A People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn

  The United States continued to supply lethal arms to some of the most vicious regimes in the world. Indonesia had a record of mass murder, having killed perhaps 200,000 out of a population of 700,000 in its invasion and occupation of East Timor. Yet the Clinton administration approved the sale of F-16 fighter planes and other assault equipment to Indonesia. The Boston Globe wrote (July 11, 1994):

  The arguments presented by senators solicitous of Suharto's regime—and of defense contractors, oil companies and mining concerns doing business with Jakarta—made Americans seem a people willing to overlook genocide for the sake of commerce.

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  In 1996 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor. Speaking at a church in Brooklyn shortly before he won the prize, Ramos-Horta said:

  In the summer of 1977,1 was here in New York when I received a message telling me that one of my sisters, Maria, 21 years old, had been killed in an aircraft bombing. The aircraft, named Bronco, was supplied by the United States.... Within months, another report about a brother, Guy, 17 years old, killed along with many other people in his village by Bell helicopters, supplied by the United States. Same year, another brother, Numi, captured and executed with an [American-made] M-16. ...

  Similarly, American-made Sikorski helicopters were used by Turkey to destroy the villages of rebellious Kurds, in what writer John Tirman {Spoils of War: The Human Cost of the Arms Trade) called "a campaign of terror against the Kurdish people." By early 1997 the United States was selling more arms abroad than all other nations combined. Lawrence Korb, a Department of Defense official under Reagan but later a critic of arms sales, wrote: "It has become a money game: an absurd spiral in which we export arms only to have to develop more sophisticated ones to counter those spread out all over the world."

  Human rights clearly came second to business profit in U.S. foreign policy. When the international group Human Rights Watch issued its 1996 annual report, the New York Times (December 5, 1996) summarized its findings:

  The organization strongly criticized many powerful nations, particularly the United States, accusing them of failing to press governments in China, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia to improve human rights for fear of losing access to lucrative markets.

  A similar concern for profit over human rights was evident in policy toward the new Russia that emerged from the exploded Soviet Union. Anxious to steer Russia toward capitalism, and in the process to open it up as a market for American goods, the U.S. government simply overlooked the bullying policies of Russian president Boris Yeltsin. The Clinton administration firmly supported Yeltsin, even after Russia initiated a brutal invasion and bombardment of the outlying region of Chechnya, which wanted independence.

  The historic use of economic aid to gain political influence was underlined when in November 1993, an Associated Press dispatch

  A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

  reported the phasing out of economic aid to thirty-five countries, most of them very poor. The administrator for the Agency for International Development, J. Brian Atwood, explained: "We no longer need an A.I.D. program to purchase influence."

  The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both dominated by the United States, adopted a hard-nosed banker's approach to debt-ridden Third World countries. They insisted that these poor nations allocate a good part of their meager resources to repaying loans to the rich countries, at the cost of cutting social services to their already desperate populations.

  Foreign economic policy was presumably based on "free trade" agreements, most notably those signed with Canada and Mexico. Democrats and Republicans, enthusiastically supported by corporate interests, joined to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Clinton signed. Labor unions opposed it, because it meant businesses would be free to move across borders to find workers who would work at lower wages, under poor conditions. The claim of "free trade" was hardly to be believed, since U.S. policy was to interfere with trade when it served certain political or economic ends (although the phrase always used was "national interest"). Thus, the United States went to lengths to prevent tomato growers in Mexico from entering the U.S. market and put pressure on Thailand to open its markets to American tobacco companies, even while at home mounting public protest led to restrictions on the sale of tobacco.

  In an even more flagrant violation of the principle of free trade, the United States would not allow shipments of food or medicine to Iraq or to Cuba, the result being the deaths of tens of thousands of children. In 1996, on the television program 60 Minutes, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Alhright was asked about the report that "a half million children have died as a result of sanctions against Iraq.... That is more children than died in Hiroshima.... Is the price worth it?" Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."

  The United States, with 5 percent of the earth's population, consumed 30 percent of what was produced worldwide. But only a tiny portion of the American population benefited; this richest 1 percent of the population saw its wealth increase enormously starting in the late 1970s. As a result of changes in the tax structure, by 1995 that richest 1 percent had gained over a trillion dollars and now owned over 40 percent of the nation's wealth.

  According to the business magazine Forbes, the 400 richest families

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  owned $92 billion in 1982. Thirteen years later, this had jumped to $480 billion. The Dow Jones average of stock prices had gone up 400 percent between 1980 and 1995, while the average wage of workers had declined in purchasing power by 15 percent.

  It was therefore possible to say that the U.S. economy was "healthy"—but only if you considered the richest part of the population. Meanwhile, 40 million people were without health insurance, and infants died of sickness and malnutrition at a rate higher than that of any other industrialized country. For people of color, the statistics were worse: Infants died at twice the rate of white children, and the life expectancy of a black man in Harlem, according to a United Nations report, was 46 years, less than that in Cambodia or the Sudan.

  The United States (forgetting, or choosing to forget, the disastrous consequence of such a policy in the twenties) was consigning its people to the mercy of the "free market." The "market" did not care about the environment or the arts. And it left many Americans without jobs, or health care, without a decent education for their children, or adequate housing. Under Reagan, the government had reduced the number of housing units getting subsidies from 400,000 to 40,000; in the Clinton administration the program ended altogether.

  Despite Clinton's 1997 Inaugural Day promise of a "new government," there was no bold program to take care of these needs. Such a program would require huge expenditures of money. There were two ways of raising this money, but the Clinton administration (like its predecessors) was not inclined to turn to them, given the powerful influence of corporate wealth.

  One of those sources was the wealth of the superrich. Taxing very high incomes at post-World War II levels—that is, at 70-90 percent instead of at 37 percent—could make available several hundred billion dollars a year. In addition, a "wealth tax"—something not yet done as national policy, but perfectly feasible—could retrieve the trillion dollars gained by the superrich over the years in tax breaks.

  The other major source of funds was the military budget. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Randall Forsberg, an expert on military expenditures, had suggested, "A military budget of $60 billion, to be achieved over a number of years, would support a demilitarized U.S. foreign policy, appropriate to the needs and opportunities of the post-Cold War world."

  Instead, in 1996, the United States was spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined—four times as much as Russia, eight times as much as China, torty ti
mes as much as North

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  Korea, eighty times as much as Iraq. It was a bizarre waste of the nation's wealth.

  A radical reduction of the military budget would require a renunciation of war, a refusal to use military solutions for international disputes. It would speak to the fundamental human desire (overwhelmed too often by barrages of superpatriotic slogans) to live at peace with others.

  The public appeal for such a dramatic policy change would be based in a simple but powerful moral argument: that given the nature of modern warfare, the victims, by a ratio of 10:1, have been civilians. To put it another way, war in our time is always a war against children. And if the children of other countries are to be granted an equal right to life with our own children, then we must use our extraordinary human ingenuity to find nonmilitary solutions for world problems.

  With the four or five hundred billion dollars gained by progressive taxation and demilitarization, there would be funds available to pay for health care for everyone, to guarantee jobs to anyone willing and able to work. Instead of giving out contracts for jet bombers and nuclear submarines, contracts could be offered to nonprofit corporations to hire people to build homes, construct public transport systems, clean up the rivers and lakes, turn our cities into decent places to live. (One of Marge Piercy's poems ends with: "The pitcher cries for water to carry/And a person for work that is real.")

  The alternative to such a bold program was to continue as before, allowing the cities to fester, forcing rural people to face debt and foreclosures, offering no useful work for the young, creating a larger and larger marginal population of desperate people. Many of these people would turn to drugs and crime, some of them to a religious fanaticism ending in violence against others or themselves (in 1996, one such group committed mass suicide), some to a hysterical hatred of government (as in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing at least 168 people). The response of the authorities to such signs of desperation, anger, alienation has been, historically, quite predictable: Build more jails, lock up more people, execute more prisoners. And continue with the same policies that produced the desperation.

  But another scenario remained possible, one that envisioned a time, somewhere around the beginning of the new millennium, when citizens would organize to demand what the Declaration of Independence promised: a government that protected the equal right of everyone to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This meant economic arrangements that distributed the national wealth rationally and humanely.

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  This meant a culture where the young no longer were taught to strive for "success" as a mask for greed.

  By the mid-nineties, the elements for such a scenario were there. Public opinion surveys showed the public much more inclined than either major party to curtail the military budget, tax the rich, clean up the environment, have universal health care, end poverty. And in the nineties there were thousands of groups in cities and towns all over the country already working for such goals. But they had not yet united into a national movement.

  Still, there were signs of such a possibility. In 1995 a million black men gathered in the nation's capital to express their solidarity around common frustrations. The following year half a million adults and children of all colors arrived in Washington to "Stand for Children." The country was becoming more diverse—more Latino people, more Asians, more interracial marriages. There was at least a chance for a true "Rainbow Coalition," one that would fulfill the promise proclaimed by black leader Jesse Jackson. In the late eighties, speaking for the poor and dispossessed of all colors, Jackson gave the nation a brief, rare surge of political excitement.

  The culture had been affected by the movements of the sixties in a way that could not be obliterated. There was a distinctly new consciousness—manifested in the cinema, on television, in the world of music— an awareness that women deserved equal rights, that the sexual preferences of men and women were their own affair, that the growing gap between rich and poor gave the lie to the word "democracy."

  The labor movement was showing signs of a new energy, moving to organize white-collar workers, farm workers, immigrant workers, and to tap the idealism of young people by inviting them to help in this organizing. Employees were "blowing the whistle" on corporate crimes.

  Religious leaders, who had been quiet since their involvement in the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, began to speak out on economic inequality. In the summer of 1996, the New York Times reported:

  More than at any other time in decades, religious leaders are making common cause with trade unions, lending their moral authority to denounce sweatshops, back a higher minimum wage and help organize janitors and poultry workers. The clergy has not lined up with labor to such an extent since the heyday of Cesar Chavez, the charismatic farm workers' leader, in the 1970's and perhaps the Depression. . ..

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  There was at least the beginning of a rebellion against the domination of the mass media by corporate wealth (financial mergers had created supermonopolies in television, the press, publishing). In 1994, a television station in San Francisco initially refused to air Deadly Deception, an Academy Award-winning documentary that exposed the General Electric Corporation's involvement in the nuclear weapons industry. Activists projected the entire film on the side of the television station's building and invited the community to watch. The station yielded, and agreed to show the film.

  Disillusionment with both Democratic and Republican Parties led in the mid-nineties to a number of attempts to create independent political movements. In Texas, there was a founding convention of the Alliance for Democracy, which hoped to initiate a new anticorpome populist movement in the country. In the Midwest, the New Party sprang up, to give voters an alternative to conservative candidates. Rank-and-filc trade unionists from across the nation met in 1996 to set up a Labor Party.

  Would these elements come together in the next century, the next millennium, to fulfill their promise? No one could predict. All one could do was to act on the possibility, knowing that inaction would make any prediction a gloomy one.

  If democracy was to be given any meaning, if it was to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come—if history was any guide—from the top. It would come through citizens' movements, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

  Sometime in 1992, the Republican Party held a dinner to raise funds, for which individuals and corporations paid up to $400,000 to attend. (The fee for Democratic dinners was slightly less.) A White House spokesman told questioning reporters: "It's buying access to the system, yes." When asked about people who didn't have so much money, he replied: "They have to demand access in other ways."

  That may have been a clue to Americans wanting real change. They would have to demand access in their own way.

  24 THE COMING REVOLT OF THE GUARDS

  The title of this chapter is not a prediction, but a hope, which I will soon explain.

  As for the subtitle of this book, it is not quite accurate; a "people's history" promises more than any one person can fulfill, and it is the most difficult kind of history to recapture. I call it that anyway because, with all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance.

  That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction—so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements—that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.

  All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh
oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

  The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture, beyond politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every field,

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  thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability, obliterating our own selves. But from time to time, Americans reject that idea and rebel.

  These rebellions, so far, have been contained. The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased.

  There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media—none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.