Hedges, Chris

see bak for newer -->TWO

chris hedges1220 bak capt

fr a minister, recently ordained; he's a systems thinker

his death of lib class // my thesis on moderation

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https://chrishedges.substack.com/ 11 24

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https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-the-epstein-class-fails-to-the

How the 'Epstein Class' Fails to the Top | The Chris Hedges Report (w/ Anand Giridharadas)

Anand Giridharadas explains how the elite continuously find ways to screw you, with either good or cynical intentions.

Chris Hedges

Dec 23, 2025

IFrame Content

*This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Noam Chomsky once said “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.”

Today, this profound quote from an important figure is ensconced in irony, not only in light of Chomsky’s close ties with Jeffrey Epstein, but also regarding the entire ruling class structure’s facilitation of the pedophile’s rise to the top. Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, talks about this privilege and the elite delusions that capitalism and capitalists can save the planet from the very problems that they create.

Giridharadas joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report and shares how the world today, one of vast inequality and stark class divide, is perpetuated by the self-serving and egotistic mentality of oligarchs who see themselves as humanity’s figureheads.

Many of the elite class, especially those in Silicon Valley, believe they are shaping the world for the better. They believe, according to Giridharadas, “the way to solve gender inequality is through Silicon Valley tech companies. The way to solve the environment is through Tesla. The way to solve poverty in Africa is MasterCard and Goldman Sachs figuring out credit cards for rural people in Kenya.”

Their belief that they are the agents of change, efficiency and good in the world leads them to gut government programs and proceed to point “to the failures of government, failures they helped engineer, as evidence for why government cannot be entrusted with the solution of public problems, thus leaving only them, the private sector, to step in,” Giridharadas explains.

As for the Jeffrey Epstein-aligned elite, they are different because they can still function as good capitalists but have no reservations about the morality of their work. After Epstein’s conviction in 2008, Giridharadas spells out that Epstein surrounded himself with these people, those who do their business and have no trouble looking away.

“[Epstein] picked a group of people who are expert, if at nothing else, in putting fingers in their ears when people begin to scream.”

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an 11 24

President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to enter a second term after routing Vice President Kamala Harris in nearly all battleground states and currently leading in the popular vote tally. As pundits try to determine what went wrong, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist isn't holding back in assigning blame to Democratic Party elites.

In a lengthy tweet, Chris Hedges — who won the 2022 Pultizer Prize as part of the New York Times investigative team that reported on al-Qaeda — blasted Harris and the Democratic Party along with "the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris" for losing in a blowout to Trump. Hedges opined that it was a blunder for the party to deny its base a primary, process, saying that the vice president was "anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote."

The former Times journalist was particularly incensed with Harris' decision to embrace former Vice President Dick Cheney's endorsement, whom Hedges described as "a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating." And he lamented that the "smug, self-righteous 'moral' crusade against Trump" became a "national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics."

"It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base," Hedges tweeted, pointing out that "77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel."

"The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement," he continued. "The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump."

Hedges' point is underscored by exit poll data showing that the vast bulk of Trump's voters in 2024 were primarily motivated by issues pertaining to the economy. And while President Joe Biden's administration oversaw a period in which real wage growth (adjusted for inflation) outpaced price increases, a persistently low unemployment rate that hovered at or near 4% for the longest period in decades, the best post-pandemic economic recovery of all G7 countries and a stock market that hit multiple record highs, the economy was still tenuous for many working-class Americans.

In 2023, PBS NewsHour reported that chronic homelessness hit an all-time high. More than half of Americans who rent homes said earlier this year they feared they would never be able to actually own a home. And 86% of renters say they would like to buy a home but are unable to afford one due to sky-high home prices.

Aside from housing costs, millions of Americans are also unable to afford healthcare costs, even with insurance. 48% of insured American adults told the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) earlier this year that they worried about being unable to afford their monthly premiums. And large swaths of Americans with health insurance rated their coverage as "fair" or "poor" given the cost of premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

"About three in four adults say they are either 'very' or 'somewhat worried' about being able to afford unexpected medical bills (74%) or the cost of health care services (73%) for themselves and their families," KFF reported in March. "Additionally, about half of adults would be unable to pay an unexpected medical bill of $500 in full without going into debt."

*Click here to read Hedges' post in its entirety.

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an 12 22

The Congressional decision to prohibit railroad workers from going on strike and force them to accept a contract that meets few of their demands is part of the class war that has defined American politics for decades. The two ruling political parties differ only in rhetoric. They are bonded in their determination to reduce wages; dismantle social programs, which the Bill Clinton administration did with welfare; and thwart unions and prohibit strikes, the only tool workers have to pressure employers. This latest move against the railroad unions, where working conditions have descended into a special kind of hell with massive layoffs, the denial of even a single day of paid sick leave, and punishing work schedules that include being forced to “always be on call,” is one more blow to the working class and our anemic democracy.

The rage by workers towards the Democratic Party, which once defended their interests, is legitimate, even if, at times, it is expressed by embracing proto-fascists and Donald Trump-like demagogues. Dating back to the Clinton administration with NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the Democratic Party has become a full partner in the corporate assault on workers. The cloying feel-your-pain rhetoric, a staple of the Joe Biden White House, is offset by a hypocritical subservience to the billionaire class.

In 1926, the havoc wreaked by rail strikes led to the federal government passing the Railway Labor Act to give itself the power to impose labor settlements on the rail industry. The Biden administration used this authority to broker a tentative labor agreement that would ensure a 24 percent pay increase by 2024, annual $1,000 bonuses and a freeze on rising health care costs. But workers would be permitted only one paid personal day and no paid sick leave. Of 12 unions voting on the deal, four of them — representing 56 percent of union membership in the industry — refused to ratify it. Biden signed the legislation into law on Friday.

The railroad barons refuse to permit sick days because they have stripped the railroads down to skeleton crews in a process known as precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. In essence, no spare labor is available, which is why the reduced labor force is subjected to such punishingly short periods of time off and onerous working conditions.

Class struggle defines human history. We are dominated by a seemingly omnipotent corporate elite. Hostile to our most basic rights, this elite is disemboweling the nation; destroying basic institutions that foster the common good, including public schools, the postal service and health care; and is incapable of reforming itself. The only weapon left to thwart this ongoing pillage is the strike. Workers have the collective power to slash profits and cripple industry, which is why the ruling class has gone to such lengths to defang unions and outlaw strikes. A rail freight strike, it is estimated, would cost the U.S. economy $2 billion a day, with daily losses increasing the longer a strike continued.

The few unions that remain — only 10.7 percent of the workforce is unionized — have been largely domesticated, demoted into obsequious junior partners in the capitalist system. As of January 2022, private-sector unionization stood at its lowest point since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And yet, 48 percent of U.S. workers say they would like to belong to a union.

Railroad workers have been especially hard hit. The workforce has shrunk from nearly 540,000 in 1980 to some 130,000 today. The consolidation of the rail industry means there are only seven Class I freight companies, with four of those companies controlling 83 percent of rail traffic. Service on the nation’s rail lines, along with working conditions and wages, has deteriorated as Wall Street squeezes the big railroad conglomerates for greater and greater profits. Indeed, the fragility of the rail system led to huge backlogs and delays during the pandemic.

The Democrats insist they are the party of the working class. Joe Biden calls himself “a proud pro-labor president.” But they pile up one empty promise after another. In 2020, they promised, for example, that with control of the White House and both branches of Congress, they would pass a law to strengthen collective bargaining. Instead, they revoked the collective bargaining power of one of the few unionized industries that retains it.

They promised to raise the minimum wage. They failed. They promised a national paid family and medical leave program allowing all employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid time off. It never happened. They promised to impose a federal tax rate on corporations ranging from 21 percent to 28 percent, so that “wealthy Americans and big corporations pay their fair share.” The proposed tax increase was scuttled. They promised to pass legislation to ensure that super PACs “are wholly independent of campaigns and political parties.” It went nowhere. They then mounted a midterm election campaign, which cost both parties a staggering $16.7 billion and was funded by massive infusions of PAC money.

The Democrats routinely say the right thing and do the wrong thing, and this is true for its tiny progressive minority, which dutifully votes to funnel billions to the war industry, including the war in Ukraine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and most other progressive House members voted for the anti-union legislation while also voting for a separate resolution that would have given rail workers seven days of paid sick leave. The unions were demanding 14. The second resolution died in the Senate, as they knew it would, leaving workers with a woefully inadequate, pro-management deal that over half of them had already rejected. To his credit, Bernie Sanders voted against the bill when the sick leave amendment from the House, which he backed, was rejected in the Senate.

Why does any legislator believe railroad workers should be forced to use what few vacation days they may have if they fall sick and request permission to be absent days in advance, as if illnesses are scheduled events? Congress members and their staff do not work under these conditions.

“In a statement that perfectly captured the yawning gap between Democratic Party rhetoric and behavior,” Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board, wrote in the newspaper, “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced railroad companies as rapacious profiteers who ‘have been selling out to Wall Street to boost their bottom lines, making obscene profits while demanding more and more from railroad workers.’ Then, just one sentence later, she announced that House Democrats would stand with the profiteers.”

What are we to make of a Congress that refuses to support a single day of paid sick leave for 115,000 freight railroad workers, while the combined net income of the railroad industry is $27 billion — double what it was in 2013?

What are we to make of a Congress that in its latest military policy legislation sets the appropriation at $45 billion above the Pentagon’s request?

What are we to make of a Congress that refuses to pass gun control legislation despite 600 mass shootings this year, more than one per day?

What are we to make of a Congress that defunds the Internal Revenue Service, making it only practical to investigate those earning middle and lower incomes and near impossible to investigate tens of billions of dollars in tax evasion by corporations and the rich?

What are we to make of a Congress that rewrites the tax code on behalf of lobbyists so 55 of the largest corporations that collectively made over $40 billion in pre-tax income in 2020 – paid no federal income tax and received $3.5 billion in tax rebates.

What are we to make of a Congress, more than half of whose members are millionaires, who flagrantly use their committee assignments, inside knowledge of proposed legislation and classified intelligence reports to carry out insider trading to increase their wealth? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband invested millions of dollars in computer-chip stocks as the Democratic leadership was formulating a plan to subsidize the chip-manufacturing industry.

Most political theorists, including Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi and Max Weber, started from the premise that there is a natural antagonism between owners and workers. They understood that if the oligarchs shook off all restraints to the accumulation of wealth, it would destroy the political order. The ruling class masks its greed behind ideologies — in our nation’s case, free market capitalism and neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism never made any economic sense. But it was disseminated by compliant academics, the media and political theorists because, to quote Marx, it allowed “the dominant material relationships” to be “grasped as ideas.”

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are,”Wendell Berry wrote. “Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so, and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”

All the advances we made in the early 20th century through union strikes, government regulation, the New Deal, a fair tax code, the courts, an alternative press and mass movements have been reversed. The oligarchs are turning American workers — as they did in the 19th-century steel and textile factories — into serfs, kept in check by onerous anti-union laws, militarized police, the world’s largest prison system, an electoral system dominated by corporate money and the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history.

The rich, throughout history, have subjugated and re-subjugated the populations they control. And the public, throughout history, has awakened to the class war waged by the oligarchs and plutocrats and revolted. Let us hope that defying Congress, freight railroad workers carry out a strike. A strike will at least expose the fangs of the ruling class, the courts, law enforcement and the National Guard, much as they did during labor unrest in the 20th century, and broadcast a very public message about whose interests they serve. Besides, a strike might work. Nothing else will.

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will // hedges on literacy

an 8 22

On Wednesday, August 3, the U.S. Senate voted, 95-1, in favor of Sweden and Finland joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). President Joe Biden applauded the vote, declaring, “This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan U.S. commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. I look forward to signing the accession protocols and welcoming Sweden and Finland, two strong democracies with highly capable militaries, into the greatest defensive alliance in history.”

The vote was a rare example of everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer being on the same page. The lone “no” vote came from far-right Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who used the vote to boast about how MAGA he is on foreign policy and how devoted he is to former President Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda — and Hawley defended the vote during an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Never Trump conservative and veteran Washington Post opinion writer George Will examines Hawley’s “no” vote in his August 10 column, arguing that these events underscore the “degradation” of both journalism and politics in the United States.

“Like an infant feeling ignored and seeking attention by banging his spoon on his highchair tray, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) last week cast the only vote against admitting Finland and Sweden to NATO,” Will explains. “He said adding the two militarily proficient Russian neighbors to NATO would somehow weaken U.S. deterrence of China…. That evening, Hawley appeared on Fox News to receive Tucker Carlson’s benediction. This umpteenth episode of a senator using the Senate as a stepping stone to a cable television green room illustrates what Chris Stirewalt deplores in his new book, ‘Broken News.’”

Stirewalt served as Fox News’ political editor before being fired for, ironically, doing his job well. And he discusses that controversy in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” which has an August 23 release date on Amazon.

Will says of Stirewalt, “He was washed out of Fox News by a tsunami of viewer rage because on Election Night 2020, he correctly said Donald Trump had lost Arizona. Now, he says today’s journalism has a supply-side problem — that is, supplying synthetic controversies.”

Stirewalt, in his book, describes the state of U.S. journalism in 2022 as, “What did Trump say? What did Nancy Pelosi say about what Trump said? What did Kevin McCarthy say about what Pelosi said about what Trump said? What did Sean Hannity say about what Rachel Maddow said about what McCarthy said about what Pelosi said about what Trump said?”

Will shares Stirewalt’s complaints, writing, “But journalism also has a demand-side problem: Time was, journalists assumed that news consumers demanded ‘more information, faster and better.’ Now, instantaneous communication via passive media — video and television — supplies what indolent consumers demand. More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the Sixth-Grade level. Video, however, requires only eyes on screens. But such passive media cannot communicate a civilization defined by ideas.”

Will continues, “Our creedal nation, Stirewalt says, ‘requires written words and a common culture in which to understand them’…. Technology — radio, television, the internet — turned journalism from reporting what had happened to reporting what was happening, and now to giving passive news consumers the emotional experience of having their political beliefs ratified.”

Now 81, Will has seen a lot of technological changes over the years. And he shares Stirewalt’s view that technology has made some political journalism a form of lowbrow entertainment.

“Technology has produced a melding of journalism and politics, to the degradation of both, as illustrated by the seamlessness of Hawley’s Senate floor grandstanding and his cable news self-congratulation,” Will observes. “Small wonder, says Stirewalt, that ‘the news business treats politics like sports’ — entertaining, but with no meaning deeper than the score. The fans, consumers of emotional-impact journalism, wear, figuratively speaking, their teams’ colors: red shirts against blue shirts.”

Will continues, “This journalism’s constant attention to politics instead of government — to gaining power instead of its exercise — makes the players on the field, Stirewalt says, ‘want to show off to the fans in the stands instead of trying to win the game.’ Hence Hawley, the quintessential example of the politics that the new journalism encourages. And hence his absurd vote against NATO expansion — spoon clenched in infant fist, banging the highchair tray to say: ‘Pay attention to me!’…. Define news down, and this is the kind of newsmaker you get.”

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CDV note sys

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/donald-trump-an-american-monster/

quite long]

...But who created this American monster? Donald Trump was not built by a deranged scientist in a secret lab. He is not an orphan, and did not emerge out of nowhere. He was the almost inevitable result of a decades-long assault by the "conservative" movement aimed at ending American democracy (especially multiracial democracy) and replacing it with a pseudo-democratic authoritarian state, perhaps organized under the system political theorist Sheldon Wolin described as "inverted totalitarianism."

As part of that long-term assault, most or all the historic victories of the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor and environmental movements and other struggles for human dignity and a more just society are being rolled back. If this project succeeds, America's already threadbare social safety net will be virtually eliminated. White Christian fascists and corporate plutocrats will forge a ruling coalition with near-total dominion over American life and society. The separation of church and state, along with the guarantee of free speech and most of the Bill of Rights, will disappear.

There is no longer a "normal" or "traditional" version of the Republican Party for so-called conservatives to return to. Even those conservatives who have disavowed or denounced the Trump movement are implicated in his rise. They are like political Dr. Frankensteins, horrified by what they have created but unable to kill it. Over the course of decades, they painstakingly built the monster and created the blueprint for American fascism.

As Wajahat Ali wrote this week in the Daily Beast, some of Trump's "most prominent enablers" are now trying to distance themselves from the "ongoing, concentrated, right-wing effort to overturn the 2020 election":

Even though most of these ex-Trumpers will fail up in their careers—as is often the case in Washington, D.C. — it's important for the rest of us to recognize them as utterly complicit actors who deserve to wear that MAGA hat on their heads until the end of time….

If you believe that there is a 'team normal' in the modern GOP, then you'll also probably believe that fewer doors and arming teachers will reduce mass gun shootings, banning books will save your child from being transgender, and climate change is a hoax created by China.

Either way, you're not acknowledging that the GOP is now a weaponized cult that no longer produces 'rational' Republicans, but instead caters to the festering, fevered paranoid swamp of dangerous conspiracy theories and white supremacist ideologies. This persistent right-wing disinformation has now radicalized its base, in which many membersbelieve violence is necessary to 'take back' their country. The reality is that Team Normal and Team Crazy both play for the GOP, wear the same uniforms, and, for now, worship the golden calf known as Trump.

Ultimately, Donald Trump is not some type of monstrous Other or outsider. He was not conjured up in some other dimension ruled by Lovecraftian demons, only to descend on America out of the ether to sow destruction, chaos, misery and death.

In reality, Donald Trump — as a man, a symbol and a political leader — and everything he embodies is the product of our society, driven by extreme social inequality, consumerism and greed, unfulfilled dreams, widespread alienation and loneliness, anti-intellectualism, racism and white supremacy, the cult of the spectacle, our fetish for violence and a range of related antisocial and anti-human values and tendencies.

In a recent essay for ScheerPost republished at Salon, Chris Hedges offers a powerful diagnosis of our corrupt and failing American political system, arguing that the House Jan. 6 committee will do nothing to correct it:

The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lockstep for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. [mancinema vs bernie eliz aoc squad?]They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women who support Donald Trump and the far right.

There are other systemic failures as well. America's mainstream news media, through both habit and laziness, have approached Donald Trump, and American politics more generally, as a running narrative of "great men" (and, more recently, "great women"), singular figures who are the main characters in an unfolding drama largely independent of history, culture or economic reality.

This partly explains the media's obsession with polling and public opinion, the addiction to horserace coverage and the drive to identify "winners" and "losers" on a daily basis. Of course the mainstream media is also driven by profit, and compelled to shape the news so as not to offend advertisers or alienate the political establishment and other social and cultural elites.

Media practitioners are also trained to avoid moral language when describing domestic politics, although they routinely use such language when discussing foreign affairs, and especially Americans' official enemies. The result is that most mainstream American political journalism remains an exercise in stenography and superficial commentary, almost always bending the knee to such totems as "moderation," "normal politics," "fairness" and "balance," concepts that were likely never helpful or transparent and are now totally inadequate to the task of confronting America's democracy crisis.

Many in the media still refuse to see the Trump movement and the modern Republican Party as destructive revolutionary forces, rather than as traditional political movements with an investment in the existing system. At this point, the media's willful or compulsive refusal to comprehend the nature of the threat has become a pathology. Journalists at mainstream outlets would benefit greatly from reading "The Authoritarian Playbook: A Media Guide," a new report from the nonpartisan nonprofit group Protect Democracy. It offers the following advice:

To the extent that the authoritarian playbook has a central theme, it is that democratic erosion is a process of power concentration and consolidation. While all political actors seek to accumulate power, authoritarians, uniquely, seek to entrench that power and protect it from external checks. Experts generally agree that democracies don't tend to die at the hands of individuals alone. Rather, contemporary attacks on democracy only succeed when they are coordinated, systemic, and undertaken by broad parties or movements.

If Donald Trump the American monster is somehow banished from American political life — through criminal prosecution, advancing age or some other force — another such monster will rapidly appear. In fact, Ron DeSantis and other leading Republican-fascists are eagerly waiting for Trump to leave the stage, and could well turn out to be more competent and more effective than him. Trumpism is a hydra-headed movement, no longer dependent on Trump as an individual: Chop off one of its heads and another will grow.The only long-term solution is to drain the swamp that birthed the monster.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/capital/

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

This article originally appeared on ScheerPost.]

Preska's caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, "It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law"— capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant,"You really are a lousy piece of trash!"

Donziger, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has been fighting against polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador. His only "crime" was winning a $9.5 billion judgment in 2011 against Chevron for thousands of plaintiffs. The oil giant had bought Texaco oil company holdings in Ecuador, inheriting a lawsuit alleging it deliberately discharged 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. Since the verdict, Chevron has come after him, weaponizing litigation to destroy him economically, professionally, and personally.

The sentencing came a day after Donziger petitioned the court to consider an opinion by the United Nations human rights council that found his house arrest a violation of international human rights law. The U.N human rights council said his house arrest counted as detention under international law and it was therefore illegal for Judge Preska to demand an additional six months in jail. Amnesty International also called for Donziger's immediate release.

Donziger and his lawyers have two weeks to appeal the judge's order that Donziger be sent immediately to jail. Preska denied Donziger bail claiming he is a flight risk. If the Federal Court of Appeals turns down Donziger's appeal he will go to jail for six months. The irony, not lost on Donziger and his lawyers, is that the higher court may overturn Preska's ruling against him, but by the time that decision is made he will potentially have already spent six months in jail.

"What Judge Preska is trying to do is force me to serve the entirety of my sentence before the appellate court can rule," Donziger told me by phone on Monday. "If the appellate court rules in my favor, I will still have served my sentence, although I am innocent in the eyes of the law."

Donziger, his lawyers have pointed out, is the first person under U.S. law charged with a "B" misdemeanor to be placed on home confinement, prior to trial, with an ankle monitor. He is the first person charged with any misdemeanor to be held under home confinement for over two years. He is the first attorney ever to be charged with criminal contempt over a discovery dispute in a civil case where the attorney went into voluntary contempt to pursue an appeal. He is the first person to be prosecuted under Rule 42 (criminal contempt) by a private prosecutor with financial ties to the entity and industry that was a litigantin the underlying civil dispute that gave rise to the orders. He is the first person tried by a private prosecutor who had ex parte communications with the charging judge while that judge remained (and remains) unrecused on the criminal case.

"No lawyer in New York for my level of offense ever has served more than 90 days and that was in home confinement," Donziger told the court. "I have now been in home confinement eight times that period of time. I have been disbarred without a hearing where I have been unable to present factual evidence; thus, I am unable to earn an income in my profession. I have no passport. I can't travel; can't do human rights work the normal way which I believe I am reasonably good at; can't see my clients in Ecuador; can't visit the affected communities to hear the latest news of cancer deaths or struggles to maintain life in face of constant exposure to oil pollution.

In addition, and this is little known, Judge [Lewis A.] Kaplan has imposed millions and millions of dollars of fines and courts costs on me. [Kaplan is the judge for Chevron's lawsuit against Donziger; Preska is his handpicked judge for the contempt charges.] He has ordered me to pay millions to Chevron to cover their legal fees in attacking me, and then he let Chevron go into my bank accounts and take all my life's savings because I did not have the funds to cover these costs. Chevron still has a pending motion to order me to pay them an additional $32 [million] in legal fees. That's where things stand today. I ask you humbly: might that be enough punishment already for a Class B misdemeanor?"

Judge Preska was unmoved.

"Mr. Donziger has spent the last seven years thumbing his nose at the U.S. judicial system," Preska said at his sentencing hearing. "Now it's time to pay the piper."

The six-month sentence was the maximum the judge was allowed to impose;she ruled that his house arrest cannot be counted as part of his detention. From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.

When the law is neutered, judges become the enforcers of injustice. These corporate judges, who epitomize what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, now routinely make war on workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations.

Preska sent Jeremy Hammond to prison for a decade for hacking into the computers of a private security firmthat works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011, Hammond released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some three million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum Preska could impose under a plea agreement in the case. I sat through the. I watched Preska spew her bile and contempt at Hammond from the bench with the same vitriol she used to attack Donziger.

Preska is also infamous for her long judicial crusade to force New York public schools to provide tax-subsidized free space for evangelical churches based on blatantly illogical readings of the Constitution.

The persecution of Donziger fits a pattern familiar to millions of poor Americans who are coerced into accepting plea deals, many for crimes they did not commit, and sent to prison for decades. It fits the pattern of the judicial lynching and prolonged psychological torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. It fits the pattern of those denied habeas corpus and due process at Guantánamo Bay or in CIA black sites. It fits the pattern of those charged under terrorism laws, many held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan, who cannot see the evidence used to indict them. It fits the pattern of the widespread use of Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs, imposed to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail. It fits the pattern of the extreme sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation used on those in our black sites and prisons, a form of psychological torture,the refinement of torture as science. By the time a "terrorist" is dragged into our secretive courts the bewildered suspect no longer has the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. If they can do this legally to the demonized they can, and one day will, do it to the rest of us. The Donziger case is an ominous warning that the American legal system is broken.

Ralph Nader, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has long decried the capture of the courts and law schools by corporate power, calling the nation's attorneys and judges "lucrative cogs in the corporate wheel." He notes that law school curriculums are "built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense."

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first theNazis "changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret." And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

This redefinition of words and concepts has, as Klemperer witnessed during the rise of fascism, allowed the courts to twist the law into an instrument of injustice, revoking our rights by judicial fiat. It has seen the courts permit unlimited dark money into political campaigns under Citizens United, defending our money-saturated elections as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech. The courts have revoked our right to privacy and legalized wholesale government surveillance in the name of national security. The courts grant corporations the rights of individuals, while rarely holding the individuals who run the corporations accountable for corporate crimes.

Very few of the legal rulings that benefit corporate power have popular support. The corporate disemboweling of the country, therefore, is increasingly given cover by Christian fascists, who energize their base around abortion, prayer in schools, guns and breaking down the separation of church and state. These issues are rarely addressed in cases before federal courts. But they distract the base from the slew of pro-corporate rulings that dominate most court dockets.

Corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse have poured millions into institutions that indoctrinate these Christian fascists, including Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. They fund the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned for Amy Coney Barrett's appointment to the Supreme Court. Barrett opposes abortion and belongs to People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices "speaking in tongues." She and the other far-right ideologues are hostile to LGBTQ rights. But this is not why she is so beloved by corporations, who are not interested in abortion, LGBTQ equality or gun rights.

Barrett and the Christian fascists embrace an ideology that believes that God will take care of the righteous. Those who are poor, those who are sick, those who go to prison, those who are unemployed, those who cannot succeed in society do so because they have failed to please God. In this worldview there is no need for unions, universal health care, a social safety net or prison reform. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge,Barrett "faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations."

The Christian fascists, allied with organizations such as the Federalist Society, under the Trump administration gave lifetime appointments to nearly 200 judges, roughly 23 percent of all federal judgeships. That included 53 to the nation's appellate courts, the court immediately under the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association, the country's largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers, has rated many of these appointments as unqualified. There are currently six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Nader calls "a corporation masquerading as a human being." Two Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, who was an original faculty advisor to the organization founded by conservative law students in 1982, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.

The stacking of the courts with corporate puppets, however, began long before Trump. It was carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Preska was appointed by Republican President G.W. Bush. However, the judge who preceded Preska in the Donziger case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, was appointed by Democratic President Clinton.

The targeting of the courts was one of the key goals of Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. In Powell's 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, a blueprint for the slow-motion corporate coup that has taken place,he called on business interests to pack the judiciary with corporate-friendly judges.

The courts in all tyrannies are dominated by mediocrities and buffoons. They make up for their intellectual and moral vacuity with a zealous subservience to power. They turn courtroom trials into opera buffa, at least until the victim is shackled and pushed out the door to a prison cell. They fulminate in caustic tirades at the condemned, whose sentence is never in doubt and whose guilt is never in question.

"It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador," Donziger told me for a column I wrote about his case a year ago. "Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing, and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning."

"The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries," Donziger told me. "That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015."

Chevron promptly sold its assets and left Ecuador. It refused to pay the fees to clean up its environmental damage. It invested an estimated $2 million to destroy Danziger. Chevron sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. But the oil giant, which did not want a jury to hear the case, dropped its demand for financial damages, which would have allowed Donziger to request a jury trial. This allowed Judge Kaplan to decide the RICO case against Donziger alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra's testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

John Keker of San Francisco, one of Donziger's lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt "like a goat tethered to a stake." He called the court proceedings under Kaplan "a Dickensian farce" and a "show trial."

In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud. He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger's appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with misdemeanor criminal contempt for this principled stance — carrying a maximum sentence of six months — as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron. When the U.S. attorney's office declined for five years to prosecute his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer, Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron.Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger's bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger's apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/corporate-power/

The established ruling elites know there is a crisis. They agreed, at least temporarily, to throw money at it with the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 bill known as American Rescue Plan (ARP). But the ARP will not alter the structural inequities, either by raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour or imposing taxes and regulations on corporations or the billionaire class that saw its wealth increase by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic.

The health system will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars with the ARP, and this when they are already making record profits. The endless wars in the Middle East, and the bloated military budget that funds them, will remain sacrosanct. Wall Street and the predatory global speculators that profit from the massive levels of debt peonage imposed on an underpaid working class and loot the U.S. Treasury in our casino capitalism will continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal. There will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain intact. The fossil fuel companies will continue to ravage the ecosystem. The militarized police, censorship imposed by digital media platforms, vast prison system, harsher and harsher laws aimed at curbing domestic terrorism and dissent and wholesale government surveillance will be, as they were before, the primary instruments of state control.

This act will, at best, provide a momentary respite from the country's death spiral, sending out one time checks of $1,400 to 280 million Americans, extending $300 weekly unemployment benefits until the end of August and distributing as much as $3,600 to families per child for a year starting on July 1. Much of this money will be instantly gobbled up by landlords, lenders, medical providers and credit card companies. The act does, to its credit, bail out some 1 million unionized workers poised to lose their pensions and hands $31.2 billion in aid to Native communities, some of the poorest in the nation.

But what happens to the majority of Americans who get government support for only a few months? What are they supposed to do when the checks stop arriving at the end of the year? Will the federal government orchestrate another massive relief package? I doubt it. We will be back where we started.

By refusing to address the root causes of America's rot, by failing to pump life back into the democratic institutions that once gave the citizen a voice, however limited, and make incremental and piecemeal reform possible, by not addressing the severe economic and social inequality and dislocation that afflicts at least half the country, the anomie and ruptured social bonds that gave rise to a demagogue like Donald Trump will expand. The American empire will not staunch its disintegration. The political deformities will metastasize.

When the next demagogue appears, and the Republican Party has banked its future on Trump or his doppelgänger, he or she will probably be competent. The Republican Party in 43 states has proposed 250 laws to limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting and mandate stricter ID requirements, as well as reduce the hours at voting sites and the numbers of voting locations potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. The party has no intention of playing by the rules. Once back in power, cloaked in the ideological garb of Christian fascism, the new or the old Trump will abolish what little is left of democratic space.

The established elites pretend that Trump was a freakish anomaly. They naively believe they can make Trump and his most vociferous supporters disappear by banishing them from social media. The ancien régime, will, they assert, return with the decorum of its imperial presidency, respect for procedural norms, elaborately choreographed elections and fealty to neoliberal and imperial policies.

But what the established ruling elites have yet to grasp, despite the narrow electoral victory Joe Biden had over Trump and the storming of the capital on January 6 by an enraged mob, is that the credibility of the old order is dead.The Trump era, if not Trump himself, is the future. The ruling elites, embodied by Biden and the Democratic Party and the polite wing of the Republican Party represented by Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, is headed for the dustbin of history.

The elites collectively sold out the American public to corporate power.They did this by lying to the public about the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade deals, dismantling welfare, revoking Glass-Stegall, imposing austerity measures, deregulating Wall Street, passing draconian crime bills, launching endless wars in the Middle East and bailing out the big banks and financial firms rather than the victims of their fraud. These lies were far, far more damaging to the public than any of the lies told by Trump. These elites have been found out. They are hated. They deserve to be hated.

The Biden administration — and Biden was one of the principal architects of the policies that fleeced the working class and made war on the poor — is nothing more than a brief coda in the decline and fall, set against which is China's rising global economic and military clout.

The loss of credibility has left the media, which serves as courtiers to the elites, largely powerless to manipulate public perceptions and public opinion.Rather, the media has divided the public into competing demographics. Media platforms target one demographic, feeding its opinions and proclivities back to it, while shrilly demonizing the demographic on the other side of the political divide. This has proved commercially successful. But it has also split the country into irreconcilable warring factions that can no longer communicate. Truth and verifiable fact have been sacrificed. Russiagate is as absurd as the belief that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. Pick your fantasy.

The loss of credibility among the ruling elites has transferred political influence to those outside established centers of power such as Alex Jones, celebrities and those, such as Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who were never groomed by the media conglomerates. The Democratic Party, in an effort to curb the influence of the new centers of power, has allied itself with social media industry giants such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon, Substack and Spotify to curtail or censor its critics. The goal is to herd the public back to Democratic Party allied news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. But these media outlets, which in the service to corporate advertisers have rendered the lives of the working class and the poor invisible, are as reviled as the ruling elites themselves.

The loss of credibility has also given rise to new, often spontaneous groups such as Black Lives Matter, as well as the lunatic fringe that embraces conspiracy theories such as QAnon. None of these groups or individuals, whether they are on the left or the right, however, have the organizational structure, coherence and ideological cohesiveness of radical movements of the past, including the old Communist Party or militant labor unions. They traffic in emotional outrage, often replacing one outrage with another. They provide new forms of identity to replace the identities lost by tens of millions of Americans who have been cast aside. This energy can be harnessed for laudable causes, such as ending police abuse, but it is too often ephemeral. It has a tendency to transform political debate into grievance protests, at best, and more often televised spectacle. These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites unless they build disciplined organization structures, which takes years, and articulate a vision of what can come next. This is why I support Extinction Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network, especially in Europe, carries out effective sustained acts of civil disobedience and has a clearly stated goal of overthrowing the ruling elites and buildinga new governing system through people's committees and sortition.

This amorphous, emotionally driven anti-politics is fertile ground for demagogues, who have no political consistency but cater exclusively to the zeitgeist of the moment. Many of those who support demagogues know, on some level, they are con artists and liars. But demagogues are revered because, like all cult leaders, they flout conventions, are outrageous and crude, claim omnipotence and disdain traditional decorum. Demagogues are weaponized against bankrupt well-heeled elites who have stripped the public of opportunities and identities, extinguishing hopes for the future. A cornered population has little left but hate and the emotional catharsis expressing it brings.

Time is not on our side. The old world is never going to return. The new one is fraught with minefields that, if we do not bring down the ruling elites, will make most of our lives miserable. Vladimir Lenin urged his followers to be as radical as reality itself. What he meant is that once you understand the radical forces arrayed against you — Wall Street, militarism, the climate emergency, government surveillance, the prison system, militarized police, corporate controlled elections and legislation and austerity measures — you must embrace a radical response. These malevolent forces, and the political elites such as Biden that do their bidding, will not save us. We will only save ourselves.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/global-elites/

Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.

But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate?

Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.

"This is a disgraceful thing that was done in this country," Giuliani said at his recent bad-hair-day press conference. "Probably not much more disgraceful than the things these people did in office, which you didn't and don't bother to cover and you conceal from the American people, but we let this happen, we use largely a Venezuelan voting machine in essence to count our vote. We let this happen. We're going to become Venezuela. We cannot let this happen to us. We cannot allow these crooks, because that's what they are, to steal an election from the American people. They elected Donald Trump. They didn't elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots, that were produced and that were allowed to be used, after the election was over."

Giuliani's rant was topped by those of Sidney Powell, until yesterday another of Trump's lawyers, who blamed software designed for Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, for Trump's loss, as well as "the massive influence of Communist money." The software "was created so Hugo Chavez would never lose another election, and he did not after that software was created," Powell said. "He won every single election and then they exported it to Argentina and other countries in South America, and then they brought it here."

Compare this to how Hillary Clinton, during the recent primary campaign, warned that the Russians were "grooming" a female candidate, widely assumed to be Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, to run as a third-party candidate to serve Russian interests. Previously, Clinton called the 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein a "Russian asset." She insisted, although the Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors found no evidence to support her charge, that the Trump campaign worked closely in 2016 with Moscow and WikiLeaks — which she insists is a Russian front — to defeat her. Hillary's staff put together a "hit list" in the final days of her 2008 campaign, according to the book, "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, listing those who were loyal to the Clintons those who were not. They used a scale of 1 to 7.

"Step back and think about it," Clinton wrote in her book, "What Happened," about the 2016 election. "The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American."

Never mind that both ruling parties are silent about the massive interference in our elections by Israel, which uses its lobbying groups to lavishly fund political candidates in both parties and flies members of Congress and their families to Israel for junkets at seaside resorts. Israel's intrusion in our political process, including when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2015, without informing then President Barack Obama, to attack the president's Iran nuclear deal, dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia.

The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.

"The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement," Matt Taibbi writes.

These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, along with the major tech platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative believes whatever it wants to believe.

I first assumed this job posting from The New York Times for a Moscow correspondent was a parody posted by the Onion. It wasn't. It speaks volumes about the self-immolation of The New York Times and the press.

JOB DESCRIPTION: Vladimir Putin's Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.

Of course, every charge leveled here against Russia regarding foreign interference can be leveled in spades against the United States, both in the present and past, and even the implied criticism of its pandemic response seems like a textbook case of projection. More to the point, why should the Times even send someone to Moscow to report on what Russians think, feel and how they view themselves and the world if they have already decided they are a cartoon villain? Why have a Moscow bureau at all?

A parody response circulating on the internet imagined a parallel posting by Pravda for a U.S. correspondent:

JOB DESCRIPTION: Donald Trump's America remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out its armies, its drones, and its agents around the world to kill its enemies. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony, undermining and overthrowing regimes, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out on the golf course. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news. We will have an opening for a new correspondent.

I was a foreign correspondent for twenty years, fifteen of them with The New York Times. My job was to become bicultural, which requires hundreds of hours of language classes, to see the world from the perspective of those I covered and reflect it back to an American audience. But this type of reporting is now anachronistic.The paper might as well rehire the con artist Jayson Blair to sit in his apartment and snort coke while filing fictional variants on the preordained narrative the paper demands. Or maybe computer algorithms can do the job.

I guess I should not be surprised. After all, it was the Times that produced a ten-part podcast by its reporter Rukmini Callimachi based on interviews with a Muslim identified as Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi who claimed to have been a member of ISIS in the Middle East. He provided lurid accounts of murders and crucifixions he supposedly carried out. His stories, catering to the rampant Islamophobia that poisons American society, were the audio version of snuff films. They were also a lie. The Canadian "Abu Huzayfah," whose real name was Shehroze Chaudhry, was arrested in September 2020 by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and charged under Canadian hoax laws for fabricating his story.

The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being eviscerated.

Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests.

The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic, which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.

When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party.

The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists that do not spew the approved narrative of the right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a credibility the ruling elite fears. The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress –the more those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.

Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse than those of George W. Bush. Biden's assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those of the Obama administration.

The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the "mistake" they made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as "disinformation." This, no doubt, pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.

Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump. When the Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project. The root cause of social disintegration — the neoliberal order, austerity and deindustrialization — was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper's corporate advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.

Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump. Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden's discarded laptop. Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald, whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped found, resigned. He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the collapse of journalistic integrity.

The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks. When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks' domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers. Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks' PayPal accounts were disabled to cut off donations. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December 2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media."

This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the US-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia. I did not choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing.

"If the problem is 'American citizens' being cultivated as 'assets' trying to put 'interference' in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue to be okay to report things like the 'black ledger')," writes Taibbi, who has done some of the best reporting on the emerging censorship. "From Foxor the Daily Calleron the right,to left-leaning outlets like Consortium or the World Socialist Web Site,to writers like me even – we're all now clearly in range of new speech restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards."

Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube – in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.

"Liberal America cheered," Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, ":

They said 'Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone's taking action.' What they didn't realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now. Now, basically there's a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how people get their media. They've been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically ordered them, 'We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and spreading of misinformation.' This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post — with a 200-year history — locked out of its own Twitter account. The story [Hunter Biden's emails] has not been disproven. It's not disinformation or misinformation. It's been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It's a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. There's going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get through certain fringe avenues. That's the problem. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power.

In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance.

Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for ScheerPost every two weeks. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/pulitzer-winning-author-chris-hedges-warns-biden-and-the-democrats-will-dig-themselves-deeper-fueling-a-fascist-comeback/

cdv

...Democratic Party voters and other liberals, progressives and good Americans also have high expectations for Joe Biden's presidency. Many members of the coalition that Biden assembled are deeply suspicious of the new president-elect, and fear he will surrender to his old habits of compromise. Matt McManus writes at Jacobin:

We should be under no illusions that the president-elect and his team will attack the inadequacies of a neoliberal status quo that was allowed to fester into the rot of Trumpism. At best we can hope that Biden will reverse some of the damage Trump caused. But while it would be foolish to put much faith in the Biden administration,socialists and progressives can do a lot to shift the political terrain under Biden and ensure the electoral options are better next time around. …

The real work of politics involves building new coalitions for progressive causes while entrenching support for our policies, rebuilding institutions such as labor unions that can serve as permanent power centers for the Left, and above all working to democratize both the broader culture and politics.

Biden also faces another challenge. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author, warns that if Joe Biden fails to rehabilitate America's social democracy then the United States will become even more of a plutocracy dominated by racism and other forms of cruelty. Even worse, Hedges warns that if Biden's administration cannot find ways to relieve the deeply felt pain and social alienation being experienced by wide swaths of American society then what follows will be a regime of racialized Christian fascism, quite possibly much more disciplined, more ideological and therefore more dangerous than Trump's clumsy authoritarianism.

In our most recent conversation, Hedges explained why the mainstream American news media, many Democrats, and other observers were shocked by the 2020 election and the large growth in Trump's support, which saw him win the second-largest number of votes in American history. Hedges is the author of several important books, including "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," "American Fascists:The Christian Right and the War on America" and, most recently, "America: The Farewell Tour."

Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States. I am glad that Trumpism has been stopped for now, assuming Biden is actually permitted to take office in January. But I do not feel like anything has been won. Is this what victory is supposed to feel like?

The only thing we have ensured happening, especially with Republican control of the U.S. Senate, is paralysis. Moreover, Joe Biden does not want to create great change anyway. If you look at his record throughout his entire career, he has been nothing but a tool for the credit card companies, the war industry and similar interests. Biden is not going to change. Biden must also confront the judiciary.

Donald Trump has appointed almost 20% of the federal judges. Trump has got six of the nine Supreme Court justices, who are right out of the Federalist Society. The Supreme Court has powers it should not over the political process. My fear is that what the Biden presidency sets up is a route for a competent fascist. Trump may instinctually be a fascist, but ideologically he's empty. Trump does not have an ideology.

He's just a narcissist. He can't focus on anything. He's his own worst enemy. He's impulsive. He can't even read three lines in a briefing book. But that phenomenon of Trumpism exists, with or without Trump.

The exit polls are very interesting in that regard. First, Trump had a small decline in support from white male voters. Trump received 26% of his votes from non-whites. He took a third or so of the Latino vote. He doubled his support among Black women, from 4% to 8%. Trump's support among white women rose from 53% to 55%.Black men voted for Trump too, that number jumped from 13% to 18%.

All that happened even with Donald Trump openly catering to white supremacy, many accusations against Trump by women accusing him of rape and sexual assault, and Trump's open misogyny. And even though Donald Trump rescinded some of the rights of LGBTQ people, his support among that community rose from 14% to 28%.

Polling also suggests that the only reason Donald Trump lost the election is because of the pandemic which was the top issue for a significant percentage of the voters who supported Biden. Those voters whose top issue was the economy voted for Trump.

Examining those figures, we need to then ask what they portend about the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

The divides in this country are not only about race. The dynamic is right-wing proto-fascist populism. There are also divides of geography. Sixty percent of the Trump vote was in rural areas. Such a divide is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia. This divide in America is also a function of the dislocation of the working poor and the working class, which was created by the two parties. The failure, which I expect, under the incoming Biden administration to address this dislocation, despair, alienation and rage — all of which are legitimate — is fertile ground for a competent fascist, one probably cloaked in Christian garb.PPP

The errors with the polls reveal that we need more qualitative research, such as ethnography and focus groups, to get a real sense of how individuals and communities are thinking and feeling about politics. We also need pollsters and other researchers who are actually from the communities they are trying to understand. There should also be an asterisk on the exit polls, because Republicans were much more likely to vote in person, thereby skewing the answers. With those qualifiers having been noted, the next version of Donald Trump will be much more dangerous given his broadening base of support. There is something attractive about Trumpism, even for nonwhites.

It is the hyper-masculinity. That is the core essence of fascism. There is no coherent ideology with fascism. Fascism mutates and changes. In the lead-up to power, the Nazis were striking in Berlin, along with the communists. The Nazis put "socialist" in their name, The National Socialist Party, as a way of becoming more appealing. To reduce Trump's version of fascism solely along lines of race is to miss the forces that are pushing people into the arms of the neofascists. Racism is an element in the form of mythologies about whiteness and self-exaltation, and the other myths about identity and origin. But what people who follow fascists are really looking for is a sense of empowerment.

Donald Trump fulfilled that role, not as a political leader, but as a traditional cult leader. Members of the cult want their cult leader to break all the rules. The power of the cult leader becomes an extension of the follower's own identity and power. All moral autonomy is surrendered to the cult leader. That is the dynamic in this country with Donald Trump and his movement. Therefore, there are fewer ways in American society to communicate with one another across lines of politics and other identities. When Donald Trump, from the White House — in what was an absolutely remarkable moment — denounced the electoral process as fraudulent, what was really frightening is that there are tens of millions of Americans who believe him.

Will Trump be seen as a martyr? Will his time as president, even in defeat, be remembered as a noble cause by his followers?

The narrative will be that he and they were stabbed in the back. "The media, the liberals, Silicon Valley, they stabbed us in the back." I am worried about violence.

The violence will be directed at mainstream Democrats such as the governors of Virginia or Michigan. Once that begins and the Pandora's box is opened, control of the situation is lost. The United States is awash in weapons. People are going to be shot in acts of political violence. Then we as a country are in deep trouble.

There is a developing narrative from some Democrats about the "white working class" vote, and the idea that they lost seats in the House and did not capture the Senate because the party is "too liberal" and "too far to the left." Another developing narrative is that only Joe Biden could have defeated Donald Trump because anyone to the left of him would have been easily beaten. What is your response?

That is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The insiders who tell themselves such things are completely out of touch. Most of the people sitting around these newsrooms do not leave their studios. They might as well all be locked up in Versailles or the Forbidden City. They do not have a clue about the real suffering, pain and social and moral decay that has infected the lives of over half the country. That reality is never reported on because those people are looking for advertising dollars. They have rendered all of these suffering and struggling people in America invisible, which of course only adds to the anger and the deep distrust of the new media. Polling for the 2020 election did not capture what is really going on, woefully out of touch.

Of course this narrative exists in the context of how the Democrats have for the last 30 or so years been chasing the Republican Party farther to the right. Joe Biden played a role in embracing those corporate, gangster capitalist, neoliberal policies.

What was Joe Biden's campaign strategy? It was to cater to neocon Republicans. [CLIMATE? FRACK] It was a whole campaign devoid of ideas or real policy proposals. Joe Biden was going to save the soul of America. What Biden and the Democrats are going to do is just dig themselves deeper, and the consequences of that choice are going to be really extreme for the country.

Watching the reaction from the mainstream media has been very instructive. They appeared to be shocked by the deep levels of support for Donald Trump. The polling errors appeared to flummox them. For me, as a working-class black person in America, nothing surprises me about this country and its reservoir of white supremacy. I also grew up with these Trump voters. I know and understand them. How do the commentariat and mainstream media types convince themselves of things about America which are simply not true?

I know them. I hate to admit it. But I was at their prep schools as a scholarship student. I went to their elite universities. I've sat in their elite newsrooms. As a class they are smug, arrogant, self-referential and so out of touch. They look down on the entire working class, and that includes the white working class. The Democrats under Bill Clinton thought, "We'll take the corporate money, because labor, and in particular people of color, do not have anywhere else to go. They are not going to the Republicans." Democrats took those voters for granted, and as exit polls show, the Democrats have made a fatal mistake in that regard. The Democrats' strategic calculation about those voters may have been true then, but it is not true anymore.

I think they were in fact really shocked. In many ways the elite class is clueless. The pundits and the commentariat and others in the establishment news media were just as off with their predictions as they were in 2016. They do not spend time in these communities. They do not speak to these people at all. They move from one exclusive bubble to another. They're not in touch with the suffering and the angst.

Donald Trump, at least, is completely transparent as to who he is. He doesn't hide it. He's as repugnant as he looks. And yet all sorts of groups, including white women, voted for him. And I think they voted for him knowing full well who he is, but also confident in the fact that the two ruling parties — and in particular the Democratic Party, which at one time pretended to watch out for their interests — have sold them out.

The two main parties have lost credibility, the Democrats in particular. The press has lost credibility. And once democratic institutions no longer have any credibility left, then people just start believing whatever they want to believe.That is how you get conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Too many Americans do not have social and political institutions they believe in and see as trustworthy. On that point, they are not wrong. Ultimately, I do not see how where we're going in the United States at present is anywhere good. The result will be a type of corporate totalitarianism.

There was this widely circulated image of three white women who were praying and laying hands on the door of one of the locations where the votes were being counted. There are also these "Christian" right-wing con men (and women) trying to summon angels to defend Donald Trump, their anointed and chosen savior. These people are widely mocked, as they should be. They are laughed at by rational people. But when I see such deranged behavior, I also take it seriously. Such people are deadly sincere in their beliefs. Trump's followers view him as a deity.

As I learned doing research for and writing my book "American Fascists," what happened in essence is that the world of "secular humanism," as such people call it, almost destroyed them. It is deeply personal. "Secular humanism" destroyed them because they became alcoholics, or they became crack addicts or opioid addicts or gambling addicts, or they lost their jobs and were evicted. A number of women in the Christian right that I interviewed had also suffered either sexual or domestic violence. So they entered a world of magic, the figure of magical Jesus, what anthropologists call acrisis cult. One cannot try to free them from the cult by using rationality and reason.

The only way to break the back of such a movement is to reintegrate such people into the economy, to give them stable jobs, a place where they can have a sense that through work and their societal position they can have hope for themselves and their children's lives.

And of course, the whole situation for such people has only gotten worse. Once they become hermetically encased in that ideology, you cannot really break them out of it unless you are going to create a society where they have a place, andrebuild the social bonds which were ruptured. That is not going to happen under Joe Biden. Such people on the Christian right, the praying-for-Trump types, will become more common especially as the country reels under the effects of a pandemic that is out of control and all the economic consequences of the crisis.

The other dynamic that the mainstream news media was not prepared for is that in places where the pandemic is worse, Donald Trump is more popular. This is an example of Trumpism and conservatism more generally being a type of political religion, a death cult. The more death and suffering that takes place in America, the more popular and powerful Trumpism and its variants will become.

It is a death cult. With the rupturing of social bonds and a sense of place within society, Trump's followers and the Christian right invest their energy in self-destructive behaviors, both as individuals and societies. The sociologist Émile Durkheim made an astute observation about right-wing groups, that those types of groups which seek the annihilation of others are really at the core driven by a desire for self-annihilation.

We see that throughout American society with the opioid crisis, the suicides, which are highest among white middle-aged men, and other types of addictions such as morbid obesity and gambling and the like. Those types of behaviors are all in response to the breakdown of social bonds and a sense of place and meaning within a society.

What springs forth from this moment?

What springs forth is that half of this country, who to this point have been treated by the ruling elites, and tacitly by the liberal class, as if they are human refuse, are going to strike back. We have already witnessed them trying to do this. They have not been particularly successful. People in this country are going to start getting killed. It is going to get worse especially as the ruling elites display the kind of paralysis that I expect Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell to display.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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failed state

well, it's over. Not the election. The capitalist democracy. However biased it was towards the interests of the rich and however hostile it was to the poor and minorities, the capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. The iconography and rhetoric remain the same. But it is an elaborate andempty reality show funded by the ruling oligarchs — $1.51 billion for the Biden campaign and $1.57 billion for the Trump campaign — to make us think there are choices. There are not. The empty jousting between a bloviating Trump and a verbally impaired Joe Biden is designed to mask the truth.The oligarchs always win. The people always lose. It does not matter who sits in the White House. America is a failed state.

"The American Dream has run out of gas," wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. "The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now."

There were many actors that killed America's open society. The corporate oligarchswho bought the electoral process, the courts and the media, and whose lobbyists write the legislation to impoverish us and allow them to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and unchecked power. The militarists and war industry that drained the national treasury to mount futile and endless wars that have squandered some $7 trillion and turned us into an international pariah. The CEOs, raking in bonuses and compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars, that shipped jobs overseas and left our cities in ruins and our workers in misery and despair without a sustainable income or hope for the future. The fossil fuel industry that made war on science and chose profits over the looming extinction of the human species. The press that turned news into mindless entertainment and partisan cheerleading. The intellectuals who retreated into the universities to preach the moral absolutism of identity politics and multiculturalism while turning their backs on the economic warfare being waged on the working class and the unrelenting assault on civil liberties. And, of course, the feckless and hypocritical liberal class that does nothing but talk, talk, talk.

If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient.The liberal class, once again, served as pathetic cheerleaders and censors for a candidate and a political party that in Europe would be considered on the far-right. Even while liberals were being ridiculed and dismissed by Biden and by the Democratic Party hierarchy, which bizarrely invested its political energy in appealing to Republican neocons, liberals were busy marginalizing journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who called out Biden and the Democrats. The liberals, whether at The Intercept or The New York Times, ignored or discredited information that could hurt the Democratic Party, including the revelations on Hunter Biden's laptop. It was a stunning display of craven careerism and self-loathing.

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are, the election has illustrated, oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. Restoring the rule of law, universal health care, banning fracking, a Green New Deal, the protection of civil liberties, the building of unions, the preservation and expansion of social welfare programs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the forgiveness of student debt, stiff environmental controls, a government jobs program and guaranteed income, financial regulation, opposition to endless war and military adventurism were once again forgotten.

Championing these issues would have resulted in a Democratic Party landslide.But since the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate donors, promoting any policy that might foster the common good, diminish corporate profits and restore democracy, including imposing campaign finance laws, was impossible. Biden's campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. At least the neofascists have the courage of their demented convictions.

the liberal class functions in a traditional democracy as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It ameliorates the worst excesses of capitalism. It proposes gradual steps towards greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with supposed virtues. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements. The liberal class is a vital component within the power elite. In short, it offers hope and the possibility, or at least the illusion, of change.

The surrender of the liberal elite to despotism creates a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues, fill. It opens the door to fascist movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the absurdities of the liberal class and the values they purport to defend. The promises of the fascists are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth. Once the liberal class ceases to function, it opens a Pandora's box of evils that are impossible to contain.

The disease of Trumpism, with or without Trump, is, as the election illustrated, deeply embedded in the body politic. It is an expression among huge segments of the population, taunted by liberal elites as "deplorables," of a legitimate alienation and rage that the Republicans and the Democrats orchestrated and now refuse to address. This Trumpism is also, as the election showed, not limited to white men, whose support for Trump actually declined.

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia's useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In Notes From Underground, he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action.

"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being."

The refusal of the liberal class to acknowledge that power has been wrested from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been revoked by judicial fiat, that elections are nothing more than empty spectacles staged by the ruling elites, that we are on the losing end of the class war, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality he "idea of the intellectual vocation," as Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, "the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization — has gradually lost its allure.And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout." The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe wrote, "is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents."

"The truly powerless people are those intellectuals — the new realists — who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures," Howe wrote. "For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between 'wealth' and 'intellect' — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals."

Populations can endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power.But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times.

The historian Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair, his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, wrote of the consequences of the collapse of liberalism. Stern argued that the spiritually and politically alienated, those cast aside by the society, are prime recruits for a politics centered around violence, cultural hatreds and personal resentments. Much of this rage, justifiably, is directed at a liberal elite that, while speaking the "I-feel-your-pain" language of traditional liberalism, sells us out. tThey attacked liberalism," Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, "because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith."

We are in for it. The for-profit health care system, designed to make money — not take care of the sick — is unequipped to handle a national health crisis. The health care corporations have spent the last few decades merging and closing hospitals, and cutting access to health care in communities across the nation to increase revenue — this, as nearly half of all front-line workers remain ineligible for sick pay and some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. The pandemic, without universal health care, which Biden and the Democrats have no intention of establishing, will continue to rage out of control. Three hundred thousand Americans dead by December. Four hundred thousand by January. And by the time the pandemic burns out or a vaccine becomes safely available, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, will have died.

The economic fallout from the pandemic, the chronic underemployment and unemployment — close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics — will mean a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. Hunger in US households has already tripled since last year. The proportion of US children who are not getting enough to eat is 14 times higher than last year. Food banks are overrun. The moratorium on foreclosures and evictions has been lifted while over 30 million destitute Americans face the prospect of being thrown into the street.

There is no check left on corporate power.The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. People of color, immigrants and Muslims will be blamed and targeted by our native fascists for the nation's decline.

The few who continue in defiance of the Democratic Party to call out the crimes of the corporate state and the empire will be silenced. The sterility of the liberal class, serving the interests of a Democratic Party that disdains and ignores them, fuels the widespread feelings of betrayal that saw nearly half the voters support one of the most vulgar, racist, inept and corrupt presidents in American history. An American tyranny, dressed up with the ideological veneer of a Christianized fascism, will, it appears, define the empire's epochal descent into irrelevance.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-nomination-of-amy-coney-barrett-another-step-toward-christian-fascism

originally appeared at Scheerpost. Used by permission.

The Christian right is content to have the focus on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett revolve around her opposition to abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices "speaking in tongues." What it does not want examined is her abject subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations. And since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat Barrett's appointment to the court represents is going unmentioned.

All fascist and totalitarian movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and persecution of those who oppose them. This is the real game being played by Christian fascists, who since the early 1970s have been building institutions with tens of millions in corporate donations to take power.

Donald Trump, who has no ideology, has allowed the Christian right to fill his ideological void. He is the useful idiot. And the Christian right, awash in money from corporations that know their real political intent, will mobilize in this election to use any tool, no matter how devious, from right-wing armed militias to the invalidation of ballots, to block Joe Biden and Democratic candidates from assuming office. The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness. This was as true for Soviet communism as it was for German fascism. And it is true in the United States.

Capitalism, driven by the twin obsessions of maximizing profit and reducing the cost of production by slashing workers' rights and wages, is antithetical to the Christian Gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic defined by Immanuel Kant. But capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized in the form of theProsperity Gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The Prosperity Gospel delights the corporations that have carried out the slow-motion corporate coup.

This is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse, along with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its institutions such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett's appointment to the court. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, greenlight fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge,Barrett "faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations."

Her version of Catholicism is at odds with most of the positions championed byPope Francisand traditional Catholic teaching on women's rights, voting rights, immigrants' rights, health care and environmental protections. The pope calls on the downtrodden to change the world economic order and denounces what he terms a "new colonialism" imposed by "the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor." He speaks of the "sacred rights" of labor, lodging and land. He says the unfettered pursuit of money is "the dung of the devil" and castigates industrial nations for exploiting the raw materials and labor of the developing world.

Pope Francis has repeatedly warned that time is running out to save the planet from perhaps irreversible harm to the ecosystem. "Let us not be afraid to say it: We want change, real change, structural change," the pope has stated, decrying a system that "has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature."

"This system is by now intolerable: Farm workers find it intolerable; laborers find it intolerable; communities find it intolerable; peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself — our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say — also finds it intolerable," he said.

Barrett's religiosity, like that of other Christian fascists, is in the service of almost everything the pope condemns.

These corporations don't give a damn about abortion, gun rights or the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German industrialists who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny. These corporations view the Christian fascists the same way the German industrialists viewed the Nazis, as buffoons. They are aware that the Christian fascists will trash what is left of our anemic democracy and the natural ecosystem. But they also know they will make huge profits in the process and the rights of workers and citizens will be ruthlessly suppressed.

If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid substandard wages, if you are trapped in the lower class, if you are a victim of police violence, this is because, according to this ideology, you are not a good Christian and not blessed by God. In this belief system you deserve what you get. There is nothing wrong, these homegrown fascists preach, with the structures or systems of power. It is the mantra of self-help that made gurus like Oprah and Tony Robbins rich dressed up as the voice of God.

The Christian fascists, allied with organization such as the Federalist Society, have appointed two Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — as well as nearly 200 other judges with lifetime appointments to lower federal courts during the Trump administration.They claim to be strict "originalists." Originalists argue that the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed and immune to interpretation. Originalists denounce jurists who argue that constitutional law should respond to changing circumstances and values. The Originalists already have five Federalist Society Supreme Court justices. Barrett would be the sixth. (Two of them, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.)

The legal calculus for the Christian right no longer revolves around the concept of universal human rights but around the tenets of "Bible-believing Christians" who supposedly authored the Constitution. Huge segments of the population are stripped of moral worth and legal protection. This process is incremental and often unseen. As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood: "The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative."

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first the Nazis "changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system.They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret." And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

These Christian fascists understand the deep sickness that infects American society. They know how to exploit the moral and physical decay, as well as the despair it causes, to lure its followers towards their brand of tyranny. They are not wrong when they lambast the cruelty, corruption, emptiness and hypocrisy of the ruling elites, especially the liberal elites. They are not wrong when they mock cultural relativism, the idea that good and evil, right and wrong, truth and untruth, do not exist. It is part of the sad irony that the Christian right effectively exploits this cultural relativism to seize power. The failure of the liberal Christian church to denounce the Christian right as heretics, in the name of tolerance and cultural relativism, has given the Christian fascists religious legitimacy. At the same time, the Christian right seeks to delegitimize the liberal church as apostates. History has shown that it is unwise to tolerate the intolerant.

The Christian fascists, like all fascist movements, seek to create their own truth. It discredits verifiable fact, science, law and rationality. It promises a new, glorious world of moral renewal and prosperity.It promises a creator who will carry out miracles for believers and for America. It calls on followers to abandon the world of cause and effect and replace it with a world of magic. The reality-based world, as in all totalitarian movements, is snuffed out.

The Trump administration has implanted Christian fascists in senior positions of government, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and televangelist Paula White to Trump's Faith and Opportunities Initiative. Trump gave the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. Almost all the judges he has appointed were selected by the Federalist Society and the Christian right. Many of the extremists among his judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country's largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.

Trump has embraced the Islamophobia of the Christian right to ban Muslim immigrants and roll back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has degraded LGBTQ rights. He has allocated federal money to Christian charter schools. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His Christian right appointees, including Pence, DeVos and Pompeo,regularly use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private "Christian" schools.

The Christian fascists are not finished. Brick by brick they are building a Christian fascist state. Barrett fills one more hole in the wall. They will do this with or without Trump.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/americas-march-even-beating-trump-wont-stop-the-empires-terminal-decline

the terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy — prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our failed democracy,which has already instituted wholesale government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before.

The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white nationalism. The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care system. The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct its venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals.Lies, conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news — what Hannah Arendt called “nihilistic relativism” — will still dominate the airwaves and social media, mocking verifiable fact and truth.The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the human species and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its apocalyptic conclusion.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it,” Pascal wrote.

The worse it gets — and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in wave after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead by December and possibly 400,000 by January — the more desperate the nation will become. Tens of millions of people will be thrown into destitution, evicted from their homes and abandoned. Social collapse, as Peter Drucker observed in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, brings with it a loss of faith in ruling institutions and ruling ideologies. With no apparent answers or solutions to mounting chaos and catastrophe — and Biden and the Democratic Party have already precluded the kind of New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic power that saved us during the Great Depression — demagogues and charlatans need only denounce all institutions, all politicians, and all political and social conventions while conjuring up hosts of phantom enemies. Drucker saw that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote much the same in his autobiography: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.” After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:

They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end

The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism,will be offered up in a crisis to the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick societies. Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. The intoxication and addiction to greater and greater levels of violence to purge the society of evil led to genocide in Germany and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of death.”

These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and celebrity culture become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book “On Suicide” found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and collective acts of self-destruction proliferate. Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despairanomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”

Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans — especially those from the white working and middle class — modest social and economic advancement. The disintegration of these bonds has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized. The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States — opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings — are products of this anomie. So is our political dysfunction. My book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an examination of these pathologies and the widespread anomie that defines American society.

The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were reconfigured to mock faith in a meritocracy and the belief that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent. Some four million evictions are filed each year.One in four tenant households spends about half its pretax income on rent. Each night some 200,000 peoplesleep in their cars, on streets or under bridges.And these stark figures represent the good times Biden and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore. Now, with real unemployment probably close to 20 percent — the official figure of 10 percent excludes those furloughed or those who have stopped looking for work — some40 million people areat risk of being evicted by the end of the year. An estimated 27 million people are expected to lose their health insurance. Banks are stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected wave of bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans, personal loans and credit card debt. The ruleless-ness and anomie that defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the two ruling parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy. If we do not address this anomie, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will accelerate.

This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated in varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the finale of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary France, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia.

The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations seized by a tiny and corrupt cabal — in our case corporate — leads to an inchoate desire by huge segments of the population to destroy. The ethnic nationalists Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman, Radovan Karadžić and Alija Izetbegović in the former Yugoslavia assumed power in a similar period of economic chaos and political stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering from widespread unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half from what they had been a generation before. These nationalist demagogues sanctified their followers as righteous victims stalked by an array of elusive enemies. They spoke in the language of vengeance and violence, leading, as it always does, to actual violence. They trafficked in historical myth, deifying the past exploits of their race or ethnicity in a perverse kind of ancestor worship, a mechanism to give to those who suffered from anomie, who had lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new, glorious identity as part of a master race. When I walked through Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half of the population is African-American, with the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson a few years ago, he pointed out the numerous Confederate memorials, noting that most had been put up in the last decade. “This,” I told him, “is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.”

A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds the collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates the supposedly unique virtues of the race or the national group. It strips all who are outside the closed circle of worth and humanity. The world instantly becomes understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. These tragic moments in history see people fall into collective insanity. They suspend thought, especially self-critical thought. None of this is going away in November, in fact it will get worse.

Joe Biden, a shallow, political hack devoid of fixed beliefs or intellectual depth, is an expression of the nostalgia of a ruling class that yearns to return to the pantomime of democracy. They want to restore the decorum and civic religion that makes the presidency a form of monarchy and sacralizes the organs of state power. Donald Trump’s vulgarity and ineptitude is an embarrassment to the architects of empire. He has ripped back the veil that covered our failed democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try this veil cannot be restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden cannot bring it back.

Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects over 5 million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as bankrupt. It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades, to look at other social and political systems that serve the common good rather than corporate greed.The diminished stature of the United States, even among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms of government and new forms of power.

It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy.It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build an open society, we hold out the possibility of beating back these crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets of Beirut, that our kleptocracy, like Lebanon’s, is incapable of being salvaged. The American system of inverted totalitarianism, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we are to wrest back our democracy and save ourselves from mass extinction. We need to echo the chants by the crowds in Lebanoncalling for the wholesale removal of its ruling class — kulyan-yani-kulyan— everyone means everyone.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He wrote a weekly column for the progressive website Truthdig for 14 years until he was fired along with all of the editorial staff in March 2020. [Hedges and the staff had gone on strike earlier in the month to protest the publisher’s attempt to fire the Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, demand an end to a series of unfair labor practices and the right to form a union.] He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. He is the author of twelve books, including War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he co-wrote with Joe Sacco, and his latest America The Farewell Tour. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and The University of Toronto. He currently teaches in the B.A. program run by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/gangster-capitalist-trump-is-running-a-mafia-state-and-things-are-about-to-get-worse-pulitzer-prize-winning-journalist/

Time is broken in Donald Trump’s America. Minutes feel like hours, hours feel like days. Weeks are months, and months are years. And there is an overwhelming sense of time warped by dread as the country careens towards a dangerous climax on Election Day — whatever the outcome.Disorientation is a feature of life in a failing democracy where fascism is ascendant.

In a widely read conversation here at Salon during the first few weeks of the national pandemic lockdown and the implosion of America’s economy, journalist and bestselling author Chris Hedges warned that, compared to what may lie ahead, “these were the good times.”

This was before the coronavirus pandemic continued its deadly march where today more than 136,000 people are dead. Hedges’ warnings were also made before we saw the full horror of Trump’s willful incompetence, cruelty and sabotage, or his willingness to sacrifice millions of Americans — including, potentially, children — for “the economy,” capitalism and, of course, his own re-election. Hedges also issued his warning about “the good times” before Trump’s threats of martial law and using military forces against the George Floyd protests and people’s uprising. It was also before Donald Trump declared war on Independence Day weekend against any and all Americans who dare to oppose him.

I reached out to Hedges again and asked him, “Are these still the good times?”

Yes, he said, they are.

In our latest conversation, Hedges explains why this perilous moment in America will be looked back upon fondly, compared to what the future holds. He sees little hope in Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, which he believes have no substantive solutions for the social inequality and other institutional problems that spawned Donald Trump and his white neofascist movement. Hedges is also concerned that America is spiraling down into the type of ethno-political violence he personally witnessed in Yugoslavia during that country’s civil war in the 1990s.

But Hedges also sees hope for saving the United States from imminent tyranny. Where? In the George Floyd protests and the possibility of revolutionary change.

You can also listen to my conversation with Chris Hedges on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

As is customary, this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Under Donald Trump’s reign, America is a country run by a crime family. Trump and his Republicans have no moral authority. They are removing any oversight by firing inspectors general within the federal government, which has allowed Trump and his allies to loot coronavirus relief funds for billions of dollars. Trump and his cronies rage about “law and order” and locking up people who were looting during the George Floyd uprising — when in reality the plutocrats are looting an entire country and have been doing so for decades.

It’s a mafia state. There’s no control. There’s no regulation. The system is full of legalized bribery. The electoral process is corrupt as well. The courts are stacked with right-wing ideologues.The press has been bought off and corporatized. Many of our constitutional rights as Americans have been revoked by judicial fiat, including the right to privacy. Corporate money floods political campaigns in the name of “free speech.” The United States is a failed democracy and a mafia state, the natural result of what happens when capitalism is deregulated.

Trump, Mitch McConnell, the other Republicans and their gangster capitalist allies are telling the public that $1,200 in coronavirus relief money is adequate. But the billionaires and millionaires are the ones who received the majority of the “relief” funds. America’s billionaires are now $500 billion richer because of the coronavirus disaster. The average American is closer to homelessness. Neoliberal capitalism amounts to socialism for the rich and “free markets” for everyone else.

Mitch McConnell and the other elites really have not figured out what is happening in this moment of great crisis and upheaval. What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt. Yes, COVID certainly exacerbated it. But all of the kindling was already there. Chronic underemployment, massive consumer and student debt, being priced out of the for-profit health care system and the expansion of militarized police and the prison system.

This movement is multiracial. It is led by people of color, but certainly, there are a lot of young white people out there too, and my sense is that they are no longer buying into being gaslit by the elites anymore.

The empire always strikes back. What will that look like?

We have to acknowledge that the empire is tottering towards its collapse. So what is empire? Empire is the expression of white supremacy beyond our borders. The whole nature of empire is to go into the Middle East — previously into Vietnam, Latin America, the Philippines and elsewhere — and steal natural resources and exploit cheap labor in the name of white supremacy. And of course, we have an American society built on chattel slavery and genocide against indigenous peoples. What empires traditionally do at the end is they engage in what historians call “micro-militarism”.

At the end, as they slip into an irrevocable decline, empires engage in military adventurism in a desperate bid to bring back lost power, lost wealth and lost glory. America has done this in the Middle East. The result is that America has been hollowed out from the inside.

At the end stage, the elites need the tools that the empire perfected on people of color abroad. That is why we see the drones and militarized police and heavy weapons such as armored personnel carriers being used here in America against the country’s own citizens.

White supremacy hurts white folks. There are so many examples of this, from the way that federal and state resources are spent putting Black and brown people in prison in disproportionate numbers to how white racism hurts the overall economy. The police in Buffalo intentionally knocking down that older white man, who lay there bleeding from the head while the police walked over him like he was human garbage, was such a profound metaphor for how racism hurts white people. With the George Floyd protests and people’s uprising, white folks are seeing, again, that what Black and brown folks have been saying about police thuggery is true. Now the police are brutalizing white people.

People of color always, throughout American history, suffer first. They are the first to suffer — and they suffer disproportionately. But de-industrialization has now hit the white working class. The tools of control are now being used against them. Overall, I don’t so much fault the white racists. They are what they are. I fault the white liberals who really did not pay attention to what was happening to primarily poor people of color in urban areas.

Everything that is now enraging white progressives is not new — it goes back decades. But it was never really covered by the mainstream American news media. The liberal elites busied themselves with the boutique activism of “diversity” and “tolerance,” “multiculturalism” and the like. Sure, that is well and good, but not when such approaches are divorced from economic justice.

When you look at these multiracial, intergenerational protests, what do you see?

There has been mass economic disenfranchisement. There is a leadership crisis too among the Democrats and the so-called liberals.

For example, look at what the Congressional Black Caucus is doing. They are repeating the same kind of tired clichés about police reform we have heard for years. Most people participating in the George Floyd protests know that such reforms are useless. Empty symbolism. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, paints “Black Lives Matter” in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House. But at the same time, she’s pushing for a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. I don’t think people are buying such a performance. I also don’t believe that people are buying Pelosi’s little kente-cloth, “take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter” trick either.

In part, such actions have no credibility because younger white people no longer buy into the policies of the oligarchs which produced all of this extreme social inequality in the first place. People of color have long known this truth. Now younger white people are being forced into a new type of awareness and consciousness. That is a good thing.

I worry that the Democrats are setting themselves up for great failure and a crushing defeat with all this celebration of how Biden is leading Trump in these early polls. Polls are a snapshot in time. They are not predictive of the outcome on Election Day. Hillary Clinton and Mike Dukakis had double digit leads at various times, and they both lost to Republicans.

As embarrassing and awful as Trump is, he serves corporate power just like Joe Biden. The big corporate Democratic Party donors made it clear that if Bernie Sanders became the presidential nominee, they would support Trump. The donor class has created a system where they cannot fail. If it’s Trump or Biden, Goldman Sachs doesn’t lose, ExxonMobil doesn’t lose, Raytheon doesn’t lose, Citibank doesn’t lose. There is no way that they can lose. They have rigged the system so that their interests are always served.

Donald Trump tried to order the United States military to attack the American people several weeks ago because they dared to participate in massive protests against police brutality and social inequality. These protests continue and social movement scholars are now saying that the George Floyd protests may be the largest such mobilizations in American history. Trump tried to order martial law and the senior leaders of the United States military basically told him no. On one hand I am glad the military defied Trump. On the other hand, I am deeply concerned about such power in a democracy being normalized. Either way, America is not a healthy democracy.

The military does not want to be deployed in the streets. At present they are the most respected social and political institution in the country. The military gets even more money than they ask for from the Democrats and the Republicans. The military, quite correctly, saw that it would be disastrous for them to follow Trump’s commands to crack down and enact martial law.

As a practical matter, the military does not need to intervene against the George Floyd protesters and others who have taken to the streets because the American police are so highly militarized. In America there are SWAT teams who don’t look much different than Army Rangers knocking down doors in Afghanistan.

In many ways, the most potent anti-democratic force in the United States is the military. They are untouchable. The U.S. military cannot even be audited. Such power and influence are a classic symptom of the end of an empire. The Praetorian Guard can no longer be controlled by the supposed political leaders.

There have been incidents across the country in which white mobs attack Black Lives Matter protesters, anti-fascists and other Americans of conscience. These thugs are yelling Trump slogans, wearing his regalia and attacking with baseball bats and other weapons. The Trump street enforcers also have guns. Where do we go from here?

The more beleaguered Donald Trump becomes, the more he and the other racists and nativists will incite violence. America right now reminds me of Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

Donald Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die for him. This is just the beginning of what is going to happen as Election Day approaches. You have been in war zones and countries torn apart by ethnic cleansing and genocide. What is the model for how a people turn on each other?

It begins with economic dysfunction, which is what happened in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia went into de facto bankruptcy. The huge state factories closed, just like they did here in the United States. There was massive unemployment, the social bonds in the country were ruptured. There were bread lines. People lost everything, including a sense of identity. As a result, they retreated into these mythical narratives about themselves as Serbs, Croats and Muslims. In such a moment shared public discourse is impossible. These other identities and their myths have now superseded verifiable historical fact. That’s what happened in Yugoslavia, and that is very much part of what is happening in the United States.

Then there is the rise of demagogues who demonize a segment of the population and target them as the Other. Then the eliminationist rhetoric and violent rhetoric begins. After four years, people started shooting each other in Yugoslavia. The United States is approaching that point.

We spoke with each other several months ago during the first few weeks of the national coronavirus lockdown and economic collapse. You told me that as horrible as things were then, it was in fact “the good times.” Several months have gone by. Is the United States still experiencing “good times” as compared to what will happen in the future?

Yes, as compared to what is coming. The elites are not responding rationally to the coronavirus pandemic, the economic devastation and the myriad of other problems facing the United States right now. America’s ruling class is doing just what they did in 2008, which is to line their own pockets at the public’s expense and to cast the rest of the country — the working poor and the working class — aside as if they were human refuse. That is all very shortsighted, of course, because of the blowback. The ramifications are catastrophic. One would think that America’s elites would respond in a smarter way, if even for their own self-preservation. If elected president, Joe Biden certainly isn’t going to respond properly.

The George Floyd protests are more accurately described as a generational class revolt. I hope that the protesters and their allies win, because if we do not take power back from this American mafia state then there will be a very ugly type of tyranny in the country.

As Aristotle said, once you have oligarchic rule, there are only two choices. It is revolution or tyranny, and that’s it. I’m not naive enough to tell you the revolution is going to win, but I’m going to tell you that if it doesn’t win then there will be a very ugly corporate tyranny in the United States.

The American elites, the ruling class, has already rewritten all the laws.They already have the prison cells. They’ve already militarized the forces of internal security.They’ve already legitimized the revoking of basic rights like habeas corpus and due process. Americans are already the most watched, monitored, surveilled, photographed population in human history. The forces of tyranny are ready to go.

I’m more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets, which wasn’t there a few weeks and months ago. That’s where hope lies. It lies in the streets. And I have got to acknowledge these people. They’re mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they’re fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They’re all heroes in my book.

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/28/pulitzer-winner-chris-hedges-these-are-the-good-times--compared-to-whats-coming-next/

empires fall a little bit at a time and then all at once. Over the last two decades, America has proven itself to be well along on that journey. The coronavirus pandemic has simply pushed our nation further along that downward spiral.

Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems.

The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being reduced to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy.

Writing at the Atlantic, George Packer described this woeful state of affairs:

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly — not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

In the New York Times, Pulitzer-winning authorViet Thanh Nguyen diagnosed the health of America's body politic in the age of Trump and the pandemic he has empowered and accelerated:

If anything good emerges out of this period, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic. We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.

Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-winning journalist, author, and philosopher, is not surprised by America's decline. In places such as the former Yugoslavia, he has personally witnessed what happens when societies fall apart. In his most recent book, "America: The Farewell Tour," Hedges both details the country's many cultural and political crises and what could potentially happen next. The coronavirus crisis has shown his analysis to be eerily prescient.

In this conversation, Hedges warns that the tumult and pain of Trump's coronavirus crisis is but a preview of far worse things in America's future, as social inequality and political failure combine to create a full collapse of the country's already declining standard of living, as well as its ailing democracy.

Hedges also explains how the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, will likely not be able to respond to the Age of Trump and the economic and social destruction created by gangster capitalism, in combination with the coronavirus pandemic. Why? Because the Democrats are also part of the plutocratic establishment that has failed the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Chris Hedges on my podcast "The Truth Report"

https://radiopublic.com/the-truth-report-with-chauncey-de-GyorDQ/s1!2ff23

What has the sudden shock of the coronavirus pandemic revealed about America? If you were to take a snapshot of this moment, what does it reveal about the country?

These days are the good times, as compared to what is coming next.

How does a society change so fast?

A society can change so quickly because the underlying structures are rotten. There is the patina or the veneer of a functioning system, but the foundations of it are so decayed that they can't take the stress. That was true in the Weimar Republic in Germany, before the Nazis took full control. That was true in Yugoslavia before the civil war and ethnic violence. It is true here in the United States too. This country cannot withstand the stress of the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond the obviousness of what the Republicans are doing, the Democratic Party's response to this crisis exemplifies the problems America is facing as a whole.

Twelve hundred dollars to individuals suffering during this crisis is not sufficient. The Democrats were only really trying to block the equivalent of a $500 billion slush fund that is going into Mnuchin's hands, a man who acts like a criminal. That $1,200 is going to get vacuumed right up by the credit card companies and the banks who hold the mortgages.

This is like a repeat of 2008, where Congress is dumping staggering sums of money into the hands of Wall Street thieves. What happened in 2008? The plutocrats and the corporations gave themselves massive stock bonuses and other income and returns. I do not see how the United States is going to avoid another Great Depression, which in turn will lead to a further consolidation of power by an authoritarian, oligarchic elite. Those elites are not really worried about the coronavirus pandemic because they will have their own ventilators and private medical staff and all the other things that they need to survive. The average person will be left to take care of themselves.

The president, his party, the corporate overlords and Trump's Christian nationalist cult are now telling the American people to go out and risk death from the novel coronavirus as an act of "patriotism" and "love" for the economy.

I would also add that huge numbers of people are going to die unnecessarily. Profit is always the most important thing for the oligarchs, and because of Fox News and other right-wing outlets a significant portion of the American public will downplay the severity and dangers of the coronavirus. Quite predictably, there is an accompanying spike in racist attacks against Chinese-Americans or any people of Asian descent.

I think the pandemic and the response to it could lead us into virtually uncharted territory within the United States because as things deteriorate, the violence against nonwhites and other groups who are demonized by Trump and the right wing will increase. The desire for an authoritarian solution will grow more pronounced. I remember speaking to Fritz Stern, the great scholar of fascism, who himself fled Nazi Germany as a teenager. He said that in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word "fascism" was invented. We already see that yearning in America. The coronavirus crisis will make that yearning even more pronounced.

What of public memory, especially in the short and the medium term? There are many voices who believe the coronavirus will spur positive social change in the United States. I worry that there will be a type of organized forgetting, where several months from now the coronavirus pandemic and what it exposed about the country's underlying rot will be forgotten — all of it thrown down the memory hole.

I don't think we're going to be able to go back to a time before the coronavirus pandemic. I believe that the coronavirus is going to trigger a decline unlike anything the country has seen since the Great Depression. That is why the business class and other ruling elites are panicking. It is why Trump, the corporate leaders, Republicans and others aligned with them are telling people to go back to work — but to wear masks — which may really not keep them 100% safe.

The pandemic was predictable. And yet, of course, especially under the Trump administration, we dismantled the mechanisms through which the United States could prepare. The needed infrastructure, such as hospital beds and ventilators and other needed equipment, was not there because, like with all decaying empires, the resources go to the defense industry and the military.

The other part of this decay and vulnerability was the assault against public education and the corruption of the media. The fact that Fox News is even considered a news organization is staggering — although I don't think CNN is much better. In total, that contributes to a yearning for a system or a figure that can promise to tame the demons that have been unleashed.

I am unsure if we have any mechanisms left in the United States by which we can effectively push back against the elites, the oligarchs and other anti-democratic forces. We don't have any ability to pit power against power. We can beg Pelosi or Mitch McConnell or some other politician all we want for help. We are not going to get it.

Watching Trump stand before the country and speak about the coronavirus pandemic while he is flanked by corporate CEOs — never mind how Trump has filled the government with people from some of the world's largest corporations — really speaks to how the country is a naked plutocracy. The elites do not even try to hide it anymore.

The oligarchs don't care about democracy. They don't care about truth. They are not interested in the consent of the governed. They could care less about social and income inequality. They are not going to rein in the surveillance state. In fact, as things deteriorate, the surveillance state going to expand. The oligarchs do not care about job losses because, as Marx said, unemployment creates greater pools of desperate surplus labor. The oligarchs do not care about the climate. It's all about the primacy of profit and corporate power — and those values and systems are extinguishing our democracy.

And of course, they are all thrilled that nobody can go out in the streets because of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing. Mass mobilization and civil disobedience is what is needed to defeat the oligarchs and take those first steps necessary to win back an American democracy.

America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly. A person can either vote for nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists on one end, or a person can vote for people who speak in the language of tolerance and are willing to put gay people or women or people of color into positions of power as long as they serve the system. Of course, that is the role that Barack Obama fulfilled at the expense of the American people.

American society is in crisis, and in decline. As you point out, the coronavirus, in combination with Trump's authoritarian, neofascist movement are just symptoms of a deep societal rot. Where do we go from here?

Let's take Biden. What does it mean to vote for Joe Biden? He has this kind of goofy persona which some people find charming. What is Biden's record? What is a person voting for if they back Biden on Election Day 2020?

The humiliation of courageous women like Anita Hill who confronted her abuser. You vote for the architects of endless war. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. Biden supports those things. With Biden you are voting for wholesale surveillance by the government, including the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs. You vote for the destruction of welfare. That was Biden. You vote for cuts to Social Security, which he has repeatedly called for cutting, along with Medicaid. You vote for NAFTA, you vote for "free trade" deals. If you vote for Biden, you are voting for a real decline in wages and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

With Biden you are also voting for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to Christian "charter schools." With Biden you are voting for more than a doubling of the prison population. With Biden you are voting for the militarized police and against the Green New Deal.

You are also voting to limit a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You are voting for a segregated public school system. With Biden you are voting for punitive levels of student debt and the inability of people to free themselves of that debt through bankruptcy. A vote for Biden is a vote for deregulating banking and finance. Biden also supports for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

A vote for Biden is also a vote against the possibility of universal health care. You vote for Biden and you are supporting huge, wasteful and bloated defense budgets. Biden also supports unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy the elections.

That's what you're voting for.

A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for more of the same. The ruling elites would prefer Joe Biden, just like they preferred Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is vulgar and an embarrassment. But the ruling elites also made it abundantly clear about their interests: Many of these people were quoted by name saying that if Bernie Sanders was the nominee — or even Elizabeth Warren — they would vote for Donald Trump.

One of the dominant narratives in the mainstream news media is that Trump is done. The coronavirus pandemic and his incompetence are dooming his re-election chances; the tide has finally turned.

My response has been that this is too hopeful and borders on the delusional. One, there is no guarantee that there will even be a presidential election in 2020. Trump and the Republican Party are experts at vote-rigging and other ways of cheating to steal elections and subvert democracy. After the coronavirus crisis recedes, I believe that Trump may very well be even more powerful because he leads a cult and will proclaim that he led the country to "victory" over the virus.

Liberal elites offer hope that is not grounded in an understanding of political reality. I do not believe that Joe Biden will necessarily be able to win against Trump. Biden is an extremely weak candidate because he represents the neoliberal gangster capitalist policies that the Democratic Party has embraced and that so many Americans are revolting against.

James Baldwin explained why black people don't have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children. By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs. That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

MORE FROM CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

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corp coup d-etat: chris hedges : you have to be able to read a book like john ralston saul to know what's going on (understand systems, but [young ppl?] won't

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/cancel-culture-critics-are-battling-a-monster-of-their-own-creation

The cancel culture— the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis. Police, which along with the prison system are one of the primary instruments of social control over the poor, have taken the knee, along with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of theserially criminal JPMorgan Chase, where only 4 percent of the top executives are Black. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world whose corporation, Amazon, paid no federal income taxes last year and who fires workers that attempt to unionize and tracks warehouse laborers as if they were prisoners, put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on Amazon’s home page.

The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protestors and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.

We must be wary of allowing those wielding the toxic charge of racism, no matter how well intentioned their motives, to decide who has a voice and who does not. Public shaming and denunciation, as any student of the Russian, French or Chinese revolutions knows, is one that leads to absurdism and finally despotism. Virulent racists, such as Richard Spencer, exist. They are dangerous. But racism will not end until we dismantle a class system that was created to empower oligarchic oppression and white supremacy. Racism will not end until we defund the police and abolish the world’s largest system of mass incarceration. Racism will not end until we invest in people rather than systems of control. This means reparations for African-Americans, the unionization of workers, massive government jobs programs, breaking up and nationalizing the big banks along with the for-profit health services, transportation sector, the internet, privatized utilities and the fossil fuel industry, as well as a Green New Deal and the slashing of our war expenditures by 75 percent.

The politically correct speech and symbols of inclusiveness, without a concerted assault on corporate power, will do nothing to change a system that by design casts the poor and working poor, often people of color, aside — Karl Marx called them surplus labor — and forces them into a life of misery and a brutal criminal caste system.

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The cancel culture, with its public shaming on social media, is the boutique activism of the liberal elites. It allows faux student radicals to hound and attack those deemed to be racist or transphobic, before these “radicals” graduate to work for corporations such as Goldman Sachs, which last year paid $9 million in fines to settle federal allegations of racial and gender pay bias. Self-styled Marxists in the academy have been pushed out of economic departments and been reborn as irrelevant cultural and literary critics, employing jargon so obscure as to be unreadable. These “radical” theorists invest their energy in linguistic acrobatics and multiculturalism, with branches such as feminism studies, queer studies and African-American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriches the university. But multiculturalism, moral absolutism and the public denunciations of apostates, by themselves, too often offer escape routes from critiquing and attacking the class structures and systems of economic oppression that exclude and impoverish the poor and the marginal.

The hedge fund managers, oligarchs and corporate CEOs on college trustee boards don’t care about Marxist critiques of Joseph Conrad. They do care if students are being taught to dissect the lies of the neoliberal ideology used as a cover to orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history.

The cancel culture, shorn of class politics, is the parlor game of the overeducated. If we do not examine, as Theodor Adorno wrote, the “societal play of forces that operate beneath the surface of political forms,” we will be continually cursed with a more ruthless and sophisticated form of corporate control, albeit one that is linguistically sensitive and politically correct.

“Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity,” historian Russell Jacoby writes. “With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multicultural, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology.”

The cudgel of racism, as I have experienced, is an effective tool to shut down debate. Students for Justice in Palestine organizations, which almost always include Jewish students, are being banned on college campuses in the name of fighting racism. Activists in these outlawed groups are often barred from holding any student leadership positions on campus. Professors that dare to counter the Zionist narrative, such as the Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita, have had job offers rescinded, been fired or denied tenure and dismissed. Norman Finkelstein, one of the most important scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has been ruthlessly targeted by the Israel lobby throughout his career, making it impossible for him to get tenure or academic appointments. Never mind, that he is not only Jewish but the son of Holocaust survivors. Jews, in this game, are branded as racists, and actual racists, such as Donald Trump, because they back Israel’s refusal to recognize Palestinian rights, are held up as friends of the Jewish people.

I have long been a target of the Israeli lobby. The lobby, usually working through Hillel Houses on college campuses, which function as little more than outposts of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), does not attempt to address my enumeration of the war crimes committed by Israel, many of which I witnessed, the egregious flouting by Israel of international law, exacerbated by the plans to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, or the historical record ignored and distorted by the lobby to justify Jewish occupation of a country that from the 7^th century until 1948 was Muslim. The lobby prefers not to deal in the world of facts. It misuses the trope of anti-Semitism to ensure that those who speak up for Palestinian rights and denounce Israeli occupation are not invited to events on Israel-Palestine conflict, or are disinvited to speak after invitations have been sent out, as happened to me at the University of Pennsylvania, among other venues.

It does not matter that I spent seven years in the Middle East, or that I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, living for weeks at a time in the Israel-occupied territories. It does not matter that I speak Arabic. My voice and the voices of those, especially Palestinians, who document the violations of Palestinian civil rights are canceled out by the mendacious charge that we are racists. I doubt most of the college administrators who agree to block our appearances believe we are racists, but they don’t also want the controversy. Zionism is the cancel culture on steroids.

The Israel lobby, whose interference in our electoral process dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia, is now attempting to criminalize the activities of those, such as myself, who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The lobby, with its huge financial clout, is pushing state legislatures, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, to use anti-boycott laws and executive orders to punish companies and individuals that promote BDS. Twenty-seven states have so far enacted laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations and individuals for supporting BDS.

The debate about the excesses of cancel culture was most recently ignited by a letter signed by 153 prominent and largely privileged writers and intellectuals in Harper’s Magazine, a publication for educated, white liberals. Critics of the letter argue, correctly, that “nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.” These critics also point out, correctly, that signatories include those, such as The New York Timescolumnist David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell, with access to huge media platforms and who face no danger of being silenced. They finally note that a few of the signatories are the most vicious proponents of the Zionist cancel culture, including The New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who led campaigns while at Columbia University to destroy the careers of Arab professors; literary scholar Cary Nelson, who was one of those who denounced the Palestinian American scholar Salaita as a racist; and political scientist Yascha Mounk, who has attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite.

I find the cancel culture and its public denunciations as distasteful as those who signed the letter. But these critics are battling a monster of their own creation. The institutional and professional power of those targeted by the Harper’s letter is insignificant, especially when set against that of the signatories or the Israel lobby. Those singled out for attack pose little threat to the systems of entrenched power, which the signatories ironically represent, and indeed are more often its victims. I suspect this is the reason for the widespread ire the letter provoked.

The most ominous threats to free speech and public debate do not come from the cancel culture of the left, which rarely succeeds in removing its targets from power, despite a few high profilefirings such as James Bennet, who oversaw a series of tone-deaf editorial decisions as the Opinion Page Editor at The New York Times. These corporate forces, which assure us that Black Lives Matter, understand that the left’s witch hunts are a harmless diversion.

Corporations have seized control of the news industry and turned it into burlesque. They have corrupted academic scholarship. They make war on science and the rule of law. They have used their wealth to destroy our democracy and replace it with a system of legalized bribery. They have created a world of masters and serfs who struggle at subsistence level and endure crippling debt peonage. The commodification of the natural world by corporations has triggered an ecocide that is pushing the human species closer and closer towards extinction. Anyone who attempts to state these truths and fight back was long ago driven from the mainstream and relegated to the margins of the internet by Silicon Valley algorithms. As cancel culture goes, corporate power makes the Israel lobby look like amateurs.

The current obsession with moral purity, devoid of a political vision and incubated by self-referential academics and educated elites, is easily co-opted by the ruling class who will say anything, as long as the mechanisms of corporate control remain untouched.We have enemies. They run Silicon Valley and sit on corporate boards. They make up the two ruling political parties. They manage the war industry. They chatter endlessly on corporate-owned airwaves about trivia and celebrity gossip. Our enemies are now showering us with politically correct messages. But until they are overthrown, until we wrest power back from our corporate masters, the most insidious forms of racism in America will continue to flourish.

When Richard Wolff and Chris Hedges get together, you know it will be an interesting conversation, andProf Wolff’s latest appearance on On Contact with Chris Hedges was no exception.

THE CORPORATE COUP D'ÉTAT takes a complex political/historical theme and brings it to life. In the style of '13th', 'Manufacturing Consent', 'The Corporation', and 'All Governments Lie' it creates a powerful cinematic experience that explains how President Trump is the result of failed neoliberal globalist policies, and a 'corporate coup d'état' in which corporations and billionaires were able to gradually take control of the political process in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges: 'Donald Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. The creeping corporate coup d'état that began 45 years ago is complete. It has destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty.' Threaded through the film are the stories of the ultimate victims - working class and poor people in 'sacrifice zones' like Camden, New Jersey and Youngstown, Ohio. Many working-class whites voted twice for Barack Obama, in '08 and '12, but in 2016 they felt abandoned by the elites of both parties, and voted for Donald Trump who promised he would be different. Featuring Chris Hedges, the main 'voice' of the film as he visits Americans fighting for change and Canadian author John Ralston Saul, who warned prophetically in 1995: 'We are now in the

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no lnx quite long

Journalist explains how Trump behaves like a ‘cult leader’ for the Christian right: They ‘end up destroying themselves’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon December 9, 2019

The United States is sick with income and other forms of social inequality. It suffers from cruelty, loneliness, greed, gangster capitalism, white supremacy, violence, sexism and a culture of ignorance and distraction. Our broken political system does not encourage critical thinking or nurture a capacity for responsible, engaged citizenship.President Donald Trump is the human embodiment of almost everything wrong with American society. He is both the symptom and the disease.

Trump and the Republican Party’s fascist movement and its news media and supporters are America’s problems given life as social and political chaos and destruction on a massive scale. Even reality and the truth have not been spared this assault.

In this conversation, philosopher, journalist and cultural critic Chris Hedges warns that impeaching Donald Trump will not save American democracy from these problems.

Hedges is the author of numerous award-winning and bestselling books including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” “Death of a Liberal Class,” “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” and “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” His new book is “America: The Farewell Tour.”

Hedges has also written for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is currently a contributing writer for the site Truthdig.

In this wide-ranging conversation Hedges also explains how Trumpism, right-wing evangelical Christianity and white supremacist groups are the types of death cults that dying empires inevitably produce. Hedges also discusses the impeachment of President Trump and the 2020 campaign, warning that he sees Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a Republican-lite who cannot be trusted to create substantive social and political reform in America because she is beholden to corporations and the rich.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to my full conversation with Chris Hedges through the player embedded below.

With the Ukraine scandal, the Mueller report and Trump’s impeachment, we see a story about a corrupt criminal class in America. The superficial narrative focuses in on the facts of what Trump has done but there is little discussion of the broader context. What do those facts reveal about America’s leadership class, the myth of meritocracy and other cultural fables?

In America we make up laws to arrest poor people, whereas people who carry out massive fraud are not punished. This is not just the Republicans who are responsible for this. The Democratic Party is guilty too. Look at the Clintons. They are all dirty. Barack Obama is now running around making bucketloads of cash.

The tax code is a great example of a huge moral hazard wherein elites write the laws to benefit themselves. America’s tax code really is a form of legal theft for the rich and corporations.

The Democrats and the Republicans have fallen all over themselves to give corporations and the oligarchs every tax cut they ever wanted. Fortune 500 companies like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America paid no taxes. Amazon has actually received tax rebates. The rewriting of the tax code has been designed with the goal of essentially extracting income from the working class while allowing the oligarchical elites to pay minimal or no taxes.

One should not forget that under Eisenhower the highest income earners in terms of corporations and individuals were paying a marginal tax rate of 91% — and Eisenhower was a Republican. These are incredibly important structural issues that are ignored because of a focus on the reality-show spectacle that is the Trump presidency. In America we have personalized all our problems in the figure of Trump. In fact, impeaching Donald Trump without addressing those other issues is just going to make things worse.

I’m not against the impeachment. Donald Trump should have been impeached the first week of his presidency under the emoluments clause. But again, the Democrats have failed for several years now to stand up for the rule of law, never mind the Republican Party’s complicity with Trump. But now the only time the Democrats respond to Trump’s lawlessness and innumerable impeachable offenses is when Trump goes after Joe Biden.

When Trump and his Republican Party go after Biden, the anointed candidate of the donor class, then they respond with impeachment. The Democratic Party’s leaders would not respond before because it wasn’t politically expedient. Impeachment is not going to be the panacea that many among the liberal political class thinks it’s going to be because the underlying structural decay in American society remains unaddressed.

The mainstream corporate news media, after three years, has finally discovered that Donald Trump is a fascist, a white supremacist, and in general a corrupt authoritarian. Opinion leaders and other members of the commentariat will use that language for a week or so and then they are on to the next controversy of the day or week. They go 10 percent to the truth and then stop.

That is true of climate change as well. The liberal democratic establishment will use the language of “renewable energy” and the “Green New Deal” but they do not do anything substantive. That language is a product of the corporate burlesque. It is all part of the vaudeville act. The liberal democratic establishment is very good at telling people what they want to hear.

How would you explain to the average American the real function being fulfilled by the Democratic presidential primary “debates”?

First of all, these are not debates. They are choreographed events with questions that are chosen by a corporate-controlled media. The candidates are also not given enough time to answer. Watch how the candidates are constantly being interrupted and cut off. How long do the potential Democratic presidential candidates have? Two minutes? It is like a big “Jeopardy” episode about who can have the cleverest soundbites, but there is no substantial discussion of the issues because the structure of these so-called debates never gives time for it. The responses to questions in these Democratic debates are really just amplified Twitter responses.

How do you make sense of the way a guaranteed minimum income and wealth inequality are now being discussed by Democratic candidates, and of course rebutted by Republicans? It seems almost comical to see such discussions on TV networks owned by multinational corporations.

Guaranteed minimum income is another trick because the oligarchs are fully aware that the suppression of wages, and chronic underemployment and unemployment, means that a guaranteed minimum income will probably be necessary. This is especially true for the plutocrats and mega-corporations such as Amazon, which depend on consumer income.

We must be careful of the guaranteed minimum income, especially when it is advocated for by the likes of people such as [Facebook co-founder] Chris Hughes and others. Unless this society addresses the unchecked predatory nature of corporate capitalism, giving somebody $800 or so a month is just going back into the pockets of the very rich.

Who does the corporate oligarchy want? Will the plutocrats and other members of the one percent eventually turn on Donald Trump?

They find Trump highly embarrassing, vulgar, inept, imbecilic and all the other horrible things that he is. The thing about the oligarchic class is that they never have enough, they only know one word, which is “more.” The oligarchs turned on Obama who gave them everything but chided them mildly with rhetoric and they couldn’t even handle that mild criticism.

There was a recent interview with unnamed members of the Democratic Party’s donor class who said that if Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders becomes the nominee they will support Donald Trump. Trump has given the oligarchs and the military and national security establishment everything they want, such as slashing taxes, slashing regulations, opening up public lands to fossil fuels, stacking the courts with these ideologues who come out of the Federalist Society.

Those elites go with Trump. Look back at the Weimar Republic and Germany. I’m not saying that Donald Trump is a Nazi. But the big industrialists found the Nazi Party, not surprisingly, as vulgar and embarrassing as the big industrialists and capitalists in the United States find Trump. There was a strong communist and socialist movement in Germany which stood against Hitler. The alternative, which meant regulation or control of rapacious capitalism, led German industrialists and capitalists to build alliances with the Nazi Party.

The capitalist class will do the same in America if they cannot get their preferred candidate, which is Joe Biden or one of the other neoliberal candidates in the Democratic Party.

I am sure you have personally heard or read some version of the following: “I really like Bernie or Warren, but they won’t win. I have to support Biden or one of the other more electable candidates to stop Donald Trump.” What is your response?

That analysis is incorrect. Remember that Donald Trump is a con artist. But the only two people who were speaking in 2016 to the realities of what it means to be working class in America were Sanders and Trump.

I believe that Donald Trump can easily beat Joe Biden, because Biden is complicit in Democratic Party policies that sold out the working class. Hillary Clinton is complicit in the same way. I do not accept the claim that Warren or Sanders are somehow not electable. The corporate class and the Democratic Party’s big donors have made it clear that if Warren or Sanders are the candidate, they will do everything they can destroy them. In that sense, the corporate and donor class may succeed because they can control the messaging and subsequent influence of the news media.

The corporate news media such as the New York Times will go to war against Sanders or Warren and by doing so become a kind of de facto ally of Trump.

And for the record, I do not trust Warren completely.

What are your concerns about Elizabeth Warren?

Bernie Sanders has been consistent. Of course, there are issues. Bernie made a pact with the devil in the form of the Democratic Party so that he would get seniority. He has also obstructed third-party movements in Vermont. Sanders has also been tone-deaf on questions of race. Sanders is also pretty bad on Israel and Palestine.

However, Sanders has consistently stood with the working class. Elizabeth Warren has not. Warren started out as a Republican. Warren took lots of corporate money in order to get to the Senate. She then built a war chest of corporate money and then said she wasn’t going to take corporate money.

Is Donald Trump’s presidency and what it reveals about America playing out as you expected?

The empire is disintegrating. Nothing surprises me in that regard. The only thing that surprises me is how low Donald Trump can sink. There is also a pretty strong argument to make that Trump is becoming completely unhinged mentally.

Why do Trump’s followers love him so much?

Demagogues give voice to what are dark, unacceptable feelings in most of normal society. Those feelings are directed towards the vulnerable. Demagogues give a kind of license not only to taunt and make fun of the vulnerable but to even go so far as to carry out physical attacks against them. As Donald Trump becomes more and more cornered, this will become more and more common.

My biggest fear is that Trump’s movement will engage in actual, literal political assassinations. I believe that outcome to be inevitable. For example, Trump’s loyalist Cesar Sayoc would have likely killed the entire Democratic Party leadership had those pipe bombs gone off. The more pressure Trump feels, the more he’s going to greenlight violence.

Theorists of revolution have pointed out that such outcomes occur when a people feel that its expectations for themselves and for their children have been thwarted. That is exactly what has happened to the white working class. Of course, it is harder to fool black people. James Baldwin had a genius observation about why black people don’t have a midlife crisis. Why? Black people never believed in the American Dream, but white people do. White people wake up when they are 40 or 45 years old and realize there is no place for them. That is why suicides are highest among white middle-aged men. That is also why the vast majority of mass shootings are committed by alienated white men.

Donald Trump is a person who is detached from reality. He is creating his own reality; that is why he chronically lies. But Trump is not alone in creating his own reality. America is built on lies and myths. Most Americans — and this would happen to Trump as well — would be emotionally destroyed if their sacred myths were shattered and the truth forced on to them.

The United States is a country built on genocide and violence and racial exclusion. We are a deeply violent culture. When a people lie to themselves — which is what Americans have done collectively — then you don’t know who you are. And when you don’t know who you are, then you can’t respond rationally, and you can’t correct the problems.

That inability to face reality means that in a crisis you cannot respond rationally. And this crisis essentially creates a social environment where people do not look for healthy political leaders. They look for cult leaders, and that’s what Donald Trump is. Cult leaders always arise from decayed communities and societies where political and social and economic power has been stripped away.

The yearning for the cult leader, the political strongman, is a sign of an infantilized country and people. In that type of society, the people gravitate to the figure who appears omnipotent and promises a return to a mythical golden age. The leader promises to crush these dark forces, which are embodied in demonized groups and individuals. And the more outrageous the cult leader becomes, the more the cult leader flouts conventions and laws, and in turn the more he gains in popularity. In that way cult leaders are different from political leaders. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of society.

And this is what makes a figure like Donald Trump so dangerous. The people who follow Trump do not care how crude he is. Trump’s followers want him to get more power because they look to the cult leader as a way of healing their own sense of powerlessness.

Consider the white working class again. They feel utterly betrayed by the Democratic party and the established elites, and they are not wrong to feel that way. All the frustration and rage and economic stagnation that the working class is now experiencing primed them for a cult leader. Somebody who’s going to save them. Somebody who is going to solve their problems. Somebody who is more powerful than the forces that are destroying them.

If Trump is forced from office do you think that his cult members will lash out at other people? Or will they destroy themselves?

My last book was called “America: The Farewell Tour.” What pushes people and groups to carry out acts of self-annihilation? In my book there is a chapter on white hate groups which draws on the findings of sociologist Emile Durkheim and his conclusion that those who fervently seek the annihilation of others are driven, at their core, by a desire to annihilate and destroy themselves. There is a similar dynamic with the Christian right. A cult is really about the death instinct.Cult leaders cannot create anything positive. All they can do is destroy. They then sell that destruction as a form of creativity. That is exactly what Donald Trump does. But ultimately the cult and the cult leader end up destroying themselves.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/far-right-white-evangelicals-despite-impeachment-and-the-ukraine-scandal-still-see-trump-as-the-chosen-one/

no lnx

Far-right white evangelicals — despite impeachment and the Ukraine scandal — still see Trump as ‘the Chosen One’

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

In the 1980s, the late Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was considered an arch-conservative in his day — famously asserted that the Republican Party was making a huge mistake by embracing the Christian Right, which he described as a “terrible damn problem” for the conservative movement. But President Donald Trump, on the other hand, enthusiastically welcomes the support of far-right white evangelicals — some of whom are declaring that the impeachment inquiry he is facing is against God’s will and that demonic forces are trying to remove the president from office.

On November 21, evangelist Franklin Graham (son of the late Rev. Billy Graham and a strident Trump supporter) discussed impeachment when he appeared on fellow wingnut Eric Metaxas’ radio show. Graham told Metaxas that it’s “almost a demonic power that is trying” to remove Trump from office — to which Metaxas responded, “I would disagree. It’s not almost demonic. You know and I know, at the heart, it’s a spiritual battle.”

When far-right evangelicals speak of a “spiritual battle,” they typically mean one between God and Satan — and clearly, Graham and Metaxas believe that Trump is working for God, while his political opponents are working for Satan.

Republican Rick Perry, secretary of energy in the Trump Administration and former governor of Texas, has also claimed that Trump is on a mission from God. Perry, during a recent appearance on Fox News, described Trump as “the chosen one” and claimed he has been “sent by God to do great things.”

Many of Trump’s critics have had a hard time understanding why he is so popular with the Christian Right, which wanted to see President Bill Clinton impeached in the late 1990s for having an extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Trump, according to his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet. But the Christian Right is extremist tribalist in its thinking; so, even though Trump has never been especially religious (he’s a non-practicing Presbyterian) and former President Barack Obama has a long history of going to church, far-right white evangelicals view Trump as an ally and Obama as an enemy.

Similarly, white Christian fundamentalists detest South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a churchgoing Episcopalian and Democratic presidential candidate who often talks about his faith. Buttigieg is obviously more religious than Trump, but he is a non-fundamentalist Mainline Protestant — and the Christian Right doesn’t see him as part of their tribe. In fact, the Christian Right view Obama and Buttigieg as infidels, not unlike Islamic fundamentalists who view non-jihadist Muslims as infidels.

Journalist Chris Hedges, a non-fundamentalist Christian who has written a lot about the role that faith can play in left-wing politics, uses the term “Christian fascists” to describe the Christian Right. Hedges considers the Christian Right a dangerous authoritarian movement, often stressing that Trump appeals to the Christian Right’s authoritarian tendencies.

Such tendencies were evident in October after the death of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who chaired the House Oversight Committee. Cummings was quite religious: his association with the New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore spanned at least 40 years, and the Maryland Democrat would sing the Christian hymn “This Little Light of Mine” at civil rights marches. Yet some far-right evangelicals celebrated his death, insisting that God struck him down for opposing Trump.

Christian fundamentalist Stacey Shiflett, for example, said of Cummings, “Everything that he’s done has been nothing but trying to take this president out. I believe that God had had enough, and God moved.”

Hanna Selinger, in a November 26 article for The Independent, delves into the Christian Right’s unwavering adoration of Trump and explains why white Christian fundamentalists hold him in such high regard despite his not-so-Christian behavior.

“For evangelicals,” Selinger explains, “Donald Trump offers deliverables. The conservatives who follow the letter of the law when it comes to the Bible count among their most important issues ‘family values’: abortion, gay marriage, and so on. On these issues, Trump has offered a far-right tack. Despite who he actually is as a person, he checks the boxes — enabling evangelicals to look the other way and toward a perceived ‘greater good.’”

Christian Right voters, Selinger observes, “are willing to separate morals in a president from morals in a country. These voters will pull the lever for a man who prevaricates daily, who has had multiple wives and even more affairs. That’s because they believe that those characteristics outweigh the things they want done in Washington.”

Selinger adds, “Rick Perry is no different. He too is willing to overlook gross misconduct, of which he was part, simply because he likes the president’s policies.”

If a Democratic president had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a political revival and made that investigation a condition of military aid, far-right theocrats like Graham, Perry, Metaxas and Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. would be demanding his impeachment. But because Trump become an honorary member of the Christian Right, he gets a pass.

The Christian Right, Selinger asserts, is unlikely to turn against Trump.

“This is the problem with Trump and his allies, and it begins with religion: what it means to follow God has been lost in a political game that places legislative wins over moral losses,” Selinger writes. “Will evangelicals ever see the light? As Rick Perry demonstrates in his ruthless sycophancy, the odds are slim.”

AN 719

a repost of the Feb. 18, 2019, column of Chris Hedges, who is on vacation. He will return with a new column Aug. 12.

Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of digital media. His decisions, opinions, political positions, prejudices and sense of self are reflected back to him on screens. He views himself and the world around him as a vast television show with himself as the star. His primary concerns as president are his ratings, his popularity and his image. He is a creature—maybe the poster child—of the modern, post-literate culture, a culture that critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, James W. Carey and Neil Postman warned us about.

It is not, as some have suggested, merely that Trump speaks at the level of a seventh-grader or that he harkens back to a preliterate oral culture. He embodies the incoherence of the modern digital age, filled with sudden shifts from subject to subject, a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows punctuated with commercials. There is nonstop stimulation. Seldom does anything occupy our attention for more than a few seconds. Nothing has context. Images overwhelm words. We are perpetually confused, but always entertained. We barely remember what we saw or heard a few minutes earlier. This is by design of the elites who manipulate us.

“It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse,” Postman points out. “It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.” Americans, because television stages their world, “no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” Trump is what is produced when a society severs itself from print, when it pushes art, ethics, classics, philosophy, history and the humanities to the margins of the universities and culture, when its members spend hours sitting inert in front of a screen. Information, ideas and epistemology are, as Postman writes, given form today by electronic images.

It is a mistake to see what is happening as cultural regression. It is worse than that. Oral cultures prized memorization and cultivated the high art of rhetoric. Leaders, playwrights and poets in oral cultures did not speak to their publics in Trump’s crude vernacular. More ominous than the president’s impoverished vocabulary is that he cannot string together sentences that make sense. This replicates not only the shoddy vocabulary of television, but more importantly the incoherence of television. Trump is able to communicate with tens of millions of Americans, also raised in front of screens, because they too have been linguistically and intellectually mutated by digital images. They lack the ability to detect lies or think rationally. They are part of our post-truth culture.

Nearly any tweet or spoken remark by Trump illustrates this incoherence. In a Jan. 31 interview with The New York Times he gave this answer when asked about the gruesome murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul:

Yeah. Khashoggi. I thought it was a terrible crime. But [WHAT ABOUT-ISM] if you look at other countries, many other countries. You look at Iran, not so far away from Saudi Arabia, and take a look at what they’re doing there.So, you know, that’s just the way I feel. Venezuela is very much in flux. We’ve been hearing about it for probably 14 years now, between the two of them. And some terrible thingsare happening in Venezuela. So, if I can do something to help people. It’s really helping humanity, if we can do something to help people, I’d like to do that.

Electronic images are our modern-day idols. We worship the power and fame they impart. We yearn to become idolized celebrities. [youtube influencers] We measure [literally ct likes #] our lives against the fantasies these images disseminate. If something does not appear on a screen or is proclaimed on a screen its authenticity is questioned. We fervently build miniature social media platforms where we daily update our “life the movie,” confusing self-presentation with genuine communication and friendship. This yearning to be validated by electronic images and their audiences has made us an isolated, uninformed, alienated and very unhappy people.

“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation,” John Ralston Saul writes. “We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence. And the image has all the Godly powers. It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly. The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of electronic image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.”he fixation on electronic images by Trump means he and millions of other American adults—who, according to a 2018 report by the Nielsen company, on average watch four hours, 46 minutes of TV each day and spend “over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media”—have severed themselves from complex thought. They have been infantilized. Television, including the news, reduces all reality to a childish, cartoonish simplicity. News as presented on screens “provides degenerate photographs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes,” James W. Carey writes. “News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sport scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, economic transactions such as foreign trade or balance of payments.” News on our screens is incapable of imparting complexity and nuance. It is devoid of historical, social or cultural context. TV news speaks in easily digestible clichés and political and cultural tropes. It is sensational and fragmented. The frenetic pace of TV news means that except when delivering statistics, the programs can trade only in established stereotypes. TV news is, in essence, divorced from the real, mindlessly grounded in the ruling elites’ reigning ideology of neoliberalism, militarism and white supremacy.

Postman, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” writes that after the development of the telegraph, “News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch.” Arguing that the 19th-century invention is the basis for communication in the digital age, he says, “Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each ‘headline’ stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. ‘Knowing’ the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative.”

Those who seek to communicate outside of digital structures to question or challenge the dominant narrative, to deal in ambiguity and nuance, to have discussions rooted in verifiable fact and historical context, are becoming incomprehensible to most of modern society. As soon as they employ a language that is not grounded in the dominant clichés and stereotypes, they are not understood. Television, computers and smartphones have addicted a generation and conditioned it to talk and think in the irrational, incoherent baby talk it is fed day after day. This cultural, historical, economic and social illiteracy delights the ruling elites who design, manage and profit from these sophisticated systems of social control. Armed with our personal data and with knowledge of our proclivities, habits and desires, they adeptly manipulate us as consumers and citizens to accelerate their amassing of wealth and consolidation of power.

“The only people who grasp the distinction between reality and appearance, who grasp the laws of conduct and society, are the ruling groups and those who do their bidding: scientific, technical elites who elucidate the laws of behavior and the function of society so that people might be more effectively, albeit unconsciously, governed,” Carey writes in “Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.”

Daniel Boorstin in “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Reality in America” argues that the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have now displaced the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous. Reality has become stagecraft. We live in a world, he writes, “where fantasy is more real than reality.” He warns>We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic,’ that they can live in them. [3d vr videogames] We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.

Trump is a product of this cultural decay, not an aberration. The way he speaks, acts and thinks is the way many Americans speak, act and think. He will one day disappear, but the cultural degeneracy that produced him will remain. Academic institutions, which should be the repositories of culture and literacy, are transforming themselves, often with corporate money, into adjuncts of the digital age, expanding departments that deal with technology, engineering and computer science—the largest major at universities such as Princeton and Harvard—while diminishing the disciplines that deal with art, philosophy, ethics, history and politics. These disciplines, rooted in print, are the only antidotes to cultural death.

Intellectual historian Perry Miller in his essay “The Duty of Mind in a Civilization of Machines” calls us to build counterweights to communication technology in order “to resist the paralyzing effects upon the intellect of the looming nihilism” that defines the era. In short, the more we turn off our screens and return to the world of print, the more we seek out the transformative power of art and culture, the more we re-establish genuine relationships, conducted face-to-face rather than through a screen, the more we use knowledge to understand and put the world around us in context, the more we will be able to protect ourselves from the digital dystopia.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/beware-the-thought-police-are-coming

Beware: The thought police are coming

written by Chris Hedges, Mr. Fish / Truthdig June 12, 2019

Chris Hedges gave this talk Tuesday, June 11, at an event held in London in support of Julian Assange.

Ask the Iraqi parents of Sabiha Hamed Salih, aged 15, and Ashwaq Hamed Salih, aged 16, who were killed by shrapnel in Baghdad on July 31, 2004, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the man and his two young daughters who saw their wife and mother shot to death and were themselves wounded in a car fired upon by U.S. Marines in Fallujah on July 22, 2005, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of Huda Haleem, an 18-year-old girl, and Raghad Muhamad Haleem, a 5-year-old boy, shot dead by U.S. soldiers on June 2, 2006, in Iraq’s Diyala province what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of the 15-year-old boy choked with a wire and then shot to death by U.S. Marines in Ramadi on Aug. 10, 2006, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the relatives of Ahmed Salam Mohammad, who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 2006, when U.S. troops attacked a wedding party near Mosul, an attack that also left four wounded, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the families of the over one dozen people shot to death with .50-caliber machine guns by bantering U.S. Apache helicopter crews in east Baghdad in July 2007—the crew members can be heard laughing at the “dead bastards” and saying “light ’em up” and “keep shooting, keep shooting”—a massacre that included two journalists for Reuters—Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh—what they think of Julian Assange. Ask the then 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his 5-year-old sister, Doaha, both wounded, whose 43-year-old father, Saleh, was shot to death from the air as he attempted to assist one of the wounded men in the Baghdad street what they think of Julian Assange.

There is nothing like the boot of the oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.

None of these war crimes, and hundreds more reported to the U.S. military but never investigated, would have been made public without Julian, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. That is the role of journalists—to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, to hold the powerful to account, to give the forgotten and the demonized justice, to speak the truth.

We have watched over the last decade as freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The repeated use of the Espionage Act, especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make them public, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah Harrison has pointed out: “This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”

Even if Julian were odious, which he is not, even if he carried out a sexual offense, which he did not, even if he was a poor houseguest—a bizarre term for a man trapped in a small room for nearly seven years under house arrest—which he was not, it would make no difference. Julian is not being persecuted for his vices. He is being persecuted for his virtues.

His arrest eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities carried by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments in the seizure of Julian two months ago from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power, no matter what their nationality, will be hunted down around the globe and seized, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where journalism is outlawed and replaced with propaganda, trivia, entertainment and indoctrination to make us hate those demonized by the state as our enemies.

The arrest of Julian marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.

The BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was locked out of WeChat in China a few days ago after posting photos of the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong marking 30 years since student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were gunned down by Chinese soldiers in June 1989.

“Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was?” he wrote. “Why were people gathering? Where was it? That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China. I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.”

In order to get back on WeChat he had to agree that he was responsible for spreading “malicious rumors” and provide what is called a faceprint.

“I was instructed to hold my phone up—to ‘face front camera straight on’—looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to ‘Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese.’ My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.”

Governmental abuse of WeChat, he wrote, “could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike. Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.”

This is almost certainly our future, and it is a future that Julian has fought courageously to prevent.

In another sign the noose is tightening, the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., the country’s national broadcaster, were raided by federal police last Wednesday. The raid was carried out because the broadcaster had disclosed detailed accounts of Australian special forces in Afghanistan killing unarmed people, including children. That story was generated, in part, by a leak of hundreds of classified military documents. The police raid and search through raw footage and thousands of files, emails and internal documents appear to be part of a hunt for the source, who will, no doubt, be arrested and imprisoned.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a nationalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Julian, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did Donald Trump demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

The psychological torture of Julian—documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and ill treatment, Nils Melzer—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of the novel “1984.” It is said the Gestapo broke bones and the East German Stasi secret police broke souls. Today, we too have refined the cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is why Julian, his physical and psychological health in serious decline, has been moved to a prison hospital. We can all be taken to George Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to be made compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures”—and you can be sure there are American intelligence operatives here assisting the British in the psychological torture of Julian—have destroyed thousands of detainees in black sites around the globe. These techniques, including prolonged solitary confinement, are the staple form of control in maximum-security prisons in the United States, where the corporate state makes war on its most oppressed and politically astute underclass—African Americans.

There has been a coordinated smear campaign against Julian by our Thought Police, one that is amplified by the very media organizations that published WikiLeaks material. The campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called for eradicating the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroying Julian’s reputation.

This character assassination was championed by the Democratic Party establishment after WikiLeaks published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, should have remained hidden, that the public did not have a right to know, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Snowden from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow after he made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Julian was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

We must build popular movements to force the British government to halt the extradition and judicial lynching of Julian. We must build popular movements to force the Australian government to intervene on behalf of Julian. We must build popular movements to reclaim democracy and the rule of law. If Julian is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Donald Trump has attacked as “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging of the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the profits of corporations and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will no longer be part of public debate. First Julian. Then us.

wicked smart henry g

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/

The ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe.They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.

Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Chris Hedges is right to argue that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined.He is worth quoting at length:

The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. We no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate; an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as “Russiagate” or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise.Puffed up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.

Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, and render invisible important social issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in “No Name in the Street” that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

...

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/chris-hedges-and-matt-taibbi-the-rot-of-american-journalism-runs-deep/

In the latest episode of “On Contact,” host and Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges sits down with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone for the first of a two-part series on American media, which Hedges calls a “purveyor of hate.” Together they explore the ways in which Fox News has reshaped the industry in its own image, and how networks like MSNBC have come to tell viewers exactly what they want to hear. Hedges also devotes a portion of his segment to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s seminal book, “Manufacturing Consent,” which remains no less essential several decades after it was first published. Watch a video of their conversation above.

arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/israels-stranglehold-on-american-politics/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/corporate-dictatorships-are-subjugating-us-workers-and-stripping-employees-of-fundamental-constitutional-rights/

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-idiot-entertainer-who-only-cares-about-lurid-spectacles-sex-gore-and-fantasy

magic thinking

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles and impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy.

There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.

The idiots know only one word—“more.” They are unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds where they eat chocolate cake and order missile strikes. They see the state as a projection of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Wilhelmine, Pahlavi, and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law.

Donald Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality—a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac. He wields armies and fleets against the wretched of the earth, blithely ignores the catastrophic human misery caused by global warming, pillages on behalf of global oligarchs and at night sits slack-jawed in front of a television set before opening his “beautiful” Twitter account. He is our version of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers, the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back the potion that would give him eternal life, and a decayed Russian royalty that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as their nation was decimated by war and revolution brewed in the streets.

This moment in history marks the end of a long, sad tale of greed and murder by the white races. It is inevitable that for the final show we vomited a grotesque figure like Trump. Europeans and Americans have spent five centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting and polluting the earth in the name of human progress. They used their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone and anything, especially indigenous cultures, that stood in their way. They stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and resources. They believed that this orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. They do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. But even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to break free from our evolutionary past. The more the warning signs are palpable—rising temperatures, global financial meltdowns, mass human migrations, endless wars, poisoned ecosystems, rampant corruption among the ruling class—the more we turn to those who chant, either through idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what worked in the past will work in the future, that progress is inevitable. Factual evidence, since it is an impediment to what we desire, is banished. The taxes of corporations and the rich, who have deindustrialized the country and turned many of our cities into wastelands, are cut, and regulations are slashed to bring back the supposed golden era of the 1950s for white American workers. Public lands are opened up to the oil and gas industry as rising carbon emissions doom our species. Declining crop yields stemming from heat waves and droughts are ignored. War is the principal business of the kleptocratic state.

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Magical thinking is not limited to the beliefs and practices of pre-modern cultures. It defines the ideology of capitalism. Quotas and projected sales can always be met. Profits can always be raised. Growth is inevitable. The impossible is always possible. Human societies, if they bow before the dictates of the marketplace, will be ushered into capitalist paradise. It is only a question of having the right attitude and the right technique. When capitalism thrives, we are assured, we thrive. The merging of the self with the capitalist collective has robbed us of our agency, creativity, capacity for self-reflection and moral autonomy. We define our worth not by our independence or our character but by the material standards set by capitalism—personal wealth, brands, status and career advancement. We are molded into a compliant and repressed collective. This mass conformity is characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian states. It is the Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes. And when magical thinking does not work, we are told, and often accept, that we are the problem. We must have more faith. We must envision what we want. We must try harder. The system is never to blame. We failed it. It did not fail us.

All of our systems of information, from self-help gurus and Hollywood to political monstrosities such as Trump, sell us this snake oil. We blind ourselves to impending collapse. Our retreat into self-delusion is a career opportunity for charlatans who tell us what we want to hear. The magical thinking they espouse is a form of infantilism. It discredits facts and realities that defy the glowing cant of slogans such as “Make America great again.” Reality is banished for relentless and baseless optimism.

Half the country may live in poverty, our civil liberties may be taken from us, militarized police may murder unarmed citizens in the streets and we may run the world’s largest prison system and murderous war machine, but all these truths are studiously ignored. Trump embodies the essence of this decayed, intellectually bankrupt and immoral world. He is its natural expression. He is the king of the idiots. We are his victims.

see self-help cat

see prosperity gospel

goes back to ben franklin, parodied in gatsby?

american reinvention // exceptionalism? rules/ past do not apply, structural forces do not matter, can be overcome with hard work/ will aha

we do not need social safety net if we have amway, power of pos thinking, we are a winner

https://www.alternet.org/cult-trump

ult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them.

Donald Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party into a cult. All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the cult leaders. The cult reflects the leader’s prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas. Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader. Huge segments of the population, betrayed by the established elites, were conditioned for a cult leader. They were desperately looking for someone to rescue them and solve their problems. They found their cult leader in the New York real estate developer and reality television show star. Only when we recognize Trump as a cult leader, and many of those who support him as cult followers, will we understand where we are headed and how we must resist.

It was 40 years ago next month that a messianic preacher named Jim Jonesconvinced or forced more than 900 of his followers, including roughly 280 children, to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge and address the impending crisis of ecocide and the massive mismanagement of the economy by kleptocrats, his bellicosity, his threats against Iran and China and the withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties, along with his demonization of all who oppose him, ensure our cultural and, if left unchecked, physical extinction. Cult leaders are driven, at their core, by the death instinct, the instinct to annihilate and destroy rather than nurture and create. Trump shares many of the characteristics of Jones as well as other cult leaders including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult; the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who led the Unification Church; Credonia Mwerinde, who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda; Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong; and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

“A cult is a mirror of what is inside the cult leader,” Margaret Thaler Singer wrote in “Cults in Our Midst.” “He has no restraints on him. He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as a child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.”

George Orwell understood that cult leaders manipulate followers primarily through language, not force. This linguistic manipulation is a gradual process. It is rooted in continual mental chaos and verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements that defy reality and fact soon paralyze the opposition. The opposition, with every attempt to counter this absurdism with the rational—such as the decision by Barack Obama to make his birth certificate public or by Sen. Elizabeth Warren to release the results of her DNA test to prove she has Native American ancestry—plays to the cult leader. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously and often denies ever making them, even when they are documented. Lies and truth do not matter. The language of the cult leader is designed exclusively to appeal to the emotional needs of those in the cult.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

The cult leader grooms followers to speak in the language of hate and violence. The cult leader constantly paints a picture of an existential threat, often invented, that puts the cult followers in danger. Trump is doing this by demonizing the caravan of some 4,000 immigrants, most from Honduras, moving through southern Mexico. Caravans of immigrants, are, in fact, nothing new. The beleaguered and impoverished asylum seekers, including many families with children, are 1,000 miles from the Texas border. But Trump, aided by nearly nonstop coverage by Fox News and Christian broadcasting, is using the caravan to terrify his followers, just as he, along with these media outlets, portrayed the protesters who flooded the U.S. capital to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as unruly mobs. Trump claims the Democrats want to open the border to these “criminals” and to “unknown Middle Easterners” who are, he suggests, radical jihadists. Christian broadcasting operations, such as Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, splice pictures of marching jihadists in black uniforms cradling automatic weapons into the video shots of the caravan.

The fear mongering and rhetoric of hate and violence, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia, eventually lead to widespread acts of violence against. The 13 explosive devices sent last week to Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James Clapper and CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc, an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter who was living out of his van, herald more violence. Trump, tossing gasoline on the flames, used this assault against much of the leadership of the Democratic Party to again attack the press, or, as he calls it, “the enemy of the people.” “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” he tweeted. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its acts, FAST!”

It should come as no surprise that on Saturday another enraged American white male, his fury and despair seemingly stoked by the diatribes and conspiracy theories of the far right, entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and massacred eight men and three women as he shouted anti-Semitic abuse. Shot by police and arrested at the scene was Robert Bowers, who believes that Jewish groups are aiding the caravan of immigrants in southern Mexico. He was armed with a military-style AR-15 assault rifle, plus three handguns. The proliferation of easily accessible high-caliber weapons, coupled with the division of the country into the blessed and the damned by Trump and his fellow cultists, threatens to turn the landscape of the United States into one that resembles Mexico, where at least 145 people in politics, including 48 candidates and pre-candidates, along with party leaders and campaign workers, have beenassassinated over the last 12 months, according to Etellekt, a risk analysis firm in Mexico. There have been 627 incidents of violence against politicians, 206 threats and acts of intimidation, 57 firearm assaults and 52 attacks on family members that resulted in 50 fatalities. Trump’s response to the mass shooting at the synagogue was to say places of worship should have armed guards, a call for further proliferation of firearms. Look south if you want a vision of our future.

Domestic terrorism and nihilistic violence are the natural outcomes of the economic, social and political stagnation, the total seizure of power by a corporate cabal and oligarchic elite, and the contamination of civil discourse by cult leaders. The weaponization of language is proliferating, as seen in the vile rhetoric that characterizes many political campaigns for the midterm elections, including the racist robocall sent out against Andrew Gillum, an African-American candidate for the governorship of Florida. “Well, hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I’ll be askin’ you to make me governor of this here state of Florida,” a man speaking in a caricature of a black dialect accompanied by jungle noises said in the robocall. Cults externalize evil. Evil is embodied in the demonized other, whether desperate immigrants, black political candidates and voters, or the Democratic Party. The only way to purge this “evil” and restore America to “greatness” is to eradicate these human contaminants.

The cult leader, unlike a traditional politician, makes no effort to reach out to his opponents. The cult leader seeks to widen the divisions. The leader brands those outside the cult as irredeemable. The leader seeks the omnipotence to crush those who do not kneel in adoration. The followers, yearning to be protected and empowered by the cult leader, seek to give the cult leader omnipotence. Democratic norms, an impediment to the leader’s omnipotence, are attacked and abolished. Those in the cult seek to be surrounded by the cult leader’s magical aura. Reality is sacrificed for fantasy. Those who challenge the fantasy are not considered human. They are Satanic.

Meerloo wrote:

The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have received. He is suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any means he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing device for his own conscience, he cannot live. His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal contradictions, or man’s inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological fact that man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error, through the interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit himself to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never become a mature person. … It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow man. He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded.

Behavior that ensures the destruction of a public figure’s career does not affect a cult leader. It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented by The New York Times or The Washington Post. It does not matter that Trump’s personal financial interests, as we see in his relationship with the Saudis, take precedence over the rule of law, diplomatic protocols and national security. It does not matter that he is credibly charged by numerous women with being a sexual predator, a common characteristic of cult leaders. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. The establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its complicity in empowering the ruling oligarchy and the corporate state, might as well be blowing soap bubbles at Trump. Their vitriol, to his followers, only justifies the hatred radiating from the cult.

The cult leader responds to only one emotion—fear. The cult leader, usually a coward, will react when he thinks he is in danger. The cult leader will bargain and compromise when afraid. The cult leader will give the appearance of being flexible and reasonable. But as soon as the cult leader is no longer afraid, the old patterns of behavior return, with a special venom directed at those who were able to momentarily impinge upon his power.

The removal of Trump from power would not remove the yearning of tens of millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking, attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based science and journalism long before Trump did. Cults are a product of social decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode in another financial crisis.

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters the press and Trump’s mainstream critics.

Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like liberation movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals, feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a Democratic Party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression and cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny.

ch de vega:

https://www.alternet.org/pulitzer-prize-winner-explains-why-trump-product-failed-democracy

...Can America be salvaged? Is the American experiment in democracy over? How did an unholy union of Christian fascism and unchecked corporate power combine to destroy the American dream and gut the commons? Are the American people fighting back to reclaim democracy and a healthier society?

In addition to his new book, Hedges is the author of numerous award winning and bestselling works including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," "Death of a Liberal Class," "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" and "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt."

Hedges has also written for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is currently a contributing writer for the political commentary and news analysis website Truthdig.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version can be heard on my podcast.

Donald Trump has been president for almost two years. At this point are things better or worse or as expected?

The situation is worse. Donald Trump was always a pretty frightening and repugnant figure. But even I wouldn't have predicted that he was this bad. He and this situation are completely unhinged. By virtue of every benchmark of a functioning democracy -- including the debasing of the political discourse in the United States -- Donald Trump has really accelerated the decay. This includes things such as the tax cut for the rich, deregulating the coal and the fossil fuel industry, opening up public lands for exploitation, the assault against public education, dismantling the EPA and stacking the courts with ideologues from the Federalist Society. As a whole the situation with Trump is pretty grim.

The emergence of Donald Trump and the forces he represents should not be a surprise. This crisis was decades in the making. Yet the American corporate news media still keeps treating Trumpism as some type of surprise. Most in the news media are still unwilling to tell the truth about Trump and the Republican Party represent.

It is many decades in the making. I think the problem with the press is that they're driven by the same motive that drives Trump which is to make money. And Trump is part of the sick entertainment which has replaced the news. Consider all of the stuff about Stormy Daniels or her lawyer for example. It isn't news. It's court gossip. It is entertainment. It feeds corporate coffers.

So CNNmade more money last year than they've ever made. A billion dollars. It is good for profits. It is good for ratings. But it's not journalism. And it's really a mask for self-interest. Look at the types of people who are brought on these cable news programs. It is a veneration of the elite. It's the established politicians. It is the generals or the ex-generals who now work for Raytheon or other defense multinational corporations. It's the intelligence chiefs. The former head of the CIA, John Brennan, is now a paid contributor on MSNBC. These approved voices are the established apologists who carried out the corporate coup d'état in America who are still chattering away. What happened with Trump is a surprise to them because they don't actually live in the United States. They live in a country which a writer for the New Yorker called "Richistan." These elites are completely unplugged from the effects of what they have done to the country and world through neoliberalism and the resulting deindustrialization.

They don't understand the attendant rage that this dislocation within the economy and broader American society has caused, especially within the working class.

You have a Democratic Party running around talking about James Comey or the Podesta emails or WikiLeaks or Russia without addressing the core issue, which is the orchestration of incredible social inequality -- which the Democrats were part of and thus don't address. The longer the Democrats follow this track of believing that Trump will implode and attempting to blame his election on Russian interference, the more dangerous the situation becomes. The Democrats are demonizing outside forces such as Russia without addressing the core issue which has created this largest transference of wealth upwards in American history and a corporate oligarchic elite which at this point is worse than even the Gilded Age.

What role does entertainment and spectacle play in all this?

Political elections became forms of entertainment. Political figures became celebrities with their own manufactured personalities. Politics was then all about how we are made to feel about a particular candidate -- and we confuse how we are made to feel with political knowledge.

This was done long before Trump. So you have NBC, through the TV show "The Apprentice," creating the fictional persona of Trump. He wants to present himself as a billionaire real estate developer in New York but he's really a product of TV.

Donald Trump sees reality through the lens of the TV screen. And in that way he is in touch with the zeitgeist of the American public. He knows how to speak their language. Donald Trump is a president who by most estimates is spending four to five hours a day tweeting in front of a TV set. So, yes, Trump is the symptom, not the disease. He is the product of a failed democracy. Political theorist and philosopher Sheldon Wolin explained this in his book "Democracy Incorporated."

Wolin showed how there are no institutions left in America that are authentically democratic. What exists is the leaching of entertainment into politics. It is the manipulation through the public relations industry as well as a system that's calcified the lockout of third parties or insurgent candidates. Substantive social and political issues are marginalized. Manufacturing consent by the news media and popular culture at large is the norm. Donald Trump knows how to manipulate emotion and to operate in that sphere of mediated reality.

Donald Trump is a master of lifestyle branding and marketing. This allowed him to develop a clear and coherent message. Hillary Clinton had no coherent message. Her narrative and messaging about technocratic, responsible government stewardship was boring. It could not compete with the entertainment spectacle that was Trump and his campaign. Why were the Democrats unable to see this?

Hillary Clinton has a history which makes her hard to brand. She's the one who along with her husband Bill Clinton "dog-whistled" the rhetoric of the Democratic Party and decided to take the "law and order" issue away from Republicans. The Clintons dismantled whatever diversity the Democratic Party had achieved under Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. The power of Obama is that he was kind of an unknown and therefore an empty slate that you could write "hope and change" on. That is a lot harder to do with Hillary Clinton. I would also argue that her campaign was devoid of meaningful policy proposals.

Obama was running around holding rallies saying that the 2016 election was so Hillary "can finish the job." The Democrats branded her as a woman. This was all so empty. It was junk politics. This is the type of political theater and discourse which created an opening for Donald Trump.

Since the 1990s the Republican Party has also become increasingly authoritarian, right-wing and dangerous. Yet the Democrats kept chasing the Republicans to the right in some misguided effort to capture right-leaning independents. The Democrats ended up in a position where they could not outflank the Republicans.

What happened was that the Democratic Party, courtesy of Bill Clinton, became the Republican Party and this pushed the Republican Party so far to the right they became insane. It wasn't just Trump.

I keep hoping that there will be a reckoning in America and some accountability for the forces that installed Trump and the Republicans in office. But as a student of history I don't see it really happening.

I'd like to think there will be a reckoning. But reality has proven otherwise. As somebody who spoke out against the Iraq war, all of us who were correct got pushed out of the political mainstream. All the people who cheered on that war -- Bush's useful idiots like Thomas Friedman -- they're still there. In a way it doesn't matter that they were wrong because they did precisely what they're supposed to do -- discredit their leftist critics. I'm kind of stunned at how it doesn't matter how many times these people are wrong. The next day they are still there in your face.

What do you think of this whole controversy about the "deep state," which has come to the forefront in the age of Trump and the Russia Scandal. There is clearly a continuity of policy across administrations, but that's not the same as the conspiracy that Trump and his defenders have claimed.

There's just complete continuity on all of the major issues from one administration to the next. The expansion of imperial wars, the assault on civil liberties, the bailing out and coddling of Wall Street, mass incarceration, unemployment as well as underemployment. The difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that Democratic elites don't want to be identified as racists. But on the core economic, political and imperial issues there is no difference. Do not forget that there were also high-profile establishment Republicans such as the Bushes who voted for Clinton too. This is all an example of what Sigmund Freud called "the narcissism of minor differences" between the Democrats and Republicans.

Another dimension to this crisis is that Donald Trump does not exist. He's a caricature, a projection. He's quite literally a signifier. Why were so many millions of Americans compelled to him? Are they not equipped to understand this part of celebrity culture? Is this postmodernism run amok, where people think that reality TV is real?

You are exactly right. Trump does not exist. These are fictional creations and personas. And yet because these fictional creations are so convincing and disseminated nonstop through electronic devices, in many ways they're more real to us than the people who live next door. We build our emotional relationships with these fictional personas, and this leaks into the news because it thrives on celebrity gossip. News has become a mini-drama with a star and a villain and a supporting cast.

With Trump, for example, even though you have these figures who are flesh-and-blood human beings they are cartoons in how they present themselves. Unfortunately, this is a cultural problem that we see with how people create narratives around fictionalized versions of their own lives on Facebook and other social media too.

Trump has spawned a whole subgenre of writing about the denizens of "Trumplandia" as I describe them. It is easy to write stories about white rubes in rural areas who were somehow duped into voting for Trump. Where are the stories about rich white folks in Chicago, Greenwich and New York who voted for Trump? Your book attempts to disrupt the dominant narrative about Donald Trump and this moment. What did you learn?

The mainstream corporate news media looks at Trump voters like they are zoological specimens. My new book looks at the pathologies that arise in a decayed culture which led to this moment.

What we are seeing now in America is how a diseased culture behaves. In my new book I look at examples such as gambling, BDSM groups in San Francisco, "preppers" and survivalists and white hate groups. The latter are important because hate groups are always a product of a diseased society. I also went to deindustrialized parts of the country. I was in Anderson, Indiana, with all of these old UAW workers.

Bill Clinton passes NAFTA and by 2006, the GM plants in Anderson have all been leveled. Literally there are empty spaces because the factories have moved to Monterrey, Mexico, where they're paying workers $3 an hour without benefits. So these union jobs where you could make $25 or $30 an hour with a pension plan, where you could buy a house and live on a single income and send your kids to college, have all but vanished. This loss has created economic hardship and all the community social problems which come with it.

And these former workers in Anderson? Most of them voted for Bernie Sanders. But when the general election came around they voted for Trump. There was just too much tying Hillary Clinton to decisions such as NAFTA which destroyed their lives. I think that writing off Trump's supporters as irredeemable racists -- although some, maybe even many of them are -- is counterproductive. This is a class issue. If you walk in any Walmart and say, we're here to organize for $15 or $20 an hour you will have people of various political persuasions sign up for it. We have to get back to an understanding of class, oligarchy and class warfare.

It is important to also emphasize that we should never countenance or support any kind of xenophobia, racism, homophobia or anything else. But the dividing line has to be class. It can't be centered on these particular cultural issues, because that, in essence, keeps the economic underclass pitted against each other, which is just what the oligarchs want.

We need to develop a more sophisticated way of talking about the connections between race and class in America.

Race and class are intimately connected. In America it has traditionally been African-Americans who were always on the lowest level of the class hierarchy. So if you go back and look at the auto plants in Detroit, black Americans were the last hired, first fired, and they always got the worst jobs, the most dangerous jobs, the most poorly paid jobs.

2x: So CNN made more money last year than they've ever made. A billion dollars. It is good for profits. It is good for ratings. But it's not journalism. And it's really a mask for self-interest. Look at the types of people who are brought on these cable news programs. It is a veneration of the elite. It's the established politicians. It is the generals or the ex-generals who now work for Raytheon or other defense multinational corporations. It's the intelligence chiefs. The former head of the CIA, John Brennan, is now a paid contributor on MSNBC. These approved voices are the established apologists who carried out the corporate coup d'état in America who are still chattering away. What happened with Trump is a surprise to them because they don't actually live in the United States. They live in a country which a writer for the New Yorker called "Richistan." These elites are completely unplugged from the effects of what they have done to the country and world through neoliberalism and the resulting deindustrialization.

They don't understand the attendant rage that this dislocation within the economy and broader American society has caused, especially within the working class.

some rep?

2x What role does entertainment and spectacle play in all this?

What happened was that the Democratic Party, courtesy of Bill Clinton, became the Republican Party and this pushed the Republican Party so far to the right they became insane. It wasn't just Trump.

What do you think of this whole controversy about the "deep state," which has come to the forefront in the age of Trump and the Russia Scandal. There is clearly a continuity of policy across administrations, but that's not the same as the conspiracy that Trump and his defenders have claimed.

The mainstream corporate news media looks at Trump voters like they are zoological specimens. My new book looks at the pathologies that arise in a decayed culture which led to this moment.

We need to develop a more sophisticated way of talking about the connections between race and class in America.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?450850-1/chris-hedges-discusses-america

SEPTEMBER 8, 2018

America: the farewell tour

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges examined the fate of American democracy.

sf summer 18 talk? (fundraise show)

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-september-19-2018/

addiction, gambling, pioneer micro-target

magical thinking, crisis _; anomie: social instability based on breakdown of standards, lack of social control, isolation, soc provides little moral guidance.

can't argue, just restore stability, rx etc so that won't try for revenge on world that beats them down

megachurch also has target for recruits, sever you from family

...

PIC harbinger of pvt, phones, rx, commissary, aramark, idel labor, no strike, no vacation, no sick day, no union, no mages GA and __, disobey go to solitary; 90% no jury trial

see democracy inc bk

we are stripped of econ and pol? power and dems will not help

new book am farewell tour

https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/the-falling-of-the-american-empire/

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-2735

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-may-25-2018/

corp coup

mercenaries block road standing rock, no ID

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-september-15-2017/

mar 3 vancouver speech kpfa

http://time.com/4659390/howe-strauss-steve-bannon/

When Steve Bannon joined Donald Trump’s campaign months ago, I recalled an encounter I had with him eight years earlier. Writing in November, after he was appointed to the White House staff, I described how Bannon had interviewed me for a documentary film he made in 2009. Our conversation took on a worrying layer of meaning given Bannon’s new political power, and events of the last two weeks have confirmed the historical role he wants to play.

The film, Generation Zero, which, was largely based on a theory laid out by William Strauss and Neil Howe in the 1990s in two remarkable books, Generations and The Fourth Turning. Bannon interviewed both Neil Howe and myself at length (Bill Strauss had died in 2007) about its implications for the immediate future. Looking at the whole sweep of American history, Strauss and Howe realized that a great crisis, involving the death of an old order and the birth of a new one, had occurred every 80 years at least since the 18th century. These crises included the period of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-1794), the Civil War (about 1860-1868), and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-1945). Doing the math, they predicted a fourth great crisis—or “fourth turning”—sometime in the first 15 years of the 21st century. While they were far too wise to attempt to predict exactly what might trigger it or what course it might take, they listed terrorism, financial crises and federal-state conflicts as possible events that might begin the new era. Their prediction has come true.

This theory, which never really caught on in the media or in academia, is something I have tried to introduce to readers in various posts here over the past three years and in numerous posts since 2004 at my personal website, and in books on the Vietnam War and U.S. entry into the Second World War. In the piece about my conversation with Bannon, I discussed two particular aspects of our discussion about Strauss and Howe—our conversations about the wars that had accompanied the last of America’s three great crises, and my realization that other nations had not come through their moments of crisis as well as ours had.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

He has a point. Many people in the major media, academia and Democratic politics cannot imagine alternatives to the status quo. They simply could not believe that something like Trump’s immigration order would go through, because it was antithetical to their values. The election, however, already showed that their values, while shared by most of the population in the blue states, are not consensus values. Some polls have shown that a majority of American voters supported the idea of Trump’s immigration order. Trump’s opponents are now in a fight for their political lives. To paraphrase FDR, they hate Trump — and he welcomes their hatred. Meanwhile, Trump — like Lincoln and FDR — is now also a leader of a worldwide movement: the populist nationalism that already rules Russia and Turkey, contributed to the Brexit vote in Britain, and will soon be tested in France and Germany.Since then, it has become even clearer that Bannon sees this moment as a crisis of the sort Strauss and Howe described. “What we are witnessing now,” he wrote this week in an email to the Washington Post dealing with the outcry against the immigration order, “is the birth of a new political order, and the more frantic a handful of media elites become, the more powerful that new political order becomes itself.”

No one can predict the outcome of the next four years, but the preservation of the status quo does not seem to be any more of an option than it was in 1861 or 1933.

In one scenario, Trump, Bannon and the Republicans may not only eliminate much of the federal government but truly break the political influence of the educated blue-state elites, reducing them to local powers in certain regions, like the Federalists after 1801 or white southerners after 1868. Another more chilling scenario would echo the Civil War in a different way, involving actual conflict between federal and local authorities over a topic like immigration, which might easily ignite the talk of blue-state secession that has already started on the west coast. Alternatively, the Administration may not be able to survive what may be its greatest vulnerability—Trump’s own leadership, which, it has been widely reported, has bred chaos in the White House, the consequences of which cannot be predicted. Or, as happened in the most recent American crisis, the nation may become involved in a confrontation and war with a foreign power, with utterly uncertain results. And it remains possible that the effects of climate change will become so obviously threatening that even Trump may have to decide to do something about it.

In none of these cases will the United States resemble what we have come to know over the last two decades. Even if a Democrat wins the White House in 2020, he or she will head a very different nation.

Nothing in Strauss and Howe’s ideas favored a right-wing outcome to our current crisis. I thought eight years ago that Barack Obama was going to revive the New Deal, but he chose not to do so. He very consciously declined to mobilize the anger in the country to set one group of Americans against another—a feature of previous fourth turnings. The Tea Party and the Republican Party filled the vacuum, and the Trump campaign piggy-backed on what they had done.

Bannon is where he is, and can do what he is doing, partly because he took the trouble to read The Fourth Turning. Those who want the next few years to turn out differently than he does would do well to do the same.

Horians explain how the past informs the present

David Kaiser, a historian, has taught at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Williams College, and the Naval War College. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War. He lives in Watertown, Mass.

:{:{}:

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http://www.alternet.org/investigations/chris-hedges-how-one-city-revolting-against-corporate-takeover

...agricultural corporations, in particular in Salinas, California and their effect on communities and grassroots democratic movements with host Chris Hedges, Jose Castaneda, an independent radical city councilperson and Anthony Prince, an attorney who has been working with groups in Salinas to fight back against the power of big business....

ANTHONY PRINCE: Well, Chris, I would say that what's happening in Salinas is emblematic of what's happening in many cities across the United States, where it appears that in response to this deepening economic crisis--here in California, for example, there are 8 million people in poverty, at or below the poverty line, and the ranks of the homeless are expanding at an accelerated rate. Especially the establishment of these homeless encampments, where, as opposed to a single individual out there in the woods, we have tent after tent after tent, established communities where there is at least some modicum of safety, of community, self-supporting efforts of mutual assistance.

And what we have in Salinas is an all-out attack, war has essentially been declared on the homeless. We see this in a number of other cities as well, but what's unique about Salinas is that a resistance has been organized. The homeless community, in particular the encampment that Jose mentioned, has been a longstanding community of--.

HEDGES: How large is that encampment?

PRINCE: Well, the total number of homeless in Salinas is somewhere around 2,000, perhaps more.

many vids incl death of lc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCvSntOI5s

The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership [3]—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.

“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.

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These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.

The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”

If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.

Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.

The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.

There will be a mass mobilization [4]Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.

“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance [5], which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”

The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.

“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization [6].”

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The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research 7, estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.

“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate [8], said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”

“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”

Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study [9] by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.

“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”

The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen [10]. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.

“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”

The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.

“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference [11] that might come out of Paris.”

There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig [2] every Monday. Hedges'

oreilly hit:

Starting in Fall 2012, discussions with a small group of students in Professor Alam’s course, Critique of Capitalism, led to the idea of launching a new student club that would promote (i) awareness of alternative approaches to the study of economy outside of mainstream economics, and (ii) discussions on issues relating to economic inequalities and economic injustice.

The efforts of these students has now resulted in the formation of Northeastern Political Economy Forum (NPEF). It began functioning as an official student club in November 2013. The students who helped to found this club include Viraj Parikh, Arshan Khalid, Evan Shikora, Victor Martinelli, Eliot Douin and Morgan Sinclaire. The NPEF is currently run by a Committee that includes — Sean Hansen, Chandana Cherukupulli, Tomas Von Rickenbach, Danielle Tolliver, Farouk Kadous, Lukas Scott and Maria Amasanti.

Since its recognition, PEF has held weekly discussions on variety of topics ranging from ‘History of Global Economy’ to ‘Economics and Environmental Devastation’. The goal of these discussions is to explore alternative approaches to the study of economic issues. NPEF believes that mainstream economics – as currently taught at universities – fails to address key portions of real- world economies. In Spring 2014, the PEF invited Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges, who spoke on the topic of ‘Myth of Progress’. PEF also plans to do research on issues of poverty and inequality in the Boston communities.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/killing_ragheads_for_jesus_20150125

“American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.

...

There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.

“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”

Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.

The evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war” against the United States.

had chris hedges sacrifice zone book talk 40 min (pine ridge, coal country; produce fields)

alex jones: RAND corp plot to crash economy, poverty for pol control: pvt citites for elite to live in;

globalist model is to shut down world economy until freedom lovers give up; rolls into ads on survivor gear, which funds out good info war work)

DOD spy on activists.

patriot act, drone attack; NDAA suit by CH: lost?

...“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”

Afran, Mayer and I brought the case to the U.S. Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O’Brien, RevolutionTruth founder Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla....

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/were-post-constitutional-era?akid=11791.1076705.SFOSNT&rd=1&src=newsletter990845&t=17

---

deathlibclass

8/12/2015

===

Resistance

intro? no notes

-- Permanent war --

inverted totalitarianism, no national institution left democratic

workers/union hard hit

// Weimar says chomsky, like joe stack did all right, but still poor

m moore booed

scahill on pvt sector takeover of security/intel, only 20 co-sponsor on bill ~; strengthened corp and weakened govt; pentagon pvtize 69% workers; 1.5::1 afghan p42 could go 3:1 soldiers, but less than 100 alQ; karzai bro gets cia $ tho heroin trafficker

...

Dismantling the liberal class --

Wwilson cavalry escort ~ anarchist decl war germany 1917, industrial war; also new propaganda; le bon, trotter, ..Freud. brief period of populism wiped out by new PR 62 reformers painted as traitors; jane addams stunned how progressives supported, uppie called for war at mad sq garden rally after us ships sunk supported ww1 63

1917 Espionage and Sedition laws, disloyal or profane language that cd encourage contempt for flag or Const 65

Debs 2 yrs jail for ~war sp. 65 rather be shot as traitor than "go to war for Wall st" 75

Creel 69, CPI, posters in every PO; thousands of empl, boosted prop and ended local indep press 70, pre pkg news releases ; tactics used by b43 to sell war, and exxon denial 74 (fake studies and experts) ; creel said nonpartisan impossible? after war shady self improvement Pelmanism and Teapot Dome; went anti-commie worked for McC and RMN 75

hired fiction writers for stories and screenplays 76 the kaiser; the beast of berlin...cops had to quell riot for overflow ppl, almost paid for itself

4 min men lib bond and pro wr sp 77, 75 k in stentorian guard; made bk w/ dewey and lippmann sic

demon: goldberg, bourne, addams, debs, bertie russell; Appeal to Reason mag censor b/c undermine war (Jack london, mo jones, debs) ; and other left jrnl, the Masses, censored it self

boston symphony orch conductor , elderly, arrested for playing german music 79 german miner lynched, "patriotic murder" 25 min not guilty 79 praised by Wapo

after war, target shift german to commies palmer raids (at ast blurred, so lenin and trotsky german agents 82); 247 deported with ema g; App to reason shut down 79 ex CPI went to gov't and corp NY DC.

Dewey ~ fake news 81 news outgunned b/c deals in facts vs emotion 81

local diff cultures gave way to corp cult, not self-sff, thrift, aesthetic expression, history, difference 82

b/c of rising economy/ lib embrace gov't as tool of progress 84, utopian vs classical lib (claimed by libertarian kochs?]

socialist million votes debs 1912; 29 engl and 22 for weekly papers 86 12 mayors ond congr; almost beat gompers afl prz;

by late 1929's way to assess public opinion

rad theater 1920-30's ; John Howard Lawson jazz play on coal labor; HUAC WPA theater project a ctr-wt to CPI, played to 30 il ppl; welles houseman voodoo (Virgil Thomson music) Cradle will Rock Mr Mr; harry hopkins liked it prok killed 1939 pinocchio stay as a puppet

HUAC --> self-censor thru fear 95 RR ended NEA grants for left theater

Malcolm Cowley Exile's return artist sellout

Beats book Holy barbarians about leisure, sonsukptiom the burbs ?! says Lawrence Lipton 100-1

cult of coddled kids paganism ?! 101

exile led to exotic taste in goods/travel

religion of art, eg abstract expression

final purge of artist ols eg H Wallace; 40-50's.

CounterAttacks and Red Channels , 3 ex fbi paid by grocery rich guy ~ Hammett, ring lardner, Albert E

Weavers

some blacklisted made it back: mostel, faulkner, seeger

CBS loyalty oaths RR SAG purge

commie --> Taft-hartley, ~ union worst ever (NLRB excl agric, b/c he needed S Dem votes,

Politics as spectacle --

union ~ commie, pro cold war, ~ CRM, ~VN

New left no ally workers, so looked to Mao etc; beats, drugs self indulgence, leary, zen i ching; lured inward; yppe dssent street theater for TV; song Solidarity Forever --> Yellow Sub 111

Catholic berrgans faithful, Dorothy Day, Dwight McS and Murray Bookchin 111

art no longer to understand world, so pollock makes spectacle 113

daniel bell the end of ideology 114 art and sci sch produce specialists 115 conform to taste of pwr elite so no challenge to SYSTEM of pwr 115 which req broader scope, to get phd req timid and mediocre and narrow CW Mills aid brilliance creativity not wanted in univ; 122

New L short lived (// VN) never equalled Pop Front 1930's diverse vs fractured and white;

post-str French ~ pol 123, tossed marxist --> cult critics, multi-culty ghetto; pluralism becomes catchall, abandon goal of progress; (j hillis miller, greg ulmer, fredric jameson) not the public intellectuals like mumford, jacobs, dw mcD CWM; now multicult watered down to hiring, Patronage not revolution 125.

Rockford coll sp dead on predictions gulf 2 removed by sec; Spker Disrupts Graduation' headline.

media complicit w/ power but pretends to objective; pedals myth that vision/spectacle is understanding 131

paper 15% news reast on how to be feel success 132

darkie --> darlie toothpaste P&G ?

suck up to ceo reporter gets sweet gig 133

paper as institutional memory

steinbeck reported on san joaq valley

creed of objectivity infects classroom 140

Liberal defectors --

expert like tom friedman become apologist for crps; end of VN, alt periodicals folded ; sydney schanberg exposed landlords, fired/demoted 146

lib = rule of law, international institution, eg Amnesty intl 149 (hobbled in israel); pro-palestine scholar pays price; Dershowitz enforcer; nat assoc of scholars has Sidney Hook award: said name names in 50's; Congress for Cultural Freedom took CIA $ 152

left ossified, tepid and technical jargon lip service reform, but corps have gutted actual mechanisms for actual reform" 153

Greenspan's mea culpa 2008 that he tot self-interest would keep banks etc (not to be dumb?) 153

fear as control made new patriots", lost jobs, house, Rx, terror attacks, fall back on prov of patriot and/or white 154

left fails to provide alt vision, so we get hyper-masc (Am Sniper?) disdain of empathy (trad lib). reality TV and Jerry springer/ 155 end of wwi study of german soldiers // 155

best hope of radical change with the dispossessed. cath Worker est on Gt Dep; ~ not-for-profit, paid no tax took no grants, neighborhood food. worry about RW xian b/c now no longer team of labor, indep media and comm to resist (pop front?) 158 DD connected dots for berrigan: enough for all, but not war too 160; Th Meron monk;

IF Stone: wwii reporter, w/ holoc on leaky boats to palestine. ~ truman loyalty oath, NATO, H bomb disappeared, FBI surveil, blacklist --> newsletter, expose gulf of Tonkin, expelled from nat'l press club when black ex fed judge refused service; 167 joined black reporter club; praise malc x;

RMN used suppression against marginal eg anti war and no one cared but when he went after lib = democrats, problem 169

Zinn fbi file 423 pp 1948-74; 5 agents, never even suspected of crime, labelled high sec risk; jeh Res Sect A, pick up in nat;l emergency 170; served on SNCC, took students out to protest, fired for insubordination (he pled guilty ;) spoke at bobby seal rally at boston pol hq; testified for ellsberg (he and chomsky edited section on VN) 172

ref Dana P intel study; 1200 govt orgs 1900 pvt co, 850K w/ top secret clearance `173

Nader: pirgs found imp info, reporters publ, bills passed, life got better; corps fear, so they copied techniques of res and presentation; 1966- 73 25 consumer bills, nearly all b/c of nader; 1973 named #4 most infl in US; then NYT Abe Rosenthal (cda RW ~ commie came to US ~ progressive, ~ mader chomsky; rule that no story unless corp response, and corps played along; other papers felt no need/pressure to cover him.

GM hired dicks; tried to seduce in supermarket; 425K damages; 8 pp Pwl memo aug 1971: attacks nader marcuses, puzzled as to why TV partic in own destruction (ie cover VN protests, nader?); --> Biz rntable, cato, heritage, manh, CSE, Acc in Academe (sic) 176 monitor to press for good corp press, legal orgs bogus disciplines cost-benefit, risk magmt; shift story from health, labor, safety to cost of govt 177. Nader never met w/ BC or Gore as VP. gore camp never mentioned GW?! 178 Nixon last pres to fear libs.

last stand 1979 dereg nat'l gas, Consumer protection Agcy, nader put all in; one hose pass, then other next year; short 20 votes in hse but 2/3 in seate yes; JC ran on it, but did not help; then RR, pirg put out reports, but press ignored. 180; 1970 tony coelho showed dems how to raise $, no interest in nader issues; got little win, foia 1974, GSA buy airbag cars [graha?] so nader rn 1996 as none of the above; dems pull punches (eg gild war Kerry, so both can get worse if we keep picking least worst 9em)

MKL/macl X converged at end, both outcast (mlk ~ VN and called for econ justice) 187

Fred smith fdr of fedex, skull & b w/ dubya and kerry, McCain finance chair (hase carveout ~ union, b/c inep contractors) trucks dangerous, 13 hrs no break; UPS is Teamster, fought exemption

Rebellion

Herzen: revo job is not to save dying system; "we think we are the doctors. we are the disease" 193

CLIMATE CRISIS = POL CRISIS 205

McKib and ppl's voice failed at Cop15; [// Klein big green on compromise?] lib thot cooperate w/ corps 194; b/c work them MC decimated, have to up levels of corruption to increase profits 195; Bechtel buying water; capit expansion vs deteriorating planet --> more repression 195 the revolt will be RW, funded by corps as in nazi; monk mode hunker down?! history and humanities as bulwark; violence seductive/corrupting; Obama was beneton scam; (won mkter of year over apple and zappos 199 magical thinking that progress is automatic --> passive; we give allegiance to port or celeb; to question corp is seen/portrayed as negative and obstructive 2000; appealing to better nature of corp or tweak internal levels of power will not work; tim flannery sats homo s are "future-eaters" ; civ is .02% of 2/12 mil yrs since sharpen stone 202;

acts of resistance are moral acts"

death of lib class // shift from print to image; fact no longer basis of public discourse ["reality-based journalism"]; now emotional narrative in which fact and opinion indistinguishable [faux news]; lang requires context; images have the3 appearance of reality but distort it; frags and spectacle; WWW seensas salvation, but Google etc just aggregates other ppl's work, does not pay for it, so creative pll and press decline; herd mentality [jaron hive mind]: privacy, self-reflection, honesty obliterated for image 209 only journalism that gets eyeball will survive, thus sleaze; only print that makes $ is finance ; red slave states connected and getting angrier: jaron. mkts good for ct jellybeans in a jar, but not creativity, or synthetic, or compound reasoning, but rather dull; worst case violence; hypersensitive to pecking order; always someone below you in gp, and designated enemy. // KB hier built in 213

augustine: hope has 2 beut dtrs: anger and courage

mario savio: fsm “ and you've got to indicate to the ppl who run it, to the ppl who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all" 216

Cicero despised by crowd and elite, so mark A had head and hands mounted on the podium in the Coliseum. 217

===

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131166027

From organizing workers to preventing war to making the economy more green, journalist Chris Hedges argues that, for decades, liberals have surrendered the good fights to corporations and ruling powers.

In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams five specific groups and institutions — the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia — for failing Americans and allowing for the creation of a "permanent underclass."

Hedges says that, for motives ranging from self-preservation to careerism, the "liberal establishment" purged radicals from its own ranks and, as a result, lost its checks on capitalism and corporate power.

"For millions of Americans, including the 15 million unemployed Americans," Hedges tells NPR'S Neal Conan, "the suffering is becoming acute."

He cites a recent trip to Camden, N.J., per capita the poorest city in the nation, as an example.

Cover of 'Death Of The Liberal Class'

DEATH OF THE LIBERAL CLASS

BY CHRIS HEDGES

HARDCOVER, 256 PAGES

NATION BOOKS

LIST PRICE: $24.95

Read An Excerpt

"When you get up and see the human cost of what this has done — these foreclosures, these bank repossessions, the fact that one in eight Americans and one in four children depend on food stamps to survive," Hedges says, it's clear the system has failed.

But how is that the fault of, say, the universities?

Hedges describes a "kind of withering of the humanities" in which the liberal education that would normally ask broad questions and challenge structure and assumptions has become corporate. Academic departments now carry the burden of raising their own funds. "This is pretty hard to do if you're in the classics department," Hedges notes.

Hedges says he also faults the "purging within economics departments and business schools of people who challenged what I call the utopian vision of globalization — the idea that somehow the marketplace should determine human behavior and guide human activity."

He says that dynamic is to blame for turning elite, Ivy League universities into, essentially, vocational schools.

"We create classes of systems managers," Hedges says, "highly astute and intelligent in a kind of analytical way … [who] only know how to service a particular system."

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_death_of_the_liberal_class_20101029

By Chris Hedges

In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite.

But the assault by the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And reducing the liberal class to courtiers or mandarins, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, shuts off this safety valve and forces discontent to find other outlets that often end in violence. The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.

The liberal class refuses to recognize the obvious because it does not want to lose its comfortable and often well-paid perch. Churches and universities—in elite schools such as Princeton, professors can earn $180,000 a year—enjoy tax-exempt status as long as they refrain from overt political critiques. Labor leaders make lavish salaries and are considered junior partners within corporate capitalism as long as they do not speak in the language of class struggle. Politicians, like generals, are loyal to the demands of the corporate state in power and retire to become millionaires as lobbyists or corporate managers. Artists who use their talents to foster the myths and illusions that bombard our society live comfortably in the Hollywood Hills.

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions—-the pillars of the liberal class—-have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. The media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

In the name of tolerance—a word the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., never used—the liberal church and the synagogue refuse to denounce Christian heretics who acculturate the Christian religion with the worst aspects of consumerism, nationalism, greed, imperial hubris, violence, and bigotry. These institutions accept globalization and unfettered capitalism as natural law. Liberal religious institutions, which should concern themselves with justice, embrace a cloying personal piety expressed in a how-is-it-with-me kind of spirituality and small, self-righteous acts of publicly conspicuous charity. Years spent in seminary or rabbinical schools, years devoted to the study of ethics, justice, and morality, prove useless when it comes time to stand up to corporate forces that usurp religious and moral language for financial and political gain.

Universities no longer train students to think critically, to examine and critique systems of power and cultural and political assumptions, to ask the broad questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. These institutions have transformed themselves into vocational schools. They have become breeding grounds for systems managers trained to serve the corporate state. In a Faustian bargain with corporate power, many of these universities have swelled their endowments and the budgets of many of their departments with billions in corporate and government dollars. College presidents, paid enormous salaries as if they were the heads of corporations, are judged almost solely on their ability to raise money. In return, these universities, like the media and religious institutions, not only remain silent about corporate power but also condemn as “political” all within their walls who question corporate malfeasance and the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class struggle and filled with members who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated negotiators with the capitalist class. Cars rolling off the Ford plants in Michigan were said to be made by UAW Ford. But where unions still exist, they have been reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of unions in the early twentieth century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday, and Social Security, have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and have no new ideas. The arts, just as hungry as the media or the academy for corporate money and sponsorship, refuse to address the social and economic disparities that create suffering for tens of millions of citizens. Commercial artists peddle the mythical narrative, one propagated by corporations, self-help gurus, Oprah and the Christian Right, that if we dig deep enough within ourselves, focus on happiness, find our inner strength, or believe in miracles, we can have everything we desire.

Such magical thinking, a staple of the entertainment industry, blinds citizens to corporate structures that have made it impossible for families to lift themselves out of poverty or live with dignity. But perhaps the worst offender within the liberal class is the Democratic Party.

The party consciously sold out the working class for corporate money. Bill Clinton, who argued that labor had nowhere else to go, in 1994 passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which betrayed the working class. He went on to destroy welfare and in 1999 ripped down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks to turn the banking system over to speculators. Barack Obama, who raised more than $600 million to run for president, most of it from corporations, has served corporate interests as assiduously as his party. He has continued the looting of the U.S. Treasury by corporations, refused to help the millions of Americans who have lost their homes because of bank repossessions or foreclosures, and has failed to address the misery of our permanent class of unemployed.

Populations will endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to manage and wield power effectively. But human history has demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet insist on retaining the trappings and privileges of power, their subject populations will brutally discard them. Such a fate awaits the liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional role within the democratic state. The liberal class has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. And as corporate power pollutes and poisons the ecosystem and propels us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded. The death of the liberal class means there is no check to a corporate apparatus designed to enrich a tiny elite and plunder the nation. An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal. It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and middle classes will find expression outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.

===

Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. His most recent book is titled, "Death of the Liberal Class," which he will be his lecture topic of choice for the night.

Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).

In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received in 2002 the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He is currently the F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Visitor in American Studies, Centre for the Study of the United States at The University of Toronto.

Nation Books writes this summary of his new book:

"For decades the liberal class was a defense against the worst excesses of power. But the pillars of this class—the press, the universities, trade unions, the Democrats, and the liberal church—have collapsed as effective counterweights to the corporate state. In its absence the needs of the poor, the working class, and even the middle class no longer have a champion. The death of the liberal class has permitted the rise of a new and terrifying political configuration. In his devastating new book, Chris Hedges chronicles the gradual corruption and decline of the liberal class, which no longer provides an institutional check to mitigate corporate control of politics, education, labor, the arts, religious institutions, or financial systems. Without any impediments, the corporate state is dismantling the last vestiges of protection for ordinary citizens once put into place by the liberal class.

A lucid and disturbing look inside America's fallen liberal institutions, Hedges tells of his own experiences, especially of his role as a journalist for the New York Times. Although the liberal class was always compromised by its embrace of the power elite, as well as its deep hostility to American radicals who questioned the assumptions and the structures of the elite, it nevertheless provided a mechanism that made incremental reform possible. But with the rise of the corporate state, the liberal class has been forced to distort its basic belief systems to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization, and staggering income inequalities. It relinquished it moral authority to become courtier and apologist for a system of power that despises liberal values.

The anger among the working and the middle class is, without a functioning liberal class, being expressed in ideologies that detest democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The death of the liberal class is creating a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, and gangsters, often led by charismatic demagogues, are beginning to fill. Totalitarian and proto-fascists, from militias to Tea Party movements, ridicule and taunt the liberal class and its democratic values. The promises of these movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in a disturbing truth. History has shown time and again that when the liberal class ceases to function, as happened in Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany, and the former Yugoslavia, it always opens a Pandora's Box of evils that infect the remnants of civil society."

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/cmd_event/2011/03/10361/chris-hedges-death-liberal-class-sponsored-student-progressive-dane#sthash.raMV0vyA.dpuf

SUMMARY

The liberal class plays a vital role in a democracy. It gives moral legitimacy to the state. It makes limited forms of dissent and incremental change possible. The liberal class posits itself as the conscience of the nation. It permits us, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define ourselves as a good and noble people. Most importantly, on behalf of the power elite the liberal class serves as bulwarks against radical movements by offering a safety valve for popular frustrations and discontentment by discrediting those who talk of profound structural change. Once this class loses its social and political role then the delicate fabric of a democracy breaks down and the liberal class, along with the values it espouses, becomes an object of ridicule and hatred. The door that has been opened to proto-fascists has been opened by a bankrupt liberalism The Death of the Liberal Class examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues there are five pillars of the liberal establishment - the press, liberal religious institutions, labor unions, universities and the Democratic Party-- and that each of these institutions, more concerned with status and privilege than justice and progress, sold out the constituents they represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.

Review by Booklist Review

The real danger to progressive social ideals is not President Obama's failure to push through a more liberal agenda or the threat presented by the Tea Party and others pushing the Republicans more to the Right. Hedges argues that the true threat to liberalism is the long and gradual weakening of its ideals. Drawing on analysis and interviews from his long career as a journalist, including 15 years with the New York Times, Hedges chronicles the corruption of such bastions of liberalism as the Democratic Party, academia, and labor unions. He cites the NAFTA agreement and welfare reform during the Clinton administration and union coziness with corporations as recent examples of the merging of government and corporate interests to the detriment of the interests of the poor or even the middle class. He also reviews the long history of assassination and co-optation of radical voices in the U.S. and the singular career of Ralph Nader as a consistent voice against capitalist excess. This is a thoughtful analysis of why and how liberals have compromised principles due to the allure of power and wealth.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this tsunami of terrifying revelations, juxtaposed truths, and demonstrated facts, Hedges (War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) argues that the traditional beacons of the liberal class-the universities, media, church, labor unions, and arts-have sacrificed themselves completely to the dominance of corporate greed and unbounded capitalism. We are all to blame and everything moral about our democracy stands to be lost-is indeed already vanishing, in Hedges's view-and those who draw attention to it are banished and booed. While every page erupts with calamities of the human spirit worthy of their own irate broadcasts and bull-horned fury, Hedges is at his best when he unpacks the density of his polemic and embraces the power of his narrative. Regardless of form, however, his most interesting theses include the parallel between the current domestic climate and the fall of Weimar Germany and the conclusion that "Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief, and destruction." These insights come not just as warning, but as witness. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review by Library Journal Review

Anyone who doubts that politics in the first half of the Obama administration has been dirty and a bit frightening should listen to this book. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/New York Times best-selling author Hedges is not going for laughs here, nor is he simply pointing a finger at a few overzealous pundits; rather, he convincingly argues and supports his view that liberal politics as we know it is as vicious and deceitful as any political philosophy in recent history. Narrator Arthur Morey (arthurmorey.com) gives Hedges's work the solemnity it deserves. Bound to antagonize those of the mind that American participation in global politics (e.g., wars) is guided by idealism and a sincere belief that were other countries to behave as the United States does, this would be a better world. An enlightening, fluff-free title highly recommended for academic libraries and for collections with extensive holdings in political science.-Joseph L. Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

AUTHOR NOTES

Chris Hedges , currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor , National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times , where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the best selling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning , which draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister, has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard during the academic year of 1998-1999. He has a strong grounding in the classics and knows Greek and Latin, as well as Arabic, French and Spanish. He currently writes for numerous publications including Foreign Affair .

- See more at: http://www.buffalolib.org/vufind/Record/1804683/Reviews#sthash.1efEz3lH.dpuf