resources they bring to influence and profit from market processes.

4. Big Business and its Political Agents are Freedom-Loving Libertarians Who Hate “Big Government.”

False. They only hate big government that’s not under their control and doesn’t serve their interests. The contemporary capitalist elite and its many agents and servants hate only what the left French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state”—the parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent majority. They want to starve and crush those branches of government that reflect past popular victories in struggles for social justice and democracy. But the portions of the state that serve the opulent minority and dole out punishment for the poor are not the subject of their ire. The regressive and repressive “right hand of the state,” comprising the big sections of “big government” that distribute wealth upward and attack those who resist empire and inequality, is not its enemy. It grows in accordance with the slashing of left-handed social protections, as the increased insecurity that results drives ever more disadvantaged people into the clutches of the military and the criminal injustice system.

5. The United States is a Great Land of Liberty.

Really? It depends on what part of the class-race structure you inhabit. With a massive and highly militarized police and prosecutorial state that has used the so-called war on drugs and related cooked crime crazes as pretexts for racially hyper-disparate mass arrest and imprisonment, the U.S. is home to the highest rate of mass incarceration in the world (and in world history). Social movements are regularly infiltrated, surveilled and crushed by the high-tech U.S. police state.

Hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens depend on employers not just for their incomes but also for their and their families’ health insurance, something that militates strongly against their willingness to speak freely within or beyond the workplace.

Americans suffer the longest working hours in the “developed” (rich nation) world; they spend inordinate and crippling amounts of time under the despotic supervision of bosses and lack the time and energy and information to participate meaningfully in the nation’s supposed “democracy.”

Freedom to do what one wants with one’s life depends on the possession of money and wealth, which is more unevenly distributed and harshly concentrated in the U.S. than in any other wealthy capitalist nation. Liberty is certainly enjoyed in great proportions by the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent, which owns as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. Liberty is far less prevalent among the 57 percent of Americans who, as CNBC reported last fall, have less than $1,000 in savings; 39 percent have no savings at all. Last January, the same network reported that more than a third (36 percent) of Americans would have to go into debt to pay for a major unexpected expense like a trip to the hospital or a car repair.

Wall Street chieftains who threw millions of Americans out of work and destroyed billions of dollars in savings through their reckless and often criminal practices have escaped prosecution while the nation’s jails and prisons are loaded with disproportionately black, Latino and poor people serving long terms for comparative small-time drug offenses. In a report titled “The Price of Justice,” The Nation reported last year that “roughly 500,000 people are in jails across the country simply because they are poor”—that is, because they can’t make bail payments or pay fines and/or court fees.

In the words of the title of one report on the poverty and bail jail problem, “Freedom Isn’t Free.”

6. The United States is a Great Monument to Classlessness.

No, it isn’t. The U.S. is a great monument to savage class inequality, marked by an extreme concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands (Louis Brandeis’ death knell for democracy) and the lowest rates of upward mobility from the lower and working classes into the middle and upper classes in the “advanced” world. Three absurdly wealthy Americans (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) now possess among them as much wealth as the poorest half of the United States. As one of those three, Buffett, noted 12 years ago: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” As wealth and income congeal ever upward in New Gilded Age America, even the professional middle class now experiences ubiquitous “precariousness,” lost security and status, and downward mobility. As the cultural theorist Lynn Parramore writes in a recent review of journalist Alissa Quart’s new book, “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America”:

Today, with their incomes flat or falling, [young middle-class] Americans scramble to maintain a semblance of what their parents enjoyed. They are moving from being dominant to being dominated. From acting to acted upon. Trained to be educators, lawyers, librarians, and accountants, they do work they can’t stand to support families they rarely see. … Their new reality: You will not do as well as your parents. Life is a struggle to keep up. Even if you achieve something, you will live in fear of losing it. America is not your land: it belongs to the ultra-rich. …

They are somebodies turning into nobodies … the Chicago adjunct professor with the disabled child who makes less than $24,000 a year; and the California business reporter who once focused on the financial hardships of others and now faces unemployment herself. … Uber-driving teachers and law school grads reviewing documents for $20 an hour—or less. Ivy Leaguers who live on food stamps. … Their labor has sputtered into sporadic contingency: they make do with short-term contracts or shift work. … Once upon a time, only the working poor took second jobs to stay afloat. Now the Middle Precariat has joined them. … Deep down, they know that they probably can’t pass down the cultural and social class they once took for granted.

It sounds like something out of, well, Marx.

7. Hard work and individual brilliance is the key to individual wealth and the lack of such work and brains is the source of individual poverty.

Nonsense. In the U.S. as across the capitalist world, private oligarchic fortunes rest on the parasitic collection of multiple forms of rent obtained through the ownership of multiple forms of inherited property and the wildly inordinate influence that the wealthy Few exercise over the oxymoronically named “capitalist democracies.” The preponderant majority of the wealth “earned” (appropriated) by the ever more obscenely opulent is produced by countless less privileged others and by a set of societal and institutional arrangements designed to serve those fortunate enough to be born into affluence. (See the brilliant left geographer Richard A. Walker’s masterful discussion of the real source of Silicon Valley’s spectacular profits in his recent book “Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area.”) Millions of Americans work absurdly long, smart and hard hours for an ever-shrinking share of total income and wealth and face economic precarity for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their own personal effort and smarts. Rising labor productivity has not remotely been matched by rising wages or benefits in a globalized labor market structured by and for the employer class.

8. Growth is Good.

U.S. and Western state capitalist ideology has long proclaimed that growth—not redistribution and sociopolitical democratization—is the solution to poverty and joblessness. But contemporary capitalist expansion is largely predicated on low wages, weak benefits, a fading left-handed social welfare state, generalized precarity for the Many, and relentless destruction of the earth on which we all depend. Economic growth under the heedless, commons-plundering command of the unelected dictatorship of capital is now clearly environmentally exterminist—a grave threat to livable ecology. There are no jobs, no economy, on a dead planet, and there’s no Planet B.

9. We Have an “Independent” and “Mainstream” Media.

False. We have neither. For elaboration (I am running of word count), please see my 2015 ZNet essay “On the Nature and Mission of U.S. Corporate Mass Media.”

10. The U.S. is a Force for Good and Peace in the World

It is no such thing. For some ugly details (word count again, dear reader), please see my recent Truthdig essays “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony” and “The Chomsky Challenge for Americans.”

11. Buying Stuff Makes People Happy.

12. We Get Meaningful Input on Policy Through Voting.

13. There is No Alternative to Neoliberalism/Capitalism and Underlying Social Structures are Beyond Our Sphere of Influence.

14. The Police Serve and Protect Us.

15. U.S. Troops Have “Died for Our Freedom.”

16. “They Hate Us for Our Freedom;”

17. Socialism is an Authoritarian and Even Totalitarian Nightmare.

18. The Soviet Union and Empire was Marxist Socialism and Communism in Action.

19. Blacks Have Achieved Parity with Whites

20. Racism is No Longer a Serious Barrier to Black Advancement and Equality

21. Immigration is Bad for America.

22. The United States’ Latest Designated Global Bad Guy is a New “Hitler.”

23. Recurrent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Deceptions.

24. Our Greatest Enemies are External to the U.S.

25. The Rich are Heavily Taxed.

26. Environmentalism is a Job-Killer

27. Social Welfare and Economic Regulation Stultify Economies.

28. Deficits Must be Slashed.

29. We Have an Independent Judiciary.

30. The Two Reigning U.S. Political Parties Adequately Capture the Spectrum of U.S. Public Opinion.

31. Contemporary Oligarchy and Plutocracy is Contrary to the Democratic Intent and Spirit of the U.S. Founders and Their U.S. Constitution

32. The “Intelligence Community” Protects We the People.

33. Soviet Russia Was the Main Aggressor in the Cold War and Putin’s Russia is the Main Aggressor in Cold War II.

34. Only Paid Labor Deserves to be Called Work.

35. Doing Paid Work Makes People More Stable and Virtuous.

36. American Entertainment Media is Just About Entertainment.

37. There’s a War on Drugs.

38. The So-Called War on Drugs is About Drugs.

39. Increased Wealth for the Few Trickles Down to the Rest.

40. The U.S. Has Done Nothing to Cause Immigrant Flight to the U.S. and Owes Nothing to Central American Migrants on its Southern Border.

41. Two-Plus Centuries of Arch-Racist Hyper-Exploitative Black Chattel Slavery Hold No Relevance to Contemporary Black American Experience and U.S. Racial Disparity.

42. White America Owes Blacks Nothing in the Way of Reparations for Slavery – or for the Jim Crow Era or Mass Ghettoization or Racist Mass Incarceration and Felony Marking or for Any Other of the Multiple Forms of Institutional and Societal Racism That Persist in U.S. Life.

43. The Racist Terror and Apartheid State of Israel Deserves Our Respect and Support.

44. We Can Have a Decent, Just, and Democratic Society While Dedicating Vast Portions of Government Expenditure to the Maintenance of a Giant Military State and Global Empire.

45. Our Relevant Reference Group of Belonging is “Fellow U.S. Americans,” not “Fellow Human Beings,” and not “Fellow Sentient Beings.”

46. Nature is a Great Windfall for Us to Subdue and Exploit

47. Human Nature is Egoistic, Competitive, Individualistic, and Selfish.

48. Concern for Others, Social Justice, and Livable Ecology is Dysfunctional, “Radical,” and Unnatural.

49. Everyone Else in the World Wants to Live Like U.S.-Americans.

50. Human Beings are Superior to Other Animals and Life Forms.

Paul Street @ TruthDig.