Chris Hedges Call for Revolt

 Writer, war correspondent, religious scholar, Chris Hedges has become increasingly radicalized over the past dozen or so years although he would argue it's society that has truly changed, particularly through the influence of religious fundamentalism and the capture of political power by the forces of corporatism.  Whatever the balance of changes and forces, he's calling for revolution as the last hope.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.  

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet.

...The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind ...horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible. 

...It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”   

The Right Will Howl Tonight

Income inequality seems to have sprung up as a hot issue in the American elections.    With a consummate rent-seeker, Mitt Romney, carrying the Republican banner, America's crippling inequality - income, wealth and opportunity -  was bound to bubble to the surface.

Today's American Right (no, they're not conservatives) has reacted like junkyard dogs at the mention of inequality.  It sends them howling about "class warfare" and "unearned wealth."  We can expect to hear plenty of their growling tonight and for days to come.

Americans are taught to honour their flag, not to spit in church and to recoil in dread and panic at the utterance of the words "class warfare."  They're brought up to believe that class warfare = socialism = communism = totalitarianism and the destruction of private property.

But it's helpful to remember that it isn't Mitt's 47% or the entire 99% that are fueling class warfare.   In fact they've been on the receiving end of a powerful, divisive and destructive class war launched under Ronald Reagan that continues today.  Two years before Barack Obama was elected President, billionaire investor Warren Buffet got to the bottom of it:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

And that may just be what this election will be all about - whether Class Warriors like Romney manage to cement the work begun by Ronald Reagan.  That's not to say that Obama would make everything right again, he won't.   And, if he tried, America's "bought and paid for" Congress in both camps would thwart his efforts.

No, just as the neo-cons knew they needed a seismic event (9/ll) to springboard their perverted supremacist ideology, progressivism may need a similar scale, economic event to coalesce  blue and white collar workers in opposition to America's rentier class and the Congress that is in their service.  It's really just a matter of when.

North America's North Koreans

When I see Tea Party rank and file interviewed on television I'm often struck by how thoroughly indoctrinated they are.   They're sort of the white bread equivalent of North Koreans only obviously much better fed.

They've been taught things that they come to firmly believe and it seems they're programmed to auto-reject anything, no matter how factual or blatant, that conflicts with their received wisdom.

A telling example is the standard Tea Partier response to global warming and what should be done about it.   They're apt to dismiss it as a hoax and, like any serious hoax, it's for an ulterior motive.  What lies beneath the global warming issue, they claim, is a plot to effect a massive, unearned transfer of  wealth from the American people to those of the Third World, all under the auspices of the dreaded "world government."  It's downright Socialist that's bound to lead to gun control.

Oddly enough, these same Tea Partiers worship at the altar of Lord Reagan, the very president who set in motion a very real, truly massive unearned transfer of wealth from these same Tea Party rank and file into the pockets of America's ultra-rich; a pillaging that many, including Joe Stiglitz, contend has been going on for the past thirty years.

In The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz chronicles how government policy, not natural market forces, enabled the siphoning of wealth from working and middle-class America into the bank accounts of the richest of the rich.   Although per-worker productivity in terms of GDP increased a staggering 75% over those three decades, worker incomes stagnated and, for some groups, declined.   And where did the wealth those workers generated go to?   The question answers itself.   Take a bow, Mr. Romney.

The era ushered in by Ronald Reagan and his sidekicks Thatcher and Mulroney has been devastating to the middle class, especially in America.   The States' once healthy, vibrant and robust middle class has been hollowed out, gutted, forced to find comfort in debt instead of the deserved reward of their labours.  It's a national horror story but one that was entirely scripted in pages of bills enacted by Congress in the shadow and name of  Ronald Reagan.

While North Koreans are indoctrinated to blame their recurrent famines on the devious Americans, there's an even better scam underway in the U.S.   There the citizenry has it drummed into their heads that the source of their misfortune isn't their government and the elite it serves but actually themselves.   They learn to point a finger at liberals and, gasp, unions - the very institutions that seek to improve the lot of the working and middle-classes.   The illogic should be glaring but perhaps it's less so when you're struggling to hold down three, part-time jobs just to avoid default on your credit card balances.

And so, as Stiglitz and others observe, we're faced with an America that has terminal economic and social afflictions.   Not incurable but, left unremedied, certainly terminal.   Canadians need to become very aware of what's happening south of the border because it affects the health of our own economy and our own society.   As the Bank of Canada governor, Carney, warned, we have lashed the Canadian economy far too tightly to America's to escape the contagion.

Our garden gnome FinMin, Jimbo Flaherty, is the High Priest of Harper's Church of Conservative Corporatism.  He hears the pleas of Canada's CEO's who would wreck our middle class just as devastatingly as their American counterparts did in the States.   Canadian workers are overpaid, they claim.  Union powers must be suppressed.   We can't compete with America's diseased economy.

I have no interest in being transformed into a North American North Korean but I know with the regime currently in power, preventing that demands a public willing to stand up and speak out in defiance.  

Americans Waking Up to Class Warfare, Find Themselves Under Attack

This could just be what the corporatist Right fears most; the American public realizing there's a class war underway and they've been taking fire.   If the American people get in a mood to counterattack, the forces of corporatism and their rightwing political minions could be in a very bad way.

A Pew Research Center study has found two-thirds of Americans now believe there are "very strong" or "strong" conflicts between rich and poor America.   That's up almost 20% since just 2009.

"Not only have perceptions of class conflict grown more prevalent; so, too, has the belief that these disputes are intense. According to the new survey, three-in-ten Americans (30%) say there are “very strong conflicts” between poor people and rich people. That is double the proportion that offered a similar view in July 2009 and the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987."

And the Pew study found the rich-poor divide had taken top spot among socially divisive issues plaguing America.

"As a result, in the public’s evaluations of divisions within American society, conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension—between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old."

"...While blacks are still more likely than whites see serious class conflicts, the share of whites who hold this view has increased by 22 percentage points, to 65%, since 2009. At the same time, the proportion of blacks (74%) and Hispanics (61%) sharing this judgment has grown by single digits (8 and 6 points, respectively).

"The biggest increases in perceptions of class conflicts occurred among political liberals and Americans who say they are not affiliated with either major party. In each group the proportion who say there are major disagreements between rich and poor Americans increased by more than 20 percentage points since 2009.

"These changes in attitudes over a relatively short period of time may reflect the income and wealth inequality message conveyed by Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country in late 2011 that led to a spike in media attention to the topic. But the changes also may also reflect a growing public awareness of underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society."