Filmmakers Notebook

Filmmaker’s Notebook # 149
'American System' -Why You Need to Know About It
WEALTH, POWER AND THE CRISIS OF THE LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM
"Why Wealth Wants It Dead"...Wealth, Power and the Crisis of Laissez Faire Capitalism by Donald Gibson: 'a snowshoefilms review'

Donald Gibson’s new book needs a punchier title. I told him so in 2009.  I looked forward to reading it, but only got to it recently.[i]  I’d call the book,  “The American System: Why Wealth Wants It Dead” or something like that. After all, the protagonist standing up to wealth, power and laissez faire capitalism is “the American System,” and those who understand and fight for it.[ii]   

University of Pittsburgh sociologist Gibson is the author of four other books, including Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency; and Environmentalism: Ideology and Power. The author’s close look at the forces that killed Kennedy[iii] paid off in this fleshing out the American System. 

The ‘American System’ was born in reaction to the ‘British System’, an ideology crafted over the 1700s by, among others, the utilitarians,[iv] John Locke, Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin (social Darwinism: survival of the fittest) and Adam Smith.  Of Smith, whose Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, Gibson writes:   “Smith argued for reliance on the individual seeking private gain in a market system as little influenced by government as possible. The self-seeking individual ends up serving the greater good.” 

Government’s role, from this perspective, is to keep those in power in power. The British colonial system could hardly allow any other fledgling centers of power (independent manufacturing, protective tariffs, regulation in the public interest, etc.) to exist. Up against this British System were the Americans; the lead author of the new system, Gibson argues, was Alexander Hamilton.  The ideas were essentially developed during and shortly after the revolution.  Gibson: “The debate revolved around several basic issues: the role of government in society and economy, the desirability of giving direction to economic affairs, and the wisdom of promoting domestic manufacturing.” 

The idea of government for the ‘general welfare’ was set in motion by Hamilton through the Federalist Papers, his Report on Manufactures, and his role as George Washington’s Treasury Secretary.  The term ‘American System’ was introduced in 1824 by  Kentucky Senator Henry Clay to In 1824 to describe his three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements and a national bank.”  This system of government predominated, Gibson writes, until it broke down during the laissez faire free-for-all of the Civil War. National recovery only came when the American System was revived under FDR and the New Deal. After a period of retrenchment (Truman, Eisenhower[v]), it was revived again during the three short years of the Kennedy presidency.  LBJ and Nixon both had a sense of the American System with regard to domestic policy but conceded foreign policy control to the oligarchs.  The worst thing Nixon did, Gibson jokes, was to select Ford as his vice president, leaving the White House to the passive Ford (and Nelson Rockefeller). Capitulation continued under Carter (abandon the New Deal), was rampant under Reagan (mergers and acquisitions)[vi]… on through Bush (continued privatization and union busting), Clinton (‘Roosevelt in reverse’) and G.W. Bush….   Gibson’s re-introduction of the idea of the American System better enables one to evaluate historical periods, and individuals.[vii] It would be especially useful for Tea Party ‘populists’ to understand. 

To the wealthy whose hegemony they challenged, FDR and JFK were class traitors, not just pedigree but the notion that private interests should be paramount over public interests. FDR[viii] imposed limits on their self-seeking and enabled a national government to shape its own economic future. To the wealthy, the ‘absentee owners’ as sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) labeled them, virtually everything those two presidents did was perceived as threats to their continued hegemony. 

The intellectual champions of the American System, including Friedrich List, Mathew and Henry Carey “have now been airbrushed out of the history of economic thought,” Gibson writes.   

This brings up some questions: why is an understanding of the American System not part of our awareness of our own short history? It could be that lacking it we fail to appreciate departures from the public interest; in a sense we would be grounded in our own best history.  In learning the story, we would better appreciate the fragility of the ‘American System’ -- which is always being undermined by Wealth and its minions, while most of us are asleep.[ix]  Recognition of the American System would unnecessarily induce a critique of the laissez faire system and those who profit from it. Cognizance of the ‘American System’ would dispel some of the obfuscations of the left-right metaphor.  Synonymous with the American System is the notion of the public commons.   Without it, the public is too easily convinced – historically by agencies such as the Chamber of Commerce – to sell off its public assets: a kind of IMF conditionalities self-imposed through the guiding hand of paid propagandists such as the Chamber and its allies.[x] 

Gibson quotes Veblen, 1919: “…the business interests of these absentee owners no longer coincide in any possible degree with the material interests of the underlying population…”[xi] Gibson documents the co-mingling of the British Round Table/Cecil Rhodes group and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded 1921, congealing the new oligarchy with its closely related groups, the Trilaterals and the Bilderbergs etc. 

 “The American System, and similar approaches in other nations, provide an alternative to the two major ideological doctrines of the twentieth century, Soviet-influenced Marxism and British school laissez faire,” Gibson says. “One gave something like direct and total power over economic processes to a centralized state apparatus. The other stipulated that economic processes are best left to private interests seeking to maximize their own self-interests.” 

What is the “crisis” of laissez faire capitalism?  Essentially that the acquisitionalist capitalist system won’t change, can’t change.  Gibson says the upper class “is unlikely to provide any impetus for change,” they probably own much more of the wealth now than they did 35 years ago…are thoroughly insulated from criticism…[and] appear to be incapable of making even minor changes that might be in their long term interests…” (p. 244).  “That means,” Gibson says, “that all hopes for useful change are primarily with the general citizenry and our elected chief executive.” 

So, what about the current chief executive?  How does Barak Obama stack up using the New Deal as a standard or base line? Basically, Gibson resorts to psychological analysis: “It appears that Obama’s personal life has involved the continuous need to adapt, conform, conciliate, and blend in” and thus he will cave on the crucial questions.  Gibson makes a good case, but resorts to this method because the Obama phenomenon is a mystery unless one delves into the continuity of criminality initiated by the neocons under George W. Bush. 

In 2009, we asked Gibson about the official 9/11 story.  He said he tended to accept it (19 Arab hijackers), but that some of his students had tried to get him to look at their conspiracy stuff.  Too bad Gibson didn’t do it.  For a proper appreciation of the oligarchs, it would seem crucial to understand the “inside job” nature of 9/11; but Gibson lets the neocons off easily, dismissing them as “essentially just an extension of the Establishment’s long-standing ideas about property, markets, and government and are derived from the views set forth centuries ago by Locke and Smith.”  

Gibson faults Canadian Professor Shadia Drury’s work on University of Chicago Leo Strauss (neocon intellectual father and guru) for her failure to understand the significance of the New Deal that Leo (Noble Lie) Strauss (and students) was purportedly reacting to. 

In so easily dismissing the neocons as more of the same, Gibson ignores the primary integument that holds the neocons together, loyalty to Israel and/or Zionism.  Stephen J. Sniegoski, in his  book, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, 2008, made this clear. To make sense of the war on Iraq, Gibson suggests several reasons for the war: get rid of a troublesome regime; prevent regional rivals making deals with Iraq, takeover of Iraq’s oil, but foremost: the invasion of Iraq was a bold action in furtherance of ‘free trade’ imperialism.” (p. 186)  None of the reasons Gibson advances references Israel’s long term plans which are outlined in the 1980s World Zionist Federation paper, A Strategy for Israel in the ‘80s.  The neocons in the U.S.produced a parallel strategy for the US called “Clean Break” (Feith, Perle et alia) that called for the destruction of the same seven countries near Israel. 

Gibson, cognizant that the CFR has long been a power center opposed to the American System, should be aware of the role of neocon Philip Zelikow as author of the 1998 CFR article (Foreign Affairs):  “Catastrophic Terrorism: Imagining the Transformative Event.” And less than two years later, the neocon Project for a New American Century picked up on the CFR-Zelikow language, saying that the desired transformation “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor…”[xii] Zelikow’s subsequent infamous role was to head the 9/11 commission to cover up the crimes that the neocons themselves were especially complicit in. 

Thanks to Gibson, we can recall Veblen’s words: “…the interests of these absentee owners no longer coincide in any possible degree with the material interests of the underlying population.”   

I said above, “the Obama phenomenon is a mystery unless one delves into the criminality initiated by the neocons under George W. Bush.” The criminality was egregious, including the false-flag 9/11 operation used to kick off war on the Islamic/Persian world and all the subsequent police state rationale for fighting the ersatz ‘war on terror.[xiii]  Obama must go along with the official story; he can’t escape it; he does what he’s told; who exactly tells him, that’s the question.  

On economic matters, Gibson says Obama “…takes his basic perspective…from Robert Rubin, and Rubin’s view is that globalization is inevitable and no tariff or other form of trade regulation is desirable or even possible…That Obama would accept Rubin’s views as authoritative is disturbing. Laissez faire means that if the so-called markets dictate that the United States be reduced to rubble, so be it.” 

The long and the short of it is, Gibson’s book does a great service in helping revive the American System.   

Yoryevrah, Dec. 2013