THE MAINLINE MEDIA: ONE
ENORMOUS PROPAGANDA MACHINE

[Much of the material that follows was taken from Daniel Brandt's excellent study on elite methodologies, "Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite" (NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993).]

INTRODUCTION

Recently we received the following email from one of our subscribers. It reads as follows:

Hello Antipas,

Last year you sent me a story about the vast oil reserves and their contribution to the illegal bombing campaign conducted by Clinton. The story was very well written and very believable but I found nothing in any other news outlet to support your claims not even from some of the new media net outlets. Now there is a story out from the Washington Post that supports your claim and I am happy to send the story to you as an attachment. Keep up the good work. [The report by the Post, of course, comes "a day late and a dollar short" insofar as Kosovo and Bosnia are concerned - but at least the Post is finally coming clean; please see "Vast Oil Field Found" by David B. Ottaway, (Washington Post, May 16, 2000, pg. A01) - Antipas editor.]

THE MAINLINE MEDIA: ONE
ENORMOUS PROPAGANDA MACHINE

All this, of course, comes as no surprise to us here at Antipas. Please see our four articles on the slanted reporting of the mainline media regarding the Kosovo crisis

(1) The Elite's Explanation Of What's Happening In Chechnya

(2) Kosovo And America: What's Going On?

(3) Mores Lies And Deception Concerning Kosovo

(4) Kosovo And Depleted Uranium Weapons

The very real fact of the matter is, America's mass media has become nothing more than an enormous propaganda machine for America's corporate elites and the U.S. government which those elites ultimately control. Take the collusion that took place between the government and CNN during the Kosovo "crisis:" the Dutch newspaper Trouw and the French magazine Intelligence Newsletter reported that during the Kosovo intervention, the U.S. Army's 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group brazenly placed its own people in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia to help in the "production of news" relating to the war. [Please see Alternative Press Review, "Bits and Pieces," (Spring, 2000) pg. 8.] The "collaboration" between CNN and PSYOPS was later confirmed by Major Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information Service.

But instead of condemning it, Collins hailed the CNN / U.S. government collusion of the news regarding Kosovo as the kind of "cooperation" the government was looking for insofar as the other major media are concerned. Indeed, at a recent closed-door symposium on "Special Operations" in Arlington, Virginia, the government went further and called for even more "aggressive measures" in spreading the "government (i.e., corporate) line" regarding critical matters on the elite's foreign and domestic agenda, and suggested that more "control" over the internet and private commercial satellites - coupled with a greater ability to wage electronic warfare against disobedient media - was also needed to push that agenda forward.

Not only that, but high ranking officers of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) talked about developing a methodology that eventually could be used to bring down "an informational cone of silence" on defiant and otherwise fractious members of the media - apparently (according to Alternative Press Review ) a subtle reference to what they did in Serbia when the U.S. bombed the Serbian state television RTS in Belgrade which killed fourteen people. Another SOCOM official suggested that NATO should have gone further and taken out the independent Serbian radio station B-92 (which is opposed to the current regime in Belgrade) since their coverage had not always conformed to official NATO propaganda, and had - as a result - occasionally embarrassed NATO briefers trying to get out the "party line" at various times during the conflict.

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND
MANIPULATION OF THE NEWS

It is absolutely mind-boggling the lengths to which the U.S. is prepared to go in controlling what the American people can and cannot hear. Take another example: how the government suppressed the real reason behind the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo "crisis." In October 1999, the London Observer and the Danish paper Politiken reported that the U.S. military, acting without authorization from other NATO countries, deliberately bombed the Chinese Embassy after learning it was transmitting military signals to Yugoslavian forces in Kosovo.

The story was picked up by a number of European newspapers but was virtually ignored by the mainstream media in America. According to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), numerous activists queried the New York Times why they had not reported on these allegations. However, Times editor Andrew Rosenthal claimed that his paper had thoroughly investigated the charges with the authors, but had been unable to verify the accuracy of their report. Suspecting that Rosenthal was being less than truthful, FAIR contacted the authors to verify Rosenthal's story and discovered that nobody from the Times had ever talked with them. And even more, FAIR also discovered that both the London Observer and Politiken had sources for their report which included not only current and former military and intelligence officials from NATO countries, but also a four-star general, who - out of disgust with the U.S. government's lies to the American people - had come forward to confirm the story. Plainly, what FAIR had unearthed was the Times colluding with the government to suppress information.

WHAT THE ELITES CAN'T
MANIPULATE, THEY SHUT DOWN

And it's not just in the United States that naked manipulation of the mainline media in the interests of the corporate elites is taking place - it's everywhere today! Moreover, it's not just manipulation of the mainline press, but it's also INTIMIDATION of the so-called "alternate press;" take what happened to the magazine Living Marxism (or LM), a radical left-leaning magazine in Britain which twitted the British elites once too often.

LM claimed that two mainstream reporters for the British TV news program ITN, Ian Williams and Penny Marshall, had faked pictures of Bosnian Serb war crimes. An image of an emaciated Bosnian was described by ITN as if the photo had been taken from outside a camp enclosed with barbed wire. In reality the camp was not enclosed and the Bosnian was actually standing in front of the barbed wire fence rather than behind it.

Nonetheless, ITN brought suit against LM for defamation, and the British courts found for ITN against LM. The judge who heard the matter, Judge Moreland, said that although LM's article might have been true, it didn't matter. He wrote, "Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their TV teams were mistaken (in fact, they were lying - editor) in thinking they were not enclosed by the barbed-wire fence, but does it matter?" Moreland concluded that it did not, and then promptly fined LM $500,000 which forced LM into bankruptcy. This kind of misuse of the legal system in England is an old "tried-and-true" practice there, and it's now spreading to the United States where increasing numbers of corporate giants are forcing those who twit and contradict them into the courts and embroiling them in extremely expensive litigation, forcing them consequently into bankruptcy.

PACIFICA RADIO: CO-OPTATION
OF OFFENDING MEDIA

Finally there's the matter of Pacifica Radio in Berkeley, California. Pacifica Radio - which has over the course of its history been attacked by the House un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, the Federal Communications Commission, and as "hate radio" by the U.S. Congress - was founded in 1951 as a radio station with an "alternate view." Pacifica is an advocate for radical left social issues such as militant forms of feminism, gay and lesbian issues, abortion, etc. But it was Pacifica's recent unrelenting opposition to NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, union busting, the use of "slave-wage factories" by Nike, Boeing, Ford, GE, and so forth in Mexico, China, Indonesia, etc. that aroused the wrath of the elites against them. The elites, it seems, could live with Pacifica's liberal views with regard to social issues, but what it could not tolerate was Pacifica's opposition to its economic agenda and its globalization policies.

In attacking Pacifica, however, the elites carefully crafted their assault to make it look like a case which pitted "responsible liberals" against "irresponsible liberals." To this end, they enlisted the aid of people like Jesse Jackson (founder of PUSH), Amy Goodman (whose program "Democracy Now" on WBAI in New York is a staple of social liberalism on the east coast), Samori Marksman (who helped develop Amy Goodman's program, "Democracy Now"), Dr. Helen Caldicott (who is a leading anti-nuclear activist), and others who - while they may be classified as "raging liberals" socially - are also in bed with the elites on economic matters (in other words, liberals who - like so many on the Right - have been "bought off" by the elites on economic issues, but whose social agendas the elites tolerate and are willing to fund).

Social issues for economic issues - that's the bargain the elites offer both liberals and conservatives alike. Play ball with the elites on economic issues, and the elites will fund your social agendas - and here the elites are "equal opportunity" corrupters. They are just as willing to corrupt the Left with their money as they are willing to corrupt the Right - it makes no difference to them.

Using their flunkies in the Clinton Administration - specifically Robert Coonrod, a former executive of the U.S. propaganda outlet, Radio Marti, who at the time the elites launched their attack against Pacifica, headed up the government's Corporation for Public Broadcasting - the elites put pressure on a number of Pacifica's Board members, including Pacifica's Executive Director Pat Scott and her successor Lynn Chadwick. Alternately they offered inducements and then threatened them. Eventually, both caved-in; after that, the rest of the Board capitulated as well. The elites (in cooperation with the now compliant Board) then launched a blistering campaign of intimidation of the station's staff, "brow-beating" perceived recalcitrants and firing those who refused to submit. In detailing what happened at Pacifica, award-winning journalist Robin Urevich wrote, "Questioning of authority inside the station became taboo ... It's proven next to impossible to encourage news and public affairs staff to question authority outside the station while suppressing disagreement inside."

By the time the elites had finished with Pacifica, Pacifica had been reduced to nothing more than another elite media outlet. True, they have been permitted continued liberty insofar as their liberal-left social agenda is concerned, but all attacks against the economic policies of the elites have now been stifled, and so much so that Pacifica nowadays presents itself as a champion of economic globalization.

THE ELITES: EQUAL OPPORTUNITY CORRUPTERS

In one form or another, this is precisely what is happening all over the country - to both the ideological Left and the ideological Right. For example, take what happened to Rush Limbaugh. When he first started in Sacramento as a radio talk-show host, Rush was a "Pat Buchanan economic nationalist" who opposed economic globalization; but today all that's changed. The elites "bought him off" by offering him money and his own New York syndicated radio talk-show. And the price? - end his opposition to economic globalization! He could talk till he was blue in the face about the Right's conservative social agenda, but that was it! - and the same is true of Oliver North, Michael Reagan and all the rest of them. As we said before, the elites are equal opportunity corrupters!

Indeed, there seems to be no end to the intimidation and deceit the corporate elites in the United States and throughout the West are willing to engage in insofar as the media is concerned. When the corporate press lauds the "unlimited possibilities" of free trade with China and talks up our expanding exports to that country [while failing to mention in any meaningful way that we are running a $400 billion dollar annual trade deficit (knowing all the while that this translates into over 400,000 lost high-paying manufacturing jobs on a NET basis - jobs which are being replaced by exceedingly low-paying service sector jobs, many of which are only part-time and pay no benefits)]; when the corporate media "talks up" the stock market and encourages the "little guy" to get in by encouraging legislation that would pour social security money from the pay checks of individual workers into an already over-heated stock market [knowing all the while that the prices of almost all of today's stocks are GROSSLY overvalued (with "price to earnings" ratios averaging better than 60:1 on the DOW and as high as 270:1 on the NASDAQ) and that the "little guy" is probably being set up to take "the hit" while the "big boys" get off scott free]; when the corporate media toes the corporate line insofar as Bosnia and Kosovo are concerned, and refers to the U.S. involvement there as "humanitarian interventions" (knowing all the while that what it's really all about is protecting elite oil investments in the Middle East and the Caspian basin), then it truly does seem that there are no lengths to which the corporate media won't go to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. Propaganda! That's what the news is all about today. Propaganda!

There are some of our subscribers who will, no doubt, have difficulty in believing that their wealthy friends in the elites - the same elites who so openly are funding their cultural agenda - are also pouring money (often very surreptitiously) into liberal-left organizations like Pacifica Radio. Why? - why would the same elites who pour money into Religious Right organizations and fund conservative think tanks like the Olin Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, etc. be funding the Left - the very people the Religious Right opposes? Why? - again, because in the end, all the elites care about is money! The elites are not idealogues, and in order to protect their money and advance their predatory economic policies, they are as willing to "buy off" the Left as they are willing to "buy off" the Right.

YOU DOUBT?

You still doubt? Well, to be honest, you're not alone. Most defenders on the political Left agree with you; they too like to believe that the elitist shoe is on the other foot (i.e., with conservative Christians exclusively), and note that their (i.e., the political Left's) critics are funded by certain conservative foundations. For example, Sara Diamond tracks the Olin Foundation and Smith-Richardson money behind Dinesh D'Souza and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), two of the more vocal critics of the liberal Left. Diamond points out that the Smith-Richardson Foundation has its own CIA connections, even though they pale in significance alongside the Carnegie - Ford - Rockefeller nexus.

But Diamond's major error is in framing her arguments in terms of "Right and Left." This allows the real dynamics to escape her radar - and, again, it's not just her radar, but the radar of most evangelical Christians on the opposite side of the cultural divide. While both the ideological Right and the ideological Left take ideas seriously - too often a characteristic of those who lack power in this world - the elites are not weighed down by such concerns. The fact is, the elites operate at a level which transcends Right and Left - all they care about is money. [Please see Sara Diamond, "The Funding of the NAS." In Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (Saint Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 1992), pp. 89-96. This essay first appeared in Z Magazine, February 1991.]

CREATING A SMOKE SCREEN TO
HIDE WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON

What's really in play here is not a "Right / Left" dynamic (at least insofar as the elites are concerned), but a procedure which the elites have unleashed designed to enrich them while pauperizing the rest of mankind - which is exactly what the "black horse" of the Apocalypse signifies: a terrible personage in whose hand is a pair of balances and an enigmatic poem which issues forth from his lips:

"A measure of wheat for a penny [literally - denarius, a Greek coin which represented a WHOLE DAY’S wages], and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine." (Rev. 6:6)

The meaning of this, according to Dwight Pentecost of Dallas Theological Seminary, is that the circumstances of most men and women as the end approaches will be reduced by the economic machinations of the elites to such that they will have to labor a whole day simply to buy a loaf of bread or three measures of barley. But the second part of the verse ["... and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine ..."] means that the hardship of those days will not extend to the world's globalist elites who have evidently allied themselves with the anti-Christ - only the rich in the ancient world could afford oil and wine. [Please see Dwight Pentecost, Things To Come, Dallas Theological Seminary.]

And it is precisely this process - the one signified by the Black Horse of the Apocalypse - that is currently at work in today's economy, the process of economic globalization which the elites have unleashed on an unsuspecting world designed to move manufacturing facilities out of nations which pay their workers a living wage, maintain adequate labor standards, and are concerned about meaningful ecological standards to those segments of the world where labor is cheapest, work standards are minuscule, and ecological concerns are non-existent - and in order to hide what they are doing, the elites are playing the ideological Left off against the ideological Right, and in doing so creating enough confusion that very few people can see what's really happening. What the elites are doing here is continuing to sell their products at the same prices they were selling them at when these products were being produced in the First World, and pocketing the money they've saved in labor costs.

That's what's really happening, and the "money trail" leaves no doubt as to all this. Facts are facts insofar as this money is concerned. The Left is receiving vast amounts of elite money [all for the purpose of "buying them off" and neutralizing their leadership (just as much of the leadership of the evangelical community has been "bought off") - and the Left has been receiving this money for a long time; consider the following examples, some of which extend backwards thirty or forty years:

• Student leaders James Kunen and Carl Oglesby both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with the SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory. [Please see James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (New York: Avon Books, 1970); please also see Steve Weissman, Big Brother and the Holding Company (Palo Alto CA: Ramparts Press, 1974).
• Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents. [Please see AP in San Francisco Examiner, June 21, 1986.]
• The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture. [Please see Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).]
• Feminist leader Gloria Steinem and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium. (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton's, didn't hurt his career either.) [Please see Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 483-4, 727; please also see Richard Cummings, The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1985).]
• Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence. [Please see Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 337.]

Again, does this surprise you? It probably does, but remember what the essence is of the bargain the elites have made with those who "play ball with them (i.e., the leadership of the Left and the Right):" cooperate with us on economic issues, and we will fund your social agendas - and here they are just as willing to corrupt the Left with their money as they are willing to corrupt the Right - it makes no difference to them. The fact is, they actively promote the "Left / Right dichotomy" (i.e., social liberals against social conservatives) because it keeps average Americans off balance and hides what the elites are really up to.

This is exactly the conclusion that Daniel Brandt reached ten years ago in his penetrating article, "Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite" (NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993). Brandt, in a piercing series of articles carried by NameBase Newsline in 1993-'94, tracked the funding proclivities of the elites over a period of some thirty years (essentially, 1963 - 1993) and discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that the money behind most of the so-called "New Age Movement," the militant feminists, the gay and lesbian agenda, etc. was elite money; not only that, but most of the "big names" in these movements were receiving money on a PERSONAL basis from the same sources. This, of course, is the same conclusion that Constance Cumbey, working from a somewhat different perspective than Brandt's, reached in her landmark study on the New Age, Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow.

THE HISTORY OF THE ELITE'S SUPPORT OF THE LEFT

Over the last year and a half we have spent a good deal of time discussing the effort by the elites to corrupt the Right, and most especially Christian conservatives. But Christians need to realize that they are not the only "game" in town. Conserative Christians need to take note of this fact! It's time now to turn our attention to the Left.

The effort to "buy off" the Left began in the early 1960s. The instrument the elite used initially was the CIA, but when Ramparts blew the whistle on the CIA's domestic cultural activities in 1967, President Johnson appointed a committee consisting of elitists Nicholas Katzenbach (Rhodes scholar and former Ford Foundation fellow), OSS old-boy John Gardner (Carnegie Corporation president, 1955-1965), and CIA director Richard Helms to study the problem.

It was clear to Katzenback et. al. that they could no longer use a government agency like the CIA to buy the Left (or for that matter, the Right) off. They needed a new cover - and they found that cover in a plethora of new elite institutions and foundations that began to surface after the Second World War - growing from about 2,200 in 1955 to more than 18,000 in 1967 when Katzenbach turned to them for help in subverting both the ideological Right and the Ideological Left. In doing so, Katzenbach created "public-private mechanism" [the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)] which mixed public and private funds - and so much so that by now it has become all but impossible to distinguish among the complicated overlapping networks of CIA funding, NED funding, and funding by foundations such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller. The same people are behind all three (i.e., CIA funds, the NED, and the private foundations and institutions) - buying first the conservatives off, then the liberals. Meanwhile, the elites get richer every day.

HOW THE LEFT-WING FUNDING MECHANISM WORKS:
A CASE STUDY; THE CCF & "BLACK NATIONALISM

Take, for example, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was funded initially by the CIA [which, over the course of its checkered history has proven itslef to be nothing more than a "handmaiden" of the elites (please see our article on this entitled, )] - and after that was exposed (i.e., that the money behind the CCF was CIA money) - by the Ford Foundation. CCF created magazines, published books, and conducted conferences throughout the world encouraging multicultural and "diversity" programs that are anathema to the Religious Right, but which - at the same time - encouraged "lefties" in Europe to embrace Western capitalism and economic globalism. (Please see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989).

And it wasn't just in Europe that the CIA was running "new Left" programs that were anathema to conservative Christians, it was also busy in Africa. In an article entitled "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer" that first appeared in 1969 in Ramparts and was reprinted in the Black Panther newspaper and elsewhere, members from the Africa Research Group presented convincing evidence that "the CIA has promoted black cultural nationalism to reinforce neo-colonialism (i.e., economic globalism) in Africa." In the introduction to their article, the Africa Research Group added that "activists in the black colony within the United States can easily see the relevance to their own situation; in many cases the same techniques and occasionally the same individuals are used to control the political implications of Afro-American culture." [Please see Dan Schechter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney, "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer," Ramparts, June 1969, pp. 25-33. Reprinted with an introduction in Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl van Meter, and Louis Wolf, eds., Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa (Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1979).

In other words, elite money - the same elite money that was flowing into "black nationalism" in Africa in order to promote the murderous regimes that had taken hold in Nigeria, the Congo, etc. (regimes which the elites, nonetheless, could count on to promote access by the West's multinationalists to the riches of Africa) - was also flowing into radical black groups in the United States in order to "buy them off" for capitalism and free trade in the same way it was buying off black nationalists in Africa. The fruits of this deceitful and hideous "trade-off" can be seen in the strange silence of leading black groups throughout the United States on issues like NAFTA, the WTO, the World Bank, etc. - issues that adversely impact the black community in the United States far more than they do the white community.

The elites have "bought them all off." Indeed, since 1947, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, all in cooperation with the CIA, have been funding liberal-left cultural programs at major U.S. universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Columbia for the purpose of "buying off" the Left insofar as the elites economic agenda is concerned.[Please see Sigmund (not Sara) Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 371 pages; please also see David Horowitz, "Sinews of Empire," Ramparts, October 1969, pp. 32-42.]

Consider the schizophrenic history of the Ford Foundation insofar as "Right / Left" politics are conderned: the Ford Foundation began supporting feminist groups and women's studies programs in the late '60s and early '70s - just about the same time they were busy training Indonesian elites (using Berkeley professors as instructors) to impose a military dictatorship on Indonesia - a take-over of Indonesia (led by the CIA and supported by Christian missionaries) that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Do the folks at the Ford Foundation suffer from "split personality?" - or were they pushing the same battle (i.e., economic globalization) on another front? It would appear to be the latter. The elite knows exactly what it's doing, and it is remarkably consistent.

What it has been doing is stripping workers in Europe and the United States of their pay by shipping their jobs overseas where the work is done "Third World" workers at a tiny fraction of what workers were getting in the United States and Europe, and the elites have been pocketing the difference. To keep average Americans from focusing on what they have been up to, they have been busy inflaming the ideological Right against the ideological Left. And the economic repercussions on average Americans has been breath-taking.

For example, the average weekly take home pay of a worker who entered the work force in 1989 is $5.68 less today than thirty years ago. This is also reflected in hourly wages. Compared to 1959, there has been a slight increase, 60 cents an hour. But hourly wages are down from their peak in 1973. The 1950s were our boom time. In that one decade hourly wages grew by 83 cents. It took the following three decades to add a mere 60 cents. Families made do by doubling up in the work force. Between 1955 and 1989 female participation in the work force rose from 35.7 percent to 57.4 percent. Even so, family income stayed flat. Median family income in 1973 was $32,109. [Please see Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Deficit by Default" (14th edition of an annual series beginning with Fiscal Year 1976), July 31, 1990, pp. xiv - xvii.]

Christians should think about all this the next time a speaker from the Olin Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, etc. and the various Christian groups that elite money supports (i.e., Concerned Women of America, Wycliffe, the Navigators, Dr. Dobson, etc.) show up at their churches or at one of their conferences to speak. Who's really responsible for "death of morality" in this country - the gays and lesbians, the militant feminists, or the globalist elites who have forced mothers into the work place leaving their children to the "tender mercies" of the streets. The fact is, more American women are working just to keep the family going, then they are to enhance themselves in a career. The flip side of increased opportunities for American women is that they can no longer choose to stay out of the labor force. As David Rieff asks, "If multiculturalism is what its proponents claim it is, why has its moment seen the richest one percent of Americans grow richer and the deunionization of the American workplace? There is something wrong with this picture." [Please see David Rieff, "Multiculturalism's Silent Partner: It's the newly globalized consumer economy, stupid." Harper's, August 1993.]

Consider also what's been happening to African-Americans. Ideological conservatives get mad as all he-l about affirmative action, but what they fail to realize is that the only people who have gotten ahead as a result of affirmative action the Jesse Jacksons of the black community and black personalities on television who justify what they've got by emphasizing how far we've come thanks to the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile the young in the ghettos, and increasingly even on campuses, know that these front-office PR slots mean nothing insofar as average blacks are concerned. It's not a problem of inequality; for the next generation there's already a rough equality in anticipated misery. The big problem is that opportunities are vanishing altogether, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Affirmative action (the PR phrase is "equal opportunity" and the accurate phrase is "preferential treatment") is a facade, affecting only the low-level and public-interface positions in large corporations. After instructing their human resource departments along federal guidelines, the elites pretty much the same, secure in the knowledge that the low-level hires will statistically offset the white males behind their closed office doors.

Feminists, of course, call this the "glass ceiling" - but for young white males without exceptional advantages, it's closer to a glass floor. Math doesn't play language games: if you quota something in you also quota something out. Someone must pay for the sins of the elite. When the diversity-mongers target white males, at best they are almost half correct -- many (not all) older white males have enjoyed advantages. But then when they make someone pay, they are all wrong: it's always the young and innocent who bear the brunt of their policies. It would make as much sense for U.S. institutions to impose sanctions on young women today, simply because historically they have enjoyed exemption from the military draft.

Brand says that the fact that affirmative action appeared so rapidly over twenty years ago, without opposition from entrenched interests, should have provided a clue as to what was really going on. It may have been designed to defuse civil unrest, but this remedy was forced from above, not from below. In a poll commissioned by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which plans to organize minorities in support of traditional family values, only 36.6 percent of Hispanics, 37.6 percent of blacks, and 10 percent of whites agreed with the statement that "African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities should receive special preference in hiring to make up for past inequalities." [Ralph Z. Hallow, "Christian Coalition to Court Minorities: Blacks, Hispanics Back Key Stands," Washington Times, 10 September 1993, p. A5.]

As Brandt says,

"The ruling elite are experts at manipulating their own interests; they know how to divide and conquer, which is why they continue to rule. As inequality becomes increasingly obvious, those who are less equal begin to see society in terms of "us" and "them." The dominant culture shades this definition by using the mass media to emphasize our differences at every opportunity. Conventional wisdom becomes articulated within narrow parameters, which is another way of saying that the questions offered for public debate are rigged."

"The objective is to define "us" and "them" in ways that do not threaten the established order. Today everyone can see that there is more Balkanization on campus, and more racism in society, than there was when affirmative action began over twenty years ago. And for twenty years now one can hardly get through the day without being reminded that race is something that matters, from TV sitcoms all the way down to common application forms (it would have been unthinkable to ask about one's race on an application form in the 1960s). We are not fighting the system anymore, we're fighting each other. [Please see "Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite" (NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993).]

Brandt says that multiculturalism fails to challenge the underlying reality behind all affirmative action rationales, namely that in a "free trade" regime fun in the interests of the global elites it's just poor business sense to build a factory in the U.S. if you can build it in Mexico. In 1983 the cost of an hour's labor time here was $12.26. The hourly savings for using foreign labor that year amounted to $10.81 in Mexico, $10.09 in Singapore, $6.06 in Japan, and $10.97 in Korea. [Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington: 1985), p. 435, Table 132.]

The fact that economic globalization is pauperizing a vast portion of the American population is of little concern to the elites. They are citizens of the world, and no one - now not even the Soviet bloc - stands in their way. They have no need for borders; absolute, unfettered free trade is what they want and what they will eventually get. Indeed, what many on Wall Street really prefers is unrestricted immigration [which is why America's borders remain so porous - the elites refuse to countenance (fund) a truly closed border regime]. Porous borders and the illegal immigration that such borders promote drive down wages and neuter labor unions. For the elites, private security provides insulation and "social decay" is just an irrelevant phrase.

The owners of corporate America have the resources to move offshore or south of the border, while the rest of us are here for the duration. If we were all tightening our belts together, there might be some basis for programs designed to redistribute opportunities. But the rich are getting richer at the same time that they institute policies such as affirmative action and NAFTA. Brandt says it doesn't pass the smell test.

Brandt, an old fashioned leftist writes:

"The campus left speaks of equality, and then forgets about justice by ignoring economic ... (issues). This failure is so fundamental that multiculturalists should no longer be considered "leftists." As long as they claim this description, some of us - those who still feel that elites ought to be accountable - are beginning to feel more comfortable as "populists."

And this is precisely what is leading economic leftists (socialists, labor leaders (at least those who have not yet been "bought off" by the elites) and right-wing populists team up in demonstrations against the elite in Seattle (the WTO demonstration), Washington (the demonstrations against the World Bank and the IMF) and soon in Philadelphia at the Republican National Convention. [Please see "Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite" (NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993).]

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