Scum vs. Scum
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American
political system than the Senate race in New Jersey. Sen. Bob Menendez,
running for re-election, was censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for
accepting bribes from the Florida businessman Salomon Melgen, who was
convicted in 2017 of defrauding Medicare of $73 million. The senator had
flown to the Dominican Republic with Melgen on the physicians private jet
and stayed in his private villa, where the men cavorted with young Dominican
women who allegedly were prostitutes. Menendez performed numerous political
favors for Melgen, including helping some of the Dominican women acquire
visas to the United States. Menendez was indicted in a federal corruption
trial but escaped sentencing because of a hung jury.
Menendez has a voting record as sordid as most Democrats. He supported the
$716 billion military spending bill, along with 85 percent of his fellow
Senate Democrats. He signed a letter, along with other Democratic leaders,
calling for steps to extradite Julian Assange to stand trial in the United
States. The senator, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee,
is owned by the lobby for Israela country that routinely and massively
interferes in our electionsand supported moving the U.S. Embassy to
Jerusalem. He helped cause the 2008 global financial crisis by voting to
revoke Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law enacted to create a firewall
between commercial and investment banks.
His Republican rival in the Senate race that will be decided Tuesday is Bob
Hugin, whose reported net worth is at least $84 million. With Hugin as its
CEO, the pharmaceutical firm Celgene made $200 million by conspiring to keep
generic cancer drugs off the market, according to its critics. Celgene, a
model of everything that is wrong with our for-profit health care system,
paid $280 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower who accused
the firm of improperly marketing two drugs to treat several forms of cancer
without getting Federal Drug Administration approval, thereby defrauding
Medicare. Celgene, over seven years, also doubled the price of the cancer
drug Revlimid to some $20,000 for a supply of 28 pills.
The Senate campaign in New Jersey has seen no discussion of substantive
issues. It is dominated by both candidates nonstop personal attacks and
negative ads, part of the typical burlesque of American politics.
Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that
100 million Americans dont bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob
One or Bob Two, why bother? One-fourth of Democratic challengers in
competitive House districts in this weeks elections have backgrounds in the
CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department.
Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored,
with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida
Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as
Democrats. The securities and finance industry has backed Democratic
congressional candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans,
according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Democratic candidates and political action committees have received $56.8
million, compared with Republicans $33.4 million, the center reported. The
broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given
$174 million to Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans.
And Michael Bloomberg, weighing his own presidential run, has pledged $100
million to elect a Democratic Congress.
In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors
and those who raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary
level of investment and excitement from the finance sector
, The New York
Times reported about current campaign contributions to the Democrats from
the corporate oligarchs.
Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump
fascism. But should the Democrats take control of the House of
Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and
control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the pipe
bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward
prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the
white mans party of the president retain control of the House and the
Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political control
as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we
are in for it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux
populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise
the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is
hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some
obstacle to Trump, you shouldnt vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the
war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and
the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic
control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate
tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The
rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.
The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped
orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and
ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their
core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is ultimately a losing formula.
It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run
for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her
political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West
Coast elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American
Power warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal,
benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the
executioners sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to
a captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises
protection against enemies real and invented. But denounce its ideology,
challenge its power, demand freedom from fascisms iron grip, and you are
mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States form of fascism,
expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true
intentions behind its friendly face we would be stripped of power, shorn
of our most cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.
Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism
creeping slowly across America, Gross wrote. Faceless oligarchs sit at
command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly
evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and
privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or
unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For
Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring
recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil
and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More
broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international
politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military
invasion.
No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate
state. Our press has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories,
jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery
corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions are skillfully
manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We
are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including
sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump
is a master of this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual
energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena.
Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of
dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us
that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national
discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative
fiat. It is a vast con game.
You cannot use the word liberty when your government, as ours does,
watches you 24 hours a day and stores all of your personal information in
government computers in perpetuity. You cannot use the word liberty when
you are the most photographed and monitored population in human history. You
cannot use the word liberty when it is impossible to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot use the word
liberty when the state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate
lethal force against unarmed citizens in the streets of American cities. You
cannot use the word liberty when 2.3 million citizens, mostly poor people
of color, are held in the largest prison system on earth. This is the
relationship between a master and a slave. The choice is between whom we
want to clamp on our chainsa jailer who mouths politically correct bromides
or a racist, Christian fascist. Either way we are shackled.
Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to
corporate fascism. It is the natural consequence of the ruling ideology of
neoliberalism that consolidates power and wealth into the hands of a tiny
group of oligarchs. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, refining Gross
thesis, would later characterize this corporate tyranny or friendly fascism
as inverted totalitarianism. It was, as Gross and Wolin pointed out,
characterized by anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral
politics, the Constitution and the iconography and symbols of American
patriotism but internally had seized all of the levers of power to render
the citizen impotent. Gross warned that we were being shackled
incrementally. Most would not notice until they were in total bondage. He
wrote that a friendly fascist power structure in the United States, Canada,
Western Europe, or todays Japan would be far more sophisticated than the
caesarism of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no
charismatic dictator nor even a titular head
it would require no one-party
rule, no mass fascist party, no glorification of the State, no dissolution
of legislatures, no denial of reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an
outgrowth of present trends in the Establishment.
Gross foresaw that technological advances in the hands of corporations would
be used to trap the public in what he called cultural ghettoization so
that almost every individual would get a personalized sequence of
information injections at any time of the dayor night. This is what, of
course, television, our electronic devices and the internet have done. He
warned that we would be mesmerized by the entertaining shadows on the wall
of the Platonic cave as we were enslaved.
Gross knew that the most destructive force against the body politic would be
the war profiteers and the militarists. He saw how they would siphon off the
resources of the state to wage endless war, a sum that now accounts for half
of all discretionary spending. And he grasped that warfare is the natural
extension of corporatism. He wrote:
Under the militarism of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism violence was
openly glorified. It was applied regionallyby the Germans in Europe and
England, the Italians in the Mediterranean, the Japanese in Asia. In battle,
it was administered by professional militarists who, despite many conflicts
with politicians, were guided by old-fashioned standards of duty, honor,
country, and willingness to risk their own lives.
The emerging militarism of friendly fascism is somewhat different. It is
global in scope. It involves weapons of doomsday proportions, something that
Hitler could dream of but never achieve. It is based on an integration
between industry, science, and the military that the old-fashioned fascists
could never even barely approximate. It points toward equally close
integration among military, paramilitary, and civilian elements. Many of the
civilian leaderssuch as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Paul Nitzetend to be much
more bloodthirsty than any top brass. In turn, the new-style military
professionals tend to become corporate-style entrepreneurs who tend to
operateas Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Savage
have disclosedin accordance with the ethics of the marketplace. The old
buzzwords of duty, honor, and patriotism are mainly used to justify officer
subservience to the interests of transnational corporations and the
continuing presentation of threats to some corporate investments as threats
to the interest of the American people as a whole. Above all, in sharp
contrast with classic fascisms glorification of violence, the friendly
fascist orientation is to sanitize, even hide, the greater violence of
modern warfare behind such value-free terms as nuclear exchange,
counterforce and flexible response, behind the huge geographical
distances between the senders and receivers of destruction through missiles
or even on the automated battlefield, and the even greater psychological
distances between the First World elites and the ordinary people who might
be consigned to quick or slow death.
We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and
progressives, as they do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for
the Democrats, although the Democratic Party in Europe would be classified
as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build progressive movements
the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The
Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its
abject service to corporations. It knows the left and liberals become
supplicants in every election cycle. And this is why the Democratic Party
drifts further and further to the right and we become more and more
irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for
it. But there is no fight in us.
The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in
it. Take a look at the flight roster of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who
was accused of prostituting dozens of underage girls and ended up spending
13 months in prison on a single count. He flew political insiders from both
parties and the business world to his secluded Caribbean island, known as
Orgy Island, on his jet, which the press nicknamed the Lolita Express.
Some of the names on his flight roster, which usually included unidentified
women, were Bill Clinton, who took dozens of trips, Alan Dershowitz, former
Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers, the
Candide-like Steven Pinker, whose fairy dust ensures we are getting better
and better, and Britains Prince Andrew. Epstein was also a friend of Trump,
whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago.
We live on the precipice, the eve of the deluge. Past civilizations have
crumbled in the same way, although as Hegel understood, the only thing we
learn from history is that people and governments never have learned
anything from history. We will not arrest the decline if the Democrats
regain control of the House. At best we will briefly slow it. The corporate
engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war are untouchable.
Corporate power will do its dirty work regardless of which facethe friendly
fascist face of the Democrats or the demented visage of the Trump
Republicansis pushed out front. If you want real change, change that means
something, then mobilize, mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two
political parties but to rise up and destroy the corporate structures that
ensure our doom.
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers
