The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history… the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority… One percent of the nation own a third of the wealth. The rest is distributed is such a way as to turn those in the 99% against each other…
In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers… doctors, lawyers, nurses… garbagemen and firemen. These people–the employed, the somewhat privileged–are drawn into alliance with the elites. They become the guards of the system: If they stop obeying, the system fails. …
At a time when the middle class is increasingly insecure economically the system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds… Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
The threat of unemployment has spread to white-collar workers, a college education is no longer a guarantee against joblessness… The poor are accustomed to being squeezed and always short of money, but the middle classes, too, have begun to feel the press.
With the Establishment’s inability to solve severe economic problems at home Americans might be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another reshuffling of the same deck, another New Deal, but radical change.
The levers of power [will] have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state–the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators…
Howard Zinn
