Reagan Beacon of Economic Destruction

Published on Sunday, July 10, 2011 by Al Jazeera

Reagan Mythology is Leading US Off a Cliff

During Reagan's presidency, the US went from a creditor to debtor nation and marked a take-off for financial inequality.

by Paul Rosenberg

As things stand today, the US is hurtling toward a budget showdown in less than a month. Either President Obama will once again capitulate to extreme Republican budget-slashing demands, making Democrats seem as much of a threat to Medicare as Republicans, and virtually ensuring a GOP electoral sweep in 2012, or the US will default on its debt for the first time in its history, most likely plunging the world economy back into another five-continent recession, also costing Democrats the 2012 elections. These are the options left for a president and a political class completely divorced both from reality, and its own history of how one of the three greatest US presidents of all time steered the country from the brink of collapse eight decades ago

Corporate CowboyEntirely forgetting the real history of how Franklin D Roosevelt used activist government to save American capitalism from itself, the entire US political establishment is instead hypnotized by the false history woven around its most over-hyped president of all time: Ronald Reagan. Idolatry of Reagan's supposed tax-cutting wonders propels the now widespread economic belief that up is down, that cutting government spending is the way out of - rather than into - a severe recession. At the same time, idolatry of Reagan's supposed political wonders propels GOP extremists to ignore all other considerations.

Because of this hypnotism, America's political establishment has barely even begun to notice two unconventional possible ways out that remain, neither of which require anything from Congress, but both of which need bold presidential leadershipala FDR.

The first is to ignore the debt ceiling, relying directly on the 14th Amendment's statement that: "the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned". The second is a proposal from maverick Republican Ron Paul to have the Federal Reserve Board destroy the $1.6 trillion in government bonds that it currently holds, which progressive economist Dean Baker recently wrote, "actually makes a great deal of sense". It might take some arm-twisting on Obama's part, but Congress has no say over the Fed, and central bankers have no great love of spreading financial panic.

In anything close to a sane world, either one of these two bold strokes would be widely hailed for avoiding a reckless threat to the still-fragile world economy. But we do not live in a sane world, and the idolatry of Ronald Reagan is one of the principle reasons why. This is why it behooves us to review some of the principle lies involved with Ronald Reagan's record, focusing specifically on the economy. What follows is but a brief rundown.

The idea that Reagan produced a uniquely booming economy is false

First, Reagan's record on the economy was not just exaggerated by his boosters, it's almost exactly the opposite of what they claim. It was a fairly ordinary time by the most common measurements of economic growth, looking good only in comparison with a selective time-slice of the 1970s. But once you start looking beneath the surface even the tiniest bit, the picture turns very dark indeed.

In terms of the most basic measure of economic growth - increase in gross domestic product (GDP) - the vaunted "Reagan boom" was an unremarkable period of time. If we look at Reagan's eight years, and compare them with Clinton's and JFK/LBJ's, Reagan comes in dead last, with 31.7 per cent compared with Clinton's 33.1 per cent and JFK/LBJ's 47.1 per cent. Only Nixon/Ford's eight years make Reagan look good, with a mere 26.2 per cent growth.

The idea that Reagan brought prosperity is true only for those at the top, not for average American workers

If we examine incomes, we discover that Reagan's eight years marked a real take-off for inequality, while average incomes stagnated. The income growth of the top once per cent was ten times that of everyone else during his term: 61.5 per cent versus 6.15 per cent. Under JFK/LBJ, the bottom 99 per cent actually did better: gaining 30.9 per cent compared with 26.9 per cent for the top once per cent. And while inequality continued to rise under Clinton, the bottom 99 per cent did more than twice as well as they did under Reagan, gaining 16.7 per cent compared with 56.6 per cent for the wealthiest one per cent.

The idea that Reagan was good for the American economy in general is false

Reagan was a disaster for the American economy in at least four fundamental ways:

Debtor Nation Status: Under Ronald Reagan, the US went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years - and we have remained the largest debtor nation ever since. In 1981, Reagan's first year in office, the US was a net creditor to the tune of $140.9bn. By 1984, that had shrunk to just $3.3bn - and the next year, the US shifted from being a creditor nation to a debtor nation for the first time in almost 70 years. By 1987, the US was a net debtor by $378.3bn - the largest debtor nation in the world. The figure rose to $532.5bn by the end of 1988, when Reagan left office.

De-Industrialization: While the percentage of industrial jobs in the economy had been declining since the 1950s, with the growth of the service sector, the raw number of industrial jobs continued to increase right up through 1979, just before the 1980/1982 double-dip recession. From that year onward, the number of industrial jobs began declining, with a smattering of years when the number would increase. In addition to the raw number of jobs declining, the number of unionized jobs and the number of jobs with American companies declined even further.

Personal indebtedness: The income stagnation that began under Reagan has had a devastating impact on personal savings. While it fluctuated considerably, the personal savings rate had more than doubled between 1949 and 1982, from 5.0 per cent up to 11.2 per cent. Ironically, one of the main stated purposes of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts, the basis for Reagan's 1981 tax cut bill, was to boost personal savings. Instead, they plunged precipitously, falling all the way down into negative territory by 2006.

Government Indebtedness: The idea that Reagan was "fiscally conservative" is false. The story of government indebtedness was even more bleak. Before Reagan, debt really wasn't a problem for America. From World War II to 1981, every president had reduced the debt as a percentage of GDP, except for the divided term of Nixon-Ford, which saw a tiny 0.2 per cent increase.

The debt-to-GDP ratio is much more significant than the debt alone, since the GDP represents the nation's total capacity to pay off the debt. And from WWII to 1981, the debt-to-GDP ratio fell from almost 120 per cent down to just down to just 32.5 per cent. The sharpest drop came early on, but even during the supposed "big government" heyday of the Kennedy/Johnson years, the ratio fell by over 16 per cent in eight years. Conservatives then might have complained about the debt - and they certainly did - but no one knowledgeable about economics took them seriously, because the debt grew significantly slower than our ability to repay it.

During Reagan's term, this changed dramatically. The ratio rose by over 20 per cent, and it rose another 13 per cent under his successor, George Bush Sr. It took a Democrat, Bill Clinton, to get the ratio headed down again - by almost 10 per cent during his two terms, before Bush Jr sent it skyrocketing again - by almost 28 per cent. It's rising fast under Obama as well - but that's to be expected as a result of the worst recession since the 1930s.

The idea that Ronald Reagan consistently opposed tax increases is false

The idea that Ronald Reagan always opposed tax increases is completely untrue. He raised taxes dramatically as Governor of California in 1967 - by a whopping 30 per cent. But he also raised them as president - 11 times. Sure, his 1981 tax increase, along with three smaller increases, was much larger than his total tax cuts. But his willingness to raise as well as lower taxes would have made him at least somewhat compatible with President Obama, and totally unacceptable to movement conservatives today, especially Tea Partiers.

Bruce Bartlett was a leading supply-side economist in the 1970s, who helped draft the Kemp-Roth tax bill as a staff economist for Congressman Jack Kemp. He went on to serve in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations. In an April 2010 blog post, listing Reagan's 11 presidential tax hikes and four tax cuts, Bartlett wrote: "It may come as a surprise to some people that, once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, Republicans actually cared enough about budget deficits that they thought raising taxes was necessary to bring them down. Today, Republicans believe that deficits are nothing more than something to ignore when they are in power and to bludgeon Democrats with when they are out of power."

Bartlett was obviously overstating his case, given how the debt skyrocketed under Reagan. But things would have clearly been much, much worse if Reagan had never raised taxes. And if Reagan were around today, he would no doubt be denounced as a "socialist" for all the tax increases he signed onto.

The idea that Reagan's tax cuts spurred job creation is false

As noted in Bartlett's table of tax cuts and increases, Reagan followed up his 1981 tax cuts with increases in 1982 and 1983. And for good reason: The unemployment rate - already high when Reagan took office - continued to skyrocket after his tax cuts were passed - peaking at 11.2 percent in 1983, when the jobless rate finally started to come down. The exact mixture of cause and effect over such an extended period may be subject to debate. But one thing is certain: Reagan's 1981 tax cuts did not magically result in job creation in anything like the way that conservatives nowadays mindlessly claim.

The idea that Reagan changed America's mind about taxes and the role of government is false

Political scientist James Stimson, author of Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, has constructed an index of economic liberalism based on hundreds of public opinion questions asked repeatedly over the years. This index reached a low-point in 1980 and rose dramatically for the next seven years, reaching a plateau at levels not seen since Nixon's first term, as if Reagan's rhetoric were convincing more and more people of the exactly the opposite of what he was saying.

This rise was reflected, for example, in four questions asked in the General Social Survey, the most-cited data source for social scientists after the US Census. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people saying the government was spending "too little" nationally increased 27.4 per cent on health care, 32.9 per cent on education, 67.8 per cent on welfare and 46.7 per cent on the environment. The questions all reminded people that increased taxes might be required if more was spent.

What's more, 20 years after Reagan's election, in 2000, federal tax receipts as a percent of GDP were up 8.4 per cent over what they had been the year Reagan was elected, indisputable proof that government's role had ultimately not decreased across that time-span.

TIME Magazine Cover: Why Obama ♥ Reagan. Feb. 7, 2011The idea that Reagan was a singularly popular president is false

Reagan was quite fortunate in getting re-elected in 1984 when his popularity was particularly high, but that was not true of his record in general. According to Gallup, Reagan's overall average approval rating was only 52.8 per cent, lower than John F Kennedy (70.1 per cent), Dwight Eisenhower (65 per cent), GHW Bush (60.1 per cent), Bill Clinton (55.1 per cent), and Lyndon Johnson (55.1 percent). It's only modestly higher than George W Bush (49.4 per cent) and Richard Nixon (49.1 per cent).

Summing Up

Surveying all these lies in a single panorama, it should be clear that neither Reagan's economic record nor his political one should provide any case at all for embracing conservative economics. Quite the opposite: They clearly point to failure on both counts. What's more, the only reason his mythology is possible at all is because he significantly backtracked by raising taxes, when doing otherwise would have completely exposed the failure of his principal economic intentions.

President Obama is as drunk on Reagan's kool-aid as anyone else in Washington today. It will be difficult indeed for him to break the spell in time to save the country - and himself - from repeating the economic disaster that conservative policies led to just before he was elected.

One thing about Reagan is true, however: His wife did play a significant role in saving him from following ideologues into dangerous folly on a number of occasions. Perhaps Michelle Obama is America's last best hope. Perhaps she can see what her husband thus far cannot.

© 2011 Al Jazeera

Book Review: In the Claw of the Tiger

Cover of In the Claw of the Tiger

"Claw" A Gripping Tale - Book Review by Susanni Douville

POW Camp - Philippines

On a crisp autumn day in October 1940 plucky Franklin J. ("Porky") LaCoste of the small mill town of Athol, Massachusetts and five of his closest friends enlisted in the United States Army, visions of an expenses-paid vacation in Paradise - Hawaii - dancing in their heads. Little did the boys realize that, following an all-too-brief detour to Paradise, they would begin a descent into Hell.

In her powerful, moving novel, In the Claw of the Tiger, author G. Thomson Fraser chronicles the enmeshment of iconic Everyman Porky in the horrors of World War II as he and his compatriots endure the Japanese incursion into the Philippines in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the notorious Bataan Death March, internment in sub-human, malaria-ridden conditions in Japanese-run Philippine POW camps and, finally, transport to Japan in the dark and airless holds of "Death Ships" to toil in ore and copper mines. 

Porky (left), Billy and a friend enjoy PI before the war

Improbably, and thankfully for the reading public, the diminutive Porky (who stands only five-feet four-and-a-half inches tall) survived to tell the tale and, many years later, to encounter a particularly keen listener in novelist Fraser, of the neighboring town of Orange, Massachusetts. Fraser, who interviewed Porky periodically over a five-year period and undertook extensive historical research, captures his story with affection, humor and warmth. 


Make no mistake: In the Claw of the Tiger is a war novel; Porky and Company come face-to-face with the bloody, the evil and the unsavory, which Fraser does not flinch from describing. Yet it is just as much the story of Porky and his friends; of Athol; of great loyalties and losses; of the silliness and high-jinx of youth, and of sometimes life-saving acts of kindness from quarters least expected, including occasionally enemy quarters. In a certain sense, if you know the story of the Bataan survivors, or of World War II, or of war in general, you know this story. But you don't know it through the eyes of this novel's compelling, likable and hitherto unsung hero, Porky LaCoste, who survived by dint of grit, resourcefulness and, perhaps most valuable of all, an innate kindness to others that in certain critical moments happened to be repaid.

Porky (left), Billy, and Herman

Fraser's novel is enlivened by the presence of a number of personal photographs of Porky, his family, and the friends who enlisted with him on that fateful fall day in 1940, some depicting their carefree transport to Hawaii and stopover there and early days in the Philippines, before Japanese bombs struck in December 1941. As Fraser does in the text of the novel, she interweaves the personal and historic by adding to the mix a number of public photos depicting the great events that served as backdrop to the boys' adventures and tribulations, including General King's surrender of the Philippines to the Imperial Army. 

Visiting grandmother, stepfather and cousin in Athol before the war

In the Claw of the Tiger contains, in an appendix, the full text of three FDR fireside chats, "On the Declaration of War with Japan," broadcast on December 9, 1941; "Report on the Home Front," broadcast on October 12, 1942; and the "State of the Union Message to Congress," broadcast on January 11, 1944. 

In his brilliant 1941 speech, President Roosevelt noted: "We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children. We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini. So we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows." It is chillingly apparent that, without the courage, vision and determination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the on-the-ground heroism of another Franklin - Franklin ("Porky") LaCoste - and countless others like him, this promise could not have been kept. In penning this novel, Fraser, who was born in December 1945 - scant months after Porky was liberated from his grueling years of internment and deprivation - provides some small measure of overdue thanks from the Baby Boom generation and all others born since for the world of relative safety, security and freedom we have been privileged to enjoy. 

Susanni Douville

Susanni Douville, a resident of Portland, Maine, has copy-edited and written for The Hartford Courant and The Washington Post, among other publications. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Oberlin College, a Master of Science degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a JD from the Yale School of Law. A Baby Boomer herself, Douville is the niece of Fraser - but hastens to add that all opinions expressed herein are sincerely held.

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How to Respond to a Poison Pen Letter, and Awaken the Global heart

 Columnist Opeyemi Parham, MD

How to Respond to a Poison Pen Letter, and Awaken the Global heart
Spirit moves in mysterious ways.  I am trying to ramp up my computer literacy and set an intention of focusing more on blogging. So I began by going to my wordpress blog site, and trying to really understand it’s potential. That meant checking into features that I had previously ignored, like the comments section.
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog titled, “I Hate Money”.  This week, I found a comment/response to that blog from back in April. It reads as follows:
“Speaking as one of your former friends, I know from personal experience why you didn’t receive much money: you’re a user. I paid you once to assist me for a project, and you shorted me on your time. In my generosity, I paid you in advance, and yet you never reimbursed me for the extra money. I’ve also witnessed you borrowing money from other friends, and also not paying them back.
All of your misinformed and magical mumbojumbo, doesn’t detract from the reality of your life: you’re poor because you fucked up your potentially lucrative career. It’s not anyone’s responsibility but yours, to straighten your life out.
It’s all finally caught up with you, Camilla. Eventually, you’ll run out of friends, family, and lovers to filch off of. I’ll bet that you lack the courage to print this, too.”
Wow, pretty nasty. And the thing that really got to me (besides the anonymous nature of the message) was that it really addresses some of my shadows.  I feel terribly incompetent financially, and I am still running like a hamster in a cage to “get back on top” with respect to my relationship with money. The part about using folks and borrowing from friends without repaying them really hit home. The part about “fucking up my lucrative career” was like salt in a wound, as I move from three years working as a clerk to a new, part time job as a receptionist, grateful that I have money to pay my rent.
And as I said, Spirit moves in mysterious ways.  The morning I found the comment, my daily meditation using tarot cards had revealed “guilt” from the Osho deck and “crossroads” from the goddess oracle deck. My  “magical mumbojumbo” had left me ready for something to happen that day that would be about a crossroads with respect to guilt issues. I was ready for that attack. It helped me clarify my priorities. I will be working with Jean Gran, who is a financial recovery counselor (see http://www.jeangran.com/) really taking the bull by the horns.
For about a day, I really couldn’t imagine who disliked me enough to send a comment like that.  I tried to respond to the e-mail address listed
My e-mail was returned, with the address no longer in existence.
And all this happened this week, during The Days of Awe, culminating this morning with Yom Kippur.  Once again, that magical mumbojumbo has deep meaning and significance.
I woke up this morning and knew exactly who had sent me the poison pen letter.
What an epiphany.
I have no need to name this person; let it suffice that it is a  Jewish man.  I found myself rapidly moving from anger and hurt over the words of that comment to a deep understanding for how injured this former friend really is.  I am not faking it; I actually respond to stress more and more with a “tend and befriend” response, rather than the taker culture’s “fight/fly/ or freeze” patterning.
How appropriate that this entire incident resolves itself on a high holy day in Judaism, when forgiveness and atonement are central.
I forgive myself my clumsiness and inadequate focus on money, and I set my intention to right it.
I forgive my name caller and attacker. I deeply understand and acknowledge the wounding done to this man by his own family, and his religion. I hold compassion and understanding, having witnessed him make poor choices in personal relationships and witnessed him suffer the consequences. I will send him love and light…from the appropriate distance. I am pagan; no Christian martyrdom, here.
This is how we really do it—heal the world. Awaken the Global Heart. Tikkun Olam.

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Zinn A True Patriot

Published on Monday, August 2, 2010 by TruthDig.com

Why the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn

by Chris Hedges

Today I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain’s genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American society.
We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”
The power of Zinn’s scholarship—which I have watched over the past few weeks open the eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite—explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn on July 30, saw him as a threat. 
Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not advocate violence or support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators on several occasions. He was rather an example of how genuine intellectual thought is always subversive. It always challenges prevailing assumptions as well as political and economic structures. It is based on a fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and it is uniformly branded by the power elite as “political.” Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth. 
The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn’s activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn “in Reserve Index, Section A,” a classification that permitted agents to immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing has changed.
The file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of our national security state. And it seems to indicate that our security agencies prefer to hire those with mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality and little common sense. Take for example this gem of a letter, complete with misspellings, mailed by an informant to then FBI Director Hoover about something Zinn wrote.
“While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City, Indiana,” the informant wrote.  “This pamphlet was left in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I know is a DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number of ethnic groups move into our area in the last few years. We are in a war! And it doesn’t look like this pamphlet will help our Government objectives.”
Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone identified as Doris Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent says is Zinn’s sister, is interviewed “under a suitable pretext.” She admits that her brother is “employed at the American Labor Party Headquarters in Brooklyn.” That is all the useful information that is reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister gives a window into the quality of the investigations and the caliber of the agents who carried them out. 
FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a clumsy attempt to recruit Zinn as an informant, an attempt in which they admitted that Zinn “would not volunteer information” and that “additional interviews with ZINN would not turn him from his current attitude.” A year later, after another interrogation, an agent wrote that Zinn “concluded the interview by stating he would not under any circumstances testify or furnish information concerning the political opinions of others.”
While Zinn steadfastly refused to cooperate in the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, principals and college administrators were busy purging classrooms of those who, like Zinn, exhibited intellectual and moral independence. The widespread dismissals of professors, elementary and high school teachers and public employees—especially social workers whose unions had advocated on behalf of their clients—were carried out quietly. The names of suspected “Reds” were handed to administrators and school officials under the FBI’s “Responsibilities Program.” It was up to the institutions, nearly all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There rarely were hearings.  The victims did not see any purported evidence. They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their professions. The historian Ellen Schrecker estimates that between 10,000 and 12,000 people were blackballed through this process.
The FBI spent years following Zinn, and carefully cutting out newspaper articles about their suspect, to amass the inane and the banal. One of Zinn’s neighbors, Mrs. Matthew Grell, on Feb. 22, 1952, told agents that she considered Zinn and another neighbor, Mrs. Julius Scheiman, “to be either communists or communist sympathizers” because, the agents wrote, Grell “had observed copies of the Daily Workers in Mrs. Scheiman’s apartment and noted that Mrs. Scheiman was a good friend of Howard Zinn.”
The FBI, which describes Zinn as a former member of the Communist Party, something Zinn repeatedly denied, appears to have picked up its surveillance when Zinn, who was teaching at Spelman, a historically black women’s college, became involved in the civil rights movement. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He took his students out of the classroom to march for civil rights. Spelman’s president was not pleased.
“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”
Zinn in 1962 decried “the clear violations by local police of Constitutional rights” of blacks and noted that “the FBI has not made a single arrest on behalf of Negro citizens.” The agent who reported Zinn’s words added that Zinn’s position was “slanted and biased.” Zinn in 1970 was a featured speaker at a rally for the release of the Black Panther leader Bobby Seal held in front of the Boston police headquarters. “It is about time we had a demonstration at the police station,” Zinn is reported as telling the crowd by an informant who apparently worked with him at Boston University. “Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception.”
“America has been a police state for a long time,” Zinn went on. “I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”
Agents muse in the file about how to help their unnamed university source mount a campaign to have Zinn fired from his job as a professor of history at Boston University.
“[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU. Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s]  efforts for his removal.”
Zinn and the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan had traveled together to North Vietnam in January 1968 to bring home three prisoners of war. The trip was closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover sent a coded teletype to the president, the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and the White House situation room about the trip. And later, after Berrigan was imprisoned for destroying draft records, Zinn repeatedly championed the priest’s defense in public rallies, some of which the FBI noted were sparsely attended. The FBI monitored Zinn as he traveled to the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut to visit Berrigan and his brother Philip. 
“Mass murders occur, which is what war is,” Zinn, who was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972, according to the file, “because people are split and don’t think … when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn’t deserve to be obeyed. … To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government.”
Zinn testified at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to Zinn and Noam Chomsky. The two academics edited the secret documents on the Vietnam War, sections of which had appeared in The New York Times, into the four volumes that were published in 1971.
“During the Pentagon Papers jury trial, Zinn stated that the ‘war in Vietnam was a war which involved special interests, and not the defense of the United States,’ ” his FBI file reads.
By the end of the file one walks away with a profound respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of our internal security apparatus, to think that things have improved. There are today 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000 people, all of whom hold top-secret security clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together, the paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet.
We are amassing unprecedented volumes of secret files, and carrying out extensive surveillance and harassment, as stupid and useless as those that were directed against Zinn. And a few decades from now maybe we will be able to examine the work of the latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of thousands. Did any of the agents who followed Zinn ever realize how they wasted their time? Do those following us around comprehend how manipulated they are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but discredit and destroy social movements as well as protect the elite from those who would expose them? 
Zinn’s book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is revered because these men intimately know racism, manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this. Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth.  And he knew that when these myths implode it is the beginning of hope.
“If you were a Native American,” one of my students asked recently, “what would have been the difference between Columbus and Hitler?”

Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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• Inside Howard Zinn's FBI Files (thedailybeast.com)
• FBI Was Probing Howard Zinn For Criticizing Them (crooksandliars.com)
• FBI Releases 423-Page File On Author Howard Zinn [Surveillance] (gawker.com)