Here’s another blistering sermon from the pen of the Presbyterian minister and Pulitzer prize winner, Chris Hedges. In my previous post, Washington cuckoos its allies, I wrote:
In the case of the aggression on Iran, my efforts are focused less on its illegality, and the price everyone else is paying to shore up an empire growing reckless. On these things I’m pushing at an open door. The challenge lies more in countering the superficially plausible view that this is all down to the deranged personalities of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hence my insistence that (a) America is not a functioning democracy, (b) policy on what most matters is decided behind closed doors by corporate elites, ergo – (c) – beneath a surface froth of partisan quarrel can be seen, by the few who choose to look, a continuity in US foreign policy across every administration since Bill Clinton’s. On the drivers of that continuity those elites can afford to be remarkably candid (since few do choose to look) in their policy documents. Witness the Brookings Institute’s Which Path to Persia? and the Rand Report on Extending Russia.
For the many who remain blind to the depth, range and dark history of America’s crimes against humanity, the attraction of blaming Donald Trump is twofold. One, the man’s an oaf. Two, it lets empire off the hook. More than a decade before the tangerine narcissist first set foot in the Oval Office as POTUS 45, British playwright Harold Pinter got it right in his 2005 Nobel acceptance speech:
The crimes of the USA have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but few have talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
In the eyes of those who truly rule an empire now flailing in ways that make even hypocrisy an unaffordable luxury, if the expendable Trump has committed any offence – and that’s a big if – it is that of letting the cat out of the bag. The United States, far from being a democracy in any meaningful sense of that word, is a corporate oligarchy captured long ago by billionaires.
Over to Chris, writing yesterday, May 8:
America’s Suicide Pact
America’s suicidal march began long before Donald Trump. Trump and the buffoons around him are the inevitable final chapter of the decaying empire.
Live or DIY – by Mr. Fish
Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.
Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.
There is a word for these people. Traitors.
These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.
Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.
These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.” Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.
Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.
“These people are on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But [their] highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.” – Anand Giridharadas
“Trump is not an anomaly”, I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour” …
He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.
The Epstein files, window on the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.
Read in full on Chris’s substack …
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On an only slightly tangential note, Thursday’s local elections in my own UK have seen heavy losses by both Labour and the Conservatives, while by far the biggest gains have been to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party. Farage, no less an oaf than Trump, is also a beneficiary of the bankruptcy of neoliberal policies pursued to the benefit of an obscenely wealthy few by both sides – TweedleLab and TweedleCon – of what Tariq Ali aptly dubbed The Extreme Centre.
Just saying.
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