Wages of Rebellion (11 page)

The US Army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of US soldiers and ten terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre in 1968. He ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing US soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. And for this act of moral courage, Thompson was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It is always defined by the state as treason—the Army attempted to cover up the massacre and threatened to court-martial Thompson. Moral courage is the courage to act and to speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg had it. Martin Luther King Jr. had it. What those in authority once said about them, they say today about Snowden.

We who have been fighting against mass state surveillance for years have made no headway by appealing to the traditional centers of power. It was only after Snowden methodically leaked documents disclosing the crimes committed by the state that genuine public debate began. Elected officials, for the first time, promised reform. None of this would have happened—none of it—without Snowden.

His critics argue that he could have reformed the system from the inside. He could have gone to his superiors or Congress or the courts.
But Snowden had numerous examples—including the persecution of the NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake, who originally tried to go through so-called proper channels—to remind him that working within the system is fatal. Drake attempted to alert Congress and his superiors about waste, mismanagement, and possible constitutional violations at the NSA but was repeatedly rebuffed. He eventually provided information—none of it classified—to a reporter at
the Baltimore Sun
who was investigating a bungled $1.2 billion surveillance program called “Trailblazer.” Drake was charged by the government under the Espionage Act and faced up to thirty-five years’ imprisonment. When the government’s case collapsed in court, Drake was able to plead to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer.
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Snowden had watched as senior officials, including Obama, lied to the public about internal surveillance. He knew that the president was willfully dishonest when he assured Americans that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret and hears only from the government, is “transparent.” He knew that the president’s statement that Congress was “overseeing the entire program” was false. He knew that everything Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the press, the Congress, and the public about the surveillance of Americans was a lie.

Snowden had access to the full roster of everyone working at the NSA. He could have made public the entire intelligence community and undercover assets worldwide. He could have exposed the locations of every clandestine station and their missions. He could have shut down the surveillance system, as he has said, “in an afternoon.”
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But this was never his intention. He wanted only to halt the wholesale surveillance that was being carried out, until he documented it, without our consent or knowledge.

He knew that the information he possessed could be made available to the public only through a few journalists whose integrity he could trust. There is no free press without the ability of reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or
judicial oversight to address abuses of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion.

Snowden had no choice, just as we now have no choice. He defied the formal institutions of government because they do not work. And all who seek reform must follow his example. Appealing to the judicial, legislative, or executive branches of government in the hope of reform is as realistic as accepting the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea-Party in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland:

T
he public’s inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic corporate elite makes it difficult to organize effective resistance. Compliant politicians, entertainers, and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture and news media hold up the elites as leaders to emulate. We are repeatedly assured that through diligence and hard work we can join them. We are taught to equate wealth with success. This narrative keeps us from seeing the truth.

“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

The exchange, although it never took place, does sum up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich
are
different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant and expendable workers, hangers-on, servants, and sycophants. Wealth, as Fitzgerald illustrated in his 1925 novel
The Great Gatsby
—a tome on the depravity of the rich in the giddy world of speculation that would lead to the Depression—as well as his short story “The Rich Boy,” which appeared a year later, breeds a class of people for
whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, business partners, clients, associates, shareholders, investors, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. And that, in the eyes of the elite, is what we are.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” Fitzgerald writes in “The Rich Boy.” “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
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Aristotle, who saw extreme inequality as the fundamental cause of revolution, argues in
Politics
that the rise of an oligarchic state leads to one of two scenarios. The impoverished underclass can revolt and overthrow the oligarchs to rectify the imbalance of wealth and power, or it can submit to the tyranny of oligarchic rule.
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The public face of the oligarchic class is carefully crafted by publicists and a compliant media. It bears little resemblance to the private face. This is hard for those who have not been admitted into the intimate circles of the elite to grasp. I, like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the embrace of the upper crust as a boy. I was sent to an exclusive New England boarding school at the age of ten as a scholarship student. I had classmates whose fathers—fathers they rarely saw otherwise—arrived at the school in their limousines accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so the press could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of dutiful dads. I spent time in the mansions of the ultra-rich and powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies, and servants. When the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble, there are always lawyers,
publicists, and political personages to protect them—George W. Bush’s life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. The rich have a disdain for the poor—despite carefully publicized acts of philanthropy—and a haughty dislike of the middle class.

The lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances to be endured, sometimes placated, and always controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness, and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. I returned on summer breaks to the small town in Maine where my grandparents and relatives lived. They had more innate intelligence than most of my prep school classmates. I knew from a young age who my enemies were.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald writes of the wealthy couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
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“Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle writes in
Politics
. “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.”
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Oligarchs, as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation—subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case, neoliberalism and globalization—that conveniently justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
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The blanket dissemination of the ideology of neoliberalism through the media and the purging, especially in academia, of critical voices have
permitted our oligarchs to orchestrate the industrial world’s largest income inequality gap. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in a May 2011 article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” in
Vanity Fair
, warned of the damage caused by the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite. “In our democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income,” he writes.

For every $1 that the wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980, they had an additional $3 in yearly income in 2008, David Cay Johnston explains in his article “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes.”
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In the same period, the bottom 90 percent, Johnston says, added only one cent. Nearly half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income.
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The real value of the minimum wage has fallen by $3.44 since 1968.
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Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice for the common good. They never have. They never will. And now that they have full control of the economy and the legal system, as well as the legislative and executive branches of government, along with our media outlets, they use power as a blunt instrument for personal enrichment and domination.

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are,” Wendell Berry writes.

The ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the Romans, the Mayans, the Hapsburgs, even the inhabitants of Easter Island, all died because they were unable to control the appetites of their elites. The elites were able to exploit ecosystems and human beings until these civilizations self-destructed. The quest by a bankrupt elite in a civilization’s final days to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. As there is less and less to exploit, this quest leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, infrastructure collapse, and, finally, death.

It is the self-deluded on Wall Street and among the political elite—those who entertain and inform us and those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation—who are foolishly held up as exemplars of intelligence, success, and progress. This is the mark of a civilization that has gone insane. The National Alliance on Mental Illness calculates that “one in four adults—approximately 6.5 million Americans—experience mental illness in a given year,” which seems a reasonable reaction to the future being constructed for us by our corporate masters.
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