And you from the rural states
who object to the Wall Street bailouts
and flood my inbox with complaints
about private banks under cover
of the so-called Federal Reserve
being given the right to create money
which they then lend to the government
at interest,
I recall a long friendly conversation
about restoring American values
with people much like you
at a Birch Society table surrounded
by exhibits of pickled tomatoes
and blossoms made from old nylons and copper wire
at the Nevada County Fair
where each year on Constitution Day
to the music of the Ophir Prison Marching Kazoo Band
they reenact with authentic uniforms
and noisy puffs of cannon smoke
Civil War battles.
Your placards call for "LIMITED GOVERNMENT"
which could not be more timely --
there is a bill in Congress
to censor the Internet
that will probably pass.
Here is a common agenda
for freedom-loving Americans --
let us all preserve the First Amendment
so you can keep the Second --
or "TWO PARTIES SAME RESULT",
exactly my frustration
when it comes to our twin afflictions
of Wall Street dominance and Asian wars,
so like you I invoke
Madison in the Federalist Papers
against the accumulation of all power
in the same hands
I have just read The Ruling Class
carefully designed to be your handbook
by Angelo Codevilla
guest of the Mother Lode Tea Party
and late of the Hoover Institution,
the brains trust for the millionaires
who meet each summer in the Bohemian Grove.
It is published by The American Spectator
published by billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife.
It attacks The Ruling Class
blaming them as do you and I
for the collusion of both parties
in financing the bailout of Goldman Sachs,
and the apparently endless series of wars
in which our Ruling Class has embroiled America,
and it defends as would you and I
the right of families to home schooling
and of localities to control their schools,
but whereas for me the rulers
are those top-level millionaires
who have paid for both political parties
while seeing their own incomes
rise almost fivefold in thirty years,
for Codevilla the Ruling Class
consists not of the wealthy
but of those bureaucrats
who would tax them
and indeed of all those with
as David Frum puts it
more education than money,
who oppress the Country Class --
Americans like yourselves
who think it is just
to spend the money they earn
to satisfy their private desires
It seems that I
because I believe in evolution
am part of the Ruling Class
along with trade unions
and those who believe in global warming
while the Country Class
includes not just you
but corporations and banks
forced by politicians to make loans for houses
and even Fox News
(owned by the mogul Rupert Murdoch
whose personal wealth in 2007
was estimated at over $340 million).
Attributing to progressives
a ridiculous and hateful ideology
(such people cannot believe
that a Christian might be
their intellectual and moral equal)
Codevilla seeks to deflect your anger
on to people like me
which is perhaps what we should expect
from a fellow of the Hoover Institution
and the Claremont Institute
funded by the usual
millionaires’ foundations
like that of Sarah Scaife.
You are out in the streets
as members of what are billed
as spontaneous tea parties
but are you aware
that an Internet domain name
ChicagoTeaParty.com
was registered in August 2008
long before the convening
of any of your grass-roots events?
As for your being grass roots,
do you know that you were organized
under umbrellas called "Samspheres"
by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation
which meticulously hid
its links to the ultra-rich
Koch brothers
worth a combined $32 billion
as owners of the largest
private oil company in America
with good reason
to dislike government scrutiny?
For which Keith Olbermann on MSNBC
has called you an Astroturf party,
the way Glenn Beck on Fox News
has sneered at America’s progressives
both ignoring the real pain
we all share at our loss of freedom
and our politics gone awry.
Why does the Tea Party invite
a speaker like Ken Timmerman
to attack Big Government
at the same time he advocates
a US blockade of Iran?
Or John Yoo who denounces
the supersized executive
while still defending his memos
on enhanced interrogation
(or what most would call torture)
which even the Bush Administration
in the end found incorrect
or highly questionable?
All this makes you the heirs
of the Moral Majority
a movement designed by six men
(one of whom was launched
with money from Sun Myung Moon)
and funded by the Coors family
which raised a fuss about abortion
in order to split the democratic vote
elect Reagan
and thus maintain the global US system
of 761 military bases
at the cost of the budget deficit
you are now so worried about.
You want what all of us should want
a more limited government.
Will you then help force Congress
to do what the law requires -- namely
review the state of emergency
we have had since 9/11
which has restricted habeas corpus,
suspended the Posse Comitatus Acts,
introduced permanent military surveillance,
and provided for warrantless detention?
From Barney Frank, on the left,
to Ron Paul, on the right
there is a growing belief
that unrestrained military spending
is a danger to the budget.
In a land of barren ridges
while I was writing this
a small detachment of US troops
took fire from all four directions
on their way back from a village
whose radioed request for help
in digging a canal
turned out to have been only
a set-up for an ambush
in a land where we are not welcome,
while General Petraeus has said
tacitly correcting his Commander-in-Chief,
This is the kind of fight we're in
for the rest of our lives
and probably our kids' lives.
So while it is right to declare
that America is in crisis
and in need of a people’s politics
let us not be guided
by those who are profiting from
our loss of freedoms
and wars our country cannot afford.
Above all as we turn
to America’s most urgent priority
the defense of the constitution
let us be certain
as Confucius advised millennia ago
to call things
by their right names.
..........................................................
Peter Dale Scott's latest book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus, appeared in 2009 from McGill-Queen's University Press. It can be ordered from Amazon.com. His other chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994), published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. He is married to Ronna Kabatznick; and he has three children, Cassie, Mika, and John, by a previous marriage to Maylie Marshall.
His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (from JFKLancer, 1995), and Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003)
An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rick Ames and Yasha Levine, “Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC's Rick Santelli Sucking Koch, The Exiled, February 27, 2009,
http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/
Rick Ames and Yasha Levine, “Tea Party Flacks Are Drill, Baby, Drill Messengers Too,” Alternet, June 11, 2010,http://www.alternet.org/world/147124/tea_party_flacks_are_drill,_baby,_drill_messengers_too/
Jim Bovard, “Tea Party: Pro-Torture, Pro-War, Pro-Freedom?” Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 2010
Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do about It, An American Spectator Book (New York: Beaufort Books, 2010)
David Frum, “How the Elites Became Tea Party Enemy #1,” FrumForum, September 19, 2010,
http://www.frumforum.com/how-the-elites-became-tea-party-enemy-1
Dan Gillmor, “Hollywood wants to censor the Internet, and Congress is on board,” Salon, September 28, 2010,http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/09/28/worldwide_authority_for_american_copyright_cops
Joshua Green, “Cut the Military Budget,” Atlantic, June 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/cut-the-military-budget/58282/
Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations,” New Yorker, August 30, 2010
Kate Phillips, “The Sam Adams Project,” New York Times Caucus Blog,
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/the-sam-adams-project/
Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010)
Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008)
Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010)
