AMERICA'S RAW STORY
17th Post
By Gary Brumback
The Bloodletters
Bloodletting
as a medical practice flourished for thousands of years before finally yielding
to more “enlightened” medicine except in special circumstances. One of history’s
ironies is that
America’s
first president, George Washington, a bloodthirsty warrior before and during
his presidency, died arguably from bloodletters called in to his bedside to let
out one-fourth of his blood.
This
essay highlights two unparalleled groups of bloodletters in America’s 240 years
of history, U.S. presidents and the captains of America’s industries. These two
groups are part of the power elite of America’s corpocracy, the incestuous
marriage between Government America and Corporate America, with the latter in charge.
The power elite also include the chairs of relevant Congressional committees;
key people in the shadow government (e.g. the CIA); the US Supreme Court (never
ruling a war unconstitutional); and influential advisors and ideologues.
Besides
being the vital fluid that courses through our bodies, “blood” serves as a
useful metaphors (as the one in the first paragraph about George Washington)
that connote the diminishment or loss of what is valued by the victims and
their loved ones.
The
first purpose of this essay is to highlight the ways in which America’s power
elite “let blood” literally and figuratively, with the metaphorical instances
causing all sorts of human misery up to and including death. The second purpose
is to underscore just who the real enemy of the American people is, America’s
corpocracy and its power elite. The only reason the U.S. has foreign enemies is
that the corpocracy creates them to sustain and grow its profits and power.
The
essay begins with an overview of the greatest bloodletters, literally, of all
time throughout the history of America, her presidents, and then overviews the
bloodletting, figuratively and literally, by the captains of industry. The
reason for picking the two at the top of their pecking orders is that any form
of wrongdoing, bloody or not, is done under their leadership. They either
authorize it explicitly, implicitly as in setting “wink and nod” expectations,
or indirectly in creating and/or condoning an organizational culture of
“anything goes.” The essay closes with a short explanation and prediction.
America’s Greatest Bloodletters: Her 42 Presidents
Three
presidents don’t count. Two were in office too few months to send combatants
and civilians in foreign lands to their graves. As for the new third it is too
early to tell. All told, the 42 bloodletters have sent countless millions to
their graves, maimed millions, devastated cities, villages, and historic sites,
and done everything else imaginably and unimaginably atrocious. A conniving
dishonest president sent 750,000 or so of his own countrymen to their graves.
One president, who disingenuously and belatedly complained about the
“military/industrial complex,” indirectly sent thousands to their graves to
protect dictators and the likes of the United Fruit Company. One president is
the only human being so far to ever have dropped nuclear bombs on two populous
cities, not to win the war but to start a profitable Cold War with Russia. Two
presidents committed treason in order to get elected and proceeded to send more
than their share of people to their graves. The death toll in just one country
from one president’s decisions was over one million. The most recent past
president is the first so far to sit in the White House, pour over a hit list
like a Mafia don, and decide who gets killed next by drone strikes, never mind
that most of them are civilians, including children.
In Second Place: America’s Industries and their
Captains
The
industrial revolution swept away the cottage industry and ushered in
corporations, an intrinsically dysfunctional, corrupting innovation and with them
their captains, or CEOs, often bearing MBA credentials that alone predispose
them to mismanagement and malfeasance of one form or another. It is pointless to
name the captains. They come and go. The industries where they practice mostly
stay unchangeable.
There
are dozens of industries in America. The exact number is elusive because the
counters disagree on what an industry means. That being said, industries vary
in the scope and kind of their bloodletting, so it is possible to pick out the
worst ones. But before doing that, let’s briefly consider the following victims
of industry wide bloodletting: the U.S. government; the environment; employees;
and customers.
Victims
of Industry-Wide Bloodletting
1.
The U.S. Government. It is Corporate America’s flunky, a revenue drain of
misspending (the war budget) on behalf of the corpocracy, and a safety valve
for mismanaged and errant corporations that would flounder and fail were it not
for the U.S. government giving them myriad subsidies and overlooking and
tolerating constant corporate wrongdoing of the illegal kind.
2.
The Environment. All human beings depend on the environment. Industries do too,
on a wide scale, and they abuse the environment on a wide scale, polluting the
air we breathe and the water we drink.
3.
Employees. Corporations have Human Resource Departments, but corporate
employees are treated generally as disposable, not human, resources. Just ask Alice
who wails in Dilbert, “I am not a resource!” Oh, but yes you are Alice, and so
too are all real corporate employees except those in and close to the corner
office, and, of course, they are not called “employees.” Unsafe and unhealthy
working conditions topped by sweat shops; pittance compensation; reneged health
benefit plans; emasculation of organized labor; and automation and outsourcing
of jobs are the typical experiences of disposable employees.
4.
Customers. In fancy academic circles customers are theorized to be among
corporations’ important stakeholders. If that is so, customers are barely
holding on with excessive insurance and credit fees; and shoddy, unreliable,
unsafe, and unhealthy products and services.
The
Bloodiest Industries
They
stand out like a bloody thumb. Rank them as you will. Here’s my ranking: hands
down for first is the war and gun industry; second, the pharmaceutical industry;
the food and agricultural industry; the health care industry; the banking
industry; and lastly, the auto industry.
In
Closing: An Explanation and a Prediction
U.S.
presidents get away with bloody murder and more because the rest of the
corpocracy wants regime changes in resource rich foreign lands, and the
corpocracy gets away with bloody murder and more because it is the corpocracy.
Trained
as a behavioral scientist (with apologies to the real physical sciences) to
predict future human behavior I am going out on a limb to predict the future of
Homo sapiens. It will probably
not
exist later this century. Our species has been a deplorably irresponsible ancestor
of its descendants. And in modern times the blame rests mainly on America’s
corpocracy and its power elite.
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