Only when enough Americans come to understand the following, only then
will we begin to build effective resistance.
Carl Jarvis
"No progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise up, take
control of the party and save us.
There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may engage in
petty,internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government
shutdown. It may
squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more
tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of
color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and corporate
domination there is no divergence."
On 1/28/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The World to Come
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American
power
are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the
plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be
reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of
numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state. The
failing
roads, bridges and public transportation are making commerce and
communications more difficult. The soaring government deficit, now almost a
trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration's massive corporate tax
cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial system by global
speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another financial meltdown.
The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up con artists such
as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured
politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a
new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars of the state,
including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt
force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and fuels
endless and futile foreign wars.
Just as ominous as the visible rot is the internal decay. Among all social
classes there is a loss of faith in the government, widespread frustration,
a sense of stagnation and entrapment, bitterness over unfulfilled
expectations and promises, and a merging of fact and fiction so that civil
and political discourse is no longer rooted in reality. The nation's
isolation by its traditional allies and its inability, especially in the
face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate rational and visionary
policies have shattered the mystique that is vital to power. "A society
becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,"
George Orwell wrote. "That is when its ruling class has lost its function
but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." Our elites have
exhausted fraud. Force is all they have left.
The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death
throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover. These are
the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. The death blow will come
when the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency, a process
already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet, setting off a
severe
depression and demanding instant contraction of the military overseas.
Seth A. Klarman, who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, which manages about
$27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page letter to his investors. He
pointed out that the nation's ratio of government debt to gross domestic
product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100 percent and is close to that in
France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt crisis, he warned, could be the
"seeds" of the next financial crisis. He decried the global unraveling of
"social cohesion," adding, "It can't be business as usual amid constant
protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions."
"There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will
inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical
debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford,"
he said in the letter. "By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be
too late to get our house in order."
The ruling elites, worried about impending financial collapse, are
scrambling to cement into place harsh legal and physical forms of control
to
stymie what they fear could be widespread popular unrest, nascent forms of
which can be seen in the strikes carried out by American teachers and the
protests by the "yellow vests" in France.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism, the ruling elites recognize, has been
discredited across the political spectrum. This is forcing the elites to
make unsavory alliances with neofascists, who in the United States are
represented by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism is swiftly
filling Trump's ideological void. It is embodied in figures such as Mike
Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.
In its most virulent form, one that will be expressed once the economy goes
into crisis, this Christian fascism will seek to purge the society of those
branded as social deviants, including immigrants, Muslims, "secular
humanist" artists and intellectuals, feminists, gays and lesbians, Native
Americans and criminals-largely poor people of color-based on a perverted
and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Abortion will be illegal. The
death penalty will be mandated for a variety of crimes. Education will be
dominated by white supremacist views of history, indoctrination and the
teaching of creationism or "intelligent design." The pantheon of new
America
heroes will include Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The
state will portray the white majority as victims.
This Christian fascism, like all forms of totalitarianism, wraps itself in
a
cloying piety, promising moral as well as physical renewal. The degradation
of mass culture with its celebration of sexual sadism, graphic violence and
personal dysfunction, its plagues of opioid addiction, suicide, gambling
and
alcoholism, along with social chaos and government dysfunction, will lend
credibility to the Christian fascists' promise of a return to a "Christian"
purity. The cloak of this piety will be used to snuff out all civil
liberties.
Central to any totalitarian ideology is a constant inquisition against
supposedly clandestine and sinister groups held responsible for the
country's demise. Conspiracy theories, which already color Trump's
worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will whipsaw the
population, swinging from championing individualism and personal freedom to
calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the nation
and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death penalty,
unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and compassion to
the
fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A grotesque hypermasculinity
will be celebrated. Violence will be held up as the mechanism to cleanse
the
society and the world of evil. Facts will be erased or altered. Lies will
become true. Political language will be cognitive dissonance. The more the
country declines, the more the paranoia and collective insanity will grow.
All of these elements are present in varying forms within the culture and
our failed democracy. They will become pronounced as the country unravels
and the disease of totalitarianism spreads.
The ruling oligarchs, as in all failed states, will retreat into fortified
compounds, many of which they are already preparing, where they will have
access to basic services, health care, education, water, electricity and
security largely denied to the wider population. The central government
will
be reduced to its most basic functions-internal and external security and
collecting taxes. Severe poverty will cripple the lives of most citizens.
Any essential service once provided by the state, from utilities to basic
policing, will be privatized, expensive and inaccessible to those without
resources. Trash will pile up in the streets. Crime will explode. The
electrical grid and water systems-decrepit, poorly maintained and run by
corporations-will repeatedly turn on and off.
The mass media will become nakedly Orwellian, chatting endlessly about a
bright future and pretending America remains a great superpower. It will
substitute political gossip for news-a corruption already far
advanced-while
insisting that the country is in an economic recovery or about to enter
one.
It will refuse to address ever-worsening social inequality, political and
environmental deterioration and military debacles. Its primary role will be
to peddle illusions so that an atomized public, fixated on its electronic
screens, will be diverted from the collapse and see its plight as personal
rather than collective. Dissent will become more difficult as critics are
censored and attacked as responsible for the decline. Hate groups and hate
crimes will proliferate and be tacitly empowered and condoned by the state.
Mass shootings will be commonplace. The weak-especially children, women,
the
disabled, the sick and the elderly-will be exploited, abandoned or abused.
The strong will be omnipotent.
There will still be money to be made. Corporations will sell anything for a
profit-security, dwindling food supplies, fossil fuel, water, electricity,
education, medical care, transportation-forcing citizens into debt peonage
that will see their meager assets seized when they can't make payments. The
prison population, already the largest in the world, will expand along with
the number of citizens forced to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day.
Big corporations will pay no income tax or at best a symbolic tax. They
will
be above the law, able to abuse and underpay workers and poison the
environment without oversight or regulation.
As income inequality becomes more massive, financial titans such as Jeff
Bezos, worth some $140 billion, will increasingly function as modern-day
slaveholders. They will preside over financial empires where impoverished
employees will live in run-down campers and trailer parks while toiling 12
hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated warehouses. These employees, paid
subsistence wages, will be constantly recorded, tracked and monitored by
digital devices. They will be fired when the punishing work conditions
cripple their health. For many Amazon employees the future is now.
Work will be a form of serfdom for all but the upper elites and managers.
Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book "Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management
Harms Employee Health and Company Performance-and What We Can Do About It"
quotes a survey in which 61 percent of employees said workplace stress had
made them ill and 7 percent said they required hospitalization as a result.
The stress of overwork, he writes, may cause 120,000 deaths annually in the
United States. In China there are an estimated 1 million deaths a year from
overwork.
This is the world the elites are preparing for by setting in place legal
mechanisms and internal security forces to strip us of liberty.
We, too, must begin to prepare for this dystopia, not only to ensure our
survival but to build mechanisms to blunt and attempt to overthrow the
totalitarian power the elites expect to wield. Alexander Herzen, speaking
to
a group of anarchists a century ago about how to overthrow the Russian
czar,
reminded his listeners that it was their job not to save a dying system but
to replace it: "We think we are the doctors. We are the disease." All
efforts to reform the American system is capitulation. No progressive in
the
Democratic Party is going to rise up, take control of the party and save
us.
There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may engage in petty,
internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government shutdown. It may
squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more
tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of
color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and
corporate
domination there is no divergence.
We must carry out organized civil disobedience and forms of non-cooperation
to weaken corporate power. We must use, as in France, widespread and
sustained social unrest to push back against the designs of our corporate
masters. We must sever ourselves from reliance on corporations in order to
build independent, sustainable communities and alternative forms of power.
The less we need corporations the freer we will become. This will be true
in
every aspect of our lives, including food production, education,
journalism,
artistic expression and work. Life will have to be communal. No one, unless
he or she is part of the ruling elite, will have the resources to survive
alone.
The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more
unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite's goal is to keep
us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian
structures
of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us to pit power
against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter the larger
culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can
approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based
on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in
front of us, will be a victory.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
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.
