Kennedy Says He’ll End the Corrupt Merger of State and Corporate Power

What does that mean?

“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign, and throughout my presidency, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country.” —Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

So spoke Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on April 19, in Boston, when announcing his intention to run for president in 2024. 

In making this statement, RFK Jr. is reviving a strand of US politics that has been lost to history. Most notably, US statesmen like Henry Wallace, John Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy sought to redirect the US away from global dominance. Tragically, the immense profits of empire were too powerful to resist, allowing corporate forces to carry the day. Nevertheless, every empire that rises will ultimately face its decline and fall.

There is a lot to unpack in Kennedy’s phrase above: “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.” Most obviously, it jives with the definition of fascism as laid out in a quote attributed to Mussolini. Less obviously, it highlights grave issues related to corporate power, democracy, and the “free press.”

As a pithy definition of fascism, “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power” is passable. 

European fascism emerged in the chaotic years between the World Wars. Its driving purpose was to crush the growing threat of socialism, as European politics and society became ever more unstable in the wake of World War I and during the Great Depression. It is often forgotten or elided that the formal name for the fascist Axis alliance was the Anticommintern Pact—a nice Germanic mashup defining the regimes by their opposition to communism. 

Infamously, many American oligarchs did business with the fascists and/or approved of their willingness to use state terror in defense of private wealth and power. Among those were politically active titans of US corporate wealth—firms like JP Morgan, Standard Oil, IBM, United Fruit, Texaco, and GM, as well as individuals like John Foster Dulles, Prescott Bush, and Henry Ford, to name just a few.

When World War II broke out in Europe, US elites took stock in the situation. Fatefully, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration allowed the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) to plan US entry into the war. The CFR was Wall Street’s leading foreign policy think tank. By allowing the CFR to formulate these momentous plans, the most progressive administration in US history allowed an oligarchy of private wealth to chart the course for the supposedly democratic United States of America. This is how US elites overrode what RFK Jr. has described as “Roosevelt’s impulse to dissolve the British empire rather than take it over.”

Imperialism had long been a divisive issue in US politics. American mythology depicts the US as being born in resistance to empire. While it is muddled by westward expansion, it is true that the US did not have notable external colonies for its first century as a nation-state. 

Around the turn of the century, US leaders sought to annex the Philippines—a move that was hugely controversial and which gave rise to the Anti-Imperialist League. Though the Anti-Imperialist League ultimately failed, anti-imperialism was still a strong current in US politics. 

When World War I broke out, the US public had to be manipulated and deceived into entering the war by Woodrow Wilson, a man who had been reelected in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” In the years after the great conflict, there was a widespread perception in the US that World War I had been a boondoggle for “merchants of death” like DuPont and other manufacturing giants. As a result, isolationist sentiment in the US was very high at the start of World War II.

To bring the public around, the globally-minded US oligarchy—represented by Wall Street’s CFR—turned to one of their own: CFR member Henry Luce. He was the publishing tycoon whose media empire included Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. To present the CFR’s plan for global empire, Luce famously penned “The American Century,” an imperial manifesto that appeared in Life, his own publication. Most of Luce’s arguments were presented in terms that were somehow simultaneously banal and utopian. But at certain points, he gives the game away:

Our thinking of world trade today is on ridiculously small terms…. in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero—or else it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence.

This gets at the heart of what RFK Jr is talking about when he says that JFK “wanted to revive Roosevelt’s impulse to dissolve the British empire rather than take it over.” The State Department under FDR did allow the CFR to draft plans for essentially a postwar US global empire. However, FDR himself likely had different plans. His vice president, Henry Wallace, issued a rejoinder to Luce with a speech entitled, “The Century of the Common Man.”

No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. The methods of the nineteenth century will not work in the people's century which is now about to begin. India, China, and Latin America have a tremendous stake in the people's century. […] There can be no privileged peoples. We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis. And we cannot perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military warfare. We must use our power at the peace table to build an economic peace that is just, charitable and enduring.

In 1944, corrupt party bosses staged a coup at the Democratic National Convention, ignoring Roosevelt’s preference by foisting Harry Truman on the ticket as vice president. The rest is history—a history whose legacy is all around us. Nevertheless, Wallace’s words were prophetic. Robert Kennedy Jr. seeks to revive Wallace’s thesis about the need for an anti-imperialist US foreign policy. Speaking recently, Kennedy said:

Our strategy in this country has been to use military weapons to project power around the world. The Chinese did something different. They adopted my uncle's philosophy and strategy. We were spending $8 trillion bombing bridges, ports, roads, and hospitals. They were spending $8 trillion building bridges, roads, ports, and hospitals.

Kennedy is calling for the US to adopt such policies—which were US policies—historically proposed and sometimes even pursued by statesmen like Henry Wallace and JFK. Because of the power of the US corporate oligarchy, including its huge publicity advantages, the enlightened foreign policy of anti-imperialism was abandoned. The incalculable riches offered by empire were too much for US elites to pass up.

To wit: During World War II, Wall Street-centered US elites mobilized in such a way as to embark the US on a quest to politically, economically, and militarily dominate “the free world”—i.e., Western Europe and the colonized “Third World.” A paragon of the Wall Street oligarchy, Time-Life publisher Henry Luce is a cipher that reveals how corporate media played an indispensable role in selling “The American Century” to the US public. 

Postscript: My next installment in this series of articles will explore how the drive for empire led to the creation of the CIA and its relationships with the national and international media.