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Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Paul Street at Apr 27, 2005

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Please look back at a tax-day piece I did on the United States' harshly regressive and militarist (imperial) priorities, where I quoted Martin Luther King. Jr. on the need for a "radical restructuring of those priorities. I broke down the US budget, using data from the National Priorities Project to show that anti-poverty, education, and other positive social expenditures were dwarfed by the federal government's investment in what dominant discourse likes to call "Defense" and which many ZNet readers and writers understand to mean "Empire." You can read this essay/posting at http://blog.zmag.org/index.php/weblog/entry/taxing_reflections_national_priorties_past_and_present/ Of course, "we" spend much more on "defense" - our imperial military - than all conceivable enemy states combined even as millions (including millions of US children and millions of Americans in working families) suffer from poverty and even deep poverty (less than half of the United States' notoriously inadequate poverty level) in a county where the top 1 percent owns 40 percent of all wealth: the most unequal and wealth top-heavy nation in the "advanced" industrialized world. On wealth distribution in the US, see: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1565846656/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-4434286-4507361#reader-link On poverty and inequality in the US, please check out some useful and quickly accessible information at http://www.inequality.org/execsummay04.html. As Global Issues notes: * "The US military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world's. * The US military budget is more than 8 times larger than the Chinese budget, the second largest spender. * The US military budget is more than 29 times as large as the combined spending of the seven “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.4 billion. * It is more than the combined spending of the next twenty three nations. * The United States and its close allies account for some two thirds to three-quarters of all military spending, depending on who you count as close allies (typically NATO countries, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea) * The seven potential “enemies,” Russia, and China together spend $116.2 billion, 27.6% of the U.S. military budget * The current (2005) United States military budget is larger than the military budgets of the next twenty biggest spenders combined, and six times larger than China's, which places second. The United States and its close allies are responsible for approximately two-thirds of all military spending on Earth (of which, in turn, the U.S. is responsible for two-thirds), and spend 57 times more than the seven so-called "rogue" nations combined (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). * Military spending accounts for more than half of the United States' federal discretionary spending, which is all of the U.S. government's money not spoken for by pre-existing obligations." See http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp Next, to shift gears (though not really), please go check out some information on how it appears that by last year at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the illegal and immoral U.S. invasion of their nation. I suggest starting with BBC, which did a nice job on the by now well known Lancet (leading British medical journal, not known for leftism) report last October at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3962969.stm. You can also see the more conservative numbers (with civilian deaths in the 20 thousands) based on official/ legal reporting requirements at Iraq Body Count http://iraqbodycount.net/. Please also see liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's useful Monday column on American journalism's failure to cover civilian deaths in Iraq athttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/25/opinion/25herbert. html?th&emc=th. Fine. Now please look at the full but brief text of a recent bit of web investment advice and reporting from "CNN/Money." This enlightening dispatch, titled "Wall Street Has Embraced Defense Stocks: Can the Rally Last?," reports that "defense" stocks are a shining jewel within a broadly bad investor market right now. "The reason," CNN points out, is "fairly simple:" the imperial war on terrorism (what CNN calls "the ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention an increased focus on homeland security"). "Shares of the twenty U.S.-based defense companies with a market value of at least $1 billion are up 30 percent," CNN notes, "during the past 12 months compared to just a 2 percent gain in the S&P 500." I linked this story at http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/26/markets/defense/index.htm In a broadly bad market, CNN reports, "one sector has held up quite well. And it's helping to prove that one of the most overused cliches of professional sports is actually applicable to investing: You can't win without a good defense. Shares of the ten defense and aerospace companies in the S&P 500 are up an average of 5 percent this year while the broader market has sunk 4 percent, according to Thomson/Baseline. Boeing (Research), up 15 percent year to date, is the second best performing stock in the Dow this year. Meanwhile Goodrich (Research) and Rockwell Collins (Research) have both surged nearly 20 percent." CNN quotes a leading funds manager whose firm owns shares of leading military contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and United Technologies. "In spite of clear budgetary constraints," this manager explains, "there hasn't been any attempt to reign in defense spending." This marvelous militarist budget exceptionalism "should be reflected," CNN notes, "in the strong first quarter numbers that most defense firms are expected to post this week. Lockheed Martin (Research), for example, reported on Tuesday morning that earnings increased a better than expected 27 percent from a year ago. Meanwhile, L-3 Communications (Research), a spin-off of Lockheed that makes intelligence and surveillance systems, reported that its first quarter profits surged 42 percent from the same period last year. L-3 boosted its 2005 forecast as well. Later this week," CNN adds, "Boeing, Goodrich, Northrop Grumman (Research), Raytheon (Research), and Rockwell Collins are all on tap to release their first quarter results. All of these companies, with the exception of Boeing, are expected to post year-over-year earnings gains in excess of 30 percent." Call your broker right now. You can ask your minister or priest what he thinks next Sunday In this investor report, the people on the bloody receiving end of American "defense equipment" and military "research" are invisible and irrelevant. The murderous immorality and illegal nature of the "ongoing military operations" are invisible and irrelevant (like the predominantly nonwhite and nonviolent inmates who are incarcerated in the many hundreds of prisons that serve as rural "economic development" [actually quite flawed in economic as well as moral terms] in America, the world's leading incarceration state). Also invisible: the domestic social and antipoverty opportunity cost of the billions of taxpayer dollars we are spending to make these increasing "defense" company profits possible. War and empire are just two more investments, good places right now for the savvy market actor with a wad of cash he or she wants to thicken. Big Pharma's down (with all those drugs being pulled off the shelves these days), but Big Empire is looking good (with all those bombs and missiles being pulled off the shelves these days), at least to those who do their stock market "homework." As that naughty Mr. Marx noted in the 1840s, capitalism has no soul. It reduces everything material and spiritual to the gutter morality of "the cash nexus" and "drowns" all past human values, commitments, and activities "in the icy waters of egotistical calculation." It's an evil system, perfected of in its core socio-pathology by the rise of The Corporation, that powerful fictitious personality that mobilizes stupendous collectivities of capital for the sole purpose of ripping investor profit out of humanity, earth, animal life, and sky. Capitalism is soul death...among other kinds. Its moral and ethical homework comes in late and mangled when it arrives at all. Like war, with which it is intimately linked, it is "the enemy of all [hu]mankind." Read all this and pass it on to some of your non-radical friends and acquaintances and ask them if this helps them get it. Ask them if it assists them in understanding why some of us cannot resist the call to dedicate significant parts of our lives to --- strange as the words may sound in these times --- the revolution.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Street, Paul at May 02, 2005 05:57 AM
Well, I do think mass media (dominant corporate media, falsely named "mainstream") is a HUGE part of the survival and spread of corporation capitalism...how big I do do not and cannot of course know. It changes things in monumental ways that Marx and Bakunin and Rosa Luxembourg and our great great great grandparents could never have imagined. In that sense I am perhaps something of a media fundamentalist...I probably see media as even more of problem in a way than even Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media because I think the news media (what NC and EH focus on in that justly famous and repeatedly reprinted book) may be the smaller part of the thought control apparatus. The "entertainment" and related lifestyle and self-help components and the advertisements themselves may be as relevant as the news (which is itself merged more and more over time with entertainment culture)in manufacturing mass consent (and idiocy). The complexities of this (a very interesting topic I wrote about for Monthly Review: "More Than Entertainment," Feb. 2000) will put me over the limit. I was differing mainly with cryofan's quest for the silver techno-communicative bullet. To some extent I think people need to be encouraged to step away from their tele- and computer-screens. An odd thing to say on a blog but well I make an exception for my Internet writings, to which people must pay constant rapt attention.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 30, 2005 01:15 AM
F.C.- I handed them media in the form of a book but I expounded to them the importance of the bibliography and the idea that the book was a collection of facts from which they could draw their own conclusions.The problems facing us [ was, is, and always will be]is that the vast majority of people are so tied up in their day to day struggles they have'nt the time[they think] nor the inclination [what can I do about it?.] to ingest the facts and react in a cognizable manner.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 30, 2005 00:31 AM
Likewise, the most visible mass media figures(TV talking heads, etc) are also passed through this set of filters. Mainly, those who are most friendly to the elite are those that make it to the top. It is survival of the fittest--and the most fit are those who friendly to the elite. It's not a conspiracy--it's an ecology filled with evolving, adaptive organisms. And the mass media enculturation effect is cumulative over generations. A man living in Illinois may have 50% of his culture inherited from the labor union culture which was very strong in that area not too long ago. The other 50% of his culture comes from the mass media. And much of that mass media culture passed through the elite-frindly mass media filter system. His father was probably 80% labor union culture. his son inherits some of that labor union culture, but lives even more in the new mass media culture. So his culture is maybe 80%, mass media and 20% labor union culture. And the progression continues....drip drip drip. I think that widespread, cheap broadband and cheaper computers will, in perhaps 3 to 5 years, allow most Americans to get video entertainment directly fron other people, rather than filtered through the mass media. These videos (many of them, OBVIOUSLY) should be made by large groups of people collaborating over the Internet, much as open source software is made. That is how we kill the beast--strike at its heart.....

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Sullivan, M. at Apr 30, 2005 00:28 AM
I agree that the media is incredibly powerful and saturates the environment, but I find your idea of the masses as mere sheep elitist and condescending. A media environment controlled by the proto-fascists of high capitalism will indeed be a tough doctrinal tool for any activist to face. But the media does not overpower lived experience. For evidence of this, talk to soldiers who believed the media hype re. the Iraq war and are now anti-imperial activists. Why? The experiences they lived through in Iraq were heterodoxical to the "reality" described by the elite media or the legitimation attempts of their superior officers. Many people in this country believe Bush is a liar and are against the war, despite the media's breathtaking efforts to prop up the Bush administration and make every effort cover up and normalize Bush's deceitful and anti-human agendas. These people think the way they do inspite of the most tremendous propaganda machine in the history of mankind. THis is a testament to the power of people to think critically and question authority. I believe the reason that there is not more antiwar sentiment is that people are not feeling it as directly as they were during Vietnam, which had tremendous causalties for the U.S.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 30, 2005 00:07 AM
Like birds floating in an endless sea, the sea of our culture surrounds us. And it is such a part of our environment that it is invisible to us. We do not see it as foreign, and so, as the frog slowly boils in the pot, never noticing the increasing temperature, so too do we Americans fail to notice that our culture feeds us from birth with ideas that are becoming ever more friendly to the rich and powerful elite that control the mass media. Once upon a time, most ideas passed from person to person, for the most part. Now most ideas in our culture come via the mass media, are these ideas must pass through a set of filters, and then through a mass media conduit, to our brains. These filters knock out most ideas that are unfavorable to the rich and powerful. American culture is an evolved culture, a species of livestock domesticated slowly by the elite via control of the mass media. Not consciously, per se, but through a darwinistic, selective process: those aspects of Mass Media American culture that displease and are unfavorable to the elite and slowly filtered out. As years pass, the mass media culture changes more: like an animal adapting to its environment, successive generations of the mass media are more and more elite-friendly.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 29, 2005 23:42 PM
The world is more complex than just the media, And the beast that leaps at you and tears at your throat is a complex creature, too. Yet strike at its heart and see it fall. Complex systems do have critical organs. and humans use their interpetive functions to create meaning from lived experience, interpersonal relationships, their biological identity etc. Humans are a function of nature and nuture--genetics and culture. Parents pass on their genes to their childrens, and they also pass on their culture to their children. But nowadays the family is not the only conduit through which American children are enculturated. Mass media is a major method of enculturation. The community ALSO enculturates the child. And these days we live in a mass media culture. Over the decades, our culture has been supplanted in large by the culture that comes from the tv and radio. This process took years, decades, generations. When I grew up, I lived in a place and time where TV was of little influence, at least compared to today. THe Despoblado od west Texas, to be exact. THe TV signal was very weak there, so I did not get much of it. Now they have cable TV and satellite TV. 100 years ago, ideas passed much more from person to person. Like they did back in wesNow they come via the mass media.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 29, 2005 23:34 PM
Lest I come across as being elitist,the annual dues for being a member of my community is $375.00 per anum.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 29, 2005 22:52 PM
I live at a location that would seem to be ideal for personal communication between people, a private lake with around 220 households.We have potluck dinners,4th of July fireworks,swim meets,golf course,a real community with people sharing ideas and resources--when it comes to our little corner of this planet.But if you try to interject national or worldly concerns to these people,all they can do is bleat out what they've gathered from the media.I tried passing around a copy of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s" Crimes Against Nature",but the media and the churches got there ahead of me.People would look at the author and say"no thank you".These are decent,caring, loving people,but they can't abandon the idea that media=truth.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Sullivan, M. at Apr 29, 2005 20:25 PM
The world is more complex than just the media, and humans use their interpetive functions to create meaning from lived experience, interpersonal relationships, their biological identity etc. The media is not something that gets beamed directly into people's brains and is accepted totally. People dispute and engage what they see, and yes, even resist it. People are smart. They dont believe everything they read. I think the problem is, that within mainstream media their is a complete hegemony of corporatist-, militarist discourse. The media is owned by the masters, they wont distribute the educational programme that will destroy their rule. If the meme theory worked, Kerry would be in office right now seeing as how Bush was humiliated and discredited in the Farrhenheit 9-11 mega meme that has become the most profitable and seen documentary in (American) history. Fundamentalism is never a good thing. The world' structural and political forces, and the human beings within it and participating in it, are far more dynamic than any essentialist understanding can grasp. Media is a tool. It is not the Holy Grail.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 29, 2005 19:35 PM
In response to various posts in this thread and previous threads: I am PROUD to be a Media Fundamentalist! Wouldn't YOU like to be a Media Fundamentalist, too? As for the "uber-meme" designation, I am not of them. They are really of the Lakoffian spinmeister group, the "Democratic Party Brand" group. They brainstorm jingles, branding strategies, etc. This is basically a species of electoral politics , Spy vs Spy, Blue vs Red machinations, and ultimately a form of tunnel vision. It is OK for what it is, but it is quite limited. I am more of the persuasion that the HISTORY and ANATOMY of the SYSTEM must be explained. Pure education. And mixed in with that, a strong dose of audiovisual propaganda techniques. And education regarding propaganda..... I want to exploit developing technologies to distribute entire sets of memes by explaining history from a leftist perspective, by diagramming the anatomy of the system, by diagramming the economic system from a leftist perspective. Once the historical development of the anatomy of the system is explained in detail from a leftist perspective, and the forces that are currently deployed are explained and understood, we may be able to raise political consciousness. But we first need the conduit. That is the Media, or rather the medium through which we can reach a critical mass. But before the conduit is in place, we need to have the content that will be delivered via the conduit.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Sullivan, M. at Apr 29, 2005 18:57 PM
The Democrats are right wing now, as well as being from the same oligarchy as the GOP. They are never going to give the masses socialism. If anything they will do their best to destroy (by any means necessary) such a threat. Revolution never comes from the masters, but from the oppressed, from the margins. The masters just take credit for the reforms pushed on them by mass movements. If there is a socialist revolution, it wont be helped by the top, the top will be the counterevolutionary force-and thats when you will see some real violence I think.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Alp2k2, Superstring at Apr 29, 2005 17:36 PM
I think the "revolution" could be sped up if Democrats could somehow be taught the true principles of the left, which to me is socialism, and not be ashamed to speak of it in the media. Somehow people must change the tone of socialism from one of an underdog to one of a proud Democrat who thinks clearly that the goal is socialism and not an endless political play between right and left.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Street, Paul at Apr 28, 2005 19:44 PM
I agree with M.Sullivan and yes there's a generational angle.That's great about certain younger activists looking for a mysterious "uber theme" that will "fly through the Internet." Also like the phrase "media fundamentalist." We confronted some commenters' rather soulless "techno-communications fetishism" (as I think I put it)in a previous go round on this. Strange as it might be to be saying this on an impersonal blog to people with mostly anyonomous handles (I am obviously not a communications Luddite), it's realy about people organzing and meeting and acting together face to face, non-anonymously at the end of the day. There's something chilling in this call (of some) for the perfect subliminal media message from the left. And where do those thought controllers and subliminal mind masters and communications gurus (members of the coordinator class in charge of mass thinking/feeling) go after the revolution? Movies and the Net are useful tools but people need to meet and discuss and organize and act --- for the purpose, this original posting audaciously suggested, of overthrowing capitalism --- in person and there's quite a bit to be said for some good Buddhist (or whatever) withdrawl from electronic media and messaging and encouraging people to read and talk and walk and build community and corny stuff like that. I'm starting to sound like Utne Reader.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Sullivan, M. at Apr 28, 2005 18:44 PM
Many of the activists I work with believe that some sort of uber-meme must be created which would fly through the net and change the consciousness of the American People. Many of these media fundamentalist activists state "If we could distill revolutionary spirit into a pop format as popular as Desperate Housewives we could definitely overthrow the Empire!". Another favorite of mine is "Wars are no longer fought with men but with advertising." Right. Tell that to the wounded and those who survive the slaughter of their communities by material means of d.u. and cluster bombs. I think this is a return to idealism fostered by the current fashions of po-mod theory. I think that many younger activists have this idea that by transmitting a single message through the mass media could turn things around. While media's importance is almost impossible to, I fear many focus on it exclusively while resigning the work of organizing human beings in real time and space to the dustbin. A t.v. spot or a radical film helps to disrupt the total cascade of propaganda, but under the current system would be suppressed to the point of negligible political usefulness. I think the main thing is to organize, organize, organize while supplementing such efforts with networking and (media) education.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 28, 2005 05:02 AM
Capitalism is soul death--Reminds me of a flick I caught on LINK TV. It had to do with an Australian farmer whos young daughter wondered off chasing a full moon. He refused to let an aboriginal tracker participate in the search because he didn't want any "darkies" on his land.The song defining this scenario was haunting--Farmer: "This land is mine." Native:"this land is me." The little girls corpse was eventually found by the tracker and the farmer committed suicide.The people who proclaim "mine" need to aknowledge the fact that their tenure on earth is finite and we are all renters.Soul death indeed.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 27, 2005 22:05 PM
cryofan I will inform ZNet to shut down all operations until your movie is released and we can assess whether or not its impact has created the beach-head required for us to resume our currently futile counter-propaganda campaign. No need to do that. I am sure that Znet and other leftist websites do some good. I have a blog myself, although I am concentrating my efforts on the video. I am sure that znet (and other similar websites) communicates a lot of good ideas to a lot of people, but just not enough to reach a critical mass. But maybe it could someday serve as a tool for organizing efforts to create videos that could reach more people. Most people just don't read that much anymore. No need to. And for conveying the fairly complex ideas that are needed to understand what is going on, well, they need to do a fair bit of reading. But maybe we could convey those ideas in video. And of course I meant no offense to you or Znet. Just getting real, is all. As for realpc, I was of course referring to "war profits", where profits are from corporations that help instigate war to make money. AFAIK, this is something that started in the 19th Century.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Apr 27, 2005 20:00 PM
"The elite have been using us as war-profits fodder for a hundred years or more" Are you saying war is something new for our species?

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Street, Paul at Apr 27, 2005 19:54 PM
Bruce W the interrelated, dialectically inseparable forces of (state) capitalism, empire, and inequality run strongly in the English-speaking states. England is one of the most unequal of the "advanced" nations and generally I think the English-speaking states are fairly regressive relative to non-English-speaking nations within the core of the world system. It has something to do with John Locke, the great English bourgeois revolution of the 17th Century, the British and later American success in becoming the hegemonic states in that system, and I suppose Protestantism. Are the Pentagon and Navy investigating the use of whale songs and language as obvious vehicles for global terrorist communications? Rummy should go out as an Ahab-like submarine captain chasing (or pretending to chase) the White (-robed) Whale of Islamic terrorism. cryofan I will inform ZNet to shut down all operations until your movie is released and we can assess whether or not its impact has created the beach-head required for us to resume our currently futile counter-propaganda campaign. pranjal its about time that every last corner of the human geographical terrain learns what Latin Americans have been being told for a very long time: Uncle Sam owns you and what he says goes.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Apr 27, 2005 17:58 PM
This is nothing new. The elite have been using us as war-profits fodder for a hundred years or more. They start wars to sell their bombs, to scare people and make them work harder. Paul, as long as the primary communications channel (mass media) is owned by enormous accumulations of organized capital, your message has no chance to establish a beachhead on the American mind. I am working on a video documentary dealing in part with the use of war to manipulate and the use of pro-war, patriotic, and enemy-demonization propaganda to engineer consent for war. I want to demonize war, turn my viewers against war and war propaganda, So, I am using visceral, war-related and propaganda-related imagery to hit subconscious "hot cues" of the viewers. For example, I am going to use various public domain images, e.g., bodies, wounded children, tanks, bombed buildings. Then I am juxtaposing those images with propaganda images (flag, patriotism, enemy-demonization propaganda images) along with "scary," ascending-scale music, and repetitive, spoken, propaganda phrases. Well, that is just one part of it. I have other themes and sub-plotlines as well. I will distribute my documentary for free over the internet. Hopefully, in a few years, most Americans will have broadband. Here is where I am getting my Iraw war, pix (includes wounded children) I am also using images from many other wars.

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By Aberriz, Gentho at Apr 27, 2005 11:00 AM
The United States is completely out of control, however the larger problem is the utter unawareness of the American public. People are ignorant to the maximum of their abilities. http://freecognition.blogspot.com

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Ptiwari, Pranjal at Apr 27, 2005 09:56 AM
Mind, another great quote was from Adm. Vern Clark, in this press release: Northrop Grumman-built LPD 18 Transport Dock Ship Christened in New Orleans Monday November 22, 12:58 pm ET Adm. Vern Clark says the LPD 18 "will take American sovereignty to the far corners of the Earth" http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/041122/68146.html

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By Jautter, Mind at Apr 27, 2005 06:33 AM
Bruce W--Ad another billion to that 500 million and you can have one of our newest nuclear attack submarines.According to the navy,they have "shallow water capabilities,good for combating terrorists." Swear to God I read that somewhere-you can't make up shit that crazy.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By W, Bruce at Apr 27, 2005 04:54 AM
Dammit! That should be SPENDING for war and empire, sorry.

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Re: Wall Street, War, and Revolution

By W, Bruce at Apr 27, 2005 04:33 AM
It's interesting to see that my humble home (Australia) rates a mention in the "elite" ranks of sending for war and empire. The government is currently planning to buy $500 million worth of Abrams tanks (the same ones causing mayhem in Iraq). These monstrosities are virtually useless in northern Australia and the Asia-Pacific region (the most likely sources of threats to this country). Their only real value is to work with the US military on overseas expeditions to more tank-friendly terrain (eg the Middle East). In other words, this is an explicitly imperial commitment. They can find money for this, but not for public education, Medicare (the entity that pays hospital and doctors' bills - in part, anyway), or reducing the growing rich-poor divide. Empire and inequality: it's spreading.

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