Has America Become a Plutocracy? | Opinion

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
On 11/21/18 at 9:54 AM

President Trump’s easy forgiveness of the Saudi plutocrats who almost certainly murdered and dismembered journalist Jamal Khashoggi is consistent with this president’s comfortable bonhomie with military and authoritarian tyrants in Russia, China and North Korea. His solace for dictators contrasts starkly with his uneasy bickering with our traditional democratic allies in Europe, Canada and Australia. But President Trump is no historical anomaly. He is rather the radical acceleration of a devolution towards plutocracy that has been diminishing America’s democracy and ideals for the last half century.

These trends have transformed our nation into a warfare state with vast gaps between rich and poor. America has spent $6 trillion on war since 9/11. It can credibly be argued that America is now, officially, a plutocracy.

My grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, warned that America could not be both an imperial nation abroad and a constitutional democracy at home. That unstable configuration, he argued, would diminish the middle class, yield large chasms between rich and poor and erode our constitutional and civil rights.

Jefferson and Adams similarly argued that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy at home and cautioned against “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” In 1960, days before JFK took his oath, outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower warned America about losing the American struggle to preserve democracy against the growing power of “the Military Industrial Complex.”

Seven great traumas have since pushed us down the path toward plutocracy, and decisively ended America’s claim to be an exemplary experiment with democracy. Those traumas have helped transform our country into an imperium abroad and a national security state at home.

Those traumas include the assassinations of JFK and RFK who were both arcing the country toward peace, and Martin Luther King Jr. who, at the time of his murder in Memphis, was forcefully linking the Vietnam war with the poverty, racism, violence and injustice back home.

The Vietnam War, which became an American War in 1965, was the fourth trauma that took us away from our aspiration to be the world’s exemplary democracy.

The bizarre election of George W. Bush by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote and his handling of the 9/11 attack further pushed us down the path of plutocracy. Imagine for a moment that the Florida vote was counted and Albert Gore became president. We would not have invaded Iraq—a policy choice that eventually led to the war in Syria and the refugee crisis that is already breaking up the EU and will threaten democracy and stability in Europe for at least a generation.

Gore would have handled 9/11 by attacking its root cause—our deadly addiction to oil. Instead of squandering $6 trillion on wars, he would have spent that money transitioning America to a clean energy economy. There would have been $5 trillion left to build America the world’s greatest schools, hospitals, health care for all Americans, roads and infrastructure, internet and more.

Trump’s bonhomie with dictators contrasts starkly with his bickering with our democratic allies. Getty Images

We have paid for these wars by hollowing out the middle class and creating the seething American economic refugees who elected Donald Trump.

Trump himself is the latest trauma and his presidency has not just discredited our nation, but the entire American experiment in self government.

In 1784, America was the first democracy in modern history. By 1865, there were six—all modeled on ours. By 2000, 63 percent of the world’s nations were governed by democracies, according to The Economist and it was the preferred system for most of the world’s people. The United States was still the prevailing template. In that sense, we had achieved our historical aspiration to be the planet’s exemplary nation.

But with Trump as president, can we still make that claim? He is, by every measure, the most loathed, feared and disdained leader alive. Why would any nation opt for a system that could yield the rise to ultimate power of a belligerent and incurious man who doesn’t read books but instead gains office by his capacity to assemble money and wield the demagogic alchemies of racism, fear mongering and tribalism? The Economist reports a growing disillusionment with democracy worldwide; only 19 true democracies remain, a number that has fallen by six since 2006.

I’m in China at the moment meeting with Chinese leaders on environmental issues. During my last visit in 2014, even the top leadership here spoke of a slow transition to more democracy. Now that vanity is gone. A Chinese minister told me that the Chinese system produces leaders at every level who tend to be the smartest most capable technocrats in the nation. “Why would we adopt a system that produces clowns and buffoons or dangerous leaders?” he asked. In 2014, Mao, China’s former absolute dictator was in disrepute. Now, his representations and statues and photos can be seen everywhere.

A Chinese environmental activist—once a strong democrat—explained to me the change in attitude. “China needs a strong leader who will put Chinese first. Mao is our role model,” he said.

Everything is connected and it seems that the $6 trillion did not buy us more security. Just more opportunities for conflict which is of course is what the plutocrats want. If we continue along this path, there is plenty yet to come.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a longtime environmental advocate and author of several best selling books, including his latest: American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family. Follow him on Twitter @RobertKennedyJr. Like him on Facebook.

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John M Hunt Jr., 52, of Tiverton, RI, passed away suddenly in October. John was born in Jacksonville, FL, on November 13, 1965 to John and Alice Hunt. He was preceded in death by his mother Alice Hunt. John is survived by his father John Hunt, his sister Tina Bettencourt and her children Amy and Alyson Bettencourt. John attended Middletown High school and is a graduate of Roger Williams College. He was employed for many years as a purchasing manager at Jamestown Distributors.

John had a quiet and humble nature. But those close to him knew his artistic ability in drawing, music and writing (both fiction and non-fiction). During college, John was also active in theater where he performed in several plays.

John’s life long passion with the Kennedy brothers assassinations brought him to Washington, DC where he conducted extensive research at the National Archives and subsequently wrote several well cited essays. His work culminated in the the soon to be published book, “Wilderness of Deception: New Evidence in the Robert Kennedy Assassination.”

John’s laugh was infectious but he could also hold a thoughtful conversation on many subjects as he was a curious and an avid reader. On any given day, John could be found working at his computer with his beloved cat Dilly by his side.

Mr. Hunt was well known within the assassination research community as a top-notch researcher and his absence will be sorely felt.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newportri/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=190719268

By Matt Schudel | 27 October, 2018

Victor Marchetti, a high-ranking CIA officer who grew disillusioned and co-wrote a best-selling book in the 1970s about the agency’s inner workings, resulting in a legal battle over whether the CIA could censor the writings of its past employees, died Oct. 19 at his home in Ashburn, Va. He was 88.

He had complications from dementia, his son Chris Marchetti said.

Mr. Marchetti joined the CIA in 1955, after a college interview with a mysterious figure who had two missing fingers. Mr. Marchetti thought he had found his spiritual and professional home.

“I was going to be a mysterious person — adventurous, romantic, living in foreign countries,” he told The Washington Post in 1971.

He rose in the agency’s ranks, with laudatory performance evaluations. He became an intelligence analyst who specialized in Soviet military affairs and by 1968 was executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director, Rufus Taylor.

A year later, Mr. Marchetti resigned for “personal reasons.”

Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti. (Family Photo)

In 1971, he published a novel, “The Rope-Dancer,” which portrayed an inept “National Intelligence Agency” whose director was a spy for the Soviet Union. The CIA grew concerned that Mr. Marchetti had gone rogue.

At the time, revelations were emerging about clandestine wars, secret airlines and CIA ma­nipu­la­tion of international rebellions and coups. With his inside knowledge, Mr. Marchetti wrote a nonfiction manuscript, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” with former State Department intelligence officer John D. Marks. They described what they considered an agency that had too much money and not enough supervision.

“He was a man deeply offended by what he perceived to be wrong,” Marks said Saturday about Mr. Marchetti. “He showed great courage in standing up for what he believed.”

CIA officers are required to sign an agreement that any books or articles they write about espionage, whether fact or fiction, must be cleared by the agency beforehand. When Mr. Marchetti and Marks submitted their book to the CIA for review, it came back with demands that 339 passages be removed because they could compromise national security.

The authors and their publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, supported by the legal arm of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit. They charged that the CIA was improperly imposing “prior restraint” before publication and therefore violating the First Amendment right of freedom of the press.

“The agency’s attempt to muzzle Marchetti was one of the first maneuvers to put a curtain of secrecy in front of itself,” historian John Prados, the author of several books about the CIA, said Saturday in an interview.

Mr. Marchetti and his legal team argued that much of the information in the book was already on the public record or was absurdly benign — such as descriptions of wood-paneled offices.

Over time, the CIA’s lawyers relented on about half of their suggested changes. When the book was published in 1974, it contained 168 blank sections marked with the word “Deleted.” (By the time a federal judge in Virginia further reduced the number of deletions to 27, the book was already in production.)

“The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” became a best seller, and Mr. Marchetti appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show” and was interviewed in Penthouse magazine.

In 1975, CIA Director William E. Colby admitted the agency had violated its charter by spying on U.S. citizens — one of whom was Mr. Marchetti. The same year, a Senate committee led by Frank Church (D-Idaho) investigated abuses by the CIA. Marks and Mr. Marchetti’s book “gave the Church Committee a road map that this is what the CIA does,” Prados said.

Mr. Marchetti’s legal battle with the CIA was hardly over, however. In May 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower-court order upholding the CIA’s policy of requiring its officers to submit any manuscripts for review. Mr. Marchetti had, in the words of the federal court decision, “effectively relinquished his First Amendment rights,” the moment he signed his employment agreement with the CIA.

It was a principle later applied to books written by CIA officers Philip Agee and Frank Snepp. Agee was stripped of his U.S. passport, and Snepp was sued by the government and forced to surrender his book royalties to the CIA.

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

David Wise, a journalist and author who became one of the country’s foremost authorities on espionage, writing books on the CIA, turncoat spies and whether intelligence agencies had become an unaccountable “invisible government,” died Oct. 8 at a Washington hospital. He was 88.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Joan Wise.

Mr. Wise was a reporter for the old New York Herald Tribune newspaper, which assigned him to its Washington bureau in 1958. He became best known for his coverage of the world of spycraft, writing more than 10 nonfiction books about the Cold War era and beyond, as well as three novels.

In one of his first books, the best-selling “The Invisible Government,” written with journalist Thomas B. Ross in 1964, Mr. Wise wrote about the excesses of intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and its role in orchestrated coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s.

“We felt very strongly that there were two governments in the United States: one in the civics texts and the other in the real world,” Mr. Wise told the New York Times in 1988. “We thought the intelligence agencies were important to our security. But we were troubled about a system based on the consent of the governed when the governed didn’t know to what they have consented.”

Before “The Invisible Government” was published, the CIA surreptitiously acquired a copy of the galleys and summoned the authors to a meeting with the agency’s director, John A. McCone. Ross and Mr. Wise were told their book was a breach of national security. They were handed a list of 10 items stamped “Top Secret” and were told the information was not allowed outside CIA headquarters.

The authors said all the information in the book came from unclassified sources, and that they intended to publish their book without any changes. After some hesi­ta­tion, one of McCone’s assistants then took a pair of scissors and cut the words “Top Secret” from the page, and Ross and Mr. Wise were free to go.

“I later obtained part of my file under the Freedom of Information Act, and learned that a whole ‘task force’ had been assigned to me,” Mr. Wise told The Washington Post in 1981. “One phrase stated that the agency ‘should contact such assets as it has in the press to try to secure unfavorable book reviews, and so discredit author.’ They also ran a legal study to see if they could lawfully buy up the entire first printing.”

He also noted that the CIA’s legal counsel had called the book “uncannily accurate” — in large part, Mr. Wise later said, because one of his primary sources was Allen W. Dulles, the CIA’s founding director.

For more than 40 years, Mr. Wise continued to write books — including three novels — that exposed the tactics, blunders and dangers of a security state. He was “generally described,” as journalist Evan Thomas wrote in the Times, “as the best-sourced, most knowledgeable author of books on espionage.”

During the 1970s, Mr. Wise warned of the erosion of personal liberties and public accountability in his books “The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power” and “The American Police State: The Government Against the People.”

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ISTANBUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded Monday that Saudi Arabia prove that journalist Jamal Khashoggi left the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on his own, as Saudi officials have repeatedly asserted, after he disappeared last week while inside the mission.

Erdogan’s comments were his most direct suggestion yet of potential Saudi culpability in Khashoggi’s disappearance. But other Turkish officials have said they believe that Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents inside the consulate.

“Do you not have cameras and everything of the sort?” Erdogan said of the consular officials. “They have all of them. Then why do you not prove this? You need to prove it.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Saudi ambassador to urge “full cooperation” in the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance, the official Anadolu news agency said Monday.

The ambassador was called to the ministry in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on Sunday, the agency said. It was the second time Turkey summoned the ambassador since Khashoggi failed to emerge after a visit to the consulate on Oct. 2.

Turkish officials have said they believe Khashoggi, 59, a critic of the Saudi leadership and a contributor to The Washington Post’s Global Opinions section, was killed by a team of 15 Saudis flown in specifically to carry out the attack. Saudi authorities have called the allegation “baseless.”

In his first remarks about the disappearance, President Trump told reporters Monday afternoon that he was concerned. “I don’t like hearing about it. Hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now, nobody knows anything about it, but there’s some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it,” Trump said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a statement issued late Monday, said that “we have seen conflicting reports on the safety and whereabouts” of Khashoggi. Repeating Trump’s expression of “concern,” Pompeo, who had just returned from a trip to Asia, called on the Saudi government “to support a thorough investigation of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance and to be transparent about the results of that investigation.”

Turkey has yet to make any evidence public. The private Turkish broadcaster NTV reported Monday that police had requested access to the Saudi Consulate. It was unclear whether the police were granted access or whether they would search the diplomatic mission in Istanbul’s Levent district at a later date.

A report Monday in the daily newspaper Sabah said investigators were also focused on a convoy of diplomatic vehicles that departed from the consulate on the day Khashoggi vanished. A U.S. official said that Turkish investigators believe Khashoggi was probably dismembered and his body removed in boxes and flown out of the country.

Members of Congress, where there has long been bipartisan skepticism about Saudi Arabia, have issued statements and tweets demanding answers from Riyadh. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a string of tweets Monday that “if there is any truth to the allegations of wrongdoing by the Saudi government it would be devastating to the US-Saudi relationship and there will be a heavy price to be paid—economically and otherwise.”

Graham, who played golf Sunday with Trump at the president’s course in Sterling, Va., said that he had consulted with Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) over their “shared concerns regarding the whereabouts and treatment” of Khashoggi.

In a statement sent to journalists Monday, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, said that reports the kingdom had detained or killed Khashoggi were “absolutely false and baseless . . . I don’t know who is behind these claims, or their intentions,” he said, “nor do I care frankly.”

“What we do care about is Jamal’s wellbeing and revealing the truth about what occurred,” the ambassador said. “Jamal has many friends in the Kingdom, including myself, and despite our differences, and his choice to go into his so called ‘self-exile,’ we still maintained regular contact when he was in Washington.”

The Saudi government, he said, was “fully cooperating” in the Turkish government’s investigation. “Jamal is a Saudi citizen whose safety and security is a top priority for the Kingdom.”

In a meeting Sunday night with The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, the ambassador said it was “impossible” that such a crime could be covered up by consulate employees “and we wouldn’t know about it.”

Khalid told Ryan that Khashoggi, who was once close to the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, had “always been honest” and that his criticism of the current Saudi leadership “has been sincere.”

During the meeting, Ryan expressed The Post’s “grave concern” about Khashoggi’s disappearance, and said the news organization would view any Saudi government involvement in his disappearance as a flagrant attack on one of its journalists.

Read more at The Washington Post