Vitriolic Corporatism in an Unconscious Society

By Randell A. Monaco, Esq.
January 10th, 2011




The abundance of guns has little to do with being responsible with one’s rhetoric. Mentally ill people or criminals will find guns when determined. More bad laws as shamefully and opportunistically announced by Rep. Robert Brady, will not solve the problems which most easily can be avoided by self censorship with our support and commitment to stand up to corporatism.

Here are some excerpts from an article published October 15, 2010, when Fox News was clearly put on notice, “Drop Glenn Beck or Have Blood on Your Hands.” “No one, left, right or center, wants to see another Oklahoma City. The next ‘assassin’ may succeed, and if so, there will be blood on many hands. The choice is yours. Please join my call to do the right thing in this regard and put Fox News at arm's length from your company by halting your advertising with them.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/15/tides-foundation-ceo-glenn-beck_n_764470.html

The solution is the same as when driving a car. Telling people not to drive cars 100 mph through a school zone is obvious, just as Beck’s vitriolic ranting that, not long ago, almost resulted in an incident that unfortunately did eventually occur just as Fox had been warned likely to happen.

What I’m driving at here is that words have consequences and, just as traffic laws are intended to reduce the risk, that doesn’t always avoid the inevitable collisions. Civil responsibility, hitting offenders in the pocketbook, does modify the behavior of most. In the case of Beck and Fox it truly is time to make them pay for speeding through our verbal school zones, if you will.

What our unconscious society is experiencing is a long list of people crushed by credit card debt, mortgages they shouldn’t have been granted, predatory lenders as well as sudden and catastrophic unemployment caused by outsourcing. Inadequate insurance runs the gamut – healthcare, employment, worker safety and more. How this ties into Fox, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and the neoconservative dialogue responsible for the vitriolic tenor in America stems from the heart of corporatism.

American’s were allowed to prosper in the latter part of the 20th century through what might be described as, managed capitalism. Now, after an almost complete gradual dismantling, we have a government that serves the interests of corporations rather than those of its citizens. The transformation and dark logic that has engorged and empowered new oligarchy holds our economic and political life hostage to corporate interest and profits. The fact is that American’s just can’t grasp the grave implications for our future. This is particularly so when our U.S. Supreme Court continues to drive a federalist agenda, most recently with its ruling in the Citizens United case.

The furious pace of technological progress, the global doubling of the workforce in the early twenty-first century, the emergence of such giants as China and India with their huge and well-educated legions of workers have rewritten the playbook of this pernicious transformation into a corporate state.

The fact is that the rise of a corporate state undercuts our most fundamental rights as citizens, creating a society in which we are forced to subordinate our common welfare to the higher priority of corporate profit. The corporate state champions personal greed and self interest with disdain for public good. This mission is not possible without media vehicles such as Fox and their on camera henchmen. The tragedy in Arizona was a matter of time, predicted and warned against!

This assault on the middle class is under way and at full speed. Increasing the frustrations and making matters worse, anything that can be put on computer software – finance, architecture, and engineering is now outsourced to workers in countries at a fraction of the pay and no benefits. A college education is no longer a guarantee of a stable job. Worse the power of national, state and judicial authorities to respond has been neutralized through huge corporate campaign contributions, political action committees and armies of lobbyists. With the help of the neoconservative spin machine, the consent of the governed has become an empty phrase. The solution in my opinion begins with election campaign finance reform and restoration of the integrity of our elected government. In short, Fix Congress First.

Today, with the skewed vitriolic rhetoric of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and their Fox Friends along with a host of equally irresponsible shock jocks, including Rush Limbaugh, our mainstream less than fifth grade political debate does nothing to attempt to confront the advanced destruction of our democracy by the corporate state. To ignore these facts and the responsibility that mainstream media’s words have consequences, not just in Arizona but for our nation’s future is a dark realization of the transformations that have occurred in our seemingly unconscious society.

Delousing Anti-foreigner Patriotism

By Randell A. Monaco
January 09, 2011

How many times will the illegal immigration card be played as a political smoke screen before Americans begin to comprehend the shame of our anti-foreigner patriotism? Not long ago, while discussing new immigration policies being instituted in Arizona a friend commented that, “every time conservatives take too much out of the system they play the illegal alien card.” She was quick to point out that this same type of manipulative smokescreen had appeared in the mid 90’s following the George Bush administration.

Not long ago, in April of 2009, an email chain letter was making the rounds claiming that the amount of money taxpayers spend on illegal immigrants would be enough to "stimulate the economy.” The sources cited in the email letter attributed at least nine specific points to either the conservative Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) or the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), both of which call for more restrictive immigration laws.

A quick look at the more recent George W. Bush era doesn’t seem to support this reoccurring theory of illegal immigration economics. The three biggest hits to our economy occurred from 2001 to 2008. First was the Tax Cuts for the rich that reduced annual tax revenue available for public needs by 300 billion each year. Unfortunately, and with the blessing our current President making matters worse, these cuts were extended by capitulation in the final weeks of the 111th Congress.

The second economic hit to our economy results from the Bush/Cheney occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan which as of 2008 has cost $700 billion according to Congressional Research Service. This has been calculated to amount to $400 million a day by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz who also has estimated that the tab is well over $2 trillion when you add in rehabilitation for injured vets, replacement of military hardware and the value of things we could have produced (but didn’t) with that money during their administration.

The third economic hit is not from illegal immigration, it’s a result of banking deregulation. An ideological absurdity obviously lost on the likes of presidential hopeful Ron Paul who has claimed that banking regulation is not needed. Worse, the real tab on bank deregulation is not in yet as home prices are projected to continue to decline through 2011 and of even greater concern is the possibility that strategic defaults could let the bottom out of the entire market place. At this point, there should be little argument that deregulation of banking, not illegal immigration has brought our economy to its knees, causing the collapse of banks in addition to the steep decline in the value of most American homes along with a sharp rise in the cost of living in them.

Returning to the misleading illegal immigration smoke screen being repeated once again as our economy struggles on, a more objective and responsible perspective can be found in a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office which examined 29 reports on state and local costs published over 15 years. Attempting to answer our concern about illegal immigration the CBO concluded that most of the estimates determined that illegal immigrants impose a net cost to state and local governments but "that impact is most likely modest." CBO said "no agreement exists as to the size of, or even the best way of measuring, that cost on a national level."

Author David Dorado Romo suggests, and many of us agree, that it’s time for America to start apologizing for it’s shameful immigration past and change a history that keeps repeating itself, over and over again. In his February 26th, 2006 editorial for the Los Angeles Times, Crossing the line, he confirms that the anti-immigrant fervor that continues to sweep across the U.S. is nothing new. He talks about decades of indignities put upon Mexican immigrants going back to 1904.

Mr. Romo correctly points out border crossers were not considered illegal in the US until 1917, the year that we entered World War I. Anti-foreigner patriotism and paranoia sweep the country fearing that Germans would launch bombing raids from Mexico. As a protest against Germany, Americans changed the name of frankfurters to hot dogs and sauerkraut to “liberty cabbage.”

Civic leaders and Anglo intellectuals such as Stanford Chancellor David Starr Jordan and Los Angeles Times owner Harry Chandler were influential in helping to draft the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 which established the first U.S. Border Patrol to keep what racial hygienists saw as “genetically inferior aliens” out of the country.

For decades, border crossers were forced to endure the humiliation of a delousing process that included stripping naked, bathing with kerosene and vinegar, and sometimes being forced to shave hairy parts or be denied entry. Even into the 50’s, long after the threat of German bombs, Mexican laborers were being sprayed with DDT before being allowed entry into the U.S.

A few years ago several state governments, including California, apologized for the thousands of forced sterilizations carried out in the name of eugenics that had occurred into the 1970s.

If anything, this kind of treatment at the international checkpoints has exacerbated illegal border crossings and led to a Republican proposal for a 700-mile border fence. In the 1990’s, social and economic inequities in Mexico and other Latin American countries continued to push people north. Unable to find well-paid work at home or along the US-Mexican border, millions of immigrants risked capture by illegally crossing the border to find a better life. Their presence in this country has fueled an ever more strident anti-immigrant backlash which scuttled Congress’ attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. Since then, border enforcement has been stepped up, workplace raids have increased and deportations have more often been carried out in inhumane ways.

In response, a New Sanctuary Movement whose roots go back to the 1980s was formed to showcase and provide refuge for unauthorized people who voluntarily came forward to claim sanctuary, in the hope of calling attention to the plight of the millions of immigrants who live in fear of arrest and separation from their families. It’s undeniable that it takes courage and a willingness to serve a larger cause to play this role.

Last April we had the good fortune of sharing my father’s 90th Birthday with a large group of friends who assembled to share in the celebration. I shared a table at our celebration with the three adult children of now deceased Marco Palumbo, founder of the once famous Marco's in Coronado. In the early 1950s their father Marco, an illegal immigrant at the time, was sponsored and worked for my father where he met their mother who also worked in our family restaurant. You can read more about their family and pursuit of their dream of coming to America as portrayed by their cousin (paisan) who continues in the family tradition. (http://www.palumbosristorante.com/history)

Not unlike the plight of other immigrants, our families worked hard and contributed. They raised their children to become Americans, serve in our military, became lawyers, doctors, teachers, business owners and when given the opportunity - citizens.

Unfortunately, the immigration card has become a standard tool in the politician’s repertoire of attacking unrepresented class. How many decades of inhumane immigration policies will continue to pass before America has to stop apologizing for a history that’s not safely stored away in our repeating immigration history?