Over the past 100 years, numerous people claiming to have the academic credentials to speak with convincing authority, mostly American citizens, have written literature advancing the notion that democratic socialism does not, cannot, and will not practically work in human society.
Most of these people, pundits educated in the United States, were weaned on the abundant fruit of corporate capitalism and the doctrine of pragmatism advanced primarily through the philosophic efforts of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Chauncy Wright, Nicholas St.
John Green, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the latter-part of the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th Century.
These individuals, all aloof academic thinkers, affluent, and extremely wealthy, inculcated through private discreet dialogues the contrived philosophic predicates for much of the public policy (federal and state legislation) which directly advanced the practices of corporate capitalism to the level at which they presently exist and flourish around the globe, especially within the United States.
These primarily federal public polices, which have made a very few American entrepreneurs and as many foreign investors extremely wealthy over the decades, have been blindly accepted by most of the generational American electorate as necessary for the United States to have maintained a global economic prowess.
Nonetheless, most present-day Americans, the great majority of whom work for wages and salaries paid by corporations and incorporated companies in the 58 U.
S.
states, territories, and possessions, have no real knowledge and understanding of the practical philosophy of pragmatism, or of the history of economic capitalist development in the United States, and this is most unfortunate.
While a majority of U.
S.
citizens are currently high school graduates (approximately 80 percent), much less than a majority are college graduates (around 28 percent in 2006); and the information an adolescent learns in high school about comparative economics and U.
S.
political and economic history, which is used and carried into adulthood, is deliberately minuscule and a very small component of what should be a complete and comprehensive adult public education.
Yet, those citizens over twenty-five years of age, who are without the benefits of a liberal college education, are the many millions of hard-working, law-abiding men and women comprising the national workforce, who spend 40-or-more hours-per-week earning money to provide the essentials of life for themselves and the wives, husbands, and children they might be supporting.
Once most of these Americans enter the workforce to earn their subsistence, they use what education they have to be as productive as humanly possible within their own spheres of influence.
Essentially, most of these people are not that concerned with what is happening in Washington, DC, in their state capitals, and in their local counties and towns, as long as they are able to maintain the jobs with which they earn the money needed to pay the required bills, such as mortgages or rent, utilities, a car payment, gasoline, healthcare, and the many other debts which are incurred through the use of credit.
Even an unnecessary foreign war, instigated through illegal presidential and congressional duplicity, is frequently not enough to engage a majority of U.
S.
citizens into active opposition when an economic status quo apparently exists.
As long as such a status quo, as a modicum of stability, is maintained, whereby individuals and families have the income and the apparent liberty to afford the basic necessities of life, the media, daily newspapers, news magazines, and network television programming are merely instruments for dispensing public entertainment, not for the dissemination of pertinent factual information necessary for the promulgation of the deliberative democratic process.
The face of American capitalism has, for many generations, been adeptly painted by pragmatic economists and apologetic historians as the best working financial system in the modern world.
Even when an ongoing 85 percent of working-class citizens (the ones who have succeeded in making less-than-10 percent of the American population very wealthy) haven't possessed over time the basic necessities of life, the impoverished many will continue to, strangely, stand up and cheer for the existing status quo.
It's hard to believe, but, presently, one out of four people in New York City don't know from where their next meal is coming.
That's about 25 percent of over eight million residents in America's largest city; and if they can't afford proper food, I seriously doubt whether they can afford proper healthcare.
This statistic is proportionately the same for most U.
S.
cities with over 2 million in population.
Presently, 98 percent of the wealth in the United States is controlled by only 2 percent of the population.
And that's a hard cold fact.
That's basically, and shockingly, around 4 million in number, the number of people who would fit into three cities the size of Seattle.
With over 16 million American citizens around the nation who cannot presently afford any type of medicine and medical care to relieve their sickness and pain, I think that a proper explanation of American economic pragmatism, and the way it fits into corporate capitalism in a convoluted military-industrial complex, is well overdue.
If studied and examined in the light of correct history and facts, the evolution and expansion of American capitalism is enough to make a reasonable person retch.
In the beginning of the American republic, it was very convenient and utterly pragmatic to make promises to the many poor soldiers of the Continental Army that the very wealthy Founding Fathers were not willing to keep.
The working definition of pragmatism was, in and of itself, an illusory foundation for the apparent establishment of deliberative democracy.
That is, the very nature of pragmatism was originally embedded in the principle that the successful end result of any productive endeavor justifies the means used, whatever it might be.
The men elected to the First Continental Congress were, of course, the wealthiest men in the thirteen original British colonies, which eventually became the thirteen original states of the United States.
These very affluent men, Franklin, Mason, Henry, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, and Washington promulgated the Declaration of Independence, which asserted in theory that all men are created equal, and that a just nation-state should ensure, by law, that every individual in that state has access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Then, after the successful American Revolution, most of these same men wrote the American Constitution, which in its preamble stated that "the people (or citizens) of the newly created United States establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare (of the people).
" These were nice sounding words, but were hardly practical in minds of the wealthy Framers.
Now, like I've already emphasized, the very small number of the representatives of the people, comprising the First U.
S.
Congress (1789), were the wealthiest and most influential men in the thirteen states.
The first U.
S.
Representatives were rich land barons supposedly elected by the common folk, and the U.
S.
Senators were appointed by the wealthy land barons in the state legislatures.
They and a few others in the new republic were the controllers of the money available to the first population of Americans, which comprised approximately 4 million people.
So, much less that 1 percent of the first U.
S.
Census population had control of nearly 100 percent of the available wealth.
Yet, one might ask, what were the fiduciary incentives offered to the poor illiterate, and semi-literate, soldiers who were recruited to fight the British in the war for American independence? Surprisingly, these eager men were offered land, and a wee bit of money, by the First Continental Congress, for their willingness to lay down their lives for the advanced principles of human liberty and dignity during the years of the bloody American Revolution.
So they fought, and many of them died, in the years prior to the final Battle of Yorktown, when the British Lord General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington.
Nevertheless, later, the First U.
S.
Congress realized that it had the power to create an economic system in the fledgling nation-state for the express benefit of every man, woman, and child in the new republic, to ensure the practical expression of the welfare clause of the constitutional preamble, and to provide a way for every citizen to benefit from the right to a pursuit of happiness.
Democratic socialism would have been heartily embraced, at that moment, by those many wounded survivors of the American Revolution, and those fortunate enough to have avoided harm during the melee.
But hadn't they already been promised a hundred acres of land, per soldier, for their military service? Well, on paper they had, in much the same way that treaties were subsequently created and conveniently broken with the decimated American Indian tribes throughout the 19th Century.
None the less, the very wealthy male owners of land, who were the elected representatives of the people in the First and Second Continental Congresses, realized that by allowing base common men the right to own and develop land, they might, through the vote, lose control of the available money in the new republic.
So, they breached, with impunity, the contract that they had previously made with the members of the Continental Army, and allowed only the current wealthy land owners to cast votes in federal elections until around the year 1824.
While the U.
S.
Representatives for the first three U.
S.
Congresses were elected by only white property owners in most of the 13 original states in accordance with federal requirement, laws protecting the money and possessions of the land barons were expectedly legislated.
Voting rights were extended more generously, however, to religious, ethnic, and racial minorities by the rules of a few progressive states.
But one must bear in mind that the great majority of federal and state legislators were of one mind regarding the possession and control of money and capital resources throughout the new republic.
Between 1789 and 1824, the first large companies and corporations, owned by the one (1) wealthiest percent of the population, began to assemble and employ the first national workforce, which was comprised of men, women, and children who at that time in history were very grateful for jobs, and the pittances they paid, in order to feed hungry families.
Though some 45 percent of the men who had fought in the Revolution decided to leave the confines of the new republic and homestead in the western territory beyond the national borders, the preponderance of the former army, and their families, flocked to the cities in search of viable employment.
In those first 35 years, a generation of common Americans lived, worked, and died, most of them in poverty, in a republic that had originally promised on paper that the general welfare of the people would be ensured.
Yet, the affluent 1 percent of the population that controlled 99 percent of American wealth soon became a solid 2 percent that would consistently control, over the next 185 years, 98 percent of the wealth.
The practical doctrine of pragmatism (that planned deception was an ethical means to an end) was embraced from the inception of the American republic by rich powerful men who privately and sincerely entertained the belief that the common people of the nation were basically stupid, and could not be trusted to acquire wealth and use it properly.
It was a plausibly deniable approach to creating and maintaining a capitalistic status quo directly opposed to an ideal united effort to care for the physical welfare of the greater segment of the population.
Simply expressed, the origin of pragmatism came directly from the notion that if you have the means, or the power, to reach a desired end for the specific benefit of the few, it is ethically permissible to use that power to shape such an end, though it actually results in a detriment to the many.
Democratic socialism, in its pure form, is essentially the opposite of the use of pragmatism in the course of economic development for a nation-state.
It is, instead, predicated on an idealism that is realizable if the common desire of the majority of a population of people is implemented by those having the power to legislate prevailing law.
Harry S.
Truman stated the purpose of government quite well, in the second volume of his memoirs, when he said, "Government is for the purpose of causing the good to prevail.
" Democratic socialism had not meant that the opportunity to own, develop, and use capital resources by citizens would be eliminated through federal legislation.
On the contrary, this particular heuristic approach to meeting the basic human needs of an expanding population was, rather, based on the proposition that the people laboring to make an investing capitalist wealthy should be as benefited by, and from, their labors as would the profiting capitalist.
For if the capitalist is well housed, provided the best food and clothing, afforded state-of-the-art transportation, and enjoys the best health care available from the profits derived from the labors of his employees, why shouldn't the employees deserve the same basic human rights and dignities in their proper proportion? That is, if promoting the general welfare of the republic's citizens, according to constitutional mandate, is an end result of just law.
Today, just like in the year 1825, American capitalists who employ large numbers of people to produce purchasable consumer, industrial, and military products are continually seeking practical means of increasing their profits by utilizing the prevailing laws to provide their employees with legally minimal wages, salaries, and benefits.
By doing so, capitalists maximize their profits and dividends.
To maintain such an unethical, quasi-legal status quo in a republic supposedly ruled by constitutional law, the public laws passed by federal and state legislatures must be as pragmatically oriented, in order to produce a desired projected outcome, as the ultimate goal of a capitalist is to invest and reinvest in order to generate obscenely exorbitant profits.
Ask, however, any affluent capitalist and the equally affluent federal and state politicians if they are pragmatists at heart (believing that end results justify the means used to obtain them), they will all answer with a vehement, but laughable no.
And for the past 185 years, a majority of the American population, the poor and the struggling middle-class, have believed this pretentious response.
As a general rule, for such a successful use of pragmatism to result, a population of gullible people has to be persuaded that something, actually deleterious to their wellbeing, is for their benefit.
This is covertly accomplished through a consistent barrage, over time, of persuasive propaganda, via the existing media, which serves to pacify the masses.
The best example that I can use to illustrate this point is the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi regime, to power in Weimar Germany over a relatively short period of time, less than ten years.
Over this timeframe, a freedom loving population of civilized human beings was persuaded that a fascist political system bent on the extermination of a race and religion of people, and on the military domination of the free-world, was in their best interest.
If I remember correctly, "Time" Magazine brazenly accorded Adolf Hitler the honor of "Man of the Year" in 1939.
Even the inimitable Charles A.
Lindbergh was a proponent of Hitler, as were many other prominent Americans, including affluent banker Prescott Bush, George W.
Bush's grandfather.
The refinement of practical systematic pragmatism, in the late 19th Century, was the express goal of such men as Charles S.
Peirce.
By reflecting philosophically on the Mexican War of 1848, and noting that the Manifest Destiny of President James Polk was only realized through the illicit, but effective use of military power, in order to obtain the land now known as the American Southwest, Peirce envisioned pragmatism as an effective ethical means of achieving future political and economic objectives.
Might makes right was to him an expediently effective aphorism in endorsing the use of governmental power to achieve the best for a few.
But the charade of pragmatism went a bit deeper.
In a popular movie "Dave," of the early 1990s, starring Kevin Kline as a presidential twin employed by a conniving White House Chief of Staff to take the place of an incapacitated President, Dave ultimately realizes that what he is doing is wrong and attempts to make it right by going against the will of the pragmatic Chief of Staff.
In response, the Chief of Staff, played by Frank Langella, quips, "I'll kill him.
I could kill a hundred ordinary people.
" This movie reflects the evolution of pragmatism to the point where the deaths of many thousands of "ordinary" people, in order to justify the creation and end result of a capitalistic global economy, have become accepted as okay by a duped American public.
Today the American people The U.
S.
Government, especially the organs of the U.
S.
Executive Branch, has farcically explained to the American public that the tragic carnage in New York City, on September 11, 2001, was the work of Islamic terrorists.
And apparently a majority of the masses have, over time, bought and accepted the superfluous explanations offered in the "9/11 Commission Report.
" Yet, the short-lived murder investigation which ensued after the destruction of the WTC towers, and the Pentagon bombing, was deliberately, and fatally, flawed by apparent U.
S.
Government intervention.
The crime scenes, in both New York City and at the Pentagon, were fatally desecrated and tainted by a destruction of material evidence, witnesses were intimidated by federal agents, and a federal lawsuit brought against the Bush administration by a San Francisco attorney, Stanley R.
Hilton, representing over 160 9/11 victims' families, was dismissed by federal judge Susan Illston not for the lack of credible evidence which Hilton had to present to the court, but, rather, on a grounds of sovereign immunity, that the President and his subordinates are not bound by law.
Again, the U.
S.
Government has persuasively explained to the masses that 9/11 was the result of terrorism by militant Islamic extremists.
Yet, there is hard credible evidence available to those who read and research beyond the "9/11 Commission Report" that the U.
S.
Government probably planned and executed the events which occurred in September 2001, and arranged through, perhaps, a foreign intelligence service (Pakistani?) for the Muslims they supposedly captured and tortured to confess that they were responsible.
In 2004, approximately 80 percent of the American public (that is, the ones who supposedly responded to a Harris telephone poll) allegedly stated that they believed that the U.
S.
Government had some involvement in 9/11.
Today, there are, according to several blogging websites, more than five million citizens who are convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the U.
S.
Government was intricately involved in the planning and execution of 9/11.
This state of mind goes, however, against the moral fiber of a people who are unwilling to believe that their government would commit such horrible crimes against humanity in order to further their economic and political goals.
Nonetheless, the primary product of the events of 9/11 was a national fear of an amorphous entity called Islamic terrorism.
This same type of fear gripped the nation when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and all Japanese-Americans were locked-up and deprived of their liberty.
This same fear of the Jews by the German people was inculcated through vicious propaganda by Hitler and his henchmen.
Over a period of years, the good relationships that German Jews had with Christian Germans deteriorated because the Christian Germans were persuaded over time by government propaganda that the Jews were a sub-human race.
Idealism loses its appeal and value in the face of blatant pragmatism simply because human justice and equity are not as lucrative, for business purposes, as are the practical tools for deriving a capital profit through illusion and deception.
The United States is a culturally diverse nation of over 300 million people, with, supposedly, 15-20 million residents who are in the country illegally.
With all of its demographic diversities, the United States is, perhaps, the most racially and ethnically heterogeneous nation-state in existence on earth, comprising a plethora of minority cultures, beliefs, religions, and political persuasions.
Racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity, such as what it is, is, for example, prevalent in the nation of Finland, and is constructively conducive to a greatly united economic, social, and political consensus.
This is why Finland enjoys a practical democratic socialist idealism which pervades every aspect of Finnish life, from employment, to medical care, to education.
The Finnish people are usually in agreement, as a majority collective mind, with a common goal of affording each individual citizen a quality of life and liberty.
In a nutshell, economic and political pragmatism in a contrived Machiavellian scheme are more effectively implemented in a vast heterogeneous population of people because it is quite difficult for a majority of such people to come together to oppose it, and to seek commonality of purpose.
While rehearsed political interactions between parties and affluent politicians are occurring publicly in the U.
S, according to an interactive status quo defining program, with differing segments of the population espousing differing political agendas, strategic planning is occurring behind closed doors to advance corporate agendas (the Federal Reserve Board, Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-lateral Commission) for the benefit of the very wealthy.
The current economic stratum of the United States corporate capitalist hierarchy is thoroughly political in nature.
The laws and machinery for the expansion of capitalism in America, which have been created by the past U.
S.
Congresses and quasi-constitutional executive orders without the consent of the voting-age population of Americans, are the means whereby the rich get and the poor get poorer.
Capitalism is essentially predicated upon human greed and the practical expression of the powerful rich through pragmatism.
What appears to be, but is not, is called an illusion.
It's sort of like a mirage in the barren waterless desert, when a person dying of thirst wants to believe so badly that the less thirsty person next to him is right in saying that a cool pool of refreshing water lies over the next sand dune.
The person dying of thirst will see what she believes to be water, will rush to it, and will drink the sand not realizing the difference.
Perhaps another example of illusion would be a young boy in large room full of horse manure digging happily saying, "There's got to be pony here someplace," At a time when over 600,000 Americans are losing jobs every month, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics states on its website that, "with more than 1.
8 million civilian employees, the Federal Government, excluding the Postal Service, is the Nation's largest employer.
" On this particular website, the number of federal employees are broken down and indexed according to job function showing that 9 out of 10 of these workers reside out of the Washington D.
C.
metropolitan area.
What it doesn't show, for practical illusory purposes, is that approximately 5 out of every 10 of these workers are foreign nationals, holding visas, who have been allowed to enter the country to take the place of eligible American workers.
The United States Government refers to these foreigners as "the best and the brightest" of a global job market.
Some of these workers, most a part of executive branch agencies, have been in the United States for more than 20 years holding jobs with complete employment security that could have been filled from the many college graduates around the USA.
Over 40,000 of these foreign nationals are allowed to enter the U.
S.
every year to take federal jobs, and corporate jobs endorsed by federal contract, which could easily be assumed by American citizens.
I personally know of one such foreign national, from Eastern Europe, who has been allowed to enter the United States on a visa, and work as a supervisor in a Washington D.
C.
based veterans' service organization representing U.
S.
Marine Corps veterans before the Board of Veterans Appeals.
He has been in the U.
S.
for more than ten years, but has not, for some reason, attained citizenship.
He's certainly a cocky fellow who appears to think that he has a right to hold a job that would be better served by an American citizen, perhaps one of the 150,000 currently unemployed Marine Corps veterans.
This illusion promulgated by the U.
S.
Government, that it is doing all it can to foster employment within the country, when it is, in fact, the republic's largest employer and hires over 10,000 foreign nations every quarter, is the practicality of pragmatism.
I recall my second re-reading of David Halberstam's book, "The Best and the Brightest," which recounted the Kennedy Era and the young President's bringing to the helm of the American government a group of well educated American citizens, trained in the best American universities, for the purpose of advancing American interests for the benefit of the American republic, not a world economy.
The machineries of the military-industrial complex, nurturing multi-national capitalism, were intact during the 1960s.
They had been placed into strategic eco-political position through congressional legislation and executive orders over many decades for the purpose of eventually creating what George Herbert Bush, the son of the Nazi sympathizer, Prescott Bush, called the new world order.
I don't know if the wealthy and affluent John F.
Kennedy was privy to this secretive plan for a global economy.
Perhaps he didn't, at first, know, but came to realize shortly after his election that such was he case.
Maybe he disagreed with it, and that's what got him killed.
A lot of people, including movie producer Oliver Stone, believe that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was correct in pursuing the U.
S.
Government's Executive Branch as responsible for the Kennedy assassination.
His well-made movie, staring Kevin Costner, seemed to bear this out.
Maybe Kennedy was an idealist, instead of a pragmatist, who saw the evils of a global economic and political hierarchy, and wanted the U.
S.
to maintain a sovereign bearing for the benefit of every American man, woman, and child, regardless of socio-economic level Very few American citizens know that the original plan to replace Congress' constitutional control over the coining and valuation of money with the Federal Reserve System, of 1913, was concocted between wealthy affluent financiers and bankers in 1910 at a plush resort off the coast of Georgia called Jekyll Island.
The express purpose of this meeting was to birth a banking cartel to protect its members from competition, and to produce a strategy for convincing Congress and the public that the cartel was an organ of the U.
S.
federal Government.
The author, G.
Edward Griffin, has produced a well researched and footnoted book about this very secretive event in American history entitled "The Creature from Jekyll Island," which every American citizen should read.
This work of concise non-fiction clearly denotes the power of wealth in a political economic system that has been predicated on pragmatic capitalism.
U.
S.
senators and representatives usually listen very closely, and cooperate fully, with affluent people who are willing to promulgate their rise in national politics and to finance their reelections, especially bankers and financiers.
For example, when ordinary citizens ask to speak briefly to their senators, by telephone, office staffers always tell them that the senators are very busy, even if, at that particular moment, the senators are at home, working-out at a plush congressional spa, or just doing nothing.
Several years ago, one independent investigative journalist decided to find out just how presumed wealth affects one's relationship with a U.
S.
senator or representative.
So he called the Washington DC office of a junior senator from a particular state and told the young staffer, who answered the call, that he had just come into possession of a great deal of money and wanted to donate half of it to the senator's re-election campaign.
The only condition was that he wanted to speak to the senator beforehand and ask him some questions about the economy.
The staffer excitedly took the reporter's landline number and told him that she would do what she could.
An hour later, the reporter received a call directly from the senator, who, on learning after the fact that the call was only in the interest of journalistic research, and that his response had been recorded, threatened to sue and levy criminal charges against the reporter.
To quell the lambasting epithet-chunking senator, the reporter merely said that he would turn the tape of the senator's incriminating words over to CBS News if the good senator pursued any legal action against him.
While nothing more threatening was heard from that particular senator, that incident paved the way for nearly all federal politicians investigating, and screening, telephone representations by presumed wealthy citizens, before returning calls.
It revealed the truth about how wealth influences and, more times than not, controls the practices of elected politicians, but also, unfortunately, made these purchasers of power more aware that their unscrupulous stratagems were under the scrutiny of some concerned citizens.
In the second part of this essay, I will devolve upon a working model of democratic socialism which would practically replace global capitalism in the United States.
Most of these people, pundits educated in the United States, were weaned on the abundant fruit of corporate capitalism and the doctrine of pragmatism advanced primarily through the philosophic efforts of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Chauncy Wright, Nicholas St.
John Green, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the latter-part of the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th Century.
These individuals, all aloof academic thinkers, affluent, and extremely wealthy, inculcated through private discreet dialogues the contrived philosophic predicates for much of the public policy (federal and state legislation) which directly advanced the practices of corporate capitalism to the level at which they presently exist and flourish around the globe, especially within the United States.
These primarily federal public polices, which have made a very few American entrepreneurs and as many foreign investors extremely wealthy over the decades, have been blindly accepted by most of the generational American electorate as necessary for the United States to have maintained a global economic prowess.
Nonetheless, most present-day Americans, the great majority of whom work for wages and salaries paid by corporations and incorporated companies in the 58 U.
S.
states, territories, and possessions, have no real knowledge and understanding of the practical philosophy of pragmatism, or of the history of economic capitalist development in the United States, and this is most unfortunate.
While a majority of U.
S.
citizens are currently high school graduates (approximately 80 percent), much less than a majority are college graduates (around 28 percent in 2006); and the information an adolescent learns in high school about comparative economics and U.
S.
political and economic history, which is used and carried into adulthood, is deliberately minuscule and a very small component of what should be a complete and comprehensive adult public education.
Yet, those citizens over twenty-five years of age, who are without the benefits of a liberal college education, are the many millions of hard-working, law-abiding men and women comprising the national workforce, who spend 40-or-more hours-per-week earning money to provide the essentials of life for themselves and the wives, husbands, and children they might be supporting.
Once most of these Americans enter the workforce to earn their subsistence, they use what education they have to be as productive as humanly possible within their own spheres of influence.
Essentially, most of these people are not that concerned with what is happening in Washington, DC, in their state capitals, and in their local counties and towns, as long as they are able to maintain the jobs with which they earn the money needed to pay the required bills, such as mortgages or rent, utilities, a car payment, gasoline, healthcare, and the many other debts which are incurred through the use of credit.
Even an unnecessary foreign war, instigated through illegal presidential and congressional duplicity, is frequently not enough to engage a majority of U.
S.
citizens into active opposition when an economic status quo apparently exists.
As long as such a status quo, as a modicum of stability, is maintained, whereby individuals and families have the income and the apparent liberty to afford the basic necessities of life, the media, daily newspapers, news magazines, and network television programming are merely instruments for dispensing public entertainment, not for the dissemination of pertinent factual information necessary for the promulgation of the deliberative democratic process.
The face of American capitalism has, for many generations, been adeptly painted by pragmatic economists and apologetic historians as the best working financial system in the modern world.
Even when an ongoing 85 percent of working-class citizens (the ones who have succeeded in making less-than-10 percent of the American population very wealthy) haven't possessed over time the basic necessities of life, the impoverished many will continue to, strangely, stand up and cheer for the existing status quo.
It's hard to believe, but, presently, one out of four people in New York City don't know from where their next meal is coming.
That's about 25 percent of over eight million residents in America's largest city; and if they can't afford proper food, I seriously doubt whether they can afford proper healthcare.
This statistic is proportionately the same for most U.
S.
cities with over 2 million in population.
Presently, 98 percent of the wealth in the United States is controlled by only 2 percent of the population.
And that's a hard cold fact.
That's basically, and shockingly, around 4 million in number, the number of people who would fit into three cities the size of Seattle.
With over 16 million American citizens around the nation who cannot presently afford any type of medicine and medical care to relieve their sickness and pain, I think that a proper explanation of American economic pragmatism, and the way it fits into corporate capitalism in a convoluted military-industrial complex, is well overdue.
If studied and examined in the light of correct history and facts, the evolution and expansion of American capitalism is enough to make a reasonable person retch.
In the beginning of the American republic, it was very convenient and utterly pragmatic to make promises to the many poor soldiers of the Continental Army that the very wealthy Founding Fathers were not willing to keep.
The working definition of pragmatism was, in and of itself, an illusory foundation for the apparent establishment of deliberative democracy.
That is, the very nature of pragmatism was originally embedded in the principle that the successful end result of any productive endeavor justifies the means used, whatever it might be.
The men elected to the First Continental Congress were, of course, the wealthiest men in the thirteen original British colonies, which eventually became the thirteen original states of the United States.
These very affluent men, Franklin, Mason, Henry, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, and Washington promulgated the Declaration of Independence, which asserted in theory that all men are created equal, and that a just nation-state should ensure, by law, that every individual in that state has access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Then, after the successful American Revolution, most of these same men wrote the American Constitution, which in its preamble stated that "the people (or citizens) of the newly created United States establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare (of the people).
" These were nice sounding words, but were hardly practical in minds of the wealthy Framers.
Now, like I've already emphasized, the very small number of the representatives of the people, comprising the First U.
S.
Congress (1789), were the wealthiest and most influential men in the thirteen states.
The first U.
S.
Representatives were rich land barons supposedly elected by the common folk, and the U.
S.
Senators were appointed by the wealthy land barons in the state legislatures.
They and a few others in the new republic were the controllers of the money available to the first population of Americans, which comprised approximately 4 million people.
So, much less that 1 percent of the first U.
S.
Census population had control of nearly 100 percent of the available wealth.
Yet, one might ask, what were the fiduciary incentives offered to the poor illiterate, and semi-literate, soldiers who were recruited to fight the British in the war for American independence? Surprisingly, these eager men were offered land, and a wee bit of money, by the First Continental Congress, for their willingness to lay down their lives for the advanced principles of human liberty and dignity during the years of the bloody American Revolution.
So they fought, and many of them died, in the years prior to the final Battle of Yorktown, when the British Lord General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington.
Nevertheless, later, the First U.
S.
Congress realized that it had the power to create an economic system in the fledgling nation-state for the express benefit of every man, woman, and child in the new republic, to ensure the practical expression of the welfare clause of the constitutional preamble, and to provide a way for every citizen to benefit from the right to a pursuit of happiness.
Democratic socialism would have been heartily embraced, at that moment, by those many wounded survivors of the American Revolution, and those fortunate enough to have avoided harm during the melee.
But hadn't they already been promised a hundred acres of land, per soldier, for their military service? Well, on paper they had, in much the same way that treaties were subsequently created and conveniently broken with the decimated American Indian tribes throughout the 19th Century.
None the less, the very wealthy male owners of land, who were the elected representatives of the people in the First and Second Continental Congresses, realized that by allowing base common men the right to own and develop land, they might, through the vote, lose control of the available money in the new republic.
So, they breached, with impunity, the contract that they had previously made with the members of the Continental Army, and allowed only the current wealthy land owners to cast votes in federal elections until around the year 1824.
While the U.
S.
Representatives for the first three U.
S.
Congresses were elected by only white property owners in most of the 13 original states in accordance with federal requirement, laws protecting the money and possessions of the land barons were expectedly legislated.
Voting rights were extended more generously, however, to religious, ethnic, and racial minorities by the rules of a few progressive states.
But one must bear in mind that the great majority of federal and state legislators were of one mind regarding the possession and control of money and capital resources throughout the new republic.
Between 1789 and 1824, the first large companies and corporations, owned by the one (1) wealthiest percent of the population, began to assemble and employ the first national workforce, which was comprised of men, women, and children who at that time in history were very grateful for jobs, and the pittances they paid, in order to feed hungry families.
Though some 45 percent of the men who had fought in the Revolution decided to leave the confines of the new republic and homestead in the western territory beyond the national borders, the preponderance of the former army, and their families, flocked to the cities in search of viable employment.
In those first 35 years, a generation of common Americans lived, worked, and died, most of them in poverty, in a republic that had originally promised on paper that the general welfare of the people would be ensured.
Yet, the affluent 1 percent of the population that controlled 99 percent of American wealth soon became a solid 2 percent that would consistently control, over the next 185 years, 98 percent of the wealth.
The practical doctrine of pragmatism (that planned deception was an ethical means to an end) was embraced from the inception of the American republic by rich powerful men who privately and sincerely entertained the belief that the common people of the nation were basically stupid, and could not be trusted to acquire wealth and use it properly.
It was a plausibly deniable approach to creating and maintaining a capitalistic status quo directly opposed to an ideal united effort to care for the physical welfare of the greater segment of the population.
Simply expressed, the origin of pragmatism came directly from the notion that if you have the means, or the power, to reach a desired end for the specific benefit of the few, it is ethically permissible to use that power to shape such an end, though it actually results in a detriment to the many.
Democratic socialism, in its pure form, is essentially the opposite of the use of pragmatism in the course of economic development for a nation-state.
It is, instead, predicated on an idealism that is realizable if the common desire of the majority of a population of people is implemented by those having the power to legislate prevailing law.
Harry S.
Truman stated the purpose of government quite well, in the second volume of his memoirs, when he said, "Government is for the purpose of causing the good to prevail.
" Democratic socialism had not meant that the opportunity to own, develop, and use capital resources by citizens would be eliminated through federal legislation.
On the contrary, this particular heuristic approach to meeting the basic human needs of an expanding population was, rather, based on the proposition that the people laboring to make an investing capitalist wealthy should be as benefited by, and from, their labors as would the profiting capitalist.
For if the capitalist is well housed, provided the best food and clothing, afforded state-of-the-art transportation, and enjoys the best health care available from the profits derived from the labors of his employees, why shouldn't the employees deserve the same basic human rights and dignities in their proper proportion? That is, if promoting the general welfare of the republic's citizens, according to constitutional mandate, is an end result of just law.
Today, just like in the year 1825, American capitalists who employ large numbers of people to produce purchasable consumer, industrial, and military products are continually seeking practical means of increasing their profits by utilizing the prevailing laws to provide their employees with legally minimal wages, salaries, and benefits.
By doing so, capitalists maximize their profits and dividends.
To maintain such an unethical, quasi-legal status quo in a republic supposedly ruled by constitutional law, the public laws passed by federal and state legislatures must be as pragmatically oriented, in order to produce a desired projected outcome, as the ultimate goal of a capitalist is to invest and reinvest in order to generate obscenely exorbitant profits.
Ask, however, any affluent capitalist and the equally affluent federal and state politicians if they are pragmatists at heart (believing that end results justify the means used to obtain them), they will all answer with a vehement, but laughable no.
And for the past 185 years, a majority of the American population, the poor and the struggling middle-class, have believed this pretentious response.
As a general rule, for such a successful use of pragmatism to result, a population of gullible people has to be persuaded that something, actually deleterious to their wellbeing, is for their benefit.
This is covertly accomplished through a consistent barrage, over time, of persuasive propaganda, via the existing media, which serves to pacify the masses.
The best example that I can use to illustrate this point is the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi regime, to power in Weimar Germany over a relatively short period of time, less than ten years.
Over this timeframe, a freedom loving population of civilized human beings was persuaded that a fascist political system bent on the extermination of a race and religion of people, and on the military domination of the free-world, was in their best interest.
If I remember correctly, "Time" Magazine brazenly accorded Adolf Hitler the honor of "Man of the Year" in 1939.
Even the inimitable Charles A.
Lindbergh was a proponent of Hitler, as were many other prominent Americans, including affluent banker Prescott Bush, George W.
Bush's grandfather.
The refinement of practical systematic pragmatism, in the late 19th Century, was the express goal of such men as Charles S.
Peirce.
By reflecting philosophically on the Mexican War of 1848, and noting that the Manifest Destiny of President James Polk was only realized through the illicit, but effective use of military power, in order to obtain the land now known as the American Southwest, Peirce envisioned pragmatism as an effective ethical means of achieving future political and economic objectives.
Might makes right was to him an expediently effective aphorism in endorsing the use of governmental power to achieve the best for a few.
But the charade of pragmatism went a bit deeper.
In a popular movie "Dave," of the early 1990s, starring Kevin Kline as a presidential twin employed by a conniving White House Chief of Staff to take the place of an incapacitated President, Dave ultimately realizes that what he is doing is wrong and attempts to make it right by going against the will of the pragmatic Chief of Staff.
In response, the Chief of Staff, played by Frank Langella, quips, "I'll kill him.
I could kill a hundred ordinary people.
" This movie reflects the evolution of pragmatism to the point where the deaths of many thousands of "ordinary" people, in order to justify the creation and end result of a capitalistic global economy, have become accepted as okay by a duped American public.
Today the American people The U.
S.
Government, especially the organs of the U.
S.
Executive Branch, has farcically explained to the American public that the tragic carnage in New York City, on September 11, 2001, was the work of Islamic terrorists.
And apparently a majority of the masses have, over time, bought and accepted the superfluous explanations offered in the "9/11 Commission Report.
" Yet, the short-lived murder investigation which ensued after the destruction of the WTC towers, and the Pentagon bombing, was deliberately, and fatally, flawed by apparent U.
S.
Government intervention.
The crime scenes, in both New York City and at the Pentagon, were fatally desecrated and tainted by a destruction of material evidence, witnesses were intimidated by federal agents, and a federal lawsuit brought against the Bush administration by a San Francisco attorney, Stanley R.
Hilton, representing over 160 9/11 victims' families, was dismissed by federal judge Susan Illston not for the lack of credible evidence which Hilton had to present to the court, but, rather, on a grounds of sovereign immunity, that the President and his subordinates are not bound by law.
Again, the U.
S.
Government has persuasively explained to the masses that 9/11 was the result of terrorism by militant Islamic extremists.
Yet, there is hard credible evidence available to those who read and research beyond the "9/11 Commission Report" that the U.
S.
Government probably planned and executed the events which occurred in September 2001, and arranged through, perhaps, a foreign intelligence service (Pakistani?) for the Muslims they supposedly captured and tortured to confess that they were responsible.
In 2004, approximately 80 percent of the American public (that is, the ones who supposedly responded to a Harris telephone poll) allegedly stated that they believed that the U.
S.
Government had some involvement in 9/11.
Today, there are, according to several blogging websites, more than five million citizens who are convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the U.
S.
Government was intricately involved in the planning and execution of 9/11.
This state of mind goes, however, against the moral fiber of a people who are unwilling to believe that their government would commit such horrible crimes against humanity in order to further their economic and political goals.
Nonetheless, the primary product of the events of 9/11 was a national fear of an amorphous entity called Islamic terrorism.
This same type of fear gripped the nation when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and all Japanese-Americans were locked-up and deprived of their liberty.
This same fear of the Jews by the German people was inculcated through vicious propaganda by Hitler and his henchmen.
Over a period of years, the good relationships that German Jews had with Christian Germans deteriorated because the Christian Germans were persuaded over time by government propaganda that the Jews were a sub-human race.
Idealism loses its appeal and value in the face of blatant pragmatism simply because human justice and equity are not as lucrative, for business purposes, as are the practical tools for deriving a capital profit through illusion and deception.
The United States is a culturally diverse nation of over 300 million people, with, supposedly, 15-20 million residents who are in the country illegally.
With all of its demographic diversities, the United States is, perhaps, the most racially and ethnically heterogeneous nation-state in existence on earth, comprising a plethora of minority cultures, beliefs, religions, and political persuasions.
Racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity, such as what it is, is, for example, prevalent in the nation of Finland, and is constructively conducive to a greatly united economic, social, and political consensus.
This is why Finland enjoys a practical democratic socialist idealism which pervades every aspect of Finnish life, from employment, to medical care, to education.
The Finnish people are usually in agreement, as a majority collective mind, with a common goal of affording each individual citizen a quality of life and liberty.
In a nutshell, economic and political pragmatism in a contrived Machiavellian scheme are more effectively implemented in a vast heterogeneous population of people because it is quite difficult for a majority of such people to come together to oppose it, and to seek commonality of purpose.
While rehearsed political interactions between parties and affluent politicians are occurring publicly in the U.
S, according to an interactive status quo defining program, with differing segments of the population espousing differing political agendas, strategic planning is occurring behind closed doors to advance corporate agendas (the Federal Reserve Board, Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-lateral Commission) for the benefit of the very wealthy.
The current economic stratum of the United States corporate capitalist hierarchy is thoroughly political in nature.
The laws and machinery for the expansion of capitalism in America, which have been created by the past U.
S.
Congresses and quasi-constitutional executive orders without the consent of the voting-age population of Americans, are the means whereby the rich get and the poor get poorer.
Capitalism is essentially predicated upon human greed and the practical expression of the powerful rich through pragmatism.
What appears to be, but is not, is called an illusion.
It's sort of like a mirage in the barren waterless desert, when a person dying of thirst wants to believe so badly that the less thirsty person next to him is right in saying that a cool pool of refreshing water lies over the next sand dune.
The person dying of thirst will see what she believes to be water, will rush to it, and will drink the sand not realizing the difference.
Perhaps another example of illusion would be a young boy in large room full of horse manure digging happily saying, "There's got to be pony here someplace," At a time when over 600,000 Americans are losing jobs every month, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics states on its website that, "with more than 1.
8 million civilian employees, the Federal Government, excluding the Postal Service, is the Nation's largest employer.
" On this particular website, the number of federal employees are broken down and indexed according to job function showing that 9 out of 10 of these workers reside out of the Washington D.
C.
metropolitan area.
What it doesn't show, for practical illusory purposes, is that approximately 5 out of every 10 of these workers are foreign nationals, holding visas, who have been allowed to enter the country to take the place of eligible American workers.
The United States Government refers to these foreigners as "the best and the brightest" of a global job market.
Some of these workers, most a part of executive branch agencies, have been in the United States for more than 20 years holding jobs with complete employment security that could have been filled from the many college graduates around the USA.
Over 40,000 of these foreign nationals are allowed to enter the U.
S.
every year to take federal jobs, and corporate jobs endorsed by federal contract, which could easily be assumed by American citizens.
I personally know of one such foreign national, from Eastern Europe, who has been allowed to enter the United States on a visa, and work as a supervisor in a Washington D.
C.
based veterans' service organization representing U.
S.
Marine Corps veterans before the Board of Veterans Appeals.
He has been in the U.
S.
for more than ten years, but has not, for some reason, attained citizenship.
He's certainly a cocky fellow who appears to think that he has a right to hold a job that would be better served by an American citizen, perhaps one of the 150,000 currently unemployed Marine Corps veterans.
This illusion promulgated by the U.
S.
Government, that it is doing all it can to foster employment within the country, when it is, in fact, the republic's largest employer and hires over 10,000 foreign nations every quarter, is the practicality of pragmatism.
I recall my second re-reading of David Halberstam's book, "The Best and the Brightest," which recounted the Kennedy Era and the young President's bringing to the helm of the American government a group of well educated American citizens, trained in the best American universities, for the purpose of advancing American interests for the benefit of the American republic, not a world economy.
The machineries of the military-industrial complex, nurturing multi-national capitalism, were intact during the 1960s.
They had been placed into strategic eco-political position through congressional legislation and executive orders over many decades for the purpose of eventually creating what George Herbert Bush, the son of the Nazi sympathizer, Prescott Bush, called the new world order.
I don't know if the wealthy and affluent John F.
Kennedy was privy to this secretive plan for a global economy.
Perhaps he didn't, at first, know, but came to realize shortly after his election that such was he case.
Maybe he disagreed with it, and that's what got him killed.
A lot of people, including movie producer Oliver Stone, believe that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was correct in pursuing the U.
S.
Government's Executive Branch as responsible for the Kennedy assassination.
His well-made movie, staring Kevin Costner, seemed to bear this out.
Maybe Kennedy was an idealist, instead of a pragmatist, who saw the evils of a global economic and political hierarchy, and wanted the U.
S.
to maintain a sovereign bearing for the benefit of every American man, woman, and child, regardless of socio-economic level Very few American citizens know that the original plan to replace Congress' constitutional control over the coining and valuation of money with the Federal Reserve System, of 1913, was concocted between wealthy affluent financiers and bankers in 1910 at a plush resort off the coast of Georgia called Jekyll Island.
The express purpose of this meeting was to birth a banking cartel to protect its members from competition, and to produce a strategy for convincing Congress and the public that the cartel was an organ of the U.
S.
federal Government.
The author, G.
Edward Griffin, has produced a well researched and footnoted book about this very secretive event in American history entitled "The Creature from Jekyll Island," which every American citizen should read.
This work of concise non-fiction clearly denotes the power of wealth in a political economic system that has been predicated on pragmatic capitalism.
U.
S.
senators and representatives usually listen very closely, and cooperate fully, with affluent people who are willing to promulgate their rise in national politics and to finance their reelections, especially bankers and financiers.
For example, when ordinary citizens ask to speak briefly to their senators, by telephone, office staffers always tell them that the senators are very busy, even if, at that particular moment, the senators are at home, working-out at a plush congressional spa, or just doing nothing.
Several years ago, one independent investigative journalist decided to find out just how presumed wealth affects one's relationship with a U.
S.
senator or representative.
So he called the Washington DC office of a junior senator from a particular state and told the young staffer, who answered the call, that he had just come into possession of a great deal of money and wanted to donate half of it to the senator's re-election campaign.
The only condition was that he wanted to speak to the senator beforehand and ask him some questions about the economy.
The staffer excitedly took the reporter's landline number and told him that she would do what she could.
An hour later, the reporter received a call directly from the senator, who, on learning after the fact that the call was only in the interest of journalistic research, and that his response had been recorded, threatened to sue and levy criminal charges against the reporter.
To quell the lambasting epithet-chunking senator, the reporter merely said that he would turn the tape of the senator's incriminating words over to CBS News if the good senator pursued any legal action against him.
While nothing more threatening was heard from that particular senator, that incident paved the way for nearly all federal politicians investigating, and screening, telephone representations by presumed wealthy citizens, before returning calls.
It revealed the truth about how wealth influences and, more times than not, controls the practices of elected politicians, but also, unfortunately, made these purchasers of power more aware that their unscrupulous stratagems were under the scrutiny of some concerned citizens.
In the second part of this essay, I will devolve upon a working model of democratic socialism which would practically replace global capitalism in the United States.
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