Brace for impact, reader. Hedges doesn’t wear kid gloves, and you’re
about to get walloped.
Inflation and other statistics in our society are
manipulated and baldly changed in tracking and composition. Why?
Because they can, and it serves the corporate elite. By significant underreporting and
misrepresentation, these false statistics greatly benefit corporations. "An artificial inflation rate, one far lower
than the real rate, keeps down equitable interest payments in bank accounts and
certificates of deposit. It masks the
deterioration of the American economy. The fabricated statistics allow
corporations and the corporate state to walk away from obligations tied to real
adjustments for inflation. These
statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. These statistics reduce the interest on the
multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations
never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees.” (181)
“Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage
bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a
looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.” (182-183). Too many have lost hope and live in
fear. The despair goes on, and becomes
not just personal, but familial, even extended family, even throughout
community and society. They know those
“good jobs” aren’t coming back. They are
ripe for manipulation by “demagogues and charlatans.” (183) Do we not already see this? And with much of the middle class embracing
misdirected anger, the true originators of the impoverishment and negative
change are not being focused on. “And
unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy,
unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.” (183)
Hedges is bringing so much to us in the final pages of this
last chapter. He quotes from the book Collapse, written by economist Jared
Diamond. Diamond “lists five factors
that can lead to social decay, including a failure to understand and prevent
causes of environmental damage; climate change; depredations by hostile
neighbors; the inability of friendly neighbors to continue trade; and finally,
how the society itself deals with the problems raised by the first four
factors. A common failing involved in
the last item is the dislocation between the short-term interests of elites and
the longer-term interests of the societies the elites dominate and exploit.”
(183)
Hedges goes on to say that Diamond’s “last point is
crucial. Corruption, mismanagement, and
political inertia by an elite, which is beyond the reach of the law, almost
always result in widespread cynicism, disengagement, apathy, and finally
rage. Those who suffer the consequences
of this mismanagement lose any loyalty to the nation and increasingly nurse
fantasies of violent revenge. The concept
of the common good, mocked by the behavior of the privileged classes,
disappears. Nothing matters. It is only about ‘Me.’” (183)
Whoa. The
illusion-shattering is becoming deafening, and the shards are everywhere. Hedges thinks the American public will see
this and grasp the abyss of how much betrayal and abuse our true rulers and
their lackeys have visited upon us. Will
finally see that both the Democratic and Republican parties are near-automaton
tools of the corporate state. Will see a
day when “savings accounts, college funds, and retirement plans become
worthless,” will see unemployment go up markedly and home values plummet. But, he believes, instead of the public
realizing who the real enemy is, the anger and ignorance will combine to propel
right-wing radicals, both the religious and a-religious kind, to the fore.
(183) Some of this was seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s, but this
time, the “center” is weak. No wonder
that Russian analyst a few years ago felt that America could come apart at the
seams, become so radicalized and disunited that mass riots or even civil war
were not unthinkable.
The crisis of faith in the robber/casino/criminal form of
capitalism we have allowed to develop has been long coming—and long overdue. Not just the idea of “unrestrained” (read,
unregulated) markets needs thoroughly re-examined, but the traditional blind acceptance
of the basic form of capitalism is also deeply flawed and in need of our
critical thinking. The capitalist
ideology is unlimited growth (sometimes modified to mean only unlimited “development”),
which by itself can be consuming, unsustainable, and self-defeating. It reaches its utter absurdity when we pause
to consider that the premise is UNLIMITED GROWTH IN A LIMITED SPACE (the
Earth). If we were rational and
self-examining, we could have seen long ago that we would, sooner rather than
later, run into walls, and maybe deplete the resource wells. We long ago started using up resources past
the replenishing point. Whether it is
fossil fuels, clean, fresh water, fish stocks, precious topsoil where we grow
life, or any of a number of resource marks, we are staring catastrophe in the
face. Combine these with overpopulation
and environmental change (see a concise but still lengthy list by Hedges on
185) and pollution, and we face resource famine. And precisely because we have drained those
resources far past the replenishing point, bouncing back won’t be easy—if it is
possible for many of us at all. (184)
We combine this with more ingredients for catastrophic
failure: colossal, unregulated international flows of capital from utterly
greedy and self-serving manipulators and corporations who care nothing for how
it affects the majority of the world’s people, and who are so reckless they are
willing to risk train-wrecking the world financial system and ushering in the
Mother of All Depressions; unchanneled
money that seeks and creates “bubbles” that rob middle class citizens of what
wealth they thought they accumulated in stocks and homes and other “recommended”
things; workers who are watching their wages being effectively ratcheted down
to increase profits of money-mad corporations and uber-wealthy “owners” who
surely own those workers in all but name; marked and growing inequality and the
drying up of social movement or advancement; the corruption of the people’s
supposed representatives and those “representatives” subservience to moneyed
power; gargantuan-like excessive “defense” and “security” spending at a time
when the world has rarely been systemically safer—and that every dollar so
burned up is not available for the society, the infrastructure, the education,
or the common good of its people; and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, thoroughly
unsustainable and irrational borrowing, like some crazily drunk giant gone
berserk right before collapsing. (184)
Hedges tells us that Karl Polyani tried to warn us in 1944
in his seminal book The Great
Transformation about blindly, foolishly trusting “the market” to “self-regulate.”
He had just watched the fascism that
followed in the wake of dysfunctional or broken down market societies. And “he warned that a financial system always
devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia
political system—which is good description of our power elite.” (184)
Polyani also wrote that “self-regulation” of a “free” market
means that human beings as well as nature itself become commodities to be ruthlessly
exploited and used up, where the “market” determines their worth. From this flows the destruction of both the “society
and the natural environment.” (184)
Polyani, Hedges writes, cried out to “us that a society that no longer
recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic
worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until
they die.” (184)
“Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental
regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polyani predicted,
for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We
remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas, and automobile industries and a
corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels.” (185) Not just temperature rise, but other things
as well, may soon make huge portions of the world effectively
uninhabitable. The rest of humanity
largely wants to, in varying degrees, tackle this civilization-threatening and
maybe biosphere-threatening challenge head-on.
Who are the feet draggers? Yes,
US.
When we nearly melted the national and world economic system
just a few years ago, how did we respond?
The corporate managers and government officials did the only things they
knew how to do: pour massive amounts of money and resources into the financial
sector whose criminality had caused it—the servants of the system know only how
to manage and sustain the system; they have neither the will nor the ability to
change it. (186)
The corporate powers of today move like their counterparts
in Germany and Italy of the 1920s. They
push power and money to economic and social interest groups that serve them
(now), and seek to weaken the state by dissolving the public interest and making
everything presently public instead private, contracted out, or for sale. Hedges says this sounds “depressingly
familiar.” (186) The reader can investigate
for him or herself how corporations fed and fueled and aided and abetted the
rise of the fascists of Germany and Italy.
The US working class has definitely become the lower
class. Their wages are going down in
real dollars, and, though it was never a good thing to have to compensate by
borrowing, their ability to borrow to keep up has now largely been removed from
them. Meanwhile, the wealthy
corporations and plutocrats drain the state and national treasuries by their self-serving
elite welfare, burden the society by using more of the roads, airways, court
systems, etc., and yet maneuver to pay little for all those things. By having their political servitors drive
their taxes low, they have simultaneously underfunded and defunded the
government, forcing massive borrowing in the people’s name.
By driving up debt and starving the government for revenue,
all while feeding themselves many tens and hundreds of billions in payments
(whether military contractors, or security, or any number of private firms
doing lucrative—and often corrupt—business with the government), they ensure
the enfeeblement of what the Framers designed to be the people’s creature: the
government. “The government—the only
institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough (Prof’s Note:
As Teddy Roosevelt knew!) to protect their rights—is becoming weaker, more
anemic, and increasingly unable to help the mass of Americans who are embarking
on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the
1930s.” (186) To add searing insult to
grievous injury, the people are even whipped up by the servitors of the
corpocracy to fear and hate their government—the one entity they the people
might use to rescue and free themselves.
Ralph Nader warns us how corrupt nearly everything connected
with “high” finance has become. And even
if we had dedicated, incorruptible people in government to regulate it (hard to
do when the knowledgeable ones almost all come from the diseased sector), the
government doesn’t have the resources. “’It
doesn’t have a tenth of the prosecutors, the investigators, the auditors, the
attorneys needed’” to deal with the criminal behavior of Wall Street, Nader
says. A Wall Street, if you’ll remember,
that knew how so untouchable it was that it paid itself lucrative bonuses and
retirement packages instead of reforming anything, indeed for even apologizing
for vaporizing the wealth of millions of everyday citizens. (as listed in
Hedges 186)
The modern feudal lords are fine with modern-day feudalism: “’Private
police, gated communities, and serfs with a twenty-first century nomenclature,’”
Nader says, are examples of the forming feudalism. (Hedges 187)
All this borrowing to feed our criminal elites (and our
illusions) can come to a forced end at any time. Look up and witness the chilling words China
gave the US Treasury Department during the financial crisis of 2008. Hedges paints an equally cold picture for us:
“The moment China, the oil-rich states, and other international investors stop
buying U.S. Treasury Bonds, the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a
betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically
for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascists, from Christian
demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk-show hosts, will
find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard
Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their
sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort.
We will be left bereft, abandoned outside the gates, and at the mercy of
the security state.” (188)
If we, by our foolishness, selfishness, and refusal to face
reality, make our currency of little value or even worthless, we will unravel
it all. “When money becomes worthless, so does government. All traditional
standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out
while the gangsters, profiteers, and speculators” win. “An economic collapse does mean only the degradation of trade and commerce,
food shortages, bankruptcies, and unemployment.
It also means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society.”
(188)
Hedges does not let us go.
Like the hero who makes the selfish, ignorant, coward look at what that coward has done, at the truth of it all, so does Hedges: “The free market and
globalization, promised as routes to world-wide prosperity, have been exposed
as two parts of a con game. But this exposure does not mean our corporate
masters will disappear. Totalitarianism,
as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. ‘A society becomes totalitarian when its
structure becomes flagrantly artificial,’ Orwell wrote. ‘That is when its ruling class has lost its
function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.’ They have
engaged in massive fraud. Force is all
they have left.” (Hedges 188)
While Hedges, writing in the immediate aftermath of the
financial crisis, MAY have cast things too dark (hard to tell yet), and certain
aspects of globalization have been positive, it is hard to ignore the overall
theme. He would classify the present
period as a lull, nothing more. “There
are powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth
[Prof’s Note: especially with ethnic and
age demographics tilted against them], arrayed against us. They are waiting for a moment to strike, a
national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and
moral renewal, to take complete control.
The tools are in place. These
antidemocratic forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical
Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the
ruling elites, and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose
draconian controls to extinguish our democracy.
And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting
patriotic slogans, promising law and order, and clutching the Christian
cross. By then, exhausted and broken, we
may have lost the power to resist.” (189)
And as you Madame, have pointed out, our enfeebling and energy sapping
diets and lifestyle only depress this further.
Can this 236 year old marriage of the people and “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” be saved? Hedges is giving us the counseling—and the
warnings. It is up to us to do the hard
work. It won’t come from being
distracted by yet more diversions.
Diversions are tools used by our common adversaries. Focus and dedication are your
counter-tools. But first you have to pick
them up.
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