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www.NewDemocracyWorld.org Jimmy Carter: Myth vs. Reality
What Jimmy Carter actually did when he was president--the reality--has been almost entirely replaced in the minds of most people today with a myth, a public relations image of the man as almost a saint, a person who even in old age and immediately after leaving the hospital with a serious medical condition nonetheless resumes helping to build homes for poor people. Wow! What a guy. If we could only elect a president like Jimmy Carter again then imagine how wonderful our nation could be. This is powerful propaganda to make people retain hope that by working "within the system"--by using the election process--we can make the changes we need without having to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement. So let's examine the reality of Jimmy Carter's presidency. DOMESTIC POLICY To start with, we need to know what was happening in the United States that concerned the billionaire ruling class and its desires for presidential action just prior to Carter taking office. And then we need to see what Carter actually did in this regard when he was president. Here is what Dave Stratman wrote about that period in a book that is online (pdf) with the references for the footnotes: [begin extract from Stratman's book] Preparing the Way: The Story of the 1970s As the movements of the `60s gained momentum, the explosion of militant labor struggle sent shock waves through the business establishment. Profits began to slide as workers won wage and benefits gains, and as struggles for safety on the job and protection of the environment added to costs. Profits of non-financial corporations fell from 15.5 per-cent in the period of 1963-66 to 12.7 percent in 1967-70. In spite of corporate efforts, profits continued their slide throughout the `70s: from 10.1 percent in 1971-74 to only 9.7 percent through 1978. [84] In addition to undermining profits, mass struggle was undermining elite control. Black ghettoes were exploding in rage. The armed forces in Vietnam were collapsing as a fighting force. Labor officials were losing control of the rank-and-file, as the wave of wildcat strikes continued to build. 1969 saw 2,000 wildcat strikes—twice the number of 1960. [85] The Wall Street Journal reported in 1970:
Business leaders began clamoring for a recession in 1967, to restore "discipline" to the labor force. Richard Nixon's election in 1968 led almost immediately to an engineered recession, as the government cut the federal budget to slow the economy. Unemployment rose sharply in 1969 and early 1970. Business leaders began to take heart as the government put the brakes on the economy:
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK The recession of 1969-70, however, proved inadequate to the task of taming discontent. Teamsters and postal workers went out on nationwide wildcat strikes in 1970, and other strikes continued to erupt. Over 66 million work days were lost due to strike activity in 1970, "a record exceeded only by 1946 and 1959 in the postwar era.[88] Campuses exploded in an unprecedented strike wave after the invasion of Cambodia and the murder of students at Kent State. The recession was also short-lived, as Nixon shifted gears and began to stimulate the economy to insure his victory in the 1972 election. Many government and business leaders recognized the need for a strategic counteroffensive against workers and popular movements.They began the planning and organizing necessary to undertake what the authors of one book call "The Great Repression."[89] To plan the counter-offensive on the U.S. domestic front, the chief executives of the two hundred largest corporations organized the Business Roundtable. The Business Roundtable planned and coordinated massive campaigns to rollback wages and benefits, and to weaken the power of organized labor, directing its earliest efforts at the construction industry; at the same time,it began a wide-ranging public relations and lobbying campaign to gut the Clean Air Act and to promote the deregulation of business. The campaign for deregulation of industry gained steam as the `70s progressed; "deregulation" became the watchword of corporate leaders and politicians of both parties.[90] To coordinate economic policies on the international level, David Rockefeller and others organized the Trilateral Commission, which included corporate, government, and labor leaders from the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. A report of the Commission said that "The international system which depended for its leadership in the past on the United States alone now requires a truly common management." It recommended formation of a supranational advisory commission of three heads of state to set policy for the Trilateral nations. Annual economic summits and other forums were used to coordinate internal economic and political policies of the Trilateral countries.[91] Corporate and government leaders undertook a massive public relations effort, to convince the public that the gains working people had made in the `60s were having a negative effect on the competitive position of the U.S. in the world economy. An often-cited Business Week editorial declared in 1974:
Corporate and government leaders pressed their counteroffensive on many fronts. Corporations went on the attack against their employees, with sharply intensified supervision and disciplinary practices, speed-up, and other measures. They began to spend millions on union-busting consulting firms. Business, Doug Fraser, then president of the UAW , said in 1978, had declared "a new class war." From 1973 to 1979, the Federal Reserve Board restricted the money supply in an effort to slow the economy.[93] In 1974, the Ford Administration severely cut the federal budget, to produce the deepest recession since the Great Depression. "We need a sharp recession," one businessleader had declared. Another said, "This recession will bring about the healthy respect for economic values that the Depression did."[94] The results of the 1974-75 recession, however, were not as anticipated.The Administration had purposely created a recession because the high unemployment rates associated with recessions are supposed to make workers hungry enough that they will accept lower wages to get or keep a job. But a study conducted by the President's Council of Economic Advisors reported with dismay that, while the pace of wage growth slackened during the recession, the rate of price increases slowed even further, with the disturbing result that real wages actually rose during this period.[95] The recession had backfired. Corporate and government leaders learned a hard lesson: "As it was with the Vietnamese, however, so it was with U.S. workers: a short quick war could not be won....With no swift and decisive victory for business in sight, the macroeconomic decisionmakers prepared for a prolonged period of programmed economic stagnation, hoping at least that high levels of unemployment in the long runwould bring labor to heel."[96] Throughout the rest of the `70s, neither business nor labor was strong enough to win a decisive victory against the other. The nation entered a period of "stagflation." Stagflation was the name devised to describe the historically unprecedented combination of high unemployment and rising inflation. Economists and politicians declared the phenomenon a mystery. In fact, stagflation was a result of the combination of two factors: economic stagnation and political stalemate. Economic stagnation was a conscious policy of the government, intended to increase unemployment and to weaken labor; inflation was a function of corporations' efforts to recoup through higher prices the profits that high wages made so elusive. When the Carter Administration took over the reins of power from the Ford Administration, it took the effort to break the back of popular resistance to new levels of international coordination. The Carter Administration had the distinction of including twenty-five members of the Trilateral Commission among its highest officials. They included, in addition to Jimmy Carter himself, Vice-President Walter Mondale and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board PaulVolcker, and eighteen other officials.[97] Democrat Jimmy Carter was presented by the media as a well-intentioned if ineffectual leader, with "populist" policies which did not quite succeed. In fact, Carter's policies were as much the conscious weapons of capital as those of Republican Presidents Ford before him and Reagan after him. Carter was a loyal Trilateralist who took the war on working people further than any previous president. The Carter Administration's contribution to the corporate counteroffensive included:
[end extract from Stratmn's book] FOREIGN POLICY President Carter, the supposedly kind and saintly Jimmy Carter, implemented a foreign policy that, when closely examined, is nothing short of heinously cruel to innocent people abroad. Carter increased military aid to Indonesia’s President Suharto who used it to occupy East Timor and to kill 200,000 East Timorese. Read the gory details here and here. Carter also backed Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, a notoriously anti-democratic repressive dictator. Read about this here and here ("Even Jimmy Carter, for all his talk about human rights, found it expedient to avoid irritating Marcos" and in one Washington Post opinion article April 20, 1980 that said, "Yet Jimmy Carter is stubbornly clinging to the same discredited policy by propping up the repressive dictatorship of Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos." Carter also supported the Shah of Iran, a notoriously anti-democratic and brutal ruler. You can watch Carter, in a video included in an article here, praise the Shah. This article includes the following and provides a time point in the video to focus on:
The Shah's secret police organization, SAVAK, was as brutal, and as hated by the people, as possible. Wikipedia reports:
Read about how the Shah, so praised by Jimmy Carter, used SAVAK to torture and kill his political enemies here and watch this video about it . Carter similarly backed the murderous Somoza regime in Nicaragua (while uttering mere words of conern about its human rights violations, of course.) Read about this here, where the Harvard Crimson reports:
Noam Chomsky wrote about Carter's support for the brutal Somoza regime as follows:
Carter also had the U.S. Army School of the Americas train 250 Salvadoran officers and non-coms for El Salvador's brutal and violently repressive military that blew up every union meeting place and opposition newspaper as it killed opposition leaders. Read here how the "Godly" Carter was denounced for being on the wrong side of God with his support for the Salvadoran armed forces' brutal repression of the Salvadoran people:
Wikipedia reports on Carter's despicable role in El Salvador as follows:
A New York Times article January 18, 1981 reports:
Here's an online article that gives a summary of Jimmy Carter's horrible, anti-democratic and anti-working class foreign policy. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 'WONDERFUL' CURRENT (POST- PRESIDENTIAL) JIMMY CARTER? Some people point to Jimmy Carter's actions after being president and say, "Oh, how wonderful he is." I think these people are naive. I discuss this in my article, "Jimmy Carter: Friend or Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?" in which I deal with a) Carter's book describing Israel as apartheid, and b) Carter's monitoring of elections around the world. In doing these things, Carter has actually just been continuing to do what he did as president, strengthening the power of the billionaire plutocracy's domination of ordinary people, in a way designed to appear to be doing the opposite. Contrary to the conclusion that the ruling class wants us to draw from the saintly public relations image of a mythical Jimmy Carter, the real Jimmy Carter provides yet more evidence that we cannot prevent the billionaire plutocracy from continuing to treat us like dirt if we rely on voting for "nice" politicians. We need to remove the billionaire plutocracy from power: here's how.
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