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Chris Hedges is a war correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He is also one of the “truthiest” people out there, and is one of the few who actually has a handle on things. Sad thing is, the truth is damn scary.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com…
In his seventh book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, veteran U.S. war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges systematically attacks what he sees as the self-deluding and corrupt character of American society, economics and global influence today.
In this excerpt from the final chapter, he ties his analysis to the recent bailouts of banks and other corporations.
Democracy is not an outgrowth of free markets. Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities. Democracy, like individualism, is based not on personal gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must often defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of citizens, but this is not happening.
The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they are trained only to manage and sustain the established system, not change it.
John Ralston Saul writes that the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy, and France during the 1920s, those that went on to become part of the fascist experience, were “to shift power directly to economic and social interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies” and to “obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest – that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.”
It sounds depressingly familiar.
The working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now faces years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury, meanwhile, is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests.
The government – the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rights – is becoming weaker, more anemic, and increasingly unable to help the mass of Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s. Creative destruction, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter understood, is the essential fact about unfettered capitalism.
“You are going to see the biggest waste, fraud, and abuse in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I asked him about the bailout. “Not only is it wrongly directed, not only does it deal with the perpetrators instead of the people who were victimized, but they don’t have a delivery system of any honesty and efficiency.
“The Justice Department is overwhelmed. It doesn’t have a tenth of the prosecutors, the investigators, the auditors, the attorneys needed to deal with the previous corporate crime wave before the bailout started last September. It is especially unable to deal with the rapacious ravaging of this new money by these corporate recipients,” Nader said.
“You can see it already. The corporations haven’t lent [out the bailout money]. They have used some of it for acquisitions or to preserve their bonuses or their dividends. As long as they know they are not going to jail, and they don’t see many newspaper reports about their colleagues going to jail, they don’t care. It is total impunity. If they quit, they quit with a golden parachute. Even [General Motors CEO Rick] Wagoner is taking away $21-million.”
There are a handful of former executives who have conceded that the bailouts are a waste. The former chairman of American International Group Inc. (AIG), Maurice R. Greenberg, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the effort to prop up the firm with $170-billion has “failed.” He said the company should be restructured. AIG, he said, would have been better off filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection instead of seeking government help.
“These are signs of hyper-decay,” Nader said from his office in Washington. “You spend this kind of money and do not know if it will work.
“Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,” he added. “That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them, then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities, and serfs with a 21st-century nomenclature.”
The United States will not be able to raise another $3- or $4-trillion, especially with our commitments now totalling more than $12-trillion, to fix the mess.
It was not long ago that such profligate government spending was unthinkable. There was an $800-billion limit placed on the Federal Reserve. The economic stimulus and the bailouts will not bring back our casino capitalism. And as the meltdown shows no signs of abating, and the bailouts show no sign of working, the recklessness and desperation of our capitalist overlords have increased.
The cost to the working and middle class is becoming unsustainable. The Fed reported that households lost $5.1-trillion, or 9 per cent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of record-keeping by the central bank. For the full year, household wealth dropped $11.1-trillion, or about 18 per cent.
These figures did not record the decline of investments in the stock market, which has probably erased trillions more in the country’s collective net worth.
The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at the rate of more than $2-billion a day over the last 10 years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China, the oil-rich states, and other international investors stop buying U.S. Treasury Bonds, the dollar will become junk.
Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans.
A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk-show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft, abandoned outside the gates, and at the mercy of the security state.
Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. As our financial crisis unravels, and our currency becomes worthless, there will be a loss of confidence in the traditional mechanisms that regulate society. When money becomes worthless, so does government.
All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers, and speculators walk away with millions.
There are signs that this has begun. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. Many of his investors lost everything and yet he pocketed $485-million. An economic collapse does not mean only the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies, and unemployment.
It also means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I watch it now in the United States.
The free market and globalization, promised as routes to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as two parts of a con game. But this exposure does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia.
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”
They have engaged in massive fraud. Force is all they have left.
There are powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth, arrayed against us. They are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control. The tools are in place.
These antidemocratic forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian Right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites, and the spectre of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order, and clutching the Christian cross.
By then, exhausted and broken, we may have lost the power to resist.
George Carlin was an extremely funny guy. I used to think that he was also a bitter old hippie, a guy who admittedly didn’t vote, a guy who could go on some really negative-sounding rants when I was really just wanting him to make me laugh.
Then one day I realized that he was absolutely dead-on right about all this stuff, and that I’d figured it out, too.
He was right. And he was trying to tell us.
George Carlin said it quite well:
“”Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . you don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying . . . lobbying, to get what they want . . . Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want . . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it . . . they’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in The big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you . . . they don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it…”
What are we supposed to do? Take control. Take it back. Take what is ours. Not demand it, not ask for it, not try to work out some kind of a deal with these assholes, but just TAKE IT.
It’s ours anyway.
They stole it from us, and we want it back.
They’re in power because they know they are screwed if we all stand up and just take it back. Because we can if we want to, and they know it.
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ten years after they invaded, the USSR finally was forced to give up it’s dreams of domination of Afghanistan and withdrew… and collapsed.
The interesting thing though is that although the Soviet Union “collapsed”, and collapse it did,… it wasn’t the people who collapsed. It was the political structure and the power establishment that collapsed. It didn’t involve any mass violence or die off of citizens or anything like that. Just the political elite mostly had to run for cover as the authoritarian fascist power structure folded like a house of cards in the wind. Life may have gotten a little tougher, in the sense that maybe there was less on the store shelves and so forth.
But it was the power structure that collapsed, that’s all. And Russia is still one of the most advanced and powerful countries on earth.
I don’t really see how there will be any resurgence of the “Right,” unless you count as the “Right” the entities which have monopolized the political class for the past thirty years. You could call them “the Right” if you wanted to — you might, for instance, call the Clintons part of “the Right” — but I don’t think that’s what Hedges has in mind.
More likely we will have tomorrow what they have now in Argentina — catastrophically high unemployment and a general distrust of the political class. If “the Right” had its heyday in America, the ’90s and early ’00s were pretty much the era in which most of the regressive legislation was passed. The Welfare Bill, the regressive legislation against immigrants, the tradition of “humanitarian warfare” (Serbia, Iraq), No Child Left Behind, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and so on. No serious politician today would call for any of that. Instead, what they do is put forth a bunch of corporate giveaways under the pretense that it’s all “saving the economy.” (Oh, and of course the unelected appointees push more of that upon us — see Timothy Geithner, Arne Duncan, and so on.)
As for “inflation,” real inflation occurs when money is going into the system. The corporate vacuum-cleaner that is sucking up all of the money is so efficient, and so voracious, that $11.4 trillion in national debt and $12.8 trillion in promises to the banks has not even stretched its ability to clean up. Sure, there might be a lot of inflation in the assets purchased by the real holders of money — which at this point might be gold or something — but I won’t be seeing any of that. Will you?
when everything ‘changed’. The US has to go through the same crap every other country on this planet had o go through. War, pestilence and financial ruin to come out on the other side, hopefully a better place, a true democracy. It will be rough and scary, but I think eventually Americans will find their inner strength and over come the totalitarian rule.
We can do this! Yes, we can!
The main reason for the situation we face today lies in the capitulation of the Left in America. I don’t mean the various “movements” but those that profess being “progressive” or whatever we call it these days.
I’ve said this so many times I’m tired of it–which is why I’ve stopped, more or less, writing on blogs but I’ll say it once again. You can’t play in the political realm unless you are willing to use force (I mean force not votes). The reason why our elected officials pay no attention to us is because all progressives can do is whine and send money. King and Ghandi were non-violent but they used “force” to get what they wanted and they were willing to put their lives on the line–few on the Left in this country are willing to do that. It’s all just another spectator sport for us.
If we cared about what we profess to care about we would be willing to build a strong cadre of revolutionaries or at least support them. But we don’t. The only way to change the situation is to organize and use our economic wealth to create corporate entities and battle the pirates who are looting our tax money–and I do mean battle. You are not going to shame the corporations into some kind of civic-spirited actions. You have to battle on their level, i.e., take away their profits and markets through competing with them directly. But no one here or on any other progressive blog will do anything because that would mean coming together communally, trusting others, taking chances (not very bloody likely in a society that worships “security”). Things will continue as they are and we and our children and grandchildren will live in some neo-fuedalist variant (I don’t think classical Fascism will happen because the power structure is global and fairly diverse and incredibly robust as a system of rule).
The very first thing to do here is to stop blaming politicians for being cowards. They have to react to real political power–if you choose not to apply power then don’t blame them for ignoring your interests. The political game is very, very, very rough, particularly now since the stakes are so high.
Passive Observer schtick.
He got real live and engaged towards the end of his career.
That piece of his that you quoted almost made me cry, shit, it may have.
Totally spot on, there.
The Hedges piece is scary.
I think we should get together and start building a megaphone.
A megaphone that pipes out the truth and takes on, directly, the Corporate Agenda.
There are LOTS of us, so many.
The Corporate Media is a lie, as if I needed to tell anyone here that, but it’s a lie.
Remember the DLC after the 2006 elections? They were corporate fronts who had zero support in the Party. And yet there they were, running the show.
They were SHIT right after the election. They were worse than shit.
Then the ‘reality based’ crowd got busy and shored up that weak flank.
Everybody I talk to hates corporate power. There is a very large local movement here in rural MI, despite the terrible economy.
People want to do what’s right. They know what’s going on.
Nobody is talking about it.
All the leaders are talking about ‘beer summit’ and bullshit.
We get the truth out there, with a good megaphone, and we’re prophets.
Speak for the left. Give the left a megaphone and we’ll get millions. Then we can fight them and put forth an Human Agenda.