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The Corporate State and the Subversion of Democracy
Note: Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28 at 7 p.m. in Furman University's Younts Conference Center. The address was part of the protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college's decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.
When it was announced earlier this month that President Bush would deliver the commencement address 222 students and faculty signed and posted on the school's Web site a statement titled "We Object." The statement cites the war in Iraq and the administration's "obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits."
"We are ashamed of the actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel," the statement read. "Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values."
I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves. I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father, and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The "consent of the governed" has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, "a coup d'etat in slow motion." We are being impoverished-legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that-a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweat shops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.
"There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.
But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China's totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.
Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill. And today we stand in shame with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most for nonviolent drug offenses. More than one in 100 adults in the United States is incarcerated and one in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. The United States, with less than 5 per cent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
The growing desperation across the United States is unleashing not simply a recession-we have been in a recession for some time now-but the possibility of a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. This desperation has provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. This is good news if you are a corporation. It is very bad news if you work for a living. For the bottom 90 percent of Americans, annual income has been on a slow, steady decline for three decades. The majority's income peaked at $ 33,000 in 1973. By 2005, according to New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in his book "Free Lunch," it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000, this despite three decades of economic expansion. And where did that money go? Ask ExxonMobil, the biggest U.S. oil and gas company, which made a $10.9-billion profit in the first quarter of this year, leaving us to pay close to $4 a gallon to fill up our cars. Or better yet, ask Exxon Mobil Corp Chief Executive Rex Tillerson, whose compensation rose nearly 18 percent to $21.7 million in 2007, when the oil company pulled in the largest profit ever for a U.S. company. His take-home pay package included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36-million bonus, and $16.1 million of stock and option awards, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received nearly $430,000 of other compensation, including $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the company aircraft. In addition to his pay package, Tillerson, 56, received more than $7.6 million from exercising options and stock awards during the year. Exxon Mobil earned $40.61 billion in 2007, up 3 percent from the previous year. But Tillerson's 2007 pay was not even the highest mark for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Occidental Petroleum Corp. CEO Ray Irani made $33.6 million and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. chief James Hackett took in $26.7 million over the same period.
For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top 10th's greatest share of the income pie, Johnston writes, since 1929, just before the Roaring '20s collapsed in the Great Depression. And within the top 10 percent, those who made more than $100,000, nearly all the gains went to the top 10th of 1 percent, people like Tillerson, or Irani or Hackett, who made at least $1.7 million that year. And until we have real election reform, until we make it possible to run for national office without candidates kissing the rings of Tillersons, Iranis and Hacketts to get hundreds of millions of dollars, this rape of America will continue.
While the Democrats have been very bad, George W. Bush has been even worse. Let's set aside Iraq-the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. George Bush has also done more to dismantle our Constitution, ignore or revoke our statutes and reverse regulations that protected American citizens from corporate abuse than any other president in recent American history. The president, as the Boston Globe reported, has claimed the authority, through "signing statements," to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." George Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has gutted environmental, food and product safety, and workplace safety standards along with their enforcement. And this is why coal mines collapse, the housing bubble has blown up in our face and we are sold lead-contaminated toys imported from China. Bush has done more than any president to hand our government directly over to corporations, which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary spending. Over 800,000 jobs once handled by government employees have been outsourced to corporations, a move that has not only further empowered our shadow corporate government but helped destroy federal workforce unions. Everything from federal prisons, the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests, interrogating prisoners and running the world's largest mercenary army in Iraq has become corporate. And these corporations, in a perverse arrangement, make their money off of the American citizen. Halliburton in 2003 was given a no-bid and non-compete $7-billion contract to repair Iraq's oil fields, as well as the power to oversee and control Iraq's entire oil production. This has now become $130 billion in contract awards to Halliburton. And flush with taxpayer dollars, what has Haliburton done? It has made sure only 36 of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in 30 different countries. Halliburton is able through this arrangement to lower its tax liability on foreign income by establishing a "controlled foreign corporation" and subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries known as a "tax havens." They take our money. They squander it. And our corporate government not only funds them but protects them. Halliburton-and Halliburton is just one example-is the engine of our new, rogue corporate state, serviced by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, once the company's CEO.
The disparity between our oligarchy and the working class has created a new global serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimates that the number of subprime foreclosures in the United States over the next two years will total 1,390,000 and that by the end of 2012, 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers in the United States will be forced out of their homes. The corporate state, which as an idea is an abstraction to many Americans, is very real when the pieces are carefully put together and linked to a system of corporate power that has made this poverty, the denial of our constitutional rights and a state of permanent war inevitable. The assault on the American working class-an assault that has devastated members of my own family- is nearly complete. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when George Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. In the past three years, nearly one in five U.S. workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually. A total of 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department. There are whole sections of the United States which now resemble the developing world. There has been a Weimarization of the American working class. And the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything that can be put on software-from finance to architecture to engineering-can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China who accept a fraction of the pay and work without benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, allow this to happen.
Take a look at our government departments. Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? Who runs the Department of Labor? Corporations. And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power. The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty. They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy. They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes.
We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority. They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs. This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War even as we have more than $400 billion in annual deficits. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense. This will not end when Bush leaves office. And so we build Cold War relics like $ 3.4-billion submarines and stealth fighters to evade radar systems the Soviets never built and spend $ 8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense that will be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation's resources and investment capital. These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account. Melman, like President Eisenhower, saw the defense industry as viral, something that, as it grew, destroyed a healthy economy. And so we produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule, and our automotive industry tanks. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve technologies to fight against global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This massive military spending, aided by this $3-trillion war, is hollowing us out from the inside. Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay and our safety net is taken away.
The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 per cent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called "near poverty." Our health care system is broken. Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can't afford health care. That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year. But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. We are diverted by bread and circus. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip. The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox's celebrity gossip program "TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network's "700 Club" as "bona fide newscasts." The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse "participatory fascism."
How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation-the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy. This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled "Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power." In it, he wrote:
"The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism-ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living."
The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.
I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." In depressed former manufacturing towns from Ohio to Kentucky it was the same. There are tens of millions of Americans for whom the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability has plunged the working class into personal and economic despair, and not surprisingly into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we re-enfranchise these Americans back into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.
As the pressure mounts, as this despair and desperation reaches into larger and larger segments of the American populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. It is not accidental that with the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state. This is why the Bush White House has pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of "extraordinary rendition," the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is part of a package. It comes together. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about control. It is about their control of us.
Sen. Frank Church, as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the government's massive and highly secretive National Security Agency. He wrote:
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. ... I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. ..."
When Sen. Church made this statement the NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens. Today it is.
In a military brig in Charleston an American citizen, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, is being held in a black hole set up on American soil. He was stripped on June 23, 2003, by George Bush of his constitutional rights and declared an "enemy combatant." He is being detained without charge, interrogated without a lawyer and held indefinitely. Lawyers for the Bush administration claim that the president can send the military into any neighborhood, any town or suburb, capture a citizen and hold him or her in prison without charge. They base this claim on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, that gives President Bush the power to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the attacks. But Al-Mari was not captured in Afghanistan or Iraq. He was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. And if the president can declare American citizens living inside the United States to be enemy combatants and order them stripped of constitutional rights, what does this mean for us? How long can we be held without charge? Without lawyers? Without access to the outside world? Maybe Al-Mari is, as the government claims, a terrorist. I don't know. But I do know that if this becomes a precedent, if it is not overturned by the courts, habeas corpus, the most important bulwark of our democratic state, will be dead.
We are fed lie after lie to mask the destruction the corporate state has wrought in our lives. The consumer price index, for example, used by the government to measure inflation, has become meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low the government has been substituting basic products they once measured to check for inflation with ones that do not rise very much in price. This trick has kept the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The disconnect between what we are told and what is actually true is worthy of the old East German state. The New York Times' consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be in the 10 percent range. The advantage to the corporations is huge. A false inflation rate, one far lower than the real rate, keeps equitable interest payments on bank accounts and certificates of deposit down. It masks the deterioration of the American economy. The Potemkin statistics allow corporations and the corporate state to walk away from obligations tied to real adjustments for inflation. These statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. It has reduced the interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees. The term "unemployment" has also been steadily redefined. This has rendered official data on employment worthless. In real terms about 10 percent of the working population is unemployed, a figure that is, over the long run, unsustainable. The economy, despite the official statistics, is not growing. It is shrinking. And as the nation crumbles we are awash with the terrible simplicity of false statistics. We confuse our emotional responses, carefully manipulated by advertisers, pundits, spin doctors, television hosts, political consultants and focus groups, with knowledge. It is how we elect presidents and those we send to Congress, how we make decisions, even decisions to go to war. It is how we view the world. Four media giants-AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch's NewsGroup-control nearly everything we read, see and hear. This growing disconnect with reality is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.
"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines," Hannah Arendt wrote, "totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda-before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world-lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world."
So what do we do? Voting is not enough. If voting was that effective, to quote the activist Philip Berrigan, it would be illegal. And voting in an age when elections are stolen by rigged ballot machines and a stacked Supreme Court willing to overturn all legal precedent to make George Bush president, will not work. I am not saying do not vote. We should all vote. But that has to be the starting point if we want to reclaim America. We must lobby, organize and advocate for the dissolution of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. The WTO and NAFTA have handcuffed workers, consumers and stymied our efforts to create clean environments. These agreements are beyond the control of our courts and have crippled our weakened regulatory agencies. The WTO forces our working class to compete with brutalized child and prison labor overseas, to be reduced to this level of slave labor or to go without meaningful work. We need to repeal the anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947. The act obstructs the organization of unions. We need to transfer control of pension funds from management to workers. If these pension funds, worth trillions of dollars, were in the hands of workers the working class would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange.
The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.
George Bush, who will be here on Saturday, has done more to shred, violate or absent the government from its obligations under domestic and international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons, and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law. He has set up offshore penal colonies where we deny detainees basic rights and openly engage in torture. He launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we allow the Democratic majority in Congress to get away with its refusal to begin the process of impeachment, which appears likely, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation-largely put in place by the United States-destroy our own constitutional rights and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We are one, maybe two, terrorist attacks away from a police state. Time is running out. We must not allow international laws and treaties-ones that set minimum standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political, economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences-to be discarded. The exercise of power without law is tyranny. And the consequences of George Bush's violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can swallow American citizens along with those outside our borders, run in a direct line from the White House to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and military brigs in cities such as Charleston. George Bush-we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo-fabricated a legal pretext for war. He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution. And so he and his advisers manufactured reports of weapons of mass destruction and disseminated them to a frightened and manipulated press and public. In short, he lied. He lied to us and to the rest of the world. There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law, a war that under the post-Nuremberg laws is defined as "a criminal war of aggression."
We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We can either begin an orderly withdrawal or watch the mission collapse.
A rule-based world matters. The creation of international bodies and laws, the sanctity of our constitutional rights, have allowed us to stand pre-eminent as a nation-one that seeks at its best to respect and defend the rule of law. If we demolish the fragile and delicate domestic and international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation, democracy and law are worthless, if we allow these international and domestic legal safeguards to unravel, our moral and political authority will plummet. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies. We will lose our country. And we will, in the end, see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides' history. Read how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the primary instrument of tyranny and empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war-if we do not understand how deadly that poison is-it can kill us just as surely as the disease.
Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. We are waging a war that devours lives and capital, and that cannot ultimately be won. We are told we need to give up our rights to be safe, to be protected. In short, we are made afraid. We are told to hand over all that is best about our nation to those like George Bush and Dick Cheney who seek to destroy our nation. A state of fear only engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante's circle the damned remained motionless. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us towards the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it most.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."
©2008 TruthDig.com
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Show AllGail June 1st, 2008 9:22 am .....Most Americans are controlled and kept in a stupor by a media totally complicit with the rape of our freedoms, the abduction of our youth into service and the obfuscation of the truth. Until more Americans become informed and learn to think for themselves through ignoring the MSM, the critical mass needed to start the revolution will never be reached. Even hunger and worsening economic strife will not keep Americans from rallying behind the flag. They have been indocrinated, de-educated and mesmerized under the "Great American Dream" to recognize subversion even when it's already sitting at their dining room table.
Chris Hedges is, as always, brilliant and articulate in his thinking ("War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" is an amazing book and everyone should read it). It concerns me that so many who have commented are saying that we need to vote for Obama. No, we certainly do not. As Americans, we really need to stop only appreciating authors like Hedges when their thought process mimics our own. Hedges writes about all of these intertwined issues that our country really desperately needs to deal with ... right now. We are in an election in which neither two-party candidate will change anything for the better for the average person living in this world (including the faux progressive Obama). Hedges, whom we all seem to agree and understand is brilliant, endorses Ralph Nader for president. Many are likely to disagree with his endorsement and all I can ask of those of you who do is that you treat his endorsement with the same careful consideration and thought that you would apply to any of his other arguments (whether they be about war, corporate power, the military industrial complex or distribution of wealth). Try to get over the anti-Nader brainwashing we have all been subjected to for the last 8 years and demand from yourself a rational argument as to why his extremely well-reasoned endorsement is faulty. Put your own pro-corporate thought process up against Hedges' logic, line by line, and see how successful you are at arguing your brainwashed point of view. Don't just make cyclical nothing statements like "Nader is irrelevant" or "Nader spoiled in 2000". Try to use factual argument against Hedges' well-thought assessment of where we are and what we need to do. I have yet to meet a single Democrat who can articulate how it is they think that Ralph Nader cost Al (the racist) Gore the 2000 election, yet most of them seem to feel that he did. How is that? Everyone who worked for a living, was anti-nuke or anti-war revered and respected Ralph and thought he was amazing and brilliant ... as long as he kept stating publicly that the Democrat party was the lesser evil. When Ralph decided to take on the warmongers and robber barons in BOTH parties by running for president, he became an egomaniac and persona non grata to them all. All of a sudden, a man who for thirty years was their hero lost ALL merits overnight. Are any of these "intellectual" Dems who hate Ralph really thoughtful intelligent people or are they just easily led sheeple who believe whatever mainstream media tells them? Does it matter if your media of choice is the pro-war, pro-corporate NY Times or the pro-war, pro-corporate Fox TV? Understand this - Ralph Nader, like Chris Hedges, is an EXCEPTIONALLY SMART human being! When someone as keen and insightful and brave as either of these two wishes to impart some information to you, it's of VITAL importance that YOU put your own fragile ego aside and try to understand what they are saying. They are far more prescient than you or I. By all means, question what they say and learn more about the information they impart. Think about it. Read and learn and analyze BUT, when you're done, if you still find yourself in disagreement with what they have imparted, then it is more than likely that it is YOU that has not really done your homework, and not them. Vote for Obama, as many of these comments say you should, and you show your ignorance of everything Hedges is trying to tell you. All those who have commented here about voting for Dems need to really think about something. Chances are 4 in 5 (80%) that you live in a safe state. As such, it doesn't matter who you vote for (between the two party choices). The race is already over in your state and everyone knows it but you. If you live in a safe state, your vote for Ralph (or for any third party or independent candidate), gets them media attention, money and possible entrance to the debates (in some cases it builds a third party or allows it ballot access). If you throw your vote away by selecting ANY of these corporate stooges, you are changing NOTHING. YOU are actually the SPOILERS! You are working directly with the fascists and the corporatists to destroy our democracy entirely. You are allowing yourself to be used to maintain the status quo and you are doing nothing to cause change to occur. It really doesn't matter whether you are intellectually capable of seeing or admitting this or not. You are helping them consolidate their power and keeping their precious two-party system intact either way. I blame YOU! Shame on you for not doing your homework. Shame on you for trusting whatever mainstream media and your faux progressive party tells you. Shame on you for vilifying Ralph Nader, who has fought tirelessly all of his adult life to change things for the better. Wake up and once you do start reading and start reading history so that you can understand how things have always worked. That way, maybe just a few more Democrats and a few more Republicans won't be so easily taken again this time (or next time).
You got it exactly right.
Instead of saying the following:
I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored.
Perhaps you should say:
I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were in the working class, but it was a country I loved and honored.
You keep losing elections because you enumerate preferential victimization groups based on race and gender. Working class white voters consistently vote republican precisely because of the above rhetoric. Everyone who has a four-year degree who is a woman, gay, African American, immigrant, etc., has it better than I do even though working class folks such as myself do most of the real work and produce most of the nation's wealth. Why on earth would working white voters replace one oppressor group with another?
Mercy. Well, let's try to get Barack Obama elected, along with a majority of democrats in Congress. Then let's put pressure on them day after day to head America in a better direction. If this doesn't help, then we're simply in deep doo doo (along with the rest of the world). All we can do is try, however imperfect our trying might be.
Very well said. A classic denunciation of the evil that is the corporate state.
Chris Hedges points out that one of the kings of corporate America, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson received "$229,331 for personal security."
Why is that enough?
Chatter chatter Iraq chatter chatter WTO chatter chatter hyper-inflation chatter chatter Guantanamo chatter chatter unemployment chatter chatter Democrats chatter chatter Republicans chatter chatter NAFTA chatter chatter Abu Ghraib chatter chatter chatter chatter and...
$229,331.
Why is that enough?
Mark Whittington June 1st, 2008 10:38 am ...So, are you saying that the distinction of the different groups of voters is what is causing the white working class to vote Republican? Does this mean that the distinctions Hedges mentions...African-American, Native American and Japanese or poor or gay or women or immigrant are not of the working class and none of these are white ( gay, women or immigrants)? Am I missing something here?? Are you saying that SOME of these people are different, but just do not talk about it because it upsets the WHITE working class and causes them to vote Republican?
Beautifully said!
matt funiciello June 3rd, 2008 10:39 am
"If you throw your vote away by selecting ANY of these corporate stooges, you are changing NOTHING. YOU are actually the SPOILERS!"
matt,
If you can't convince the majority not to vote for corporate stooges in the primaries, what makes you think they are going to change their minds in November? Are you kidding?
Meanwhile, we have two or three Supreme Court Justices getting ready for retirement. What we don't need is a Supreme Court filled with Alitos and Scalias!
To prevent that, I am more than willing to "throw-away" my vote.
Perfect. Thanks for all the good work you do Chris.
The best, clearest, most succinct statement of our present condition that I have seen to date.
We must stand up and claim our heritage.
Chris has laid out the challenge as well as a blueprint for survival.
UnionPete has the right answer. In order to take back our Constitutional rights, people have to organize outside of the processes (wasted writing to Congress and voting) of government - government that has been totally co-opted by the corporations.
The organized labor union structure provides the best foundation upon which a power base can be built that can force change. And believe me, only force will accomplish change. Despite their rhetoric about the need for "change", neither of the Democrats running for president gives any indication that they see corporations as the principal obstruction to change. Until everybody recognizes this truism, change will not come.
Every worker (including senior mamagers below the level of corporate V.P.) needs to belong to a union. We would have a better country and a much better workplace - and we would restore our respect and presitige in the world.
Bravo!
"We are being impoverished-legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs..."
So what do we do?
If our government continues to repeat the same mistakes and if the "Kress Cylcle" is accurate, we may be headed for another economic revolution shortly down the road:
"As long as the cost of resistance is greater than the cost of compliance, people will remain docile and will submit to a tyrannous government. But whenever the cost of compliance exceeds the cost of revolution, a revolution will be the inevitable choice." -Dr. S. Crane
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/droke/2008/0530.html
As more Americans become disenfranchised in this globalization process and the fleecing of the average citizen continues while the aristocracy gets bailed-out, is there any doubt a revolution is the only possible choice?
Mountaineer notice he said a lot of this started during the Clinton error. Obama equals more of the same of Clinton error if not worse. Now I may end up voting for him but certainly not under the delusion things will widely get better but rather to prevent McInsane from nuking Iran.
Wow, great article and comments. The US empire needs to be broken up. I'm hoping Vermont takes the lead and secedes.
"We are one, maybe two terrorists attacks away from a police state". Yes, and the neocons can hardly wait. It may not be a good idea to remind them of this.
G3n3ral Stryck
"So what do we do?, Chris asks. Vote? Yes, but voting is not enough. We must "lobby, organize and advocate"...he says.
Great idea. But be sure you are not "lobbying, organizing and advocating" against a Republican government. Because if you are, you might as well be shouting at the stones on Mount Rushmore. Your voices won't change them at all (they're granite).
Your first (and only) "organizing" that's going to matter at all and will enable (or not) everything else you try to do is to get your country organized enough to elect Democrats to your Congress and The White House. One they are there, you have a "chance" to be considered by them, because you will be the folks that brung 'em. Without the more liberal party in both of those branches, you just lose on every issue (again and again and again).
Okay, you can lynch me again, now. But I'm right on this.
.
I'll say it again…
We needed Ralph Nader as President in 2000.
We needed Ralph Nader as President in 2004.
We NEED Ralph Nader as President in 2008.
Never before as we do now
http://www.votenader.org/index.html
.
of course, we could resort to what our founding fathers felt was needed....revolution...it may be necessary.
I stored this article in the 'favorites' folder of my web browser. He manages to mention and back-up with statistics just about every concern I ever had with the path America has been taking my entire adult life. The easy solution, for now, is to vote Dem, as 'mountaineer' says.
My personal opinion, somewhat uninformed, is that you can't stop change, only slow it. Thus, borderless markets cannot be stopped, only managed somewhat to keep the affected American workers from falling off a cliff. I also think the solution to big business isn't big labor, its small business. That means less focus on labor unions and more focus on legislation preventing corporations from getting too big. Indeed, any corporation that capitalized out at more than 250 million U.S. dollars (or that hired more than 2000 employees) I'd have legislation to cut in half. Doing so doesn't reduce the labor demanded by the business, it doubles the number of corporate managements competing to serve that business. In essence, twice as many managers competing to attract the same labor pool = win/win for labor. An ununionized laborer who quits a job at a huge company finds there's little competition for his/her skills. By splitting up companies, laborers have more companies to choose from, and management will become more accomodating to labor in recognition of this shift.
Mostly, I'm Dem cuz I think the rich should be taxed more like they were between 1930-1970: when this country became truly great. Chris Hedges statistics about the division of wealth is truly sobering. Monopolistic wealth control = monopolistic political and media control = death of democracy AND capitalism. Monopolistic wealth control is almost as bad as communism.
Well done! As you point out, the people need to some how rise up and take more control back, but there's a real problem. We have the rise of the military-corporate-congressional complex that is taking over (along with the complete control of information dissemination by their media lackeys) and starving us domestically and socially but has the jobs that people need in order to eat and live however distasteful the jobs may be morally. Local opportunities and family businesses are disappearing, but people still need to eat and live and will take the jobs that are available if they can - survival! Asking a large majority who are already very likely angry or depressed about it all to have courage and actively support the destruction of their only remaining means of providing for themselves and their families is a tall order. That will take inspirational leadership that will be able to break through the fear and mistrust of everyone and everything around, that has been steadily instilled in people for decades preventing us from naturally working together to solve issues to mutual benefit. Electing another figure head who is still part and parcel of the complex and says soothing things to keep the masses calm, is not going to give us that leadership or change a thing. We rarely see true leaders running for office because they either are "ruled out" by media very early on because their ideas are threatening to the status quo or they're too smart to run for office in the first place. Let's hope that Obama and a democratic majority can start us on a path back to the America we used to appreciate and, as mountaineer says if we can't pressure them to do that, it may be doo doo, but we do have to try.
There are many jumping off points in discussing this article. For brevity's sake, I like to address just a couple points.
The era of Industrial capitalism is ending and is being replaced with electronics. Labor is being replaced with robotics. All of the reforms that the capitalists were willing to give up under the industrial era, when they needed to exploit labor, are coming to an end.
This objective fact is not clear, therefor workers, even the destitute, still accept leaders who claim to represent their interests, but who, in reality, defend and expand capitalist corporate interests and power, the goal of which is to preserve capitalist corporate private property.
In this country, nothing can move forward for our class until a broad section of Americans see their interests as different from, and diametrically opposed to, those of their corporate capitalist rulers, and act on that basis.
mrraven, I have no illusions about things improving dramatically. I do think that Obama would provide better direction for this country than McCain, but this is simply my best guess. McCain would be more of the same as we have now. I'm aware of what Bill Clinton did during his presidency. Obama isn't a Clinton. I personally think Obama would be closer to a Roosevelt as president than a Clinton. But if I'm dreaming, so be it. I still like hopeful dreams.
I simply want to reduce each and every corporation to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in my bathtub.
Corporate America got an "easy" pass the minute FDR signed the OBSCENE tax increase on Cannabis later followed by outlawing it. If Obama is willing to put up a strong fight to get rid of the ban on Cannabis completely, then he's got my vote even if he does have a hell of a long ways to go. PEACE !
The only Constitutional Amendment that could make a difference is a one term limit for legislators - make those corporations buy new loyalists constantly. If even the ACLU says campaign contribution limits are anti-free speech, forget that one.
Best speech ever - even sent it to my mom.
Well written, but wrong missing its own point. Any candidate featured in mainstream media is an integeral part of the problem, and will do nothing to change the status quo. Those are the rules for membership in the Uncle Buck Party, of which most of D.C. belongs to. McKinney, Nader and some others excluded. The reality is that our Congress doesn't listen to us anymore. They don't listen anymore because it doesn't matter what we think anymore. They don't have to care because we don't pay their bills. That is now being done by corporate America. They aren't afraid of the voters as much as they are afraid of offending corporate sponsors. Uncle Buck runs a tight party and uses his PR Department to keep law and order. Nobody gets into the national spotlight that would pose a threat to the established order. Don't expect change from the current candidates, no matter what they say. They all work for Wall Street.
Hoa binh
"Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
Halliburton "special program" detention centers, NYPD now armed with MP5 machine guns (650 rounds-per-second,) local cops buying "surplus" military weapons and tech by the boatload, all kinds of new laws and "secret" laws in place, the crazies on the "right" openly calling for the rounding up and/or execution of "liberals" or "liberal haters" or anyone else who doesn't say Bush three times per paragraph...
Folks, the sky she is a-fallin already. Arm yourselves, train for survival, and get ready to go to the mattresses...
I agree - this puts it all out there in one place. I printed the whole thing so I can share it with my family. It'll make a lot more sense to them than my telling does.
Someone ahead of me said it right - we need to get a Democratic President elected, and a bunch more Democrats in Congress - and if the repugs start jamming the works, shut them out like they did the dems.
Then we need to take those "socialist" programs back and restore them to what they were meant to be. And get all those corporate slaves unionized!
Yeah, hemp-- one can't help but think that if someone had managed to slip the occasional doobie into that elegant cigarette holder that was FDR'S trademark, that the only conflict in the Middle East today would be between hashish dealers underbidding each other to capture the American export market!
Ah, the inestimable RichM stopped by while I was whimsically, but sincerely, responding to hemp.
The incrementalist strategy recommended by moderate partisan Democrats is also predicated, in part, on the intertwined double helix formed by two assumptions: first, the practical assessment that once the Democrats have finally established a commanding edge in votes, they will ride a fresh tsunami of support, with abundant momentum to promptly begin remedial measures, from icing the abominable Lieberman to belatedly making good on deconstructing the multifarious evils of our malificent maladministration.
Second, to the extent that a Democratic administration and congressional supermajority fails to address inconvenient concerns, vigorous and sustained public activism will successfully influence and push government toward long-rejected progressive values.
Just as the magnetic poles of the Earth "flip" polarity every few eons, the implication is that a Democratic landslide will at long last flip the polarity of political power from "top-down" to "bottom-up". So it's the Democrat's turn to sit astride the pendulum-- and anyway, it's the only ride in town!
Ya gotta believe. Ya gotta believe...
Excellent article!
Nothing will ever change for any length of time until we amend the Constitution. Take away corporations' 'personhood' status and they will no longer have equal [or better] protection under the law. Then we can make campaign finance stick. Molly Ivans always said nothing will change without campaign finance reform, but first we must deal with this corporate welfare and greed.
From the article, "If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties, who herd us toward the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it the most."
Today, while filing my old pickup with $4.20 gas, I looked at some others who were filing also, "pretty bad huh?", "yeah, I hear it's may go to $5.00 by the end of the year" was the response. Another said "but what are you going to do, they got us over a barrel". "ha, ha," everyone laughed.
I may be blind but I see very little anger about the economy, the war, the totalitarian creep of government; not with neighbors, not with friends or family or corporate media or anywhere except on a few websites like Common Dreams. When I express frustration or start to rant I get "but what are you going to do about it? it's out of our control".
So with that in mind I tend to agree with frank1569 above "Arm yourselves, train for survival, and get ready to go to the mattresses".
Meanwhile also read Bugliosi's book. Do what we can legally to end this madness.
Brilliant article, one I will also pass around.
And good work, too! to the group of 222 that made it clear they did NOT want BUSH to speak at their university for all the reasons Chris Hedges made so luminiously clear.
The best summation of how we have arrived at our current situation I have yet read. I agree with everything Chris has written. One problem - no solution.
There is a solution, the only solution possible, a constitutional ammendment. po grandma is correct.
Without a constitutional ammendment, on campaign financing, corporations will be able to continue to rule the people. The Supreme Court has ruled that Money=Speech. It will take a constitutional ammendment to over-ride the Supreme Court.
If we do not do this, there is no hope, we will continue our slow motion journey into economic and political serfdom.
A constitutional ammendment on campaign financing should be the center peice of the Progressive and Libertarian movements. It is essential.
So let's discuss, design the ammendment, and begin the movement.
Article 1. Contributions to those running for elected office can only be made by individual citizens who would be represented by the elected official.
Article 2. Contributions to political parties can only be made by individual citizens not in excess of
"The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel,"
As a military man, I say let's quit this "brave and honorable U.S. military personnel" crap. It only helps to get young idealists to enlist to become a "hero" and get sent into shit they can't escape alive, crippled, or poor.
John F. Butterfield said: "I simply want to reduce.. every corporation to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in my bathtub."
Careful. There's been enough pseudo-religious talk about drowning things in bathtubs the last 20 years. In this pseudo-religious country, its amazing how much damage a bad idea can end up doing. Norquist may have said it, but BUSH did it!!! And more's the pity. To move forward, we should, at the very least, acknowledge the forces that got us here (most powerful and richest country on earth, horrid at spreading her wealth for the general welfare): and that includes corporations.
"How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation-the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state."
We should have seen it coming with the ability of banks and corporations to concentrate money-power. That doesn't happen in direct democracies.
"We must lobby, organize and advocate for the dissolution of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA."
We can and do until we're red in the face but we're ignored. We can organize We the People by incorporating ourselves and receiving actual and equal non-transferable shares of stock in our public treasure. Who can beat a corporation? A much larger one. One person, one vote.
the big problem is cynicism. i've spent years of my life doing political organizing and the biggest obstacle in that process is peoples' cynicism.
We have to show the world that we are aware of the perversion of democracy in the USA, and we have to realize that we are the MAJORITY. One way to do this is to put small signs out every day. A tool I have seen used is someone writing " LIAR BUSH MURDERS FOR OIL" on dollar bills. A Sharpie magic marker works well for this task. One can pass 3 to 5 marked bills each day into circulation. Our leaders must know that the American people do not approve of this war, and would love to see Cheney and Bush impeached. Not until they are 100% sure of the groundswell of approval behind them will they act.
Thank you Chris Hedges.
I agree with every observation you've made. Unfortunately, as in the climate discussion, we are very late in our awakening. The reality is, our lives mean nothing to those presently in power. We are, as you observe, expendable in this mindless pursuit of power and money. The discussion must be focused on picking up the pieces in the future. I do not wish to be tasered, imprisoned, tortured, hassled, charged, fined, or any of the other many ways power has of destroying an individuals life, with impunity. What now, are the stakes, and what will be gained? We are a stupified country. Who's really listening? The truth will never be known. There are layers and layers of lies that will die with those who tell them. Truth is now meaningless in this discussion. We are a generation who can believe nothing. Product advertisements, scientific studies, White House proclamations, 9/11 inquiries, where is the truth? It will take a few generations to gain the ability to tell the truth. While I totally agree with every one of your other points Chris, I cannot after nearly fifty years of paying attention, maintain any sense of hope for the United States of America.
Daniel David, Little Brother and kloro,
Well said.
RichM, not worth the effort of responding.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it if/until we defeat it:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
Benito Mussolini
"Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism."
Benito Mussolini
The political decision by the US power elite to deindustrialize (post-industrialization) and produce the rust belt was/is hardly noticed by the media, academia and those citizens living outside these areas.
Only Michael Moore produced a documentary that focused on deindustrialization and its consequences, "Roger and Me."
Very few pop songs, movies or TV programs bothered noticing this phenomenon.
The only way we developed a prosperous working class was through government regulations and protections that placed laws and institutions between us and US-based corporations.
The more these institutions and laws are scrapped, the more impoverished the working people become.
One problem that we possess in this society is that nobody consistently defines what Rightwing, Leftwing and Moderate actually mean.
The rightwing (or conservative) passes laws that force working people to work harder and longer for less. All forms of economic and social security are cut back.
Cultural pursuits are transformed into passive, commercial entertainment. Citizens are converted into debt-ridden consumers: serfs.
Leftwing governments pass laws that effectively allow working people to work less and less intensively while being paid more.
All forms of economic and social security are expanded.
Creative and uplifting cultural pursuits and citizen participation are highly supported.
Moderates continue things as they are.
I am in awe. This speech by Chris Hedges blew me away. What can I say, well done.
mountaineer May 31st, 2008 12:56 pm
Mercy. Well, let's try to get Barack Obama elected,
==========================================
Obama is an empty suit.
Has he done anything to make Bush accountable? NO
Has he stopped funding the war? NO
Has he stopped unilaterally supporting Israel's illegal occupation of and war crimes in Palestine? NO
Stop and think. Do not participate in this "personality contest", look for concrete facts.
FOr me the start is to VOTE FOR ANYONE BUT THE TWO PARTIES.
Wow! What a mouthful.
"In a word, deregulation-the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing
economy to a capital economy."
Siouxrose May 31st, 2008 4:42 pm
Nice to mention the 222. At least it would have been a short speech....walk to the podium....say, sorry...walk away from the podium.
And I believe this paragraph is the one from which all the other ills flow.
Little Brother May 31st, 2008 4:10 pm
So in opther words you believe the inevitability argument. Huuummmm, hope it works for them better than it did for Hillary. But then you agree with RichM to his delight I'm sure, they haven't accomplished one darn thing, but you are still hopeful.
aliensoup,
Nice post. Wrong answer.
Obama is a representative of corporate military and in this is NO different than Hillary, McCain, Bush, etc.
"Obama's foreign policy advisor and vocal supporter is Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, who says that Obama offers 'a new definition of America's role in the world'.
This is the same Brzezinski who created the Illuminati's Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973. The Trilateral Commission is dedicated to a world government dictatorship and closely connects with other strands in the web like the Council on Foreign Relations (member: Barack Obama) and the Bilderberg Group.
Brzezinski's foreign 'policy' during the Carter administration, as he has since admitted without regret, was to entice the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in December, 1979. The idea, he said, was to weaken their rival superpower and the result was a ten-year occupation that cost the lives of an estimated 1.3 million Afghans and spawned the Mujahedin, Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Deep breath: he's now advising Barack Obama on foreign policy ... "
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message487849/pg1
Considering the role Brzezinski has played in setting up several of the current genocides and the opportunity for elite consolidation of power and resources...
I really think that the only possibilities for change will be based upon each and every person taking responsible steps to be a contributor to peace... and not its opposite.
If the job supports war, the job must go. If the operation supports genocide or more unfair policing and surveillance of citizens, the operation must be halted.
Our responsibility is not to choose the best leader. Our responsibility (response-ability) is to choose the best each and every day, in every way.
More intimacy with all of life is the answer... and that answer produces all the answers.
http://allinharmony.org
The corporate power paradigm (dominator society) rests upon some obvious fallacies in regard to nature and human nature. Shedding light upon these fallacies is key to a return to natural sustainability. The transition is actually MUCH EASIER to accomplish than continuing to break every natural law required for biosphere survival.
Obama lovers:
read the other piece here at CD
After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama)
by John Pilger
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/31/9327/
"The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy."
"In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added]." Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".
I don't copy everythings.... read for yourself