Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Reverend Chris Hedges, 2022: Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy
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This year’s Reith Lectures have seen the BBC slated for erasing a sideswipe at Donald Trump from the opener, part one of four. The speaker is Rutger Bregman, described by wiki as:
a Dutch popular historian and best-selling author. He has published four books on history, philosophy, and economics, including Utopia for Realists, which has been translated into thirty-two languages. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian and the BBC. He has been described by The Guardian as the “Dutch wunderkind of new ideas” and by TED Talks as “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers”. His TED Talk, “Poverty Isn’t a Lack of Character; It’s a Lack of Cash”, was chosen by TED curator Chris Anderson as one of the top ten of 2017.
The son of a preacher man, Rutger tells us in a pre-airing interview that every good sermon has three parts: misery, redemption, thankfulness.
Part 1, The Age of Monsters, concerns the misery of the West’s predicament. The title is a nod to the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who wrote from his Mussolini prison cell that:
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
I’ve referenced that quote myself, as one acutely applicable today. So how well does Part 1: the Age of Monsters deliver? Well enough to get my vote. It’s searingly eloquent, easily passes an acid test of our times – the honesty to call a genocide a genocide – and paints a witheringly accurate picture of the state we’re in.
Do you detect a ‘but’? It’s this. While Rutger’s message – Act One, recall, of a three-act ‘sermon’ in four parts – is outstanding in ways barely touched on in that last paragraph, it’s flawed by an idealism (in the philosophical sense) flagged in his ultimate trust, bruised and battered by grim reality though it may be, in social democracy. Flagged too in its call to Moral Revolution.
Don’t get me wrong. I too see the gob-smackingly clear case for “moral revolution”. But being a materialist (in the philosophical sense) I see that as neither sufficient nor possible given the very realities he sets out, plus those of my opening quote from a Chris Hedges writing on Joe Biden’s watch, and in dark satirical form – for him unusual – those of Jonathan Cook, previous post.
I fear Rutger Bregman has brilliantly illuminated an evil whose depth and reach he has not fully grasped, though that won’t stop me tuning in for Act 2, Redemption, and Act 3, Thankfulness.
Watch this space.
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