Corps Is Only One Letter From Corpse

Madame M:

An excellent article and excellent comments by you.  The author we review keeps making points.  If only more were listening…

Is it so hard for people to believe that corporations are so powerful?  I thought about quoting nearly the entirety of page 166 of the book, but suffice to say that ideological drivel is being used to further corporate coffers, often in ways that are egregious.  So many government functions are done (expensively) via contract by “more efficient and less costly” corporations.  Of course, often they are neither. 

Halliburton has received hundreds of billions of dollars from US taxpayers, is nearly unaccountable to anyone but itself, and hides its profits in foreign countries in ways that show how multinationals do whatever they want.

As the middle class gets more and more squeezed, and as the lower class is already, more are spinning out of home ownership and into renting.  Often this becomes multi-generational or even multi-family in one unit as well.  While this may have some tangential beneficial side effects, how in general is that the American dream?

Corporations have assumed effective control, and not enough care about that.  We still schlepp forward under the illusion that we the people do the hiring and firing politically.  But Hedges sets us straight about corporate control: “You cannot, in most instances, be a viable candidate without their blessing and money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates ( a private organization), determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care, to Wall Street bailouts, to NAFTA.  If you do not follow the corporate script, you become as marginal and invisible as Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney.” (Hedges 167)  And most people don’t know or care.  It is also, Hedges says, why, even when they are reluctant, which isn’t often, Democrats—supposedly the reps of the “common man”—toe the corporate line on nearly any subject.  Everything meaningful is moved in the direction the big and powerful corporations want.

We pretend not to see that Depression-level layoffs—most of those jobs are forever lost—have occurred.  We let the corporate-media and the corporate-controlled statisticians play games with statistics and cloud their true meaning.  We pretend not to realize that stopping looking for work—giving up—is not a positive trend.  Nor is regaining jobs that don’t pay enough to live.  Nor is getting only part-time work when full-time work is needed.  We willingly give ourselves a scatoma, so as not to see that “there are whole sections of the United States that now resemble the developing world.” (168)  We pretend not to see increasing poverty.  Our willing historical amnesia—nay, our disdain for history as being relevant for anything—keeps us from realizing we are going back, back, back to the dark days we painfully and barely managed to climb out of  in the 1800s and early 1900s.  Except that this time, we may not get the chance: The corporations do know history, and feel they know how to prevent the people’s assertions this time.   You mentioned some of the methods in your post.

When profit-maximization is the sole goal, even competitive American businesses and workers are outsourced if it can be done a little cheaper elsewhere.  That it’s not as good is irrelevant. 

America has been a great country, and can be again.  But not if it embraces its myths about how great it is right now, because that will prevent it from facing this “time of collapse, and moral and political squalor.”  (168)

Now we know why Hedges named his book what he did.  We are not in the serious business of fixing ourselves.  We are more concerned with—indeed look to with fixated anticipation—the next diversionary thing: some movie, some sport event, some video game release, some cellphone release, some purchase. 

We would not be the first people to still be going to plays, watching gladiator fights and chariot races, playing games of dice, getting caught up in consumer possessions—right up to the point it all came down in painful, catastrophic, utterly real change.

We can be different.  We can learn from the past.  We still have the means.  But not for much longer.