Potemkin Politicians Talk, While the Nation Suffers - Letter from America 3
As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump swap words, much of America is in deep, undiscussed trouble. A view from Bennington, Vermont where Robert Frost the country's greatest poet lays at rest.
They have marble sidewalks in front of Robert Frost’s grave.
Frost was the greatest-ever American poet. A literary giant that bestrides the ages. There are few of us who have not read and understood within our hearts his words:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry that I could not take both
And be one traveller…
Or
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to before I sleep.
Frost, finally lay down to sleep in a graveyard at the top of a hill overlooking the small Vermont town of Bennington. It is a peaceful spot. From his grave you can see the lovely wooded foothills of the Green Mountains. Next to him lies his wife - Elinor - who spent her life, according to the memorial, “together wing to wing and oar to oar” with her husband.
On this still, sunny, summer evening far from the hurly burly of the political news and the Chicago Convention of the Democratic Party, I am moved by the tranquility of the place. I am also struck by the symbolism of Bennington and all that it represents. Understand this town, its societal layers and its history and you understand much of the forces that are silently moving America today.
The neighbourhood at the top of the hill where Frost rests, is a symbol of a bygone, better age in American economic history. There are marble pavements and a white clapboard church the size of a small cathedral. The street is lined with wooden mansions and green gardens. They were built in the 1800s, a time in the country when a local businessman could compete with the powerful of the world; when a Vermont bank could dream of building empires; and, when the community could fund the construction of these gorgeous buildings.
What is striking about the area is how accessible it was. Unlike today, the rich did not huddle together in gated communities. These were the houses of the rich but anyone could stroll down the sidewalk or tether their horse to a stand. Now, the rich of Bennington have different tastes. Someone with both money and a sense of humour is constructing a stone, mock-medieval castle wall around their wooden house. Down the road, is the country club where the great and good of the town gather to play golf far from any outsider wandering past.
Up the hill, there is an enormous phallus standing erect in the middle of a field. It is 306 feet high and constructed by the aptly-named Odd Fellows Society in 1887 to celebrate the victory of the local Green Mountain Boys over the British General John Burgoyne’s forces in the 1776 - 1783 War.
An aerial view of Bennington and its battle monument
The Bloody Civil War
This “War of Independence” is a conflict whose motivations still echo around the town and it is a useful stop in our tour to understand both the history of America and its current conflicts.
Americans are taught in their schools that the war was motivated because people wanted independence from an oppressive government that denied them liberty and freedom of belief.
They are mostly wrong.
The “American “War of Independence” was actually a bloody civil war - more akin to a Taliban-style internecine feud. The motives were mixed, conflicted and confused. For example, Burgoyne’s “British” army was far more multi-cultural and supportive of minority rights - with a mixture of run-away slaves, native Indian warriors, French-Canadian Catholics, United Empire Loyalists along side Hanoverian mercenaries - than the largely Protestant Green Mountain Boys who were predominantly concerned with their real estate claims over nearby New Yorkers. The actual fighting was, mostly, late night tar and feather attacks on neighbours rather than formal battles. And, as in all civil wars, it pitted communities, friends and families against each other.
Benjamin Franklin’s son supported the British King. Franklin was not alone in having his family divided. For all their later celebrations of the battle, at the time, Bennington was regarded as a loyalist stronghold and the town was holding supplies for Burgoyne’s Army. This was not exceptional. Much of America was split, the later-President John Adams wrote, that one-third were for us (the fight against the British), one-third were against us and one-third just wanted the whole thing to stop.
This situation more or less matches the American voting public today. Roughly, one-third are for Kamala Harris’s Democrats, one-third are for Donald Trump’s Republicans and one-third, discounted by the pollsters, want a pox on both their political houses and will not vote for either party.
However, there was one certain issue that caused the war in 1776, it still shatters America, yet virtually none of the political parties discuss it.
Monopolies - private corporations who so dominate one industry or one section of the marketplace that they can set any price that they want.
It was one of the strongest motivations for the founding of America but it, generally, gets short shrift from public historians. They love to play up quotes about freedom and democracy. But the reality was that many Americans who took up arms against the British were not fighting against a government or a King but against a corporation - the East India Company. The Boston Tea Party, one of the catalyzing events of the conflict, was against the Company and their complete monopoly of the tea trade into America.
A later sketch of the Boston Tea Party
It is strange that there is, now, a near-amnesia about the hatred of monopolies because Bennington, Vermont and much of modern-day America has been hit hard by them. Great sections of the once competitive US markets have been taken over by effective monopolies from Google to Amazon to Uber to Ticketmaster to LinkedIn to all-American past-times like cheerleading.
Hopelessness Blowing Like Tumbleweed
Down the hill, at the classically columned Museum of Bennington there is a free jazz concert. The NPR (National Public Radio) types are out with their straggling beards (men), severe haircuts (women) and Birkenstock sandals (both). Further down the slope is an empty, grassy lot scattered with rubbish and surrounded by a thin wire fence. Then the motels that look like they serve customers by the month, week and hour are located.
Much of the rest of the town is like that: empty lots, shuttered stores and hopelessness blowing through the streets like tumbleweed.
To be fair to Bennington, there are scatterings of prosperity among the bankrupted businesses and closed down stores - like almost every New England town they have a collection of superb IPA breweries. I went to a local supermarket to buy some. The women there were very welcoming. One poor soul, who by the state of her teeth looked as if she had had dreadful issues with her boyfriend, announced to her colleagues that Canadians were the friendliest people she had ever met. I didn’t point out that she was speaking about Maritimers from Nova Scotia and Newfoundlanders - who are the most hospitable communities in the world, unlike my part of Canada - Ontario - which is full of boring, up-tight types who would rather study a mutual funds prospectus than be friendly to a stranger.
Past the store and up a well-treed lane is Bennington College, a contrast to the town as it looks like an academic version of Downton Abbey and is surrounded by a vast country estate. I meet my friend Antonio there. He is teaching Italian for American students under the “Middlebury Pledge” - a social pact where everyone on campus agrees to speak the language that they are learning in all public settings. To judge by the conversations in the student cafeteria it is a great success. Although the topics of discussion do follow the cultural biases of the languages. It seemed the Arabic students were discussing various shopping trips and football matches, the Italians were discussing books and the art world while the Brazilian Portuguese students were boasting about their sex lives.
**
Back in Bennington I drive past the massive, empty factory that sits unused in the center of the town. The town once dominated the world. It was one of the globe’s great centers of pottery making. It is the same across all of New England. This was the region most ferocious in the fight against the East India Company. Once they had won the war, the New Englanders built towns and cities that were the industrial centers of America. Now - these places are like broken shards from a dropped plate scattered across the region.
On the other side of Lake Champlain is forgotten Plattsburgh where one in five people live below the poverty line. Hundreds-of-miles and dozens of similar towns away in Massachusetts, there are a range of politically abandoned cities like Springfield, whose neighbourhoods boast the worst crime rates in the area. Further south there is the financial nuclear-bomb-explosion destruction of Bridgeport, Connecticut - a massive city that in the 1800s rivalled New York but is, now, an urban Zombie - a municipal walking dead of decay, poverty, and amazingly corrupt politicians.
A building in downtown Bridgeport
A Financial Nuclear Bomb in a small American town
Speaking about financial nuclear explosions there is a Walmart in the center of Bennington. Walmart is the close to monopoly store that has caused such misery across America. In the early 1990s, the Swedish director Lasse Hallström helped make stars out of two young actors called Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp in his movie Whats Eating Gilbert Grape. One of the themes of the story was the destruction of a small, rural community with the opening of a nearby super-store. Those halcyon days where the arrival of a Walmart store was at least debated are long gone. In the last two decades, Walmart has spread, near unopposed, across America like a giant blood-sucking cockroach.
Its difficult to estimate the social cost that these stores, based on non-union labour and exploitation of foreign workers, have done to American communities. As for the financial cost, the Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2016 that the “Walmart-based trade deficit with China alone eliminated or displaced over 400,000 U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2013.”
There are lots of other reasons for the downfall of Bennington and thousands of other small towns across America but it is worth stressing the effect of both Walmart and the politicians who helped them destroy so much of the social fabric of the country.
Two families did particularly well from the growth of Walmart. The first, of course, are the Waltons. The heirs to the founding family of the business are now worth over $267 billion.
The second family who did well out of Walmart are the Clintons - the founders of the modern version of the Democratic Party. Before the Clintons, the Democrats were largely a working class party hewn in the shape of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, after taking power in 1993, Bill Clinton steered the Party away from its traditional labor and union roots towards the financial brokers of Wall Street. His wife, Hilary Clinton, served on Walmart’s Board of Directors. She was, by all accounts, a trusted and faithful servant of the company and made sure its profits, unhindered by too much legislation, regulation or competition, grew every year.
There is a telling e-mail in the Wikileaks trove hacked from her former campaign director. that quotes Clinton’s speech at a private corporate function. She said, that Walmart stores gave poor, rural Americans the chance to "go and look" at "products that never were readily available in a lot of those places before."
The e-mail, and others, reveals both the “deplorables” snobbery of the former Yale University graduate and the two-faced nature of her politics, playing the left-wing, progressive game in public, while sucking up to the rich in private.
Potemkin Politicians Away in Chicago
Kamala Harris giving her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention
On this hot, summer night, eight hundred and fifty miles away, at the Chicago Convention Center Hilary Clinton’s anointed successor - Kamala Harris speaks a great game about helping Americans like the people left behind in Bennington from “price gouging”. But the central question around her candidacy is - can she be trusted?
Before the current media campaign began to promote Harris and her “joyful” campaign, she was one of the most unpopular politicians in the country. In 2020, she had dropped out of her primary election campaign because her polling numbers were so dreadful. Just before being chosen by then-President candidate Joe Biden to be his Vice-President, what little popularity she had melted away after an interview with the comedian turned Democrat court lackey - Steven Colbert.
During a primary debate, she had attacked Biden, a supporter of the Clintons, with his opposition to school busing to help diversity. She said, “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me!” It was a powerful, personal attack against Joe Biden that came very close to declaring him a racist.
Colbert asked her Harris how she could declare herself to be so moved against Biden and then be ready to work as his official assistant. Harris’s response? To laugh and declare, “Steven, it was a debate… it was just a debate.”
“It was just a debate…”
Harris’s popularity tanked with many Americans after the interview. One of my friends, a former FBI agent, declares her to be a “Potemkin Politician”: an empty vessel who looks good from the outside but is only there to hide the truth for the near-monopoly corporations who actually run America. My Democrat friends claim that Harris has been forced to hide her true concerns but now she can come out “joyfully” swinging against America’s many problems.
One way of analyzing the tea leaves of power is to study who the candidate surrounds themselves with. Barrack Obama spoke beautifully in public about helping poor Americans but in private his cabinet was seemingly picked by Citibank officials - an institution that, a few months later, received tens-of-billions of taxpayer money.
Joe Biden is, now, a political dead-man-walking. The good that he has done is interred in his bones, while every unpopular issue lives on. However, the one, undeniable populist policy that he did do was appoint an aggressive head of the government agency to fight monopolies - Lina Khan. She has helped begin legal cases against TicketMaster, predatory rental companies and is just about to begin a trial that may result in the break-up of Google.
So who are Kamala Harris’s people and will they continue this well-hidden initiative of Biden against the East India Companies of today’s America?
I will not write about Harris’s brother-in-law and now one of her close aides. He is a prominent lawyer for the near-monopoly Uber who spent hundreds-of-millions of dollars to fight government legislation designed to regulate taxi companies. Few people are like Elinor Frost and work “wing to wing and oar to oar” with their romantic partners or their in-law families.
However, we can study who Harris has chosen to work with since being named, four weeks ago, the Democratic Party Presidential nominee.
The man who vetted her Vice-Presidential candidates practically has a Wikipedia picture as a Washington swamp creature. His name is Eric Holder and he dates back to the Clinton-era.
Eric Holder testifying before a Congressional Committee
As a Clinton’s deputy attorney-general Holder had helped pardon the convicted racketeer Marc Rich. He worked for the Washington law firm Covington and Burling who had a long history helping the tobacco industry. Holder defended the Purdue Pharmaceutical company and their instrumental role in causing the opioid epidemic. When he was named Barak Obama’s Attorney-General, Holder came up with a legal defense of extra-judicial killing of American citizens with no trial or due process. He also helped the Obama administration prosecute more whistle-blowers for revealing secrets in the public interest like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning - than all other administrations combined, while refusing to prosecute large banks as they were “too large to fail”.
More troubling for people who view monopolies with concern is the financial courtship between the Kamala Harris campaign and Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman. Hoffman a long-time Democrat donor who founded LinkedIn and, now, sits on the board of Microsoft - two tech quasi-monopolies. Reid Hoffman has stated in media interviews that he is funding Kamala Harris and that he specifically wants her to fire Joe Biden’s anti-monopoly fighter Lina Khan. It is as near as public as a bribe can be made. It is not clear - yet - whether Harris will accept it.
Donald Trump, Running Like a Republican
There was once, an American politician who won the Presidential election running on a platform of helping the people - Donald Trump. His 2015-16 campaign was a masterpiece of political strategy. The multi-millionaire businessman claimed at various points to support the idea of the “Obamacare” public health plan, to be against the Israel Lobby and global trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He won and the Walmart supporting Hilary Clinton lost.
However, Trump-version-2024 is not what he was in 2016. On almost every one of his previous policies he has morphed into a standard Republican who supports billions-of-dollars transferred to hopeless proxy wars in Ukraine/Israel rather than economic policies that would help the poor of America. I will write more on this issue in later Letters from America. But for now, it is worth nothing that his supporters have largely not understood Trump’s transformation. They are living in hope for a man who has long since taken the road far more traveled by.
Meanwhile, on top of the hill in Bennington the birds are singing near Frost’s grave and a golden light shines across the field. It is a tranquil moment before what will be a tumultuous fall full of political debate and campaigning. Whether any of those words will actually help forgotten American towns like Bennington is doubtful.
Another home run, Declan! I appreciate the third way, if you will. It is a necessary and much needed addition to the conversation. Keep the letters coming.
I’m somewhat optimistic that by being so blatant in the attempted bribery, Hoffman has inadvertently created a situation where Harris can’t fire Khan.
Sometimes my children want something, and I’m inclined to give it to them, but then they throw a big hissy fit and I can’t give it to them any more.