The beginnings of America’s internal rot

He seemed to me to be on the point of taking off into the heights, like some great bird.’ For his part, on his return to Washington, Kennedy was to say in a ‘Report to the American People’ on June 6 that he had found General de Gaulle a ‘wise counsellor for the future and an informative guide to the history that he had helped to make … I could not have more confi dence in any man.’

It seems that certain powerful interests in the Anglo-American world were less than enthusiastic over the prospects of such confi dence between the French president and his young American counterpart becoming a full-fl edged change in direction for United States foreign policy. Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president on November 22, 1963, could never be accused of inspiring similar hopes. As President, Johnson never dared defy the powerful Wall Street interests.5

LBJ soon escalated Vietnam from a CIA ‘technical advisory,’ into a full-scale military confl ict, pouring tens of billions of dollars and 500,000 uniformed men into a self-defeating war in southeast Asia. The war kept Wall Street bond markets busy fi nancing a record level of U.S. Treasury debt, while select defense-related U.S. companies kept their profi ts fl owing from the Asian campaign. The persisting U.S. economic stagnation, which worried the politician Johnson, was seemingly ‘solved’ by the boom in war spending, so that he secured a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. But he bought his ‘victory’ at a staggering cost.

THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICA’S INTERNAL ROT

Faced with the need to address America’s growing urban decay, on August 20, 1964, President Johnson signed the Equal Opportunities Act. In signing it, he boasted, with characteristic bravado, ‘Today, for the fi rst time in the history of the human race, a great nation is able and willing to make a commitment to eradicate poverty among its people.’ The War on Poverty and LBJ’s Great Society program, as he called it, hardly eradicated poverty. But it provided an additional excuse for one of the largest increases of defi cit spending and fi nancial looting in modern history, a defi cit in effect fi nanced by surplus European dollars.

Millions of the nation’s youth were herded into colleges during the mid 1960s as a form of ‘hidden unemployment,’ with the university student population rising from less than 4 million in 1960 to almost 10 million in 1975. It was the excuse for Wall Street to fl oat additional billions of dollars of state-guaranteed public bonds for university

construction. Investment in expansion of the real industrial economy was being shifted into this ‘post-industrial’ or ‘service economy,’ in a path similar to that traveled by Britain on its road to ruin late in the previous century. Social Security and welfare spending increased, as entire sections of the population were thrown onto a permanent human scrap heap of unemployment.

The NASA space program reached a spending peak of $6 billion in 1966, and was sharply cut by Johnson every year after. The technology push in American universities began to stagnate and then decline, with students instead being encouraged to pursue careers in ‘social relations’ or Zen meditation. University education, once the heart of the American dream, was transformed during the 1960s into lowquality mass production, as standards were deliberately lowered.

Investment in transport, electric power installations, water supplies and other necessary infrastructure began a steady deterioration as a portion of the total economy. If you don’t care about producing industrial goods anymore, the New York bankers reasoned, why invest more in roads or bridges to carry them to market?

In order to sell this policy of de facto disinvestment in the economy of the United States during the 1960s, the more far-sighted of the Anglo-American establishment realized they must alter the traditional American commitment to scientifi c and industrial progress.

With the Vietnam War and the unleashing of the drugs and sex ‘fl ower power’ counterculture of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, this is what a part of the Anglo-American liberal establishment set out to do. Under a top-secret CIA research project, code-named MKUltra, British and American scientists began carrying out experiments using psychedelic and other mind-altering drugs. By the mid 1960s, this project resulted in what was known as the Hippie movement, sometimes referred to as the launching of New Age Thinking, or the ‘Age of Aquarius.’ Its heroes were rock and drug advocates such as the Rolling Stones and Jim Morrison, and author and LSD victim Ken Kesey. Mystical irrationality was rapidly replacing faith in scientifi c progress for millions of young Americans.6

Government commitments to scientifi c and industrial development were cut, as the Johnson administration embraced Wall Street’s ‘postindustrial’ policy. A new, young elite, preoccupied with personal pleasure and cynical about national purpose, began to emerge from American college campuses, starting with Harvard, Princeton, and the other so-called elite universities. They had ‘turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,’ as Harvard professor Timothy Leary expressed it.

To transform thinking in America’s corporations and industry, managers were also treated to a new form of training, run by outside psychologists from the National Training Laboratories, kown as ‘Tgroup sessions,’ or ‘sensitivity training.’ The effect of this was to dull the wits and help prepare the population to accept the coming shocks. People were so preoccupied with being more sensitive and more understanding of each other’s defects that they failed to see that the nation was losing its sense of purpose.

In 1968, the same year that Senator Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles by a ‘lone assassin’ as he threatened to win the Democratic convention, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was also assassinated outside his Memphis motel room. Few realized the strategic circumstances around King’s murder. He had come to Memphis to lend his powerful support to a black municipal workers’ strike in a drive to unionize the non-union south. In the new era of ‘runaway plants’ following the 1957 recession, the southern United States was to be simply another ‘cheap labor’ haven for industrial production. This would work only so long as trade unions, which dominated the industrial centers of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York, were kept out of the ‘New south.’

While the big factories fl ed to the cheap non-union-labor areas of the south, or to developing countries, slums, drug addiction and unemployment grew on an epidemic scale in the northern industrial cities. Wall Street’s policy of disinvestments in established U.S. industry began to show real effects. Skilled white blue-collar workers in northern cities were pitted against increasingly desperate unskilled black and hispanic workers for a shrinking number of jobs. Riots were deliberately incited in industrial cities like Newark, Boston, Oakland and Philadelphia by government-backed ‘insurgents’, such as Tom Hayden. The goal of this operation was to break the power of established industrial trade unions in the northern cities by labeling them racist. These domestic insurgents were nurtured by the Ford Foundation’s Grey Areas program, the model for President Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Johnson’s War on Poverty was a government-fi nanced operation, aimed to exploit the economic decay created by the Anglo-American establishment’s policies. The goal was to break resistance to what were about to be new levels of wage-gouging of the American population. The fi nancial establishment was preparing to impose on the United States nineteenth-century British colonial-style looting. And manipulated ‘race war’ was to be their weapon.