Well said, Chris Hedges.
Now that we understand the depth and breadth of where we are headed,
it is far past time that we prepare a plan that will culminate in a
new world order. One that includes all people. Or is such a plan an
impossible pipe dream?
Carl Jarvis
On 9/12/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
Fooled Again
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/fooled_again_20160911/
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Posted on Sep 11, 2016
By Chris Hedges
A Hillary Clinton rally in Cleveland in June. (Andrew Harnik /
AP(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/DEM-2016-Clinton/6928c04d5f6e40f08
ea6622f92b3d1f1/4/1) )
The naive hopes of Bernie Sanders’ supporters—to build a grass-roots
political movement, change the Democratic Party from within and push
Hillary
Clinton to the left—have failed. Clinton, aware that the liberal class and
the left are not going to mount genuine resistance, is running as Mitt
Romney in drag. The corporate elites across the political spectrum,
Republican and Democrat, have gleefully united to anoint her president. All
that remains of Sanders’ “revolution” is a 501(c)(4) designed to raise
money, including from wealthy, anonymous donors, to ensure that he will be
a
senator for life. Great historical events happen twice, as Karl Marx
quipped, first as tragedy and then as farce.
The multibillion-dollar extravaganza of our electoral Circus Maximus is
part
of the smokescreen that covers the ongoing devastation of globalization,
deindustrialization, trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
endless war, climate change and the intrusion into every corner of our
lives
by the security and surveillance state. Our democracy is dead. Clinton and
Donald Trump do not have the power or the interest to revive it. They kneel
before the war machine, which consumes trillions of dollars to wage futile
wars and bankroll a bloated military. To defy the fortress state is
political suicide. Politicians are courtiers to Wall Street. The candidates
mouth the clichés of justice, improvements in income equality and
democratic
choice, but it is a cynical game. Once it is over, the victors will go to
Washington to work with the lobbyists and financial elites to carry out the
real business of ruling.
While there is a difference in the temperament of the two major
presidential
candidates, that difference will play out only in how our poison will be
delivered. Political personalities serve global corporate centers of power.
They do not control them. Barack Obama illustrates this.
To neoliberals, everyone and everything are disposable. The failed states
that have risen up across the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus and Asia in
the wake of the Cold War herald a neoliberal world driven by violence,
corruption, greed and desperation. The drug traffickers, smugglers,
pirates,
kidnappers, jihadists, criminal gangs and militias that roam huge swaths of
territory where central authority has vanished are the real faces of
globalization. These nihilists define Islamic State just as they define the
corporate state. Corruption may be more naked and cruder in Afghanistan or
Iraq, but it has its parallel in the for-sale politicians and political
parties that dominate the United States and Europe. The common good—the
building of community and solidarity—has been replaced through decades of
corporate indoctrination with the callous call to amass all you can for
yourself and leave the stranger bleeding on the side of the road.
Is the Goldman Sachs commodity trader, who hoards futures of rice, wheat,
corn, sugar and livestock to jack up prices on the global market, leaving
poor people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to starve,
any less morally repugnant than the drug trafficker? Are F-16 pilots who
incinerate families in Raqqa morally distinct from jihadists who burn a
captured Jordanian pilot in a cage? Is torture in one of our black sites or
offshore penal colonies any less barbaric than torture at the hands of
Islamic State? Are the decapitations of children by military drones any
more
defensible than decapitations of Egyptian laborers on a beach in Libya by
self-described holy warriors? Is Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, who
raised the price of the lifesaving
EpiPen(https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/24/epipen-mylan-bresch/ ;) by 400
percent or more and whose compensation since 2007 has risen by 600 percent
to above $18 million a year, any less venal than a human trafficker who
sends an overloaded boat and its occupants to their doom on the coast of
Libya?
There is a new world order. It is based on naked exploitation. It—not
democracy—is what we have exported across the globe. And it looks a lot
like
the anarchic state that Hobbes
feared(https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-of-nature-political-theory ;)
.
The criminal gangs that deliver migrants to Europe make about $100 million
a
month for their work. They exploit and traffic human beings just as highly
paid CEOs do.
The failed states of Iraq, Syria and Libya, a direct result of
globalization, have their counterparts in Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland,
Memphis, Baltimore, Atlanta, Milwaukee and the south side of Chicago. They
are our versions of Mogadishu, complete with lawlessness, senseless
killings, armed gangs, widespread hunger, fear, a population retreating
into
the numbing embrace of opiates, crippling poverty, dysfunctional state
institutions, the growth of private security companies that protect the
elites, and indiscriminate police violence that creates reigns of terror
aimed at the poor. The more the global corporate forces extract from us in
the name of austerity and the maximization of profit, the more parts of the
U.S. will descend into domestic versions of the failed states overseas. The
same system exists here and abroad. And it has the same result here and
abroad. It may appear first in Somalia, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Libya, but
it will soon come to characterize much of America. The proliferation of
weapons will do to our society what it has done to every other failed state
where there has been unchecked access to arsenals—hand power to those with
a
penchant for violence.
“Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them
out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as
powerless before him as animals,” Elias
Canetti(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elias-Canetti ;) wrote in
“Crowds and Power.” “He uses them like animals and, even if he does not
tell
them so, in himself he always knows quite clearly that they mean just as
little to him; when he speaks to his intimates he will call them sheep or
cattle. His ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck
the
substance out of them. What remains of them afterwards does not matter to
him. The worse he has treated them, the more he despises them. When they
are
no more use at all, he disposes of them as he does of his excrement, simply
seeing to it that they do not poison the air of his house.”
History has amply demonstrated where this will end up. The continued
exploitation by an unchecked elite, and the rising levels of poverty and
insecurity, will unleash a legitimate rage among the desperate. They will
see through the lies and propaganda of the elites. They will demand
retribution. They will turn to those who express the hatred they feel for
the powerful and the institutions, now shams, that were designed to give
them a voice. They will seek not reform but destruction of a system that
has
betrayed them.
Failed states—czarist Russia, the Weimar Republic, the former
Yugoslavia—vomit up political monstrosities. We will be no different.
A form of fascism has already taken hold in two nations on the edges of the
European Union, Hungary and Poland. Far-right parties, reacting to the
flood
of more than a million migrants that descended on Europe last year, are
gaining ground in France, Austria, Sweden, Germany and Greece. Nationalism,
buttressed by a deification of the military, will be used to compensate for
individual powerlessness and a loss of national identity. Dissent in the
U.S. will become “anti-American,” a form of treason. Enemies at home will
be
vilified along with enemies abroad. And this will lead to even more warfare
in the Middle East. The far-right political parties in Eastern Europe flirt
rhetorically with military conflict with Russia. And because of its
membership in NATO, the United States would be obligated to enter any
hostilities.
Voting for Hillary Clinton will not halt this slide into the apocalypse. It
will only accelerate it. Donald Trump may vanish from the political
landscape, but someone even more venal, and probably more intelligent, will
take his place. Our job is to dismantle the machinery that is pushing
toward
the cliff. And this means sustained and massive civil disobedience. As
exemplified by the protests at the Standing Rock Sioux
Reservation(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/standing_rock_sioux_chairma
n_dakota_access_pipeline_threatens_us_20160823 ) and by prisoners across
the nation who carried out work
stoppages(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/prisoners_mass_strike_
protest_state-sponsored_slavery_racism_20160906 ) last Friday, it means
doing everything possible not to cooperate with the elements of authority.
It means disrupting the mechanisms of power. It means overcoming fear. It
means no longer believing the lies we are told.
We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People
Western U.S. Faces Explosion of Wildfires
Iran and Hezbollah Welcome Kerry-Lavrov Syria Ceasefire (Video)
How Can Wealthy Elites Sleep at Night When American Teens Are Selling Sex
and Drugs in Order to Eat?
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
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