We Are All Greeks Now
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_greeks_now_20150712/
Posted on Jul 12, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A demonstrator waves a Greek flag during an anti-austerity rally in
central Athens on Friday. (Petros Karadjias / AP)
The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be
Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a
pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and
electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know the
crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to afford medical
care. They know the state seizing their meager assets, a process known in
the United States as "civil asset forfeiture," which has permitted American
police agencies to confiscate more than $3 billion in cash and property.
They know the profound despair and abandonment that come when schools,
libraries, neighborhood health clinics, day care services, roads, bridges,
public buildings and assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know
the financial elites' hijacking of democratic institutions to impose
widespread misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what
it is to be abandoned.
The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because
they are being assaulted by the same system-corporate capitalism. There are
no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external
constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate capitalism,
manipulating the world's most powerful financial institutions, including the
Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal
Reserve, does what it is designed to do: It turns everything, including
human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until
exhaustion or collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken,
regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to
legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are
privatized. Secret trade agreements-which even elected officials who view
the documents are not allowed to speak about-empower corporate oligarchs to
amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of
workers. To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and
drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It
ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism
possible. But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil.
By the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its
wake.
The Greek government kneels before the bankers of Europe begging for mercy
because it knows that if it leaves the eurozone, the international banking
system will do to Greece what it did to the socialist government of Salvador
Allende in 1973 in Chile; it will, as Richard Nixon promised to do in Chile,
"make the economy scream." The bankers will destroy Greece. If this means
the Greeks can no longer get medicine-Greece owes European drug makers 1
billion euros-so be it. If this means food shortages-Greece imports
thousands of tons of food from Europe a year-so be it. If this means oil and
gas shortages-Greece imports 99 percent of its oil and gas-so be it. The
bankers will carry out economic warfare until the current Greek government
is ousted and corporate political puppets are back in control.
Human life is of no concern to corporate capitalists. The suffering of the
Greeks, like the suffering of ordinary Americans, is very good for the
profit margins of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. It was,
after all, Goldman Sachs-which shoved subprime mortgages down the throats of
families it knew could never pay the loans back, sold the subprime mortgages
as investments to pension funds and then bet against them-that orchestrated
complex financial agreements with Greece, many of them secret. These
agreements doubled the debt Greece owes under derivative deals and allowed
the old Greek government to mask its real debt to keep borrowing. And when
Greece imploded, Goldman Sachs headed out the door with suitcases full of
cash.
The system of unfettered capitalism is designed to callously extract money
from the most vulnerable and funnel it upward to the elites. This is seen in
the mounting fines and fees used to cover shortfalls in city and state
budgets. Corporate capitalism seeks to privatize all aspects of government
service, from education to intelligence gathering. The U.S. Postal Service
appears to be next. Parents already must pay hundreds of dollars for their
public-school children to take school buses, go to music or art classes and
participate in sports or other activities. Fire departments, ambulance
services, the national parks system are all slated to become fodder for
corporate profit. It is the death of the civil society.
Criminal justice is primarily about revenue streams for city and state
governments in the United States rather than about justice or
rehabilitation. The poor are arrested and fined for minor infractions in
Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere; for not mowing their lawns; for putting their
feet on seats of New York City subway cars. If they cannot pay the fines, as
many cannot, they go to jail. In jail they are often charged room and board.
And if they can't pay this new bill they go to jail again. It is a game of
circular and never-ending extortion of the poor. Fines that are unpaid
accrue interest and generate warrants for arrest. Poor people often end up
owing thousands of dollars for parking or traffic violations.
Fascist and communist firing squads sometimes charged the victim's family
for the bullets used in the execution. In corporate capitalism, too, the
abusers extract payment; often the money goes to private corporations that
carry out probation services or prison and jail administration. The cost of
being shot with a stun gun ($26) or of probation services ($35 to $100 a
month) or of an electronic ankle bracelet ($11 a month) is vacuumed out of
the pockets of the poor. And all this is happening in what will one day be
seen as the good times. Wait until the financial house of cards collapses
again-what is happening in China is not a good sign-and Wall Street runs for
cover. Then America will become Greece on steroids.
"We are a nation that has turned its welfare system into a criminal system,"
write Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr in an Institute for Policy Studies report
titled "The Poor Get Prison." "We criminalize life-sustaining activities of
people too poor to afford shelter. We incarcerate more people than any other
nation in the world. And we institute policies that virtually bar them for
life from participating in society once they have done their time. We have
allowed the resurgence of debtors' prisons. We've created a second-tier
public education system for poor children and black and Latino children that
disproportionally criminalizes their behavior and sets them early onto the
path of incarceration and lack of access to assistance and opportunity."
The corporate dismantling of civil society is nearly complete in Greece. It
is far advanced in the United States. We, like the Greeks, are undergoing a
political war waged by the world's oligarchs. No one elected them. They
ignore public opinion. And, as in Greece, if a government defies the
international banking community it is targeted for execution. The banks do
not play by the rules of democracy.
Our politicians are corporate employees. And if you get dewy-eyed about the
possibility of the U.S. having its first woman president, remember that it
was Hillary Clinton's husband who decimated manufacturing jobs with the 1994
North American Free Trade Agreement and then went on to destroy welfare with
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,
which halted federal cash aid programs and imposed time-limited, restrictive
state block grants. Under President Bill Clinton, most welfare
recipients-and 70 percent of those recipients were children-were dropped
from the rolls. The prison-industrial complex exploded in size as its
private corporations swallowed up surplus, unemployed labor, making $40,000
or more a year from each person held in a cage. The population of federal
and state prisons combined rose by 673,000 under Clinton. He, along with
Ronald Reagan, set the foundations for the Greecification of the United
States.
The destruction of Greece, like the destruction of America, by the big banks
and financial firms is not, as the bankers claim, about austerity or
imposing rational expenditures or balanced budgets. It is not about
responsible or good government. It is a vicious form of class warfare. It is
profoundly anti-democratic. It is about forming nations of impoverished,
disempowered serfs and a rapacious elite of all-powerful corporate
oligarchs, backed by the most sophisticated security and surveillance
apparatus in human history and a militarized police that shoots unarmed
citizens with reckless abandon. The laws and rules it imposes on the poor
are, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, little more than "organized sadism."
Corporate profit is God. It does not matter who suffers. In Greece 40
percent of children live in poverty, there is a 25 percent unemployment rate
and the unemployment figure for those between the ages of 15 and 24 is
nearly 50 percent. And it will only get worse.
The economic and political ideology that convinced us that organized human
behavior should be determined by the dictates of the global marketplace was
a con game. We were the suckers. The promised prosperity from trickle-down
economics and the free market instead concentrated wealth among a few and
destroyed the working and the middle classes along with all vestiges of
democracy. Corrupt governments, ignoring the common good and the consent of
the governed, abetted this pillage. The fossil fuel industry was licensed to
ravage the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human species, while
being handed lavish government subsidies. None of this makes sense.
The mandarins that maintain this system cannot respond rationally in our
time of crisis. They are trained only to make the system of exploitation
work. They are blinded by their insatiable greed and neoliberal ideology,
which posits that controlling inflation, privatizing public assets and
removing trade barriers are the sole economic priorities. They are steering
us over a cliff.
We will not return to a rational economy or restore democracy until these
global speculators are stripped of power. This will happen only if the
streets of major cities in Europe and the United States are convulsed with
mass protests. The tyranny of these financial elites knows no limits. They
will impose ever greater suffering and repression until we submit or revolt.
I prefer the latter. But we don't have much time.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
We Are All Greeks Now
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_greeks_now_20150712/
Posted on Jul 12, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A demonstrator waves a Greek flag during an anti-austerity rally in central
Athens on Friday. (Petros Karadjias / AP)
The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be
Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a
pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and
electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know the
crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to afford medical
care. They know the state seizing their meager assets, a process known in
the United States as "civil asset forfeiture," which has permitted American
police agencies to confiscate more than $3 billion in cash and property.
They know the profound despair and abandonment that come when schools,
libraries, neighborhood health clinics, day care services, roads, bridges,
public buildings and assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know
the financial elites' hijacking of democratic institutions to impose
widespread misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what
it is to be abandoned.
The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because
they are being assaulted by the same system-corporate capitalism. There are
no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external
constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate capitalism,
manipulating the world's most powerful financial institutions, including the
Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal
Reserve, does what it is designed to do: It turns everything, including
human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until
exhaustion or collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken,
regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to
legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are
privatized. Secret trade agreements-which even elected officials who view
the documents are not allowed to speak about-empower corporate oligarchs to
amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of
workers. To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and
drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It
ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism
possible. But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil.
By the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its
wake.
The Greek government kneels before the bankers of Europe begging for mercy
because it knows that if it leaves the eurozone, the international banking
system will do to Greece what it did to the socialist government of Salvador
Allende in 1973 in Chile; it will, as Richard Nixon promised to do in Chile,
"make the economy scream." The bankers will destroy Greece. If this means
the Greeks can no longer get medicine-Greece owes European drug makers 1
billion euros-so be it. If this means food shortages-Greece imports
thousands of tons of food from Europe a year-so be it. If this means oil and
gas shortages-Greece imports 99 percent of its oil and gas-so be it. The
bankers will carry out economic warfare until the current Greek government
is ousted and corporate political puppets are back in control.
Human life is of no concern to corporate capitalists. The suffering of the
Greeks, like the suffering of ordinary Americans, is very good for the
profit margins of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. It was,
after all, Goldman Sachs-which shoved subprime mortgages down the throats of
families it knew could never pay the loans back, sold the subprime mortgages
as investments to pension funds and then bet against them-that orchestrated
complex financial agreements with Greece, many of them secret. These
agreements doubled the debt Greece owes under derivative deals and allowed
the old Greek government to mask its real debt to keep borrowing. And when
Greece imploded, Goldman Sachs headed out the door with suitcases full of
cash.
The system of unfettered capitalism is designed to callously extract money
from the most vulnerable and funnel it upward to the elites. This is seen in
the mounting fines and fees used to cover shortfalls in city and state
budgets. Corporate capitalism seeks to privatize all aspects of government
service, from education to intelligence gathering. The U.S. Postal Service
appears to be next. Parents already must pay hundreds of dollars for their
public-school children to take school buses, go to music or art classes and
participate in sports or other activities. Fire departments, ambulance
services, the national parks system are all slated to become fodder for
corporate profit. It is the death of the civil society.
Criminal justice is primarily about revenue streams for city and state
governments in the United States rather than about justice or
rehabilitation. The poor are arrested and fined for minor infractions in
Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere; for not mowing their lawns; for putting their
feet on seats of New York City subway cars. If they cannot pay the fines, as
many cannot, they go to jail. In jail they are often charged room and board.
And if they can't pay this new bill they go to jail again. It is a game of
circular and never-ending extortion of the poor. Fines that are unpaid
accrue interest and generate warrants for arrest. Poor people often end up
owing thousands of dollars for parking or traffic violations.
Fascist and communist firing squads sometimes charged the victim's family
for the bullets used in the execution. In corporate capitalism, too, the
abusers extract payment; often the money goes to private corporations that
carry out probation services or prison and jail administration. The cost of
being shot with a stun gun ($26) or of probation services ($35 to $100 a
month) or of an electronic ankle bracelet ($11 a month) is vacuumed out of
the pockets of the poor. And all this is happening in what will one day be
seen as the good times. Wait until the financial house of cards collapses
again-what is happening in China is not a good sign-and Wall Street runs for
cover. Then America will become Greece on steroids.
"We are a nation that has turned its welfare system into a criminal system,"
write Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr in an Institute for Policy Studies report
titled "The Poor Get Prison." "We criminalize life-sustaining activities of
people too poor to afford shelter. We incarcerate more people than any other
nation in the world. And we institute policies that virtually bar them for
life from participating in society once they have done their time. We have
allowed the resurgence of debtors' prisons. We've created a second-tier
public education system for poor children and black and Latino children that
disproportionally criminalizes their behavior and sets them early onto the
path of incarceration and lack of access to assistance and opportunity."
The corporate dismantling of civil society is nearly complete in Greece. It
is far advanced in the United States. We, like the Greeks, are undergoing a
political war waged by the world's oligarchs. No one elected them. They
ignore public opinion. And, as in Greece, if a government defies the
international banking community it is targeted for execution. The banks do
not play by the rules of democracy.
Our politicians are corporate employees. And if you get dewy-eyed about the
possibility of the U.S. having its first woman president, remember that it
was Hillary Clinton's husband who decimated manufacturing jobs with the 1994
North American Free Trade Agreement and then went on to destroy welfare with
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,
which halted federal cash aid programs and imposed time-limited, restrictive
state block grants. Under President Bill Clinton, most welfare
recipients-and 70 percent of those recipients were children-were dropped
from the rolls. The prison-industrial complex exploded in size as its
private corporations swallowed up surplus, unemployed labor, making $40,000
or more a year from each person held in a cage. The population of federal
and state prisons combined rose by 673,000 under Clinton. He, along with
Ronald Reagan, set the foundations for the Greecification of the United
States.
The destruction of Greece, like the destruction of America, by the big banks
and financial firms is not, as the bankers claim, about austerity or
imposing rational expenditures or balanced budgets. It is not about
responsible or good government. It is a vicious form of class warfare. It is
profoundly anti-democratic. It is about forming nations of impoverished,
disempowered serfs and a rapacious elite of all-powerful corporate
oligarchs, backed by the most sophisticated security and surveillance
apparatus in human history and a militarized police that shoots unarmed
citizens with reckless abandon. The laws and rules it imposes on the poor
are, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, little more than "organized sadism."
Corporate profit is God. It does not matter who suffers. In Greece 40
percent of children live in poverty, there is a 25 percent unemployment rate
and the unemployment figure for those between the ages of 15 and 24 is
nearly 50 percent. And it will only get worse.
The economic and political ideology that convinced us that organized human
behavior should be determined by the dictates of the global marketplace was
a con game. We were the suckers. The promised prosperity from trickle-down
economics and the free market instead concentrated wealth among a few and
destroyed the working and the middle classes along with all vestiges of
democracy. Corrupt governments, ignoring the common good and the consent of
the governed, abetted this pillage. The fossil fuel industry was licensed to
ravage the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human species, while
being handed lavish government subsidies. None of this makes sense.
The mandarins that maintain this system cannot respond rationally in our
time of crisis. They are trained only to make the system of exploitation
work. They are blinded by their insatiable greed and neoliberal ideology,
which posits that controlling inflation, privatizing public assets and
removing trade barriers are the sole economic priorities. They are steering
us over a cliff.
We will not return to a rational economy or restore democracy until these
global speculators are stripped of power. This will happen only if the
streets of major cities in Europe and the United States are convulsed with
mass protests. The tyranny of these financial elites knows no limits. They
will impose ever greater suffering and repression until we submit or revolt.
I prefer the latter. But we don't have much time.
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_greeks_now_20150712/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_greeks_now_20150712/
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