Once again, in my personal opinion, Chris Hedges is right on target.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/12/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government.
Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality,
self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle
systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future
for short-term personal gain. "The true forms of government, therefore, are
those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the
common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private
interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,"
Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions
the "sophistry of oligarchs," meaning that once oligarchs take power,
rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and
political
problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed. The late stage of every
civilization is characterized by the sophistry of oligarchs, who ravage the
decaying carcass of the state.
These deviant forms of government are defined by common characteristics,
most of which Aristotle understood. Oligarchs use power and ruling
structures solely for personal advancement.
Oligarchs, though they speak of deconstructing the administrative state,
actually increase deficits and the size and power of law enforcement and
the
military to protect their global business interests and ensure domestic
social control. The parts of the state that serve the common good wither in
the name of deregulation and austerity. The parts that promote the
oligarchs' power expand in the name of national security, economic growth
and law and order.
For example, the oligarchs educate their children in private schools and
buy
them admissions into elite universities (this is how a mediocre student
like
Jared Kushner went to Harvard and Donald Trump went to the University of
Pennsylvania), so they see no need to fund good public education for the
wider population. Oligarchs can pay teams of high-priced lawyers to bail
them and their families out of legal trouble. There is no need, in their
eyes, to provide funds for legal representation for the poor. When
oligarchs
do not fly on private jets, they fly in first class, so they permit
airlines
to fleece and abuse "economy" passengers. They do not use subways, buses or
trains, and they slash funds for the maintenance and improvement of these
services. Oligarchs have private clinics and private doctors, so they do
not
want to pay for public health or Medicare. Oligarchs detest the press,
which
when it works shines a light on their corruption and mendacity, so they buy
up and control systems of information and push their critics to the margins
of society, something they will accelerate with the abolition of net
neutrality.
Oligarchs do not vacation on public beaches or in public parks. They own
their own land and estates, where we are not allowed. They see no reason to
maintain or fund public parks or protect public land. They hand such land
over to other oligarchs to exploit for profit. Oligarchs cynically view
laws
as mechanisms to legalize their fraud and plunder. They use their lobbyists
in the legislative branch of government to author bills that increase and
protect their wealth, through the avoidance of taxes and other means.
Oligarchs do not allow free and fair elections. They use gerrymandering and
campaign contributions to make sure other oligarchs are elected over and
over to office. Many run unopposed.
Oligarchs look at regulations to protect the environment or the safety of
workers as impediments to profit and abolish them. Oligarchs move
industries
to Mexico or China to increase their wealth while impoverishing American
workers and leaving U.S. cities in ruins. Oligarchs are philistines. They
are deaf, dumb and blind to great works of art, reveling in tawdry
spectacles, patriotic kitsch and mindless entertainment. They despise
artists and intellectuals who promote virtues and self-criticism that
conflict with the lust for power, celebrity and wealth. Oligarchs always
unleash wars on culture, attacking it as elitist, irrelevant and immoral
and
cutting its funding. All social services and institutions, such as public
housing programs, public parks, meals for the elderly, infrastructure
projects, welfare and Social Security, are viewed by oligarchs as a waste
of
money. These services are gutted or turned over to fellow oligarchs, who
harvest them for profit until they are destroyed.
Oligarchs, who do not serve in the military and who ensure their children
do
not serve in the military, pretend to be great patriots. They attack those
who oppose them as anti-American, traitors or agents for a foreign power.
They use the language of patriotism to stoke hatred against their critics
and to justify their crimes. They see the world in black and white-those
who
are loyal to them and those who are the enemy. They extent this stunted
belief system to foreign affairs. Diplomacy is abandoned for the crude
threats and indiscriminate use of force that are the preferred forms of
communication of all despots.
There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest
1 percent of America's families control 40 percent of the nation's wealth,
a
statistic similar to what is seen globally: The wealthiest 1 percent of the
world's population owns more than half of the world's wealth. This wealth
translates into political power. The political scientists Martin Gilens of
Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, after examining differences in
public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, concluded,
"In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule-at
least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When
a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized
interests, they generally lose. Moreover . even when fairly large
majorities
of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."
Oligarchs accelerate social, political, cultural and economic collapse. The
unchecked plunder leads to systems breakdown. The refusal to protect
natural
resources, or the economic engines that sustain the state, means that
poverty becomes the norm and the natural world becomes a toxic wasteland.
Basic institutions no longer work. Infrastructure is no longer reliable.
Water, air and soil are poisoned. The population is left uneducated,
untrained, impoverished, oppressed by organs of internal security and beset
by despair. The state eventually goes bankrupt. Oligarchs respond to this
steady deterioration by forcing workers to do more for less and launching
self-destructive wars in the vain attempt to restore a lost golden age.
They
also insist, no matter how bad it gets, on maintaining their opulent and
hedonistic lifestyles. They further tax the resources of the state, the
ecosystem and the population with suicidal demands. They flee from the
looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or
the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are
overthrown or destroy the state itself. There is no institution left in
America that can be called democratic, and thus there is no internal
mechanism to prevent a descent into barbarity.
"The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and
representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of
executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the
degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics of
the system, not excrescences upon it," the political philosopher Sheldon
Wolin wrote in "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter
of
Inverted Totalitarianism." "The system would remain in place even if the
Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise,
the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed
in
the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last
analysis, the much-lauded stability and conservatism of the American system
owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it
is shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from
wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is
required of House candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for
the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such
times
it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it
can
miraculously cure the evils which are essential to its very existence."
The longer we are ruled by oligarchs, the deadlier our predicament becomes,
especially since the oligarchs refuse to address climate change, the
greatest existential crisis to humankind. The oligarchs have many
mechanisms, including wholesale surveillance, to keep us in check. They
will
stop at nothing to maintain the sophistry of their rule. History may not
repeat itself, but it echoes. And if we don't recognize these echoes and
then revolt, we will be herded into the abattoirs that tyrannies set up at
the end of their existence.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best
selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and
ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,.
