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. The Other War George W. Bush is waging a war at home on the American people. Launched with velvet economic and social weapons, this other war is already devastating American workers and communities. Yet Bush's war against ordinary Americans is largely invisible because the media are busy dutifully mesmerizing the public with the official propaganda entertainment on Iraq. It is high time to address this second front of the Bush war regime, since there is still time to stop it. Over the past century, the American government has evolved into a marriage of global companies, the American political class, and the Pentagon, with corporations increasingly the dominant partner. This new Iron Triangle does not share a completely unified set of interests, but the three partners increasingly work together to maximize corporate profits and minimize popular dissent. The corporate state they are working to create is formally based on democratic rhetoric, constitutionalism, and free elections, but it is profoundly anti-democratic in practice. Its aim is to shovel public wealth into the coffers of private elites. Since the corporate state steals from ordinary workers to enrich the wealthy, it is plagued by a chronic crisis of legitimacy that requires the transformation of citizens into couch potatoes. Bush's war at home seeks to tighten the grip of the corporate state by radically accelerating this money transfer from poor to rich, institutionalizing it in a reverse Robin Hood system for decades to come. His efforts in support of the corporate state take place in the wake of the dramatic new threats to its survival. The collapse of the financial markets after the 1990s speculative boom marked the beginning of a sustained crisis in corporate profitability, a long term unraveling of the current economic order that could spell the decline of American global hegemony. The Enron crisis created a follow-on crisis of faith in the American corporate order both at home and abroad. The Bush war plan attacks the double crises of profitability and faith by 1) refocusing the American public on exaggerated foreign threats and 2) creating a "regime change" at home that dismantles the remnants of the New Deal social contract and enshrines a new brutal state capitalism never seen before. In the name of the "free market," the Bush regime is marshalling all resources of the state to bail the corporate order out of the mess that it has created for itself. Bush's war at home has gone through its first battles, preparing the ground for the domestic counterpart to the "battle of Baghdad," a pending legislative campaign for the most radical socio-economic transformation since the Civil War. The first stage of the war—launched with massive tax breaks for the rich, radical deregulation, vast corporate welfare, zero-budgeting for social programs, and new policies to facilitate corporate flight abroad—is familiar from the Reagan years and relatively benign compared to what is to come. But it has created vast new casualties littered all over the home front. The most obvious are the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs; Bush is the first president in modern history to preside over a net loss of jobs, a staggering two million net jobs "disappeared." Not surprisingly, 50 percent of Americans tell pollsters that they fear for their own job in the next year. The casualties on the home front are concentrated among the unemployed and the working poor, who together now constitute close to 40 percent of the population. Bush's giant tax cuts for the wealthy, totaling in the trillions of dollars up to 2010, are the largest hand-out to the rich ever. The combination of tax cuts (including a shrinking of corporate taxes from 50 percent in 1940 to about 14 percent of the entire tax burden now) and vast increases in corporate subsidies and defense outlays, with 50 percent of discretionary expenses going to the Pentagon, have already radically reduced the amount of money for social programs, especially for the most needy. In the House-approved Bush Budget for fiscal year 2004, cuts would eliminate health coverage for 13.6 million kids, end school lunches for 2.4 million low income children, end benefits for 65,000 neglected and abused children, and reduce food stamp benefits to an average 81 cents a meal from 91 cents. To staunch the red ink of exploding fiscal and trade deficits, Bush is drawing blood by massively heaping burdens on states and localities that already are experiencing horrific deficits, forcing new, draconian cuts in education, health care, and social welfare on the state and local levels. The deficits in states from California to New York are so high that emergency services including police, fire, and "homeland security" are being radically cut, on top of the mass firing of teachers, health care and social workers, and the wholesale closing of schools, hospitals, and community shelters and services. Meanwhile, Bush's trade and labor policies have permitted big companies to eliminate defined benefit pensions, abolish corporate health insurance (or dramatically cut benefits and increase co-pays), and eliminate unions themselves. The percentage of private sector unionized workers has fallen to under 9 percent under Bush, drastically weakening workers' ability to defend minimal protections and benefits. Bush's gift of $15 billion to the airlines after 9/11 while offering nothing to their laid off workers is an apt symbol of the Bush war at home. This is all preparatory for the "mother battle" to come. The war plan for "regime change" at home—a total transformation in the nation's political economy beyond anything Reagan or the Gilded Age robber barons envisioned—is outlined in a series of legislative proposals that are buried from public view in the current carefully-nurtured obsession with terrorism and Iraq. Bush's plan exempts wealth from taxation and public accountability, privatizes the entire "commons," removes monopoly restraints on global companies, morphs the social welfare budget into a corporate welfare system, enshrines a permanent warfare state for global profits and domestic control, and builds a permanent government of CEOs and a regime of radical inequality that Jefferson believed would destroy democracy. A leading edge of the domestic "battle for Baghdad" is a series of remarkably radical programs for restructuring the concept and taxation of wealth. Taxation of wealth had always been based on a view that wealth is produced from the commons and thus should be redistributed in some measure to all who contribute to its creation. Bush has reconceptualized wealth as the constitutionally protected fruit of private entrepreneurship, thus negating the basis for taxing or controlling it. In the most radical shift since the introduction of the income tax in 1913, Bush is proposing to end the dividend tax and the estate tax while creating astonishing tax shelters for upper income families. The abolition of the dividend and estate taxes will benefit overwhelmingly the top 1 percent who already control about 40 percent of the nation's wealth and 49 percent of taxable stocks and mutual funds. The various tax shelter proposals allow a family of four to remove $60,000 each year from taxation over the entire lifetime of the owners; that is, once sheltered, no taxes will ever be paid on these funds. Rationalized as a vehicle for increasing savings and investment capital, it is a thinly disguised move to protect wealth from the reach of the state, a parallel to the constitutional shifts made during the Gilded Age that defined corporations as legal private persons and sheltered their resources from public control. Closely related is the proposed legislation for privatizing social security, legislation that will destroy social security as a redistributive social contract across generations and turn it into an entrepreneurial scheme for private investment. This is a part of the privatization of the commons that involves not only dismantling all the social insurance programs of the New Deal but turning public wilderness forests over to the mining and timber companies; water resources over to global conglomerates such as Bechtel; the air waves over to media monopolies such as NewsCorp; educational, health, prison and social welfare services over to corporations such as Microsoft and General Electric; and even military services over to private military companies such as Dyncorp and Military Professional Resources. Privatization of the commons is embedded in the constitutionalism of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, both controlled through Washington. One of the generals leading the domestic Battle of Baghdad is Colin Powell's son, Michael, Bush's chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Powell is fighting for near total deregulation of media monopolies, removing the last restraints on concentration in radio, TV, newspapers, and other key information and entertainment companies. Ten corporations already control 11,000 radio stations, 2,000 television stations, and 1,800 newspapers in the United States. The Powell plan would allow Clear Channel, the largest radio empire in the States with over 1200 stations to go up to well above 1500 stations, a move from already astonishing market power to what media analysts such as Bernard Kalb regard as market domination. The consequences of monopoly in this sector are especially obvious and alarming, as Clear Channel already is allegedly restricting any negative reporting on Iraq and preventing the playing of popular anti-war songs on any of its channels. While the new global monopolies lock in control of global markets, their size and political influence secures their control of government itself. They are developing the capacity to turn the entire federal government into a gigantic corporate patron, at whose ample breast they can suckle indefinitely. Shifting federal resources from social welfare to corporate welfare has been the key aim of both Democratic and Republican administrations since the 1960s, with even right-wing institutions such as the Cato institution agreeing with Ralph Nader that the cronyist annual corporate handouts total at least $300 billion a year. The new corporate state delivers far more expansive forms of corporate welfare than agribusiness subsidies or pharmaceutical give-aways; Bush's plan will shift virtually the entire social arm of the government to corporate control while using foreign policy to secure global corporate profits. Bush's novel contribution here is a new Orwellian empire to increase profitability and repress dissent against the corporate state. Military Keynsianism has always been the secret weapon of radical free marketeers to forestall the demand-side problem in the economy. Faced with a very serious economic crisis in the wake of the global glut and downturn, the slide in wages, and the collapse of consumer confidence, these so-called free marketeers turn to military conquest to supply new demand for corporate products and services. Bush is projecting military spending approaching half a trillion in the next fiscal year; much of this spending, including the war on Iraq, homeland security, and Iraqi reconstruction, are bonanzas for some of Bush and Cheney's closest corporate cronies. One of the first and most lucrative reconstruction contracts for fire prevention and servicing Iraq's oil fields already has gone to Halliburton, Cheney's energy company. This initial multi-million dollar contract is just a down payment on the longer-term opportunity to exploit the endless riches buried in the Iraqi desert. The almost certain early reconstruction contracts that will be given to Bechtel, the world's largest contractor with close Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld links, make clear that intimate cronies will be at the head of the line at the Iraqi trough. Those of us not blinded by the power of the corporate state can see that the Iraq war will do far less than prior wars to solve the overall crisis in the economy and is more likely, through imperial over-reach, to hasten American hegemonic decline at the expense of rivals such as Europe and China. Bush, however, is determined to go forward, blinded by his messianic militarism and his passion to feed and grow the military-industrial complex while in office. Indeed, the Bush plan is for total militarization at home and abroad, since it enriches his cronies in the short term and represses dissent. Controlling populist movements was also a vital aim of the Cold War, which split labor from other popular movements and bound it to corporate power in a monolithic force arrayed against "the evil Empire." The war on terrorism is the successor to the Cold War, a vehicle for building American empire and suppressing dissent in the name of anti-terrorism. Like the Cold War, it shamelessly exploits fear and patriotism and splinters opponents of the corporate state. Homeland security is just one part of the "shock and awe" campaign at home that seeks to divide progressive groups—including labor, environmental groups, and others—who had allied so explosively under the banner of global justice in Seattle. Nonetheless, a pre-emptive peace movement has already struck back, not only against the war in Iraq but against the larger imperial and domestic aspirations of the corporate state. Bush's war at home is meeting unexpected resistance; polls show a majority of Americans believe Bush's domestic agenda is taking the country in the wrong direction. Fighting Bush's unannounced war at home is and must continue to be an integral part of the peace movement's agenda. There will be no peace anywhere until we have created the regime change Americans need and will increasingly demand as their own fortunes decline: our battle must be to replace the Bush corporate state and its Republican or Democratic successors with democracy. Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College, is author of The Wilding of America and the recently published People Before Profit: The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money and Economic Crisis. © 2003 Tikkun Magazine
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