The Feuding Kleptocrats
Published on
Monday, March 27, 2017
by
Truthdig
The Feuding Kleptocrats
by
Chris Hedges
'The kleptocrats, in the end,' writes Hedges, 'have only one real enemy:
us.' (Illustration: Mr. Fish / Truthdig)
The Trump kleptocrats are political arsonists. They are carting cans of
gasoline into government agencies and Congress to burn down any structure or
program that promotes the common good and impedes corporate profit.
They ineptly have set themselves on fire over Obamacare, but this misstep
will do little to halt the drive to, as Stephen Bannon promises, carry out
the "deconstruction of the administrative state." Donald Trump's appointees
are busy diminishing or dismantling the agencies they were named to lead and
the programs they are supposed to administer. That is why they were
selected. Rex Tillerson at the State Department, Steven Mnuchin at the
Treasury Department, Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency,
Rick Perry at the Department of Energy, Tom Price at Health and Human
Services, Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and
Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education are eating away the foundations
of democratic institutions like gigantic termites. And there is no force
inside government that can stop them.
The sparing of Obamacare last week was a Pyrrhic victory. There are numerous
subterfuges that can be employed to cripple or kill that very flawed health
care program. These include defunding cost-sharing subsidies for low-income
families, allowing premium rates for individual insurance to continue to
soar (they have gone up 25 percent this year), cutting compensation to
insurers in order to drive more insurance companies out of the program, and
refusing to enforce the individual mandate that requires many Americans to
purchase health insurance or be fined. The Trump administration's
Shermanesque march to the sea has just begun.
William S. Burroughs in his novel "Naked Lunch" creates predatory creatures
he calls "Mugwumps." "Mugwumps," he writes, "have no liver and nourish
themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp
beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in
fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addictive fluid though their
erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism." Those addicted to
this fluid are called "Reptiles."
"The kleptocrats, whatever their differences, are united by one overriding
fear. They fear large numbers of people will become wise to their
kleptocracy and revolt. They fear the mob. They fear revolution, the only
mechanism left that can rid us of these parasites."
The addiction to the grotesque, to our own version of Mugwumps, has become
our national pathology. We are entranced, even as the secretion of Trump's
Mugwump fluid repulses us. He brings us down to his level. We are glued to
cable news, which usually sees a huge falling off of viewership after a
presidential election. Ratings for the Trump-as-president reality show,
however, are up 50 percent. CNN, which last year had its most profitable
year ever, looks set in 2017 to break even that record and is projecting a
billion dollars in profit. The New York Times added some 500,000
subscribers, net, over the past six months. The Washington Post has seen a
75 percent increase in new subscribers over the past year. Subscriptions to
magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic have increased.
This growth is provoked not by a sudden desire to be informed, but by
Americans' wanting to be continually updated on the soap opera that
epitomizes the U.S. government. What country will the president insult
today? Mexico? Australia? Sweden? Germany? What celebrity or politician will
he belittle? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Barack Obama? John McCain? Chuck
Schumer? What idiocy will come out of his mouth or from his appointees? Can
Kellyanne Conway top her claim that microwave ovens that turned into cameras
were used to spy on Donald Trump? Will DeVos say something as stupid as her
assertion that guns are needed in schools to protect children from grizzly
bears? Will Trump make another assertion such as his insistence that Obama
ordered his phone in Trump Tower to be tapped?
It is all entertainment all the time. It is the result of a media that long
ago gave up journalism to keep us amused. Trump was its creation. And now we
get a daily "Gong Show" out of the White House. It is good for Trump. It is
good for the profits of the cable news networks. But it is bad for us. It
keeps us distracted as the kleptocrats transform the country into a banana
republic. Our world is lifted from the pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
novel "The Autumn of the Patriarch," in which the "eternal" dictator was
feared and mocked in equal measure.
The kleptocrats-and, now, those they con-have no interest in the flowery
words of inclusivity, multiculturalism and democracy that a bankrupt liberal
class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public
on behalf of corporations. That rhetoric is a spent force. Barack Obama
tried it when he crisscrossed the country during the presidential campaign
telling a betrayed public that Hillary Clinton would finish the job started
by his administration.
Political language has been replaced by the obscenities of reality
television, professional wrestling and the daytime shows in which couples
find out if they cheated on each other. This is the language used by Trump,
who views reality and himself through the degraded lens of television and
the sickness of celebrity culture. He, like much of the public, lives in the
fantasy world of electronic hallucinations.
The battle over health care was all about the most effective way to hand
money to corporations. Do we stick with Obamacare, already a gift to the
for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industries, or do we turn to a sham
bill of pretend care that gives even more tax cuts to the rich? This is what
passes for nuanced political debate now. The courtiers in the media give the
various sides in this argument ample airtime and space in print, but they
lock out critics of corporate power, especially those who promote the
rational system of Medicare for all. Health care costs in the United States,
where 40 cents of every health care dollar goes to corporations, are double
what they are in industrial countries that have a national health service.
This censorship on behalf of corporations is the press' steadfast lie of
omission. And it is this lie that leaves the media at once distrusted by the
public and complicit in Trump's fleecing of America. When we are not being
amused by these debates among corporate lackeys we listen to retired
generals, all making six-figure incomes from the weapons industry, selling
the public on the imperative of endless war and endless arms purchases.
Trump understands the effectiveness of illusions, false promises and lies,
an understanding that eludes those in the Freedom Caucus, many of whom want
to do away with health care systems that involve government. If the ruling
kleptocrats strip everything away at once, it could provoke an angry
backlash among the population. Better to use the more subtle mechanisms of
theft that worked in Trump's casinos and his fake university. Better to
steal with finesse. Better to strip the government on behalf of corporations
while promising to make America great again.
The kleptocrats, whatever their differences, are united by one overriding
fear. They fear large numbers of people will become wise to their
kleptocracy and revolt. They fear the mob. They fear revolution, the only
mechanism left that can rid us of these parasites.
They are perverting the legal system and building mechanisms and
paramilitary groups that will protect the kleptocrats and oligarchs when the
last bits of the country and the citizens are being "harvested" for
corporate profit. They don't want anything to impede the pillage, even when
climate change forces people to confront the reality that they and their
children may soon become extinct. They will steal despite the fact that the
ecosystem is collapsing, heat waves and droughts are destroying crop yields,
the air and water are becoming toxic and the oceans are being transformed
into dead zones. There will be hundreds of millions of desperate climate
refugees. Civil society will break down. They won't stop until their own
generators have run out of fuel in their gated compounds and their private
security forces have deserted them. When the end comes they will greet it
with their characteristic blank expression of idiocy and greed. But most of
us won't be around to see their epiphany.
The kleptocrats have placed all citizens under surveillance. This is by
design. They sweep up our email correspondence, tweets, web searches, phone
records, file transfers, live chats, financial data, medical data, criminal
and civil court records and information on movements. They do this in the
name of the war on terror. They have diverted billions of taxpayer dollars
to store this information in sophisticated computer systems. They have set
up surveillance cameras, biosensors, scanners and face recognition
technologies in public and private places to obliterate our anonymity and
our privacy. They are watching us constantly. And when a government watches
you constantly you cannot use the word "liberty." The people's relationship
to government is that of slave to master.
The kleptocrats have used the courts to strip us of due process and habeas
corpus. They have constructed the largest prison system in the world. They
have militarized police and authorized them to kill unarmed citizens,
especially poor people of color, with impunity. They have overturned the
1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which once prohibited the military from acting as
a domestic police force, by passing Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act. Section 1021 gives the kleptocrats the power to carry out
extraordinary rendition on the streets of American cities and hold citizens
indefinitely in military detention centers without due process-in essence
disappearing them as in any totalitarian state. The kleptocrats have handed
the executive branch of government the power to assassinate U.S. citizens.
And they have stacked the courts with corporate loyalists who treat
corporations as people and people as noisome impediments to corporate
profit.
This omnipresent surveillance state and militarization of the forces of
internal security are designed to thwart popular revolt. These tools are the
moats the kleptocrats have built to protect themselves from the threatening
hoards. Full surveillance, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, is
not a means to discover or prevent crimes, but a device to have "on hand
when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population."
The most innocuous information will be twisted and used by the kleptocrats
to condemn anyone considered a threat.
The kleptocrats, in the end, have only one real enemy: us. Their goal is to
make sure we are mesmerized by their carnival act or, if we wake up,
shackled while they do their dirty work. Our goal must be to get rid of
them.
C 2017 TruthDig
