America from Lincoln to Trump xier, as a single unit really, to increase their wealth and power. Some critics
called this “the corporate state.” The government and corporations collaborate
on laws and codes to regulate business and keep it as free from restrictions or
control as possible, the central bank, the Federal Reserve, offers relief to Wall
Street when fiscal crises hit, the courts enforce laws favorable to corporations
or reject laws that might help labor or women, various political entities at all
levels offer tax breaks and subsidies to the wealthy. Even the National
Football League, a $10 billion a year business, is a 501 (c) (6) organization—
along with the National Hockey League and Professional Golfer’s Association—
and is tax-exempt because it is “not organized for profit” according to the law.
Power is also used abroad, as the Spanish American War, the Great War,
World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and various interventions have
shown. When the ruling class has interests outside the United States—such
as land in Central or South American, investment and markets in China, oil
in the Middle East—it will use its economic and military power to gain the
trade or resources or cheap labor it wants, and oppose those nations who try
to defend themselves and retain their own rights to control their own coun-
tries—a situation that we have seen with deadly consequences in Afghanistan
and Iraq especially for over a decade now.
But power is not always used by corporations sending out the police to
break strikes, laws and mobs attacking Blacks in the South, men preventing
women from having careers or equality, or assaults on Chicanos, Gays, or
Indians, to name a few. Power is also seen in the development of American
culture. Even so-called “popular culture,” the amusements that let us enjoy
beauty and creativity, or just distract us from everyday life, fit into this narra-
tive of power too. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid may have been out-
law folk heroes, but were also a symbol of resistance to Capitalism in the West
at the turn of the 19th Century. Babe Ruth, the great baseball player, showed
the economic power of “play,” of hitting home runs out of Yankee Stadium.
Edward Bernays, like the Mad Men who make up the popular television show,
developed methods of advertising to expand corporate power by convincing
people to buy more things. Woody Guthrie, perhaps the most influential
singer in America’s past, offered a national history lesson in power and resis-
tance through his songs about working people, labor struggles, and even out-
laws like Pretty Boy Floyd. Poets and authors of the Beatnik period shouted
down conformity, telling people to pursue their own creative lives and live the