This article is cross-posted on Naked Capitalism.

Another Monday, another “deficit crisis” panic. If you haven’t got the feeling yet that you’re being played like a sucker over this alleged “deficit crisis,” then let me help you cross that cognitive bridge to dissonance. It comes in the figure of the recently-deceased William Niskanen, the embodiment of how Reaganomics and the Koch brothers’ libertarian movement were joined at the hip. Niskanen was an advisor to Ronald Reagan throughout the 1970s; a board director for the Koch-founded Reason Foundation; a member and chairman of Reagan’s Council on Economic Advisers from 1981-85; and he moved directly from Reagan’s side back to the Koch brothers’ side, as chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute from 1985 until 2008. This is a brief story about how the 1% transformed this country into a failing oligarchy, and their useful tools, starting with A-list libertarian economist William Niskanen, Chicago School disciple of Milton Friedman, advocate of the rancid “public choice theory.”

First, let’s go back to December, 1981, and news is leaking out that Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts for the rich, combined with huge increases in defense spending, caused an explosion in the deficit to unimaginable levels, from Carter’s projected deficit of $27 billion to a real deficit of $109 billion and climbing fast–this, despite the fact that Reagan ran as a “responsible” deficit hawk. Someone needed to rationalize that deficit away, and the job fell to none other than CEA director and future Cato Institute chairman Niskanen, as reported in the AP on December 9, 1981:

Faced with record-smashing deficits that could top $100 billion a year, the Reagan administration now says it can live with a torrent of red ink without reversing its strategy against inflation and high interest rates.

In a turnaround from President Reagan’s longstanding assertion that deficits are a cause of inflation, senior White House economic advisers yesterday sought to downplay that relationship. One member of the Council of Economic Advisers, William A. Niskanen, suggested the connection is virtually nonexistent.

…Rudolph G. Penner, a budget official during Gerald Ford’s administration, said there is a “certain irony” that the record deficit of $66.4 billion, which occurred in 1976, “was set by a conservative president (Ford), and the record will be broken by another conservative president.”

Actually, what Niskanen said was this: “The simple relationship between deficits and inflation is as close to being empty as can be perceived.”

And this: “There are no necessary relationships between the deficit and money growth.”

And this: “Evidence doesn’t support” the assertion that deficits crowd out private borrowers.

And finally, William Niskanen, one of the leading libertarian figures of the past four decades, said this about deficits: “The economic community has reinforced an unfortunate perspective on the deficit which is not consistent with the historical evidence…It is preferable to tolerate deficits of these magnitudes either to reinflating [the money supply] or to raise taxes. Other things being equal, I would like to see lower deficits too, but other things are not equal.”*

William Niskanen looks back on a malevolent life well spent (by the Koch brothers)

That glib, “hah-hah we fooled you!” attitude towards federal deficits–the same deficits Reagan’s people used to scare the shit out of Americans in the 1980 elections–was captured best by Ronald Reagan himself, who in 1984 quipped, ”I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.”

Hardy-har-har. Such a charming guy.

Even Der Austerity-führer himself, Friedrich von Hayek, bragged in 1985 that the deficit scare was purely political–you can almost see the little troll rubbing his troll hands together gleefully as he brags about his master plan’s success:

After remarking that his work had influenced by Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher of Great Britain, that many of the president’s advisers had come from “circles I am acquainted with,” and that he was wearing a set of cuff links given to him by Reagan, the economist [von Hayek] commented:

“I really believe Reagan is fundamentally a decent and honest man. His politics? When the government of the United States borrows a large part of the savings in the world, the consequence is that capital must become scarce and expensive in the world world. That’s a problem.”

But, von Hayek continued, “You see, one of Reagan’s advisers told me why the president has permitted that to happen, which makes the matter partly excusable: Reagan thinks it is impossible to persuade Congress that expenditures must be reduced unless one creates deficits so large that absolutely everyone becomes convinced that no more money can be spent.”

Thus, the economist said, Reagan “hopes to persuade Congress of the necessity of spending reductions by means of an immense deficit. Unfortunately, he has not succeeded.”

The way von Hayek brags that he and his little circle of free-market Nazis swindled the world is just stunning–really stunning, as in it’s almost impossible to respond to it’s so vile. But as Yasha Levine and I reported in The Nation in September, swindling the public and shameless hypocrisy–that’s how Friedrich von Hayek, and his sponsor Charles Koch, roll:

Publicly, in academia and in politics, in the media and in propaganda, these two major figures—one the sponsor [Koch], the other the mandarin [Hayek]—have been pushing Americans to do away with Social Security and Medicare for our own good: we will become freer, richer, healthier and better people.

But the exchange between Koch and Hayek exposes the bad-faith nature of their public arguments. In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.None of them—not Koch, Hayek or the other libertarians at the IHS—express anything remotely resembling shame or unease at such a betrayal of their public ideals and writings. Nowhere do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.

Like typical Randroid libertarians, they find the public’s gullibility and good faith contemptible. This is something that Americans still can’t get their heads around about the free-market libertarians who’ve ruled us and ruined us over the past three decades. Here, for example, is how a middle-of-the-road guy, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, described von Hayek’s cynical boasting about the big deficit swindle back in 1985:

While some Americans may agree that a shrunken government makes a deliberately created deficit “partly excusable,” such a deficit still reflects a reckless deception with worldwide consequences yet to be calculated. And congressional Democrats should realize the source of the pressure they’re under to sell their political birthright.

Poor earnest Tom Wicker’s problem here, we all know now, is his lack of rank cynicism; he still believes that these people care about “consequences” for anyone but themselves; he still believes in fantasy-Democrats who will “wake up” or get wise to the swindle. Keep waiting, Mr. Wicker. Yep, they’ll get wise all right.

A couple more things I want to say about Niskanen, who just died a few weeks ago of a stroke (he was still chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute up to his last breath). He not only was a cynical bastard who helped screw this country over, but he also had that other nauseating libertard trait: The faux-maverick contrarian dickhead trait.

In October 1984, just weeks before the election between Reagan-Bush and Mondale-Ferraro, libertarian economics adviser William Niskanen spoke before a meeting of women’s groups to tell them that the wage gap was all their own fault, if it even existed at all:

Wage Plan Is Labeled As “Crazy”

(AP) — White House economist William Niskanen, tackling a sensitive political issue, yesterday criticized Walter Mondale’s support for the concept of comparable pay for men and women and said it was “a truly crazy proposal.”

Niskanen, a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, also told a meeting of Women in Government Relations that the wage gap between the sexes was largely due to women interrupting their careers for marriage and children.

…Niskanen was asked for elaboration by one woman in the audience who said his remark had caused “bristling in the back of the room.”

“Comparable worth is an idea whose time, I think, has long passed,” he responded, adding it was based on the “rather medieval concept of a just pay and a just wage.”

Mondale’s response when he heard what Niskanen said is poignant, because it’s pretty much every sane American’s response to every batshit crazy, pernicious idea and “maverick” poison that Republicans and libertarians have been puking on this country–like that spitting dinosaur in Jurassic Park–for lo these past few decades. Here’s Mondale’s reaction:

“He said that?” Mondale asked incredulously.

Yep, he sure did.

You know what makes Niskanen so cool? He’s not “politically correct.” Nosiree, he’s a mavericky maverick (when he isn’t pushing his nose deep up Charles Kochs’ ass, that is)

In 1985, Niskanen left Reagan’s side for the comfort of a lifelong sinecure in the Koch welfare program, safely protected from the ravages of the free-market, just like Hayek, just like all the pus-humpers in the libertarian nomenklatura.

And within a year, chief pus-humper himself, William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, was attacking Catholic bishops for daring to allege that Christianity is not all about free-markets and enriching the 1-percent:

A former economic adviser to President Reagan says the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are ignoring the Bible as well as sound economics in their call for more government help for the poor.

…In a lengthy teaching letter approved last month, the bishops declared that significant poverty in such a rich nation is “a moral and social scandal that must not be ignored.” They said government as well as individuals and businesses should do much more to help the poor and powerless take part in economic life.

Niskanen, identifying himself as “an economist and a Protestant,” said, “one has reason to question the moral authority of a letter that has little apparent basis in the Scriptures of our shared religious heritage. The letter seeks to provide an agenda for the state. The New Testament is a message of individual salvation through Christ,” he said. “The bishops encourage us to seek justice through political action. Jesus counsels us that the Kingdom of God is not of this world.’ The central theme of the letter is economic justice. The New Testament provides no concept of secular justice, economic or otherwise,” he said.

Now William Niskanen is dead. For all I know, Niskanen may be in Heaven, bouncing on Calvin’s lap. Or maybe–one hopes–he’s dealing with a very Guantanamo-like wrathful god. The only thing we can say for sure is that William Niskanen did everything possible to create a kind of Hell on earth for the 99% of Americans who weren’t as blessed with Koch-funded sinecures as he.

May the bastard writhe in pain.

* Source: Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the President’s Top 100 Officials by Nina Easton and Ron Brownstein.

Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames’ article “Anatomy of a Libertard: Will Wilkinson and the Koch-Funded Libertarian Nomenklatura” and “Megan McArdle’s Hypocrisy Exposed: Portrait of a Libertarian As A Taxpayer-Subsidized Brat.”

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere. The American Right devotes an insane amount of resources into manufacturing hagiographies on anyone whom they believe makes them look good–even the Soviets couldn’t compete with today’s American Right when it comes to glorifying their pantheon of degenerate cretins like Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlafly, Friedrich von Hayek…

I found a few passages that I think explain why they never liked Naipaul much. Basically, it comes down to this: The American Right only needs “team players”–shameless, cynical hacks who can be counted on to churn out whatever rank propaganda ordered up by the Heritage Foundation. For that, you need a Rotary Club nihilist like Dinesh D’Souza, someone totally devoid of a literary ego, intellectual curiosity or a gag reflex.

I was just reading Patrick French’s brilliant biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, and came across this interesting scene from Naipaul’s visit to America in 1969. Naipaul had already started developing a reputation at that point as one of the rare examples of a dark-skinned reactionary Tory from a Third World colony, making him one of the most despised literary figures among the trendy-left.

His first impressions of America weren’t good: ”They [Americans] are really now a group of immigrants who have picked up English but whose mental disciplines are diluted-European,” he wrote in one letter home.

In another letter, he confessed:

I now dread meeting Americans, especially their alleged intellectuals. Because here the intellect, too, is only a form of display; of all the chatter about problems (very, very remote if you live in an ‘apartment’ in Manhattan: something that appears to be got up by the press) you feel that there is really no concern, that there is only a competition in concern…The level of thought is so low that only extreme positions can be identified: Mary McCarthy, Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver and so on. Ideas have to be simple…The quandary is this. This country is the most powerful in the world; what happens here will affect the restructuring of the world. It is therefore of interest and should be studied. But how can one overcome one’s distaste? Why shouldn’t one just go away and ignore it?”

A good question–I ask myself that just about every morning. The “relevancy” argument he raises is losing its persuasive appeal fast. (The best answer I can come up with is, “To make some of their lives as miserable as they’ve made mine.”)

Anyway, it’s interesting that Naipaul mentions the name of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver here in 1969–because Cleaver’s name comes up again in an essay Naipaul published in 1984 on the Republican Party Convention in Dallas. This was at the height of the Reagan counter-revolution, when a reactionary like Naipaul should have come to pick up his check, make a few speeches, write a glowing account of America’s turn to Conservatism, and find his books turned into bestsellers via the right-wing mail-order pipeline.

But Naipaul was always too intellectually honest–and too vain. In the essay on the 1984 Republican convention, titled “Among the Republicans,” Naipaul describes the degradation of Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther whom he once lumped in with all the “simple” American intellectuals he had contempt for. It’s the first morning of the Convention, and Naipaul sees this announcement in his Dallas Sheraton hotel:

11:00 AM. Press conference, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips, Populist Conservative Tax Coalition. Subject: “Are Liberals Soft on Communism?” Guest speaker: Eldridge Cleaver, former Black Panther.

Eldridge Cleaver! One of the famous names of the late 1960s: the self-confessed rapist of white women, the man who had spent years in jail, the Black Muslim, the author of Soul on Ice (1968), not really a book, more an assemblage of jottings, but a work of extraordinary violence, answering the mood of that time. In 1969, when for a few weeks I had been in the United States, I had heard it said of Cleaver that he was going to die one day in a shoot-out with the FBI. That hadn’t happened. Cleaver had found asylum in Algeria and then in France; he had become homesick there and had returned, a born-again Christian, to the United States.

In Paris earlier this year I had met a man who had made an important film about Cleaver during the revolutionary days of the late 1960s. The film man now regarded that time, which had its glory, as a time of delusion. And now Cleaver himself was part of a side-show—or so I thought of it—at the Republican convention.

It seemed a big comedown. And it was even sadder, when I got to the conference room, to find that there was no crowd; that Cleaver was not the most important person there, that he was sitting on the far right of the second row, that some people didn’t seem to know who he was; that the few journalists asking questions were more interested in the other people of the Populist Conservative Tax Coalition.

So ordinary now, so safe, this black man for whom a revolutionary’s desperate death had been prophesied. I had known him only from his younger photographs. He was now forty-nine and almost bald; what hair he had was gray. There was something Chinese, placid, about his eyes and cheekbones; he looked very patient. His eyebrows were thin, like penciled arcs, and his hooded eyes were quiet.

Seeing Cleaver paraded around like a defeated, conquered aborigine struck Naipaul hard, opening up deep raw wounds: that of a colonized, backwater, dark-skinned twerp whose only way out of Trinidad was through Tory England, his conquerors.

Although a reactionary, Naipaul was never a lackey like today’s right-wing “intellectuals”; he never shied away from describing about the brutality of colonialism (unlike bootlicking scum like Dinesh D’Souza, who never missed an opportunity to glorify his white right-wing masters for colonizing India, despite the tens of millions of Indians who died of famine in the Raj).

Naipaul continues:

And at last Cleaver stood up. He was tall beside the CIA man. He was paunchy now, even a little soft-bellied. His blue shirt had a white collar and his dark red tie hung down long. The touch of style was reassuring.

Somebody asked about his political ambitions. He said he wanted to get on the Berkeley city council. And then, inevitably, someone asked about his attitude to welfare. His reply was tired; he gave the impression of having spoken the words many times before. “I’m passionately opposed to the welfare system because it’s made people a parasitic dependency on the federal system…. I want to see black people plugged into the economic system…. Welfare is a stepping-stone to socialism because it teaches people the government is going to solve our problems.”

That was more or less it. It seemed to be all that was required of “Eldridge,” that statement about socialism and welfare. And soon the session was declared closed. A repeat began to be prepared. As in a fair, shows were done over and over again, and in between business was drummed up.

Naipaul is so affected by the sight of this conquered, lobotomized-Republican Eldridge Cleaver that he goes back again to Cleaver’s Black Panther days and finds himself not just empathizing but actually appreciating Cleaver’s literary and intellectual talents, something Naipaul couldn’t see back in the 60′s:

…Away from the dark corner, Cleaver, placid, gray-haired, leaned against a wall. Two or three journalists went to him. But the very simplicity of the man on display made the journalists ask only the obvious questions, questions that had already been asked.

There was a many-layered personality there. But that personality couldn’t be unraveled now, with simple questions in a formal public gathering. To find that man, it was necessary to go to his book, the book of 1968, Soul on Ice. And there—in a book more moving and richer than I had remembered—that many-layered man was: with his abiding feeling for religion and his concern with salvation (as a Roman Catholic, then as a Black Muslim, then as a revolutionary); his need for community constantly leading him to simple solutions; his awareness of his changing self; his political shrewdness:

And here Naipaul quotes an amazing passage from Cleaver’s Soul On Ice:

I was very familiar with the Eldridge who came to prison, but that Eldridge no longer exists. And the one I am now is in some ways a stranger to me. You may find this difficult to understand but it is very easy for one in prison to lose his sense of self. And if he has been undergoing all kinds of extreme, involved, and unregulated changes, then he ends up not knowing who he is….

In this land of dichotomies and disunited opposites, those truly concerned with the resurrection of black Americans have had eternally to deal with black intellectuals who have become their own opposites….

In a sense, both the new left and the new right are the spawn of the Negro revolution. A broad national consensus was developed over the civil rights struggle, and it had the sophistication and morality to repudiate the right wing. This consensus, which stands between a violent nation and chaos, is America’s most precious possession. But there are those who despise it.

The task which the new right has feverishly undertaken is to erode and break up this consensus, something that is a distinct possibility since the precise issues and conditions which gave birth to the consensus no longer exist.

That was Eldridge Cleaver in the late 1960′s, describing exactly what would happen over the next two decades.

Now that Naipaul could compare the two Eldridge Cleavers–the Black Panther vs. the Republican lackey–the message was clear. If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American Right-Wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front-lines of the ideological battle of the 1970′s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself, an Eldridge Cleaver. He’d have to give up everything interesting about himself.

Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American Right by doing what he was always best at: Describing exactly what he saw at  the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering. Here is Naipaul describing the effect of the climactic speech by Ronald Reagan:

So that at the climax of the great occasion, as at the center of so many of the speeches, there was nothing. It was as if, in summation, the sentimentality, about religion and Americanism, had betrayed only an intellectual vacancy; as if the computer language of the convention had revealed the imaginative poverty of these political lives. It was “as if”—in spite of the invocations and benedictions (the last benediction to be spoken by Dr. Criswell)—”as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more.”

The words are by Emerson; they were written about England. English Traits, published in 1856, was about Emerson’s two visits to England, in 1833 and 1847, when he felt that English power, awesome and supreme as it still was, was on the turn, and that English intellectual life was being choked by the great consciousness of power and money and rightness. “They exert every variety of talent on a lower ground.” Emerson wrote, “and may be said to live and act in a submind.” Something like this I felt in the glitter of Dallas. Power was the theme of the convention, and this power seemed too easy—national power, personal power, the power of the New Right. Like Emerson in England, I seemed in the convention hall of Dallas “to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow.”

All of the young reactionary intellectuals I knew when I was younger eventually came around to a similar epiphany. At some point, it just couldn’t be ignored: These people were scum; mean, sleazy, boring scum. It became impossible to be near them. They–we–dropped out of the Right, and wanted nothing more to do with it all. But by ruining everything in this country–economically, culturally, intellectually, militarily–the Right essentially chased us wherever we went, poisoning everything they could get their hands on. Until finally there was nowhere to go but Leftward. A hardened, mean Left.

Either get the Republican lobotomy (just look at poor P.J. O’Rourke), or go Left: those are the only choices in this country today.

Naipaul’s career developed at a time when Western reactionary intellectuals could still be formidable, dynamic and unpredictable; there was space carved out on the Right for reactionary talent like Naipaul. They had to struggle for publishing success at a time when the printed word was dominated by left-wing/Marxist philistines. Those Left-wing intellectuals no longer exist today, except as phantom boogeymen in the heroic fantasies of the Right. What’s worse, the American Right has no need of unpredictable talent like V.S. Naipaul, so they’ve driven his species into extinction as well, poisoning the intellectual eco-system forever, making it impossible for a new Naipaul to threaten them again. They’ve replaced the Naipauls with libertarians, the fake, predictable, genetically-modified version of reactionary intellectualism–so insanely corrupt and so profoundly retarded that, like a skunk spraying foul stupidity whenever threatened, libertarianism has successfully scared away anyone with brains and dignity from bothering them while they feed.

Naipaul always despised facile thinking. It was because Naipaul was so committed to merciless observation that he allied himself with reactionary intellectuals of the pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher era–it was the Left that wore the rose-tinted glasses back then. What Naipaul didn’t realize was how much worse, how much more intellectually stifling America’s right-wing intelligentsia would turn out to be once in power. And sentimental to the point of disgusting–that’s the other thing that comes through Naipaul’s essay on the 1984 Republican Convention: the cheap, contemptible sentimentality of the American Right, the very opposite of rigor.

What’s left today, three decades after Reagan’s victory, is a ruling class of Rotary Club nihilists. Right-wing degenerates. And they’re not even interesting degenerates anymore, the way some Right-wingers used to be. They just scream a lot. Scream and bang a stick on the ground–and at the end of the stick-banging, they go to pick up their checks from their billionaire sponsors.

All of which brings me back to Naipaul’s original question: How can one overcome one’s distaste? Why shouldn’t one just go away and ignore it?

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Michael Dell: “I’m smiling because I force Lone Star peasants to pay my property taxes!”

***

A version of this article was first published by The Nation…

For all those feeling the pinch this Tax Day, rest assured America’s wealthiest one percent have no idea what you’re going through. Not only have they shaved over a $100 billion off their income taxes thanks to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, but, thanks to misuse of agricultural tax breaks, many did not have to pay their property taxes, either.

Take Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers and the second-richest Texan, who qualified for an agricultural property tax break on his sprawling 1,757-acre residential ranch in suburban Austin and saved over $1 million simply because his family and friends sometimes use the land as a private hunting preserve to shoot deer. Or take billionaire publisher Steve Forbes, who got more than a 90 percent property tax reduction on hundreds of acres of his multimillion dollar estate in upscale Bedminister, New Jersey, just by putting a couple of cows out to pasture. They are not alone. All across the country, a huge number of America’s wealthiest are tapping into agricultural tax breaks—and none of them have to do any real farming to qualify.

Not only are agricultural tax breaks allowing wealthy landowners to shift their tax burden onto other less-affluent taxpayers, but they are also helping bankrupt public schools, which derive the bulk of their funding from local property taxes.

Agricultural tax breaks got their start in the 50s and 60s, as a response to the explosive growth of suburban development, which was encroaching on farmland and raising agricultural property values to the point where farmers were having paying their tax bills. Fearing that this would pressure farmers into selling out to developers, states began granting exemptions that allowed agricultural land to be assessed at rates well below market value. The practice, called use-value assessment, is today used by all but one of the fifty states to artificially deflate the value of farmland, frequently by 90 percent or more.

The plan looked good on paper, but in the real world it was quickly manipulated to steer money to the rich.

Steve Forbes: “Mmmm-ummmm. Check out the tax-saving udder on that baby!”

Many states expanded the definition of “agricultural land” beyond land that was farmed to land that simply had not yet been developed. In South Carolina, all it takes is five acres of trees to qualify for a tax exemption. New Jersey requires that a landowner have five acres, but also sell $500 of agricultural goods a year from their farm. Steve Forbes and his wife, Sabrina, qualify for their exemption by breeding show cows on their 450-acre Bedminster estate. “You don’t make money selling hamburger meat. You make money breeding show cows; that’s the name of the game,” Forbes told Fortune magazine in 1996. Florida requires a couple of cows or a herd of goats, which don’t have to be on the property all the time. Texan law is so broadly defined that the PGA Tour golf resort in San Antonio has been trying get recognized as a “nature preserve” to get a farm tax break.

“You can go out and cut some brush, put out some feed and count the deer once a year and qualify,” a tax appraiser from Travis County in Texas told The American-Statesman.

That’s exactly what Michael Dell did with the suburban Austin ranch he uses as a second home. Periodically hunting and maintaining a “well-managed deer herd” reduced the property’s 2005 market value from $71.4 million to an agricultural value of $290,000, which saves him—and costs Texas—$1.2 million a year.

It’s all perfectly legal under Texan law. As long as property owners stick to the state guidelines, country officials have no right to deny them agricultural status. Korea’s Samsung Electronics qualified for a “wildlife management” agricultural tax exemption on 54 acres of land outside its semiconductor plant in the Northeast Austin by putting up a few birdhouses, eradicating ants, and taking a wildlife “census,” which reduced its tax bill from  $21,080 to just over $135 (a reduction of over 99.4%), reported the Wall Street Journal in 2007. If wildlife isn’t your thing, dedicating a few acres to Christmas trees is enough to qualify for a property tax exemption under “timber production,” which is exactly what Hewlett-Packard opted for on its corporate campus in Houston. The company saved half a million dollars in property taxes in 2004, despite the fact that it openly plans to develop that land.

The exemption is such a money-saver that it’s hard to find rich Texans who aren’t moonlighting as farmers on their estates, and that includes President George W. Bush.

Bush has used the farm-tax dodge scheme on at least two properties in the last two decades. When he was governor of Texas, Bush’s lakeside home near Athens, nestled in a secluded pine forest shared with a few other high-powered homeowners, lost its agricultural tax exemption, but was then promptly redesignated as “scenic land” under a similar law and taxed at massively reduced value of $101,770. In 1998, his tax bill was a measly $543.07. (The owner of a $100,000 home in a drab tract development on the very outskirts of Austin would pay somewhere around $3,000.)

After a hard day’s work executing mentally retarded minorities, Texas Governor George W. Bush sought refuge and solace at his rustic lakeside farm, comforted by the fact that he paid no property taxes…

Bush was cleared for another agricultural tax exemption a few years later on his new 1,582-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, which reduced its taxable value from $2.1 million to $950,000, according to an AP investigation. In 2003, the year American invaded Iraq, the tax break saved Bush $23,679 in property taxes. Bush might have been a disastrous president, but he sure is good at tax-avoidance schemes—which is good for him, considering that Texas has one of the highest property tax rates in the nation.

While there is no definitive national study about the use of agricultural tax breaks, a patchwork of reports and investigations carried out by local news organizations over the past decade makes it clear that the exemptions are not being used as originally intended. All across the country, agricultural land is being used by wealthy landowners to dodge paying their share of property taxes. And it has been going on for decades.

Here are just a few examples:

*  In the mid-1970s, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan was approved for an agricultural exemption by agreeing to not develop his 688-acre Santa Barbara ranch, which shrunk his tax bill from $12,600 to $1,100. The ranch was classified as farmland, despite the dubious fact that it sat on land “too rugged for serious ranching and almost impossible to farm,” reported UPI in 1974.

*  In Florida, Walt Disney World planted a few trees and flowers and put some cows to pasture on its 1,600 acres of undeveloped land adjacent to the theme park. The company told the AP that it planned to develop the land in the future. In the meantime, Disney was content to pay taxes on the $194-million property as if it was worth only $12.3 million. Disney isn’t the only one taking advantage of Florida’s tax loophole. In 2004, two-thirds of the top 60 tax exemption recipients in South Florida were not farmers.

*  A recent investigation by New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press found widespread abuse of agricultural tax breaks throughout the Garden State, where “fake farmers” qualified for tax exemptions simply by growing weeds or letting cows roam on their front lawns.  Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Forbes and the billionaire heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune (one of whom is trying to build a helicopter pad on his “farm”) are just a few of New Jersey’s megarich who pay pennies on the dollar in property taxes.

Just another day at the Reagan Ranch: the Gipper and Papa Bush swap tax-dodging tips over a light lunch…

While there are plenty of real farmers who legitimately claim the tax exemption on their land, every year tens of billions of dollars in state and municipal revenue is lost due to farm tax breaks claimed by those who abuse the loophole.

California’s Monterey County loses about $1 billion a year due to a farm tax reduction program, in which 30 percent of all private land in the state is enrolled. In Texas, the state comptroller said that $409 million in agriculture tax savings goes to out-of-state interests, and $500 million goes to Texan families with incomes greater than than $90,000. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a study of a few counties revealed that half the land receiving agricultural tax breaks was owned by real estate developers. The report even included hilarious photographs of these subsidized “farms” being advertised as future shopping centers and tract home developments. One of them had a big yellow For Sale sign that read: “Great Restaurant Location.”

But while wealthy landowners and developers reap massive tax breaks, average Americans are forced to foot the bill. To recoup revenue lost to tax breaks given to phony farms, municipal governments have simply ratcheted up their taxation on the rest of us. Counties have raised taxes on non-agricultural property, cut services, and increased sales tax rates. (In fact, we can thank farm tax breaks for giving us the gift of the regressive sales tax, which has become the biggest source of tax revenue for local governments, outpacing property taxes. All across the nation, the rise in sales taxes coincides with the appearance—and expansion—of property breaks for the wealthy landowners.)

Raising taxes and cutting services for the benefit of speculators? Sounds a lot like an IMF austerity program designed to squeeze every last drop of money from impoverished nations. And in many ways that is exactly what agricultural tax breaks are doing to municipal governments by sucking money out of public services, including public education.

In Texas, agricultural tax breaks cost public schools $1.5 billion in lost revenue, according to a 2005 investigation by the Houston Chronicle. Just the tax break Michael Dell got on his $71.4 million suburban Austin ranch cost the local school district $1.2 million in lost revenue in 2005. But instead of trying to recoup these funds, Texas is considering cutting at least $3 billion from public education in order to close the state’s staggering $25 billion budget shortfall.

Rural areas, which have a smaller and less diverse tax base, are being disproportionately affected. In southern Pennsylvania, the tax shift from agricultural exemptions increased taxes on non-agricultural properties by 27 percent, said State Rep. Bryan Cutler. But even that has not been enough.

Two school districts in Rep. Cutler’s district each lose roughly $5 million a year in funds as a result of an increasing number of properties being enrolled in the state’s “Clean & Green” agricultural tax exemption program. For one of the districts, the loss represents nearly 10 percent of its annual budget—or $1,200 for each one of its students.

“The poorest population in our county is bearing the responsibility to provide green space for the county while our wealthiest areas bear little of the responsibility to assure there is green space in the county,” wrote Thomas L. Newcome, superintendent for the Octorara School District, in a testimony prepared for the Pennsylvania’s state legislature in 2009, while it was debating a bill that would help offset the drop in municipal revenues due to agricultural tax breaks. “The very people that pay more to provide a resource for others – their children receive less.”

Pay more; get less. That’s the brutal reality facing kids and parents today. And it is only going to get worse.

The financial threat to public education and other government services has only become more acute since the collapse of the financial and real estate markets. Just in 2010, home values dropped by $1.7 trillion, further eroding the property tax base that public schools rely on for revenue.

You would think that closing this loophole would be a high priority for cash-strapped states and municipalities. But apparently not. A few states, including California and Denver, plan on making minor adjustments to their farm property tax rates, but not much else. And it is not a partisan issue, either. It seems state legislators from both parties are more keen on slashing social spending, perfectly willing to plunge a whole generation of Americans into ignorance and poverty just so that a small number of millionaires and billionaires can keep dodging their property taxes.

***

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine’s award-winning exposé: “Manhattan’s Welfare Kings: How Billionaires Turned Farms Into Personal Tax Havens and Petty Cash Machines, Allowing Them to Give Less, While Taking More.” Then check out his reporting on California’s water wars: “The Story of How Beverly Hills Billionaire Farmers Stewart and Lynda Resnick Have Privatized California’s Water Supply.”

“I know these people in my goddamn blood!”

–Hunter S. Thompson’s Attorney

I’ve had Reagan all my life. In 1967, 13 years before the rest of you got President Reagan, he became governor of California. It was the terrarium in which Reagan’s tinkerers figured out how to stimulate the beasts in the tract houses to hatred and bathos, the tools with which they ruled and destroyed the nation.

Nixon usually gets the blame for that, but I’ve always found Nixon a rather sympathetic figure: wretched, ugly, and without much malice for either the forests or the ordinary American. Nixon didn’t even share the worship of “business” forced on us all in Reagan’s reign. Nixon’s dreams were old-fashioned Soviet machinations, full of maps and coups; he was willing enough to toss the rest of us a few bones if we’d let him play with his schemes undisturbed. And some of the bones he tossed us were rather significant. It was Nixon who created the EPA and OSHA. Reagan would have strangled both in the cradle.

Reagan did it often enough once he had power, in a thousand blunt, cruel mandates that no one ever mentions. The one I always remember is one of the more trivial: he vetoed the airbag requirement Carter planned to introduce for all 1980 cars sold in the US. Everyone who died in a head-on crash during the next decade can thank Reagan. And you know, they probably would thank him. There is no end to the groveling masochism of this nation where Reagan is concerned. All his victims love him. No wonder the checkers at Safeway wear nose rings; they belong to the world’s biggest submissive website, “Reagan’s Slaves: Real Submissives, Live 24/7.” Before Reagan they would have had decent blue-collar jobs—there really were such things back then—and bought a house of their own. Now they share garage apartments with the scum of the earth and are saving up for a car that runs.

That’s why it always shocks me when I see another manifestation of the consensus view that Nixon was the evil Republican. I just saw a Futurama episode with Nixon’s head in a jar, planning to take over the world. Reagan never gets that treatment; he’s a god.

I suppose it proves what I knew already: he was good at what he did. After all, if he really was the perfect evil spirit for this tribe, why should I be surprised or disgusted that we worship him? Like I once said to this Women’s Studies professor, “Why get upset at all this sexism? It’s your living; it’s like a marine biologist getting furious at all the salt water on the planet.”

But she was still mad—and she was goddamn well right to be mad. And I’m still sick every time I see headlines like the one I just caught: “Ronald Reagan: How Do GOP Candidates Measure Up?”

The sad thing is, they don’t really have to “measure up.” Reagan transformed this country; that much of what his adorers say is true. His successors only have to hit the same notes to make their zombie army move in the desired manner. Reagan and his stage managers did the difficult part, experimenting relentlessly until they found the notes that worked.

When you say “Reagan,” you’re using a synechdoche of the classic container-for-the-contained sort. Reagan was the face of a little clique who were the essence of California plutocracy. They took shares in him, the way poorer folk do in a racehorse, funded his campaigns, and stayed with him all the way to the presidency. They were remarkable only for their lack of any distinction. Perhaps the most typical was Holmes Tuttle, a car dealer who came from Oklahoma to get rich. He did, but not the way Bill Gates did.  Tuttle was so dumb that he turned down a chance to have the first Volkswagen dealership in California because he was sure no American would ever buy a car made by our erstwhile enemies. Like many successful Californians of his generation, he got rich because he was there, on the spot while the population of California exploded, and the average income soared—and because he had the perfect pathology for a rising tide: unreflecting, smug self-confidence. Tuttle made his money in cars, then picked Reagan as his new product and marketed him like a Ford, using Reagan’s front-man status as a selling point: “[Wouldn’t] you rather have a candidate who is backed by very successful capitalists who have created dozens of companies and tens of thousands of jobs, people who know what it takes to attain success within our system?”

Reagan’s other backers were even less distinguished. There was Alfred Bloomingdale, who inherited his money and made the papers in his own right only by buying an underage prostitute, Vicky Morgan, making her his ponygirl, complete with saddle, then dumping her when she was of boring legal age. Bloomingdale died before the palimony suit, but his wife fought to the end not to give the wretched girl a cent. Vicky Morgan was eventually beaten to death with a baseball bat; Bloomingdale was mourned by all of Reagan’s America.

Bedtime for Bloomingdale’s slave: One day she’s making Reagan look bad (above)… The next day, Jesus pinch-hits one for the Gipper (below)

Then there was Charles Wick, Reagan’s communications guy, the man who taught the Great Communicator how to communicate. Reagan made Wick director of the US Information Agency, but before that, he’d made his bones as a “very successful capitalist” by producing one film: Snow White and the Three Stooges.

The most grotesque of Reagan’s owners was Joseph Coors, an outright lunatic whose family money is behind nearly every sleazy fascist initiative in recent US history. Coors was Reagan’s mentor on campus radicalism. Coors even had his own hilarious stint on the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, doing his best to destroy that institution before he realized that it was better to work through the camera-ready Reagan. He made sure Reagan’s hatred of the public universities never let up, but stepped back to let the group refine its techniques for stirring bile among the sullen majority.

It’s tempting sometimes to think what one grenade, detonated at one of this “kitchen cabinet’s” meetings, could have done to change history. California could have been, was on the verge of becoming, something truly extraordinary. It’s no accident that Philip K. Dick’s Martian colonists in their hovels choose to dream of San Francisco in the mid-1960s, out of all the fantasylands they could visit. All the worst of America seemed to be melting away. The South of evil memory: melting away, not without blood and horror, but melting, doomed. The mean, stupid bullies’ world of jocks and losers to which all American children were violently introduced at an early age–melting away in a warmer and more humorous pantheon of possible identities. The dullards’ worship of Coolidge’s “business,” melting away in contemptuous laughter.

It’s easy to see now that this was a delusion, the absurd dream of a tiny fraction of rich kids and middle-class brains. There was another world out there, a thousand times bigger and ferociously devoted to the old hatreds. I grew up in that other world. Actually, I grew up on the border, literally, between those two Californias that Reagan would soon set at each others’ throats: a place called Pleasant Hill, California, 13 miles east of Berkeley, but across the hills, the other side of Caldecott Tunnel. The hot, tract-home side—Reagan’s side. I could cross over; every summer the summer school took us to the Berkeley Folk Festival to listen vaguely to cleaned-up songs about murdered maidens but mainly to look at those magnificent hippie girls, who were in my little mind a complete refutation of the politics, aesthetics and in fact the entire culture of the Reagan side.

But that was once a year. The rest of the time, we were Reaganites before Reagan. You have to realize that in the mid-sixties, what is now called “the Right” was hopelessly confused about what was going on. There really was a sort of silent majority, because no one could figure out to say what it wanted to say in public. What it wanted to say, what I heard every time we watched the news, was simple: “Kill them!” But before Reagan, no one knew how to say that out loud.

It was the students who gave Reagan’s managers their chance. Nobody remembers now how insanely those students were hated by the people out on the hot, sullen side of the California divide. To understand where that hate came from, you have to pan back a little. Reagan’s “Greatest Generation” (which they certainly were not, but that’s another story) created the G.I. Bill, enfranchising a huge number of veterans who would never have dreamed of doing something like going to college if the state hadn’t waved money in their faces while they were being demobilized. In America, higher education had been something for rich kids—rich boys, in the beginning, slowly expanding to include some rich girls as well. Everyone else was supposed to go to work, and count themselves lucky if they found a job.

The G.I. Bill made college a normal option, for a huge chunk of families who weren’t particularly rich. And soon, like many perks that once marked the aristocracy, it became something desirable, then something almost required of those who were striving. My father’s family was one of those. They grew up, ten kids, in a house about the size of your garage in the slums of Jersey City. The war freed them from that claustrophobic Irish-Catholic ghetto and they strove successfully—most of them, anyway. Our failed outpost in the California suburbs was the exception. It wasn’t easy for educated white people to fail completely in California in the post-war years, but we managed it. And still we gave our allegiance to Reagan’s counterrevolution, his long war to destroy the government initiatives that had given all our successful uncles their chance. In fact, our poverty contributed to the virulence of our resentment of those students, those lucky swarms of Berkeley kids who mouthed off and didn’t have to work.

Their world was at once too tempting and too sinful for us, but to most of the other families on our street, it was simply alien, offensive for suggesting that there could or should be a gentler, more literate world. I had a foot in both worlds, and my parents, though fiercely reactionary, were gentle with their children, devoted to our education. So we ended up going to those colleges. But no one else from that neighborhood did.  The only way you’ll ever understand how Reagan came to rule is if you actually remember his people. These are some who lived on my street:

My friend Kenny Tamblyn, three houses down: his dad was a welder at the refinery, used to beat Kenny with a belt when he came home in a bad mood. Mr. Tamblyn was pure white and wanted you to know it, too—he was from Oklahoma—but he had these slitty eyes, looked like a cross between a Mongol and an Orc. Liked to shoot things.

The Hansens, up the street with the pickup. Also worked at the refinery, but Mr. Tamblyn didn’t deign to know him; some guild snobbery I never understood.  Mr. Hansen was loud and fat and stupid even by local standards. A few years on, he had Wallace signs all over his tiny lawn, but in the mid-60s he settled for threatening to shoot our dog when we walked it past his place. Two sons, roughly my age, sullen, silent, special ed. His wife was rarely allowed out of the house. She was tiny, less than five feet, and I think retarded, with a severe speech impediment. When she escaped and wandered down Belle Avenue, she’d babble about Jesus. (That’s another big, big change since Reagan’s time: it was eccentric, embarrassing, to talk about God in California before Reagan took over.)

The Mastranos at the corner had one son. He was killed in their garage by a DEA agent. Supposedly he was going for a gun. He didn’t own any guns. No one objected; it was clear to everyone that somehow or other he had it coming. His mother went insane.

My brother’s friend Brian, one of the smartest and most delightful little kids I knew. He and my brother met at one of those gifted summer schools. We used to make “civilizations” out of mud and scraps by the creek. But Brian’s dad, who worked at the gas station, would come home pissed off and scream down to the creek, telling Brian to get his butt in there. Once Brian was inside…yeah, you guessed it. With a belt. We tried to walk away fast so we wouldn’t hear Brian screaming.

Brian, IQ or no IQ, was not going to UC Berkeley or anyplace else. None of those kids were going to Berkeley. None of their parents wanted them to. Some of those parents were sick monsters like Brian’s dad, or my friend Calvin’s dad, who once interrupted Calvin’s sleepover birthday party to chase Calvin around the yard with the inevitable belt. Most of the others were just standard human issue: mean, dumb, resentful.  They didn’t want the fanciful pre-Raphaelite hippie enclave of Berkeley to exist. That it should not merely exist but talk back to their appointed masters, the real-estate developers and car dealers who were the anointed of California, provoked these people to insane rage.

They weren’t poor. You have to remember that. Reagan would see to it that their kids were poor, but their generation was coasting happily on the well-paid, for-life blue-collar jobs that were plentiful back then. Most of them had far more money than we did, as well as virtually free medical care through “Kaiser.” They were willing to give all that up in the name of what was nearest their hearts: a world in which all public discourse was bland and epideictic, and privilege was restricted to those who were restrained enough to keep it secret. It was the cracking open of American discourse, with the “Free Speech” profanity, people talking about sex, and parading their pleasures on the streets of San Francisco, that made them murderously angry. That rage was even stronger than their hatred of black people. Although Reagan used coded and not-so-coded race triggers in his speeches (“welfare bums” was a favorite of his, as was “militants”), it was the hatred of those students, who were overwhelmingly white and middle-class, that made the people of the inland tracts love him.

And it was that gloating, taunting exhibition of pleasures properly reserved for the back rooms of the elite that drove the inlanders craziest. That was the one thing that made my parents, gentle and erudite people in many ways, make common cause with their neighbors, whom they were in the habit of dismissing as noising, self-indulgent Protestants in most contexts. I’ll always remember my mother’s first day in a writing class at Diablo Valley College, the local community college. She came home in a daze and said, “This woman in my class…one of these hippie women..read her ‘poem’ [you could hear the quotes around the word as she spoke]…and do you know how this ‘poem’ began?”

My brothers and I grunted cautiously. We weren’t sure whose side we were on in this one. In fact, I didn’t come down on the inland side until the local hippie girls made it clear I was not a potential consort.

My mother said, “This is her ‘poem’:

‘My husband’s ass

Is the most beautiful ass

In the world.’”

Silence reigned in our family room. That word “ass,” spoken—twice!—for the first time inside our house, made us all a little dizzy. You could hear the linebreaks, too, and budding poet that I was, I thought, “Maybe she should’ve put the second ‘ass’ on a line by itself.” Then, in one of the sudden switch-flips you do at 12, I imagined, very vividly, tearing out the tongue of the woman who had recited that poem in front of my mother.  My brothers were already running from the room, making “la la la” noises so they wouldn’t have to hear whatever else my mother had experienced in class.

I suppose we were a rather high-strung family. Catholics were, in those days. The only people who remind me of them now are the Muslims.

What cemented my allegiance once and for all to that doomed, absurd code was the fact that somehow in the cornucopia of 1960s California, we were completely bankrupt, utter failures.

Disloyalty was not an option as it was for rich kids. If your parents have made it, you can sneer; when the family narrative is an endless replay of disastrous failure, defecting to the comfy and victorious is unthinkable. My parents voted for Reagan, largely on the strength of that poem and a few news shots of Berkeley women dancing to rock with their tops off. I’m sure everyone on Belle Avenue voted the same way, mostly because Wallace wasn’t running in California yet.

But in their case it made sense. Most of them were brutal and illiterate. We weren’t. We were the kind of family who most needed the public sector Reagan set about destroying: penniless, hyperliterate and ambitious. My brothers and I spent most of our free time at the wonderful library near our house. Last time I checked it was open for about 15 hours a week. We gloried in the art and music classes that were soon to be dropped by the public schools. We loved the forests, the one point we grudgingly shared with the VW Bus crowd that voted liberal. And when I applied for college and was turned down by the expensive private schools, Berkeley, center of Belle Avenue’s hatred, accepted me, gave me a chance for a decent education.

It was the public universities like Berkeley that were Reagan’s special target. He didn’t have any interest in starving Stanford, even if he’d had the power; Stanford was for the rich, and only very belatedly joined the student revolt. It was the public universities, above all the Berkeley campus, that he and his public hated. One of Reagan’s famous lines from the time makes clear the basis of that hate: “Education is a privilege, not a right.” Education, at university level, had always been a “privilege” in the United States. In fact, it was the mark of privilege, a sign of belonging to the upper class. After WW II, that changed, and at least in public universities in a few states like California, there really was something like admission on merit. There was no tuition at public universities—imagine, you could get a degree from UC Berkeley without paying a dollar in tuition, if you were good enough. UC official history page evokes that time with something like disbelief in its timeline: “1960 – The California Master Plan for Higher Education affirmed that UC should remain tuitionfree (a widely held view at the time)…”

Yes, “a widely held view at the time,” but that was going to change, thanks to people like our neighbors on Belle Avenue. They hated the notion that kids no better than their own (or so they believed) were daring to ape the rich by getting respected university degrees—and worse still, they lacked the patronizing discretion of the truly privileged who’d preceded them. The people on my street never resented the really rich. What they hated was middle-class people having pleasure, having sex without punishment, ease without the grasshopper’s winter comeuppance.

Reagan plugged that hate into his owners’ agent and, with an assist from Prop 13, managed to destroy everything that was best about the state: the park system, the libraries, the protected shorelines, forests and rivers. He was just in time; when he took power, coastal California was reaching critical mass.  There was a moment, as Hunter Thompson says in Fear and Loathing, when it seemed that whole littoral would just lift up, a reversal of the earthquake the inlanders were praying to sink it, and float away from the dead mass of the continent. Reagan came to fix that.

His method was simple: Reagan was the first to talk straight-out hate. Strange as it seems now, nobody was talking hate then, in public. In the living rooms, over dinner, oh yeah! Every house on our street. But not on the air, not yet. Reagan showed the way. This was Reagan 1.0, the California-only issue. This version had not yet learned his second great innovation: the smile. This early Reagan was angry, as Mark Ames discovered in a search of archived stories from the 1960s. The headlines of those stories would shock fans of the later “amiable” Reagan: “Angry Reagan Shouts Back at Heckling Students”; “Reagan Prepared to Attack Militant Student Leaders”; “Reagan Explains Angry Words.”

Rage at the students not only got Reagan elected, it powered his entire career. He took that show on the road in 1969, delivering a major speech reviling insolent student protestors in DC just before the Vietnam Moratorium demonstrations. As a reporter noted at the time, this was Reagan’s chance to impress the national Republican cadre, which was finally experiencing the sort of student infestation Reagan had been battling for years: “It is an opportunity for [Reagan] to test in a national forum whether his militant stand on California’s campuses…has support among the great middle class nationwide as well as in his own state.”

Of course that’s reporter-speak. They knew by then it would work. If hatred could work in California in the sixties, did anybody really doubt it would work in Missouri? Winning the governorship of California was the hard part, as Nixon found in 1962. From there to the presidency was all downhill for a hate man. All you have to do is start your campaign in Mississippi, as Reagan did in 1979—because in a countrywide election, “blacks” played better than “students.”

There’s another, far stranger, California political story that proves decisively how far you could get by smacking down students: the strange career of S. I. Hayakawa. Until 1968 Hayakawa was an academic wacko, one of those bypassed relics whose office at the end of the corridor is avoided by all. He had pursued a number of bizarre crusades, including one against replacing alphabet prefixes on phone numbers with digits, and by the mid-sixties was marking time, waiting for retirement at the undistinguished CSU-San Francisco. Then his history of rightwing nuttiness lifted him to fame: in 1968 Reagan appointed him president of the university, and a few months later Hayakawa was on the front page of every newspaper in the country, pulling the speaker wires off a student loudspeaker van during a demonstration.

Ten years later Hayakawa was a US senator from California, solely on the strength of that one photo. Belle Avenue had long memories, at least for hate.

Ronald Reagan rose to power much faster. He was sworn in as governor at a few minutes to midnight on January 3, 1967. He was such a hick nutcase that when his astrologer told him that would be the most auspicious moment, Reagan insisted on it, placating the sucker reporters with the usual garbage about wanting to get to work undoing his democrat predecessor’s big-gov’t boondoggles. They all bought it. I never heard a word about Reagan and “his wizened co-star” Nancy’s astrological and UFO creepiness until the late 80s, and no one cared even then.

By that time, Reagan 2.0 had been in power for some time, relying on a lesson learned the hard way during his governorship: use the hate to get in power, but if you want to stay there, you need that Colgate smile they coached you on in Hollywood. This was the smiling Reagan that amnesiac America chooses to recall, the nice grandpa nobody ever had.

But that’s not the Reagan who vivisected my home state. It was his snarl they loved in those days. And even after he learned to smile, the snarl was there, a Cheshire snarl that stayed when the smile faded. Reagan was by that time defined more by a wink than a smile. The wink said to his vast, vile constituency that the smile was simply the best face to wear while the malign enterprise proceeded apace. Like Limbaugh’s little jokes about himself as “a harmless puffball,” Reagan’s smile was meant to be seen through. It was useful for the undecided suckers, because it distinguished him from the other Phalangist contenders, who could not, no matter how long they were coached, stop looking like they were smiling over some hideous memory.

It was a wonderful smile. It suited America right down to the ground: part gloat, part taunt, part utter void. By the time Reagan went to DC, he no longer had to do the grunt work of stoking all that hate. His techniques worked so incredibly well that a whole army of little hate commissars was on the air, all day, every day, keeping Belle Avenue pissed off and stupid. And over all of them presided that terrible smile, at once a taunt, a gloat, and a claim of complete innocence, or at least amnesia. 

Buy

“Pleasant Hell”

By John Dolan

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

This article was first published in The eXile on June 10, 2004

“One thing’s for sure. Pessimism never created a job.”

– From Bush’s new anti-Kerry television ad

For my first two months out here, watching the Republican goon-machine retreat into the shadows in shame as their paradigm crumbled around them provided an excellent source of entertainment. But over the past week, the madness has come full circle. The shock of imperial decay has been too much to bear — and so a strange moratorium has been imposed upon all current events in America.

It started at the end of May, with the longest and most gratuitous celebration of D-Day imaginable. The D-Day celebrations on cable news networks ran every single day for over a week, taking up nearly every minute of every news program. Nothing but long, weepy elegies to the Greatest Generation, a lone trumpet wistfully soundtracking to shots of the flag and steely, wrinkled veterans.

These overwrought D-Day celebrations served one purpose: to make Americans forget about all the depressing news about Iraq and George W. Bush. We’ve been forced to watch the collapse of the American empire right before our very eyes, the imperial death-agonies twitching in every American family room’s home theater system. It’s so depressing that even FoxNews can’t get it up anymore. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. America is supposed to win, and the drama should unfold in an upward, positive direction. That’s what we were promised! So how could the Iraq War start off great and go into a long, downhill spiral from there? How can you smile and be optimistic?

You can’t. So now America has decided that if the reality won’t fit our expectations, then reality is fired. America abruptly canceled its subscription to current events, and signed up for a heavy dose of the glorious past to replace it. Thus, we’ve been subjected to a two-week-long self-congratulatory circle jerk over the 60th anniversary of D-Day, and the Greatest Generation — burying the depressing present in an idealized American past when we were the good guys who won the good wars, rather than today’s prisoner-torturing imperialist morons who blew the empire to ruins fighting a handful of tin-pot surrender-monkeys.

O how the mighty have fallen. Only dead civilizations make a fetish of the glorious past. Isn’t this looking-backwards a specialty of the Brits? Or the Arabs? Weren’t they always once great, and someday destined to be great again? Has the American rot set in that quickly? Are we already dead?

On MSNBC, the cutting and pasting of the glorious past over the depressing present was taken to such an extreme that they actually replaced current news with simulated news from D-Day, only they used the same newscasters and analysts to “report” the events. They re-enacted D-Day on their regular news broadcasts, issuing up-to-date news accounts of the invasion of Normandy as if it was going on today, while totally ignoring Iraq for almost 10 days. They used their own newscasters and their Iraq War military analyst, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, standing on oversized maps of the English Channel in clear imitation of the graphics used during the invasion of Iraq last year. Both newscaster and McCaffrey played it with a straight face, as if relieved that they didn’t have to talk about the depressing failure in Iraq. “This is a brilliant, bold plan, and it’s not at all certain to succeed,” they’d say of the D-Day invasion. “The German defenses are strong, and Rommel is a military genius. If we lose this, we could lose the war.” This is how we like it served up — fake cliffhangers with the triumphant outcome already telegraphed in-advance. The MSNBC re-enactment served another purpose — to remind viewers that the press had been just as unquestioning and cheerleading during the glorious D-Day invasion as during Iraq, and since no one made a fuss then, well, gosh, maybe their behavior last year over the Iraq War was just, you know, Greatest Generation patriotism. Right?

And then Ronald Reagan died.

What a relief! Now the awful present could be buried under two thick layers of the idealized past. The lies they’re feeding us about Reagan, about his alleged kind-heartedness, his alleged defeat of the Soviet Union, the allegedly wonderful 80s, and his alleged resolute fight against terrorism (in fact no single president was a greater fool, liar and coward when it came to the fight against terrorism)… It was strange to watch because I WAS THERE. I was alive during the Reagan years, I know what went on!

The lies about Reagan weren’t just offensive. They were desperate. They were a sign of profound weakness that I haven’t seen here, and quite frankly, watching them really depressed the shit out of me. I realized watching the bizarre stories they spun about a mythical Ronald Reagan served the same purpose as the D-Day glorification. The point is to promote a mythical past over a depressing present.

We’re already dead, folks. As dead as Ronald Reagan. Russia, China, you guys can stick a fork in our asses. The meat is so well-cooked that it falls off the bone.

*            *           *

I took Kanan Road through the dry, jagged desert coastal mountains, out to Simi Valley, to pay my last respects to Reagan’s body. It is fitting that Reagan wanted to be buried in Simi Valley, site of the all-white jury that acquitted the LA cops who pulled an Abu Ghraib on Rodney King, a verdict that set off the greatest riots in America this century.

Nearly all of the thousands who gathered to say goodbye to the Gipper were white, aging and lumpy. The networks still won’t report this factoid about the racial makeup of the “throngs” visiting his coffin — instead, they run rigged polls showing that most Americans believe Reagan was “one of the two greatest presidents of the 20th century” or that he’s “on my short list of the greatest presidents in U.S. history.”

I parked in the lot and took the shuttle bus to the library. The TV networks spoke of crushing crowds, but I didn’t see them. Ah well, if that’s the only lie that they can get away with now, let ‘em have it. On the way to the library, the passengers laughed and spoke about their diets.

The line outside of the Reagan Library moved slowly. It was hot and dry, not a cloud in the sky. We inched forward, into the high-ceilinged anteroom where Reagan’s coffin lay. As we got closer, I noticed that each person leaned down into the coffin. I was surprised that this was an open-casket wake. The mourners paused briefly at the coffin, leaned down, and seemed to be saying some last words to the president. An arm moved — and they leaned up again. When they were through, each passed something that looked like a pen to the person behind them — the next mourner leaned down, appeared to write something, say some last words, then walk away in tears.

Ronald Reagan looks at Milton Friedman and thinks, “Bonzo! You’re back!”

It wasn’t until I was two people away from the coffin that I understood what was happening. A lumpy old man with large glasses took the “pen” from the last mourner — it was a long, thin ice pick with a makeshift cloth handle — and he leaned into Reagan’s casket, and stabbed the corpse in the neck repeatedly, like Joe Pesci in Casino. “Who’s the tough guy now?! Huh motherfucker?!” When the man was through jabbing Reagan’s corpse, he stood up, tears running down his face. “The bastard…ruined my life…” He handed it to the old woman in front of me, who took the pick and jabbed Reagan’s throat, which was now just a torn mesh of dried tendon meat. Incredibly enough, Reagan’s corpse kept his famous charming smile. When it was my turn, I saw the Gipper’s smile and thought, “Gosh, it’s hard to hate the guy.” Then I stabbed his neck with the pick, and handed it to the weeping yuppie behind me, who cried about his 80 hour workweeks as he jabbed away.

When Ronald Reagan took power in 1981, Americans lived completely different lives. Health care insurance was a given for nearly all working Americans. Downsizing — the concept of mass layoffs in order to boost a CEO’s bonus — hadn’t entered the vocabulary. Neither had outsourcing. Working parents came home from work before sundown and ate dinners with their families. Unions were strong, and the industrialists felt a social responsibility to ensuring their workers’ well-being. This was all reflected in the income differential: in 1979, the average CEO earned 30 times his average employees’ wage. For some reason no one wants to remember this part of the past — because it’s too depressing, and speaks too obviously to the real decline in America.

Reagan came to office and told the plutocrats to take everything that they wanted. I mean everything. Today, CEOs make 571 times their average employees’ wage. Today’s male white collar workers in America only earn, in real dollars, six cents per hour more today than they earned in 1973. Health care is increasingly hard to come by, no job is ever safe, Americans work far longer hours and suffer from stress-related illnesses once unheard of. As an Economic Policy Institute report noted, “What income growth there was over the 1979-1989 period was driven primarily by more work at lower wages.” What happened to Russia in the 90s was really started by Reagan’s attack on Americans in the 80s. When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he told America he was literally willing to kill us all if we didn’t give in to his plan to transfer the wealth out of the pockets of the middle- and lower-middle classes and into the plutocrats’ offshore accounts. It was so shocking that it worked. The air controller’s union broke — and so did a whole way of life. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we are all miserable wage slaves…or exiles.

This article was first published in The eXile on June 10, 2004

Read part 1 of The eXile Tribute to Reagan: “Here Lies the Worst of All” and part 3 of our tribute, “Homeless in Mourning”.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Homeless Mourn Reagan

Normanson PodKristolwitz

June 10, 2004

NEW YORK (Weekly Standard) — Hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans mourned the death of former president Ronald Reagan, whom they view as a hero and patron for cutting government funding of mental hospitals and welfare during his term.

“Before Reagan, man, they kept me in a mental hospital, which was really unfair,” said one teary-eyed homeless man in Manhattan, who said his name was Jesus Christ. “You can’t harass healthy people from a mental hospital, you know? You can’t give ‘em diseases or shit in public parks or rape joggers from a mental hospital. Thanks to Reagan, we were liberated.”

Another homeless man, a veteran from the Vietnam War, agreed. “Before Reagan, my family lived on food stamps in government housing. We were victims of big government, man. Get off our backs, man. Then Reagan freed us, and we learned responsibility. When you have to earn your own cardboard box or shopping cart, you appreciate it. We stopped and smelled the roses, man. And then shat on them. My wife and kids just couldn’t adjust. They died years ago of pneumonia, but that’s the free market, man. Wait…hey, did you hear that? Don’t make me do it, man!”

Most homeless people agree that it was no accident that Reagan died of pneumonia, the same disease that kills most homeless people. “We always did call pneumonia ‘Reagan’s Disease,’” said Christ. “He wanted to go out like a homeless man, and…he did. He was one of us, man. I miss him so much, I think I’ll rename myself Ronald Reagan.”

This article was first published in The eXile, June 10, 2004.

Read part 1 of The eXile Tribute to Reagan: “Here Lies the Worst of All” and part 2 of our tribute, “The Abominable Chimp-fucker is Dead!”

This article was first published in Alternet

What happens when Americans plunder America and leave it broken, destitute and seething mad? Where do these fabulously wealthy Americans go with their loot, if America isn’t a safe, secure, or even desirable place to spend their riches? What if they lose faith in their gated communities, because those plush gated communities are surrounded by millions of pissed-off Americans stripped of their entitlements, and who now want in?

We finally have the answer, and you’re not going to like it: a new fleet of castles that float in the oceans. The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all: moats made of oceans, keeping the land-based Americans they’ve plundered at a safe distance.

The first such floating castle has been christened the “Utopia“–the South Korean firm Samsung has been contracted to build the $1.1 billion ship, due to be launched in 2013. Already orders are coming in to buy one of the Utopia’s 200 or so mansions for sale--which range in price from about $4 million for the smallest condos to over $26 million for 6,600 square-foot “estates.” The largest mansion is a whopping 40,000 square feet, and sells for $160 million.

It’s the first of its kind to offer permanent housing units to buyers, and there’ll be plenty on board the Utopia for the global elite inhabitants to keep themselves entertained: an outdoor movie theater, casino, miniature golf course, nightclubs, restaurants, shops, and a water park for the elites’ heirs (featuring a “Lazy River,” rock-climbing wall and water slides). At nearly 1,000 feet, the Utopia is almost as long as a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

The floating castle is a longtime dream of libertarian oligarchs — a place where they can live their lives in peace free from the teeming masses of starving losers and indebted parasites and their tax demands. Since they’ve grown so rich off of America, they have enough spare change to fund projects like the Seasteading Institute, run by Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, and financed by the bizarre right-wing PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. It couldn’t have come a moment sooner for Milton Friedman’s grandson, who was best known until recently for running a grotesque advice blog for married swingers, PUA4LTR (Pick Up Advice For Long-Term Relationships). Actually, Patri Friedman ran that pick-up advice blog with his wife–the two of them are apparent big-time cyber-swingers, apparently–posting blog entries saying things like “Why Should Husbands Become PUAs? Because otherwise, your wife will talk like those wives on the blog My Husband Is Annoying.”

Both Thiel and Milton Friedman’s grandson see democracy as the enemy–last year, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” at about the same time that Milton Friedman’s grandson proclaimed, “Democracy is not the answer.” Both published their anti-democracy proclamations in the same billionaire-Koch-family-funded outlet, Cato Unbound, one of the oldest billionaire-fed libertarian welfare dispensaries. Friedman’s answer for Thiel’s democracy problem is to build offshore libertarian pod-fortresses where the libertarian way rules. It’s probably better for everyone if Milton Friedman’s grandson and Peter Thiel leave us forever for their libertarian ocean lair–Thiel believes that America went down the tubes ever since it gave women the right to vote, and he was outed as the sponsor of accused felon James O’Keefe’s smear videos that brought ACORN to ruin.

Genius at work: Various designs for billionaire-libertarian escape pods

While Thiel and Friedman are busy cooking up their libertarian dystopia, the Frontier Group investment firm — an offshoot of the Carlyle Group — has already entered the realization phase with the Utopia floating castle. Frontier Group, was founded by some of the same big names from the notorious Carlyle Group–the private equity firm that brought together right-wing oligarchs like George H. W. Bush and other top American officials with their billionaire pals in Saudi Arabia like the Bin Laden family, who together raked in enormous profits thanks to the War on Terror that their kids Dubya and Osama launched.

While neither Bush nor the Bin Ladens are principals in the Frontier Group, its founding director, Frank Carlucci, is a name they know well, and you should too. Carlucci ran the Carlyle Group as its chairman from 1989 through 2005, right around the time that the wars started going undeniably bad, and floating castles started to look like a viable plan. But Carlucci’s past is much weirder and scarier than most of us care to know: whether it’s his strangely timed appearances in some of the ugliest assassinations and coups in modern history, or serving as Carter’s number two man in the CIA, and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, if Frank Carlucci (nicknamed “Creepy Carlucci” and “Spooky Frank”) is the founding director of a firm that’s building floating castles, it’s a bad sign for those of us left behind.

I’ll get into Carlucci’s partners in the Frontier Group in a moment, but first, let’s reacquaint ourselves with Frank Carlucci. From an early age, Carlucci learned the importance of getting to know the right people in the right places. He studied at Princeton in the mid-1950s, where as luck should have it, Carlucci roomed with Donald Rumsfeld. Both Carlucci and Rumsfeld shared a passion for Greco-Roman wrestling at Princeton, and both went on to serve in the Navy after Princeton. Their paths would split and merge several times over the next few decades, even as they remained close personal friends throughout their lives. In the late 1950s, Carlucci briefly served as an executive at a lingerie manufacturer, Jantzen (the Victoria’s Secret of its day), but quickly left to join the State Department.

At age 30 Carlucci was named vice consul of the U.S. embassy in the Congo–just in time for the colony’s independence from Belgium. Of all the European colonies in Africa, Congo suffered perhaps the worst, at least that we know about: the Belgians exterminated up to 10 million Congolese between 1885 and 1908, and introduced the now-widespread punishment of hacking off Africans’ forearms to scare everyone into submission. All of this was done in order to strip the Congo of its lucrative rubber, ivory, and later, precious metals, as quickly as possible, and send the riches back to Belgium.

Naturally the Belgians didn’t want to let go of their colony, so they held out until 1960, when the Congo finally was granted independence and democratic elections. Unfortunately for the Congo, America didn’t like way they voted–so two months after Patrice Lumumba was elected president, he was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, taken out into the jungle, murdered, chopped into little pieces with a hacksaw, and then dissolved in sulfuric acid by Belgian goons and their local collaborators. Carlucci has been accused of green-lighting Lumumba’s assassination by multiple investigative reporters.

The dictator who replaced Lumumba was a CIA asset named Joseph Mobutu–the notorious dictator who brought the Congo to ruin after embezzling more than any dictator in Africa. Mobutu was finally deposed in 1997, but the wars since then have claimed roughly six million lives, the bloodiest conflicts since World War II.

After his success in Congo, it was all uphill for Carlucci: he moved to the Brazil embassy just in time for the military coup in 1964, then went to Washington to serve as deputy to his buddy Donald Rumsfeld in Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity, where the young Dick Cheney was making his name. The first thing they did upon taking control of the OEO was conduct a purge of “subversives” firing up to a quarter of the staff. In 1974, Carlucci was named ambassador to Portugal just in time for the overthrow of the dictatorship–Carlucci saw to it that the communists who led the overthrow were themselves overthrown by IMF-friendly “moderate” socialists, and a few years later, he was back in Washington serving as the number two man in the CIA under Carter.

Once that agency was sufficiently gutted, he moved on to other forms of destruction: In 1974, Carlucci was named ambassador to Portugal just in time for the overthrow of the dictatorship–Carlucci saw to it that the Communists who led the overthrow were themselves overthrown by IMF-friendly “moderate” socialists, and a few years later, he was back in Washington DC serving as the number two man in the CIA under Carter. In 1981, Reagan named him deputy Defense Secretary; Carlucci left in 1983 to head up Sears World Trade, a trading company involved in shady arms deals that was once described by Fortune magazine as a front for US intelligence ops. Once that collapsed, Carlucci moved back to the Reagan Administration as National Security Advisor and then Defense Secretary.

In 1989, Carlucci left to become chairman of the fledging Carlyle Group, which subsequently morphed into the monster we remember it by: using its highly paid A-list of public officials to lobby big government for lucrative contracts, profiting off of privatized rest stops and unnecessary arms contracts, leaving the public to foot the bill while guys like Carlucci run around preaching the benefits of private enterprise.

Creepy Carlucci

Carlucci may be the scariest of the Frontier Group bunch building the floating castles, but he’s among his kind. Other Carlyle Group directors who joined Carlucci at Frontier include David Robb, who headed up Carlyle’s investments in defense and aerospace; Sanford McDonnell, the former CEO of McDonnell Douglass and onetime head of the Boy Scouts of America; and Norman Augustine, another ex-president of the Boy Scouts, another Princeton alum, and former board director at the scandal-plagued Riggs bank.

Riggs bank became one of those dark unsolved mysteries of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror. After the attacks on 9/11, the FBI discovered that Saudi government officials used accounts at Riggs bank to wire funds to at least two known associates of the Saudi hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Riggs was also implicated in the Britain-Saudi $3 billion bribery scandal, in which British Aerospace bribes were wired through Riggs accounts to Saudi officials in return for lucrative contracts. One of Riggs bank’s top executives was Jonathan Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush, after Riggs bought out Jonathan Bush’s bank in 1997, and appointed him as a director. In 2005, with Riggs embroiled in investigations and scandals–Riggs pled guilty to money laundering Augusto Pinochet’s stolen funds, and the funds of various Equatorial Guinea officials– it was taken over by PNC bank, with the approval of Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Even after the Washington Post revealed that Riggs’ billionaire chairman flew Greenspan’s wife, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell, on the Riggs company jet.

But the weirdest of all the Frontier Group directors has to be founding director Danny Pang. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pang embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from his private equity firm PEMGroup. Pang claimed he was investing money in “Dead Peasants Insurance” (life insurance policies for people considered likely to die), but in secret, Pang confided to PEMGroup’s ex-president that he ran it as a Ponzi scheme. That sparked a fresh FBI investigation into Danny Pang’s crimes–which led back to the unsolved murder of his wife, Janie Louise Pang, a 33-year-old ex-stripper who was shot to death execution style in their Irvine, California home in 1997, the same year Pang was accused of embezzling three million dollars from another fund he worked at. There was plenty of reason to suspect Danny Pang of murdering his wife: he beat her so often (breaking her nose on one occasion) that police were called in on at least four occasions before her murder. She’d had him tailed by a private detective who discovered Danny holding hands with another woman shortly before she was murdered. Danny had known ties to the Taiwanese Triad mob, he took the fifth and refused to cooperate in the murder trial, and reportedly threatened Janie’s friends after her murder, demanding to know what Janie told them about his business activities.

Janie Louise Pang

Here is a description of Janie Louise Pang’s murder, from the L.A. Times:

According to the family maid and two of Pang’s children, a clean-cut man with a pencil-thin mustache arrived at the door asking for her husband. The pair talked casually for a couple of minutes, until the man drew a semiautomatic pistol. Pang began running and the maid, terrified, spirited Pang’s children out the back door. Within minutes, the killer caught up with Pang, who tried to hide in her bedroom closet. The killer fired several .380-caliber rounds and left her to bleed to death as she lay in a fetal position.

Somehow, the trial ended with a hung jury, and Danny Pang went on to join Frank Carlucci and the Boy Scouts presidents to start building the world’s first billion-dollar floating castle to spirit away all that stolen money in luxury. But Pang was apparently too careless for them. He was outted last spring in the Wall Street Journal, and you can probably guess what happens to guys like Pang who become a liability to the right-wing oligarchy: In September 2009, Danny Pang was found dead of unknown causes in his Newport Beach home.

Danny Pang

After a three-month investigation, Pang’s death was ruled a suicide:

John C. Hiserodt, a private forensic pathologist in Cypress, Calif., reviewed the toxicology report released by the coroner. He said it showed that Mr. Pang had roughly five times the typical fatal levels of both oxycodone and hydrocodone in his blood, plus the equivalent still in his stomach of about 30 oxycodone pills of 10 milligrams apiece. “You don’t get this level of drug accidentally,” he said. “It’s pretty clearly a suicide.”

Indeed. Meanwhile, plans to launch the Utopia are moving ahead on schedule.

This article was first published in Alternet

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Mark Ames gets his thrombo on debating (by way of shouting) with right-wing radio host Chuck Morse and liberal radio host Patrick O’Heffernan on their AM radio show “The Fairness Doctrine.” Hear them reach for blunt, heavy objects as they debate whether or not America was ever intended to be a democracy.

Listen to “The Fairness Doctrine” in Massachusetts on radio stations WDIS AM 1170, WNSH AM 1570, weekdays from 3pm-5pm.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

One of the great ironies of the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago is that the East German protest leaders who led the uprising did not want unification with West Germany.

It’s important on this anniversary to distinguish between two entirely different events: first, the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989; and then German unification, on October 3, 1990. Americans often conflate the two into one process. But for Germans and those who were there, it’s a much more complicated story. The fall of the Berlin Wall became a poisoned memory for a certain set of Easterners, thanks to the events that followed that event.

The movement to overthrow the totalitarian regime in East Germany and tear down the wall was led by a relatively small number of activists and rejectionists whose aim wasn’t unification, but rather an independent, free, idealistic socialist East Germany. These people were very different from the institutional opposition that had success elsewhere in the East Bloc, which arose after Gorbachev eased Soviet pressure and allowed a kind of top-down reform in places like Hungary and Poland. But in East Germany, the government was too hardline and unwilling to reform, so opposition arose from underground operators.

The groups that got the ball rolling for the mass street protests that eventually convinced the ruling SED party to depose dictator Erich Honecker, install the more moderate Egon Krenz, and liberalize travel restrictions, largely operated from under the protective umbrella of the Lutheran church, which enjoyed special status in East Germany. These groups included human rights activists, environmental activists, peace activists, and underground artists and musicians–in other words, they were secular, but they still took refuge in the churches. Much of the church leadership itself was also heavily involved in the opposition.

Most of these people, the ones who did the legwork to bring down the wall, often paying a dear personal price, were too leftwing and idealistic for those Americans who were looking for self-affirmation in Germany’s revolution . They weren’t protesting for McDonald’s and Western pop music (not even David Hasselhoff’s “Looking for Freedom”), and they sure as hell weren’t inspired by Ronald Reagan. But our inability to distinguish the fall of the Berlin Wall from Germany’s unification means this awkward twist is lost in American coverage anyway.

Take Thomas Friedman writing about the fall of the wall a few weeks ago, celebrates a Dunkin Donuts branch at the Brandenburg Gate, which served as the backdrop for some of the most stirring images from November 9th: “Normally, I am horrified by American fast food brands near iconic sites, but in the case of this once open sore between East and West, I find it something of a balm. The war over Europe is indeed over. People power won. We can stand down–pass the doughnuts.”

Unfortunately for Friedman, the hamburgers-and-Hasselhoff set had fuck all to do with the fall of the wall. They did, however, bring about unification, much to the chagrin of the folks who facilitated the breach. The people who brought down the wall at the risk of being beaten, jailed, fired, sent off to military service, or expatriated lost control of the process as soon as the stakes for participation dropped to nil. At that point–and it was only days after the fall of the wall–the chant in the streets of the GDR changed from “we are the people” to “we are one people.”

It also turned out that many of the East German church leaders who had harbored the hardcore rejectionists and activists did not share their vision for post-wall East Germany, and quickly struck alliances with the West German Christian Democrats, Helmut Kohl’s right-of-center pro-unification party. Kohl’s party funded an Eastern sister party and literally passed out bananas to woo Eastern voters.

In hindsight, it’s often seen as inevitable that the two Germanys would reunite. But this, too, is a somewhat revisionist view. The territories that made up East and West Germany had previously been properly united for only a relatively brief period, from 1871 to 1945, from Kaiser Wilhelm’s consolidation following the Franco-Prussian War until the dissolution of Germany after World War II. (Nobody would advocate a Germany based on the Holy Roman Empire, another period when the two Germanys were under common rule-along with Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Holland, Belgium, Slovenia, and parts of Poland, France, and Italy.) The southern border of East Germany-with Bavaria-was also a religious fault line, with the Oktoberfest state traditionally Catholic and the GDR’s Thuringia mostly Protestant from a few years after the Reformation. So again, on the face of it, there was no overriding logical necessity for reunion.

Look at it this way: When Canada gained independence from Britain in 1931, nobody thought it inevitable that the US and Canada–nations that share a 3000-mile border, virtually integrated economies, a common language, and a common origin as British colonies–would unite.

Nevertheless, the 1990 election that determined East Germany’s path forward was indeed won with promises of BMWs and bananas (which, incidentally, isn’t the same as Dodges and doughnuts), as the reactionary hamburgers-and-Hasselhoff voters carried the day. But this is the ugly part of the story-the part where money buys elections, the part where shrill sloganeering drowns out nuanced discussion, the part where an abstract pleasant-sounding goal beats any platform detailing the nuts and bolts of how to get there. In short, the election that led to unification was rife with exactly the sorts of things we bemoan in our own country, but with unimaginably high stakes: the continued existence of the voters’ country.

It is a great disservice to the brave East Germans who brought down the wall to confuse its fall with unification and to see, for instance, the proliferation of American fast food joints at the Brandenburg Gate as somehow fitting tribute to the events of November 9. Doing so allows the perpetuation of some of the biggest lies we–we, as in Americans–tell ourselves. These lies-about the motivation of the people who brought down the wall, about the inevitability of their embrace of the West, about rock and roll and Coca Cola and fucking doughnuts-are so insidious because they inform our ideas about freedom and the ostensible US role in spreading it. Nothing could be more ignorant and ahistorical–except perhaps crediting Reagan, which much of the rest of the US media was busy doing this week.

Tim Mohr writes for the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post.

Mega-Statue Of Chicken Plutocrat Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim

The killing spree in Alabama fits a well-worn pattern of workplace-driven massacres that we’ve seen since the “going postal” phenomenon exploded in the middle of the Reagan revolution.

In spite of the fact that these killings have gone on unabated for over 20 years, most of the country doesn’t want to know why they’re happening — least of all the people in power.

If we study the motive for Michael McLendon’s shooting rampage Tuesday, which left 11 bodies across three towns in southern Alabama, and we look at the bizarre way that the causes of the shooting are being hushed up, you begin to understand why this uniquely-Reaganomics-inspired crime started in the United States, and continues to plague us.

But of all the inexplicable circumstances surrounding the murder spree, one of the oddest has to be the way Alabama authorities went from focusing hard on solving the shooter’s motive to suddenly dropping the issue like a hot potato and running away from the scene of the crime, as if they didn’t like what their investigation produced.

On Wednesday night, investigators announced that they had discovered the motive, and they would reveal it to the world on Thursday morning.

Investigators close in on motive of Alabama gunman
by Donna Francavilla
SAMSON, Ala. (AFP) — Alabama investigators said they were closing in on a motive for the U.S. state’s deadliest-ever shooting, in which a man killed his mother, grandmother and eight others before taking his own life. The Alabama Bureau of Investigations said there had been “very recent developments that we believe may direct us to a motive” for the grisly rampage, but ABI was quick to dismiss earlier reports that a hit list had been found in the house of the gunman, identified as Michael McLendon.

But then something funny happened on Thursday. Alabama investigators completely reversed themselves: They were now claiming there was no way to find out the motive for the killings, and in fact, no motive ever existed in the first place.

“There’s probably never going to be a motive,” Trooper Kevin Cook, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, said Thursday.

Even the list that provided so many obvious clues as to what sparked the shooting is now no longer the “hit list” or list of people who had “done him wrong,” but rather, “the kind of list you’d put on a magnet on the refrigerator door,” according to Cook.

Which is odd, because just the day before, Cook told reporters, “As to motive, what we do know is that his mother had a lawsuit pending against Pilgrim’s Pride.”

Why the bizarre about-face? We may never know, because Alabama investigators abruptly closed the investigation at noon on Thursday, sending home almost the entire team. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving along.

This raises a new question: What was it about McLendon’s motive that officials wanted hushed? Or better yet: What did Pilgrim’s Pride do that could have incited a man described by all as nice, quiet and respectful to unleash a bloody killing spree?

On the surface, the horrific details seem to suggest a straightforward case of a lone psychopath unleashed: Michael McLendon, 28, shot and killed execution-style his own mother and four dogs, then set their bodies on fire before driving to other relatives’ houses and killing them; he killed a deputy’s wife and baby, along with bystanders; and like so many rampage massacres over the past 20 years, he ended his life inside of his former workplace: Reliance Metal Products, in the small town of Geneva, Ala.

Authorities say they discovered a list — presumably a hit list — of people and companies whom McLendon felt had done him wrong. Popular culture tells us that the hit list and his grievances are themselves signs that he suffered from a persecution complex, like so many Charles Mansons. No need to actually look into who was on that hit list and why — the mere discovery of such a list should be enough to indict him, case closed.

But nothing’s solved, nothing’s closed; and if we’re serious about understanding the “why” of this massacre, as everyone claims to be, then that list is the best place to start.

As with so many of these rage massacres from the past 20 years, the more you look at Tuesdays’ killing spree, the more you see that the system we’ve been living under since Reaganomics conquered everything has created all kinds of monsters and maniacs, from the plutocrats who’ve plundered this country for three decades straight, down to the lone broken worker — McLendon — who took up arms in a desperate suicide mission against the beast that crushed him.

Michael “Doughboy” McLendon

So far we’ve learned that McLendon’s hit list names the three companies he had worked for since 2003 — Reliance Metals, which makes construction materials; Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s number one poultry producer, where his mother also worked, until she was suspended from her job last week; and Kelley Foods, a smaller family-owned meat-processing company from which McLendon apparently quit just last week.

Even more striking to someone who has studied these workplace massacres, it appears that McLendon was bullied and abused at work. One clue as to why he’d end his spree at Reliance, where he hadn’t worked since 2003, could be that he was trying to kill the source of the pain: workers at Reliance used to taunt him incessantly, giving him the nickname “Doughboy.” Which basically means “fatso” and “faggot” combined: McLendon was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, but he weighed roughly 210 pounds.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but “Doughboy” is the exact same nickname that workers at Standard Gravure, a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., gave to a guy named Joe Wesbecker back in the 1980s.

Like McLendon’s case against Pilgrim’s Pride, Wesbecker also was locked in an ongoing labor dispute with his company, whose top shareholders had gone on an eight-year plundering spree, leaving little for the workers; the government backed Wesbecker’s case against Standard Gravure, and he “won” his dispute, but it was irrelevant.

By 1989, the culture had changed, all power went to the CEOs and major shareholders. Standard Gravure’s senior executives ignored the arbitration rulings and continued to treat Wesbecker however they felt, slashing his pay under a different pretense, which would require a whole new round of arbitrations.

Joe “Doughboy” Wesbecker finally cracked: on Sept. 14, 1989, he unleashed America’s first private workplace massacre, pitting aggrieved worker against vampiric company, borrowing from the numerous post office shootings that had erupted a few years earlier. The result: seven killed, 20 wounded, and the death of the company that drove him to the brink. And an unending string of workplace massacres by “disgruntled employees” ever since.

Next time any asshole calls a kid or a co-worker “Doughboy,” put the bully and the bullied on the top of your next Ghoul Pool list. Bullying in the workplace, like bullying in the schoolyard, is only now being recognized as a serious problem, with devastating psychological consequences — and the occasional rampage massacre.

Conventional wisdom used to say that victims of bullying should “deal with it” since it was “just the way things are”; nowadays, after all the workplace and school shootings, anti-bullying laws and codes are becoming increasingly common.

But let’s go back to Pilgrim’s Pride, the company that the Alabama investigator first named as the possible motive for the massacre. You might have heard of Pilgrim’s Pride before, not only because you’ve bought their chicken, but because of the notorious undercover video shot in one of the company’s chicken slaughterhouses in 2004.

When you look back at that video, and you place future-rampage-killer McLendon and his mother in that environment, the gory, sadistic details take on new meaning:

PETA says its investigator witnessed workers “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.” In one shot, workers jump on live chickens with their entire body weight, sending blood and innards splashing on the lens of the hidden camera.

Mostly, the workers appear to have been acting either out of sheer boredom with their jobs or out of anger with management, sometimes for making them work too many hours. One sequence filmed on 6 April this year [2004], shows workers amusing themselves by throwing 114 birds against a wall, their stunned bodies collecting beneath it. At one point, a supervisor walks past and shouts “Hold your fire” so he can safely pass. Once out of the way, he tells the workers to “carry on.”

So this is the vicious world that McLendon spent some two years working in, and his mother far longer. The way the company treats its chickens is a good metaphor for how Pilgrim’s Pride treats its workers, shareholders and American taxpayers.

In 2006, Pilgrim’s Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who’s been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation’s No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.

That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: They made the workforce pay for the executives’ mistakes. That meant squeezing them for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim’s case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim’s Pride accusing them of grossly undercompensating their employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim’s Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.

And this is where McLendon comes in: In 2006, the year of the acquisition, McLendon and his mother filed lawsuits and claims against the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Enterprise, Ala., charging the company with illegally denying them pay for the time it takes for workers to get suited up for the dangerous factory lines, and the time to take the protective gear off. Pilgrim’s Pride had decided to stop classifying that time at the job as “work,” now that they had a bunch of Wall Street bondholders to pay off. Other lawsuits also allege that the company forced workers to work overtime but only paid them regular hourly wages.

While all of this “cost-cutting” was ravaging thousands of workers at the bottom of Pilgrim’s wage pyramid, at the very top, things were very different for chairman Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim and his little pack of plundering wolves.

Despite the chairman’s disastrous acquisition, which eventually brought the company to bankruptcy in December 2008, and despite slashing the workforce’s already-low pay, Pilgrim rewarded himself handsomely for a job well done: in 2007, Bo Pilgrim paid himself $3.2 million and $2.1 million in 2008 for his work as “senior chairman” of the board. Pilgrim’s Pride also paid Bo $1.01 million for a contract with another firm he owns, meaning he signed on both dotted lines of the contract — a clear conflict of interest that is now the subject of a shareholder-fraud lawsuit.

There’s more: In 2008, Bo Pilgrim directed Pilgrim’s Pride to pay an egg-production facility that Bo owns $775,000 in rental fees; Bo’s son, Ken Pilgrim, was paid over a half-million dollars in both 2007 and 2008 as “co-chairman” of the board; another son, Pat Pilgrim, and a daughter, Greta Pilgrim-Owens, were paid a total of over a million dollars in 2007-08 by the Pilgrim-controlled board, and little Pat Pilgrim seems to have learned a thing or two from his father, earning himself an extra half a million dollars thanks to sweet contracts between Pilgrim’s Pride and his other company.

The only reason we know about all of this corporate malfeasance — so typical in the post-Reagan economy — is because of a shareholder lawsuit filed last year. Indeed, the trajectory of Pilgrim’s wealth-plunder is a microcosm of what went on all across corporate America: first Bo Pilgrim squeezed all he could out of the workforce, and when they were squeezed dry, he fleeced his own shareholders, the unter-plutocrats, before finally crying “bankruptcy” and turning to the American government and legal system to protect him and his loot.

Thanks to the “voluntary bankruptcy,” Pilgrim’s Pride is in a much better position against all the lawsuits against it. In fact, it’s in such a good position that the bankruptcy court even allowed Pilgrim family members to be hired back as restructuring “consultants,” on company pay. And in case they were having revenue problems to pay Bo, Ken, Pat and the other vampires, the USDA handed Pilgrim’s a contract worth tens of millions of dollars in January.

How did Pilgrim’s pay back the taxpayers for this little bailout? If you’ve read the news, you’ll know the answer: A few weeks later, Pilgrim’s Pride announced mass layoffs at three plants, devastating those communities. Local reports in rural American communities complain of huge tax bills owed by Pilgrim’s Pride left unpaid now that they’re protected by the bankruptcy, multiplying again the number of ways that the Pilgrim clan are fucking rural America:

Suwannee County could be out about $2 million if Pilgrim’s Pride doesn’t pay its property tax bill, according to Property Appraiser Lamar Jenkins.

The biggest taxpayer in the county filed for bankruptcy protection Dec. 1. Now it’s not clear when – or if – the bill will be paid.

“It’s certainly going to put a hurt on the budget of the county,” Jenkins told the Democrat by phone Thursday.

Jenkins said the unpaid bill represents 7.4 percent of the money local schools get from property taxes; 5.3 percent of county funds from that source; and 8 percent of the money the Suwannee River Water Management District receives from local property tax revenues.

A spokesman for Pilgrim’s did not respond to a request for comment.

If you’re wondering what the Reaganomics concept of “wealth transfer from the employee class to the plutocrat class” looks like, this is it. Multiply this story by just about every corporation out there today, and there you have America.

McLendon’s killings holds few similarities to that other massacre that transpired this week in a school in Stuttgart, Germany.

One major difference between the Europe’s and America’s school shootings is that they happen all the time in America, with a frightening regularity, whereas they’re still incredibly rare in Europe — two school massacres in Finland and two in Germany, all of them unusually bloody by American standards, but none of them appear to have sparked an unstoppable trend in Europe’s schools.

That’s what makes America’s modern-day school shootings so unique — they happen so frequently and predictably (and for every shooting you hear about, there are dozens of averted shootings, shooting plots, kids caught with hit lists and duffel bags, etc., much of it covered up because they’re minors). This was exactly what the most famous school shooters, Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, hoped for when they attacked their school: “We need to fucking kick-start a revolution here! We need to get a chain reaction going!”

But whereas they’ve found a huge cult following among American kids devastated by a culture that coddles the bullies, pushes them to the limits to compete and succeed, and pumps them full of prescription drugs because mommy and daddy are themselves being crushed at the workplace — outside of America, Columbine’s influence has been sparse, as a culture like Germany’s is different from ours on so many levels.

For one thing, Germany is much more humane to its citizens than America is: its teachers are much more respected than in America, where “people who can’t do teach,” while all citizens have free health care and certain employee rights — like, for example, mandatory paid vacation time (America is the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country not to mandate paid vacation time to workers).

The difference between a common maniac’s murder spree and crimes that result from intolerable conditions and injustices is that the maniac’s killings take place in a kind of vacuum, resulting in shock but not widespread sympathy and an unstoppable ongoing movement. In that sense, the two school shootings in Finland and the two in Germany don’t seem to be anything like what we have here.

Which brings me back to McLendon. Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended his mother, 52-year-old Lisa McLendon, from her job. Pilgrim’s Pride won’t say exactly why they suspended her from her night shift, except to darkly note it was a “very serious matter.” So serious, in fact, that they told her she could come back to work in a week if she “resolved” the matter to their satisfaction.

So again, what was she suspended for? This is where the corporate sadism gets surreal: According to one report, she was suspended for overstating her work hours on her time card. In other words, given her lawsuit (now no longer such a threat to Pilgrim’s while it is “restructuring” under American courts), she very likely decided she couldn’t wait for the courts anymore and decided to clock in her time spent putting on and taking off the required protective gear.

Suspending her in such a case would be a classic example of illegal corporate retribution against a worker with a labor dispute — but what can a small-town Alabama hick do, with so little money and only so much resources, against a many-headed corporate beast like Pilgrim’s Pride? The fact that Michael McLendon had the names of so many lawyers written down on lists in a spiral notebook shows that he tried going the legal route, but I mean, really, who’s fooling whom? You think a small-town Alabama chicken-plucker has a chance in hell of fighting these oligarchs in the courts?

The lead attorney in the class-action suit against Pilgrim’s Pride explained the dilemma this way:

“What has been difficult for these workers, both because of the raids and that there’s been a lot of press about layoffs at Pilgrim’s Pride, a lot of workers are afraid of retaliation for coming forward, afraid of losing their jobs,” [Jenny Yang] said. “We are trying to make sure people are aware federal laws protect them against retaliation for participating in the case.”

But anyone who understands company-labor relations since Reagan knows that companies routinely flout these laws and retaliate at will, suffering at worst a minor slap on the wrist, usually getting away with it completely.

Now that the company is under bankruptcy protection, with the same Pilgrims running the show, what’s the worst that would happen for punishing a lowly worker who made a claim? Another lawsuit? Yeah, right.

So now we can start looking at the “motive” that Alabama investigators first broke, then hushed up: Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended McLendon’s 52-year-old mother from her grim night-shift job as retribution for her demands to be paid in full for her work. Almost the same time that his mother was suspended from Pilgrim’s Pride, McLendon abruptly quit his job at Kelley Foods, a meat-processing company a few towns over. Add to this another corporate attack on the locals: In mid-February, Reliance Metal Products, the place where McLendon worked until 2003 and where he ended his killing spree, quietly started laying off its workers and pushing the lucky few who still had jobs into working longer hours.

You can glean some of the anger and frustration in unofficial forums, but there’s little information in the official realm: According to a report dated Feb. 18 from a local TV station, WTVY:

Local Prefabricated Metal Manufacturer Lays Off Worker

At one time, Reliable Corp., based in Geneva, Ala., employed 800. We’re being told by those who work there that fellow employees have been receiving their lay-off notices. Reliable Corp. has been manufacturing prefabricated metal products for more than 50 years. Over recent days, News 4 has received several calls from those who’ve been laid off.

They haven’t been told if it’s temporary or if it’s a permanent job loss. In one correspondence, we’ve learned that those who’ve been laid off will meet with a delegation of company and state officials early next month in Geneva. Following the loss of a body-armor company late last year, Geneva Mayor Wynnton Melton says any loss of jobs for his city is tragic.

News 4 was unsuccessful in getting a statement from reliable officials in Geneva. In the 1990s, Geneva lost more than 2,000 textile jobs as they went to overseas’ countries. At this time, we’re not being told if the layoffs are due to the national recession. We will continue to follow this story as details become available.

As the local news crew reported, it’s almost impossible to find out any news about the layoffs because Reliable was keeping quiet. You get some clues to the answer via the three lonely comments at the bottom of the WTVY story:

Posted by: Rudy Location: New York on Feb. 18, 2009 at 4:28 p.m. — My heart goes out to the layoff victims of Reliable Corp. I found immediate advice and strategies in an iTunes app called “Pink Slip.” It helped me know my rights and keep my head during and after the meeting with HR.

Posted by: Gwynn Location: Westville on Feb. 18, 2009 at 7:56 a.m. — I have been laid off from Reliable. I have not been informed of any meetings. We were told that the layoffs were due to lack of work and that if work picked up, we would be called back to work. If work orders didn’t, we would be terminated at the end of the month.

Posted by: RELIABLE WORKER on Feb. 17, 2009 at 10:35 p.m. — Company laying off employees and giving overtime to other workers is more of a losing battle either way you look at it! Employees were told if they were called back by March 2nd, they would have a job, if not, they no longer had a job! Cut out overtime and put people back to work, not only are you hurting your employees but the city of Geneva as well. Loss of income is a loss of sales for the city. Not many jobs in the city makes people seek new jobs elsewhere. Makes you think we should have voted wet on the wet dry ballot. That would have been a lot of tax money for the city, which is now being lost by loss of jobs!

What these commenters reveal is the same Reaganomics corporate approach at work as with Pilgrim’s Pride, only scaled down in size. Everywhere it’s the same: the company only exists as a vehicle for the top half a dozen or so executives and major shareholders to plunder as many suckers — workers, investors, taxpayers — as they can soak. We know a lot less about Kelley Foods, the last place McLendon worked before his killing spree. Divorce papers from 2003 reveal that the wife of Charles Kelley, one of the principal owners, accused him of having “engaged in domestic violence” against her.

Watch Bo Pilgrim’s insane vanity video

We also know that, like Pilgrim’s Pride, Kelley Foods earns a substantial amount of money from American taxpayers: $1.36 million in food contracts with the Defense Department in just three years, 2005-07. For Kelley, that’s a huge amount.

So now we can go back to the question of motive, a question that Alabama investigators are running away from: rapacious corporations that cheat their workers and plunder the company wealth, a systematic bullying that extends all the way down to the way workers treat each other, and the sadism in the way they treat the chickens. It’s a snapshot of a vicious law-of-the-jungle world, and yet it’s just plain flat reality for most Americans.

Put in this context, McLendon seems a lot less like a maniac, and more like a victim of maniacs, who finally snapped and lashed out — killing many of the “wrong” people, although judging by his list and what authorities had said earlier, he had plans to kill the right people, too.

But this isn’t something Alabama authorities would want to expose: It would pissing off a serious company which is in the middle of choosing which plants to close, and it would mean creating some very confusing and potentially dangerous sympathy for McLendon.

While much of the massacre details are a repeat of similar “going postal” attacks over the past 20 years, the way he killed his mother and family suggests that a new pattern is emerging to go with the Great Depression 2: Now, killers take their families down with them.

In today’s rampage, the shooter began by killing his mother and torching her home, then driving to where other family members lived and killing them, before ending it all at his former employer Reliable Metals. This sequence strongly resembles a couple of other recent high-profile family slayings: one in Los Angeles, which left seven family members dead in January, and another in Ohio a few weeks later, leaving three dead. In those killings, the shooter and his family were left financially devastated by the Great Depression 2.

It’s interesting that McLendon began his attack by taking out his family, but ended it attacking the source of the pain — inside the company premises, where he ended his life. McLendon’s family murders were a bit more complicated than those in Ohio and Los Angeles, however: It appears that he was very careful and respectful with the bodies of his mother and four dogs after he killed them, placing the dogs at his mother’s head and feet the way ancient civilizations buried their leaders, before setting their bodies on fire as if in a funeral pyre — as if he loved her too much to have her endure not only the aftermath of his planned attack, but a world in which she was constantly being crushed by a vampiric corporation, and a culture that nurtured such corporations.

On the other hand, he seems to have had genuine scores to settle with other family members across town, whom he shot on their porch — reports coming out indicate that a nasty divorce some years earlier had led to deepening disputes with this side of McLendon’s family, suggesting that unlike his mother, they were killed for retribution.

For years, these shootings were considered “random acts” committed by people who “snapped for no reason.” Now, hundreds of dead victims and a massive financial collapse later, we know better: They’re reactions against corporate oppression. If the super-rich and the corporations constantly squeeze their workers of time, money and health, a few of their victims are naturally going to “snap” and fight back with guns. Call it a small price to pay for looting everyone’s wealth.

Will it end? With the current economic crisis, there’s a chance the playing field might even out a little, that our culture might finally learn to stop humping the plutocrats’ legs while they plunder us and instead start biting them to get our fair share.

Watch PETA’s undercover video inside Pilgrim’s Pride

LATE NOTE: Reader Doug sent a letter pointing out that Abu Ghraib model/scapegoat Lynndie England worked briefly at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in West Virginia but quit because she was too horrified by what she saw. According to the American Prospect:

England noticed that unhealthy-looking chicken parts were being sent down the line. She told her supervisors, but they ignored her. Her sister recalls her walking over to her station and taking off her smock.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Klinestiver says. “‘We’ve only been at work for an hour.’ She said, ‘I quit,’ and walked out the door.”

“I didn’t like the way management was doing things,” England explains. “People would take the good chicken off and put the bad chicken on. Management didn’t care.”

This article first appeared in Alternet. Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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