How the CIA Created a Ruling, Corporate Overclass in America By Len Hart

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_len_hart_080118_how_the_cia_created_.htm



The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.
--Steve Kangas, The Origins of the Overclass

The Bush administration will be forever associated with a "ruling overclass" --oligarchs who were the sole beneficiaries of Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982 and, later, several equally inequitable tax cuts during the Bush regime. It is no coincidence that the oligarchs likewise benefited in various ways from Bush's military adventures in the Middle East. GOP tax cuts are typically called "trickle down" theory. Reagan's Budget Director David Stockman called the theory that justifies them a "trojan horse".

Since Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982, "conservatives" myopically cite a mythical "Reagan Recovery" as proof of "Reaganomics", otherwise called supply-side economics. The right wing argument is simplistic and fallacious. It must be pointed out that following the tax cut, the nation plunged into recession, the worst since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression of 1929. Nevertheless, conservatives will persist in citing a three percent growth rate following two years of severe recession as proof that "wealth trickles down". This assertion fails to address key questions.

Who benefited from the recovery?

At some 3 percent how long did it take for the nation to regain lost ground?

Did Reagan's tax cuts bring about more growth than would have normally occurred?

The record shows that between 1979 and 1989 the growth rate was 3% --the same as the growth rate between 1973 and 1979! There was, then, no improvement with "voodoo economics" than without it. There was no "Reagan recovery"! Wealth did not trickloe down; it flowed upward at alarming rates. The nation had been plunged unnecessarily into recession upon a pack of lies. The only beneficiaries were those who were rich already.

However hard you may look, you will not find in the cold hard stats any confirmation of GOP/Reaganomics whatsoever. Go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the BEA! You will find, rather, confirmation of a more pernicious trend: the rich began to get even richer. The poor began to lose ground at alarming rates. It seems almost to have been deliberate. The late Steve Kangas believed it was deliberate just as I believe that the war against Iraq is a payoff to the robber barons that make up the Military/Industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned. Later, JFK would warn of the dangers posed by the CIA, which he proposed to "smash into a thousand pieces".


The following essay by the late Steve Kangas should be required reading. He makes the bullet proof case that the enrichment of the "overclass" is the work of radical "conservatives" who knew at the time that "trickle down" hardly describes the effect of inequitable tax cuts. Kangas' is supported by Ronald Reagan's own Budget Director, David Stockman, who later called "Reaganomics" a "trojan horse" insisted upon by radicals, a "noisy faction of Republicans"!

Kangas' work is a classic. Kangas himself was found shot to death just outside the office of the infamous Richard Mellon Scaife --the man who bankrolled the dubious attempt to buy witnesses against Bill Clinton! It is more than a mere footnote to history, that not even Scaife's millions succeeded in "buying" a single witness against Clinton. But I digress. The story that Kangas might well have paid for with his life is nothing less than the role played by the CIA in the creation of a permanent ruling "overclass" in America.

Stockman was right. Supply-side, otherwise called "trickle down" theory, was indeed a trojan-horse, about which it was known that it would create and support a class of oppressive oligarchs. Following is Kangas' essay in its entirety.

LONG AND COMPREHENSIVE ESSAY FOLLOWS--SEE LINK

Authors Website: http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio: Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The Existentialist Cowboy